CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE IDIOTS WHO CAME TO THE STAGE
Night had fallen again by the time he found her on the rooftop of her dorm at Komaba. The thick flannel blanket in which she had wrapped herself fluttered in the cool Autumn breeze. She was alone and humming something softly to herself.
Bone-chilled recognition tore through to the essence of his soul as he listened and felt the presence of the ghost from Nishi Otani with him. He knew the song; it was again the one from his dream about Jerusalem bells ringing and St. Peter's silence. A bewildered, haunting sense of deja vu came over him as his memories of that strange night in Kyoto became inextricably intertwined with those of a different night on a different rooftop during another season. Eventually, the last notes of her song died away in the darkness. He had forgotten how beautiful her voice truly was.
"Not only does someone like me manage to sneak up on you from time to time now," she taunted, glancing back at him in between the faint, yellow threads of lamp light. "You can't even sneak up on someone like me anymore."
Ranma chuckled to himself as he made his way out of the shadows and up to the rail on her left. She had known all along that he was there watching and listening to her. He wanted to tell her that he didn't really mind that she could pick him out; that he was curious about how she had done so; and that it was actually endearing because it was her. However, other far less pleasant things had to be said instead.
"It ain't true, ya know. What ya said about beauty not being possible without pain. A lot of what ya told me is true — but not that."
"Oh?" she asked, quizzically tilting her head ever so slightly in his direction.
"Yeah." He couldn't tell if she was actually curious about his meaning or merely intrigued by him challenging her. He pressed on regardless, drawing now on the words that had been given to him at Nishi Otani. "It ain't really about the pain. It's about candor. It just so happens that pain is one of those things that has a tendency to make people candid."
She replied with a snide, derisive caricature of a laugh. "I don't know where you heard that, but someone else also tried to tell me something similar a long time ago."
"Oh? Who was that?"
"My mother," she replied tersely.
Ranma guessed she would say that, but his brow still quirked involuntarily when he heard her. "Why didn't ya believe her?"
"I told you to please not come," she said, ignoring his question. "You… You're hurting me by doing this."
"How?"
"You're just making it harder to say goodbye — for both of us. For everyone else too, especially Akane."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do ya assume that we have to say goodbye?"
She barked out a mirthless laugh now somewhere between desperate and maniacal. "My sisters just don't get it, you know. None of you do."
"Then tell me, Nabiki," he said. "Let's be candid. I'm listening."
"You're wasting your time here." She wrapped her arms around herself and turned away from him. It was so easy for all of them to get excited about things like this re-transplantation nonsense. "People assume I should be excited too about any chance, even with long-term odds of cure as sh#t as 1 in 5. When things go wrong though, it's me who pays for it. Not you or anyone else. All the praying to a God who either doesn't exist or just doesn't give a f-#k. The helplessness of waiting. The folly of hope and the pain of disappointment. My body, my life, my end — all and only mine alone. Everything is me alone in the end."
"Ya think I'm going to leave you in the end too?" He wanted to hug her, but sensed that he shouldn't. "I wouldn't."
"I know, Ranma," she replied with a sigh. "That's the problem. I think if a boy were with a girl like me, he should leave, but I also don't think if you were that boy that you'd be smart enough to actually do that. You wouldn't move on either even after I'm gone. You have this puppy dog loyalty problem."
She could see it. He would be just as stupid as her father was for her mother and as deaf to everyone else around him as Soun Tendou was to his daughter. Nabiki was angry too with her mother for not preparing her husband and daughters to go on living even after she was gone. Fair or not, this was a fact.
"I won't make the same f-#king mistake!" she screeched with naked, hateful fury. "I won't create monsters and leave misery in my wake the way she did when I go!"
Another shudder traveled down Ranma's spine as he recognized the haunted words of the girl at Niomon. Outwardly, though, he willed himself to press on and laugh. He had to finish the job. "I don't think what I have is called a 'puppy dog problem'."
"So what do you want to call it? Love…?!" she sneered. "You're just going to hurt yourself with that."
"Your word, not mine," Ranma replied with a cool, deliberate shrug. He now knew for sure.
This was all an act, not really at all the girl who had offered him shots of espresso that day at Sartre to get him to open up; glared back at him up in the tree at Himonya as she had sketched the essence of his soul; or kissed him for the first time that terrible day in Hongo. Because of that day and all of the things she had said that she wasn't supposed to say, he knew now who Icarus at Kiyomizu really was. Her sisters did too.
You may be the only one who can convince Nabiki that Icarus didn't actually crash and die alone in the Icarian Sea when he reached for the Sun. I know you can because I've seen you already do something that even I stopped believing could be done: you've made Nabiki happy. That was the hard part too. Now, all you have to do is just convince my sisters that you intend to keep doing that; that it's finally okay for Nabiki to feel that way; and that you're ready to want more for Nabiki than even for yourself.
Those were Kasumi's wishes for her sister.
I can't compete with someone who's dying, can I…. However you do it, give her something to believe in again….
And those were Akane's.
"I told you that Existentialists don't believe in love," she snorted disdainfully. "If they call themselves Existentialists and do, then they're sh#tty ones. Love just gets in the way of Destiny."
"Come on, Nabiki!" he scoffed, committing now to the strike and throwing the full weight of his eyes on her. "You were so eager to help me out with my love life when ya thought it had nothing to do with ya, but now that it does, ya wanna wax poetic about feelings getting in the way of Destiny?! You're just being a coward!"
He told her she was as melodramatic as a shoujo manga character and that Sartre himself was full of sh#t for saying all that stuff about love. Even old Jean-Paul had a lifelong partner (1), and that certainly didn't get in the way of his style. Maybe she cheated on him from time to time, and that's what his issue was, but, if so, that was on Sartre. A whole school of thought that says a lot of good and right things otherwise shouldn't have to answer for one guy's poor taste in women.
Even Nietzsche no less said that love can be "the most angelic instinct" and "the greatest stimulus of life." It wasn't about greed or possessiveness or trapping anyone in anything; that was something else altogether.
"It's not really about wanting to be with someone, but wanting more for someone else than what ya want for yourself." He did want more for her than for himself just as he knew she did for him. That was how he knew she was as full of sh#t as Sartre.
She was left sputtering incoherently at him in indignation. Her mouth moved with the intent of shouting back at him, but no words came. He saw her balled fists too at her sides peaking out just below the edges of the blanket draped over her shoulders.
Ranma recognized this part of the story too. This time, however, he glared back at her with the full weight of his own unyielding stare straight into the deepest depths of her fiery, soul-piercing eyes. This time, he would not be the one backing down.
Time passed.
He thought again of the song that she had been humming earlier, the one about Jerusalem bells, Roman cavalry choirs, and St. Peter's silence.
I believe again in possibilities because you came. For the same reasons that Kasumi-chan believes that you can convince my Na-chan that Icarus didn't actually crash and die alone in the Icarian Sea when he reached for the Sun.
Kasumi and the girl at Niomon seemed to be right; the actual girl before him eventually relented. She huffed and muttered something under her breath that sounded vaguely like she was calling him a stupid, stubborn jerk as she turned away. She looked incredibly tired and world-weary, defeated even, as she sat down with her back up against the rail and drew her knees up to her chest.
Something strange was happening now there in the darkness. Ranma felt an aching compulsion to sit down beside her. The feeling was strikingly reminiscent of the primordial draw that he had felt in Kyoto by Nishi Otani. He considered if he should be scared, and yet somehow he wasn't. Instead, he only realised how tired and spent he was now too.
At some point, Nabiki surprised him by leaning her head on his shoulder. Instinctively, he wrapped an arm around her in reply. That was when he discovered how very cold her body was. Now he was actually scared. He asked if they should go in.
She nodded and let him help her to her feet.
"I love you," she suddenly said in a small, weary, resigned voice. "I'm not a coward, and I'm not trying to be melodramatic. I just don't want you to become me. Bitter and angry. Cynical and disillusioned."
Ranma nodded. "I know. I just want you to be happy and to believe again."
Maybe you're right, that we are born alone and that we do die alone. Living though, however short or long that may be — that doesn't have to be done alone. That's a choice — our choice.
That was what he actually wanted to tell her, but they had to go in now. She was very cold, and she had to rest. He would find another chance soon.
For now, he simply said, "I love you too." As he said the words, however, he was more sure of them than he had ever been of anything.
"Even if I'm bitter and angry, cynical and disillusioned…?"
"Even if and no less."
# # # # #
As he foresaw, she was not able to last long after they came back to her room. He helped her settle into her bed and dragged the desk chair over to sit by her side. Realising what he intended, she slid over towards the wall and reached her hands out for his.
"Lie with me," she said. "I barely take up space."
"It's okay," Ranma replied with a warm, reassuring smile.
Nabiki was much smaller than him and more so now because of her illness. Even then, the single bed still would have been tight for them both. He wanted her to be able to rest comfortably. He gave her hands a gentle, affectionate squeeze to let her know that he appreciated her gesture regardless.
Those hands were still the same: soft and gentle, yet unyielding and unapologetic about what they were. They had been so cold when she had first placed them in his earlier as they had made their way down from the roof. He had been unsettled, but the restored warmth in her hands now put him at ease. The feel of her fingers interlaced between his own was wonderful, something far beyond the fleeting brushes of her touch against him that he had only known before then.
He whispered a promise to still be there when she woke up as he told her to close her eyes. The smile she gave him as she faded away was still more beautiful than anything captured in his dreams and memories. The same was true of the delicate peach blossom scent of her hair now and the sound of her voice when he had heard her humming earlier in the night.
That realization scared him. Even the most important and soul-felt of memories seemed doomed to dim with time and distance. That there was not a single day since that first fateful night in Roppongi when he had not thought of her had made no difference. Though he secretly believed more than ever in the hope of the blood-written answer given to him at Niomon and that there would not be a need for good-byes any time soon, he wanted more than ever to have a way to ensure the fidelity of his memories.
He took up the sketch pad that he had brought back with him from Kyoto and settled back in Nabiki's desk chair. Sights, sounds, and even smells from the Spring and Summer days that they had spent between Naka-Meguro, Himonya, Sartre, and here at Komaba rushed up at him as he worked.
What's it like to be normal?
Funny that you think I'd know. I'm a Tendou, remember?
He laughed. Maybe she wasn't normal, but she did have a sense of humor. Among the Tendou sisters, she was probably the only one who knew how to laugh. It must have been a skill borne out of the need to survive.
Meet me up there in that tree.
I can get us up there in a leap or two.
No, thanks. I can make my own way up.
Are ya —?
I said just meet me up there! I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not f-#king made of glass!
He was humbled. He had been arrogant for underestimating her.
Flllor a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does. Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved.
He smiled. Of course, he still had a big mouth and a propensity to be insensitive and speak without thinking. He was, however, listening and he intended to keep on listening – because it was her.
Ya can pontificate about Sartre, dissect Plato in your sleep, and wax poetic on the fly about human nature with metaphors drawing on quantum physics. Yet ya can waste hours on that stuff?
It's not a waste.
But shoujo…?
Hey. I'm still a girl, and dreaming is what girls do from time to time.
He hoped that she still dreamed like that. He wanted to thank her for inspiring him too to dream and aspire to be more than the vacuous, aimless person he had been before that night in Roppongi.
Ya wanna be a saint…?
Hell no! I'm just doing my best to be okay with what I am.
That being?
A mortal human being. Maybe even one that likes chocolate, cookies, and ice cream from time to time. Occasionally fugu and caviar too.
He was drawn by her playful, mischievous honesty. A lot of people around Nerima used to say that Nabiki Tendou was a skilled liar without equal. They were wrong. In many ways, she was actually the most honest person whom Ranma had ever met. People just didn't always like what Nabiki said or how she said it, and they resented her more for not caring. That was the real reason why people disliked her. For her, however, everything had been a knife fight that had to be won because winning was surviving.
I was desperate. I really just had to do whatever it took for me to get out.
The sketches that he was working on were complete now. He closed the pad and laid it on the desk beside hers. For a moment, he was tempted to peek inside. Doing so, however, he realized would have been tantamount to reading her diary. He had no desire to incur her wrath as he had that first day at Himonya.
Instead, he studied her as she slept, still unable to believe in the present reality of her being with him in this place and this time. He had missed her so very much. She really was an excellent climber of trees and the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, definitely one of a kind and so very special in so many ways. She had thrived and achieved so much despite her rotten draw.
"You've won," he whispered proudly in reverent admiration. "Against all the odds, you've already won."
For now, Todai really was where she belonged. Even beyond here, there were so many other wonderful things that he knew she deserved the chance to know and have. Ranma wanted with every fiber of his being to give those dreams and possibilities back to her.
She was supposed to be the Believer who knew that there was no beauty without candor, be that via pain or otherwise.
She was supposed to be the mistress alone of her sea.
She was supposed to be the one at her own sail who understood that whoever called her out and tried to shout her back down into silence did not matter.
He suddenly remembered the penultimate question she had asked him that first night in Roppongi.
Tell me this much. Do you at least like girls.
Ranma laughed softly to himself in the darkness. He really did love her.
# # # # #
Ranma awoke to find sunlight shining in his eyes, which was annoying. He was sitting in her chair with the flannel blanket from the night before wrapped around his shoulders. It was morning again.
Nabiki was sitting up in the bed with her back to the wall studying him. She was resting her chin on arms placed over knees drawn up tightly to her chest. She was cute like that.
"Good morning," she said with uncharacteristic shyness.
"Good morning," he replied. "I promised I would stay."
"Thank you. I'm sorry about the bed."
"Don't be. It's luxurious compared to what my old man and I often had on the road."
"Oh."
An awkward silence fell between them in which they found themselves studying one another. He sensed that she wanted to ask him something, probably even many things. There were things that he wanted to say and ask her too.
"Ranma — "
"Nabiki — "
They shared a shy laugh together over their mutually bad timing.
"The Stage," she eventually started, breaking the silence. "I…. I can tell you now. Do you still want to know why?"
"Only if ya want. I'm pretty sure I already know why," Ranma said with a warm, reassuring smile.
He told her about his trip to Kyoto, his time at Kiyomizu-Dera itself, and how he had stumbled upon Nishi Otani at sunset. He omitted the part about the funeral procession that had drawn him into the cemetery grounds.
He told Nabiki too about the recurring dream of meeting her mother at the Niomon gate, but left out the part about the prophesied blood-written answer for her, Akane, and himself. He gave Nabiki the first sketch that he had finished the night before: the image of her mother coming to them in the night at Niomon.
He told Nabiki that he understood now. Icarus came to Kiyomizu-Dera searching for her mother. She was a lonely, desperate child seeking to reclaim what had been taken away from her before she'd even had a chance to know what she'd lost. It was far more than any person alone should ever have to bear.
As Nabiki studied the drawing, the sequence and spectrum of raw, powerful emotions that flashed across her beautiful face was unlike anything Ranma had ever seen. Anger, sadness, joy, longing, anguish, and wonder — all of those things came and went and more than once.
She clutched the pad tightly against her chest as the dam broke, and she began to cry. The naked pain of her broken heart revealed itself openly now as her body exploded with violent, unchecked sobs.
Instinctively, Ranma folded her tightly in his arms and let her bury the heat of her tear-streaked face in his shoulder. As she wept, he gently stroked her hair while whispering calm, compassionate assurances in her ear.
"I'm here, Nabiki," he told her. "Icarus doesn't have to leap alone."
For a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does. Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved.
"I hear you and see you. And I…. I wanna jump with you."
She answered by wrapping her own arms around him in a fierce, desperate embrace. They held each other like that for a long time. Eventually, the ragged, chaotic rhythm of her broken sobs settled into a spent, even rhythm that came to a deep exhale of a coda.
"I need your help," Nabiki said in a small, broken voice as she fell back and let go. "I don't know right from wrong anymore. I'm not sure I can remember when I last did. How do we tell Akane?"
"There ain't anything to tell."
He told her more or less about how Akane had confronted him at the shinkansen terminal at Tokyo Station and ended their engagement. He left out the part about Akane's desire to have him help find a donor. Any decision they made about being together could not be contingent on anything other than a a mutual desire for him to be a part of her life, however short or long that was going to be.
"I'm a terrible sister and a really bad person, aren't I," she said. "I wasn't strong enough to not love you or to make you actually hate me that day in Hongo. I knew I should have, but I … I couldn't."
He told Nabiki how both of her sisters had told him that love itself isn't ever wrong; what was wrong rather was all the assumptions that everyone kept making about what love is, ought to be, or shouldn't be.
Nabiki laughed despite herself. "It's because that was something that our mother used to say."
Indeed, the girl at Niomon had said the same thing about love.
"Maybe 'coz it's true?" Ranma ventured. "I don't think Akane ever meant to fall for me any more than you or I meant to fall for each other. Ya didn't do anything wrong any more than Akane did."
If anyone had done anything wrong, maybe it was him for trying to convince myself for so long that he could eventually feel about Akane the way she did for him. He should have admitted a long time ago that he just didn't love her.
Nabiki's features softened with sympathy as she listened to him. "Don't be so hard on yourself," she said. "You've never been in love before, right? You didn't know."
"I…. Can I ask ya a question?"
She laughed again, but this time her amusement was genuine. "Let me get this straight. Ranma Saotome sneaks into a girl's dorm at night, challenges her entire philosophical worldview as a lie, calls her a melodramatic coward, and invites himself to spend the night in her room. Now he wants to ask if it's okay for him to ask her questions…?!"
When put like that, he had to laugh too. "Point taken. It's good to hear ya laughing again though."
"What's your question, Ranma?"
"That last night here in Meguro when ya pushed me away. Right before ya…. When I wasn't able to see ya for a month. Did ya know then?"
She nodded. "I had a sense. Leukemias are blood diseases." Fatigue and decreased endurance because of anemia was oftenthe first things a person noticed. That or unusual bleeding or unexplained fevers. "Is that… is that really the question you want to ask me?"
He smiled. She understood him too well. "That night in Roppongi. Was it really by chance that we met up on that rooftop?"
"Kasumi was worried about you. She had been for a long time. I… I was too. You were so depressed after Jusendo and the wedding."
"That obvious?"
"Yeah."
He suddenly remembered how he had yelled at her that first day at Sartre when she had asked him what he wanted in life.
This again? Come on! It's not like anyone's ever given a sh#t about that before. Least of all you.
A rotten sense of guilt and shame came over him anew as he heard his own words echoing now in his memory. "I'm sorry. For getting angry at ya for caring enough to ask what I want. It's just that, well, no one else ever asked me. I didn't know what to do."
"Don't worry about it. I told you. I didn't have any illusions about who or what you thought I was. I was used to that."
"Still, I'm sorry for all the wrong things I thought about you. No one else ever told me that my happiness was important."
She gave him a sad, bittersweet smile. "The Tendous — we were spiritually dead as a family before you came. You brought something special with you, this realisation that there were still so many things about the world that none of us truly understood, and you made us all believe again in possibilities. For that alone, my sisters and I owe you a great deal. You still haven't asked me your real question though."
"Which is?"
"You asked me once before what I know about love, if I'd ever felt that way for someone before. The truth is, well, I've always liked you, even from the beginning when you and your father first came into our lives. You were my first real crush, always larger than life. That was the real reason I was so mean to you. As far as the Tendou-Saotome family agreement was concerned, I couldn't have you, and then my sister developed feelings for you. I'm sorry that I was immature like that."
With those words, so many strange ideas suddenly occurred to him. "So that time when Akane tossed me and the honor engagement to ya — ?"
"And I told you that night in my room that I loved you? That I'd felt that way for some time?"
He nodded.
"Okay, maybe 'love' was a little too strong of a word back then. The essence of what I said though? I wasn't really pretending."
"Nabiki…. I should've — "
"Ranma?" she said, cutting him off with a finger gently placed against his lips. "What I want to say is thank you. For giving me a chance to know what love actually is before I'm out of time."
"Nabiki…."
"Just hold me for a moment, Ranma," she said as she turned and leaned her head back against him. "I feel so tired, but whatever happens now, I'm just happy and grateful."
Her phone began to vibrate on the desk just as she closed her eyes. Ranma started to reach for it, but she stopped him.
"They can leave a message," she said. "Daedalus and Icarus didn't answer phones. Worshippers at Kiyomizu and mourners at Nishi Otani don't either. I just want to be with you."
# # # # #
CHAPTER NOTES:
(1) Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French Existentialist philosopher, social theorist, feminist activist, and writer who met Jean-Paul Sartre during her college years. Though never officially married, they were life partners for 51 years. SDe Beauvoir was openly bisexual and public about her open romantic relationships, which, at times, overshadowed her considerable academic reputation.