PoT: okazaki
a/n: Inspired by Jay, of GW's "R.E.M." fame.
static is used when no variables owned by a particular construction are involved.
You say, "No, look, don't-keep your seatbelt on--" but Ryoma is already leaning over the gearstick, whispering buchou, buchou, and you turn towards him because you want, you want, you need--
Ryoma's mouth is like the sun, like warmth from the summer pavement after the rain--
Of course you don't see it coming.
*
You open your eyes. The ceiling is unfamiliar in the early morning light. You can hear Masako and her gentle breathing beside you, a seashell figure in the sheets. You reach over and touch her shoulder, lightly shaking her. You press your lips against her forehead, the line of her jaw. She stirs, making small protesting noises, before opening her eyes.
"Kunimitsu," she says, and you tremble, not knowing why. "It's too early," she says, soft. "Is something wrong?"
"I had this dream--" you say, and cannot continue.
*
"Of what?" Fuji asks, and suddenly you rediscover that you are in a park. It is slightly chilly; the scarf your mother bought for your birthday is hanging loosely around your neck like you've forgotten to tie it all the way. The bench is freezing under you. You shift your legs and squint your eyes into the sky. Today it is a strange shade of gray, like it couldn't make up its mind whether to be sunny or cloudy.
"What are we doing?"
"Right now?" Fuji rattles a small white paper bag and smiles. "Feeding the birds."
"Fuji," you say, and he asks you again, "What was your dream of?" and you have forgotten. Lights, and someone beside you, and--
*
"It's not permanent, though, is it?" the man says. His hair is slicked and tame, flat on his head with a look of premature thinning, and his mouth is contorted between a look of worry and reassurance. He glances quickly at you, smiles with the timidity of someone who has known disappointment too many times.
"No, he should be fine after a few weeks. Just take it slow, and make sure he takes that medication I prescribed. And try to get him to connect with surroundings he used to be familiar with." The doctor is in his late 40s, perhaps, with wrinkles around his mouth and the beginnings of white hair. He continues to talk to the man about mundane things, then leaves, shutting the door behind him impassively.
A silence swallows his absence. You look at the man still in the room. Something itches in the back of your mind. You touch your forehead. There is gauze. The man rushes over to you and puts his fingers on the bandage as well, as if it had moved or you had somehow disturbed it.
"Tezuka," he says.
"Who are you?" you ask. Immediately you know something is wrong. His smile falls away, swandives into the cesspool of doubt and fear in your stomach. He holds onto your hand, grasping it hard, blinking rapidly.
"My name is Oishi Shuuichirou." He releases your hand and, so tentatively it makes you tense, touches the gauze around your head again, not looking at your face. "I
*
used to play tennis with you," Momo says, then hissing, “Hot, hot,” as he hastily shoves a slice of pizza into his mouth. “And then they asked him, ‘Who’s Tezuka Kunimitsu?’ and you should have seen the look he gave them.” Momo frowns and gestures with his hands full of hanging cheese. “Go on, eat your pizza.”
“What are you doing in California?” you ask, gingerly tearing the crust off a slice and poking it into your mouth, which instantly turns it cardboard-like between your tongue and teeth. You’re worried that you sound accusatory; he has just as much right, maybe even more, to be here.
Momo swallows a mouthful quickly and almost chokes. “Oh, you know-- stuff. We’re filming in a couple of months here.” He gives you his classic self-deprecating shit-eating grin. “About tennis. There’s this actor, he’s maybe 18? 19? He looks a lot like you.”
“Oh,” you say, and you hear the front door open, so silent, like the calm before a hydrogen explosion, like the sound before the end of the world. Momo’s expression is that of a dog lying on the porch, suddenly seeing its owner near the house from far away, after months of absence. You wonder what expression you have on your face.
You hope it doesn’t give you away.
*
From the door, Masako says, “The cucumbers are really fresh today,” and takes off her tiny white shoes. She hands you the grocery bag. It hangs limp and lifeless from your hands, a flimsy thing, and you see that the off-white of the bag is the same color of her shirt.
You smile, used to disappointment.
“Are you okay?” she asks, peering up at you. Her shoe is still in her hand. She slides into her slippers, while you open the bag to stare at the mentioned cucumber, surrounded by various other vegetables, lonely with its awkward height. “Did you end up falling asleep this morning, afterwards?”
“Falling asleep?” you say, bewildered. You are heading to the kitchen to put the groceries in the refrigerator. Her voice trails in behind you, light, distinctly feminine, that of a stranger’s.
“After your dream. The one you woke up from.” Her hand is on your forehead. You try to compose an idea of the shape of it, its cool fingers and gently hollowed palm, the swells and falls. There is a map in your head. There is the image of someone’s hand, but Masako is asking, “Are you sick? Your forehead feels warm. I think you have a fever,”
*
Fuji tells you with a swift shake of the thermometer. His hand is still cold on your forehead. You remember the strength of it curling around a racket before a return. You lean into it a little, searching for the shape of it as it once was, smiling a little to fend off his concern.
“Tezuka,” Fuji says, almost firmly, but he could never be firm unless he was angry, and so you say, “I’m fine,” and take the thermometer from him, holding it to the light.
“You can’t see anything of it now. It’s already cooled down to room temperature,” Fuji explains.
You make some noncommittal humming sound. Turning the glass tube in your hand around and around, you realize Fuji has one of those old-fashioned mercury ones. The core is a dull, dark silver, and you stare at it, fascinated. Lethal and threatening, but so harmless, so unassuming in a glass case, and you touch it a couple of times just to be sure it’s really there. You can’t touch the mercury. In plain sight, but hidden.
“What are you doing?” Fuji asks you, amused, his hand reaching out for the thermometer in return. You blink rapidly when you turn away from the light, momentarily blind. The outlines of his face, his hand, his pose blurring to shifting lines and colors. You automatically reach up to adjust your glasses. “Hey-“ he says, right as you start blanking out, falling.
*
The ceiling is unfamiliar. The bed is hard and unwelcoming beneath you. Somewhere in the distance a radio is playing early morning calisthenics, the kind that hasn’t changed for years: stretch, bend, hold. The window is open, and the sky is an anonymous shade of steel blue gray. You wiggle your toes and shift your arms and fingers just a tiny portion of a centimeter to make sure everything is all right. Everything is. Someone has left your glasses on your face. Sometime during your rest you had rolled over and smashed your skin against the lenses. Now they need a touch of cleaning up.
You throw off the covers. Someone else’s neat slippers have been laid next to the bed. It’s a little chilly, and the pajamas you’re wearing, too new to be “yours”, are of thin light cotton. The hallways are brightly lit, windows and good sunshine, a hard sunshine. While you’re wiping your glasses on your shirt, you hear the front door open, quiet like the sound of snow falling, and you turn because you think you know who it will be, you think-
“Tezuka,” he says, shocked. He has groceries in one hand, taking off his shoes with the other. “You’re up already.”
You look at him. You keep staring until he makes this haltering movement towards you, and then you say his name, afraid to lose it, and you think that he looks like he’s about to cry when he hears it. You’re wrong, you think. You made a mistake. But you say it anyway. You say, “
*
Echizen,” rolling over and throwing your arm over your eyes to block out the sun from the opened window. “It’s too early.” The smell of the sheets are wrong, foreign and not yours, but they smell familiar. In your sleep-muddled mind you think of junior high, and locker rooms, and someone else’s tennis jerseys-
“Wake up,” he says. A hand on your shoulder. You take a deep breath, hiding it in a yawn. What are you so afraid of? Stupid, stupid, you tell yourself, and almost tremble feeling the warmth of his palm through your shirt. Your glasses are on the bed stand beside you. You’re so frightened even though you can’t see him.
“Play tennis with me.”
“Echizen, it’s-“ but now he’s somehow in the bed with you, long limbs tangling around you, his hair morning fresh and tangled and you used to dream about this every night, though you would never admit it. You knew this was coming but here he is, his nose tucked into the crook of your neck, smelling you or maybe just breathing you in. Inhaling you bit by bit. You try to remember how you rationalized coming here. You try to think of your wife, Masako, Masako, Masako, Masako and the unborn child, but you feel his warmth against you, the shock of remembering he’s real, his smell and how much you’ve wanted this for years, and your voice refuses to make it into a question when you ask him, “What are you doing.”
“Momo’s gone,” he whispers, lips against the collar of your pajama shirt. “He went site scouting an hour ago. It’s just us. Buchou-“ he says, and you know you’ve lost to him now, “play tennis with me. And then we can-“
“I had this dream,” you tell him, and can’t continue. “I had this dream about-and I had forgotten you-“
“Play tennis with me,” he says, like he didn’t hear you. You feel your heart constrict, squeezing itself smaller and smaller, made up of nothing but desire and old memories-a boy in the middle of a tennis court, black hair, eyes the color of impossible.
“And then.”
*
Masako is making soup in the kitchen. You can smell it as you enter, warm and a bit spicy in the air, and you come up behind her, your hand on her waist. She startles a bit, as if unsure it was you, but then she turns around, the small butterfly quality of her eyes, the roundness of her face. You smile. “Your cooking smells good,” you say, drinking from her stirring spoon.
On the table is a newspaper, folded in half so that the picture which takes up the front page is neatly divided along the lines of a car door, a crash site. You turn away to sit down. Masako hums a tune deep in the back of her throat as she chops something into fine slices. You could do that for her, but you haven’t cooked since the two of you got married. She doesn’t let you, much.
You unfold the newspaper as you stretch out your legs under the table. Something catches your eye-a headline, a string of text, a name-and suddenly you are frozen in place, staring, the newspaper still in an awkward half-straightened position. Something shallow and prickling in your chest. Cold sweat, deep breaths, numb fingers.
“There’s an article I spotted,” Masako is saying, or at least you think she’s saying. Your hearing has been muffled. You keep reading the same few words over and over again, wondering if you’ve suddenly forgotten how to comprehend written text. “They mentioned your old junior high school. Apparently some celebrity who graduated there died the other night.”
“Oh,” you say. Masako’s voice, the gentle bubbling of the soup, her knife returning to its redundant, reliable chopping compels you to refold the newspaper, pushing it far away from you onto the middle of the table.
“Yes,” you say. “I didn’t know him that well anyway.”
“And I wanted to tell you,” Masako continues, now cutting up green onions into sharp, tiny wedges for garnish, “that I found out today that I’m pregnant.”
“I need to take a shower,” you answer dully. “That’s very good news. I need to take a shower.”
You hear her call after you, asking you if you’re all right. You snap on the running water and, stripping roughly, your clothes in a pile on the tiled floor, you step under the cold spray, letting it batter all the feeling out of your skin. After a while you wonder how many different ways you could drown yourself. You turn your face towards the showerhead, closing your eyes. You count the seconds. You keep counting.
When the water enters your lungs, though, you start coughing violently. You force yourself out of the shower, wrapping a small towel around your hips, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, heaving water out of your body. The water has turned hot enough to scald. The shower curtains are open, drenching the floor and letting the steam fog up the mirror. You walk to the sink and watch as your face slowly gets crowded out by the heat.
Finally, when you can’t see your face anymore, you take a shaky breath and put your finger to the mirror. ‘I had a dream,’ you start, and then stop. You finish to yourself, ‘and you were dying.’ The image of someone else’s slender, finely controlled back. Black hair in flash of sunlight. Eyes the color of impossible.
At dinner you tell Masako that it’s very good news, you’re very happy, you should both tell both of your parents soon, and has she asked for leave at work yet? You tell her you know a very good doctor to handle her pre-natal care. He was a school friend, you say, and you don’t eat anymore for the rest of that night.
*
“You have to eat something at least.”
“Fuji, it’s your cooking,” you chide mildly. You feel like vomiting, but you don’t tell him that. You had that dream again, the one that you wake up panting from, the one where someone is dying but you can’t remember who.
“Tezuka, you’re being ridiculous,” Fuji says. You know by the tone of his voice, the way he grips his chopsticks tightly, that he’s angry at you. “You haven’t been feeling well the whole day.”
“I’m going to take a drive around the neighborhood. I’ll be back in half an hour.” You placidly take his car keys from the drawer and slip them into your coat pocket. He stands in the kitchen with his cooking chopsticks still extended as if they were trying to eat the air. You don't want to tell him, but sometimes you're sorry that he cares about you. These are one of the moments when you wish he didn't.
Eventually he turns around, saying, “Do whatever you like. Just be back in half an hour. I promised Masako you’d be there.” You nod, knowing full well he can’t see you, and close the door softly behind you.
You pass by the old junior high school. It’s summer conditioning for the tennis team. You can see them in their uniforms, some of the lucky few in regular’s outfits, running laps around the tennis court. You still have a headache from earlier, and you’re groggy, but when you open the windows and let the wind come in, the sounds of their distant calling and chanting, you feel good. Free, almost. Like you’re suddenly falling from a great height, and enjoying it.
*
“You probably don’t remember. You brought me up here once,” Oishi muses. He leans his elbows, bending his back a little, hunching over the railing as if he were considering how high he would be falling if he were to jump. You wander back towards him. The whole place smells of oxygen and metal. “It was on a lunch break. You asked me to come to the roof with you. You had a can of black coffee in one hand, almost empty. You never liked to drink coffee,” Oishi explains, almost apologetically. You realize you are a stranger, intruding on this memory of him and you. You’re the ignorant rude one trampling on someone else’s precious ground. You wonder if you look like you belong. “So it was odd that you were drinking it. Because you normally didn’t like to drink anything with caffeine in it.”
“At any rate I asked you-“ Oishi takes a deep breath, shuddering a bit from his shoulders down, “I asked you why you didn’t play tennis anymore. Because you used to, in junior high. You quit. After high school, I mean. You stopped playing.”
It’s sunset. You just now notice you are overlooking the tennis courts. In the orange glow you can see some of the students practicing serves, picking up balls, running laps. They look so small. You can’t remember being that small.
“You told me about this one boy you played. You were maybe fifteen and he was twelve. It was an invitational, open to anyone under sixteen, and for the final round they paired you up with this boy whom you had never heard of. He was from New York, I think you said, and you-“ Oishi pauses. In this space, you should have remembered something, but you don’t. He gives you a frustrated frown, and says, “I’m sorry, it’s just-when you told this story to me-
Then Oishi shakes his head, determinedly not looking at you. “Anyway, you played three sets with him and you won all of them but he was the most extraordinary player you had ever met. I remember that was what you had said too, ‘the most extraordinary.’ When it was over you went to shake his hand, and you asked him if you would ever see him again. He looked Japanese, but his accent was horrible, and it was only after he had left that you realized he had asked you to come to America with him. Because he was only here for a day, with his dad.”
Summer, you think. And red tennis rackets, and the sharp contrast of a lime green tennis ball on the clay court, and a twelve-year-old standing in front of a fifteen-year-old. You try to imagine it. He would be smaller than you. You would be tall even for a fifteen-year-old, maybe. Already wearing glasses. Knitting your eyebrows. Looking at his lips as he formed the words. Black hair. Moss brown eyes, an impossible color. Him saying something like-
“So you stood there, holding his hand like you were still shaking hands, and you couldn’t understand what he was saying. His dad came to pick him up, and he left, not even saying goodbye. You didn’t even get to tell him your name. And you said-you said-“ Oishi turns away from you now, making a surreptitious gesture against the bridge of his nose that you know means he is starting to tear up. “You said after that you couldn’t play tennis seriously anymore. You said you wanted so badly to play him once more, but you never saw him again. It was the most important game of your life.
“When you told me that, you started crying. Just for a little bit. But I was so scared. I didn’t know what to say at all. It was the first time I had ever seen you cry.”
Silence. The two of you watch the faraway tennis courts. Listening closely, you can discern the sounds of impact, yelling, exuberant young physical movement. There is something nostalgic about the color of blue the tennis players are wearing. You search deep in yourself for that body memory that transcended mental memory, so engrossed in concentration that you’re surprised to find your vision fading in and out of focus when you blink.
“Something got in my eye,” you say evenly, reaching to take off your glasses. You think you see Oishi nod from the corner of your eye.
You clear your throat.
*
“Do you know where you are?” The doctor, a man in his late 40s, with wrinkles around his mouth and the beginnings of white hair, stands over you, peering down at your face. “You crashed on your way home. Do you remember that?”
Your voice is dry. The lasting feel of someone’s warmth on your lips, or pressing down your hand, in the wedges between your fingers, tightening around your heart, and you try to pinpoint it. "Where's Ryoma?" you ask, trying to control the shaking in your voice.
The doctor turns to Fuji, puzzled. You have a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. There is something wrong, something very wrong. What is it? You look wildly at Fuji for answers.
"Who's Ryoma?" the doctor asks.
Fuji does not say anything for a long while. Finally he unfolds his hands from his lap and tucks a piece of his hair behind his ear. "A classmate," he says, strangely resolute. "He died in a car crash in America. That was a couple of years ago."
The silence swallows the room. No, you realize numbly. Drowns. It has drowned the room, and taken you with it, and you think you’ll never wake up from this unreality of silence.
*
You open your eyes.
extended a/n: A link to the wikipedia article on okazaki fragments. The basic idea of this fic is that there are four stories, all inter-related with a car crash and Ryoma. The first one is about Tezuka going to California to see Ryoma. He meets Momo, he sees Ryoma, they have sex, they get run over by a truck. The second one is of Fuji trying to deal with Tezuka and Tezuka's inability to see past Ryoma. Tezuka has a dream of Ryoma and him dying in a car crash. He gets sick, Fuji is trying to arrange a marriage between Tezuka and his friend Masako. Tezuka takes a drive to Seigaku and, on the way home, gets in a car crash. The third story is of Tezuka and Masako who are married. Ryoma dies in a car crash, Masako is pregnant, and Tezuka, who again has a dream of Ryoma dying, tries to drown himself in the shower. The last story is of Tezuka after he gets in a car crash. He has basically lost his memory and Oishi is trying to nurse him back to health. That's, uh, honestly all. The original title of this story, before I started learning Okazaki fragments in AP Bio, was "the solitary birdcall outside your window as you wake." Don't ask me how that relates. ^^;; couldn't tell ya.
static is used when no variables owned by a particular construction are involved.
You say, "No, look, don't-keep your seatbelt on--" but Ryoma is already leaning over the gearstick, whispering buchou, buchou, and you turn towards him because you want, you want, you need--
Ryoma's mouth is like the sun, like warmth from the summer pavement after the rain--
Of course you don't see it coming.
*
You open your eyes. The ceiling is unfamiliar in the early morning light. You can hear Masako and her gentle breathing beside you, a seashell figure in the sheets. You reach over and touch her shoulder, lightly shaking her. You press your lips against her forehead, the line of her jaw. She stirs, making small protesting noises, before opening her eyes.
"Kunimitsu," she says, and you tremble, not knowing why. "It's too early," she says, soft. "Is something wrong?"
"I had this dream--" you say, and cannot continue.
*
"Of what?" Fuji asks, and suddenly you rediscover that you are in a park. It is slightly chilly; the scarf your mother bought for your birthday is hanging loosely around your neck like you've forgotten to tie it all the way. The bench is freezing under you. You shift your legs and squint your eyes into the sky. Today it is a strange shade of gray, like it couldn't make up its mind whether to be sunny or cloudy.
"What are we doing?"
"Right now?" Fuji rattles a small white paper bag and smiles. "Feeding the birds."
"Fuji," you say, and he asks you again, "What was your dream of?" and you have forgotten. Lights, and someone beside you, and--
*
"It's not permanent, though, is it?" the man says. His hair is slicked and tame, flat on his head with a look of premature thinning, and his mouth is contorted between a look of worry and reassurance. He glances quickly at you, smiles with the timidity of someone who has known disappointment too many times.
"No, he should be fine after a few weeks. Just take it slow, and make sure he takes that medication I prescribed. And try to get him to connect with surroundings he used to be familiar with." The doctor is in his late 40s, perhaps, with wrinkles around his mouth and the beginnings of white hair. He continues to talk to the man about mundane things, then leaves, shutting the door behind him impassively.
A silence swallows his absence. You look at the man still in the room. Something itches in the back of your mind. You touch your forehead. There is gauze. The man rushes over to you and puts his fingers on the bandage as well, as if it had moved or you had somehow disturbed it.
"Tezuka," he says.
"Who are you?" you ask. Immediately you know something is wrong. His smile falls away, swandives into the cesspool of doubt and fear in your stomach. He holds onto your hand, grasping it hard, blinking rapidly.
"My name is Oishi Shuuichirou." He releases your hand and, so tentatively it makes you tense, touches the gauze around your head again, not looking at your face. "I
*
used to play tennis with you," Momo says, then hissing, “Hot, hot,” as he hastily shoves a slice of pizza into his mouth. “And then they asked him, ‘Who’s Tezuka Kunimitsu?’ and you should have seen the look he gave them.” Momo frowns and gestures with his hands full of hanging cheese. “Go on, eat your pizza.”
“What are you doing in California?” you ask, gingerly tearing the crust off a slice and poking it into your mouth, which instantly turns it cardboard-like between your tongue and teeth. You’re worried that you sound accusatory; he has just as much right, maybe even more, to be here.
Momo swallows a mouthful quickly and almost chokes. “Oh, you know-- stuff. We’re filming in a couple of months here.” He gives you his classic self-deprecating shit-eating grin. “About tennis. There’s this actor, he’s maybe 18? 19? He looks a lot like you.”
“Oh,” you say, and you hear the front door open, so silent, like the calm before a hydrogen explosion, like the sound before the end of the world. Momo’s expression is that of a dog lying on the porch, suddenly seeing its owner near the house from far away, after months of absence. You wonder what expression you have on your face.
You hope it doesn’t give you away.
*
From the door, Masako says, “The cucumbers are really fresh today,” and takes off her tiny white shoes. She hands you the grocery bag. It hangs limp and lifeless from your hands, a flimsy thing, and you see that the off-white of the bag is the same color of her shirt.
You smile, used to disappointment.
“Are you okay?” she asks, peering up at you. Her shoe is still in her hand. She slides into her slippers, while you open the bag to stare at the mentioned cucumber, surrounded by various other vegetables, lonely with its awkward height. “Did you end up falling asleep this morning, afterwards?”
“Falling asleep?” you say, bewildered. You are heading to the kitchen to put the groceries in the refrigerator. Her voice trails in behind you, light, distinctly feminine, that of a stranger’s.
“After your dream. The one you woke up from.” Her hand is on your forehead. You try to compose an idea of the shape of it, its cool fingers and gently hollowed palm, the swells and falls. There is a map in your head. There is the image of someone’s hand, but Masako is asking, “Are you sick? Your forehead feels warm. I think you have a fever,”
*
Fuji tells you with a swift shake of the thermometer. His hand is still cold on your forehead. You remember the strength of it curling around a racket before a return. You lean into it a little, searching for the shape of it as it once was, smiling a little to fend off his concern.
“Tezuka,” Fuji says, almost firmly, but he could never be firm unless he was angry, and so you say, “I’m fine,” and take the thermometer from him, holding it to the light.
“You can’t see anything of it now. It’s already cooled down to room temperature,” Fuji explains.
You make some noncommittal humming sound. Turning the glass tube in your hand around and around, you realize Fuji has one of those old-fashioned mercury ones. The core is a dull, dark silver, and you stare at it, fascinated. Lethal and threatening, but so harmless, so unassuming in a glass case, and you touch it a couple of times just to be sure it’s really there. You can’t touch the mercury. In plain sight, but hidden.
“What are you doing?” Fuji asks you, amused, his hand reaching out for the thermometer in return. You blink rapidly when you turn away from the light, momentarily blind. The outlines of his face, his hand, his pose blurring to shifting lines and colors. You automatically reach up to adjust your glasses. “Hey-“ he says, right as you start blanking out, falling.
*
The ceiling is unfamiliar. The bed is hard and unwelcoming beneath you. Somewhere in the distance a radio is playing early morning calisthenics, the kind that hasn’t changed for years: stretch, bend, hold. The window is open, and the sky is an anonymous shade of steel blue gray. You wiggle your toes and shift your arms and fingers just a tiny portion of a centimeter to make sure everything is all right. Everything is. Someone has left your glasses on your face. Sometime during your rest you had rolled over and smashed your skin against the lenses. Now they need a touch of cleaning up.
You throw off the covers. Someone else’s neat slippers have been laid next to the bed. It’s a little chilly, and the pajamas you’re wearing, too new to be “yours”, are of thin light cotton. The hallways are brightly lit, windows and good sunshine, a hard sunshine. While you’re wiping your glasses on your shirt, you hear the front door open, quiet like the sound of snow falling, and you turn because you think you know who it will be, you think-
“Tezuka,” he says, shocked. He has groceries in one hand, taking off his shoes with the other. “You’re up already.”
You look at him. You keep staring until he makes this haltering movement towards you, and then you say his name, afraid to lose it, and you think that he looks like he’s about to cry when he hears it. You’re wrong, you think. You made a mistake. But you say it anyway. You say, “
*
Echizen,” rolling over and throwing your arm over your eyes to block out the sun from the opened window. “It’s too early.” The smell of the sheets are wrong, foreign and not yours, but they smell familiar. In your sleep-muddled mind you think of junior high, and locker rooms, and someone else’s tennis jerseys-
“Wake up,” he says. A hand on your shoulder. You take a deep breath, hiding it in a yawn. What are you so afraid of? Stupid, stupid, you tell yourself, and almost tremble feeling the warmth of his palm through your shirt. Your glasses are on the bed stand beside you. You’re so frightened even though you can’t see him.
“Play tennis with me.”
“Echizen, it’s-“ but now he’s somehow in the bed with you, long limbs tangling around you, his hair morning fresh and tangled and you used to dream about this every night, though you would never admit it. You knew this was coming but here he is, his nose tucked into the crook of your neck, smelling you or maybe just breathing you in. Inhaling you bit by bit. You try to remember how you rationalized coming here. You try to think of your wife, Masako, Masako, Masako, Masako and the unborn child, but you feel his warmth against you, the shock of remembering he’s real, his smell and how much you’ve wanted this for years, and your voice refuses to make it into a question when you ask him, “What are you doing.”
“Momo’s gone,” he whispers, lips against the collar of your pajama shirt. “He went site scouting an hour ago. It’s just us. Buchou-“ he says, and you know you’ve lost to him now, “play tennis with me. And then we can-“
“I had this dream,” you tell him, and can’t continue. “I had this dream about-and I had forgotten you-“
“Play tennis with me,” he says, like he didn’t hear you. You feel your heart constrict, squeezing itself smaller and smaller, made up of nothing but desire and old memories-a boy in the middle of a tennis court, black hair, eyes the color of impossible.
“And then.”
*
Masako is making soup in the kitchen. You can smell it as you enter, warm and a bit spicy in the air, and you come up behind her, your hand on her waist. She startles a bit, as if unsure it was you, but then she turns around, the small butterfly quality of her eyes, the roundness of her face. You smile. “Your cooking smells good,” you say, drinking from her stirring spoon.
On the table is a newspaper, folded in half so that the picture which takes up the front page is neatly divided along the lines of a car door, a crash site. You turn away to sit down. Masako hums a tune deep in the back of her throat as she chops something into fine slices. You could do that for her, but you haven’t cooked since the two of you got married. She doesn’t let you, much.
You unfold the newspaper as you stretch out your legs under the table. Something catches your eye-a headline, a string of text, a name-and suddenly you are frozen in place, staring, the newspaper still in an awkward half-straightened position. Something shallow and prickling in your chest. Cold sweat, deep breaths, numb fingers.
“There’s an article I spotted,” Masako is saying, or at least you think she’s saying. Your hearing has been muffled. You keep reading the same few words over and over again, wondering if you’ve suddenly forgotten how to comprehend written text. “They mentioned your old junior high school. Apparently some celebrity who graduated there died the other night.”
“Oh,” you say. Masako’s voice, the gentle bubbling of the soup, her knife returning to its redundant, reliable chopping compels you to refold the newspaper, pushing it far away from you onto the middle of the table.
“Yes,” you say. “I didn’t know him that well anyway.”
“And I wanted to tell you,” Masako continues, now cutting up green onions into sharp, tiny wedges for garnish, “that I found out today that I’m pregnant.”
“I need to take a shower,” you answer dully. “That’s very good news. I need to take a shower.”
You hear her call after you, asking you if you’re all right. You snap on the running water and, stripping roughly, your clothes in a pile on the tiled floor, you step under the cold spray, letting it batter all the feeling out of your skin. After a while you wonder how many different ways you could drown yourself. You turn your face towards the showerhead, closing your eyes. You count the seconds. You keep counting.
When the water enters your lungs, though, you start coughing violently. You force yourself out of the shower, wrapping a small towel around your hips, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, heaving water out of your body. The water has turned hot enough to scald. The shower curtains are open, drenching the floor and letting the steam fog up the mirror. You walk to the sink and watch as your face slowly gets crowded out by the heat.
Finally, when you can’t see your face anymore, you take a shaky breath and put your finger to the mirror. ‘I had a dream,’ you start, and then stop. You finish to yourself, ‘and you were dying.’ The image of someone else’s slender, finely controlled back. Black hair in flash of sunlight. Eyes the color of impossible.
At dinner you tell Masako that it’s very good news, you’re very happy, you should both tell both of your parents soon, and has she asked for leave at work yet? You tell her you know a very good doctor to handle her pre-natal care. He was a school friend, you say, and you don’t eat anymore for the rest of that night.
*
“You have to eat something at least.”
“Fuji, it’s your cooking,” you chide mildly. You feel like vomiting, but you don’t tell him that. You had that dream again, the one that you wake up panting from, the one where someone is dying but you can’t remember who.
“Tezuka, you’re being ridiculous,” Fuji says. You know by the tone of his voice, the way he grips his chopsticks tightly, that he’s angry at you. “You haven’t been feeling well the whole day.”
“I’m going to take a drive around the neighborhood. I’ll be back in half an hour.” You placidly take his car keys from the drawer and slip them into your coat pocket. He stands in the kitchen with his cooking chopsticks still extended as if they were trying to eat the air. You don't want to tell him, but sometimes you're sorry that he cares about you. These are one of the moments when you wish he didn't.
Eventually he turns around, saying, “Do whatever you like. Just be back in half an hour. I promised Masako you’d be there.” You nod, knowing full well he can’t see you, and close the door softly behind you.
You pass by the old junior high school. It’s summer conditioning for the tennis team. You can see them in their uniforms, some of the lucky few in regular’s outfits, running laps around the tennis court. You still have a headache from earlier, and you’re groggy, but when you open the windows and let the wind come in, the sounds of their distant calling and chanting, you feel good. Free, almost. Like you’re suddenly falling from a great height, and enjoying it.
*
“You probably don’t remember. You brought me up here once,” Oishi muses. He leans his elbows, bending his back a little, hunching over the railing as if he were considering how high he would be falling if he were to jump. You wander back towards him. The whole place smells of oxygen and metal. “It was on a lunch break. You asked me to come to the roof with you. You had a can of black coffee in one hand, almost empty. You never liked to drink coffee,” Oishi explains, almost apologetically. You realize you are a stranger, intruding on this memory of him and you. You’re the ignorant rude one trampling on someone else’s precious ground. You wonder if you look like you belong. “So it was odd that you were drinking it. Because you normally didn’t like to drink anything with caffeine in it.”
“At any rate I asked you-“ Oishi takes a deep breath, shuddering a bit from his shoulders down, “I asked you why you didn’t play tennis anymore. Because you used to, in junior high. You quit. After high school, I mean. You stopped playing.”
It’s sunset. You just now notice you are overlooking the tennis courts. In the orange glow you can see some of the students practicing serves, picking up balls, running laps. They look so small. You can’t remember being that small.
“You told me about this one boy you played. You were maybe fifteen and he was twelve. It was an invitational, open to anyone under sixteen, and for the final round they paired you up with this boy whom you had never heard of. He was from New York, I think you said, and you-“ Oishi pauses. In this space, you should have remembered something, but you don’t. He gives you a frustrated frown, and says, “I’m sorry, it’s just-when you told this story to me-
Then Oishi shakes his head, determinedly not looking at you. “Anyway, you played three sets with him and you won all of them but he was the most extraordinary player you had ever met. I remember that was what you had said too, ‘the most extraordinary.’ When it was over you went to shake his hand, and you asked him if you would ever see him again. He looked Japanese, but his accent was horrible, and it was only after he had left that you realized he had asked you to come to America with him. Because he was only here for a day, with his dad.”
Summer, you think. And red tennis rackets, and the sharp contrast of a lime green tennis ball on the clay court, and a twelve-year-old standing in front of a fifteen-year-old. You try to imagine it. He would be smaller than you. You would be tall even for a fifteen-year-old, maybe. Already wearing glasses. Knitting your eyebrows. Looking at his lips as he formed the words. Black hair. Moss brown eyes, an impossible color. Him saying something like-
“So you stood there, holding his hand like you were still shaking hands, and you couldn’t understand what he was saying. His dad came to pick him up, and he left, not even saying goodbye. You didn’t even get to tell him your name. And you said-you said-“ Oishi turns away from you now, making a surreptitious gesture against the bridge of his nose that you know means he is starting to tear up. “You said after that you couldn’t play tennis seriously anymore. You said you wanted so badly to play him once more, but you never saw him again. It was the most important game of your life.
“When you told me that, you started crying. Just for a little bit. But I was so scared. I didn’t know what to say at all. It was the first time I had ever seen you cry.”
Silence. The two of you watch the faraway tennis courts. Listening closely, you can discern the sounds of impact, yelling, exuberant young physical movement. There is something nostalgic about the color of blue the tennis players are wearing. You search deep in yourself for that body memory that transcended mental memory, so engrossed in concentration that you’re surprised to find your vision fading in and out of focus when you blink.
“Something got in my eye,” you say evenly, reaching to take off your glasses. You think you see Oishi nod from the corner of your eye.
You clear your throat.
*
“Do you know where you are?” The doctor, a man in his late 40s, with wrinkles around his mouth and the beginnings of white hair, stands over you, peering down at your face. “You crashed on your way home. Do you remember that?”
Your voice is dry. The lasting feel of someone’s warmth on your lips, or pressing down your hand, in the wedges between your fingers, tightening around your heart, and you try to pinpoint it. "Where's Ryoma?" you ask, trying to control the shaking in your voice.
The doctor turns to Fuji, puzzled. You have a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. There is something wrong, something very wrong. What is it? You look wildly at Fuji for answers.
"Who's Ryoma?" the doctor asks.
Fuji does not say anything for a long while. Finally he unfolds his hands from his lap and tucks a piece of his hair behind his ear. "A classmate," he says, strangely resolute. "He died in a car crash in America. That was a couple of years ago."
The silence swallows the room. No, you realize numbly. Drowns. It has drowned the room, and taken you with it, and you think you’ll never wake up from this unreality of silence.
*
You open your eyes.
extended a/n: A link to the wikipedia article on okazaki fragments. The basic idea of this fic is that there are four stories, all inter-related with a car crash and Ryoma. The first one is about Tezuka going to California to see Ryoma. He meets Momo, he sees Ryoma, they have sex, they get run over by a truck. The second one is of Fuji trying to deal with Tezuka and Tezuka's inability to see past Ryoma. Tezuka has a dream of Ryoma and him dying in a car crash. He gets sick, Fuji is trying to arrange a marriage between Tezuka and his friend Masako. Tezuka takes a drive to Seigaku and, on the way home, gets in a car crash. The third story is of Tezuka and Masako who are married. Ryoma dies in a car crash, Masako is pregnant, and Tezuka, who again has a dream of Ryoma dying, tries to drown himself in the shower. The last story is of Tezuka after he gets in a car crash. He has basically lost his memory and Oishi is trying to nurse him back to health. That's, uh, honestly all. The original title of this story, before I started learning Okazaki fragments in AP Bio, was "the solitary birdcall outside your window as you wake." Don't ask me how that relates. ^^;; couldn't tell ya.