Author's Notes: The first week of this semester destroyed me. Sorry for the delay.

You will enjoy this chapter a lot more if you read Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants beforehand. I promise.

Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.



Oneirophobia



5.

He is so tired, but he cannot let himself go to sleep.

He is rapidly learning a technique that so many other students in the past have acquired: resting the mind, but remaining aware. It is quiet in here and smells of nervous sweat and chalk dust. Someone coughs, drums a pencil against the desk, and sighs; the teacher talks on, pausing only to ask questions and designate an answerer. Ken must remain aware in case his name is chosen from the roll sheet, but his head tips too far back anyway and he is almost lost to oblivion. Luckily, the fluorescent lights above him provide little chance for the darkness he needs to sleep.

This is not college. This is not even the fancy preparatory school he battled tooth and nail to get into when he was a teenager. He looks through his eyelashes at the ceiling tiles made from plaster and paper, the modern kind interrupted by aluminum slats that form boxes of indeterminate function, and knows where he is. He is sitting in a normal classroom of rudimentary Tamachi—the exceptional depot for gifted students, the primary school that attempted to mold and shape him in its own image.

Literature class, isn't it? Posters on the wall concerned with breakthrough and obedience, lists upon lists of required reading for the term, many pencil sharpeners, mindless students who only say what the teacher wants to hear. The teacher is a stereotypical curmudgeon with a narrow mind and narrower tweed patches on his jacket's elbows. The class is reading Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. ("Reading" is a euphemism here: the students are ripping apart the story by making too many trite remarks they hope sound intelligent.)

Ken does not care about the story's bead curtain and uncommunicative American man. He is tired and he has more important things to think about. The students around him are tense and troubled and hold their breaths whenever the teacher runs one knobbly finger down the roll sheet, but Ken is too close to blissful sleep to worry about that.

Ten days ago he was still the ruler of the Digital World. Ten days ago he was still the famous runaway genius. Ten days ago he might have left the country according to flaky accounts from witnesses at a train station outside of the city, although at the reported time he was actually monitoring Chimeramon's progress in an entirely different world. Meanwhile, his parents were busy scheduling another press conference to plea for their son's return. Please act rationally, Ken-chan. Everyone misses you. We love you so much!

His shoulders ache because he is slumped down in his seat in an attempt to unravel the significant clump of stress that has accumulated in his lower back. As his head lolls to the side, his eyes finally shut and he finds a niche in the not-quite-darkness.

Nine days ago the Chosen Children came for him in what was to become known as the final showdown. Nine days ago they liberated him from his own insanity, he lost Wormmon, and he wandered around in the desert for what seemed like an etenrity before he made it back to the real world. Nine days ago his mother screamed when she opened the front door to find him standing there, confused tears running down his cheeks, his hair a sandy mess, and his signature Tamachi uniform torn and tattered and travel-stained. While away he had missed the ending of the previous school year, the entire summer, and now part of this new semester. Nine days ago there was no time to think about school, however, because he collapsed into a faint in his mother's arms.

Even though he felt better a few days later, his parents didn't want him to return to school until he was completely certain of himself. In truth, he never wanted to go back. His parents reached a compromise with the school in his stead: the school would allow him to waive the time he missed last term if he started within three days of their negotiations. And so he did. This is his first day back and he is so tired, but he cannot let himself go to sleep because he might be called upon to answer some vacuous question about Hemingway's story. This is Tamachi, a private school where the administration cares about the parents' money and little else; this is a luxurious educational institution where the students carry briefcases because backpacks aren't professional enough. Ken forgot his briefcase today, and basically anything else he should have brought except for one plain ballpoint pen. He wants to sleep, but he can't. He looks at the white ceiling tiles and bright lights through his eyelashes.

". . . so there is a certain lack of human responsiveness in the bar's patrons," the teacher is saying. He looks across the classroom, observing every student and determining which aren't paying attention or are paying too much attention. A list of names compiles for later use. "Similarly, the host of the bar doesn't display overt hospitality."

The story is familiar to Ken because he—as the Kaiser—had read it once. Beyond that familiarity, he doesn't recall anything specific about the story. In fact, he has begun to notice many gaping holes in his mind where information and even memories have been lost, and these holes disturb him. Hills Like White Elephants hangs on the edge of one hole, hazy and dim like a dream, but of no more relevance to him than something unlearned. He stopped trying to remember anything more than the story's basic plot when the struggle for further details gave him a tension headache. There are bead curtains and the American man's communication problems, Jig and her continual questions, the couple's hopes and the denial of those hopes . . . but Ken cannot remember the story having any deeper meanings. It is five flimsy pages out of his Literature textbook, another necessary item else he has forgotten at home, and thinking about those pages for too long causes real pain.

At least Ken kept these scraps of history: Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, United States, after a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. No one ever talks about his suicide, about whether or not his method was practical, and Ken doesn't have the energy to figure out the price of razorblades or the availability of cleaning solvents in that decade. Alternatively people talk about the mundane: in 1927 when Hemingway wrote this short story, he was already famous because of 1926's The Sun Also Rises, which had inaugurated him as a literary force. That knowledge is there without explanation, distant from the gaping holes, but he cannot remember anything about goddamn Hills Like White Elephants beyond its publication date and a sketchy outline.

"Ichijouji-san," the teacher says.

Ken immediately forces his neck straight. He masks a wince with a big smile and privately listens to his cervical vertebrae crackle like dry tinder. His eyes are gummy. Beneath the desk his hands are clasped together, sweaty and pale, not yet trembling.

The teacher appears unfazed. "Ichijouji-san, have you forgotten that you must stand when I call on you?"

Awkwardly, Ken scoots his chair back and stands. He remembers this part of the question-answer process. He hates this part. He is a fresh slab of meat for his classmates to salivate over; he stands there so that they might finally look more intelligent than the resident genius should he screw up in front of them. If he proves that he is not perfect, they will be overjoyed and the Tokyo stock market will probably jump thirty points within the hour.

Ken isn't perfect. The Kaiser was perfect, but Ken isn't. Ken is trying too late to look like an attentive student. His classmates are seeing the newest side of him—which is now the only side of him. One half is missing. The Chosen destroyed that other perfect half. He doesn't even know who he is anymore.

"Please comment, though not at length, about the relationship between the girl's mountain-watching and the barren wasteland the bar is in the middle of," the teacher says. Some of the students smirk, because they know the answer, because this question is so easy. Obviously their teacher is trying to catch Ken off-guard with so simple a question. "You may start."

The wolves stir restlessly when Ken does not launch into an immediate explanation that would leave the best of his colleagues devastated by his brilliance. Ken is caught in a loop of thoughts, one that cannot deviate away from a series of images involving shotguns and wildernesses and the sickly green-and-yellow linoleum of a kitchen someone famous used to cook dinner in. There are snapshots of blood, Wormmon's sacrifice, book signings, atrocities committed against Digimon, a silent typewriter and a sheet left curled under the roller, Motomiya calling for him to come back—please come back! Please!

Join us, Ken! Join the Chosen! We're your friends!

He looks helplessly around the room, fake smile twitching, and the teacher lifts both eyebrows when it becomes obvious that Ken isn't even going to bother improvising an answer to this easy question. That is to say, the genius does not have a response. Jaws fall open up and down the rows of desks, tongues drooping, and the smell of spilled blood stokes the students' hunger. The wolves are starving for red meat. Elsewhere eyes widen—some are filling with disbelief and others with a sinking sort of pleasure that feels similar to but more glorious than fear.

"I'm here and waiting for you," the teacher says. "You cannot comment at all?"

Any valid excuse escapes Ken along with eloquence that might have not belonged to him in the first place.

"Well?"

"No," Ken says in a tightly controlled voice.

The room breathes in collectively. The end of times has come. The seventh seal is breaking.

"No?"

Embarrassment warms his face. "No, I cannot comment."

"This is a shock. If I recall correctly from my last term with you, you usually had some sparkling observation to enlighten us with before you returned to being an ass of considerable intelligence." The teacher slides an old and well-loved bookmark into his textbook and closes the cover. "Perhaps you have been pretentious all along, Ichijouji-san. Can you say anything about the story? Or is this speechlessness now an anomaly I ought to expect from you?"

There are many things Ken can say, but he resents I don't know because it will satisfy them and make them all hunger for more. They want to destroy him and then destroy what trace amounts of him that are left over. I don't know admits defeat. I don't know admits the Kaiser was stronger than kind little Ken will ever be. In his pocket is the Crest of Kindness, and he wishes desperately that he could take it out and hold it close. It always warms easily from his touch.

"Still, you say nothing! I do not want to threaten you as though you were a child," the teacher says. He is cruel because Ken is a child—this classroom is full of children. "One redemptive answer will make me leave you alone for the remainder of the class. Answer this: What are the story's characters talking about? Hemingway never explicitly says what the topic of conversation is."

Balancing the shotgun between your feet must be hard, Ken thinks wildly. There is no other way to pull the trigger except for when you prop it up like that. It must be really hard. Once that's done, though, there comes the fast click-whiz-bang of retirement. Your legacy fans across the floor and sprays the wall. And then your fourth wife returns home and finds this, and she has to let the world know that you've stepped out forever. Their icon is dead and the sickly green-and-yellow linoleum needs cleaning.

Someone raises his hand. Then someone else does. Soon there are hands reaching up from everywhere in the room at once, even hands of students who weren't paying attention until now. Ken feels humiliated. Finally he is being torn down from the high horse that the Kaiser rode with impunity; finally he has reached an understanding with his own inherent inferiority. The limelight clicks off—and from inside the new darkness, one untouched by even the fluorescent lights, he looks at these raised hands and wishes for a shotgun.

"Can anyone help out Ichijouji-san?" the teacher asks the wave of hands. He picks out one located near the back, one more relaxed than the straining others. "You. Please come to the front of the room to speak."

Ken cannot move back to his desk to sit down. His brain has forgotten how to unlock his knees. The constricted blood cannot reach his brain soon enough; he begins to feel light-headed as the new, more reliable student parts the desks and moves to the chalkboard. The answerer is Osamu, his brother, who is wearing a casual smirk and a Tamachi uniform with far more style than Ken ever could. He is three years Ken's senior and he shouldn't be here—he should be in preparatory school getting ready for college entrance examinations. But then Ken remembers that Osamu is dead and should actually be buried under seven feet of cold earth in a little cemetery that is too quiet and always covered in dead leaves no matter which season it is.

In the classroom, it smells like an early morning. There are dead leaves on the floor and crushed marble lines the junction between floor and wall. The poster that once advocated reading is now emblazoned with the silhouette of a crucifix and a full moon. Osamu smirks at the students, at Ken specifically, and then turns around to retrieve a piece of chalk from the tray. The chalk is damp and smears his skin. He writes DARWINISM on the board in giant blocky letters using the handwriting delicacy of a small child. The teacher nods approvingly.

"Ken-chan?" Osamu asks, his back turned. He smudges the D as an afterthought. "The story's characters are talking about abortion."

"Oh," Ken says. Now he remembers. The operation the American man speaks of—abortion. "All right?"

"The termination of pregnancy. The failure of a plan." His brother sets down the chalk and takes off his glasses. While he speaks, he cleans them on the front of his school-issued shirt. "Both of these definitions apply to the story, but I'm sure you understand that the characters talk about the former. There are many ways to abort a fetus. It depends on how much money the woman has and how far along she is in the pregnancy."

"May I sit down?" Ken asks the teacher, even though he cannot move.

"Remain standing," the teacher says.

"You should be fully aware of what I'm saying, so stay here. We can't have you drifting off." Osamu replaces his glasses and retrieves the chalk to begin scribbling several diagrams on the board. "How far along in the pregnancy do you think the girl was, Ken-chan?"

"How should I know?"

"Don't be offended," Osamu says with a smile full of teeth. "I think she was no further along than three months—which would be twelve weeks. When a baby is twelve weeks old, there are two main methods of abortion: suction aspiration, or dilation and curettage." He sketches out a long, thin tool that has a hollow scoop on its top. "How much money do you think she has?"

Pause. "Very little," Ken says warily.

"That's right. So let's say she has to seek out a dilation and curettage procedure to remove the fetus, but since she has very little money, she cannot have it done in a respectable hospital. She has to visit someone who might not even have a doctor's license." Osamu draws a stick figure that is frowning and pressing handless arms to its sheer waist. After circling the thin tool, he draws an arrow from it to the stick figure. "This tool is the curette the unlicensed doctor would use, whether he purchased it legally or stole it from a hospital. You insert it into the woman, slice up the baby, and then scrape out the cervix."

"Why are you telling me this?" Ken shrills. "I don't want to hear this! Stop!"

"Giblets. The baby looks like giblets." The chalk falls from Osamu's white fingers and breaks apart when it hits the floor. He reaches into his pocket and closes his fingers around something. "You were going to look like giblets."

Ken starts. "What are you talking about?"

"Our parents never told you that you were an accident, now did they?" Osamu reveals his hand: held gently between his fingers like a pencil is a thin metal rod. It is a surgical instrument. While the real thing appears more streamline and silvery than the one drawn with chalk, it is the same curette that has been described. However, the scooped top—sharp, hollow, nasty—is more fearsome than the drawing lets on. "They wanted to use this on you. You were going to look like giblets. That's what the Internet told me, and I couldn't stop crying for you. I couldn't let them turn you into a wet handful of protein meant for the disposal."

"That isn't true," Ken whispers, his skin is crawling with disgust and déjà vu. "That just isn't true."

"My baby brother was an accident and our parents were going to ameliorate that," Osamu says. The curette shines dangerously as it exchanges hands. "It was the second month when our mother realized something was wrong. She whispered to our father and he whispered back, and then I spent the day at a friend's house while they made an emergency trip to the doctor. That was how they found out about the second pregnancy, and there was no hiding the truth from me."

Numbness settles into Ken's mind, but no matter how disconnected and light he feels, his knees refuse to unlock and let him sit down. The curette is a terrible device and soon it has him hypnotized, winking the way it does, its silver contrasted starkly against Osamu's white hands.

"I saved your life, Ken-chan. You owe me for that. You're here because I told them that I wanted a little brother. I would keep an eye out for him. I would love him."

"And you would feed him and walk him too," Ken blurts out.

"Maybe you were something of a pet." It is an honest answer. Osamu considers the curette and then pushes away from the chalkboard. "You were mine, though, and that's what mattered. We were always together."

Ken feels the frustration and humiliation returning, tearing through the fear that has fallen around his body like a cloak. "Onii-san's pet. Is that all I am?"

"I took care of you," Osamu laments, "and how did you pay me back? You killed me."

An ambulance outside steadily approaches from the east. The siren warbles higher and higher as it passes in front of the school. Far away, louder, louder, closer, right in front of them and makeing the ceiling reverberate. Dust trickles down from the modern tiles in thin ribbons. Physics is not dead.

Ken yells, "That wasn't my fault! I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it—I didn't mean it!"

Going, going, loudest, softer now, moving away, less dust. The air is thick with dust, but the ceiling is not shaking down anymore. Softer, softer, fading away . . . and then, gone.

"You wished for me to disappear, and so I did." Osamu smiles humorlessly and slaps the curette's scoop onto his opposing palm to produce a dull, fleshy sound. "You really wanted me to die, and so I did. It's sort of ironic how that all turned out, don't you think? Karma can be such a bitch, but now it is working in my favor, for my justice."

Ken looks between the curette and his brother apprehensively. "What do you mean?"

"I think it is fairly conspicuous," Osamu says. "I am here to ameliorate the situation that our parents had been planning to. It took me a while to make amends with my death, but I think I've finally accepted it. And that means you have to accept something too."

"There is—"

The curette curls up in a shining rush, sharp top blazing like a comet, and thrusts into Ken's chest between the fourth and fifth ribs. His voice expires immediately when the left lung is punctured.

"That slid in so easily," Osamu remarks. He slings his free arm around Ken's waist, keeping them both standing together as Ken descends into shock, and he grins to the point of derangement. His breath smells like licorice. "I was expecting it to go into you like an awl through leather. Do you feel it in there?"

"Nghk," Ken splutters. He cannot seem to get enough air into his lungs and back out again to speak well. Liquid warmth sluices down his chest; it stains his uniform dark red and rushes over his brother's white hands. "You . . ."

Osamu wiggles the curette and its hollow scoop rips mercilessly through the alveolar bed. Ken can feel blood welling up in his throat, and he coughs once, splattering his attacker with a bright mouthful of life.

"Now it's time for your abortion," Osamu croons, licking at the blood on his own chin. "This is an awfully simple abortion, Ken-chan."

Gently, as if he were cradling a doll, Osamu helps Ken to kneel and then from there lays him down on the floor. Ken weakly presses his hands to the mortal wound, fingers curling around the blood-covered metal rod inserted into his abdomen. His pose bears a striking resemblance to the chalk-drawn stick figure that is clutching her womb. Dead leaves swirl and crackle. The teacher smiles and the students, the pack of wolves, are morphing and contorting in anticipation of a feast.

Now there is a curtain hung in the doorway to the classroom, one made from simple strings of wooden beads that only let in trickles of light and suspended dust. Beyond the curtain, existence goes on. Ken can hear the river murmuring, the train station bustling, life thriving, and he imagines the pale mountains that look like white elephants are standing silent, beautiful, and icy behind all else.

"I fell in love with you and now you're gone," Osamu is saying from a distance as far away as the mountains. "We had communication problems. We should have talked things out. We should have let all the air in before it was too late."