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solongsun Since early childhood, Kaoru has been using doors to travel backwards and forwards through time: a motion he is sometimes able to control, and sometimes not. At the age of 22, he opens a door to the long-ago autumn of 1996 and finds something he never expected – a man who, decades before Kaoru's birth, seems to know exactly who he is...
Whilst his mother talks to the doctor, Kaoru sits on a chair in a separate room and swings his legs. They aren't quite long enough to touch the floor yet, and sometimes he wonders if they ever will be. When do you stop growing? He can't remember starting, so he must have started when he was a baby, maybe. But babies don't seem to grow up, they just get bigger and start to look more like people until suddenly they're children too.
He squeezes his eyes shut and tries extra hard, just in case it works this time and he finds himself tall as a grown-up.
The room he's sitting in is filled with toys, lots of different types: dolls and plush animals and Lego, and little army men, and plastic robots and little cars and trucks and boats – that doesn't make sense because boats go on water, like in the bath – and a train set complete with tunnels and hills that the train has to go through and around. There are musical instruments, too; but kid ones, not real ones. The kid ones never sound right, but Kaoru wants to give the toy guitar a go anyway, just to see if this one might be different.
He hasn't been told if he's allowed to touch the toys or not, though, and so he sits and looks down at his knees a bit miserably. If he was at home he might have given it a go, but his mother has said to him in a very firm voice that it's important to do everything this special doctor says, and answer all of the doctor's questions if he can.
Kaoru misses the normal doctor. She's a tall lady with wrinkles like nice brackets around her mouth, like she's smiled them there, and when she uses her wooden stick to hold down Kaoru's tongue and makes him say aaah she plays a game like he's being so loud he's blowing her backwards; he likes that, it's sort of funny, like a cartoon. Once when Kaoru brought in his gundam robot toy, she made it sit down next to Kaoru on the weird high bed and listened to its chest with her stethoscope just like she listened to his. She didn't ask it to cough, though; she said it was okay.
She didn't get that it was a robot, and there was actually a man being the pilot inside. She didn't check his chest.
Kaoru's mother and the doctor – who is a man with fuzzy strips of hair growing in front of his ears, one of the weirdest things Kaoru has ever seen – come in through the door that leads from the doctor's office into the room full of toys, and Kaoru's mother is smiling in a strange, brave sort of way. She sits down on the chair next to him and crosses her legs, and she smooths his hair flat even though it doesn't need smoothing.
'Sweetheart,' she says in a funny voice, 'This is Doctor Watanabe.'
Kaoru looks up through his fringe. 'Ichiro's dad?'
'Hm? Oh...' Kaoru's mother does the sort of laugh she does when something's not really funny, just annoying: 'Oh, no. No, nothing to do with Ichiro. He has a friend at school,' she says in a different voice, and Kaoru realises she's talking to the doctor now, 'Called Ichiro Watanabe. That's why—'
'Do you have a lot of friends at school, Kaoru?' the doctor asks, interrupting her but not like in a rude way; more like he understands that she's not very interested in what she's talking about. Kaoru looks up at him and chews on the inside of his cheek. He wants to grab the funny hairs in front of his ears and give them a tug to see what happens.
'Some,' he says. 'Me and Ichiro aren't friends. We're just in the same class.'
'Oh, Kaoru,' his mother scolds, 'Ichiro is your friend!'
'I don't play with Ichiro at break,' Kaoru says stubbornly, 'He always wants to play guns and I hate playing guns.'
'And what do you like to play, Kaoru?'
'Police,' he answers without a pause.
'And what does that entail?'
'En...tail?' Kaoru tries out the word slowly.
'What do you have to do to play police, I mean?'
'You have to drive around in a car with a siren, and you have to put the baddies in jail.'
'So who are the baddies?'
Kaoru shrugs, looking back down at his knees. He bites the inside of his cheek harder and he accidentally tastes some blood, which is disgusting; it tastes like coins smell.
'Do you like playing make believe, Kaoru?'
Another shrug. His mother touches his hand gently, turns it over and presses her thumb into his palm the way she does when she's being really serious, 'Remember what we said about answering all the doctor's questions?' she whispers, her hair tickling Kaoru's cheek and her perfume tickling the inside of his nose. He squirms.
'Yeah,' he answers in a small voice.
'What do you like to pretend, apart from being a policeman?'
'I...' Kaoru falters, 'Sometimes when we're in the car, I pretend that I'm knocking down all the signs.'
'All the signs?'
'Road signs, he means.'
'When we pass them.'
'Ah,' the doctor says. He pulls a little notepad and a ballpoint pen out of his pocket, and he doesn't write anything down, but he clicks the pen to have it ready. 'Anything else?'
'Sometimes I like playing astronaut.'
'Ah,' he says again but in a bit of a brighter way, 'So when you play astronaut, what do you do?'
'You have to walk like you keep flying up in the air, and you have to watch out for aliens, and you have to be in your rocket and say Houston we have a problem when you...when there's a problem,' he finishes lamely. He gives another squirm.
'Very good,' the doctor says. He writes a bit of something down then, very quickly. 'So. Pretending is a lot like telling lies, isn't it? You have to use your imagination a lot.'
Kaoru gets a sinking sort of feeling in his chest; he knows where this is going.
'I don't tell lies,' he says quietly.
'Everyone tells lies sometimes. I had to tell a lie to my wife this morning; I had to lie and say that I liked her skirt, so I didn't hurt her feelings. Some lies can be good, you see, like telling a little lie just so you don't make somebody upset, or playing a pretend game. Right?'
Kaoru gives the tiniest possible nod, still staring down at his lap.
'Some lies aren't good, though,' the doctor continues. 'Do you know the difference?'
Another tiny nod. Kaoru wishes he could play with the toys. He could build a big wall out of the blocks and hide behind it.
'Your mother tells me that you like to hide,' the doctor says, and Kaoru looks up at him in panic because it's like he can read his mind. The doctor gives him a smile. 'She says that you like to hide for hours and hours, and when you come out, you pretend that you've been somewhere else. Is that right?'
Kaoru shakes his head no.
'So what really happens, then?'
Kaoru casts a doubtful look up at his mother, who is very carefully not looking back at him. He gives a painful shrug.
'The handle on the door,' he says. He clears his throat the way he's heard adults do when they want to say something important. 'Sometimes I turn it and the door doesn't go to the same place.'
The doctor's eyes slide towards Kaoru's mother's eyes, and Kaoru feels a burning frustration that makes him want to cry, 'Sometimes it goes somewhere else. The door is to another place. Once my bedroom door went into a field. Once—'
'All right, Kaoru,' his mother says quietly, but he gives his head a vigorous shake.
'It's not just places,' he says insistently, 'It's—' he casts a helpless look up at her, wanting desperately for her to look at him so he knows that she still loves him and might believe him one day, 'It's time.'
'Time?' the doctor says. Kaoru hesitates.
'It's going backwards in time,' he says in a small voice.
'Oh? How far back?'
Kaoru shrugs hopelessly. 'I don't know. The machines are different. The cars look funny.'
'Funny. Hm.' Doctor Watanabe makes a little note about that and then gives Kaoru's mother a polite smile. 'Does he watch a lot of science fiction programmes?' he asks, 'Or maybe play science fiction games, or read any comics or simple books of that nature?'
'He's obsessed,' Kaoru's mother says in a relieved kind of way, 'He's transfixed by that old battle robots programme – he gets it from my husband; they watch it together every weekend – Gundom or something—'
'Gundam,' Kaoru corrects angrily, 'And they don't go back in time!'
'Would it be better if they did travel in time?' Doctor Watanabe asks gently, and Kaoru pauses. The doctor is looking at him now. 'Sometimes,' the doctor says, 'Going back in time would be a really good way to escape from bad things that are happening in the present, right?'
This feels sort of like a trick, and Kaoru looks at the doctor worriedly. 'Yeah,' he says carefully.
'Do bad things sometimes happen to you? In the present, I mean?'
Kaoru doesn't know how to answer that. Bad things happen to everybody, don't they? Sometimes he falls over and makes his knees all bloody: that's a bad thing. Sometimes his parents yell at him: that's a bad thing too. Sometimes his teacher at school tells him off for daydreaming, sometimes dogs aren't friendly so he's not allowed to say hello, sometimes he has to go to the dentist or get a haircut. Once he got a deep splinter in his finger and his mother had to dig it out with some tweezers she'd held over the burner on the stove; that was a really bad thing.
He wonders about the travelling; whether that's a bad thing or not. It's not so bad, he decides, but it makes everybody so angry when he gets back.
'Kaoru?' the doctor is prompting, and Kaoru looks up at him. He's been chewing the inside of his cheek again while he thinks; now his mouth is full of that horrible blood taste. He swallows it down but it makes him feel a bit sick.
'Some things are bad,' he says warily.
'And when you travel back in time, you get to go away from those things for a while, right?'
'I guess,' Kaoru says, still looking up at the doctor cautiously. He swallows a bit more blood. He can smell Doctor Watanabe's breath and it smells bad, like coffee but gone all stale. His stomach gives a weird little wriggle, like all his breakfast is flipping over inside it. The room feels a bit too hot.
'Can you tell me about some of the bad things?' Doctor Watanabe asks, his breath hitting Kaoru's face, and Kaoru takes a deep breath and throws up all over the floor.
Driving home, his mother seems almost angry, even though Kaoru's sick and she's told him that it's not his fault. She's sort of quiet, and whenever she has to change gear she does it roughly. Sometimes when they're on the street in front of their house she lets Kaoru sit on her lap and gives him a turn using the steering wheel while she does the pedals, but that doesn't happen today. Instead, she parks the car and turns off the engine but she doesn't take off the child locks, so Kaoru can't get his door open. He shifts uncomfortably in his booster seat, wishing he didn't have to use it. They're for babies, but his mother says he's still too small.
'Kaoru,' she says suddenly, talking to him even though she's looking out of the windscreen like she's still driving, 'Does anything bad ever happen? Really bad things, I mean? Things you don't tell us about?'
Kaoru hesitates, because there's a weird kind of break in her voice that makes him feel scared. 'No,' he says unconvincingly, and he watches her reflection in the rear view mirror as she rubs her forehead hard with both her hands. Then she does a funny thing: she puts her hands back on the steering wheel and grips it hard even though the car isn't even on. Her knuckles go a yellowy-white colour and her wedding ring makes a clicking noise against the wheel.
'Are there any adults that ever do things you're not comfortable with?' she asks abruptly. 'Do they ever hurt you, or touch you in your private places?'
Private places? Who would want to touch there? Kaoru blushes, cupping his hands defensively around his crotch.
'It's okay to tell me,' his mother says, 'I promise. Even if they've said that something bad will happen if you tell, or that we'll be angry; I promise, we won't. Nothing bad will happen, sweetheart.'
'Nobody sees my private places,' Kaoru says firmly, then remembers that's not true. 'Only dad,' he amends.
'Your father?'
Her voice is horrible then; it's quiet but it's almost a screech, and her hands tighten so much it looks for a minute like the steering wheel is going to go snap. Kaoru panics; feels sick again; he looks longingly out of the window and towards the house. He wants to get out of the car. He wants to go and be alone for a long time. He wants to sit in the closet in his bedroom where they keep all his winter clothes in the summer and his summer clothes in the winter, where it's dark and everything smells nice and clean, like laundry.
'Kaoru,' his mother is saying, her voice sounding sort of like a wire stretched tight, 'Kaoru, listen to me. This is very important. When does your father see your private places?'
Kaoru blinks at her miserably. The urge to puke again is swelling up inside him like a balloon. 'In the bath,' he says, almost annoyed because she should know that; she knows that he takes his baths with dad and she takes her baths alone.
'Mum,' he says timidly. He's frightened he's going to be sick again, all over the car, but how can that happen? He's already been sick and his stomach hasn't had any time to fill itself up again. 'Can we go in?'
Without answering, Kaoru's mother punches the button that lets the child locks off the doors. She makes a sniffing noise and wipes her face before getting out of the car.
Later that night, there's a big argument whilst Kaoru is in bed. He's been in bed all afternoon, because every time he thinks about the taste of blood or Doctor Watanabe's breath or his mum's weird, high voice, he feels sick again. Now it's late though, dark outside, and he bites off all his fingernails while they argue downstairs.
He wasn't allowed to have a bath with dad tonight. His mother said it was because he was ill and it's a bad time for dad to get sick, but how can you get germs in the bath? The bath is where you get clean. Everybody knows that. It's for washing all the germs off; that's why it's important. Instead, his mum bathed him, not getting in the tub with him but kneeling on the hard tile floor and washing his hair for him, even though Kaoru normally does that himself. He uses the shampoo to make his hair into horns.
He sort of thinks that Doctor Watanabe was right, and that the past would be a really good place to escape the bad things that happen in the present. His parents arguing: that's definitely a bad thing. It's sort of like smoke, filtering all through the house and making the air into poison. When there's a fire, Kaoru's dad explained to him once, it's not that the flames kill you by burning you all up; it's the smoke that goes into your lungs instead of air. That's scarier, Kaoru thinks. Like drowning but not being in the water.
The brass doorknob is sticking out of the wall, but he's been ignoring it for a while. It just keeps catching his eye, because it's shiny, and because even though he knows it's bad, he's curious as well. How did it get there? Nobody put it there. It's like it grew, like a weird shiny mushroom. He wants to know what will happen to the door if he turns it; if it'll open a hole in a rectangle shape like a regular door or if it'll be more of a round hole, the way it was when he crawled into the tree, or a funny fancy arch the way it was when the doorknob appeared in the wall surrounding their garden.
Forget it.
He turns onto his other side so he can't see the doorknob any more. He screws his eyes tightly shut.
Despite the tense voices from downstairs Kaoru must have fallen asleep, because he's dreaming.
It's a dream he thinks he can remember having, just vaguely. It's a dream that doesn't feel like a dream; it feels exactly like real life. There are no people in it, but he's there, and he's sort of there in the way that he is in real life; like he can hear the air going in and out of his lungs and his heart banging away in his chest. He's wearing his pyjamas which are patterned all over with spaceships; these are the ones where, whenever he's wearing them and his dad tucks him in, he doesn't say sleep well or sweet dreams, he says three two one blast off. His dad didn't tuck him in tonight; his mother did it.
Everything everywhere is white, and there's no lines between the floor and the walls and the ceiling, which is confusing. The only thing around is a door that's really far away, and it looks small but when he gets closer to it, it's big. The doorknob is all the way above his head; he has to reach up.
He turns it and the scene changes. A cold wind blows in and ruffles his hair and bangs his teeth together. His eyes start watering straight away, and the white of the floor has replaced itself with frost against his bare feet, and there's ice everywhere and the sky is bright grey and there are gravestones all around. It's sort of snowing, or trying to snow; flakes keep falling down all by themselves.
It's cold, and he shivers. There's nobody around, and all outside the wall of the graveyard there's fog so he can't see what's going on.
He's done it again, and his mother is going to be so angry. She might be doing that thing where she shouts at his dad instead of him, and that makes him feel so bad it's like a big hole has opened up in the middle of his chest.
'Hey, kid.'
He turns around pretty quickly when he hears the voice, scrubbing off his cheeks so nobody can see he's been crying like a little baby again. The person talking is a man, and he's got funny hair and funny clothes but he looks familiar, too. He looks so familiar that it kind of hurts a bit, and Kaoru stares up at him and feels a bit scared.
He looks like Kaoru's dad, but he's not Kaoru's dad. But he sort of looks like Kaoru's mum, as well.
Suddenly, he feels very tired and sits down on the frozen ground. He doesn't feel all sick like he did earlier; he just feels tired of everything and he wants to go home. He wants to be back in his bed where it's warm and everything looks the same and his parents look like who they are, and nobody else looks like them at all.
A heavy jacket drops itself around his shoulders, and then a pair of careful hands are pulling it close around him. The hands have dark tattoos on them; Kaoru stares with big eyes.
'It's okay,' the man mutters, 'Did you come here in your sleep?'
Kaoru looks up at him solemnly. 'It's a dream,' he says. The man hesitates.
'Maybe,' he says in a gentle sort of voice. 'You're five, right?'
'How'd you know?'
'Your pyjamas.' The man sort of touches the collar of them for a moment, and then his hand retreats. 'C'mon,' he says, 'I know where the door back is.'
'Back?'
'To your bedroom.'
Kaoru blinks up at him, startled, and the man sighs – his breath comes out as a big white cloud – before sitting down next to Kaoru on the cold ground, shivering a little bit as he does so. Because Kaoru's wearing his jacket his arms are bare, and Kaoru can see the way the tattoos go all the way up them. He wants to touch, and he does so, carefully. They just feel like normal skin, though.
'You like them?' the man asks, something in his voice a little bit like he's smiling, but not meanly. Kaoru nods, too interested in the patterns to say more. He tries to follow them with his finger but his hand is a bit too clumsy; it keeps going outside the lines, like it still does when he colours sometimes. He sits quietly like that for a while, trying to follow the patterns and also figure out what this weird man has said to him, all about going back and ending up in his bedroom and finding the door.
It's important, Kaoru realises at last, because this man believes him. He glances up at him, feeling strangely calm.
'You think I'm telling the truth?' he asks plainly.
'The truth?'
'About the doors, and where I go.'
'Oh. Yeah, I know you're telling the truth.' The man sort of nudges him slightly. 'I know nobody believes you right now, but they will, I promise.'
'Yeah?' Kaoru swallows hard, feeling that stupid lump rise up in his throat again, 'When?'
'In time,' the man says simply. He eyes Kaoru's bare feet on the ground and sighs again. 'You're going to catch your death, kid.' He gives a weird sort of laugh, more of a hmphing sound, like he's only laughing through his nose. 'Actually, I think you do get pretty sick after this, if I'm remembering right. Worst bronchitis of your life.'
'Bron...?'
'Like a bad cold, but in your chest.' The man taps his own chest lightly. Kaoru considers this.
'Do I die?'
'No, you don't die.'
'Are you a ghost?'
The man gives another weird smile. 'No, I'm not a ghost. Why would you think that?'
'You sort of look like my dad,' Kaoru says. He's aware this is a pretty nonsensical answer, but the man is nodding like that's all fine by him.
'But with your mum's nose, right?'
Kaoru blinks up at him. 'Right.'
The man nods like this is what he's been waiting to hear, and he gets to his feet. He reaches down and sort of pulls Kaoru up, tugging the jacket tight around him where it's slipping. 'C'mon,' he says easily, 'Time to go back.'
Kaoru falters. 'Will they be angry?'
'Your...mum and dad? No, no, they won't know this time. If you come with me now, you'll only have been gone a few minutes.'
Kaoru still hesitates. 'Okay,' he says at last. The man's got a sharp sort of face, but Kaoru watches it go all sort of soft when he says that.
'Good boy,' the man says quietly. 'I know it's not great right now. They both love you so much, they – they just don't really understand that they're hurting you.'
The man leads him to a gravestone that's not a long walk away, and Kaoru's only a little bit surprised to see the metal doorknob sticking right out of it. It's weird though, it sort of looks less shiny than it usually does. The man touches it lightly and then pulls his hand away and traces the name on the grave.
'Can you read that?' he asks quietly, and Kaoru shakes his head because it's all kanji that he doesn't know. He doesn't know much kanji yet. Sometimes it feels like the world is full of millions and millions of them and he'll never ever learn them all; they just won't all fit in his head. He reaches up to run his finger the name and the man moves his hand away, looking a bit surprised. When Kaoru's done, he gives him a solemn sort of nod and gestures to the doorknob.
'Okay, kid,' he says, his voice all weird and husky-sounding, 'Time to go. Only...' he clucks his tongue, 'I'd better take that jacket back. You won't be able to explain that to your parents.'
Kaoru sort of doesn't want to, because the jacket is pretty cool-looking, but he hands it over. The cold wind hits him again and the man places a gentle hand on his back, guiding him towards the door. Kaoru looks at him.
'Bye,' he says. The man smiles.
'See you around.'
Kaoru opens the door and his bed is cold like nobody's been in it, and they're still arguing.
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It's kinda cool that baby Kaoru gets to meet his older self, even if he doesn't realize that's who it is right now. But that wretched tombstone! T_T
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