Red
by Tin Mandigma
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Weiss Kreuz copyright Koyasu Takehito and Project Weiss. All other disclaimers apply.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
For Shi-chan and Sakura *hugs* ^_^ Criminal would have to wait for her own.
Kurenai no namida zo itodo utomaruru utsuru
kokoro no iro ni miyureta
Blood-red tears are even more hateful--
crimson, the quick-to-fade color of inconstant love
-Murasaki Shikibu
translated by Richard Bowring
"Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs"
I don't know how long I've been sitting here. It seems like hours have passed, but
it couldn't possibly be more than a few minutes since he had left. The door still swung
slightly, swaying on its hinges, like an old dying dancer in a solitary orgy, dancing
the last beats towards ecstasy, towards ecstatic annihilation. Images of Shinto
priests cavorting with the same delighted poignance came to me from my childhood mind.
I watched them, and I watched the door, and the scrape of sandalled feet across hard
earth was also the dance, the lingering footprint of a man's hasty leavetaking.
No, it hasn't been long. I stood up, brushing the dust off my pants impatiently.
He had told me not to move, not even the slightest, but why should I follow orders from
him, I thought in mingled irritation and amusement. Why should he order me, if it should
come to that? He had no power over me, despite everything that has happened and everything
that will possibly come. If I tell him this, of course, he will ask me, "But who is
the leader and who is the led?" It is time, perhaps, to stop making such distinctions.
I must tell him so. It has been three years. Or four? Ten years, maybe.
Not long.
But old habits die hard.
The door stopped dancing when I pushed it open. It subsided against my hand happily,
the dancer dead, now moving to a different kind of music. I went out into the living room,
and I was appalled. It was such a starkly crowded place. Chairs pushed against the walls,
nearly bending over backwards so that their wooden heads scraped concrete, threatened by the
carpet which loomed under them, dirty white tsunami crouching menacingly on the floor.
It will not be long before both chairs and walls are inundated, I thought. An old
refrigerator tottered precariously beside me. Trying to dance, too, perhaps, but I would
make an ungainly partner. I reached out a hand and touched it, but it was cold and
unresponsive to such an indifferent caress, as well it might, and I let it be. Peeling
paint clung to my fingers as I reclaimed my hand. I detached it from my skin
and watched it dance mindlessly in the stagnant air, up and up and up, like ashes rising
from funeral pyres. I remembered those of my parents'. I remembered watching their ashes,
filmy gray pieces of paint, the last of their lives, whirling away from me like mad
dervishes until they disappeared from sight, into the blue sky of their death, into
Buddha's paradise.
What are we doing here?
Next thing I know, I would be offering flowers, but the shop is a long way off.
A long way off.
Disgraceful.
I did not mind the harrowing semi-darkness, for light came in only through a small
broken window, astride the cacophony of chair-eating carpets and chair-prey. Light
displeased me. I had nightmares when I slept during the day. He told me he had come
upon me screaming one afternoon. He had thought I was killing someone until he walked
in and found my eyes closed, my hands peacefully clasped in repose. But I was screaming.
I did not tell him why because I didn't know, and he did not ask presumably because he
didn't want to know, but afterwards both he and I always made sure I didn't sleep in
the light.
It was the emptiness I abhorred. Not the overwhelming lack of space, no, but the
disgusting monotony of decay in this room full of dying artifacts, from his life or
mine. I stared at the chairs, the carpet, the refrigerator, the window, the poised door,
and at first they seemed to me grotesque monstrosities, beyond salvation. But suddenly
I remembered the sensation of desperate dance, of a knowing of life and fear, of childhood
long foregone come brilliantly again in these pale pathetic things, and I realized.
Color corroded, but souls did not have to. I nodded to myself and I knew what I had to
do.
I went out. The sun glared at me and for a moment it seemed to ignite in fury,
so intensely did my skin tingle, and then warm, and then burn until I felt like I was melting
into ash, into dust, into death. But what paradise could be waiting for me in this dry
and degenerate summer afternoon? What lover, what victim, would welcome me here
in the sidewalk, at once cynosure and bibelot of heated strangers and hot winds;
dying, too, but without the anger and solace of those old shadows which keep a soul
on the edge of destruction, breathing in its air?
Still I feared the sun.
It hurt me. The light was like a stake being driven into my heart, gunfire
exploding in my eyes, yet I would not die.
No one bothered with me as I walked down the street, my face hidden by dark glasses.
A group of young men did stare at my clothes as I brushed past them. I glared at them
threateningly. Insolent bastards. Were they seeing something I couldn't? Impossible.
I flicked the collar of my coat upwards, running my thumb gently across the fine smooth leather.
This must be what they wanted then. The sleekness and glamor of a one who would
not and could not see the light, and who wore that consciousness as if in love with it. I
laughed softly to myself. It was the same old magic all over again, the illusion of
an eternal and an everlasting, a miracle manifest in every step I take in the sun.
I took a can of paint and a brush from a small store, somewhere. Someone did
stare at me for a long while then, but the enchantment devoured him too, sometime, somehow.
I knew what he was seeing, but I didn't think he would ask why he was seeing it. The
question, when it came, surprised me. I hadn't realized until then that I really knew
what I was doing.
Red? he said, not so inconsequentially.
There is no other color for me, I said.
And I smiled.
Red.
He wasn't in yet when I returned. I looked around me consideringly.
The door first because he would see it first. I pried the lid off the can loose,
dipped my brush into the red and went to work quickly on the wood. It burst into life
right underneath the cold hard bristles of my brush, like a rose abloom and aflame,
undeceived by a winter which burned. And then the floor next, the bed. I was filled with
a sudden sense of urgency replete with something wild, something profound. I wasn't
painting things. I was giving them life. This red is their salvation. More brilliant
than the light, it colored the darkness and edified it with something beautiful.
Like it did the robes of my Shinto priests. Like it did the fires of my parents' funeral.
Yes, life, I told myself. Life away from the mad calm of a mad white day, where
they died and where I didn't and I hate it and I hurt. I went over to the refrigerator,
tracing its outlines carefully and then daubing it with great big splashes. Rusting
steel gaped at me in uneven pathetic patches, like ugly brown flesh interspersed
across the uniform beauty of a leper. No, no. Leprosy was a disease of the sun; it
turned people into living sunlight. No, no. I stabbed the hateful holes with my brush,
watched the red seep slowly into them, trickle insiduously down rare pieces of virgin
smoothness, and I fancied myself staring at a face, killed by light, now dead, ashes
to ashes, red to red. No, no. I swung again and the face was crimson, gone.
The chairs were next. Nothing will eat you, I told them. And don't you look
simply beautiful now. I swept the brush across the angry carpet, and it took my
gift with a savage exultant hunger, as if it had been thirsting for this for the
longest time. So very beautiful. Fascinated, I watched my feet sink ever so slowly
into the foaming mass of red on the floor, and I knew that I had made my transition
from savior to victim. What happiness, what beauty, I thought as the waters rose higher
and higher until they were lapping my thighs, my naked arms, my chest, up, up, up
to my neck, and I was positively drowning in red. I felt renewed, anew.
The window now. Quick, before he comes. Stray splotches of sunlight sprawled
on the back of my hand as I painted. I started and nearly jumped back, but then
I stopped because I realized I didn't have to be afraid today and I wasn't sleeping
so they couldn't make me scream. I turned my hand slowly and, look, the sun was in
my palm. All mine, I thought wonderingly. No pain, no threat of destruction. Just
mine. I tilted my palm experimentally and some of it spilled out of my grasp and onto
the window sill. I touched this gently with the brush and then smiled as the stain
spread from the wood to the pockets of light. I could paint the sun crimson, I thought.
In this moment, I could make it come alive, even.
"Ken?"
His purple eyes were wide, so wide, and he looked white standing there in
the doorway, with the unpainted sun enfolding him close into its sordid
unsillhouetted embrace. I screamed and hurled myself at him, running my hands
down his body frantically, kissing him with my red-kissed mouth. He shuddered
in my embrace and for a moment I felt him respond, and it seemed we were bound
together in a vermilion love, and this I knew would be eternal and everlasting,
no illusion. A dance of pure ecstasy into my red universe, where everything lived
and where we needed no flower offerings because there is no one to give them
to. We are each other's roses.
"What have you done?" he asked very very softly.
"They've all come back now," I said, smiling at him. "I was just thinking this
morning, they're dead, but now they're not."
He shook his head against my fingers. His hair was very soft, and so red. It
was his one feature which I'd never gotten tired of looking at. In the dark, or in
the light, dying or dead, I would know it. I gazed at his hair admiringly. I didn't have
to paint it; it could stay the way it was, so I would always remember why I loved red.
"But they are dead, Ken. Don't you know?"
"The red changes them. It makes them look lovely. I've never had so much fun.
And you can't tell me I'm wrong. You leave me everyday, you take so long, and I
fall asleep."
"No."
"Besides, red was the last thing they saw before they died and before you left.
Did they dance? Did you make them scream, too? Or is it the light, still?"
He didn't answer, only stared at me for the longest time, and then he cried.
His tears were colorless, but they sparkled in the hateful afternoon, and I felt
them cooling my skin, mixing with my colors and this time I knew which was devouring,
and which was being devoured. I looked at him, loving him now, knowing he would
be in my paradise if it should come to that, but I didn't pull away.
The brush had fallen to the floor. The can was distressingly empty. I reached for
the knife I could see sticking out of his pocket. Steel, too. Bright but dull. Like
ashes. Like the old refrigerator. Like this house. Like his tears. No matter.
It will not be long. I took the knife and slashed both my wrists with it calmly.
The color came faster and I didn't have to use a brush. Holding up my wrists,
I touched them to his tears.
End
NOTE:
I probably made a mess of the thing, allusively speaking.
by Tin Mandigma
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Weiss Kreuz copyright Koyasu Takehito and Project Weiss. All other disclaimers apply.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
For Shi-chan and Sakura *hugs* ^_^ Criminal would have to wait for her own.
Kurenai no namida zo itodo utomaruru utsuru
kokoro no iro ni miyureta
Blood-red tears are even more hateful--
crimson, the quick-to-fade color of inconstant love
-Murasaki Shikibu
translated by Richard Bowring
"Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs"
I don't know how long I've been sitting here. It seems like hours have passed, but
it couldn't possibly be more than a few minutes since he had left. The door still swung
slightly, swaying on its hinges, like an old dying dancer in a solitary orgy, dancing
the last beats towards ecstasy, towards ecstatic annihilation. Images of Shinto
priests cavorting with the same delighted poignance came to me from my childhood mind.
I watched them, and I watched the door, and the scrape of sandalled feet across hard
earth was also the dance, the lingering footprint of a man's hasty leavetaking.
No, it hasn't been long. I stood up, brushing the dust off my pants impatiently.
He had told me not to move, not even the slightest, but why should I follow orders from
him, I thought in mingled irritation and amusement. Why should he order me, if it should
come to that? He had no power over me, despite everything that has happened and everything
that will possibly come. If I tell him this, of course, he will ask me, "But who is
the leader and who is the led?" It is time, perhaps, to stop making such distinctions.
I must tell him so. It has been three years. Or four? Ten years, maybe.
Not long.
But old habits die hard.
The door stopped dancing when I pushed it open. It subsided against my hand happily,
the dancer dead, now moving to a different kind of music. I went out into the living room,
and I was appalled. It was such a starkly crowded place. Chairs pushed against the walls,
nearly bending over backwards so that their wooden heads scraped concrete, threatened by the
carpet which loomed under them, dirty white tsunami crouching menacingly on the floor.
It will not be long before both chairs and walls are inundated, I thought. An old
refrigerator tottered precariously beside me. Trying to dance, too, perhaps, but I would
make an ungainly partner. I reached out a hand and touched it, but it was cold and
unresponsive to such an indifferent caress, as well it might, and I let it be. Peeling
paint clung to my fingers as I reclaimed my hand. I detached it from my skin
and watched it dance mindlessly in the stagnant air, up and up and up, like ashes rising
from funeral pyres. I remembered those of my parents'. I remembered watching their ashes,
filmy gray pieces of paint, the last of their lives, whirling away from me like mad
dervishes until they disappeared from sight, into the blue sky of their death, into
Buddha's paradise.
What are we doing here?
Next thing I know, I would be offering flowers, but the shop is a long way off.
A long way off.
Disgraceful.
I did not mind the harrowing semi-darkness, for light came in only through a small
broken window, astride the cacophony of chair-eating carpets and chair-prey. Light
displeased me. I had nightmares when I slept during the day. He told me he had come
upon me screaming one afternoon. He had thought I was killing someone until he walked
in and found my eyes closed, my hands peacefully clasped in repose. But I was screaming.
I did not tell him why because I didn't know, and he did not ask presumably because he
didn't want to know, but afterwards both he and I always made sure I didn't sleep in
the light.
It was the emptiness I abhorred. Not the overwhelming lack of space, no, but the
disgusting monotony of decay in this room full of dying artifacts, from his life or
mine. I stared at the chairs, the carpet, the refrigerator, the window, the poised door,
and at first they seemed to me grotesque monstrosities, beyond salvation. But suddenly
I remembered the sensation of desperate dance, of a knowing of life and fear, of childhood
long foregone come brilliantly again in these pale pathetic things, and I realized.
Color corroded, but souls did not have to. I nodded to myself and I knew what I had to
do.
I went out. The sun glared at me and for a moment it seemed to ignite in fury,
so intensely did my skin tingle, and then warm, and then burn until I felt like I was melting
into ash, into dust, into death. But what paradise could be waiting for me in this dry
and degenerate summer afternoon? What lover, what victim, would welcome me here
in the sidewalk, at once cynosure and bibelot of heated strangers and hot winds;
dying, too, but without the anger and solace of those old shadows which keep a soul
on the edge of destruction, breathing in its air?
Still I feared the sun.
It hurt me. The light was like a stake being driven into my heart, gunfire
exploding in my eyes, yet I would not die.
No one bothered with me as I walked down the street, my face hidden by dark glasses.
A group of young men did stare at my clothes as I brushed past them. I glared at them
threateningly. Insolent bastards. Were they seeing something I couldn't? Impossible.
I flicked the collar of my coat upwards, running my thumb gently across the fine smooth leather.
This must be what they wanted then. The sleekness and glamor of a one who would
not and could not see the light, and who wore that consciousness as if in love with it. I
laughed softly to myself. It was the same old magic all over again, the illusion of
an eternal and an everlasting, a miracle manifest in every step I take in the sun.
I took a can of paint and a brush from a small store, somewhere. Someone did
stare at me for a long while then, but the enchantment devoured him too, sometime, somehow.
I knew what he was seeing, but I didn't think he would ask why he was seeing it. The
question, when it came, surprised me. I hadn't realized until then that I really knew
what I was doing.
Red? he said, not so inconsequentially.
There is no other color for me, I said.
And I smiled.
Red.
He wasn't in yet when I returned. I looked around me consideringly.
The door first because he would see it first. I pried the lid off the can loose,
dipped my brush into the red and went to work quickly on the wood. It burst into life
right underneath the cold hard bristles of my brush, like a rose abloom and aflame,
undeceived by a winter which burned. And then the floor next, the bed. I was filled with
a sudden sense of urgency replete with something wild, something profound. I wasn't
painting things. I was giving them life. This red is their salvation. More brilliant
than the light, it colored the darkness and edified it with something beautiful.
Like it did the robes of my Shinto priests. Like it did the fires of my parents' funeral.
Yes, life, I told myself. Life away from the mad calm of a mad white day, where
they died and where I didn't and I hate it and I hurt. I went over to the refrigerator,
tracing its outlines carefully and then daubing it with great big splashes. Rusting
steel gaped at me in uneven pathetic patches, like ugly brown flesh interspersed
across the uniform beauty of a leper. No, no. Leprosy was a disease of the sun; it
turned people into living sunlight. No, no. I stabbed the hateful holes with my brush,
watched the red seep slowly into them, trickle insiduously down rare pieces of virgin
smoothness, and I fancied myself staring at a face, killed by light, now dead, ashes
to ashes, red to red. No, no. I swung again and the face was crimson, gone.
The chairs were next. Nothing will eat you, I told them. And don't you look
simply beautiful now. I swept the brush across the angry carpet, and it took my
gift with a savage exultant hunger, as if it had been thirsting for this for the
longest time. So very beautiful. Fascinated, I watched my feet sink ever so slowly
into the foaming mass of red on the floor, and I knew that I had made my transition
from savior to victim. What happiness, what beauty, I thought as the waters rose higher
and higher until they were lapping my thighs, my naked arms, my chest, up, up, up
to my neck, and I was positively drowning in red. I felt renewed, anew.
The window now. Quick, before he comes. Stray splotches of sunlight sprawled
on the back of my hand as I painted. I started and nearly jumped back, but then
I stopped because I realized I didn't have to be afraid today and I wasn't sleeping
so they couldn't make me scream. I turned my hand slowly and, look, the sun was in
my palm. All mine, I thought wonderingly. No pain, no threat of destruction. Just
mine. I tilted my palm experimentally and some of it spilled out of my grasp and onto
the window sill. I touched this gently with the brush and then smiled as the stain
spread from the wood to the pockets of light. I could paint the sun crimson, I thought.
In this moment, I could make it come alive, even.
"Ken?"
His purple eyes were wide, so wide, and he looked white standing there in
the doorway, with the unpainted sun enfolding him close into its sordid
unsillhouetted embrace. I screamed and hurled myself at him, running my hands
down his body frantically, kissing him with my red-kissed mouth. He shuddered
in my embrace and for a moment I felt him respond, and it seemed we were bound
together in a vermilion love, and this I knew would be eternal and everlasting,
no illusion. A dance of pure ecstasy into my red universe, where everything lived
and where we needed no flower offerings because there is no one to give them
to. We are each other's roses.
"What have you done?" he asked very very softly.
"They've all come back now," I said, smiling at him. "I was just thinking this
morning, they're dead, but now they're not."
He shook his head against my fingers. His hair was very soft, and so red. It
was his one feature which I'd never gotten tired of looking at. In the dark, or in
the light, dying or dead, I would know it. I gazed at his hair admiringly. I didn't have
to paint it; it could stay the way it was, so I would always remember why I loved red.
"But they are dead, Ken. Don't you know?"
"The red changes them. It makes them look lovely. I've never had so much fun.
And you can't tell me I'm wrong. You leave me everyday, you take so long, and I
fall asleep."
"No."
"Besides, red was the last thing they saw before they died and before you left.
Did they dance? Did you make them scream, too? Or is it the light, still?"
He didn't answer, only stared at me for the longest time, and then he cried.
His tears were colorless, but they sparkled in the hateful afternoon, and I felt
them cooling my skin, mixing with my colors and this time I knew which was devouring,
and which was being devoured. I looked at him, loving him now, knowing he would
be in my paradise if it should come to that, but I didn't pull away.
The brush had fallen to the floor. The can was distressingly empty. I reached for
the knife I could see sticking out of his pocket. Steel, too. Bright but dull. Like
ashes. Like the old refrigerator. Like this house. Like his tears. No matter.
It will not be long. I took the knife and slashed both my wrists with it calmly.
The color came faster and I didn't have to use a brush. Holding up my wrists,
I touched them to his tears.
End
NOTE:
I probably made a mess of the thing, allusively speaking.