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solongsun April 8, 1970: the day of the Ten-Roku gas explosion, and the day that 22-year-old Ruki attempts to end his life. Less than two weeks later, he finds himself committed to the Yamauchi Hostel, a psychiatric hospital in the Kyoto hills. Kept on a ward with a number of other ill young men, Ruki is sometimes frightened and sometimes enthralled by his new friends – and none more other than the 'untreatable' Kyo, whose hospitalisation hides a legacy of dark secrets...
The good mood around the sanatorium seemed to prevail as the summer wore on and deepened, and the days grew longer. The warm breezes that had characterised May and June died, and the weather grew breathless and still; the hills surrounding them gave the sense of being in a sort of stupor, and the heat felt almost liquid. The sanatorium was a modern-looking building but it wasn't air conditioned, and so the place spent days on end with every window flung wide open in a hope of tempting a non-existent breeze in through the bars. The sky was a somnolent blue, and Ruki spent more and more time wandering beneath it, walking mostly in silence but never alone, because Kyo was always with him.
It was a strange system; they hadn't spoken about it much. If they did talk it was only about the most fleeting of subjects; the way a cloud looked on the horizon, or about a record that might have been playing in the music room, or about the birds they saw, which Ruki couldn't identify but Kyo could. Pheasants with iridescent green feathers strutting through the meadows, their peculiar calls echoing in the still air, and small, chattery swifts swooping around the hilltops. They heard the calling of a bird that Kyo said was a nightjar, and the occasional cuckoo, and once or twice they saw the sun-drenched outline of a larger bird, a crane or stork, soaring across the sky like a great white flying myth. When Ruki asked where Kyo had learnt so much about the birds, he just shrugged.
'I've lived in Kyoto all my life,' he said; a small detail, but one that Ruki found himself storing away inside his mind like something precious, a little hint of clarity in Kyo's otherwise murky, unmentioned past.
The strange thing was that, though the lack of conversation started out feeling slightly uncomfortable, Ruki adjusted to it much more quickly than he'd thought he would. Conversely, it made him feel like there wasn't a great deal he couldn't say to the other man, and as the summer wore on he found himself confiding more and more of himself to his new friend. It happened slowly, in perhaps one ten-minute slot during an hour-long walk; and what was funny to Ruki was the way Kyo always seemed to expect it. He had a habit of slowing his walking or stopping altogether, and simply studying the sky or the grass for a while until Ruki finally spat out whatever he had to say. He rarely asked questions, but instead seemed to simply let Ruki's haltingly delivered words slide over him, like he was standing underneath a slow drip and was waiting for it to soak him entirely through.
It was on a particularly sticky day in mid August when they climbed the highest peak Ruki could see from the sanatorium windows; a rugged, tough journey, but also something of a celebration; after weeks of good behaviour, Ruki's time limit outside had been extended; he was now allowed to be out for two hours at a time instead of the usual one. When they reached the top they were both slightly out of breath, and Ruki thought ruefully of the tens of thousands of cigarettes they had probably smoked between them throughout their lives.
'When did you start smoking?' he asked Kyo conversationally as the older man eased himself up onto a flat, hot-looking rock, lifting up his t-shirt slightly to get some air to his skin. Kyo wrinkled his nose.
'Eleven, twelve. Cigarettes were always in the house and my parents never cared. You?'
'When I met Eiji. When we were first getting to know each other, when he was still guest lecturing, he took me and a few other students out to a bar. We were a sort of group, I guess. Like a little fan club.'
He took a cigarette out of his packet and lit it but didn't inhale, just sort of toyed with it in his fingers as grey smoke curled up into the sky. 'I wanted...time alone with him,' he mumbled. 'So when he sort of interrupted himself once to say he had to get more cigarettes, and I just said, oh, me too. So that way we got to walk to the convenience store together. But then I had to buy some, and smoke them.'
He remembered how awkwardly he'd fumbled with the packet as he stuck his first ever cigarette between his lips, and how suddenly embarrassed he'd been to realise that he didn't have anything to light it up with. His face had gone immediately red, but then Eiji had laid a brief hand on his cheek, and used it to guide the tip of Ruki's cigarette into the flame of his own lighter. He remembered how the cigarette had tasted then; how hot the smoke had felt in his throat, and how exciting, blurred inexorably with the light touch on his face. He gave his head a slight shake. The image had a strong presence, almost physical; he wanted to bat it away.
'I did that a lot,' he said, his voice suddenly forceful, 'Do things I didn't want to do. First to attract him, and then to keep him. I was never good enough, the way I was.'
'You're good enough.'
'He didn't think so.'
Kyo shrugged awkwardly, hunching over to light a cigarette of his own. The sun was hanging about halfway down in the sky and it lit him up entirely golden; his hair shone and his skin glowed with an aura the colour of body heat. For a moment, the outline of his basic shape was visible in silhouette through the baggy institutional clothing, and Ruki felt his breath perform a strange sort of hitch in his throat. They were around the same height, but Kyo was a completely different shape to him: his body was a series of lines that were the natural extension of his strong, sharp jaw and precisely cut eyes; the torso was angular, bone and muscle, diagonal slashes separating chest from hips, hips from groin. There was a peculiarly fuzzy sort of feeling in Ruki's stomach; a strange sort of lightness in his head. He wanted to touch them; to trace those lines. He wanted to follow them with his fingers and find where they ended, or follow them back to their sources; the twin wells of collarbones and sternum, the tiny oasis of belly button in the flat stomach. He wanted to feel it all.
He spun around abruptly, taking a deep drag on his cigarette to calm his rattling nerves. His stomach was still fluttering pleasantly, and he could feel his dick stirring warmly against his thigh, starting to harden. He sat down on low a boulder and crossed his legs quickly.
'It's good to be outside,' Kyo said quietly. He held his cigarette loosely at his side as he straightened up, the sun reflecting in his eyes. 'I almost thought it wouldn't happen again.'
'Why didn't you ever go out with a nurse or something?
A wry sort of smile quirked at the corner of Kyo's mouth.
'They're all scared of me. You saw it the night you slept in my room.'
'You still haven't told me why,' Ruki said, and Kyo gave a short, humourless sort of laugh.
'You'd never believe me,' he said.
'Try me.'
Kyo gave him a soft, almost beatific smile. 'No.'
'But...maybe this is the thing that's eating you up.'
'There's nothing eating me up.'
'But you have a secret.'
'Secrets aren't bad.'
'That wasn't the line you took when I had a secret,' Ruki said grudgingly.
'You were keeping things a secret from yourself, though. It's different.' Kyo shaded his eyes against the sun. 'I know exactly who I am, and what I did.'
'So how do you expect me to trust you, if you keep everything back from me?' Ruki pushed, feeling argumentative. He knew it was mostly because he was flustered, almost angry at the other man for turning him on and for continuing to sit so calmly whilst Ruki's dick was getting stiffer and stiffer in his pants, but he couldn't seem to stop.
'I don't expect you to trust me.'
'Yes you do,' Ruki retorted. 'You took me up here. There's nobody else around, and even if I screamed so loud somebody heard, they'd take about half an hour to reach us.'
'You're right. You're trusting me not to kill you,' Kyo said in a musing voice.
'Right,' Ruki agreed in a bad-tempered voice, 'But I don't know anything about you. I know your name, how old you are, and where you're from. That's it.'
'What do you want to know?' Kyo said in a flat voice. 'I'm deaf in one ear. I work out to keep strong but I still get sick all the time. I eat all the things you eat. Sleep a lot. I've been locked up for twelve years; this place is my personality now. I used to be self-conscious until I got prodded and poked and evaluated by so many strangers. I've had a dozen therapists and I tell them the same truth over and over, but it's never good enough. I'm this place all over. Like a bad dream.'
'What do you want to do when you get out of here?' Ruki pressed, and Kyo snorted.
'I'm never getting out of here.'
'You don't know that. What's even supposed to be wrong with you?'
'I had a psychotic episode,' Kyo said shortly, 'Once.'
'Just once?'
'That's right.'
'What, so that means you get to be punished forever?'
'That all depends which therapist you ask,' Kyo said drily. 'Did I know what I was doing? Didn't I? Had I lost touch with reality or hadn't I? They don't want to believe my answers.'
'So where does that leave you?'
Kyo shrugged. 'Can't go backwards. Can't go forwards.'
'But that's—'
'Yes, I know how it is.' He took a deep drag from his cigarette. 'This conversation is boring.'
'You always say that when you're doing all the talking.'
'So you talk,' Kyo retorted mildly. 'Tell me about the maps.'
Ruki sighed. 'The maps were stupid.'
The maps had been what he was working on when everything with Eiji had started to feel unsteady. It was like something in a cartoon, where the main character has an earthquake tear a great fissure in the ground just below their feet, leaving them straddling the empty space over the guts of the earth; that had been exactly how it had felt. For a lot of the time Ruki had been making the maps, he had felt a lot of those initial tremors, little practice quakes shooting through the skin of his planet, and he had been panicking.
In some superstitious way he thought the maps were maybe part of it.
It had started when he was thinking about how much time he spent walking around the city and daydreaming. It struck him that an outside observer would say that his experience of the time would be the walk itself, whereas his experience of the time would be the daydream that had occupied it. In which case, where was he really? Once he had started tugging on that thread, many others had started to unravel, and that was how he had started making his maps. The abstract, doubling-back, scribbly shapes of his routes had become suddenly bedecked with flowery illustrations, the same way that stars can become constellations with generous outlines, but the problem with that had been the image: too decorative, too random; truthfully, too explicit to be shown to anybody but Eiji.
So Ruki had started thinking of other things that the body did. Maps were always made in metres and kilometres; those were the units for measuring the distance between two points, but what did they say about the experience of the journey? A fat lot of nothing, in Ruki's opinion. So, working in pared-back colours on a painstakingly hand-drawn grid, he had begun to think about his own body. He had recorded his statistics from place to place; how many steps it took him to walk a block, how many breaths he took in that time, how many beats of his heart it took to get from his dorm to his classes, from his classes to Eiji's apartment. He noticed the journeys his heart sped up on, and his work became suddenly flushed with life, as if it had been doused with blood himself. For a time the maps had seemed like the best thing he had ever made. They had felt pure and truthful and interesting in a way nothing really had before, and perhaps that had been the first ominous rumble on the horizon: the maps were sometimes – not always, but sometimes – a little more alluring than suffocating in a smoky bar with Eiji and his moronic entourage.
Thinking it now sent a strange thrill up Ruki's spine, almost a scared feeling, as if Eiji could read his thoughts.
Eiji had talked to him very gently about the maps. He had used words like ambitious and execution like a paternal sort of teacher: it's a very ambitious project, Ruki, but I'm just not sure about the execution...
And then the quote he had meekly nodded along to at the time, but inwardly rankled against fiercely: we're still trying to make a beautiful image, Ruki.
But he had been walking through the dirty, ashy, rainy streets and not a single thing had been beautiful, not even the architecture or the people or the gasoline rainbows puddled on the concrete; nothing. Every time he tried to appreciate something, he felt like he ended up choking on car exhaust instead. At night, the sky glowed a toxic orange, and the moon hung around in the sky like a chewed-off fingernail, dirty and jagged at the edges.
Eiji had said, in a voice so impatient that it rattled like glass, that there was beauty everywhere and an artist's job was to find it.
Gradually, Ruki had started to see things his way, and in the end he had poured the ink all over his work half out of disgust for it, and half as a desperate declaration of love. In either case, though, he had been too late.
Stuck with an erection on top of a mountain in Kyoto, Ruki thought those times seemed almost quaint now. How was it possible that everything had felt so important at the time? Every little moment of tension, every fuck, every kiss, all the maps and the walking and the arguments about ugliness and beauty; all of them had served to distract Ruki so thoroughly that the real problems just couldn't squeak through: that he felt sad all the time, and tired all the time, and that food was boring and sex was predictable and that it was taking him longer and longer to recognise his own face in the mirror. With no Eiji and no maps, that was all that was left. Ruki wondered what there would be inside him if those things ever went away; maybe there wouldn't be anything at all.
Except, he thought irritably, maybe lust. He willed his erection to go away, but it seemed that every time Kyo brought his cigarette to his lips, it sent another throb of desire through Ruki's body. He shifted uncomfortably where he sat, feeling the head of his dick push against the fabric of his pants, and leant forward in what he hoped was a casual way. If he stood up, he would be revealed for sure, and what shocked him was how the thought of that made him not only feel anxious but also, in some strange way, sent a little rush of lust through him, a sort of spark straight to the core. Suppose Kyo noticed, then what? The thought made his cock twitch between his legs, but he seemed to be unable to picture what would happen next.
'It'll be autumn soon,' Kyo said, speaking quietly over Ruki's thoughts. 'It'll start raining, and then it'll snow.'
He tilted his head back, following the progress of a swallow through the sky.
'What happened when you had your psychotic episode?' Ruki asked, and Kyo was silent for a while, words coming together behind his eyes.
'I had a long dream,' he explained at last, shortly.
'Of what?'
'Being eaten,' Kyo said, studying his cigarette as if reading answers in the smoke, 'Being digested. It changed, like dreams do. But it was always some dark, enclosed place, something like a basement or a stomach or the bottom of a well. The only light was distant and red, like it was coming through skin. And there was something waiting.'
'Waiting to what?'
'To feed,' Kyo said simply. He caught the look on Ruki's face and gave him a brief smile.
'But what really happened?'
'I didn't want to become the prey, so I fought against it. That's what I mean when I say I don't regret it. There wasn't a choice. I didn't want to die, so I chose to live.'
'But how?'
Kyo hesitated over that for a long time again, but in the end he merely shrugged.
'I can't explain,' he said. 'It was a dream; it's hard to remember. Dreams always are.'
'But you know what happened outside?' Ruki pressed, 'In the real world, I mean?'
Kyo fiddled with his cigarette, digging his thumbnail into the filter and peeling back a little of the paper. He was staring at the patch of rock between his knees fixedly.
'Yeah,' he said finally, 'I know. They told me.'
There was a strange tone in his voice that stopped Ruki from asking any more questions. Kyo's head was still lowered, his hair falling forwards to hide his face, and there was something soft in his voice that Ruki had never heard from him before. He had heard Kyo speak gently – although admittedly, on very few occasions – but this was different; it was soft because it was almost weak; almost vulnerable.
It was discomfiting, and Ruki shifted uncomfortably where he sat. He felt like he wanted to say something reassuring, like it'll be okay, but that felt meaningless; it wasn't a promise he could make. I'm sorry sounded stupid, too, when he didn't know what he was sorry for. Nothing seemed to fit.
Instead, acting on impulse so quick he didn't have time to talk himself out of it, Ruki reached out and clutched Kyo's hand in his own, squeezing it tight.
Kyo's hand was bigger than his own, with longer fingers, and although it was a hot day the palm was cool. He didn't curl his hand around Ruki's, but kept it rigid, and as soon as they'd touched the line of his shoulders had become hard and tense; his whole body seemed to stiffen. He shot Ruki a short look, something like uncertainty in his eyes, and then dropped his gaze to their conjoined hands. Ruki felt suddenly very aware of how quiet it was; the whole landscape around them, the silence as thick as the heat.
'We should go back,' Kyo said. His voice was strange, almost nervous. 'It's getting late.'
'Yeah,' Ruki said, but he didn't move; neither of them did. They sat on the rocks, both of them bathed in golden light, Ruki shading his eyes against the sun and Kyo staring at the ground, quietly clasping hands.
Eiji—
I remember the last time we fucked.
Do you remember that I woke you up in the middle of the night, pressing myself against you, and you didn't know why? I wasn't sure why either, but I know now. It was because I sensed that it was our last night together.
The sex felt like every time we'd ever done it, rolled into one. I couldn't tell fact from fiction then; what was really happening in the moment, and what was just my memory. Everything from the last two years got compressed into a few minutes. It was every single kiss and touch. Like flicking through an archive. I knew it could only ever have been the last time, because I could see everything from beginning to end – I mean because I could finally see everything from the beginning, I understood that it had to be the end. It was like standing on a dark stage with a spotlight and then suddenly having the house lights go up, and being able to see everything, and so knowing the show was over. Does that make sense?
You fell asleep afterwards, but I couldn't sleep, because I knew that thought had only occurred to me, and that you would never understand. To you it was just like everything else with no history at all.
Eiji, I've never been turned on by any man but you. How am I supposed to figure out what it's supposed to feel like, or if I like it or not? How am I supposed to understand any of this without you?
Congratulations on your big exhibition, by the way. 'Reflections of Youth'? Cool name. I hope it fucking fails.
Fuck you.
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Even so, he and Ruki are exactly what the other person needs. I think it will do Kyo as much good opening up to Ruki as it has for Ruki to have someone to confide in. What I'm interested to see is how Kyo reacts if/when Ruki reveals his attraction.
The maps Ruki was making sound really beautiful in a possibly disturbing sort of way. It's a shame he destroyed them, because I bet Kyo would GET that art. And screw E.O for saying all art has to be a certain way. *middle fingers to him*
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The maps: I was pretty inspired by my boyfriend, who is an artist. When he was at art school he started to create a series of hand-drawn, hand-gridded maps, measuring an old London green space in steps. He spent literally weeks marching around, because he wasn't just measuring the space by steps, but also its features: steps between lampposts, steps between trees, etc. So I just kind of extrapolated that a bit!
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That project sounds like a LOT of work. I hope he was happy with the results!
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