PoT: multiplicative inverses, or love's tautology
For so many people. typhoid_mary, because you requested it, but I think I just completely screwed with your original concept. niche and ztrin, because your CD is the only reason why I ever got through with writing this story. The gang that was with me the night of July 9th. Thank you for being crazy crazy crazy.
>> fast forward >> 1 x 3 = 1
You are older. Because this world, no longer the pleasant candy-like world of your youth, is out to get you now, you are, to all extents and purposes, an insomniac. It is ironic that you, who once possessed the unmatched ability to sleep anywhere at anytime, can no longer stay asleep for more than an hour at a time. Usually when people ask, you say it's because you slept too much when you were younger. Karma, you say with a smile that is more wrinkles and muscles and automatic movement than sincerity. It's as if your sleep cycle is trying to even the ratio of your life spent with your eyes open and the ratio of your life spent with your eyes closed. In a way, this is divine retribution.
You get yourself an apartment now, because you are older and no longer live at home. You use your bed as a couch, or a table, or a bookshelf; in fact you use it for anything but a bed. Your room is desolate. You can't cook very well. Because the only time you seem to be able to attempt to sleep is around 8 or 9, the time you had once spent in school asleep for so much of your life, you work nights. Out of college with a head full of brains you'll never use and afraid of the world you've never met head on as a child, you take up bartending. You learn to make Manhattans, Long Island Iced Teas, martinis, and tequila shots. You learn to polish glasses. You learn to flirt with ladies. You learn to put small, round coasters under glasses to keep condensation away from tables. You learn to wipe down a counter. You learn how to pretend you're holding your alcohol, and you never, ever seem to be able to drink yourself into oblivion.
You grow your hair out longer so that some of your curls are almost at the base of your neck. You learn to lean with your elbows off the counter, hands folded on it, so that you're eye to eye with your customers. The women tell you you have a bedroom voice. Sometimes you let the men buy you drinks. You still haven't lost the cheery slightly off-kilter good nature you had when you were younger, and you're always there with a good word and a bright smile when they're down on their luck. You take care never to touch any of them, even those with blue eyes or moles on their cheeks right below their eyelids or self-confident unshaken smiles, even the ones with green-brown eyes and American accents when they try to talk to you.
This is how you meet him again.
When you hear his voice, you don't dare to look up. You wait until he's cradling his glass with his hands and staring straight down into it, the ice making gentle clinking noises as it melts against the glass. You wait until you've settled yourself; you've seen this moment a million times when you're alone by yourself in your apartment, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. When you dream about it, you're always the cool one, the smooth one, the one who delivers the crippling putdown and walk away unscathed and unemotional.
But when he's sitting there shoulders slightly hunched over and really, really there so that if you think hard enough you can pretend you can even smell him, it's harder. You stand with your back to him, running over all the things you can say to him. You know you're not the sunglassed superstar you are in your strongest fantasies. You know you're not the calm jilted lover you've seen in movies, one step ahead and plotting murder. You don't even know if he even recognizes you anymore. You only recognize him because you follow his every move, hungry for magazine articles, spending your sleepless nights razoring pictures of him into a scrapbook you'll never admit to making.
This is, after all, really how it happens, not some locked-up manifestation of your repressed longing holed away in your gray apartment, so he's the first one that talks to you. He looks up-- and you remember those eyes--smiling, says, "The Hyotei Hundred doesn't come around here often anymore, do they? "
He reminds you of those summery tennis courts where you fell asleep so often and were so idiotically happy on, the rows and rows of light blue gray jerseys striped with white, all those people who cared so much and wanted to win so much. You never see anything like that anymore, around here, and it's something you thought you had gotten over a long time ago.
"Did you say something?" you ask him, feigning professional indifference. You want to play the tortured, dark, tall, brooding hero of this story, even if the only thing you are is tortured. You're back to your role, polishing a tall glass in your hand over and over without really seeing it. When you had imagined it, he had always said something dramatic and easy to reply to, but you realize now that he's never been that type, and you wonder how you could have ever mistaken him so badly in your mind.
He shakes his head and swings the ice around and around in his drink. "Nothing, I just thought you reminded me someone I had once known." He draws his fingernails down the condensation on one side of his glass and makes a point not to look at you. "Known well. Someone I had once known well," like this was some cop-versus-criminal movie and he's on a recording and he has to make a good testimony or else he'll get sent straight to the electric chair.
There's only so long you can keep up your pretense. You've never had a long patience, longer perhaps when you didn't work weeks at a time on five hours of sleep and no common sense or grasp on reality. After a pause, you say, "I remember your tennis." It's a neutral thing to reveal. What you're telling him is that you remember the games he played, not the person playing. You're telling him that you remember the pictures taken of him in magazines and newspapers, not the actual face he had. You're telling him that you remember him on that completely impersonal level on can remember a stranger's way of walking or talking because they remind you of something more familiar.
The look he gives you strikes as you as particularly definitive of him. You can feel your knees getting weak and your hands shaking, the way he used to make you feel when you were younger and everything was hazy and beautifully worthy of narcolepsy. You get the feeling that after all these years, one look of his can still understand you perfectly, that you don't even have to talk to him for him to know what you've been doing, who you've been kissing, what lies you've told. A valiant smile on your part before he knocks back the last of his drink in a smooth unbroken line and, index finger aimed at your heart from above the rim of his glass, "No you don't. You remember him."
Long afterwards, hours and hours later, when you are lying relatively naked on his hotel bed with him, pulling his fingers through your hair and running your hands along his shoulders as if you could draw something out of them, you say, "I've always liked Atobe better," very calmly into the wrist of his other hand. His veins are very small and tiny like the legs of a spider. You can feel a pulse under the skin. Past his head you can see the rest of the interior of his room, and you know it is a lot more cheerful, a lot more decorated than your own.
This is not how you imagined it would go. For one, you didn't think it would be easy for both of you to end up this way, vulnerable and tangled up above the sheets of his bed; for another, you didn't imagine so little would be said of what had already happened. You suppose he hasn't changed at all. You suppose that despite all the signs pointing to the obvious opposite, you really haven't either. You've traded sleeping for dreaming aimlessly; you've traded in pound after pound of your mass for inch after inch of your height; you've traded both of them in for an empty hole in your life. You've traded in all the little slumbering memories of your past for innumerable immeasurable ghosts. But by and by, you're still the same person you've always been, the same weaknesses, the same interminable desires.
His fingers twist themselves around a lock of your hair before he tentatively puts his mouth to your forehead and then down around the sides of your temples, nibbling at your hair as if the only way he can see it is to taste it. Stopping, he takes his hand away from your mouth where you've started to chew at his skin, trying to get to the veins pulsating under it, and he kisses your ear instead, your lower lip, and your eyelids, each time breathing sweet air into you like he's trying to revive you from your age-old lethargy. "See? I knew it," he says comfortably, leaving your eyelashes wet and warm with his words. "Things like this, I'm always right."
You don't point out that the reason why you remember him so well is because you liked Atobe so much. Ryoma likes winning and likes being right. You've never cared much about losing, and you've never lost much when giving in, and you've never minded being wrong. Now you are older and it should matter less, and it does, but in a different way than you had expected. He's younger than you, but older too, in the way small children are much wiser than their adult counterparts. You've been stupid for so long. For some illogical reason it occurs to you that every minute could be the last minute you spend with him. You lean in to kiss him again, and when he doesn't resist, you kiss him harder.
"Your tennis," you whisper, hesitate, and then repeat yourself. "The way you played. I always loved that," and he replies, "I know that. I knew that too," and when he touches your hair again, along the loops of your curls and the soft strands buried underneath all that tumbled irritated mess on the top, you say, "You're horrible," grabbing on.
This time you act like you're in control of the entire situation. He lets you.
|| pause || 1 x 2 = 1
You are older. Because you're busy being miserable and keeping a better, more stable, more orthodox job than either of them, you don't keep in too close contact with them. Every time you see them, they're happy together, and you don't resent it as much as you thought it would; it hurts less than you thought it would. You realize now that jealousy is like a time-lapsed poison. Sometimes you'll be alone and suddenly all that pain will wedge itself deep in-between your ribs and rest right alongside your heart to sleep with you during that night. Other times you can say their names, clearly and together in the same sentence, without flinching. This is what your life is like. Usually you don't bother finding the time, breath, or effort to complain.
But because inside you hurt, even if you don't feel it, and because you suspect that deep inside, you've always been a masochistic person with a streak of harmless self-preservation that never quite developed properly, you let them sweep you away still. They invite you over for drinks, for parties, for Saturday afternoons with a picnic too small for three and too big for two, for counseling, for matchmaking. They talk about your love life as if they had never been a part of it. They treat you like a good friend or some in-law they see too little of and therefore adore. You're a stranger, or worse, some photographer to record their life for them, and if you go with them willingly, because Atobe always asks and you can't resist, you hate yourself for it.
They make you the extra wheel. And so you're rolling, or you're stopping, or the tread on the outside of your rubber doesn't hold much to the ground anymore, but nothing you do matters, because everything around you is still turning. Sometimes you say, "I don't want to intrude," but then Atobe makes a sound like a very small, elegant, dying engine to show that he thinks you're being funny, so you know that that's the wrong thing to say.
Sometimes Atobe says something unintentionally heartless, like, "It's the same if you're there or if you're gone," and he only catches Ryoma's look of vivid reproach half of the time.
For your birthday Ryoma convinces both of you to celebrate it the American way, by getting completely and totally drunk. Atobe at first refuses to do it with whiskey and pulls out some of his best wines, but Ryoma claims that red wine makes him sick and white wine tastes like water. Atobe says that it's obvious Ryoma's never going to move away from his plebian beginnings. You just stand there and smile helplessly at both of them, clawing at the inside of your elbows, distinctly uncomfortable. After fifteen minutes or so, Atobe sends someone else to get "anything," he commands with a wave of his hand. Ryoma's young like he's always been; he yells at the departing servant to get beer too, before Atobe comments that none of them are college students and by now they should be able to get drunk like men and not like raucous teenagers.
Ryoma's an incorrigible child, still, and Atobe is indulgent. The first thing Ryoma always does at Atobe's house is always to open the refrigerator and get out Atobe's ice cream and soda, and maybe even potato chips if he gets hungry enough. Ryoma likes Atobe's food, likes the endlessness of it, like he's starved before and that's what's going to carry on for the rest of his life, into his tennis, his breathing, his habits.
You're never as hungry as Ryoma is, but Atobe's house brings back that endless sleepiness that dominated your life for so long, that strange affliction you've shaken off now. The sound of both of them talking in their soft and blithe way around you makes you sleepy. When you're sitting there with them, the littered cans and bottles on the ground between you, you're reminded of how you used to fall asleep on Atobe's shoulder, sometimes when you were watching Ryoma's games, and how he used to wake you up gently, by touching you, wrapping his arm around your shoulder and tapping you. The noise of the crowd was always very faint and muted compared to your breathing and his breathing. Whenever he talked, it would be in hushed tones that spoke volumes about how much he cared but would never confess.
Most of your memories of that time are tennis games you've played, tennis games you've watched, an endless stretch of sleep, and the both of them.
Some time later, when you realize you need to use the bathroom, Atobe sends a servant with you because you're not sure if you can walk straight without tripping. When you've reached the bathroom, you send the servant off again, recalling that you should have grown into a very shy person, having slept through so many social occasions in your life. You try to snap yourself out of your drunken stupor by washing your face. The cold water helps a little bit, so that when you're trying to find your way back to them, you don't feel drunk so much as you feel slightly dizzy and a touch nauseous.
Ryoma's talking when you get back, and you would have just stepped back into the living room if it wasn't for the fact that Ryoma has his head across Atobe's lap just like you used to do when you fell asleep during tennis matches. His hand is clenched around Atobe's shirt. You just catch the last of his sentence--"..him"--when you stop in the dark just outside their range of vision. You can't think of who the "him" could be except for you, having forgotten for a moment that you don't cease to exist for them as soon as you disappear, just as they don't cease to exist for you.
"Hypocrite," you can hear Atobe say, and something else that gets lost, and then Ryoma's hand is moving up along Atobe's shoulders, his neck, along his jaw, and he says, "I hate you. Of all the people I hate, you're the one I hate the most."
"I'll have to live with that," Atobe answers. He says his words so clearly that you can hear them even though he's leaning down, starting to kiss Ryoma.
There are certain things about Ryoma and Atobe's relationship you know will always hold true. One of the main ones is that you know they'll never last. Ryoma is always unsatisfied, you can tell that just by the way he kisses Atobe a moment later, all tongue and moving lips and not a single gasp for breath, and Atobe is always careful, carefully distant or carefully removed or carefully always belonging to himself, you're never sure. So despite your masochism and your pain and your delayed jealousy, you get a sort of depraved comfort in knowing that eventually, all three of you will wind up as three people again, unconnected to each other except through a long painstaking crumple of emotional strings, none of which are particularly binding.
But despite this, the central thing you turn over in your mind over and over again is that despite everything about you, it's still Ryoma that Atobe wants. It wasn't that you didn't hold on long enough, and it wasn't that you didn't care enough, and it wasn't that the two of you didn't fit; it was that Atobe chose.
And so even if they don't last, you know what you get out of all of this, like what you have gotten out of anything in your life, is only a bitter insincere sort of vengeance that you find is easily hidden under all of your strained smiles and good cheer.
You wait a little while longer before stepping back into the living room. You don't think you're drunk at all, anymore. Past midnight, they're both passed out next to each other, and you're almost asleep, when you wake up to find yourself kneeling beside Atobe's head. You put your hand lightly over his mouth, his breath tickling the top of your hand, and you bend over to kiss the back of your hand. This doesn't count as a kiss, you tell yourself, and you mouth that soundlessly to Atobe's unconsciousness. This doesn't count as anything. But sometimes you're hungry too, never as hungry as Ryoma is, and never as bold or brazen with insufferable ease, but after so long with the pain and the jealousy, after so long with nascent loneliness eating away inside you, you have a hunger all your own. The lingering sightless imprint of your lips against the back of your hand doesn't do anything but carve away at you some more, but in the same way that your hunger is not really hunger, for the time being, this is enough in a way that isn't really enough.
You fall asleep with your hand curled up slightly against your heart. Waking up the next morning, headache and all, you tell Atobe that you don't feel well. "Hangover?" Ryoma asks, sounding remarkably airy considering how miserable he should be feeling. He brings you a cup of coffee--black, the way Atobe likes it, and consequentially the way you've learned to drink it.
"No," you say, measuring your words carefully to yourself, rubbing your chest with your knuckles like an old man. "Heartburn, I think."
<< rewind << 1 x 1 = 1
You are older. Every now and then you forget that. You think maybe that getting older is something that is going to happen to you eventually and very suddenly without warning; one of these days you're going to wake up and you'll realize that you're twenty five, or twenty six, or thirty, or forty, or fifty-eight with heart disease, or sixty seven and dying, but for now all that escapes you. You go through life, day to day, and you take it piece by piece, and you never seem to be able to forget yourself over the night. You're never a different person when you wake up, and you never kill the person you were when you fall asleep, which, in a way, makes sense; May's plant is hawthorn, which symbolizes death, love, or birth, and sometimes all three in the form of victory.
(Hawthorn, you know, is also a sedative; it regulates blood pressure; hawthorn burns well. May's stone, furthermore, is the emerald, promising good health, good looks, and good luck; emerald aids working close with other people; it brings reason and wealth. October's flower, on the other hand, is the calendula or pot marigold, which follows the sun; calendula is for winning grace, cruelty, grief, jealousy, and sacred affection; it eases stomachaches and sore eyes. October's stone, the opal, shows poor gemstone characteristics and no crystal structure but is beautiful; it comes from the Greek "opals"--"to see a change of color"--or from the Latin "upala"--"precious stone"; it promises invisibility, hope, purity, foresight, and freedom from disease. But you like tourmaline better, the old birthstone, which comes in all sorts of colors, promising anything from money to stress relief to eloquence in communication and is in its unfinished form long and thin and roughly triangular.)
Of course you never tell him any of that. By nature, he's not a superstitious person (indicolite promises intuition, tsilaisite promises intelligence, both are forms of tourmaline) and he doesn't care, but he lets you read your awful books on birthstones and flowers that are obviously meant for prepubescent girls with covers that are glossy under your fingers. "You're not getting any younger," he says, slightly disdainful but more amused, and you always shoot back, "I know that."
You know that.
When it's raining outside and the tennis games he promises you have to be canceled, he teaches you a hand game. It's about arithmetic and counting and odd numbers, maybe about touching and commutative properties and something else somewhere in there indicating interest that you miss out on. He has you raise a finger on one hand, and he does the same. "Tap my hand," he says. You look at him curiously, the sound of the rain outside making you a little groggy and unwilling to move, but because he's the one asking you, eventually you do, and then he sticks out another finger so it looks like he's making a v-sign to the carpet. It goes on for a while before you get the hang of it, but you never like it as much as he does.
"You touch, and something happens, and then sometimes you touch and nothing happens," he tells you happily, self-satisfied. You know this is the way you'll always remember him, one of those princes who inherit their land and itch to change the world after that, with everything and nothing under their command. What he wants is constant movement, constant improvement, a life where everything is fast and shiny.
He has a fondness for anything that's new. He buys new flavors of gum, or coffee makers that look like they can fly, or devices that look like the mirrored windows of skyscrapers and don't seem to serve any real purpose. Everything around him keeps changing, his clothes and his computer and his tennis rackets, so that you're afraid you're going to have to change with them. In this way, you think you're getting older. You're frightened of waking up and realizing that you're not familiar with where you are anymore, that he's not the same person he was anymore, because that would be the same thing as dying. He hasn't changed much, except that the gaudiness he once possessed has toned down to nothing more than a faint tension between his conspicuous smile and the diminutive wrinkle on his forehead.
You're pretty sure you're the same person you've always been. More awake, maybe, and less sheltered away from the world by blankets and pillows, and now you worry more, about yourself, him, all the things you'll never get around to talking about, like old addresses and new phone numbers and people who you never keep in touch with anymore. You know he keeps the phone numbers of many of his old teammates on his cell phone, and sometimes you go through the address book he keeps to remind yourself. This is the past that he keeps constant, the thing that anchors him down to who he used to be and keeps him the same person you remember that you wanted to so badly.
Every time he gets a new cell phone, you always take the time to put your own name in there, as if this would be the way to keep you in his mind. He has five, you think, and your name is somewhere in every single one of them.
When it gets to be December, you can't play tennis outside anymore. One night it rains. He wakes you up in the morning, his nose red and his hair smelling like cold, kisses you awake with his fingers threaded through your hair, and he tells you to get dressed, quickly, and come with him outside. You let him dress you, pulling a coat on and yawning. He drags you outside to see where the clay courts have frozen over, the water puddles making little ice patches on the ground, oblivious of white lines or doubles alleys. He wraps your scarf closer around your nose and pulls at your hand, moving you closer to the ice patches. The two of you skitter across the ice in your sneakers, cracking the surface of the ice as you move, air bubbles breaking against the vein-like cracks on the ice.
You're drunkenly happy just like he is. The sound of ice breaking is sharper than the cold; his hand is warm in yours, both of you without gloves, your breath pummeling the air in white, anemic clouds. When you trip across a slippery mix of ice and water, he catches you, and then it starts snowing, like this was all planned, so he kisses you again, lightly, on the side of your mouth.
The soft touch of his mouth against your skin keeps you warm the rest of that morning.
Over breakfast with hot cocoa and all the small luxurious touches he can force into breakfast, the two of you start playing his hand game again. He tells you the winner of it will be able to determine what you're going to do for the rest of the day. You take him up on the offer, even though you always lose. The two of you both start at one. He taps you, so you're at two, and then suddenly he stops, watching you, before he reaches out and holds your hand by the wrist. His fingers are long, tapered at the ends, perfect and perfectly controlled, and warm despite having been outside for so long without gloves.
"Jirou, how many?" he asks in a strange voice. You look at his face, but his eyes are boring straight into your fingers.
You mull for a little while, trying to figure out what he means. "Two," you answer, counting again as if you had to make sure. "Why?"
"Only two? That's all, right?"
You nod, say, "That's right. Just two," and whatever it was that had held him like so much nostalgic quicksand melts away. He smiles without a hint of a tremor and beckons the two of you to keep playing.
Like always, he wins.
But as you're going to sleep that night, right before everything fades around you into cinematic anticlimactic black, it occurs to you what the real answer he was looking for was. There are only two fingers if you just count yourself; one plus one is two no matter how you add it. But when you're two, and he's still one, then it's three, not two. Once you've been something, you can't stop being. Atobe's hand game has a rule, and that rule is that you can never go back to zero. When you've given away a number, it doesn't just disappear. It's added on. One plus one is two, but the one that he is and the two that you are make three; if you give him two, then there's five, and on and on and on, and it'll never just be solitary two again; what you know is that once there has been room for three, there can never be room for only two again. It's like the morning you spend on the tennis courts with the ice cracking underneath you. There had been just two people, you and Atobe, but the ice was another person entirely, something intimate, something not quite sane, and something permeating everything around you in a way that you can't escape.
Once, you remember, you had been three people. That stretched gap Ryoma left behind, you can't fill; nothing can. Once you had been three people, and now it is just two, you and Atobe, but he can't ever go back to that lonely, solitary, tunnel-visioned view of the world that had been two.
You can't leave it alone either.
(You should have realized. After all, December's plant is holly, which stops bleeding; it means death, peace, unity, and decked churches; it asks "am I forgotten?" but at the same time it forgives; and holly--green and red, cousin of the mistletoe whose last berry means last kiss, relative of the evergreen family whose meaning like its name implies eternity--holly, that beautiful icy glossy thorny winter plant, causes water to freeze.)
[] stop [] 0
You are older. You are alone. You don't know where they are now, who they are now, who they are with now, what they are doing now. You don't know if you'll ever meet them again. What you want you will never get; what you need but you don't want you'll always keep. What you remember is what you would rather forget; what you have forgotten is unquestionable and lost. What you go to sleep with each night is an echo of who you were when you were with who they once were; what you wake up with is nothing. Winter is always cold. Fall is always sentimental. Spring never brings hope. Summer never ends.
When you play, more often than not, you still win. This you have not given away yet. You say to yourself, when I win my fiftieth game, my sixtieth game, my nintieth game, my hundredth game, I will know. You say to yourself, if I hit this ball three hundred times without a slip into the pinpointed corner of that wall, I will know. You say to yourself, when I have faced my one hundred and fiftieth opponent, I will know. You say to yourself, when I have fulfilled this promise, that resolution, this sacrifice, that change, I will know. Something will tell me. I will know.
But still, you don't know.
>> fast forward >> 1 x 3 = 1
You are older. Because this world, no longer the pleasant candy-like world of your youth, is out to get you now, you are, to all extents and purposes, an insomniac. It is ironic that you, who once possessed the unmatched ability to sleep anywhere at anytime, can no longer stay asleep for more than an hour at a time. Usually when people ask, you say it's because you slept too much when you were younger. Karma, you say with a smile that is more wrinkles and muscles and automatic movement than sincerity. It's as if your sleep cycle is trying to even the ratio of your life spent with your eyes open and the ratio of your life spent with your eyes closed. In a way, this is divine retribution.
You get yourself an apartment now, because you are older and no longer live at home. You use your bed as a couch, or a table, or a bookshelf; in fact you use it for anything but a bed. Your room is desolate. You can't cook very well. Because the only time you seem to be able to attempt to sleep is around 8 or 9, the time you had once spent in school asleep for so much of your life, you work nights. Out of college with a head full of brains you'll never use and afraid of the world you've never met head on as a child, you take up bartending. You learn to make Manhattans, Long Island Iced Teas, martinis, and tequila shots. You learn to polish glasses. You learn to flirt with ladies. You learn to put small, round coasters under glasses to keep condensation away from tables. You learn to wipe down a counter. You learn how to pretend you're holding your alcohol, and you never, ever seem to be able to drink yourself into oblivion.
You grow your hair out longer so that some of your curls are almost at the base of your neck. You learn to lean with your elbows off the counter, hands folded on it, so that you're eye to eye with your customers. The women tell you you have a bedroom voice. Sometimes you let the men buy you drinks. You still haven't lost the cheery slightly off-kilter good nature you had when you were younger, and you're always there with a good word and a bright smile when they're down on their luck. You take care never to touch any of them, even those with blue eyes or moles on their cheeks right below their eyelids or self-confident unshaken smiles, even the ones with green-brown eyes and American accents when they try to talk to you.
This is how you meet him again.
When you hear his voice, you don't dare to look up. You wait until he's cradling his glass with his hands and staring straight down into it, the ice making gentle clinking noises as it melts against the glass. You wait until you've settled yourself; you've seen this moment a million times when you're alone by yourself in your apartment, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. When you dream about it, you're always the cool one, the smooth one, the one who delivers the crippling putdown and walk away unscathed and unemotional.
But when he's sitting there shoulders slightly hunched over and really, really there so that if you think hard enough you can pretend you can even smell him, it's harder. You stand with your back to him, running over all the things you can say to him. You know you're not the sunglassed superstar you are in your strongest fantasies. You know you're not the calm jilted lover you've seen in movies, one step ahead and plotting murder. You don't even know if he even recognizes you anymore. You only recognize him because you follow his every move, hungry for magazine articles, spending your sleepless nights razoring pictures of him into a scrapbook you'll never admit to making.
This is, after all, really how it happens, not some locked-up manifestation of your repressed longing holed away in your gray apartment, so he's the first one that talks to you. He looks up-- and you remember those eyes--smiling, says, "The Hyotei Hundred doesn't come around here often anymore, do they? "
He reminds you of those summery tennis courts where you fell asleep so often and were so idiotically happy on, the rows and rows of light blue gray jerseys striped with white, all those people who cared so much and wanted to win so much. You never see anything like that anymore, around here, and it's something you thought you had gotten over a long time ago.
"Did you say something?" you ask him, feigning professional indifference. You want to play the tortured, dark, tall, brooding hero of this story, even if the only thing you are is tortured. You're back to your role, polishing a tall glass in your hand over and over without really seeing it. When you had imagined it, he had always said something dramatic and easy to reply to, but you realize now that he's never been that type, and you wonder how you could have ever mistaken him so badly in your mind.
He shakes his head and swings the ice around and around in his drink. "Nothing, I just thought you reminded me someone I had once known." He draws his fingernails down the condensation on one side of his glass and makes a point not to look at you. "Known well. Someone I had once known well," like this was some cop-versus-criminal movie and he's on a recording and he has to make a good testimony or else he'll get sent straight to the electric chair.
There's only so long you can keep up your pretense. You've never had a long patience, longer perhaps when you didn't work weeks at a time on five hours of sleep and no common sense or grasp on reality. After a pause, you say, "I remember your tennis." It's a neutral thing to reveal. What you're telling him is that you remember the games he played, not the person playing. You're telling him that you remember the pictures taken of him in magazines and newspapers, not the actual face he had. You're telling him that you remember him on that completely impersonal level on can remember a stranger's way of walking or talking because they remind you of something more familiar.
The look he gives you strikes as you as particularly definitive of him. You can feel your knees getting weak and your hands shaking, the way he used to make you feel when you were younger and everything was hazy and beautifully worthy of narcolepsy. You get the feeling that after all these years, one look of his can still understand you perfectly, that you don't even have to talk to him for him to know what you've been doing, who you've been kissing, what lies you've told. A valiant smile on your part before he knocks back the last of his drink in a smooth unbroken line and, index finger aimed at your heart from above the rim of his glass, "No you don't. You remember him."
Long afterwards, hours and hours later, when you are lying relatively naked on his hotel bed with him, pulling his fingers through your hair and running your hands along his shoulders as if you could draw something out of them, you say, "I've always liked Atobe better," very calmly into the wrist of his other hand. His veins are very small and tiny like the legs of a spider. You can feel a pulse under the skin. Past his head you can see the rest of the interior of his room, and you know it is a lot more cheerful, a lot more decorated than your own.
This is not how you imagined it would go. For one, you didn't think it would be easy for both of you to end up this way, vulnerable and tangled up above the sheets of his bed; for another, you didn't imagine so little would be said of what had already happened. You suppose he hasn't changed at all. You suppose that despite all the signs pointing to the obvious opposite, you really haven't either. You've traded sleeping for dreaming aimlessly; you've traded in pound after pound of your mass for inch after inch of your height; you've traded both of them in for an empty hole in your life. You've traded in all the little slumbering memories of your past for innumerable immeasurable ghosts. But by and by, you're still the same person you've always been, the same weaknesses, the same interminable desires.
His fingers twist themselves around a lock of your hair before he tentatively puts his mouth to your forehead and then down around the sides of your temples, nibbling at your hair as if the only way he can see it is to taste it. Stopping, he takes his hand away from your mouth where you've started to chew at his skin, trying to get to the veins pulsating under it, and he kisses your ear instead, your lower lip, and your eyelids, each time breathing sweet air into you like he's trying to revive you from your age-old lethargy. "See? I knew it," he says comfortably, leaving your eyelashes wet and warm with his words. "Things like this, I'm always right."
You don't point out that the reason why you remember him so well is because you liked Atobe so much. Ryoma likes winning and likes being right. You've never cared much about losing, and you've never lost much when giving in, and you've never minded being wrong. Now you are older and it should matter less, and it does, but in a different way than you had expected. He's younger than you, but older too, in the way small children are much wiser than their adult counterparts. You've been stupid for so long. For some illogical reason it occurs to you that every minute could be the last minute you spend with him. You lean in to kiss him again, and when he doesn't resist, you kiss him harder.
"Your tennis," you whisper, hesitate, and then repeat yourself. "The way you played. I always loved that," and he replies, "I know that. I knew that too," and when he touches your hair again, along the loops of your curls and the soft strands buried underneath all that tumbled irritated mess on the top, you say, "You're horrible," grabbing on.
This time you act like you're in control of the entire situation. He lets you.
|| pause || 1 x 2 = 1
You are older. Because you're busy being miserable and keeping a better, more stable, more orthodox job than either of them, you don't keep in too close contact with them. Every time you see them, they're happy together, and you don't resent it as much as you thought it would; it hurts less than you thought it would. You realize now that jealousy is like a time-lapsed poison. Sometimes you'll be alone and suddenly all that pain will wedge itself deep in-between your ribs and rest right alongside your heart to sleep with you during that night. Other times you can say their names, clearly and together in the same sentence, without flinching. This is what your life is like. Usually you don't bother finding the time, breath, or effort to complain.
But because inside you hurt, even if you don't feel it, and because you suspect that deep inside, you've always been a masochistic person with a streak of harmless self-preservation that never quite developed properly, you let them sweep you away still. They invite you over for drinks, for parties, for Saturday afternoons with a picnic too small for three and too big for two, for counseling, for matchmaking. They talk about your love life as if they had never been a part of it. They treat you like a good friend or some in-law they see too little of and therefore adore. You're a stranger, or worse, some photographer to record their life for them, and if you go with them willingly, because Atobe always asks and you can't resist, you hate yourself for it.
They make you the extra wheel. And so you're rolling, or you're stopping, or the tread on the outside of your rubber doesn't hold much to the ground anymore, but nothing you do matters, because everything around you is still turning. Sometimes you say, "I don't want to intrude," but then Atobe makes a sound like a very small, elegant, dying engine to show that he thinks you're being funny, so you know that that's the wrong thing to say.
Sometimes Atobe says something unintentionally heartless, like, "It's the same if you're there or if you're gone," and he only catches Ryoma's look of vivid reproach half of the time.
For your birthday Ryoma convinces both of you to celebrate it the American way, by getting completely and totally drunk. Atobe at first refuses to do it with whiskey and pulls out some of his best wines, but Ryoma claims that red wine makes him sick and white wine tastes like water. Atobe says that it's obvious Ryoma's never going to move away from his plebian beginnings. You just stand there and smile helplessly at both of them, clawing at the inside of your elbows, distinctly uncomfortable. After fifteen minutes or so, Atobe sends someone else to get "anything," he commands with a wave of his hand. Ryoma's young like he's always been; he yells at the departing servant to get beer too, before Atobe comments that none of them are college students and by now they should be able to get drunk like men and not like raucous teenagers.
Ryoma's an incorrigible child, still, and Atobe is indulgent. The first thing Ryoma always does at Atobe's house is always to open the refrigerator and get out Atobe's ice cream and soda, and maybe even potato chips if he gets hungry enough. Ryoma likes Atobe's food, likes the endlessness of it, like he's starved before and that's what's going to carry on for the rest of his life, into his tennis, his breathing, his habits.
You're never as hungry as Ryoma is, but Atobe's house brings back that endless sleepiness that dominated your life for so long, that strange affliction you've shaken off now. The sound of both of them talking in their soft and blithe way around you makes you sleepy. When you're sitting there with them, the littered cans and bottles on the ground between you, you're reminded of how you used to fall asleep on Atobe's shoulder, sometimes when you were watching Ryoma's games, and how he used to wake you up gently, by touching you, wrapping his arm around your shoulder and tapping you. The noise of the crowd was always very faint and muted compared to your breathing and his breathing. Whenever he talked, it would be in hushed tones that spoke volumes about how much he cared but would never confess.
Most of your memories of that time are tennis games you've played, tennis games you've watched, an endless stretch of sleep, and the both of them.
Some time later, when you realize you need to use the bathroom, Atobe sends a servant with you because you're not sure if you can walk straight without tripping. When you've reached the bathroom, you send the servant off again, recalling that you should have grown into a very shy person, having slept through so many social occasions in your life. You try to snap yourself out of your drunken stupor by washing your face. The cold water helps a little bit, so that when you're trying to find your way back to them, you don't feel drunk so much as you feel slightly dizzy and a touch nauseous.
Ryoma's talking when you get back, and you would have just stepped back into the living room if it wasn't for the fact that Ryoma has his head across Atobe's lap just like you used to do when you fell asleep during tennis matches. His hand is clenched around Atobe's shirt. You just catch the last of his sentence--"..him"--when you stop in the dark just outside their range of vision. You can't think of who the "him" could be except for you, having forgotten for a moment that you don't cease to exist for them as soon as you disappear, just as they don't cease to exist for you.
"Hypocrite," you can hear Atobe say, and something else that gets lost, and then Ryoma's hand is moving up along Atobe's shoulders, his neck, along his jaw, and he says, "I hate you. Of all the people I hate, you're the one I hate the most."
"I'll have to live with that," Atobe answers. He says his words so clearly that you can hear them even though he's leaning down, starting to kiss Ryoma.
There are certain things about Ryoma and Atobe's relationship you know will always hold true. One of the main ones is that you know they'll never last. Ryoma is always unsatisfied, you can tell that just by the way he kisses Atobe a moment later, all tongue and moving lips and not a single gasp for breath, and Atobe is always careful, carefully distant or carefully removed or carefully always belonging to himself, you're never sure. So despite your masochism and your pain and your delayed jealousy, you get a sort of depraved comfort in knowing that eventually, all three of you will wind up as three people again, unconnected to each other except through a long painstaking crumple of emotional strings, none of which are particularly binding.
But despite this, the central thing you turn over in your mind over and over again is that despite everything about you, it's still Ryoma that Atobe wants. It wasn't that you didn't hold on long enough, and it wasn't that you didn't care enough, and it wasn't that the two of you didn't fit; it was that Atobe chose.
And so even if they don't last, you know what you get out of all of this, like what you have gotten out of anything in your life, is only a bitter insincere sort of vengeance that you find is easily hidden under all of your strained smiles and good cheer.
You wait a little while longer before stepping back into the living room. You don't think you're drunk at all, anymore. Past midnight, they're both passed out next to each other, and you're almost asleep, when you wake up to find yourself kneeling beside Atobe's head. You put your hand lightly over his mouth, his breath tickling the top of your hand, and you bend over to kiss the back of your hand. This doesn't count as a kiss, you tell yourself, and you mouth that soundlessly to Atobe's unconsciousness. This doesn't count as anything. But sometimes you're hungry too, never as hungry as Ryoma is, and never as bold or brazen with insufferable ease, but after so long with the pain and the jealousy, after so long with nascent loneliness eating away inside you, you have a hunger all your own. The lingering sightless imprint of your lips against the back of your hand doesn't do anything but carve away at you some more, but in the same way that your hunger is not really hunger, for the time being, this is enough in a way that isn't really enough.
You fall asleep with your hand curled up slightly against your heart. Waking up the next morning, headache and all, you tell Atobe that you don't feel well. "Hangover?" Ryoma asks, sounding remarkably airy considering how miserable he should be feeling. He brings you a cup of coffee--black, the way Atobe likes it, and consequentially the way you've learned to drink it.
"No," you say, measuring your words carefully to yourself, rubbing your chest with your knuckles like an old man. "Heartburn, I think."
<< rewind << 1 x 1 = 1
You are older. Every now and then you forget that. You think maybe that getting older is something that is going to happen to you eventually and very suddenly without warning; one of these days you're going to wake up and you'll realize that you're twenty five, or twenty six, or thirty, or forty, or fifty-eight with heart disease, or sixty seven and dying, but for now all that escapes you. You go through life, day to day, and you take it piece by piece, and you never seem to be able to forget yourself over the night. You're never a different person when you wake up, and you never kill the person you were when you fall asleep, which, in a way, makes sense; May's plant is hawthorn, which symbolizes death, love, or birth, and sometimes all three in the form of victory.
(Hawthorn, you know, is also a sedative; it regulates blood pressure; hawthorn burns well. May's stone, furthermore, is the emerald, promising good health, good looks, and good luck; emerald aids working close with other people; it brings reason and wealth. October's flower, on the other hand, is the calendula or pot marigold, which follows the sun; calendula is for winning grace, cruelty, grief, jealousy, and sacred affection; it eases stomachaches and sore eyes. October's stone, the opal, shows poor gemstone characteristics and no crystal structure but is beautiful; it comes from the Greek "opals"--"to see a change of color"--or from the Latin "upala"--"precious stone"; it promises invisibility, hope, purity, foresight, and freedom from disease. But you like tourmaline better, the old birthstone, which comes in all sorts of colors, promising anything from money to stress relief to eloquence in communication and is in its unfinished form long and thin and roughly triangular.)
Of course you never tell him any of that. By nature, he's not a superstitious person (indicolite promises intuition, tsilaisite promises intelligence, both are forms of tourmaline) and he doesn't care, but he lets you read your awful books on birthstones and flowers that are obviously meant for prepubescent girls with covers that are glossy under your fingers. "You're not getting any younger," he says, slightly disdainful but more amused, and you always shoot back, "I know that."
You know that.
When it's raining outside and the tennis games he promises you have to be canceled, he teaches you a hand game. It's about arithmetic and counting and odd numbers, maybe about touching and commutative properties and something else somewhere in there indicating interest that you miss out on. He has you raise a finger on one hand, and he does the same. "Tap my hand," he says. You look at him curiously, the sound of the rain outside making you a little groggy and unwilling to move, but because he's the one asking you, eventually you do, and then he sticks out another finger so it looks like he's making a v-sign to the carpet. It goes on for a while before you get the hang of it, but you never like it as much as he does.
"You touch, and something happens, and then sometimes you touch and nothing happens," he tells you happily, self-satisfied. You know this is the way you'll always remember him, one of those princes who inherit their land and itch to change the world after that, with everything and nothing under their command. What he wants is constant movement, constant improvement, a life where everything is fast and shiny.
He has a fondness for anything that's new. He buys new flavors of gum, or coffee makers that look like they can fly, or devices that look like the mirrored windows of skyscrapers and don't seem to serve any real purpose. Everything around him keeps changing, his clothes and his computer and his tennis rackets, so that you're afraid you're going to have to change with them. In this way, you think you're getting older. You're frightened of waking up and realizing that you're not familiar with where you are anymore, that he's not the same person he was anymore, because that would be the same thing as dying. He hasn't changed much, except that the gaudiness he once possessed has toned down to nothing more than a faint tension between his conspicuous smile and the diminutive wrinkle on his forehead.
You're pretty sure you're the same person you've always been. More awake, maybe, and less sheltered away from the world by blankets and pillows, and now you worry more, about yourself, him, all the things you'll never get around to talking about, like old addresses and new phone numbers and people who you never keep in touch with anymore. You know he keeps the phone numbers of many of his old teammates on his cell phone, and sometimes you go through the address book he keeps to remind yourself. This is the past that he keeps constant, the thing that anchors him down to who he used to be and keeps him the same person you remember that you wanted to so badly.
Every time he gets a new cell phone, you always take the time to put your own name in there, as if this would be the way to keep you in his mind. He has five, you think, and your name is somewhere in every single one of them.
When it gets to be December, you can't play tennis outside anymore. One night it rains. He wakes you up in the morning, his nose red and his hair smelling like cold, kisses you awake with his fingers threaded through your hair, and he tells you to get dressed, quickly, and come with him outside. You let him dress you, pulling a coat on and yawning. He drags you outside to see where the clay courts have frozen over, the water puddles making little ice patches on the ground, oblivious of white lines or doubles alleys. He wraps your scarf closer around your nose and pulls at your hand, moving you closer to the ice patches. The two of you skitter across the ice in your sneakers, cracking the surface of the ice as you move, air bubbles breaking against the vein-like cracks on the ice.
You're drunkenly happy just like he is. The sound of ice breaking is sharper than the cold; his hand is warm in yours, both of you without gloves, your breath pummeling the air in white, anemic clouds. When you trip across a slippery mix of ice and water, he catches you, and then it starts snowing, like this was all planned, so he kisses you again, lightly, on the side of your mouth.
The soft touch of his mouth against your skin keeps you warm the rest of that morning.
Over breakfast with hot cocoa and all the small luxurious touches he can force into breakfast, the two of you start playing his hand game again. He tells you the winner of it will be able to determine what you're going to do for the rest of the day. You take him up on the offer, even though you always lose. The two of you both start at one. He taps you, so you're at two, and then suddenly he stops, watching you, before he reaches out and holds your hand by the wrist. His fingers are long, tapered at the ends, perfect and perfectly controlled, and warm despite having been outside for so long without gloves.
"Jirou, how many?" he asks in a strange voice. You look at his face, but his eyes are boring straight into your fingers.
You mull for a little while, trying to figure out what he means. "Two," you answer, counting again as if you had to make sure. "Why?"
"Only two? That's all, right?"
You nod, say, "That's right. Just two," and whatever it was that had held him like so much nostalgic quicksand melts away. He smiles without a hint of a tremor and beckons the two of you to keep playing.
Like always, he wins.
But as you're going to sleep that night, right before everything fades around you into cinematic anticlimactic black, it occurs to you what the real answer he was looking for was. There are only two fingers if you just count yourself; one plus one is two no matter how you add it. But when you're two, and he's still one, then it's three, not two. Once you've been something, you can't stop being. Atobe's hand game has a rule, and that rule is that you can never go back to zero. When you've given away a number, it doesn't just disappear. It's added on. One plus one is two, but the one that he is and the two that you are make three; if you give him two, then there's five, and on and on and on, and it'll never just be solitary two again; what you know is that once there has been room for three, there can never be room for only two again. It's like the morning you spend on the tennis courts with the ice cracking underneath you. There had been just two people, you and Atobe, but the ice was another person entirely, something intimate, something not quite sane, and something permeating everything around you in a way that you can't escape.
Once, you remember, you had been three people. That stretched gap Ryoma left behind, you can't fill; nothing can. Once you had been three people, and now it is just two, you and Atobe, but he can't ever go back to that lonely, solitary, tunnel-visioned view of the world that had been two.
You can't leave it alone either.
(You should have realized. After all, December's plant is holly, which stops bleeding; it means death, peace, unity, and decked churches; it asks "am I forgotten?" but at the same time it forgives; and holly--green and red, cousin of the mistletoe whose last berry means last kiss, relative of the evergreen family whose meaning like its name implies eternity--holly, that beautiful icy glossy thorny winter plant, causes water to freeze.)
[] stop [] 0
You are older. You are alone. You don't know where they are now, who they are now, who they are with now, what they are doing now. You don't know if you'll ever meet them again. What you want you will never get; what you need but you don't want you'll always keep. What you remember is what you would rather forget; what you have forgotten is unquestionable and lost. What you go to sleep with each night is an echo of who you were when you were with who they once were; what you wake up with is nothing. Winter is always cold. Fall is always sentimental. Spring never brings hope. Summer never ends.
When you play, more often than not, you still win. This you have not given away yet. You say to yourself, when I win my fiftieth game, my sixtieth game, my nintieth game, my hundredth game, I will know. You say to yourself, if I hit this ball three hundred times without a slip into the pinpointed corner of that wall, I will know. You say to yourself, when I have faced my one hundred and fiftieth opponent, I will know. You say to yourself, when I have fulfilled this promise, that resolution, this sacrifice, that change, I will know. Something will tell me. I will know.
But still, you don't know.