FicWad

My eyes open to a world of white, suddenly breaking with all the brilliant images and blinding noise that has filled all of my senses for as long as I can remembering; filling the darkness in with foreign silhouettes and unknown color. The light is watery, spilling in from the window to tinge the curtains yellow and grace my skin with a sort of glitter, making its paleness somehow less pronounced. There is something flaccid about the flesh where it lays, heavily tangled in the coarse sheets. My muscles fail to respond when I try and pull myself up, expand the scope of vision that now is limited to assessing the walls and the chipped plaster of the ceiling. A few machines grace the sides of my bed, letting wires into my arms, their plastic casing taking on a milky glow where they face the window. The wires ache slightly under the skin, unsightly bruises clustering around the needle where it enters my vein. Each of my slight movements prompts a response from one of the machines, and its mechanical beeping is welcome enough. Somehow, it seems as though my ears should be ringing.
Apparently in response to the noise, a woman comes rushing in, her white uniform a veritable flurry of movement. Her face flushes, whether with concern or agitation I can’t tell. She breathes deeply in relief, stopping at the edge of the bed and slipping out a stereoscope. Carefully, she manipulates the bed so that I can be in a sitting position. As the nurse worries herself with cataloguing my vitals, I study the rest of the room. Next to bed, previously unseen, is a wooden nightstand decorated with several bouquets of flowers, most with white ribbons. A single unsigned card is propped open against one, it’s blue writing can be clearly read from where I’m sitting:
“Do not take your health for granted.”
A few blue lines testify to some aborted consideration at signing the thing. The rest of the writing is neat and deeply imprinted into the cardstock, as if someone pressed down hard on the pen as they wrote. Next to the card, the cover strewn with withered petals, is a thin suede notebook. Beneath it, the title nearly inscrutable with age or damage, is a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. The tears in the binding are disconcerting.
The rest of the room is bare, and unfamiliar. A pink upholstered chair dominates the far corner. A pale wood door hangs half-open, revealing the glint of tile and a bathroom mirror. Clothes are folded neatly in a small pile on the table next to it: a pair of dark pants and what looks like leather. Leaning against the table, thoroughly out of place, is an unsheathed sword, its blade dirty and dull against the pallor of the room. I can almost feel the sweat ingrained into the leather of the hilt, the rough dips of its scratches and stains. Even across the room weighs heavy on my chest, set to balance there by some unknown hand.
“I waited for--”
“Yes? What is it?”
My mouth is dry in the wake of the unexpected words. The nurse smiles softly from where she is adjusting one of my machines. Under her calm scrutiny I shrug, turning my eyes back on that strange weapon.
My attention is jerked away from it as the nurse sits down, her slight weight an unwelcome addition to the bed. Carefully, she sets her hand on mine, leaning forward.
“Are you in any pain?”
I shake my head; beyond a confusing sense of fatigue I feel absolutely fine.
“Alright. Now, I need to ask you a few questions. No big deal, it’s just for filing purposes and insurance work. But you won’t really need to worry about that-- someone has been paying your bills before insurance can even try and catch up to them. Very lucky.”
Vaguely, I wonder who could be paying my bills. An oddly shaped word offers itself up to my mind, but the sounds are wrong. Certainly not Japanese. I ignore it, it’s probably only muddled thinking to go along with the cocktail of medical drugs in my system.
When I don’t offer up any clarification on who could be paying for my treatments, she clears her throat and moves on.
“Alright. Now, if I were you I wouldn’t worry. These questions are just to check on your mental state and ensure that there is no lingering trauma. You’ve been out of it for months. There was little cranial damage however, so we’re fairly confident you’ll be fine. That you can focus your vision is a good sign.”
“How many months exactly?”
The notion is faintly terrifying, that I lost months from my life. It’s a waste. I wonder suddenly how she could cope-- having lost years. The name is blurry. I push it aside, it’ll come later. The face that seems to correspond to the forgotten name is soft, smiling. Its hooded eyes remind me of the sterile glare of the hospital room and the flowers beside me all at once. I can’t explain the unsettling feeling, and chose to focus on the nurse’s questions instead.
She puzzles through my chart for a moment before finding it, smiling nervously as she answer.
“About 6, give or take. Apparently someone left you outside to be found, and there’s no knowing how long you were out before they brought you here.”
I don’t know what to think of that. Who would leave a comatose man outside a hospital? Unless, of course, they were the cause of it. Or couldn’t come in themselves. And who would leave a sword with an invalid? The odd assortment of objects in the room testify to some strangeness of situation. Everything I can’t remember leaves me unsettled, faintly disgusted-- though I don’t quite understand where the disgust springs from. The flowers on the nightstand smell too strongly, too sweetly, leaving me with a headache as I try to remember through the perfume.
The nurse, unperturbed, begins her questions.
“Now first I need to ask if you can remember your name. You didn’t have an I.D. on you, so for the last half a year you’ve been Mr. John Doe.”
I want to laugh. It’s a perverse desire, and my lungs ache when I try. I feel shaky, and swear I can smell tobacco residue on the inside of my nostrils. Perhaps that would settle me.
My eyes glance furtively over to the card, but it offers up no answers, no addresses or salutations to calm my nerves. Limply, I pull the notebook over to my, my medicated fingers clumsily working the cover open, languidly tearing through the pages. The handwriting that greets me is looped, and femininely rounded; spelling out in black ink notes like “Order more copies of CAP!” and “Meet Fujimiya-sensei at five!”
I doubt this ever belonged to me. Even holding the thing feels like an odd act of violation. I’m an intruder, I suppose. Perhaps the book’s owner is the one who left me here, or who is paying.
When the nurse realizes I’m not going to answer, her look turns to pity. I find myself resenting it. She has her own damned name, she doesn’t need to worry about mine. It’ll come.
I look at her name-tag. See, she has a name. It’s Itou Asuka.
“Asuka……”
The name slips from my mouth too naturally. Too closely.
Maybe the woman who owned the notebook.
It’s syllables are nauseating.
Asuka smiles with a delicate twitch of her lips. She pats my shoulder as she stands up.
“I’m sure it will come. Its expected that you would be disoriented after so long.”
With that assurance, she turns and leaves the room, setting the chart on the table by my clothes. What a promise.
As soon as she’s gone I begin flipping through the notebook more furiously, searching the lined pages and dated headers for some note, some hint or clue of a name at least. Can someone exist without a name? Someone’s entire life, entire being can be recalled with one, I’m sure of that suddenly. Perhaps that’s my lack.
I find nothing. She couldn’t have had this book very long. Apparently, she didn’t even have the time to fill in the contact information form at the beginning of the book, in case it was lost. I suppose she isn’t getting it back then.
The few notes scattered in the book’s first pages detail minute observations on various people. I learn that “Watanabe like history.” and “Remember, Hishikawa will be absent Thursday.” Somehow, the information does not act as a substitute for that most vital of things.
The last note in the book is one I have seen already, a reminder to meet “Fujimiya-sensei”. Perhaps the owner of this is a teacher then. I wonder vaguely if I am the Fujimiya-sensei she had to meet. A wave of nausea rushes through me as I try to imagine what could have happened at such a meeting that I wound up here. It is worse as I find I can come up with nothing.
Frustrated, I drop the book back on the nightstand, snorting as it lands badly and slips to the floor. The front cover of the Shakespeare is plain and worn. I cannot make out the title on it as well as on the binding. I pick it up, thumbing through it. This might have been one of my favorites. The pages are riddled with notes in a cramped, half-illegible handwriting. The meaning of the spidery comments evades my eyes and I drop that book as well, vaguely satisfied as it lands securely on the table and stays there.
Restless. My legs twitch against the sheets. I move them listlessly, trying to test how far my muscles have degenerated. Carefully, I slide them over the edge of the bed, wincing slightly as they reach the floor. The cold tile is shocking. Regardless, I shift my body up, ignoring my shaking hands and throbbing head. My nausea spikes and I consider ringing for that nurse, but instead I carefully detach myself from the machines, watching the IV marks bleed slowly, as if even my blood is still asleep. There is something satisfying in the way the blood seeps into the sheets and stains my hospital gown. This room is altogether too white for my taste. It makes my eyes hurt.
Wavering, weak-kneed, I lift myself into a standing position and inch my way across the room, leaning heavily on the edge of the bed. As I near it, I vaguely consider using the sword as a makeshift cane, but as I brush my fingers along the base of the hilt, something in me knows better than to touch it. I let it lean against the table in peace. Wouldn’t want to disturb it.
Despite my weakness, I make it to the bathroom and drop against the sink, my arms holding my up tenuously as they grab around it. The porcelain is cold on my chest, but it makes no difference. I glance up into the mirror, searching from my reflection some reason for my being here.
Before my eyes is a haggard, dilapidated man. If you look carefully you can see that his pallid skin once housed more or less developed muscles, and the lurid gleam in his eye once had a healthier cast. His jaw hangs limply, perhaps because of medication. He is proud he has not vomited today, and he can walk five feet without collapsing. The hospital gown he wears is wrinkled and stained with sweat. One sleeve is hiked up to his shoulder, and itches. White scars line his skin, outlining bones and joint once out of place, marking old sourceless wounds. The only bruises in evidence are prominent under his eyes. His grainy skin and craned neck is framed by lank hair, clumping to his shoulders in a dull shade of yellow. The roots are darker, something akin to gold when clean, he guesses, and the tips are a greasy brittle white, snapping off in his hands when he touches them. He likes the hair, and tentatively resettles his weight on one arm to run his fingers through it, bemoaning the dirt. The angle of his arm reveals a dark spot that catches his eye. Leaning closer, my head, his head, brushing the glass, we find a tattoo: a cross and some English lettering in black.
Sin: When you gonna learn?
The words are sickening, most of all for their strangeness, their unreasoning imperative.
I’m suddenly very happy not to know my name. I wonder what sot of man needs such a reminder.
Carefully, I trace some of the scars revealed by the hospital gown, looking down the neck to find more. Some of them are fresher, still pink and puckered down my rib cage, gracing my stomach with lines and dark blemishes. My hand finds my tattoo again, closing around it, over it, as if somehow by covering it I can correct the image in the mirror.
A foreign voice, deep and cold, with a clipped tone echoes from under that grip, ringing in my skull with a strange lucidity. The brusqueness of the words brings to mind the cut stems of the flowers, the harsh lines of the dirty weapon, the crabbed and illegible handwriting.
Without a word it speaks, too fluent, too close, cutting deep through that riot of perfumes.
“You can’t change what you’ve become so easily.”
It’s a reminder that informs me, helpfully, that I probably never learned. My body’s fatigue informs me that its something unnecessary. A hallucination of the medication, a lingering dream from my coma. That I’m grasping at connections, cobbling together the small bits I have into something that doesn’t exist, that never existed at all. It’s delusion.
The voice quietly agrees with me.
Biting my lip, I turn from the mirror and press the white plastic button that should call the nurse. The floor is white too as I sink down to the floor, finding my muscles unwilling to continue supporting me.
I think white is supposed to be a peaceful color, if they use it in sickrooms.
The thought is ridiculous and I shove it aside. Asuka’s dress is white when she comes in, her skin white with concern as she hauls me back over to the bed. I let my fingers linger on her arm, my knuckles white with effort.
And it is enough, and too much at once. Still reeling from that unknown voice, I let myself sleep, disregarding all concerns of waking again. It seems too easy, and too certain that I will.
______________________________________

A month later, Omi’s words are still too clear, too heavy in my mind.
“I forgive you.”
It’s absurd, to be forced into grace like that. I try to avoid the thought, turning my attention instead to the brightly decorated store windows, the tinsel and colorful displays that remind one, helpfully enough, that it is just a few short weeks until Christmas. The snow, however, is thick enough of a cue.
I wonder, is forgiveness enough to serve as redemption? Can external absolution really be a remission of sin, a change of state that allows peace and rids one of sorrow?
Or should it be enough to be carried back home?
There is something cold in the thought, colder than the wind buffeting my cheekbones, colder than the empty church, colder than my uncertain breast as I left the last of my excess funds with that nun-- knowing fully that without anything to give, I would not be able to bring myself to come back again.
And home-- the thought of it is ludicrous, luminously funny, something magically lost. It’s beautiful, I suppose, because I cannot have it. I grimace at the passers-by, faintly aware that I’ve slowed down, walking in tandem with the decelerated rhythm of my thoughts. Home is lost to happiness, to sweltering nights, to hospital beds, to the lurid light above the pavement, to smoke, and chilled skin, and awkward crucifixes-- bloodstained and soft and sourceless in smeared paint and blue suede notebooks. Home is better to be lost, if not, I would have no appetite for it, no compulsion to seek it out, or hold it dear. I stub my cigarette out on the side of a building, for a moment considering the slight figures conversing in the alley ahead, half their bodies exposed to the chill of the sidewalk. Calmly, I let myself read familiar features into them, giving my nostalgia a temporary life and urgency. After all, Sena told me about redemption. It is only right that he should haunt my wondering, even here.
“And what do you think redemption is, Sena?”
I let the words drift from my lips in a cloud of whitened air, my teeth clattering together on the final syllable.
I do not hear the answer, but I know it well. And I have not yet made it there, because there is still shock, still mute pain as the boy turns and I find him coarse-featured, and blond, and unknown. Nothing to say goodbye to.
But then, perhaps it is because of my lingering reverie that I do not struggle or pause as he slams into me, one hand groping down my abdomen, the other fisting through my pocket for some folded bills, or a wallet.
And my head is light, and shirt warm as he moves on, his steps beating a rapid fire on the pavement behind me. There is nothing to feel so much as the heat of the cut as I press my fingers to it, holding it closed. It’s reassuring, a warmth that testifies to the blood still in my body and the breath that moves it. Carefully, I stagger down the street, avoiding the eyes of other pedestrians. Finally, one block, two blocks, several streets later, my legs give out, shaking in a pile on the concrete. A metal postbox digs into my spine and a cigarette butt itches under my twitching palm, less support than the sidewalk should be.
And I want to remember. The cold sinks into my skin, the blood cakes into a thick crust under my fingernails, and it no longer matters if I suffer for remembering. May pettiness be my guide, I want to recall everything.
And from the cold, from the concrete I can feel the heat of skin, of summer sand, of blistering metal just sharpened. I can hear soft feminine laughter, persuasion and mockery that comes too playfully, in a delicate overwhelm. Her pale hand outstretches and I forget that she ever slept so long. It seems impossible now that she could have paused for even a moment, or otherwise been gone so long. I remember the dull rage of confusion, of pointless confessions, of hollow reluctance. I remember the stinging heat of wire at my throat, the stale taste of alcoholic residue, of lingering voices and a languid eye. I remember flowers, and they all rush together, an anomaly in the bitter wind, bursting through my eyes in shocks of red and white, violently clear. Too many faces, too many names to be properly saved. I want only the joy of saying my goodbyes together, only the inaudible rush of the wind into my open mouth, and the settling of snow on my lips, covering any trace of what I might have so staidly said.





Author's note: Well, it's finished. Thought I might mention that the title to this chapter is an allusion to a line from the Tao te Ching: "The strong and violent do not die natural deaths". I've always rather liked that, and it seemed fitting enough. Hope that this was enjoyed. Feedback, of course, is very welcome.