Free 69 by Ryu Murakami Page A

it was good camouflage, that it would make it harder to come up with a clear profile of the culprits.
    We’d banned the use of flashlights inside the school grounds. In the front courtyard was a carefully tended flower bed and, above it, the V-shaped main building, looming up as a dark triangle in the moonlight. Just looking at the building made me sick. On the window of the teachers ’ room I wrote “Running Dogs of the Power Structure” in blue paint, except for “Dogs,” which I did in red. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but it felt muggy to me, and I’d begun to sweat inside my thick T-shirt. “To Arms, Comrades,” I daubed on the wall of the library. Nakamura came up and whispered that the roof team had entered the school via the emergency exit next to the gym. “All right, let’s go inside,” I said.
    As soon as we’d got in, I stopped, afraid of leaving any evidence behind: I’d let some drops of sweat fall on the concrete floor, and I waited for them to dry before moving on down a long corridor where the third-year science classrooms were. The graffiti team consisted of Adama, Nakamura, and me. “I’ll probably never be this nervous again in my whole life,” Nakamura sputtered through trembling lips. “Shut up, you asshole,” Adama hissed. Though I was sweating, my own lips were bone dry and my throat was parched. We went past the teachers’ room, the administrative office, and the principal’s office to the front entrance. Most of the kids at school came in through these doors each day of the week. With large strokes of red paint, I wrote “Kill!” on the wall. Nakamura gasped and asked if that wasn’t going too far. Adama hissed at him again and pointed off to the right of the entrance. The watchmen’s room. There were two watchmen, an old guy and a young one. The light wasn’t on, though; they’d probably watched the “11 P.M.” show and gone to sleep. On the floor just inside the main doors I scrawled “You’re All Brain-dead! Fuck Higher Education!” Nakamura began shaking like a junkie in withdrawal. He was squatting next to one of the columns, doing nothing to help. “This isn’t cool,” Adama whispered to me. I could tell he was nervous, too—he kept licking his lips. The building was absolutely silent, and the only light was from the moon, streaming in through the windows; it was like being on a different planet. The fact that this was a place we clattered through in a noisy crowd almost every day only made the tension worse. We pulled Nakamura to his feet and dragged him away from the entrance, as far as the door of the principal’s office. Getting away from the watchmen’s room was a bit of a relief, but now Nakamura was hyperventilating. “Asshole,” I said. “Go back to the pool.” Nakamura shook his head. “You don’t understand. I... I...” Sweat was pouring down his face. “What? What is it?” Nakamura wagged his head again. Adama shook him by the shoulders. “Tell us. What is it? Ken and me are scared, too, man. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. What’s the problem?”
    “I have to go doo-doo .”
    It wasn’t fair: why should his bowel problems give us a stomachache? I rolled on the floor trying to smother my laughter, with my right hand over my mouth and my left holding my belly, heaving with hiccoughing spasms. Adama was doing the same. Tension only encourages laughter: it’s never so hard to stop laughing as when you mustn’t laugh. All we had to do was mutter “doo-doo” and the giggles would burst in our guts, then come bubbling up our throats. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the saddest things that had ever happened to me: the New Year’s Day when my parents hadn’t bought me the Patton tank model I’d wanted; the time my father had had an affair and my mother left home for three days; my little sister being hospitalized with asthma; the pigeon that didn’t come back when I let it loose; the time I dropped my pocket money at