The nurse is a stuffy sort of woman, with shiny black hair pulled back tight on her skull and covered in a hairnet. She wears a black dress that reaches her ankles, with white lace on the hem and the edge of her sleeves, and buttoned up boots. Her skin is pale in the flourescent lighting, covered in latex gloves. She nods often and frequently, but says no words, entering the room always with a hurried air and taking notes on a clipboard immediately until the doctor walks in, his eyes showing a thin sort of smile. Sabitsuki has never seen the nurse's face, for the woman wears a thick gas mask with valves and clips and big, shiny bug eyes that reflect the white light and send thrills down her spine. That mask greets her again today as the nurse opens the white door and begins to arrange things on the counters, viles and flasks and sharp metal syringes. This woman, in her portly black buttoned dress, has been the subject of many nightmares.
Sabitsuki rolls about in the hospital bed so that she is facing the blank wall. She scratches at the taped needles that penetrate her hands and feed cold liquid into her blood from a big pouch. The doctor comes in, she can hear, and exchanges a few short words with the nurse, before bringing forward his old swiveled chair, the yellow one that squeaks, and sitting at her bedside.
He asks her how she is feeling. Fine, she says, dully. The nurse takes notes at an easy pace. It is impossible, through the gas mask, to tell whom of the two she is watching. The doctor wonders how her sleep was, to which she responds as she always does. Fine, she lies, uneventful. Orange makes her lie. She says it is for her own safety. If they know about her dreams, she warns, they will take them away, which always makes Sabitsuki cry before Orange can cheer her up again.
Orange is Sabitsuki's best friend. She has bright red hair that falls past her shoulders and a short, olive dress with no shoes. Often they walk together at the bottom of the ocean and stay at Orange's house, a pleasant undersea cottage filled with big, monstrous machines with glassy surfaces and spindly claws. Sabitsuki is afraid of them sometimes, but Orange seems awfully cheerful about it.
They're awfully scary, Sabitsuki says, averting her eyes from the towering things that covered the house's walls. That big one looks like an alien.
Nonsense, Orange insists. This is no alien, this is an organ. She refuses to sit down and play something for her when Sabitsuki asks.
Sometimes the girls get lost together. They wander through ancient stone ruins where all the rooms look the same. Seaweed sprouts out of the sandy floor at the corners, and there are dots covering the walls in bright patterns, the only way they can tell where they're going. When they find a dead end in the maze, Orange takes out a black pencil and starts to draw pictures. She draws Sabitsuki, not four feet tall, with the short light hair that stands up in odd places and her narrow eyes that always look pensieve. She draws a black blob in a big, smiley mask. Sabitsuki is not sure if she likes these pictures. How sad her friend makes her look in that picture, how lonely. She never tells Orange she feels this way.
The doctor wakes her from this reverie. He tells her that from today onward, he'd like her to start a journal about all the things that come into Sabitsuki's head. It would be her own private place, he insists, to let her thoughts out and onto paper. A short, stubby pencil and an empty composition notebook is placed in her hands with a smile. You can start writing in it now, he beams. Sabitsuki doesn't know why the doctor is so happy, as it is only a bunch of paper and a pencil.
She makes them promise they won't look while she's writing. The doctor nods, rolling his chair away and beginning to speak with the nurse, in a low voice, so that Sabitsuki cannot hear what they are saying. They turn away from the bed, but she knows that, out of the corner of her big, shiny eye, the nurse is cheating.
The first page is ruled with thin blue lines and a big red stripe down the side. Around the edges, the ink begins to smudge, as though it were submerged in water. The top is blank, for a title. Today, she writes in big letters with the pencil.
TodayIwokeupandthedoctorcameinandgavemeapencilsoIcanwritethis, she pens dryly. She won't write about Orange, because she knows that Orange will get mad. Sabitsuki starts tapping the eraser on her nose so she can think of something else to write, but nothing comes. She sets the pencil down on her lap next to the open entry of her journal. I'm done, she announces.
The doctor turns, always grinning, and walks towards the bed so that he can see. Sabitsuki grabs the book, shuts it tight, and holds it up against her chest, reminding him urgently that he promisedhewouldn'tlook. Of course, he laughs, sending a quick and furtive glance to the nurse. Instead of reading it, then, he asks what she has written about. She says she wrote about him coming in and giving her the notebook and pencil. A quick look of - was it anger? - flits across the doctor's face, but he recovers quickly and eases into his usual grin.
Why don't you write about how you feel? He asks her cajolingly. She knows, from his tone, that it is a command, and not a question. We already talked about that, Sabitsuki says. It should be easy, then, he says, to write. The doctor simpers, standing to return to his discussion with the nurse. He is done with Sabitsuki, she realizes, as she opens the notebook and takes up the pencil again.
Thedoctorisnothappy, she writes. Usuallyheismorehappy.Maybehisdogdied,andthenexplodedintopieces,soheissadnow,angry. Ormaybehe'sscaredofthenurse,andheknowshehastokeeptalkingtoher.I'mscaredtoo.Iamafraidsheisgoingtohurtme,butOrangesaysIcan'ttellthemthatorthey'llgetmad,shethinks.Anyway,IamsupposedtowriteabouthowIfeeltoday.Ifeelokay,Iguess.It'scoldinhere,maybe.Idon'tknow.
Sabitsuki pauses, hearing only the sound of her breathing and the low murmur of the adults. The blinding white walls tower around her, and she shivers slightly, leaning towards the diary for support.
I'veforgottenwhattheoutsideofthisroomlookslike.
The day goes as nearly all of them do. Sabitsuki speaks with the doctor as he likes, and eats small rations of hospital food that taste of formaldehyde, three meals a day She takes to filling up pages with bits on how she didn't like what she had for lunch, or how a certain spring in her bed board squeaks loudly when one leans on it (she likes to think this bothers the nurse), or how the doctor has a particularly prominent wart beneath his nose that almost makes her laugh. It is busy work. It is nothing. When she grows bored, Sabitsuki draws pictures next to her writings.
She tries to imagine a sun in the sky, drifting across as the day begins to die, but the thoughts grow hazy. First it is a bright, lemon-colored ball, then the beetle eye of the nurse's mask, then a reddish thing that smiles with one wide eye and large, pointed teeth that fascinate her. It is hard to get them looking quite right or sharp enough, so she scribbles it in again and again until the tip of the pencil goes dull and her numb hand, red and chafed, starts throbbing. She can never get it right.
Hours passed in florescent light all seem the same. But the nurse enters, emotionless behind her mask, and begins to tidy the room up for the next day. Sabitsuki knows that now she must sleep, and buries her face in the covers, as she always does. Perhaps, she thinks, here the nurse will think I'm gone. The blinding lights are turned off as the woman exits the room, shutting out the last rays of visibility emitted from the hall. The notebook is still cradled in Sabitsuki's arms, pencil floating about somewhere in the sheets. A quarter of its pages are etched with open eyes and smirking teeth and dimples folding up at the corners. The rest, she tells her herself, will be finished tomorrow. Her eyes shut tight and she falls asleep with the excitement that perhaps, tomorrow, she will draw those faces that haunt her just perfectly.
The sky is a velvety black that spreads far off and lightens at the horizon. It is a night sky that makes her feel cozy, studded with stars like glass beads that shine in all different hues. Reds, yellows, pinks, colors of paper valentines. Sabitsuki is holding hands with Orange, whose ripped dress floats in a gentle breeze.
The ground is black like the night, with billowing black that masks their bare feet in the faint starlight. Sabitsuki wonders where they are, for she has never seen such a place. Star World, Orange responds as they begin to walk. The stars cast a glow enough so that she can see orange is wearing a large, green diver helmet, as she does sometimes. It's dark for miles, and flat, the air warm and gentle and soothing as it caresses Sabitsuki's face.
Orange asks what she did today, so she tells her all about the new diary she's been assigned, and how she wrote about the nurse being scary and the squeaky bedboard and all sorts of things. She tells her of the large faces with open eyes and mouths staring at her from the page, and that tomorrow she will get it right and capture what they really look like. Orange excitedly makes her promise to bring a picture the next time they play together. Only if I get it right, Sabitsuki says solemnly.
Her friend describes that she's built a new machine in her secret inventor's lab. She often speaks of the secret lab, but never lets Sabitsuki see it. When Orange isn't around, she goes looking for it, to no avail. That's why it's secret, Orange says, it's so well hidden. She says its door is black with bright orange lanturns outside, swearing with a teasing face that she only discloses this kind of trivia because she knows Sabitsuki will never, ever find it. She sticks out her tongue devilishly and giggles.
Sabitsuki asks her about her latest creation. It's nothing special, Orange says in a blithe sort of way, though she hides her eagerness. She describes it as a great, big, lit-up tube in which she will put things inside to float around in a special kind of jelly. Jelly is her word for it. I'd like to see it, Sabitsuki says. Once you show me your pictures, Orange replies.
They wander in the dark until they reach an edge, a great cliff hugged by a thin, rickety stairway. Orange tells her she has to go first. She places her weight on the first metal step, making it creak. Then another, then another, until she has worked her way, gingerly, to the first landing. Orange hops along behind her, bounding wrecklessly in a way that makes Sabitsuki flinch and hug the cliff, as though the stairs would collapse at any moment. She beams when she lands next to her, extending an arm for Sabitsuki to take.
The girls clear the next landing together, and the next and the next, the stars getting more distant and the air around them becoming darker. At the final, deepest platform, plunged halfway through the abyss beyond the cliff, sits a man in gray, with a face like red swirl. He has a fishing pole with a line descending into the infinite darkness and hunches over, calm and expressionless. Orange playfully pushes Sabitsuki so that she stumbles over her feet and almost falls over the edge. The fisherman hardly looks up. Sabitsuki asks what he hopes to catch as they watch the line bob up and down. A man, is what he says. I hope to catch a man.
Sabitsuki doesn't understand this and decides to wander back up the stairs. The stars - or are they lanturns? -
begin to die down. Orange follows suit. Wasn't he funny, she asks, and Sabitsuki imagines her wrinkling her nose behind the glass of her helmet, in the fashion she does when she thinks something's interesting. His face is like a big, swirly plate, she continues, starting to skip. Sabitsuki struggles to catch up, and trips after her friend, calling out. This makes Orange laugh.
They find an old, rotten door closed against shining white light, in the middle of the darkness of Star World. Orange opens it slowly, motioning for Sabitsuki to follow her in. The moment its wood leaves the floating doorframe, they are washed in a wave of green seawater that fills up the room. The ground becomes sand, and the ocean illuminated by sunrays that melt through the surface of the sea and penetrate down to the bed below. Rising blue boulders and caves surround them, dotted with lavender coral and bright lemon sea sponges. A trail of bubbles leaves Sabitsuki's lips, but she finds she can breathe easily.
Everything is silent.
Orange has already begun to bound ahead, the bouyancy of the water carrying her body up and down with each leap as though there were no gravity at all. She rises up as though about to float away and come crashing down again, leaving impressions of her bare feet that quickly fill up with sand. Sabitsuki begins to hobble after, her white linen dress folding and flowing with the waves. They are going towards her house, a quiet abode in the mist of the far empty sand banks that stretch for miles before coming up against the edges of a great underwater temple. As they grow more distant from the stairways of Star World, the sky lightens from dull aqua to a vibrant blue. Sabitsuki thinks that, above the ocean, it must be summer. She imagines that is the word for it.
Coming up a few hundred few away are the square bricks of her friend's house, which reflect the sunlight and nearly glow. The door is short and made of wood, with a large, sparkling brass handle. Orange approaches it and stands waving for Sabitsuki to follow. Her leaps are less graceful, and she is a stranger to the water. She begins to sprint as best she can so Orange doesn't have to wait long. The water repels against her and pushes her back in a great stream, and it seems the house is getting farther away. She trips and falls into the sand, scraping her bare palms on its surface, but steadily stands and begins to run again. The once peaceful sunlight has become almost blinding, and no matter where she turns or how she tries to bury her face in her arms its dizzying brilliance covers her vision in a large, blurry blanket.
Straining her ears, she can hear Orange ask her what's taking so long, windmilling her arm. I can't run, Sabitsuki replies, tripping over her uncovered feet again and tumbling face first into the sand. I can't see.
Her friend stands there for a moment with a mere blank stare impossible to see through her large diver's helmet. Then she opens the door to her house and walks away. The world has gone white by now, any traces of color tearing away as a page burns up in a fire. The vibrant hues of ocean water fade to the blank white of the hospital walls and the water drains away.
The nurse is folding sheets at a table stacked with boxes towards the far side of the room. It is dimly lit, illuminated only by a small bedside night light plugged beside her hospital bed (at a younger Sabitsuki's request), and she squints to see. The woman has bumped into one of the counters, waking Sabitsuki from her sleep, and nods frantically in apology. Sabitsuki watches her sleepily, for a moment, and then rolls to face the near wall, as the loose spring gives its usual squeal. Her diary has drifted out of her arms and to the edge of the bed during her sleep, the pencil somewhere underneath her. She finds them both discreetly and begins to scribble on the next blank page in the dark.
Wefoundamanwithafishingrodtodayandhescaredme.Hisfacewasabigbrightswirlandhewasontheedgeofalittleplatformthatwaswobbly.Hewasn'tfishingfornormalthings,Idon'tthink.ButIdon'tknowwhathewasfishingfor.
She tries to draw another monster underneath it, thinking that after some rest the image should be clear, and she can get it right this time. But she there is little light to see by and it ends up as a mess of lines. The nurse stirs from her position in the other end of the room, and Sabitsuki thinks she has been spotted. She doesn't want the nurse to see anything she writes, ever. The thought of her large eyes roving its entries and her drawings of monsters makes her skittish. But the nurse can't see it, Sabitsuki tells herself. Because she will hide it forever.
Peaking over the top of her blanket, she notices the nurse is watching.