Requiem for an Assassin

Midori, and Koichiro.
    Oh come on, I thought. What are you doing? Don’t you have enough to deal with right now?
    Yeah, but I was so close. I’d been aware of it the moment I stepped into the frigid New Jersey air outside Newark airport. And it wasn’t like I was going to ring her bell or anything. I would just…park, for a few minutes. Near her apartment on Christopher Street. I wouldn’t even get out of the car. I would just sit, and think, and feel what it felt like to be near my son. That wasn’t so much, was it? People did stranger things. They went to grave sites, and knelt in front of tombstones, and ornamented the earth above the bones with flowers, and why, if not to establish some frail communion with the shifting shadows of memory? This would be like that. Just a little while. To feel him nearby. To decant and briefly savor the vanished moment when I held that small child in my arms.
    I saw an open space just east of Waverly and decided it was an omen. I parked the car and angled the side mirror so I had a view of her apartment, a seventeen-story prewar building a block away. It was cold the last time I had been here, the way it was now. I remembered everything from that last time. I remembered every word.
    When he’s old enough, I’ll tell him you’re dead. That’s what I was planning to do anyway, after tonight. And you are. You really are.
    And was he old enough, now? Had she already told him the father who now sat not a hundred yards away died before he was born, and so for the son had never even existed?
    I sighed. It was Koichiro I wanted to think of, not Midori. I thought of a line I’d once read somewhere: You forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.
    What the hell was I doing, anyway. It was going to be dark soon. I was tired, and I wanted to be up at dawn in case Accinelli was an early riser. I should go.
    But I lingered a few minutes more, watching the building, watching the windows I knew were hers, wishing I could undo the past and make a different present. Just a few tweaks, a few different decisions, and maybe I would be walking up to the doorman now, announcing myself, a present under my arm, knowing my son and his mother were expecting me and eager for my arrival.
    I glanced at the iPhone screen. Accinelli’s car hadn’t moved. All right, it was time for me to go. Check the bulletin boards, a quick bite, then sleep.
    I looked up and saw a couple walking down Christopher toward me on the other side of the street, a small child between them. They were all wearing hats and gloves in the cold, an Asian woman and a Caucasian man, and the child was laughing, swinging by their arms. I blinked and looked harder, then, instinct kicking in, slumped lower in my seat. It was Midori. And the child was Koichiro.
    My heart started hammering. I glanced out again, conflicted, wanting to watch, wanting to hide, wanting to get out of the car, afraid to, resentful that I couldn’t, ashamed of my hesitation. And who was the white guy, walking with Midori, holding my son’s hand?
    I sat there, slumped and cowering and impotent, and watched as they passed me on the other side of the street, then as they stood talking in front of Midori’s apartment. After a minute, the man leaned in and kissed her. It wasn’t a long kiss, but there was an intimacy to it, a familiarity, that enraged me. The man leaned over and said something to Koichiro, smiling. Koichiro laughed, and the man turned and walked away. Midori and Koichiro watched him for a moment, then went into the building.
    The rage drained suddenly out of me, replaced by a hard, cold clarity. The man was on foot. I could leave the car here, get out right now and follow him. I was already wearing a hat and sunglasses, so no one would remember my face. And gloves, so there wouldn’t be prints. I didn’t need any time, or any special control over the environment because nothing had to look natural. I didn’t want it to look natural, I wanted it to look like what it would be, like some faceless anonymous someone came up behind him and broke his neck and was walking away unnoticed before the body even hit the pavement.
    Midori would know, of course. But what could she do? She had no way of finding me. How could she punish me? Keep me from Koichiro, maybe? Tell him I was dead? Go ahead, tell him that, if you haven’t already. I’ll show you what dead really is.
    I watched him in the side-view, walking