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solongsun When he swallowed, it made a dry clicking sound inside his head. His footsteps, dull and shuffling as any invalid's, felt heavy. He could feel eyes on him, a host of different sets in varying shades of black and brown, monitoring his progress across the room and towards Eiji's familiar figure.
There was the snap of a lighter: the sound of Die lighting up a cigarette. It made Ruki itch for one. Silently, he bypassed the apologetically hovering nurse in the doorway and stuffed his hands in his pockets, making his way doggedly towards his own bedroom: fuck the dining room, fuck refreshments.
Fuck Eiji, Kyo's hoarse voice seemed to say inside his head.
He could feel the other man tailing him, uncharacteristically quiet. It occurred to Ruki that to an outsider these surroundings might feel intimidating, but the thought felt far removed and not particularly consequential: Eiji had never been an outsider, how could he have been? He lived inside Ruki's very head, his wry smoker's voice the sound of intuition, speaking in whispers from Ruki's own sad skeleton.
He pushed open the bedroom door and was met with the sight of Toshiya lounging on his bed with a cigarette in his hand, flicking through a paperback novel, obviously trying to avoid the impending swarm of parents. Struggling upright, he raised his eyebrows at Ruki questioningly. By his side, Etta James crooned I'd Rather Go Blind through Kai's little radio.
'Hey,' he said, the tone of his voice leading, and Ruki closed his eyes for just a little longer than a blink.
'Hi,' he said back. 'Toshiya, this is—'
'Eiji Okada,' he introduced himself smoothly, offering a shallow bow. His artfully messy hair swung into his face; he smiled his lopsided smile, half rakish and half self-conscious, showing the crooked front tooth Ruki had always thought was cute. 'I'm an old friend. I don't know if Ruki mentioned me...?'
'Nah,' Toshiya said colourlessly. 'Afraid not.'
A strangely inscrutable look on his face, he swung his legs off the bed and got to his feet. He seemed unwilling to meet Eiji's eyes; he gathered up his book and the radio and hugged them both to his chest rather harder than seemed necessary. 'I'll go bug the others,' he said.
He slid Ruki a look that he felt unable to decode, and then he was gone, closing the door discreetly behind him. Eiji raised his eyebrows.
'Your roommate?' he asked. 'He's hot.'
'I guess,' Ruki said numbly.
'Is he really crazy?'
'What are you doing here?' Ruki asked, his hands squeezed into fists that felt small and ineffectual; Eiji glanced at him before sitting himself down on Ruki's bed, leaning in to examine the postcards he had affixed to the wall.
'You never answered my letters.'
'I never read your letters.'
He seemed incapable of lies; something seemed to have created a kind of bottleneck in his thoughts, so tight only the rawest truths could squeak through. Eiji. Eiji, right in front of him, in the flesh. That face Ruki had known so well, that he'd dwelt on and doted upon, the messy hair he'd run his hands through any number of times, those wise, cynical eyes behind the heavy-framed glasses. His ever-present black turtleneck; the ironic little twist he gave to his lips; the slight yellow stains on his fingers from where he held his cigarettes.
If I wanted to, Ruki thought nonsensically, I could reach out and touch him. I could wrap my arms all the way around him and breathe in his smell and fill my head with his voice. I could press my face into his chest so my eyes got full of him; so I couldn't possibly see anything else.
With the strange thought that he should be offering proof, he got down on his hands and knees and pushed his hand into the gritty dust beneath his bed, groping around for the sealed envelopes containing Eiji's letters, but he couldn't seem to find them. Stubbornly, he swept his arm all the way around, but he knew in his heart that they weren't there. Tidied away, perhaps, by some nurse; or perhaps they had simply never existed.
Eiji was watching him as he acted crazy, but the thought didn't make Ruki panic the way he'd thought it would; instead, he just felt tired. He heaved himself back up and sat down on the edge of Toshiya's bed.
He wanted a cigarette; when Eiji offered him one he accepted, and silently the two of them lit up.
'Heard you got a hell of an offer recently, kid,' Eiji said after a moment, and Ruki blinked at him dazedly.
'Huh?'
Eiji chuckled. 'They got you on something? Doped up on something, I mean?'
'I don't...'
'You're so out of it.'
Dumbly, Ruki shook his head. 'It's just weird to see you,' he said, hating how stolid his voice sounding but unable to find anything to do about it.
I'd Rather Go Blind seemed to have stuck itself in his head, its dreamily swaying rhythm matching the deadly slowness of his heart in his chest.
'Don't know why. You used to see enough of me.'
That grin again: that crooked tooth. Ruki tore his eyes away from it.
'What do you want?' he asked, trying to make his voice firmer, and Eiji shrugged.
'To congratulate you, of course.'
'On...?'
'On the exhibition, kid. 'Mapping Change'? 'New Perspectives on Modernity'? Ringing any bells?'
'How do you know about that?' Ruki asked. He became aware that his hands were scratching at each other restlessly; he trapped them between his knees. Crossing one leg over the other elegantly, Eiji snorted.
'Everyone knows. There's actual buzz around you, kid; you know that, right?'
'Buzz,' Ruki repeated as if it was a foreign word, and Eiji let smoke furl slowly from his lips.
'People know,' he said plainly. 'They know you're here.'
A weird feeling: something like icy water, trickling down Ruki's back and making him start to shiver.
'Wh-what?'
'Word got out. You know how it goes around the Institute, kid; people are people but gossip is gossip. That's what fuels the world we live in. It's not about talent any more, not even about who you know, any more. It's about who knows you.' With the fingers that were clamped around his smouldering cigarette, Eiji pointed at him. 'Nobody knows any insane artists, kid. But now they know you.'
Wordless, Ruki reached for an ashtray and gutted his cigarette. He had the weirdest feeling that he might be see through; that if he looked down at his own lap he might see the grey of the bedspread straight through it.
'Take that look off your face,' Eiji said impatiently, 'This is not a bad thing; you get that? This is the marketing strategy of the decade. This is a fucking goldmine. A few years ago it wouldn't have flown, you would've just been another sad little freak – but now. Now people are interested. They're socially conscious, and all that. Rich people want to prove they know about art, sure, that's always been the case, but now they want to prove that they care, too. That they're all so open minded. Pre-graduate work by a certified crazy person, canvases sent straight from the asylum? Kid, they'll be lining up.'
Gelatinous. The word oozed into Ruki's head and sat on the top of his mind fatly, a perfect description of how he felt; something watery and rubbery and ultimately insubstantial, a beached jellyfish. He pictured how he might be able to hold up his own hand and see the veins running through his transparent flesh, how he would have left damp imprints on the paper of his half-smoked cigarette, and swallowed the nauseous saliva that started to flood his mouth.
'Kid,' Eiji said gentler, 'There's no need to be embarrassed. It's a good thing.'
When Ruki still didn't answer he sighed and got to his feet, sitting down beside Ruki instead, laying an arm over his shoulders. It was so warm and so solid that it was impossible to avoid leaning into it. The smell of his clothes was so familiar that it brought tears to Ruki's eyes, and he sniffed quickly.
'That's it, kid,' Eiji said softly, 'It's only me. Let it all out.'
'Don't call me 'kid',' Ruki managed to say, and then his shoulders sagged. It was as sudden as if he'd been shot in the back: the way his posture crumpled and the broken crack in his voice as he cried. His tears felt unusually cold on his face, like rain. The humiliation of crying in front of Eiji existed as an idea but it didn't feel very real; he was conscious mostly of how good, how solid his teacher's body felt against his own; how warm and reassuring it was; how present. Eiji would never go transparent; would never feel like a jellyfish. He simply wasn't that kind of person.
He felt the older man lay a gentle kiss on the top of his head and shut his eyes tightly. He wiped the tears from his cheeks and noticed that his hands were trembling but were, at least, corporeal.
'Ruki.' Eiji was murmuring his name, over and over; he was stroking his back. A strong hand, muscular and lean from years of painting, took hold of his chin and angled it upward; a pair of lips pressed themselves softly all over his face, touching the tracks made by his tears.
But they felt too thin, those lips.
Not right.
Ruki pulled himself slowly away, sitting up straighter, and reached for the cigarette that he'd gutted. When he relit it, he felt the rush of warmth from his lighter against his face.
'Why are you really here,' he said quietly, no question in his voice. Eiji kept stroking his back but he was unforgiving now, curled over hard and shiny like the shell of a beetle.
'I miss you,' Eiji said, and Ruki snorted.
'Bullshit.'
'It's not bullshit. You want me to come out and say it then I'll come out and say it: I want you back.'
Ruki felt a terrible, almost savage urge to laugh. He bit at the skin around his thumbnail.
'It's not been the same without you,' Eiji said. 'We ended things too abruptly; I can see that now. Whatever you want to hear, kid, I'm ready to say it; I mean I feel it, don't you get that? Things were better with you; the sex was better, my work was better, and you – your life was definitely better, wasn't it? Kid, you shouldn't be here. You should be back in Osaka, with me.'
'You realise that I'm not allowed to just walk out of here, right?' Ruki asked listlessly, finding it oddly comfortable to think of the logistics. 'I actually have to be released.'
'Kid, you're not crazy. It's a mistake, that's all; putting you in here in the first place was a mistake; they'll see—'
'I tried to kill myself,' Ruki said, his voice louder than he'd intended.
The words seemed to ring around the room, like an echo. He swallowed hard, staring down at his hands. There had been a thin, high note of hysteria in his voice that made him want to wince.
'I tried to kill myself,' he repeated, softer, 'Eiji, I don't know if I was insane, but I wanted to die. And I think maybe...maybe those are kind of the same thing, because I wasn't in touch with reality. If I had been I'd have seen that there were things to live for. Even just one thing would have been enough.'
He started to bite at his thumb again. There were footsteps out in the hall.
'I can give you something to live for,' Eiji said seriously, and there it was again: the mad desire to laugh, almost irresistible. What was wrong with him?
Maybe if he laughed, Eiji really would believe that he was crazy.
'Think about it,' Eiji continued in the same tone of voice, 'Kid, we can live together; don't you see what a story that'll be? You being so depressed, unhinged, and then getting better when you find your place with me – both of us loving each other, making art together? We can challenge everything; everything people think about relationships like ours. Kid, we can make it this way, and the best part is that it doesn't have to just be a story. It can be real, too.'
'It wouldn't be real,' Ruki said stiffly, and Eiji took a gentle hold of his arms. Warm; he was so warm.
'Kid,' he breathed, 'Weren't we good together? You loved me once; you were crazy about me. You think that's been taken so far away from you that you can't ever get it back?'
'You didn't love me,' Ruki persisted, squeezing his eyes shut, and Eiji kissed him. It was on the lips this time, sensual in a way he remembered, the kind of touch that made him want to melt; when he pulled away it was only by the grimmest kind of will.
'I can love you,' Eiji whispered, drawing him close enough so that his breath ruffled Ruki's hair, 'God, kid, I can love you. Ruki, you've been so lost; I don't think you really appreciate how lost you've been.'
'I'm not,' Ruki said, but his voice sounded confused; pathetic.
'Kid,' Eiji said consolingly, the kind of warm voice that made Ruki's tense muscles soften in spite of himself, 'I know it's been an awful few months for you, but it's over now. Just say you'll come back to me, and we'll make things better together, okay? You'll be able to rest, then. I'll take care of you.'
Take care. The words had a strange ring in Ruki's head: so comforting, so tempting. How long had it been since anybody had promised in as many words to do that for him?
Take care. But the image the words called up in his head wasn't of Eiji's thin, distinguished face; he couldn't even force it. When he tried, the lines turned angular and uncompromising, the brown eyes darkened; inscrutable as ever, Kyo stared at him from inside his own head.
Take care. He turned it over and over in his mind and allowed Eiji to stroke his hair.
Eiji was right, he thought: he had loved him before. He'd loved him so hard that he'd allowed it to make him crazy, and wasn't that the sort of love that every romance novel and film taught people to strive for – wasn't that meant to be the only kind of love worth having? Dizzy, and unsafe, but grand; beautiful in a way that only the very fragile and vulnerable things could be, delicate, moribund as a rainbow in a soap bubble.
He felt terribly mixed up and tired. Heavily, he forced himself to sit up.
'Eiji,' he said haltingly, 'I don't know about this. I can't...I'm sort of confused right now.'
'So let me straighten you out,' Eiji soothed, 'Let me help you. We can sort it all out in your mind; we can—'
'Eiji, no. I need to think.'
Almost devastatingly, the older man smiled at him.
'Is there really anything to think about?' he asked gently, and even though it felt like he was betraying something inside of his own self Ruki nodded.
'Give me a week,' he said weakly, 'Please. I need to get things clear. I need some time.'
Lightly, Eiji kissed him again.
'Anything for you,' he said.
A final time: that urge to laugh. The kind of laughter, Ruki thought, that would bubble over and spill, drainlike, echoey; the kind of laugh that would sound like sobbing.
There wasn't much else to say after that. As Ruki walked him to the door, he wondered why Eiji seemed so cheerful; he hadn't, Ruki thought, got the answer he'd been expecting. Or had he? He kissed Ruki gently on the cheek, nodded his head to the nurses, seemed so sure of himself. In the stairwell his footsteps clattered, and Ruki frowned: he was whistling.
Like a sleepwalker, he stood and watched as the nurse on duty closed and locked the stairwell door. She seemed to be quite determinedly not looking at him, as if she was refusing to pass comment on what she had just seen: that messy, handsome bohemian; that kiss, and the way his hand had found the curve of Ruki's waist as his lips had touched his cheek, touching him like a person would touch a lover – touching just to feel the shape of them. Ruki touched the back of his hand dully to his cheek to see if he was blushing, but it was the exact opposite: his face felt cold and pale, smooth as marble.
How long had Eiji been there? It hadn't felt like long, but time was warping itself just as it had used to do in the old days, an hour passing like ten minutes, a minute passing like ten days; what was the use of trying to keep up with it? Time was only a human thing; was as fallible as every other invention. Ruki had a headache. Already everything had changed; the TV room was now deserted, the chairs all arranged at offended-looking angles to one another; there was a steady hum of chatter from the dining room and the clock above the nurses' station read gone twelve; how had that happened? Outside the snow was textureless and opaque as bone.
It felt as though some intrusive hand had thrust itself directly into his brain and stirred everything around. It felt stealthy, muffled, a strange violation; a quick and quiet rape of the mind. It hurt. Ruki dug his fingernails into the back of his neck.
He became aware that the nurse was saying something to him, but the words seemed nothing more than a series of silvery bubbles, floating up at him from deep underwater. They popped with a fishy smell.
'Huh?'
'The dining room, I said.' With an oddly clipped gesture, the nurse pointed at it with her open hand, her fingers primly together, 'Everybody has moved into the dining room. There's a buffet lunch laid out. It's time to eat something.'
'I'm not hungry,' Ruki said, but pointlessly. She gave him a smile, which she held until he obeyed her and went into the dining room. More people had arrived whilst Eiji had been talking with him, and he felt that weird disorientation again; how much time had passed? It didn't seem to make sense. He eased himself through the doorway, almost sliding along the wall, and made eye contact with Toshiya where he stood rather edgily in a corner. His roommate seemed to be asking him some kind of question with his gaze; Ruki looked away.
Platters of food covered the table, and people held plates bearing dainty party portions: gyoza, onigiri, skewers of meat...the smell wasn't unpleasant but was too thick for such a small room, filled with so many people; the guests had a gasping, cramped kind of look. Looking around the room, Ruki thought, you might have been able to guess everything about these people: there was Die sat between his parents, bashful under his mother's doting gaze and her inability to get enough of the sight of him, the sense that she was drinking him in; there was Aoi standing at a remove, the shape of his body spiky as barbed wire, his parents just as singular and the three of them bearing matching expressions of irritation; there was Uruha tapping hard at the cover of the book he held in his lap, an unfocussed look on his face as his father flitted around him and his mother sat up straight, ignoring the food, holding her handbag on her lap in a way that suggested she was about to stand up and leave. She had her hand positioned in a way that made sure the jewels in her bracelet caught the light, and she looked down at them contemplatively.
Watching them all, Ruki felt a faint sort of helplessness; a kind of lethargy that oozed through his veins. He dropped heavily into a chair and poured himself a glass of water that tasted like metal.
The afternoon felt, above all, stupid. Like the clock, like the way the sun seemed to be sliding up and down above the line of the horizon, it didn't seem to make sense: all the children locked up inside their own heads, and these parents – drinking tea, and eating party foods. Discussing what time babies' eyes changed colour and clucking over the riots in Okinawa. What was the point? Next to their parents, Ruki thought, the patients looked as distinct and noticeable as sprinkles of salt in a pepper pot, as if they had been marked in some cryptic, cultish way. The room smelled of food and bodies. Outside the window, the sky was hard and bright.
'This is for you,' Ruki caught Uruha's voice saying suddenly, very quiet and almost furred with discomfort; he glanced up to catch him pressing his book twitchily into Die's father's hands. He wasn't alone in his confusion; Mr Andou looked equally unsure, and over Uruha's shoulder, his own father was frowning slightly.
'Well, thank you,' Die's father said uncertainly, smoothing over the cover; it had been tattooed by a series of crescents, the insistent indents of Uruha's fingernails, 'The Local's Guide to The Netherlands. I'm sure this will come in very—'
'Read it,' Uruha mumbled intensely, biting hard on his knuckle.
Die's father looked at him quietly for a moment, and then opened the book. It seemed to naturally fall open halfway through, as though it had been held that way for too long or as if there was a bookmark inside it, but Mr Andou angled the book subtly upwards so that Ruki couldn't see.
What he did catch, though, was a peculiar look passing between Die and Aoi; a sort of wonderment mixed with alarm, and Aoi began chewing on a lock of his own hair, scowling at his mother when she tried to pull it out of his mouth. With bared teeth he was almost like an animal, and Ruki wondered if his parents regretted it, what they had done – if they could sense all the things inside their son that had been contorted, changed forever.
Mr Andou excused himself quietly, still holding Uruha's gift, and Die's mother took her son's hand in both of her own.
'I'll get you another copy,' Uruha's father said softly, lying his hand on his son's hunched shoulder, 'Don't worry.'
Faintly, almost too faint to be heard, Uruha said: 'Thank you, Dad.'
Oddly enough, with the book now gone from his lap, he seemed to be there at last; he had returned from whatever strange place that book had taken him to. The Netherlands, maybe, Ruki thought before he could stop himself, and frowned at his own bitterness.
Uruha seemed neither happy nor unhappy to be there, a curled-in figure, huddled and thoughtful. Silently, he reached up and laid his own hand on top of his father's; allowed his fingers to be squeezed and held.
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I'm so curious what Uruha gave Die's dad hidden in the book. A letter, maybe? Or did he write directly on the pages. Die's parents seem very trustworthy and kind, though, so I'm sure whatever it is, Die's dad will take the matter seriously.
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