Man, this is gonna get good! You will finally found out what is up with Seto and his dog, Coco, and some extra information...
We are getting closer and closer to the ending...
Chapter 28
Yugi
I look out at the courtroom and see my mother, sitting at her lawyer table, and at my father, who smiles at me just the tiniest bit. And suddenly I can't believe I ever thought I might be able to go through with this. I get to the edge of my seat, ready to apologize for wasting everyone's time and bolt—only to realize that Seto looks positively awful. He's sweating, and his pupils are so big they look like quarters set deep in his face. "Yugi," Seto asks, "do you want a glass of water?"
I look at him and think, Do you?
What I want is to go home. I want to run away to a place where no one knows my name and pretend to be a millionaire's adopted son, the heir to a toothpaste manufacturing kingdom, a Japanese pop star.
Seto turns to the judge. "May I confer for a moment with my client?"
"Be my guest," Judge Solomon says.
So Seto walks up to the witness stand and leans so close that only I can hear him. "When I was a little kid, I have a friend name Kyle Balz," he whispers. "Imagine if Dr. Neaux had married him."
He backs away while I am still smiling, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can last for another two or three minutes up here.
Seto's dog is going crazy—he's the one who needs water or something, from the looks of it. And I'm not the only one to notice. "Mr. Kaiba," Judge Solomon says, "please control your animal."
"No, Coco." Seto then turns to me. "Yugi, why did you want to file this petition?"
A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead. "She asked," I say, the first two words that will become a nasty avalanche.
"Who asked what?"
"My mom," I say, staring at Seto's shoes. "For a kidney." I look down at my shirt, picking at a thread. Just maybe I will unravel the whole thing.
About three months, or so, ago, Yami was diagnosed with kidney failure. He got tired easily, and lost weight, and retained water, and threw up a lot. The blame was pinned to a bunch of different things: genetic abnormalities, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor—growth hormone shots Yami had once taken to boost marrow production, stress from other treatments. He was put on dialysis to get rid of the toxins zipping around his bloodstream. And then, the dialysis stopped working.
One night, my mother came into our room when Yami and I were just hanging out. She had my father with her, which meant we were in for a more heavy discussion than who-left-the-sink-running-by-accident. "I've been doing some reading on the internet," my mother said. "Transplants of typical organs aren't nearly as difficult to recover from a bone marrow transplants."
Yami looked at me and popped in a new CD. We both knew where this was headed. "You can't exactly pick up a kidney at Wal-Mart."
"I know. It turns out that you only need to match a couple of HLA proteins to be a kidney donor—not all six. I called Dr. Taylor to ask him if I might be a might for you, and he said in normal cases, I probably would."
Yami hears the right word. "Normal cases?"
"Which you're not. Dr. Taylor thinks you'd reject an organ from the general donor pool, just because your body has already been through so much." My mother looked down at the carpet. "He won't recommend the procedure unless the kidney comes from Yugi."
My father shook his head. "That's invasive surgery," he said quietly. "For both of them."
I start thinking about this. Would I have to be in the hospital? Would it hurt? Could people live with just one kidney?
What if I wound up with kidney failure when I was, like, seventy? Where would I get my spare?
Before I could ask any of this, Yami spoke. "I'm not doing it again, all right? I'm sick of it. The hospitals and the chemo and the radiation and the whole freaking thing. Just leave me alone, will you?"
My mother's face went white. "Fine, Yami. Go ahead and commit suicide!"
He put his headphones on again, turned the music up so loud that I could hear it. "It's not suicide," he said, "if you're already dying."
"Did you ever tell anyone that you didn't want to be a donor?" Seto asks me, as his dog starts doing helicopters in the front of the courtroom.
"Mr. Kaiba," Judge Solomon says, "I'm going to call a bailiff to remove your...pet."
It's true, the dog is totally out of control. He's barking and leaping up with his front paws on Seto and running in those tight circles. Seto ignores them both. "Yugi, did you decide to file this lawsuit all by yourself?"
I know why he's asking: he wants everyone to know I'm capable of making choices that are hard. And I even have my lie, quivering like the snake it is, caught between my teeth. But what I try to say isn't quite what slips out. "I was kind of convinced by someone."
This is, of course, news to my parents, whose eyes hammer onto me. It's news to Joey, who actually makes a small sound. And it's news to Seto, who runs a hand down his face in defeat. This is exactly why it's better to stay silent; there is less of a chance of screwing up your life and everyone else's.
"Yugi," Seto says, "who convinced you?"
I am small in this seat, in this state, on this lonely planet. I fold my hands together, holding between them the only emotion I've managed to keep from slipping away: regret. "Yami."
The entire courtroom goes silent. Before I can say anything else, the lightning bolt I have been expecting strikes. I cringe, but it turns out that the crash I've heard isn't the earth opening up to swallow me whole. It is Seto, who's fallen to the floor, while his dog stands nearby with a very human look on his face that says I told you so.
Darrell
If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense. I thought I had been listening to Atemu, but it turns out I haven't been listening to him at all. I have listened carefully to Yugi, and yet it seems there is a piece missing. I try to work through the few things he has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.
Then it hits me—I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my son's lawyer falls to the floor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he's come to stand over Seto Kaiba's twitching body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly, repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for something to stick between his jaws so that he won't bit his own tongue, when the most amazing thing happens—that dog knocks over Kaiba's briefcase and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but is actually a bite block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off the courtroom. I yell to Elizabeth to call for an ambulance.
Joey is at my side immediately. "Is he all right?"
"He's going to be find. It's a seizure."
He looks like he's on the verge of tears. "Can't ya do somethin'?"
"Wait," I say.
He reaches for Seto, but I draw his hand away. "I don't understand why it happened."
I don't know if Seto does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.
With some effort, I got Seto back into the judge's chambers. Seto Kaiba, then, vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way back to consciousness. "Take it easy," I say, helping him sit. "You had a bad one."
He holds his head. "What happened?"
Amnesia, on both sides of the event, is pretty common. "Blacked out. Looked like a grand mal to me."
He glances down at the IV line Caesar and I have placed. "I don't need that."
"Like hell you don't," I say. "If you don't take antiseizure meds, you'll be back on that floor in no time."
Relenting, he leans back against the couch and stares at the ceiling. "How bad was it?"
"Pretty bad," I admit.
He pats Coco on the head—the dog's been inseparable. "Good boy. Sorry I didn't listen." Then he looks down at his pants—wet and reeking, another common effect of a grand mal. "Shit."
"Close enough." I hand him a spare pair from one of my uniforms, something I had the department bring along. "You need help?"
He shakes me off and tries, one-handedly, to take off his trousers. Without a word I reach over and undo the fly, help him change. I do this without thinking the way I'd lift up the shirt of a woman who needed CPR; but all the same, I know it's killing him.
"Thanks," he says, taking great care to zip his own fly. We sit for a second. "Does the judge know?" When I don't answer, Seto buries his face in his hands. "Christ. Right in front of everyone?"
"How long have you hidden it?"
"Since it started. I was eighteen. I got into a car crash, and they started up after that."
"Head trauma?"
He nods. "That's what they said."
I clasp my hands together between my knees. "Yugi was pretty freaked out."
Seto rubs his forehead. "He was...testifying."
"Yeah," I say. "Yeah."
He looks up at me. "I have to get back in there."
"Not yet." At the sound of Joey's voice, we both turn. He stand in the doorway, staring at Seto as if he has never seen him before, and I suppose in all fairness he hasn't, not like this.
"I'll, uh, go see if the boys have filed their report yet," I murmur, and I leave them.
Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.
There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming fro the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plain Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet know of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.
Make of it what you will.
Seto
The only thing comparable to the aftermath of a grand mal seizure is waking up on the pavement with a hangover from the mother of all frat parties and immediately being run over by a truck. On second thought, maybe a grand mal is worse. I am covered in my own filth, hooked up to medicine and falling apart at the seams, when Joey walks towards me. "It's a seizure dog," I say.
"No kiddin'." Joey holds out his hand for Coco to sniff. He points to the couch beside me. "Can I sit down?"
"It's not catching, if that's what you mean."
"It wasn't." Joey comes close enough that I can feel the heat from his shoulder, inches away from mine. "Why didn't ya tell me, Seto?"
"Christ, Joey, I haven't even told Mokuba." I try to look over his shoulder into the hallway. "Where's Yugi?"
"How long has dis been goin' on?"
I try to get up, and manage to lift myself a half inch before my strength gets out. "I have to get back in there."
"Seto."
I sigh. "A while."
"A while, as in a week?"
Shaking my head, I say, "A while, as in two days before we graduated from Domino." I look up at him. "The day I took you home, all I wanted was to be with you. When my stepdad forced me to go to that stupid dinner at the country club, I followed him in my own car, so that I can make a quick escape—I was planning on driving back to your house, that night. But on the way to dinner, I got into a car accident. I came through with a few bruises, and that night, I had the first seizure. Twenty CT scans later, the doctors still couldn't really tell me why, but they made it pretty clear I'd have to live with it forever." I take a deep breath. "Which is what made me realize that no one else should have to."
"What?"
"What do you want me to say, Joey? I wasn't good enough for you. You deserved better than some freak who might fall down frothing at the mouth any old minute."
Joey goes perfectly still. "Ya might have let me make up my own mind."
"What difference would it have made? Like you really would have gotten great satisfaction guarding me like Coco does when it happens; wiping up after me, living at the end of my life." I shake my head. "You were so incredibly independent. A free spirit. I didn't want to be the one who took that away from you."
"Well, if I'd had da choice, maybe I wouldn't have spent da past five years thinkin' dere was somethin' da matter with me."
"You?" I start to laugh. "Look at you. You're a knockout. You're a tiny bit smarter than I am. You're on a career track and you're family-centered and you probably even can balance your checkbook."
"And I'm lonely, Seto," Joey adds. "Why do ya think I had ta learn ta act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog da covers, and my second toe is longer dan my big one. My hair has its own zip code. Plus, ya don't love someone because dey're perfect," he says. "Ya love 'em in spite of da fact dat dey're not."
I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after twenty-one years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.
"And another thing—dis time, ya don't get ta leave me. I'm gonna leave you."
If possible, that only makes me feel worse. I try to pretend it doesn't hurt, but I don't have the energy. "So go."
Joey settles next to me. "I will," he says, smiling. "In another fifty or sixty years."
Awww... Joey is soooo sweet! Twenty respect points to him! That was just the perfect icing to the cake. :)
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