Ch. 7: Lighting on Stage
It was already midnight when he set out. He wasn't sure what the curfew was in Hokkaido, in that little town that had no name, but he was sure it was probably over already. None of the buildings had lights in them except for the back window of the police station, just beside the students dorms. There had been five other boys, including Isumi, in the dorm that they shared rent for. They mentioned the owner as Ijima's rich and wrinkly grandfather who Kaga had never seen, but certainly heard an earful of; kind, but presumably very ugly. At the thought of ugliness, he grimaced. It wasn't that he particularly hated ugly people or anything. It was just that they were unattractive.
There was no sound, no wind. The faint trickle of water across the roof and the eaves that dripped was close to silent. The wooden house where he had lived for one week, cooped up in close quarters with the other boys, stared out balefully at him with hollowed windows. The door was held half-shadow, the moonlight held the dorm in sharp regard, all angles as if to tell him not to return. He wouldn't return, after all; he'd now permanently stepped outside of all the boundaries where the other boys couldn't go. Feeling very much like a fugitive, he turned away again to face the road.
His one usable hand drifted to the map of Hokkaido jammed into his right pocket, and then to the sheathed kitchen knife on his belt. He felt like a petty thief; everything on him was stolen, even the clothes. Everything except for the blanket, which he wrapped around him like a toga, and its warmth gave him no solace. He couldn't but think, against his will, that he was somehow leaving something very important behind, and that thought nagged at him constantly. But what could he have forgotten? And perhaps, more importantly, why was he feeling sad?
The lead right hand gave a sharp jerk at that. Isumi's face floated up from the recesses of his mind and scrutinized him closely before giving a soft smile. He had not felt sad in many years, not since he realized in second grade that his father probably wasn't acting like most of the other kids' dads and probably didn't love him. That thought gave him a spark of anger and it smoldered in him like an unwrapped wound. He would save that anger until he could retaliate against that bastard someday. But all still, he realized that he didn't like that anger. It made him do things that probably Isumi wouldn't have done with a rational mind. He could recognize that Isumi probably said much less than he saw. He was smart enough to recognize thought in another.
The road he followed ran towards the sea. It became cold then, and soon his ears probably wouldn't have been able to hear a foghorn from five feet away from all the wind noise. The moon half-covered around two o'clock, or so he thought; it had been a long time since Boy Scouts. There wasn't much to see except for dark, fierce sea and the occasional white breaking of waves across the cliffs. It gave Kaga a sort of stunned fascination, as if it was some sort of climax in a soap opera on television. The road wound up to the top of a cliff before it dropped down into the forest. At the top of the cliff he stopped and looked down. He watched as a wave lunged up towards him as if it attempted to swallow him, a belligerent leviathan sent by God to eliminate all sinners.
He wondered what would happen if he actually jumped. Certainly, he would have liked to see the look on his dad's face when he came back reportedly dead from suicide - he liked that idea of revenge, twisted as it was. He hoped that it would be enough to put his father into jail for abuse, assault, or battery; certainly the bastard had done all of the above. Anger swelled in him, a dark emotion, and he glanced down at his right hand, the useless one, watching the moonlight glint sickly off of it. If he jumped, there was one less scrappy, hell-I-don't-care city boy who didn't belong in Buddhist tranquility. It wouldn't make a difference to the rest of the world.
So why didn't he jump? It was easy. The only thing was that once he jumped there would be no turning back. He couldn't rewind up to the cliff. That was part of the fear.
This was his life that he was considering! It was important, wasn't it? The cost of his life was the same as the cost of every life; if he died, he'd still get accepted into eternity like everyone else who had died and would die. Selfishly he thought of how it would look to all those other people, especially that Kimihiro that he'd beat up. That would have answered that weakling's prayers, wouldn't it? At most, maybe it would make the backpage of the obituaries - he would have liked to be remembered as some kind of martyr, but there wasn't any chance of that. He almost liked being evil at times, he could fool himself into liking that sort of power that he had over other people. It was starting to show, though, that humans probably weren't made to have that in mind. He was starting to feel other things, things that weren't angry anymore; and perhaps that was his biggest incentive to jump.
He was insecure. He could learn to adapt to that kind of life with roller-coaster emotions like the rest of the populace of the world. But right now he was scared, and he couldn't fool himself out of it. It scared him that something could change him from the way that he was now, change him from the anger that had sustained him from the very beginning. The cliff was looking very welcoming from that surge of confusion; and at the same time, it was very frightening.
After a moment, he turned around and went back up to the student dorm, all the while berating himself for being so weak that he couldn't even jump off a cliff to his death - he wasn't afraid of anything, wasn't he? It would have been better to jump off the cliff, no one cared anyway. For a moment Isumi came up in his mind, but he squashed it. Isumi probably was just being nice. From what he could tell, Isumi would probably betray him the moment he found out he was a juvenile delinquent and send him straight to the police, telling him that that it was probably "the best thing to do".
Finally, it was almost dawn when he reached the dorms again, right next to the police station that he so feared. Things went in his head - maybe it would be right to turn himself in, maybe it would be right just to tell Isumi that he was a fugitive from Tokyo that was running from the law. But somehow he thought Isumi's views of him wouldn't have changed. The brother of Touya Akira understood what people were, and so he felt, even if it was just wishful thinking, that Isumi wouldn't do anything. At the same time, he wasn't a genius at reading people like Isumi was, so he couldn't be sure either. It all came down to Isumi, in the end, what he would do, because now that he'd left he'd have to explain to the rest of them just what he had attempted to do.
Unsurprisingly, the house was still asleep when he opened up the back door with the spare key in the kitchen. As he tiptoed up the stairs after returning all of the 'stolen' goods away, he realized that the door to Isumi's room was half-open, and that warm lamplight was spilling into the hallway. Clutching the blanket as tight as he could, he entered slowly, feeling the weight of Isumi's gaze on him. Half-formed phrases went through his mind: should he greet, or should he confess? Did Isumi already know?
The clear gaze stared up at him. "You came back", Isumi stated softly.
"Yes", he answered uncomfortably.
For the first time, Isumi seemed almost troubled by this. "And why did you come back? You could have gone, been out of here. My brother is searching for a juvenile delinquent who has escaped from an island around here; I have had reason to believe that you are none other than that person. I covered up for you.but I believed that it wouldn't have been discovered just who was covering for you. I also saw that it would not be sufficient reasoning for my act of kindness to keep you here, cooped up in a student dorm, for as long as that police station stands beside this wooden house." He looked down to the tray of candles, and lit the few that he had neglected. "I expected you to be gone the first night.and yet you stayed for a week. I suppose that was more than I could have asked for.all the same it makes me wonder, why did you wait?"
There was no anger in Kaga - it was as if the sea winds had somehow blown all of that away, along with all of his strength to resist. He could only answer in truth; he could only reply to Isumi like a child would, after being found out about some small disobedience. He'd never felt the sting of patronizing like this before. "I - I don't know why I stayed. I think it was because of the others, though - the other boys, like you." He found himself fumbling and strained to keep concentration under Isumi's knowing gaze. He looked back up to meet that understanding, and found his eyes filling with - tears? When was the last time he'd cried? - and a wrenching sorrow that was starting to break in him.
He steeled himself and sat down. "My father beat me. I stole and beat up a kid on the street and was sentenced to one year of isolation instead of going to jail for three years. I got off the island and came here, and I'm still trying to avoid getting caught", I said this all in one breath. "Tell me what to do now."
His eyes fluttered. "You tried to kill yourself today." The sun was rising at the window just beyond him. "I tried to, as well, three years ago. My brother saved me and locked me in my room for an entire year - he was paranoid that I would do something to kill myself again. He took precaution to keep everything from forks, hammers and glass away from me. My door had five locks. My window was barred. I was virtually a prisoner in my own house and in my own room. I wasn't allowed to go out, not even for dinner. I didn't have any friends."
"But I learned something. I learned restraint. I didn't fling myself passionately at everything anymore - I thought things out and deliberated things before I did them. Constraint is the key thing here, and you're starting to learn what it is." I looked at him speechlessly; I'd guessed such an event in his past but hadn't bothered to look into it. "That moment before you decide to jump - that's the one pure moment. You can think of only one thing then, and that is despair." I nodded, but he didn't speak again.
"Then. . .why do you think I didn't jump?"
He gave a half-smile at that. "I'm not you. You should know that, not me."
"So I'm dumb." For a moment I was reminded of Shindou. "Explain it to me."
"The worth of all life in the world is the same - do you see that? One person dying won't make a difference if another person dies. The worth of a soul, of the life that's inside of a body, the thing that doesn't die but gives you entrance into eternity, that is of the same worth in everyone. The QUALITY of how a person lives their life is different - but the value of individual lives are the same. Do you understand?" I nodded. "But now that you haven't dropped off the cliff and decided that the value of your life still means you have more to live for, you need to decide what you're GOING to live for. Now it is the QUALITY of your life that you're questioning. What do you want to do?"
I thought a little before answering. "Like - like you guys", I mumbled lamely. "How you can be so happy with little things and not really care about anything in the world because you don't have to - how can you balance the larger world around you and then the personal lives that you have? I think - I think my balance in that instance has been off-kilter, I think I've been thinking too selfishly." The memory of my old life burned with anger when I said that, but I meant what I was saying, every bit. "How do you - live? The way that people are supposed to live. The way you live, it's like you care about your life but you care more for other people's lives. You're even nice to Ijima. How can you do that?"
Now Isumi smiled a little. "What were you accustomed to doing with your enemies?"
I shrugged, even though I was burning with something like shame inside. "Punched them, I guess."
Soft laughter. "Then you've been taking the easy way out of life so far. There are two kinds of living, I guess, one is the way you're living now - you live for the moment, and then there's me when I live to change the future of myself and of others by researching the age-old culture of Hokkaido. I have a push, a reason; you still need to find yours. There must be something other than punching than gives you inspiration and excitement."
My mind zipped back to the ghost village that had been abandoned, to the corpse that reached out the hand and made my right hand lead and unmovable. How the snowflakes had drifted slowly; how I had become entranced with the way they moved and the slow piling of white on the banks and around the trees. The feeling that I had been connected to something larger, where I could feel the pain of Mother Nature's roots, feel the groan of the world under all the feet of the humans and the weight of all the machinery - I had belonged to something larger in that moment. Isumi was still looking at me when I gathered up the blanket and slipped out the door without giving him an answer.
The window was open when I stepped inside, and it was cold. All at once I looked down at my hand, the lead one, and dashed back down the stairs. Isumi looked up calmly at me again. "My hand", I gasped from the mad juggernauting down the stairs, "can you -?"
"Yes, I can see that its lead. Is there anything else you need?"
He used his left hand to pick up his right and wave it around madly in the air for a moment to reiterate his point. "But it's weird, strange - aren't you scared of it or something?"
Isumi snapped the book shut with a loud snap, almost angrily. The candles, burning low, still reflected more than the sliver of sun that had appeared over the treetops. "No, Kaga, I am not afraid of you. You can't hurt me here, even though you think you have power. You said that you've hurt people before, because your father beat you. I believe you on that point - but I am astonished that you did nothing to change your behavior -", Kaga opened his mouth to protest loudly and harshly but Isumi cut him off, "and I understand that you probably thought you were doing the right thing, you didn't know any better. I refuse to believe, though, you cannot change - you saw how people are supposed to treat people in the past week, so follow that. You must come to terms with the fact that having NO power over NO people is better than having fear hanging over other peoples heads. People will take you the wrong way, and they'll escape your presence as soon as they can. You must learn to like living instead of liking anger, which gave you a lot of your threats and your supposed power over people. Your father is wrong, so don't follow his example." Then he opened his book again.
Kaga licked his lips at the long speech and asked confusedly, "But what I mean is, how should I get rid of the hand? It's like its useless - I want my old hand back."
Isumi gave a soft laugh. "No, no, Kaga, it's not poisoned at all. Just learn how to use it, and after that everything will be easy."
/ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
Author's note:
Well, sorry for the long update. Had stuffs to do. I hope to write a bit of Colors after this, but I want to maybe fit a songfic in somewhere once I find something worthwhile. Okay, that's all.
Andrea Weiling
It was already midnight when he set out. He wasn't sure what the curfew was in Hokkaido, in that little town that had no name, but he was sure it was probably over already. None of the buildings had lights in them except for the back window of the police station, just beside the students dorms. There had been five other boys, including Isumi, in the dorm that they shared rent for. They mentioned the owner as Ijima's rich and wrinkly grandfather who Kaga had never seen, but certainly heard an earful of; kind, but presumably very ugly. At the thought of ugliness, he grimaced. It wasn't that he particularly hated ugly people or anything. It was just that they were unattractive.
There was no sound, no wind. The faint trickle of water across the roof and the eaves that dripped was close to silent. The wooden house where he had lived for one week, cooped up in close quarters with the other boys, stared out balefully at him with hollowed windows. The door was held half-shadow, the moonlight held the dorm in sharp regard, all angles as if to tell him not to return. He wouldn't return, after all; he'd now permanently stepped outside of all the boundaries where the other boys couldn't go. Feeling very much like a fugitive, he turned away again to face the road.
His one usable hand drifted to the map of Hokkaido jammed into his right pocket, and then to the sheathed kitchen knife on his belt. He felt like a petty thief; everything on him was stolen, even the clothes. Everything except for the blanket, which he wrapped around him like a toga, and its warmth gave him no solace. He couldn't but think, against his will, that he was somehow leaving something very important behind, and that thought nagged at him constantly. But what could he have forgotten? And perhaps, more importantly, why was he feeling sad?
The lead right hand gave a sharp jerk at that. Isumi's face floated up from the recesses of his mind and scrutinized him closely before giving a soft smile. He had not felt sad in many years, not since he realized in second grade that his father probably wasn't acting like most of the other kids' dads and probably didn't love him. That thought gave him a spark of anger and it smoldered in him like an unwrapped wound. He would save that anger until he could retaliate against that bastard someday. But all still, he realized that he didn't like that anger. It made him do things that probably Isumi wouldn't have done with a rational mind. He could recognize that Isumi probably said much less than he saw. He was smart enough to recognize thought in another.
The road he followed ran towards the sea. It became cold then, and soon his ears probably wouldn't have been able to hear a foghorn from five feet away from all the wind noise. The moon half-covered around two o'clock, or so he thought; it had been a long time since Boy Scouts. There wasn't much to see except for dark, fierce sea and the occasional white breaking of waves across the cliffs. It gave Kaga a sort of stunned fascination, as if it was some sort of climax in a soap opera on television. The road wound up to the top of a cliff before it dropped down into the forest. At the top of the cliff he stopped and looked down. He watched as a wave lunged up towards him as if it attempted to swallow him, a belligerent leviathan sent by God to eliminate all sinners.
He wondered what would happen if he actually jumped. Certainly, he would have liked to see the look on his dad's face when he came back reportedly dead from suicide - he liked that idea of revenge, twisted as it was. He hoped that it would be enough to put his father into jail for abuse, assault, or battery; certainly the bastard had done all of the above. Anger swelled in him, a dark emotion, and he glanced down at his right hand, the useless one, watching the moonlight glint sickly off of it. If he jumped, there was one less scrappy, hell-I-don't-care city boy who didn't belong in Buddhist tranquility. It wouldn't make a difference to the rest of the world.
So why didn't he jump? It was easy. The only thing was that once he jumped there would be no turning back. He couldn't rewind up to the cliff. That was part of the fear.
This was his life that he was considering! It was important, wasn't it? The cost of his life was the same as the cost of every life; if he died, he'd still get accepted into eternity like everyone else who had died and would die. Selfishly he thought of how it would look to all those other people, especially that Kimihiro that he'd beat up. That would have answered that weakling's prayers, wouldn't it? At most, maybe it would make the backpage of the obituaries - he would have liked to be remembered as some kind of martyr, but there wasn't any chance of that. He almost liked being evil at times, he could fool himself into liking that sort of power that he had over other people. It was starting to show, though, that humans probably weren't made to have that in mind. He was starting to feel other things, things that weren't angry anymore; and perhaps that was his biggest incentive to jump.
He was insecure. He could learn to adapt to that kind of life with roller-coaster emotions like the rest of the populace of the world. But right now he was scared, and he couldn't fool himself out of it. It scared him that something could change him from the way that he was now, change him from the anger that had sustained him from the very beginning. The cliff was looking very welcoming from that surge of confusion; and at the same time, it was very frightening.
After a moment, he turned around and went back up to the student dorm, all the while berating himself for being so weak that he couldn't even jump off a cliff to his death - he wasn't afraid of anything, wasn't he? It would have been better to jump off the cliff, no one cared anyway. For a moment Isumi came up in his mind, but he squashed it. Isumi probably was just being nice. From what he could tell, Isumi would probably betray him the moment he found out he was a juvenile delinquent and send him straight to the police, telling him that that it was probably "the best thing to do".
Finally, it was almost dawn when he reached the dorms again, right next to the police station that he so feared. Things went in his head - maybe it would be right to turn himself in, maybe it would be right just to tell Isumi that he was a fugitive from Tokyo that was running from the law. But somehow he thought Isumi's views of him wouldn't have changed. The brother of Touya Akira understood what people were, and so he felt, even if it was just wishful thinking, that Isumi wouldn't do anything. At the same time, he wasn't a genius at reading people like Isumi was, so he couldn't be sure either. It all came down to Isumi, in the end, what he would do, because now that he'd left he'd have to explain to the rest of them just what he had attempted to do.
Unsurprisingly, the house was still asleep when he opened up the back door with the spare key in the kitchen. As he tiptoed up the stairs after returning all of the 'stolen' goods away, he realized that the door to Isumi's room was half-open, and that warm lamplight was spilling into the hallway. Clutching the blanket as tight as he could, he entered slowly, feeling the weight of Isumi's gaze on him. Half-formed phrases went through his mind: should he greet, or should he confess? Did Isumi already know?
The clear gaze stared up at him. "You came back", Isumi stated softly.
"Yes", he answered uncomfortably.
For the first time, Isumi seemed almost troubled by this. "And why did you come back? You could have gone, been out of here. My brother is searching for a juvenile delinquent who has escaped from an island around here; I have had reason to believe that you are none other than that person. I covered up for you.but I believed that it wouldn't have been discovered just who was covering for you. I also saw that it would not be sufficient reasoning for my act of kindness to keep you here, cooped up in a student dorm, for as long as that police station stands beside this wooden house." He looked down to the tray of candles, and lit the few that he had neglected. "I expected you to be gone the first night.and yet you stayed for a week. I suppose that was more than I could have asked for.all the same it makes me wonder, why did you wait?"
There was no anger in Kaga - it was as if the sea winds had somehow blown all of that away, along with all of his strength to resist. He could only answer in truth; he could only reply to Isumi like a child would, after being found out about some small disobedience. He'd never felt the sting of patronizing like this before. "I - I don't know why I stayed. I think it was because of the others, though - the other boys, like you." He found himself fumbling and strained to keep concentration under Isumi's knowing gaze. He looked back up to meet that understanding, and found his eyes filling with - tears? When was the last time he'd cried? - and a wrenching sorrow that was starting to break in him.
He steeled himself and sat down. "My father beat me. I stole and beat up a kid on the street and was sentenced to one year of isolation instead of going to jail for three years. I got off the island and came here, and I'm still trying to avoid getting caught", I said this all in one breath. "Tell me what to do now."
His eyes fluttered. "You tried to kill yourself today." The sun was rising at the window just beyond him. "I tried to, as well, three years ago. My brother saved me and locked me in my room for an entire year - he was paranoid that I would do something to kill myself again. He took precaution to keep everything from forks, hammers and glass away from me. My door had five locks. My window was barred. I was virtually a prisoner in my own house and in my own room. I wasn't allowed to go out, not even for dinner. I didn't have any friends."
"But I learned something. I learned restraint. I didn't fling myself passionately at everything anymore - I thought things out and deliberated things before I did them. Constraint is the key thing here, and you're starting to learn what it is." I looked at him speechlessly; I'd guessed such an event in his past but hadn't bothered to look into it. "That moment before you decide to jump - that's the one pure moment. You can think of only one thing then, and that is despair." I nodded, but he didn't speak again.
"Then. . .why do you think I didn't jump?"
He gave a half-smile at that. "I'm not you. You should know that, not me."
"So I'm dumb." For a moment I was reminded of Shindou. "Explain it to me."
"The worth of all life in the world is the same - do you see that? One person dying won't make a difference if another person dies. The worth of a soul, of the life that's inside of a body, the thing that doesn't die but gives you entrance into eternity, that is of the same worth in everyone. The QUALITY of how a person lives their life is different - but the value of individual lives are the same. Do you understand?" I nodded. "But now that you haven't dropped off the cliff and decided that the value of your life still means you have more to live for, you need to decide what you're GOING to live for. Now it is the QUALITY of your life that you're questioning. What do you want to do?"
I thought a little before answering. "Like - like you guys", I mumbled lamely. "How you can be so happy with little things and not really care about anything in the world because you don't have to - how can you balance the larger world around you and then the personal lives that you have? I think - I think my balance in that instance has been off-kilter, I think I've been thinking too selfishly." The memory of my old life burned with anger when I said that, but I meant what I was saying, every bit. "How do you - live? The way that people are supposed to live. The way you live, it's like you care about your life but you care more for other people's lives. You're even nice to Ijima. How can you do that?"
Now Isumi smiled a little. "What were you accustomed to doing with your enemies?"
I shrugged, even though I was burning with something like shame inside. "Punched them, I guess."
Soft laughter. "Then you've been taking the easy way out of life so far. There are two kinds of living, I guess, one is the way you're living now - you live for the moment, and then there's me when I live to change the future of myself and of others by researching the age-old culture of Hokkaido. I have a push, a reason; you still need to find yours. There must be something other than punching than gives you inspiration and excitement."
My mind zipped back to the ghost village that had been abandoned, to the corpse that reached out the hand and made my right hand lead and unmovable. How the snowflakes had drifted slowly; how I had become entranced with the way they moved and the slow piling of white on the banks and around the trees. The feeling that I had been connected to something larger, where I could feel the pain of Mother Nature's roots, feel the groan of the world under all the feet of the humans and the weight of all the machinery - I had belonged to something larger in that moment. Isumi was still looking at me when I gathered up the blanket and slipped out the door without giving him an answer.
The window was open when I stepped inside, and it was cold. All at once I looked down at my hand, the lead one, and dashed back down the stairs. Isumi looked up calmly at me again. "My hand", I gasped from the mad juggernauting down the stairs, "can you -?"
"Yes, I can see that its lead. Is there anything else you need?"
He used his left hand to pick up his right and wave it around madly in the air for a moment to reiterate his point. "But it's weird, strange - aren't you scared of it or something?"
Isumi snapped the book shut with a loud snap, almost angrily. The candles, burning low, still reflected more than the sliver of sun that had appeared over the treetops. "No, Kaga, I am not afraid of you. You can't hurt me here, even though you think you have power. You said that you've hurt people before, because your father beat you. I believe you on that point - but I am astonished that you did nothing to change your behavior -", Kaga opened his mouth to protest loudly and harshly but Isumi cut him off, "and I understand that you probably thought you were doing the right thing, you didn't know any better. I refuse to believe, though, you cannot change - you saw how people are supposed to treat people in the past week, so follow that. You must come to terms with the fact that having NO power over NO people is better than having fear hanging over other peoples heads. People will take you the wrong way, and they'll escape your presence as soon as they can. You must learn to like living instead of liking anger, which gave you a lot of your threats and your supposed power over people. Your father is wrong, so don't follow his example." Then he opened his book again.
Kaga licked his lips at the long speech and asked confusedly, "But what I mean is, how should I get rid of the hand? It's like its useless - I want my old hand back."
Isumi gave a soft laugh. "No, no, Kaga, it's not poisoned at all. Just learn how to use it, and after that everything will be easy."
/ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
Author's note:
Well, sorry for the long update. Had stuffs to do. I hope to write a bit of Colors after this, but I want to maybe fit a songfic in somewhere once I find something worthwhile. Okay, that's all.
Andrea Weiling