... June 18, 2003
It is her birthday. She will be fourteen in a matter of hours.
They bring her fresh flowers and the radio that usually stands in their kitchen. Sayu tries and tries, but it is physically impossible for her to smile. Instead she shakes her fingers, extra hard. They laugh and she sees how her mother wipes her eyes. She excuses herself to the toilet and Sayu can hear the click, as she shuts herself away.
Light sees that she sees, so he sits down on her bed and takes out a pen and a paper. Sayu swears that she could have kissed him.
Her hair has grown long and thin, it brushes against his knuckles. He lightly takes her wrists and guides her hand to the pen. Sayu watches her fingers tremble both in excitement and in strain. This is it.
She widens the space between her middle and index finger, and of course Light gets it immediately. He slides the pen between them and then they clamp shut, completely still.
And then everything is trembling too much to make sense. Sayu has no idea what to write, since her thinking no longer consist of words, but rather a crumble of unfamiliar concepts. She tries, tries so hard anyway, but from the way her whole body seems to convulse and cry for help, it is as if her own mind has built a barrier.
She holds in her breath and imagines her hand as it moves through space time. Her temples hurts and the tubes connected to it tighten up. She gazes at her paper and only sees something that the previous Sayu would have laughed at and called ugly.
The scribble, a long, thin line, with a curving, wobbly shape that vaguely resembles a snake.
''The rod of Asceipus?'' Light breathes out, after a few seconds, unsure.
Sayu herself isn't sure.
-''Sayu, you are healing.''
She knows. So this time she only draws the snake. But Light doesn't understand. She is becoming frustrated rather quickly and her scribbles become less intelligible with each breath that she takes, soon there are just circles. Circles are everywhere, just snakes that bite their tails.
But the more she writes the less her brother seems to understand. He now gazes upon her with something in his eyes that Sayu promised herself that she would never see again. Pity. That sort of deep running pity that hurts and makes people hate themselves. And Sayu does. She hates herself so much that she vows to never try to be smart again in Lights presence.
...
...
They leave, but not before turning the radio on.
Sayu is relieved.
It reminds her of the question she once heard him discuss with dad. The one with the runaway train and a single person being sacrificed for five others. Sayu can almost feel the tracks vibrate and the chains squeal as she is lying face down on her bed. Gasping for breath. It would be her, she would be Light's sacrifice.
The nurses rush in and there is even more fire-like pain, from the unfairness, from the pity.
...
In the morning she is heaved up again. Fed udon noodles, the fat and slick ones that people slurp. Their ends wiggle.
''Such a darling girl'' the hand holding the chopsticks chippers.
''Look, she even eats like a small bird.''
Sayu just wants to find a place where she could cry, but finding such a place is not easy at all. She is at the bottom of the food chain of this world.
...
Both sweat and tears are salty.
A magazine is spread over her lap, mommy turns its pages every so often. So many faces peek at her, from their compressed flatness. What are they even, these people?
''Sayu, look, Hideki!'' her mother has short fingers, and she jabs them into the magazine. Hideki Ryuga is grinning, as he is just another face. Launched from her mind, off and away. The page is turned, Sayu looks back at other printed people. This routine is just a looping of all the affection she has left. Shaped and Möbius strip-like.
Love is strange, Sayu thinks. It has always been handed to her. In rivets and in gulps. Pouring her own out isn't as simple. It doesn't follow any directions. She has to trust it to leak through.
Sachiko remains there. As softly as if she never thought about going. Quiet and smiling, and when she cries, she cries for both Sayu and herself. Her wide-eyed daughter is her calf, her fawn that she stands over even after it has been long dead. Something about it is painfully right.
They share a gentle moment. Her mind is still.
''Soon Sayu, you will come back, soon, I promise.'' wrapping her hair three times around her mothers finger. They really are short.
Sayu hiccups. All seems to be full of love.
...
Hope is falling like debris from the sky, Sayu is seated in a wheelchair.
She must have ventured in her sleep. Flown out of her bed like a curtain on a stormy day. God, if this isn't everything Sayu has wanted. This kind of hope is close knitted. Help comes in different forms and she is welcoming them all.
The hands tug on her, but now Sayu tugs on them back. They will pat her head and Sayu will shake her fingers. She is already running.
They are living in dynasty of heightened opinions and ill-fitting facts. There is no real power or a higher justice, the tv is trying to rape her and all around her are people who can't feel their sides after prolonged sleep. They are here as if there was nothing else, but the pictures are rising. Sayu will listen to them breathe at night when everything else is asleep.
And even while running Sayu makes sure to stay as close as she can to everything they want her to be. The happy Sayu, the disabled Sayu, the Sayu who is orbiting nothingness in space, there is nothing visible in the distance. No difference in what she thinks she feels or what she feels. Pictures don't remain, they stream, and it is contagious, so contagious!
Please don't make statues, don't make them stay, don't allow rust, allow collisions and allow some change in what we trust
It is earthly, Sayu is stripped and washed. Her bones wear her like a coat, but she isn't ugly. Thin so thin, her ribcage is hanging like a cage off her chest, tipping her slightly forward. One shoulder is lower than the other and Sayu wonders if there is a word that could describe how unimportant all of this is. She is a ripe being, whose skin has to be peeled.
...
Her family visits again and then the doctors allow her daddy to push her wheelchair around. Sayu is polite and shakes her fingers at every nurse that passes them by. They always smile at her while she looks at them. Some nurses have very pretty eyes that crinkle. Then there are some nurses that have golden-hazel eyes, the colour of weak tea.
If everyone had eyes made from tea.
Sachiko and Light follow after them, it would be nicer if they started to run, but they can't since they are still in a hospital and they think that they know what Sayu wants.
She can only wonder if they know that she is running to them. If they know that she wakes up every morning with strings of letters in names of symbols of beings of matter that she then rewrites into lists. Do they know that natural systems can be organized into stable large-scale patterns that emerge from individual events? That chance and chaos are close, so close to touching and all Sayu has to do is rearrange and change for them to combust and make sense again?
The stop near a drink automat. She gets a cup of juice.
In compressible sequences are in their proximity, unintelligible, whispers in laws of consequences. All the people they are masses who keep trying to run away. And the magazine faces stay contorted as they are frozen in their ways. They are animals without a pyramid, without a fair system. Like a sand pile, with shovels of tumbling sand corns that shift the whole base every time a new killer, new president, a new neighbour comes in.
And then she takes a gulp. Puts her whole mouth over the edge and tips the miserable plastic cup, pouring its contents out. It flows well enough. She shuts her eyes and hums. It is sweet.
Only Light sees a bit of what she means in his disbelief.
With the window behind her Sayu became a dark blotch in his mind. Sucking in theories and reasons, dissecting his arguments with a blink of her eye. He takes a step to her wheelchair and kneels down. She is tiny and almost scrunched up, with loose skin and wide hazy eyes. Light reels back at the notion of touching this, this thing that only bears her name and innocent stare. What is she doing here? It might have been a mistake, there was nothing there.
He decides to let it go, but Light can't shake off the feeling that he just witnessed something he wasn't supposed to see. Obsessive thinking tears and wears gears down, and Sayu is ever present and not making sense.
Light lets go of the thought almost too eagerly. He is not used to being left in the dark.
Sayu exhales and goes back to the pictures. Worlds have started to collide on the structures of her hand. She better catch the dust.
Note: The direct references/inspirations that I take no credit for
John D. Barrow has a fascinating book "Between Inner and Outer Space" that discusses sequences, among hundreds of other unknown and known things. Some of Sayu's more brilliant thoughts come from there.
Bjork has the song Hyperballad the title of the story was unabashedly taken from it among other things.