No Sleep 'Til Kanagawa

“We are beginning our decent into Haneda Airport and will be landing shortly.”

The pilot’s announcement sprung Tom awake. The flight from LAX across the ocean elapsed in a blink. Yes, his neck pillow was ratty and in need of replacement. He didn’t have the foresight to book an entire row to save himself from the rapid enshittification of the airlines for profit, narrow seats slimming in diameter to make even fitness models feel obese.

But there were no distractions. No feral cats or scheming sons. No coworkers mistaking him for lore-pieces from the depths of early Americana. No high flyers or multiversal travelers laying siege to his defenses.

Tom Battaglia had a half-day to sleep.

He might have slumbered longer had the pilot not intervened with his announcement, which to the outside observer seemed absurd given the state of his life. Tom oftentimes lay confused from where these stressors sniped at him, how simple things like a barb on Jabber here or cat vomit on the welcome mat in the foyer there put him over the edge. Static with the police died down substantially with the accord he and his mother came to. He had found steady balance in his role in PRIME, early-show crowd heater segueing into backstage peacemaker and producer, a headstart on the next step in his revived career.

This is what you wanted by now, he thought.

Then why was it so easy for his runaway mind and its neurodivergent proclivities to take his psyche into the quagmires of worry and insomnia? Over little shit, everyday annoyances, things that didn’t bother him before the periods of his life that sent it topsy-turvy on a regular basis, things like RIA and the Intense Title. Nora Ray, his brother Guido, Pleasant and the drones, his mother…

But he spent twelve hours over the Pacific Ocean sleeping uninterrupted, repaid only with a nasty glare from his seatmate who had to deal with his snoring as consequence. The time had arrived to see his nieces, not by blood but by honor, finally graduate completely from Pom Academy.

💤

This is what you wanted by now, isn’t it?

💤

The cab dropped him and his cargo, a single duffel and a medium-sized suitcase on wheels, in front of the Academy, where Pom Shinjoku and Ayame Hasegawa awaited him in puffy jackets. The Kanagawa winter stung with far less intensity than the arctic bazooka aimed and firing at the Philly area with little reprieve, so to Tom it felt downright balmy. He had to hold himself back from snickering at the women in their heavy jackets because not everyone gets to experience the polar vortex in all its bombastic fury of north winds and flurries.

“Look at you, Mister Crazy White Boy Who Doesn’t Fear the Cold,” greeted Pom with all the dour sarcasm one might expect from a woman who alternates between nine-megaton wars of fuckery and violence in Bang! Pro Wrestling and running an academy for hormonal young women.

“Look, if you had to experience what I experienced back home, you’d have two puffy coats on,” he replied leaning in for a hug with his old friend. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yes, good to see you too, Luchador.”

He then turned to his adopted niece.

“Oji, I’m so glad you could make it.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. You two girls are the closest thing I have to nieces or nephews. Speaking of, where is Chiyo?”

“Where else?” Ayame’s expression exhausted all the exuberance it held at seeing Tom almost instantaneously. “She’s too obsessed over her stupid cartoons. She’s barely done any work. Might as well call it the Ayame Hasegawa Produce Show and not the Twins.”

“Hush,” interrupted Pom. “I’ve given Chiyo her own parts to do. She just does them quicker than you.”

“Yeah, so she can get back to watching Peppa Pig. And Oji, I think you are gonna end up watching it too.”

“Wait, no, my room is the one at the end of the hall in the dorm.”

“Someone else already claimed it.”

“What? You didn’t hold it for me?”

Pom shook her head.

“I had planned on holding it, but to be fair, Madeline is actually working the show, and I don’t need her falling asleep when she pulls out her cryomancy.”

“Madeline, cryo… who?”

“Oh,” interjected Ayame, “You probably know Maddy better by her ring name. Myrtle Kombat.”

Tom shook his head and muttered under his breath “Big timed by the kung fu gimmick lady…”

💤

Yeah, this was all that you wanted for the here and now, but did you back it up with the shit you wanted to get done the years before? Whose hands held the Universal Championship in 2023 and 2024 and 2025?

Not yours.

But go off and tell yourself how happy you are.

💤

2 AM

And Chiyo was still watching those fucking cartoon pigs at full blast. Tom felt like waking Pom up and making her fill out paperwork to get the renovation orders for the dormitories and their paper-thin walls, but he thought better of it when he realized how many katanas were at her bedside. He wasn’t about to barge into Ayame’s bedroom since her door was closed, or really anyone’s bedroom. He’d built up years of trust as the lone rooster in the Academy henhouse that he wasn’t going to piss it away just because he couldn’t sleep.

The commissary was always open even if no one was occupying it. Keurig machines with a cornucopia of pods, a line of teapots with an assortment of floral and herbal teas, a fully stocked pantry with instant noodles, all of it self-serve for any hour of the night. Even though Pom had settled into the life of a mundane desk jockey in the hours she wasn’t wrestling or teaching said wrestling, she stressed to her boarders that curfews were for cowards and ran her school as such.

“Maybe Kaori will be there and we can chat,” Tom thought to himself, hoping to get some answers from Chiyo’s mother on how to cope with her mulleted wrecking ball in eternal arrested development. For a woman whose chops had already gained repute in Japan as hitting with the force of a sledgehammer against granite, Tom thought that they couldn’t be any worse than swine with bad Southern English accents that permeated the walls into his bedroom.

Kaori wasn’t there, sadly.

But the commissary wasn’t unoccupied.

Sitting alone at a table was a young lady, hand on a generic teal mug with a teabag string flung over the side and eyes glued onto her phone. Her hair was long and curled not unlike a precocious protagonist orphan from a Broadway musical, or Weird Al Yankovic in the ‘80s. Your pick. She wore wide-rimmed glasses on her face and a baggy sweater on her upper body. Tom figured out who it might be, but he didn’t really want to talk to someone he didn’t already know, so he tiptoed around the perimeter to the Keurig, hoping that she’d been transfixed enough by whatever was on her phone not to notice.

He bet wrong.

“Ayame wasn’t kidding. There is a guy staying here.”

Tom sighed.

“Yeah, I am.”

He turned back towards the cabinet with the K-Cups in it, but she had designs on more than just one remark and an end to the pleasantries.

“So are you averting your eyes because I’m not supposed to see you without your mask on or whatever shitty customs you luchadores follow?”

Tom turned back around slowly.

“No. Just trying not to disturb anyone while I try to cope with the serial cartoon viewer in the next room over.”

He turned around quickly to grab a pod of 100 percent Colombian before facing her again.

“You know who I am, obviously.”

“Well yeah, there’s only one guy in the biz Pom would let stay here, unless the two guys buried out front came back from the dead.”

How dare you talk so blithely about the Shogun and Nob he thought to himself before shaking it off. She was probably in her 20s. There was a time in his 20s when he’d make the same remarks about people he didn’t particularly know.

“Who are you, again?”

“Maddy. Maddy Park. I’m working in the sub-main.”

Tom was right in his assumption.

“Big fighting game fan, huh.”

“Not any fighting game. Basically just Mortal Kombat, duh, and King of Fighters. Everything else is too button-mashy.”

“I wouldn’t know. Other than the Smash I play with my kids, the last fighting game I played was Primal Rage back in high school. You know, the one with the dinosaurs and apes?”

Maddy’s expression was blank at the reference.

“Yeah, I guess that’s just a game immature teenage boys liked.”

He sighed, hoping that was the end of the conversation as he deposited the pod and ran the machine. The whirring and gurgling reminded him why he hated K-cups and made him thankful for the French press he had at home, but coffee was coffee. And anything was better than the wall of sound infiltrating his room at grotesque volume. He grabbed his own mug and sat down at a different table than Maddy.

“You know, it’s funny,” she said across the commissary, “I didn’t think this Anglo Luchador would be that handsome underneath his mask. I always thought luchadores, especially the gringos, would wear masks because they were uggos.”

“Uh, thanks?” Tom replied. “You do know I’m happily married though, right?”

Maddy recoiled.

“Ugh, no. Too old for me. I’m not one of these gross girls trying to find a sugar daddy.”

Tom sighed and rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying,” she continued, “I thought you’d be hideous.”

I don’t want to have this conversation anymore, he thought to himself. But Maddy had other ideas.

“In fact, I thought maybe I was hoping you’d be a pathetic, ugly old bridge troll underneath. Kinda matches how your career’s going right now.”

Tom stewed for a minute or two. The bluntness from a woman who barely knew him jarred him to his soul. She couldn’t be malicious, right? Maybe just on the spectrum. Wanting to communicate but didn’t have that “nice” filter. You know, the one that keeps people polite. In check. Not everyone has it.

It’d be rude not to engage her now, right?

“First you take my room here and not even have the decency to occupy it when I could be sleeping, and now you roast my career?”

Now it was Maddy’s turn to get a little flustered.

“Hey, I just have limited time to talk to my friends back home. I get by on not a lot of sleep anyway. But I wasn’t trying to be mean or nothin’. Just, I thought you knew too.”

“Knew what?”

“Y’know. Earlier last year, you were on top of the world. Ready to make that one last charge. I mean, I was excited. And then, you just lost to Farthington and now look at you.”

Tom scrunched face in silence, not knowing how to respond.

“What, you need me to spell it out for you? Can’t beat that bald dude from High Octane. Jerking the curtain at Colossus against maybe the fourth or fifth most important member of the Red Army over twenty bucks. Harmen had dead to rights at least three times at the DEFIANCE crossover and you had to wait for him to get mad at the ref to beat him. It’s almost like Cecilworth took your soul, Shang Tsung-style.”

Tom’s eyes widened. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find the words.

“And now” she continued, “You’re going into battle against some simpleton who thinks he’s Paul Bunyan?”

“I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to end up in battle…”

“Please! I know how this ends up. Unless he quits the fed like your last tag partner, you’re going to end up fighting him all because you’re invariably going to disappoint him when you reveal you’re not Rip Van Winkle. And until then, you’re going to end up being the same thing to people like RIA and whoever else they put you against that Jason Snow was to you. A fading husk with a name to put on a mantlepiece.”

Tom scrunched his face again.

“Are you sure you’re not being rude? Because uh, I…”

He trailed off. It was 2 AM in a communal living space. Maybe next time, he thought, I’ll stay at a hotel.

“OH jeez,” she said. “I really ain’t trying to be rude. You gotta understand that, um, I was really rooting for you the whole time, and I just have really strong opinions on this kind of stuff, and I really don’t have a filter and like, I…”

She sighed.

“I messed up, didn’t I?”

Tom got up from his seat and went over to where Maddy was sitting. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Look, you can never really mess up when you speak from the heart, huh?”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and bloodshot.

“Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves, that’s all. It’s late, and I don’t think you can handle no-sleep the way you think you can… if we’re both being honest right now.”

Her expression broke, and she laughed.

“It’s alright that you feel that way. And I’m alright with where I’m at. Just let’s forget this ever happened, alright?”

Maddy nodded as Tom nodded before he walked away. He took a sip from his coffee as he crossed the foyer out of the commissary.

And that’s when the realization hit him like an Ivan Stanislav meathook across the chest.

Maddy was right about it all.

💤

You can’t settle into a nice role backstage and ride off into the sunset as comic relief if you never ascended to the heights you planned on doing. All that makes what it is right now is the back-half of a drive through Kansas. The front-half was the same. No elevation, no peaks. You can’t have valleys without peaks, son.

If this is all you wanted, then what the hell was this comeback for?

💤

The STARCRASH Produce Show was a hit. The new recruits showed great promise in the opening six-woman tag match. Veterans from across the joshi scene turned out and filled out the middle of the card. Maddy scored an upset victory over Shoko Nabigata in the next to last match, which was only overshadowed by the Twins scoring perhaps the most impressive win of their lives to date, a thrilling, half-hour fireworks fest where they beat their head instructor Pom and her partner, the luchadora prodigy Miranda DC. After the match, Chiyo got on the mic and admitted what Ayame accused all along, that she slacked in helping put the show together. She apologized, gave her sister a big hug, and the three of them carried Ayame on their shoulders to close the show.

Tom sat in the front row, the most awake he’d been in weeks, rapt at all the action, but bothered in the pit of his soul. No matter how hard he tried shaking it off as another bout of his runaway OCD taking criticism and turning it into a deathscythe, hacking at his flesh and hollowing out his inside.

Maybe it wasn’t Maddy who planted the seed though. She was just the miner who found the motherlode deep inside, waiting to give reason to all the stress he’d felt lately. The pieces connected in place, maybe a little too snugly, a little too perfectly.

“Oji,” Ayame asked at the afterparty in Roppongi, in a sake bar Tom was too immersed in himself to notice the name, “Did you like the show?”

“Yeah, I did. I’m really proud of you and your sister,” he said before slugging an entire glass of rice wine.

“That was the hardest match of my life. Pom wasn’t kidding when she said she wasn’t going to go easy on us.”

“Look, there are two things I know in life. One, if someone owes you twenty bucks and they pay you with a gift card to Dawgz Bar and Grille, then they really owe you sixty.”

Ayame looked at her uncle with apex befuddlement.

“Second, if Pom fuckin’ Shinjoku ever goes easy on someone, then it’s someone pretending to be Pom.”

Ayame got that reference. She laughed.

“Hey, where’s Maddy?” Tom asked.

“Oh, over there, with your friend Mira and the other gaijin.”

Tom looked over to find her drinking and chatting up a storm. He wanted to go over to say something, but he didn’t know what. What could he say? It wasn’t the time or the place, but he was on a flight back across the Pacific tomorrow. He felt the monster of doubt eating at him, feasting even, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Oji!” Ayame said, “What are you doing?”

“Oh,” Tom replied, sitting back down at his stool. “Nothing. Ayame, can you do me a favor? Order another bottle of sake for me. Tell the bartender to put it on my tab.”

Ayame smiled and shook her head.

“You know, you could do it yourself if you just did what my dad asked you to do all those years ago and learned Japanese.”

Tom smiled as he put his arm around his niece’s shoulders.

💤

The sleep on the flight home wasn’t nearly as restful as it was on the way over. Tom shifted in his seat, uncomfortable and restless as a figure spoke to him in his subconscious.

“Yeah, this is what you wanted,” it said, “It’s what you wanted now.”

The shadow slowly started to take form. Humanoid form.

“You can be the butt of all the jokes now, great, but not when you were the butt of ‘em when you was supposed to be good.”

The head started to materialize into an all-too-familiar shape.

“You can’t settle into a last hurrah when you ain’t never had a first hurrah. What, am I supposed to believe that letting Paxton Ray and FLAMBERGE make you their bitch was a success?”

Tom stood face to face with the figure speaking the truths he’d heard while awake, only with much less couth. And he knew there wouldn’t be an apology to follow.

Because that figure he now saw as clear as day was his father.

Tom shook awake, this time with the plane over the Hawaiian Islands with several hours left before landing.