"Anomy."

Towa taught me this word – back when. Star-eyed I was, and love-struck. Seventeen years I had spent surrounded by tattoo freaks with shaved eyebrows, guys in tacky suits who tought there were the hottest thing out there, none of which had graduated highschool. We'd stare at each other like chiens de faience - stonily glaring at each other that is, in a state of permanent defiance.

Then Towa showed up, and he looked sharp. Always wearing the best cut jackets, doing outrageous things for the world we lived in. Mandarin collars. Checkered suits. Colored bowties. He didn't only speak English – he spoke French.

"No worries," he would tell Father, "I will take care of it."

Not once did he call him Boss. Even I, at the time, couldn't look at this guy without the word fag coming to mind, and yet - the balls on him, as he waved off the head of the Manzanka clan, blew my mind.

"Anomy."

Everytime I almost forgot why he showed up in my life, there is this word. This memory. "English is not hard," Towa told me. "It just takes a little loving." Then he looked straight at me and said: "I can tell that you love it already."

Gokudo no musuko, I was. A yakuza Boss' son, and a smart one at that. Still, no matter how many time he yelled and slapped and kicked, no matter how good I got at dodging, and hitting back, he couldn't make me into the man I had to be. So we made a deal when I was 17. I wouldn't shame him in front of his people. I'd stay out of the shadows where he did his business. In exchange, I'd take care of what we did in the light.

Business trips around the world, and little to no face-time with the family, seemed like the best deal I could get, so I took it. It meant new things though – Harvard-level things.

"Anomy."

It was Brother who suggested it – he was the Young Boss then, already. Father's right hand. A piece of trash half-korean from some slum who he appointed to be his right-hand. Brother whispered to Father about how we have this legal counselor helping on our international cases could teach me English. Then all of a sudden, he was there. Towa Shigenoi. 24 years old. Attorney at Law. He was so unlikely a person it felt that I had never seen anyone like him. The only person I had ever seen who didn't cower in front of Father.

Does it make sense? Of course it doesn't. The very term means that all the rules are off.

"It means a breakdown of norms," Towa taught me. "French philosophers theorized it – both as a desperaging cause for suicide and as the situation of a society which is ripe for new norms, rejecting old ones, and in a state of flux."

I was such a kid then – and disillusioned with the idea that I could be smart enough to cut it, too. Until I met him, at least.

And so it all went to where it should have gone to begin with.

"What's that supposed to mean anyway?"

"Anomy."

It's over, I tried to tell myself. Ashes, that's all there is now – as soon as it was, it told myself that's what it had to be, as I watched myself losing so much of a reason to be.

Snicker," is what Father would always tell me. *Happy? Just snicker. Sad? Snicker. Some guy is disrespecting you? Snicker, right in his face. Then give him what's coming.

What if I feel empty? I asked him once. Is this how you want me to be?

"I feel empty," I remember telling Towa.

This is all gone now. I am old – I even have stains of my face, and hands, and body. I'm an old man who devoted his life to a cause he didn't really believe in. I'm tired, now. The state of the carcasse my soul resides in reflects that lack of faith.

Now I am a 60 year-old widower burrying his own father. Brother is looking at me - as if to send me off. He looks to inherit the hidden part of the iceberg. That was the deal. I'll give him the dark part of Father's Empire, if he lets me be free.

Whatever sense that makes, he's here. Checkered suit, off-white bowtie – all-in, he's here, watching the old man's ashes being shipped off to another plane.

Let me gather my thought. Let me get over the fact he still looks as he used to. Please, I don't want my eyes to beg for anything. Now that Father is ashes, there is nothing I can't do.

"Anomy."

When will we finally get to be who we always wanted to be? I asked him, 30 years ago.

He looks old, too. More than stains on his face, strains. Years of no being fulfilled, he tells me, years of not filling whole. His hands close around my neck. Your family, he tells me, *they did this to me. To us." And I want to laugh, even though it's not fair. I want to laugh because he has no idea how close we came to a bullet through the throat, both of us. Because when I was 17, he was the brighest star in the sky. Now that we're both old men, he's a missed opportunity, not a dream come true.

"I feel empty," I remember telling Towa. Now that I'm old and empty, what's he coming all the way here for?

Yet for some reason, when this old man's eyes meet mine, norms don't seem to matter anymore.