[Fic] december
May. 24th, 2011 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suchacharmerDecember: It's sad quiet in our apartment, because Itachi doesn't talk much. He laughs even less. I don't laugh much either, because there's nothing to laugh about anymore. Especially in December.
Category: Chapter fic
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R for language, drug and sexual references, mature subject matter.
Notes: First person narratives alternating between Kakashi, Sasuke, Itachi, and Kisame.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
October
III. Jack and Jill went up the hill, waiting for disaster.
The tree in Kakashi’s front yard is dying.
The rain from Saturday only increased Sunday, lightning coming down to crack the earth. Newspapers on Monday ran stories about the bolt that hit a telephone pole right outside of Arden and knocked out power in our half of the town.
It just came back this morning. We spent Monday night in the pitch black with a soggy carpet.
Wind did in Kakashi’s elm tree. It already looked like wind had carved spirals and channels through the bark for rainwater to travel down, and now almost every one of its leaves are either on the ground or somewhere down the street. The storm was harsh on Sunday, harsh enough to break the second largest limb of the elm. Now it just dangles from the trunk like a decapitated arm, something out of a horror movie. Dad let me stay up late once to watch. I remember having nightmares about that for weeks. Itachi had to let me sleep in his bed.
“Is there a reason you haven’t done something about that tree yet?” Iruka asks as he turns the page of the newspaper, pencil hovering over a notebook. “It’s kind of an eyesore.”
Kakashi’s hand is also hovering, his over the chess board, waiting for his mind to tell his hand which chess piece to pick up and kill me with. He hums absently in his throat, and scratches a spot just under the cascade of his bangs. He’s disinclined to answer while trying to concentrate. Not that he really needs to concentrate overly hard against me, but as per the running trend, Kakashi will do just about anything to avoid answering most of Iruka’s questions.
Iruka taps his pointer finger against the pencil and looks to Itachi for help. Itachi is settled comfortably in chair near me, feet tucked under his thighs for warmth. The cup of tea he made twenty minutes ago is still perched on the table, untouched and no longer steaming. Itachi doesn’t like his drinks hot.
“Shade?” Itachi offers lamely.
Kakashi rolls his eyes and takes one of my rooks into captivity.
Iruka’s right. It’s not a pretty tree. Between the innumerable wrinkles in the bark, and the odd angles at which the branches protrude, and the bumps where the tree buckles from pressure, the tree could be a veteran of war. But the tree belongs to the house, and Kakashi doesn’t change what belongs to the house. The woman who lived here beforehand, he told me not too long ago, was Charlotte. Her husband’s name was Hank.
Right now, if I really pretend, we could all live here: Kakashi, Itachi, and me. Kakashi belongs to the house and I can’t leave Itachi behind. Iruka will have to go.
Iruka closes the newspaper in front of him and reaches for the one with today’s date on it. The other one was from yesterday.
“Any luck?” Itachi asks as he tests the temperature of his tea with his finger. Cool enough for his liking, he takes a tiny sip. This is the third day in a row we’ve stayed here after work, almost an hour on Sunday and forty-five minutes yesterday. It’s not like Itachi to take an interest in a near stranger’s problems, but he has. Or at least he looks like he has a few moments at a time. Sometimes, he stops after one question and drops away completely, leaving me wondering why he asked at all. Such an odd scattering of involvement. Odd enough that he involves himself at all, but this is touch and go.
Shaking his head, Iruka viciously turns the pages of the newspaper until he finds the real estate section. “Everything is too big, too expensive, or too far away.”
“The apartment in Garret was nice,” Kakashi says with a nonchalance he doesn’t mean. Every time they discuss housing, Iruka ends up leaving the room and Kakashi gets quieter.
“The apartment in Garret falls into the ‘too far away’ category.”
The chess board in front of me isn’t making any sense. I’m too absorbed in the conversation at hand, but pretending not to be, and at the same time trying to see the web of traps Kakashi’s laid out for me. Kakashi doesn’t mind if I listen, but Iruka’s taken to giving me looks behind his back. I’m not sure what they say yet. I have to figure out what I’ve done before I can puzzle out these candid glances.
“Forty-five minutes,” Kakashi says, as if it cures all. Iruka doesn’t see it that way. They’ve had this conversation.
“Forty-five minutes constitutes as too far of a drive to work.” He puts a large X through a few blurbs on this house and that apartment. “I don’t want to commute.”
Everything else about the apartment, Iruka had said when he found it last week, was perfect. One bathroom, one bedroom, combined living room and kitchen, no dining room. Reasonable price for a bachelor. It’s just not close enough to the school.
“Think about it. With all that money I’d have to spend on gas just getting to work, I’d be better off switching schools. And it’s my first year teaching on my own instead of being a teaching assistant. I’d rather not do that when the year has barely started.”
There’s fire in Iruka’s voice, and Kakashi is the fuel. It’s not exactly fair that Iruka has to keep explaining himself when Kakashi feels no obligation whatsoever, but those are the rules of the house. I understand that. Itachi understands that. Really, I think Iruka understands, too, but the difference is that he lets the rules bother him too much. Sometimes, he argues too hard for Kakashi to let go. Ever since Iruka showed up, I’ve discovered that Kakashi can turn his voice to ice, just like Itachi. And when Kakashi goes to ice, Iruka goes to fire that doesn’t seem to burn. I understand the irony of it all – the way they work and, most of the time, don’t work. They don’t just argue in loud whispers.
“You’re being too picky. It’s just a house, Iruka.” Kakashi scratches the same spot under his bangs. “It’s your move, pretty bird.”
“I’m thinking,” I retort, not taking my eyes off the chess board and finally focusing in on the soldiers. My pieces are white, his black, and black is dominating the board. “Patience is a virtue.”
His thin eyebrow arches, disappearing into the curtain of his bangs. I’ve amused him again. But if I was offended even a week ago, I can’t bring myself to be now. Saturday changed so much between us. I’ve been trying to understand him for so long with no more than baby steps of progress and middles without beginning, like starting a book in the center and reading every other page. But now I know the beginning. Kakashi doesn’t have many pictures, and certainly none that look like they could be his parents. Kakashi doesn’t keep pictures of dead people.
I wonder what Obito looked like. Did he have black hair, blonde hair, red hair? Green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes? Short, tall, somewhere in the middle? Did he look a like Iruka?
“Are you quoting me, pretty bird?”
I place a finger on the crown of my queen, seeing the danger she’s in and knowing that, once again, I can’t do a thing about it. She’s going to die.
Kakashi chuckles and Iruka’s pen makes a thick, scratchy sound against the newspaper, then against the notepad. Sounds like more X’s. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
Itachi switches the tea cup to his other hand, the injured one. He took the gauze off on Monday, saying that he needed to let it breathe. “Try not to get stitches,” he’d said as he clipped straight through the wrappings with a pair of scissors. “They itch really badly.”
“Garret really is a long drive from here,” he says, leaning his head back against the wicker chair. Kakashi’s had the chair stuffed in the corner from the first day I walked in here, and neither of us ever sits in it. The thing looks like something out of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine Mom had in the bathroom – floral and pastel and altogether too pretty for the sleek, black, cherry wood chair I’m sitting in. “We used to have relatives in Garret.”
I frown as I make my move. Tonight will be like last night, then. “We did? Grandmom lived here, not in Garret.”
“You wouldn’t remember. You were four the last time we saw them, and you fidgeted the entire ride.”
“Did not,” I argue, even though, like he said, I don’t actually remember. Because I don’t fidget. I’m good at sitting still.
“Yes, you did,” he says with that odd almost smile. “You always did on long car rides.”
Even his almost smile is slightly sad. I can’t remember the last time he talked about anything even remotely related to the days before we moved into the apartment, and now he’s doing it for the second night in a row. I’m trying to decide if I like his sad version of the almost smile. Is that better than nothing? I remember thinking so.
“Garret is nice,” Iruka agrees without looking at any of us, as if Itachi was contesting him instead of siding with him. Though I don’t think he meant to commiserate. The intensity that is my brother is offset by his wandering mind. I’m used to seeing his eyes lose focus and go cloudy, but he’s always been fixated on one thought. Now, he’s bouncing between a bunch of them and his mouth is playing along. “I just don’t want to be that far away from the school. I’m still new and just getting used to the system.
“Besides,” he smiles hopefully at his newspaper and circles something. “I’m pretty sure the kids like me.”
And just like that, the torch falls to me. Kakashi isn’t inclined to say anything, Iruka holds that smile that can’t be at a price and Itachi blows on tea that isn’t hot. This is another way they argue, not in loud whispers, but in their silence and my carefully selected words. I have no choice but to continue the conversation, carry them on. They won’t do it, and if I don’t it’ll never end.
“You’re a good teacher, Iruka,” I say after a moment’s deliberation. They both relax, somewhat the smile on Iruka’s face morphing into an actual smile. Kakashi moves a bishop one step closer to my queen’s capture. Exercises in patience and humility, that’s just how I see these games now. I’m still going to win one day, but I figure that’ll come after I completely accept defeat.
Maybe Iruka should take a leaf out of my book. It’s somewhat funny that they both think they’ve won. That’s why they never do.
“Do you still want me to give you a ride to the café tomorrow?” Kakashi asks as I realize that he’s in perfect position to take my queen. Nowhere on his face does the slightest bit of excitement, or even acknowledgement, gleam. It’s like he doesn’t know what he’s done.
I look at my brother. Yesterday, when we were all quiet, he abruptly asked Kakashi to drop him off at the café early. No reason given. I’m probably the only one who cared.
Itachi “hmms” to something, he doesn’t know what, the almost smile hanging around. I know that a short while ago I would have killed to see him do that so often, but really, this smile isn’t the same one that Kakashi induces every once in a blue moon. This one is a freeze-frame, like we caught him doing something wrong. It lingers too long on the periphery of his lips, still waiting for someone to call him on it.
“Yes,” I answer for him, taking the torch to the end. “He does.”
The smile vacates premises after a few seconds. A delayed reaction, he could claim. “By five.”
Kakashi hums agreement and I sit back and wait for his final blow.
*^*^*
Sex is equally underrated and overrated.
On the one hand, yes, it can be relaxing after the fact. While it’s happening, with good sex anyway, your senses go first into overdrive before they frazzle out completely. It’s exactly what I imagine being struck by lightning would feel like, were I stupid enough to stand out in the middle of a storm. There’s something altogether exhilarating and terrifying about the simultaneous empowerment and defeat. Sex is an oxymoron, perfect on nights when you feel up to sorting through the incredulity of it in the morning.
It’s harder and harder every time.
All I see in my post-orgasmic hazy sleep are the discouraging sides of sex. My sheets are rumpled, smelly, and sticking uncomfortably to the small of my back and my thighs. My ass and lower back sport a dull ache. I’m torn between wanting a big mug of coffee and a tall glass of ice water, whichever one will wash away the taste of Iruka’s skin from my mouth quicker. My mind, slow but articulate, plods through a bunch of things I need to do today that I forgot to do last night when I should have done them. Change the sheets. Pick up my clothes. Wipe myself down with a washcloth.
Say no to Iruka.
No, you can’t stay here anymore, no, this isn’t going to work much longer, no, you can’t fuck me into the mattress. No, Ruka, I’m not going to pour out my soul, so just forget it.
I remember a time, one, two years ago, when sticky legs weren’t all that big of a deal, when I felt less of the terrors and more of the exhilarations that come with sex. The in-the-moment feeling used to outweigh the consequences, the overwhelming sense of regret I’m experiencing now as I lie on my side, watching the curtains blowing in and up from the window I told Iruka not to open. Reminding me that I put myself in a hole more than a little too deep.
The scent of him is everywhere. On me, the sheets, the pillows. It’s strong enough to slip past the dried cum and all the sweat, just hanging around to tease me. Telling me I knew better. Normal sex is bad enough, but angry sex? Angry sex is even worse. Twice the regret in the morning.
Iruka is in the shower, washing away his half of last night. I used to join him in the morning when he stayed at my apartment overnight, soaped him up and took him from behind, trying not to fall over. There are a lot things we used to do, things I miss. Back before we were complicated.
If he’d just move to Garret, everything would be fine for a while longer. We can go on pretending that we can last forever, even though we’ve never mentioned the words love or boyfriend or future together. We’ve gotten so good at it.
No, I rethink. That’s not quite true. We did mention the word boyfriend once, early on, in his dorm room with hanging paper lanterns and pictures of half-naked girls. He invited me over, bluntly and with the no nonsense tone I’d quickly come to like about him, “to fuck me.” Third time, more than a one-night stand but not enough to constitute a fling. We had no idea what we were doing other than having sex. Good sex.
I still wonder if I was too abrupt. I could have waited. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend,” I told him breathlessly, his cock buried in my ass, just almost brushing the spot that makes the sweat, the stick, the potential regrets worth it.
He didn’t falter so much as pause, and only for a few seconds in which he processed years of sex and what it was worth to him. Our timetables had better alignment at the time. “Who says I am?” he asked, just as breathlessly, but cocky too, as if questioning how I could have thought otherwise.
That’s all it was in the beginning. And now look at the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re fighting over living arrangements.
I should have said no that first night he called after graduation, I decide for the hundredth time since that night. But by then I’d invited him drinking with me and Genma, had him over for the hockey games and ate burnt popcorn with him. We made it safely to friends.
The water isn’t running anymore. I can hear light morning noises through the open window, mostly squirrels going about their business of collecting nuts, and birds going about their branch-to-telephone wire route, gathering bugs and berries in-between. He left the door open wide enough to let all the steam out. I can see the bathtub, the white and green spider-webbed shower curtain drawing back to reveal a naked, drenched Iruka, hair plastered down his neck and cheeks. He looks good naked. He looks good with a towel around his waist, too, but he looks better naked.
He cooked naked in his kitchen for me once. Pancakes with gummy bears. Some textures shouldn’t be mixed.
“You’re awake,” Iruka says as he slips back into the bedroom. Not good morning. I didn’t expect his anger to evaporate during the night. Really, I ought to give up, let him stay as long as he needs. Be a good friend. I can’t though. I feel walls closing in on us. He has to leave soon, before we’re both forced to admit that time doesn’t stand still.
“I’m awake.” Awake and not at all ready to get out of bed and apologize for something I’m not sorry for saying. I want him to leave, sooner rather than later. It’s not even a lie. He gets ticked when I lie, and when I tell the truth. When I don’t say anything at all.
The truly funny thing about all of this is that he’s never asked about my rituals or habits since I told him I couldn’t talk about them.
He might never even ask what’s wrong with me. I ought to see that as less of a threat than Sasuke. Sasuke asked, for months on end at the cemetery. “Why do you talk to him?” he would ask, his nose scrunched up in confusion. “He can’t hear you.”
Such a naïve, simple question. Such a childlike question. And that’s it really. Right there. Sasuke is a child. He’s not an adult who has the foresight to see that I’m starting to lose it, who will insist that I do something about it. I can see how that’ll turn out now. I need therapy. I need a psychiatrist. I need to let go of the past and move on. Easy enough for him to say. He never killed anyone he loved.
That’s part of the reason I agreed to look after Sasuke in the first place. I commiserated with his brother.
No, he doesn’t ask anymore. But it’s there, in the sighs, the looks, the open window. He’s tired of me. And I don’t blame him. I’m hard to deal with and, as patient as Iruka is with me, I have a feeling he’ll crack if he stays here much longer. He’s seeing things that I didn’t let him see before, in addition to what I did. It’s going to be too much at some point. He doesn’t seem to realize that not knowing is infinitely better than knowing. I can’t even imagine how that would play out. “Iruka,” I would say softly, eyes averted. I wouldn’t be able to look at him. “I have conversations with my dead boyfriend. He died eight years ago. I can’t let him go. Oh, and I can’t throw anything in this house away because it reminds me of people I’ve never even met. You understand, don’t you?”
I must have laughed, because Iruka is looking at me quizzically. He’s in his boxers and a button-down left unbuttoned, looking at me carefully. See, he already thinks I’m a ticking time bomb. And he’s right. I’m going to blow us both sky-high.
Time is never on my fucking side. Or more likely, it just never agrees with what I need. Sasuke needed almost no time at all to accept me. Iruka’s still working on it. That’s why he can’t know about the cemetery. It sounds presumptuous and it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I know Iruka. I’ve known him for four years. He’s not the type of person who can work without an explanation. Iruka likes planners, directions, plot summaries, maps. I didn’t use a map on my road trip to Santa Fe. I took roads that felt westerly, roads that felt southerly. Iruka thought we were nuts. Considering we ended up in South Dakota some point along the way, he was right. But we made it.
“Would you look at that,” Asuma said as he lit a cigarette, the exit for Santa Fe a few hundred feet away. “The nuts made it to Santa Fe.” He took a deep inhale of the smoke that I used to smell like all the time. “You wanna be the acorn or the chestnut?”
I want him to understand and take me as I am, just as much as he’d like to know. But he’s not going to like what I have to say. What I do say makes no sense. He already told me once that I should have talked to a therapist after Asuma died, and he didn’t know about Obito then anymore then than he does now. Just one death. I can’t imagine for a one second that he would be okay coming with me every week, watching me, holding his tongue while I descend deeper into psychosis. Beneath all the muck of emotional and neurotic encyclopedia entries that explain why I’m such a commitment-phoebe, that’s what I dread the most: someone, anyone, suggesting that I should stop.
What if I fall for Iruka? What comes next? All secrets bared and an obligation to let him save me from myself? Therapy. Grief counseling. The whole spiel. And I’m just supposed to take it in stride because he loves me and wants only the best for me.
Stopping isn’t in my plan. Not until I tell him what I keep meaning to tell him. And for some reason, which Father Time might delineate to me when he feels good and ready, I think I need Sasuke to do that. I need what he gives me. Sasuke’s eyes, when he looks at me, are curious, often bewildered, and sometimes stunned, but that I can take. Iruka looks at me with concern, with worry, with caution, and, most distressingly, with disappointment.
Dig even further into my brain for an extra kick to the stomach. The people I fall in love with have a nasty habit of dying. So even if I’m wrong and Iruka does understand my neurosis, I’d live in the perpetual fear that he’d die, so I’d never be able to enjoy his company. I would rather Iruka stay alive and hate me for being a closed-off ass than stay with me and die. I’d rather not live with that hanging over our heads. I’d rather not lose the one chance I have to make amends.
So this is what I do, now that I’ve gotten myself deeper with him than I meant to, so far that I lost track of what we are. I take a deep breath as he leans over to get his watch from the table, smelling the wrong scent on him. He smells like my shampoo. He smells like me. He smells like me and I smell like him. It’s been like this for days. I touch his hair, the shell of his ear, meet those brown eyes full of worry and caution.
Exhale.
“I told you not to open the window,” I say just loudly enough to hear. I’m telling you everything, in my own way, Iruka. I’m telling you that whether or not you protest, we are going to end. I’m not going to give him up. You’ll be gone when you figure that out, even if I do let you in on my secret. See, baby, the violence is up to you.
Iruka bites his lips, looking over his shoulder at the window. There’s disappointment in his eyes. No smiles. “It’s stuffy in here,” he says as he picks up the watch and fastens it around his wrist. “You can close it if you want.”
He doesn’t see it because his back is turned, but I smile for both of us. I keep letting him down enough and he’ll catch on. I wish there was another way to break this cycle, but I’m not up to falling in love. There’s a hell of a lot to lose if I do.
*****
I’m sure it’s considered, by all accounts, childish to glare at inanimate objects. Like cursing at an armchair after you’ve stubbed your pinky toe. You are clearly at fault for the pain, whether by angle miscalculation or pure inattention. The chair didn’t do anything but sit there, waiting for the next patient to fill out its contours.
But, the way I figure it, coffee is made from a plant that was, at some point on a plantation in South America, alive. Therefore, my glare at the mug of Folgers on my desk is not entirely unjustified.
Psychologists call this phenomenon scapegoating, and ninety percent of the patients that pass in and out of my door are guilty of it. Including Itachi, who hasn’t occupied that chair for more than three weeks.
By all rational standards, I ought to drop him from my list of clientele. He’s shown no signs of progress. I’m not an impatient person, all things considered, and I don’t think I was all that rash during our last meeting. We just aren’t getting anywhere together. Short of blackmail, I don’t think there’s any way to get through to him. And it’s a shame. For both of us, it’s a shame.
At least I know that he doesn’t hate me, I think bitterly. That has to count for something.
It wouldn’t take more than a second to scribble the note for my receptionist. She’d tap a few keys at the computer, sending the court official notice, Itachi would transfer, and I’d have a free hour to myself tomorrow. I could go home early, have some leftover pasta, and watch the Thursday night game.
Every time I pick up the pen, though, I put it down again; allergic, suddenly, to ink.
Against my better judgment, I’m still hoping that the kid will show up and take his sullen place in the brown leather chair.
Curiously, even in my imagination he doesn’t talk about his problems. Something is different, nonetheless. I think he might be smiling. Which is crazy, because I’ve never seen him smile before.
I put down the pen for the sixth time.
Was I too hasty with him? Certainly, I don’t approve of how I saw him treat his brother, but a differentiation in morals is no reason to drop a client. Neither is my frustration or his unwillingness to cooperate. That’s my fucking job. I coax, lull into security. I don’t make an enemy of myself and, in return, I earn a bit of trust that he sorely needs.
He doesn’t. When I look into his eyes, examine his body stance, there’s no trust to be found. Still thinks I’m out to get him. I suppose, when it boils down, Itachi and I have drastically different ideas of what help entails. My version of help is to be nothing more than a confidant. I don’t have to say a word. I’ve had patients specifically request that I dole out no snippets of advice and just listen.
My pen taunts me. For being unable to admit to the basest of human emotions, and even more for infringing on one of the cardinal rules of psychiatric treatment: Don’t get emotionally involved with your patient. Feel for them, empathize with them, but don’t invest yourself in their lives outside of the office. Coffee may have taken me there, but Itachi should have kept me away. Psychiatrists are not meant to be friends, or even acquaintances, with their patients. Because here’s what happens: You run into one that doesn’t want to listen to you or be listened to, and all that messy stuff that friends have to shift through – the loyalty and backstabbing, the truth and the lies, the investment and drainage – all of it’s up around your neck.
I want to help him. He doesn’t want me to help. That hurts.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that I’ve gotten too close to him. The beauty of psychiatry is supposed to be the anonymity. It’s easier to spill your troubles to a random stranger than your father. Your father looks at you as if you should have known better. The stranger shakes your hand and says, ‘Nice talking to you and good luck with that. Hope it all works out.’
I want things to work out for him. I want someone to be the one to get a good reaction out of him, the right kind of anger at the right person. His father. Not me, and not himself. And the selfish, unprofessional part of me hopes that he can do it with me. Because I care about what happens to him. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it had to have happened beyond these walls. I’ve had stubborn patients in the past who didn’t get along with me and I had no trouble dropping them to let them move on, to find someone else who feels safe.
Itachi, in all his intractability, is not the problem. He’s just a patient. Granted, he’s the most difficult of the patients I’ve had in my two years of practice, and likely the most distrustful, but he’s allowed to be and, in the office, that’s precisely what he is to me.
Outside the office, it’s different. Outside the office, it’s harder to see him as just a patient. Things got personal when I saw him in a red apron, slamming biscotti down in front of me, hunkered down in my car, hand bleeding into my shirt. In a pizzeria with his little brother.
Our meeting was so random, too. How was I to know where he worked and how was I to know he’d react quite that badly? Maybe I should have known better, I don’t know, but I do know that I, accidentally and misguidedly, gave us a history. It’s not a good history, it’s not a bad history, but it’s there. It’s hard not to care about someone you have a history with. People bond through contact, after all. We’ve had more contact than is necessary for a doctor and a patient.
The dinner. That dinner was the best and worst of it. I should never have taken him out to dinner, let alone his little brother. Because it’s not his little brother either, and it’s not the way he acts around his little brother or what he expects from him. It was seeing it at all that’s turned out to be the problem.
I pick up the pen again, amazed, in spite of my education, at how complex and nonsensical human emotions can be. How is it that I can feel like such a prick and so self-righteous at the same time? I overacted but I’m glad I did?
“That’s not why I did it.” Those words of his keep floating around in my skull, the push and pull of my cynicism and optimism whacking them around like ping-pong balls. If for no other reason than Itachi is about as revealing as an Eskimo in the dead of winter, I’m convinced that there really is more to that story. There has to be more to the story. He’d tell me if there weren’t.
After all, I was right from the beginning. He never hated me. He just really, really wanted to. Now he’ll go on hating himself for not hating me, and I’ll hate him for being such an incredibly repressed, emotional, cynical mess, and then I’ll hate myself because I’m not supposed to be close enough to him to hate him for being a mess.
Mess. Big, fucking mess. All of it.
I hear a light clacking sound and realize that I’ve thrown my pen across the room. It hit the wall right under the signed poster of Ella Fitzgerald, some gem my dad found before I was born that became my birthday present the year I turned seven.
My office is filled to the brim with my personal effects. I know that a psychiatrist’s office, ideally, should host a distinctive lack of stimulation to maximize client relaxation. Soft colors, blank walls, dim lighting. Things that make you mellow. What I find, however, is that most of my patients didn’t mind the posters and the framed photographs. Those mean that I have a passion in life, an investment in something that doesn’t involve dissecting their brain. Some have roved the office from corner to corner, peering at the album covers of my childhood idols and those of my father in cheap jazz hovels in Boston. They’re intrigued by the sunglasses in the dark and the romanticism of novelty film students. Everything’s beautiful in black and white photography. A blonde told me so when I took her back to my apartment. She picked up the photo of my father at his piano, at the piano she thought was mine, and said, “I bet you play beautifully.”
That was about the time I moved my dad’s old things to the office. If I’d have known that would put people at ease in those few months after her kind words sent me into a tumult, I would have done it intentionally. Still, I’ve found these items fortuitous in putting my patients at ease; they ought to give someone the warm fuzzies, after all.
I guess I’ve become too accustomed to happy accidents to remember that there are such things as bad repercussions. His hand, last Thursday, ill will, they’re all bad for us.
Just as I’ve lifted myself out of my seat to retrieve my pen, because for some reason I never have pens that actually work in my office and I’m going to need it if I ever pluck up the courage to write down his name, there’s a soft beeping sound and the rapid blinking from the first red light on my answering machine. During office hours, I switch the phone from ring to beep in case a patient is in the room. The tone is set on low so as to not disturb their train of thought or startle them. I tend to forget to switch it back to ring on my breaks, thus all my calls end up going straight to voicemail when I could have been answering them.
Leaving the pen for a moment, I pick up the receiver and press the button for line one. My system is only rigged for two lines, one of which is the desk downstairs and one of which is my private line. I only give out my private line to patients in case of emergency. The light for the desk is the one blinking, so I patch myself directly to Izzy.
“That was fast,” she says as soon as she picks up. Her phone, which has more blinking lights than mine because she mans the fort for the other psychiatrist in the building as well, knows when I call the same way I know she’s called me. “Normally takes you a few minutes.”
“I was right at the desk,” I retort indignantly. “Didn’t listen to the message though, so I’m going to have to make you repeat yourself.”
She laughs. Izzy thinks everything I say is funny. “I have something for you. One of your patients dropped it off just a few minutes ago.”
I twirl the phone cord around my pinky finger, fondly recalling a night Dad actually called when he said he would. “Which patient?”
“He didn’t leave a name.”
The cord snaps back as I release and bounces loosely. I look at my watch. Five minutes left of my break. I have plenty of time to dash downstairs and pick up this mystery drop-off. It’s not like I have to deal with an elevator or mad rushes of people coming up and down the narrow stairwell of the converted Victorian. We’re very low key. “I’ll be right down.”
The wallpaper covering the room from floor to crown molding is a soft, pale pink, pinstriped with white. It’s feminine enough to remind me that there was a family living here eighty years ago, when all cars were Fords and candy cost a penny. Family portraits hung somewhere on these walls.
Every once in a while it strikes me that this is the perfect place to let go of ghosts and vendettas. They would simply join the ones the wars left behind.
Izzy smiles widely when she see me. She’s a small girl with brown hair and lots of freckles who looker younger than me but actually tops me by three years. No doubt she still gets carded at bars. I suspect she might be a victim of unrequited love for me, if those smiles are indicative at all. She doesn’t smile at Dr. Yamoto quite as broadly.
I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of paper, because I looked right over the cup Izzy motioned toward as she picked up the public line. I have to give the desk a second sweep before my brain readjusts to the correctional information. A cup. A cardboard cup with a familiar logo and an even more familiar aroma.
Hazelnut vanilla.
Tucked into the cardboard that protects my hands from burning is a piece of paper that looks like an order slip. I nearly smile, more interested in the note than the coffee. The paper is overly warm in my palm, feeling ready to burst into flames from heat exposure.
Itachi has neat handwriting. That’s the first thing I’m able to put together as I scan perfectly formed, even lettering. It takes a few seconds getting over the admiration of his penmanship before they make any sense. And even after they form real words, I’m not completely sure they make sense. This seems to be his version of an apology and I’m not quite sure I buy it. But it’s very intriguing.
Doctor,
Not this Thursday. And not in the office.
The Wok Grill, next Thursday.
Seven.
Itachi
I sigh before I can catch anymore professionally sticky implications. Will he ever call me by the actual name? Even Dr. Hoshigaki would do it. Doctor, remembering our first meeting, still sounds incredibly condescending coming from him. ‘You can’t help me, Doctor,’ he said. He was so sure nothing would come of me. Then I had to go and show up on his doorstep, and now I have his idea of amendment in the palm of my hand. Somewhere in between that and this, history recorded.
I pocket the note and thank Izzy for the message, blowing at my Red Lantern coffee through the slit on the rim. The hollow, reedy echo is this whole mess of ours reaching crescendo.
Chapter Six-Part 2
Category: Chapter fic
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R for language, drug and sexual references, mature subject matter.
Notes: First person narratives alternating between Kakashi, Sasuke, Itachi, and Kisame.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
October
III. Jack and Jill went up the hill, waiting for disaster.
The tree in Kakashi’s front yard is dying.
The rain from Saturday only increased Sunday, lightning coming down to crack the earth. Newspapers on Monday ran stories about the bolt that hit a telephone pole right outside of Arden and knocked out power in our half of the town.
It just came back this morning. We spent Monday night in the pitch black with a soggy carpet.
Wind did in Kakashi’s elm tree. It already looked like wind had carved spirals and channels through the bark for rainwater to travel down, and now almost every one of its leaves are either on the ground or somewhere down the street. The storm was harsh on Sunday, harsh enough to break the second largest limb of the elm. Now it just dangles from the trunk like a decapitated arm, something out of a horror movie. Dad let me stay up late once to watch. I remember having nightmares about that for weeks. Itachi had to let me sleep in his bed.
“Is there a reason you haven’t done something about that tree yet?” Iruka asks as he turns the page of the newspaper, pencil hovering over a notebook. “It’s kind of an eyesore.”
Kakashi’s hand is also hovering, his over the chess board, waiting for his mind to tell his hand which chess piece to pick up and kill me with. He hums absently in his throat, and scratches a spot just under the cascade of his bangs. He’s disinclined to answer while trying to concentrate. Not that he really needs to concentrate overly hard against me, but as per the running trend, Kakashi will do just about anything to avoid answering most of Iruka’s questions.
Iruka taps his pointer finger against the pencil and looks to Itachi for help. Itachi is settled comfortably in chair near me, feet tucked under his thighs for warmth. The cup of tea he made twenty minutes ago is still perched on the table, untouched and no longer steaming. Itachi doesn’t like his drinks hot.
“Shade?” Itachi offers lamely.
Kakashi rolls his eyes and takes one of my rooks into captivity.
Iruka’s right. It’s not a pretty tree. Between the innumerable wrinkles in the bark, and the odd angles at which the branches protrude, and the bumps where the tree buckles from pressure, the tree could be a veteran of war. But the tree belongs to the house, and Kakashi doesn’t change what belongs to the house. The woman who lived here beforehand, he told me not too long ago, was Charlotte. Her husband’s name was Hank.
Right now, if I really pretend, we could all live here: Kakashi, Itachi, and me. Kakashi belongs to the house and I can’t leave Itachi behind. Iruka will have to go.
Iruka closes the newspaper in front of him and reaches for the one with today’s date on it. The other one was from yesterday.
“Any luck?” Itachi asks as he tests the temperature of his tea with his finger. Cool enough for his liking, he takes a tiny sip. This is the third day in a row we’ve stayed here after work, almost an hour on Sunday and forty-five minutes yesterday. It’s not like Itachi to take an interest in a near stranger’s problems, but he has. Or at least he looks like he has a few moments at a time. Sometimes, he stops after one question and drops away completely, leaving me wondering why he asked at all. Such an odd scattering of involvement. Odd enough that he involves himself at all, but this is touch and go.
Shaking his head, Iruka viciously turns the pages of the newspaper until he finds the real estate section. “Everything is too big, too expensive, or too far away.”
“The apartment in Garret was nice,” Kakashi says with a nonchalance he doesn’t mean. Every time they discuss housing, Iruka ends up leaving the room and Kakashi gets quieter.
“The apartment in Garret falls into the ‘too far away’ category.”
The chess board in front of me isn’t making any sense. I’m too absorbed in the conversation at hand, but pretending not to be, and at the same time trying to see the web of traps Kakashi’s laid out for me. Kakashi doesn’t mind if I listen, but Iruka’s taken to giving me looks behind his back. I’m not sure what they say yet. I have to figure out what I’ve done before I can puzzle out these candid glances.
“Forty-five minutes,” Kakashi says, as if it cures all. Iruka doesn’t see it that way. They’ve had this conversation.
“Forty-five minutes constitutes as too far of a drive to work.” He puts a large X through a few blurbs on this house and that apartment. “I don’t want to commute.”
Everything else about the apartment, Iruka had said when he found it last week, was perfect. One bathroom, one bedroom, combined living room and kitchen, no dining room. Reasonable price for a bachelor. It’s just not close enough to the school.
“Think about it. With all that money I’d have to spend on gas just getting to work, I’d be better off switching schools. And it’s my first year teaching on my own instead of being a teaching assistant. I’d rather not do that when the year has barely started.”
There’s fire in Iruka’s voice, and Kakashi is the fuel. It’s not exactly fair that Iruka has to keep explaining himself when Kakashi feels no obligation whatsoever, but those are the rules of the house. I understand that. Itachi understands that. Really, I think Iruka understands, too, but the difference is that he lets the rules bother him too much. Sometimes, he argues too hard for Kakashi to let go. Ever since Iruka showed up, I’ve discovered that Kakashi can turn his voice to ice, just like Itachi. And when Kakashi goes to ice, Iruka goes to fire that doesn’t seem to burn. I understand the irony of it all – the way they work and, most of the time, don’t work. They don’t just argue in loud whispers.
“You’re being too picky. It’s just a house, Iruka.” Kakashi scratches the same spot under his bangs. “It’s your move, pretty bird.”
“I’m thinking,” I retort, not taking my eyes off the chess board and finally focusing in on the soldiers. My pieces are white, his black, and black is dominating the board. “Patience is a virtue.”
His thin eyebrow arches, disappearing into the curtain of his bangs. I’ve amused him again. But if I was offended even a week ago, I can’t bring myself to be now. Saturday changed so much between us. I’ve been trying to understand him for so long with no more than baby steps of progress and middles without beginning, like starting a book in the center and reading every other page. But now I know the beginning. Kakashi doesn’t have many pictures, and certainly none that look like they could be his parents. Kakashi doesn’t keep pictures of dead people.
I wonder what Obito looked like. Did he have black hair, blonde hair, red hair? Green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes? Short, tall, somewhere in the middle? Did he look a like Iruka?
“Are you quoting me, pretty bird?”
I place a finger on the crown of my queen, seeing the danger she’s in and knowing that, once again, I can’t do a thing about it. She’s going to die.
Kakashi chuckles and Iruka’s pen makes a thick, scratchy sound against the newspaper, then against the notepad. Sounds like more X’s. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
Itachi switches the tea cup to his other hand, the injured one. He took the gauze off on Monday, saying that he needed to let it breathe. “Try not to get stitches,” he’d said as he clipped straight through the wrappings with a pair of scissors. “They itch really badly.”
“Garret really is a long drive from here,” he says, leaning his head back against the wicker chair. Kakashi’s had the chair stuffed in the corner from the first day I walked in here, and neither of us ever sits in it. The thing looks like something out of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine Mom had in the bathroom – floral and pastel and altogether too pretty for the sleek, black, cherry wood chair I’m sitting in. “We used to have relatives in Garret.”
I frown as I make my move. Tonight will be like last night, then. “We did? Grandmom lived here, not in Garret.”
“You wouldn’t remember. You were four the last time we saw them, and you fidgeted the entire ride.”
“Did not,” I argue, even though, like he said, I don’t actually remember. Because I don’t fidget. I’m good at sitting still.
“Yes, you did,” he says with that odd almost smile. “You always did on long car rides.”
Even his almost smile is slightly sad. I can’t remember the last time he talked about anything even remotely related to the days before we moved into the apartment, and now he’s doing it for the second night in a row. I’m trying to decide if I like his sad version of the almost smile. Is that better than nothing? I remember thinking so.
“Garret is nice,” Iruka agrees without looking at any of us, as if Itachi was contesting him instead of siding with him. Though I don’t think he meant to commiserate. The intensity that is my brother is offset by his wandering mind. I’m used to seeing his eyes lose focus and go cloudy, but he’s always been fixated on one thought. Now, he’s bouncing between a bunch of them and his mouth is playing along. “I just don’t want to be that far away from the school. I’m still new and just getting used to the system.
“Besides,” he smiles hopefully at his newspaper and circles something. “I’m pretty sure the kids like me.”
And just like that, the torch falls to me. Kakashi isn’t inclined to say anything, Iruka holds that smile that can’t be at a price and Itachi blows on tea that isn’t hot. This is another way they argue, not in loud whispers, but in their silence and my carefully selected words. I have no choice but to continue the conversation, carry them on. They won’t do it, and if I don’t it’ll never end.
“You’re a good teacher, Iruka,” I say after a moment’s deliberation. They both relax, somewhat the smile on Iruka’s face morphing into an actual smile. Kakashi moves a bishop one step closer to my queen’s capture. Exercises in patience and humility, that’s just how I see these games now. I’m still going to win one day, but I figure that’ll come after I completely accept defeat.
Maybe Iruka should take a leaf out of my book. It’s somewhat funny that they both think they’ve won. That’s why they never do.
“Do you still want me to give you a ride to the café tomorrow?” Kakashi asks as I realize that he’s in perfect position to take my queen. Nowhere on his face does the slightest bit of excitement, or even acknowledgement, gleam. It’s like he doesn’t know what he’s done.
I look at my brother. Yesterday, when we were all quiet, he abruptly asked Kakashi to drop him off at the café early. No reason given. I’m probably the only one who cared.
Itachi “hmms” to something, he doesn’t know what, the almost smile hanging around. I know that a short while ago I would have killed to see him do that so often, but really, this smile isn’t the same one that Kakashi induces every once in a blue moon. This one is a freeze-frame, like we caught him doing something wrong. It lingers too long on the periphery of his lips, still waiting for someone to call him on it.
“Yes,” I answer for him, taking the torch to the end. “He does.”
The smile vacates premises after a few seconds. A delayed reaction, he could claim. “By five.”
Kakashi hums agreement and I sit back and wait for his final blow.
*^*^*
Sex is equally underrated and overrated.
On the one hand, yes, it can be relaxing after the fact. While it’s happening, with good sex anyway, your senses go first into overdrive before they frazzle out completely. It’s exactly what I imagine being struck by lightning would feel like, were I stupid enough to stand out in the middle of a storm. There’s something altogether exhilarating and terrifying about the simultaneous empowerment and defeat. Sex is an oxymoron, perfect on nights when you feel up to sorting through the incredulity of it in the morning.
It’s harder and harder every time.
All I see in my post-orgasmic hazy sleep are the discouraging sides of sex. My sheets are rumpled, smelly, and sticking uncomfortably to the small of my back and my thighs. My ass and lower back sport a dull ache. I’m torn between wanting a big mug of coffee and a tall glass of ice water, whichever one will wash away the taste of Iruka’s skin from my mouth quicker. My mind, slow but articulate, plods through a bunch of things I need to do today that I forgot to do last night when I should have done them. Change the sheets. Pick up my clothes. Wipe myself down with a washcloth.
Say no to Iruka.
No, you can’t stay here anymore, no, this isn’t going to work much longer, no, you can’t fuck me into the mattress. No, Ruka, I’m not going to pour out my soul, so just forget it.
I remember a time, one, two years ago, when sticky legs weren’t all that big of a deal, when I felt less of the terrors and more of the exhilarations that come with sex. The in-the-moment feeling used to outweigh the consequences, the overwhelming sense of regret I’m experiencing now as I lie on my side, watching the curtains blowing in and up from the window I told Iruka not to open. Reminding me that I put myself in a hole more than a little too deep.
The scent of him is everywhere. On me, the sheets, the pillows. It’s strong enough to slip past the dried cum and all the sweat, just hanging around to tease me. Telling me I knew better. Normal sex is bad enough, but angry sex? Angry sex is even worse. Twice the regret in the morning.
Iruka is in the shower, washing away his half of last night. I used to join him in the morning when he stayed at my apartment overnight, soaped him up and took him from behind, trying not to fall over. There are a lot things we used to do, things I miss. Back before we were complicated.
If he’d just move to Garret, everything would be fine for a while longer. We can go on pretending that we can last forever, even though we’ve never mentioned the words love or boyfriend or future together. We’ve gotten so good at it.
No, I rethink. That’s not quite true. We did mention the word boyfriend once, early on, in his dorm room with hanging paper lanterns and pictures of half-naked girls. He invited me over, bluntly and with the no nonsense tone I’d quickly come to like about him, “to fuck me.” Third time, more than a one-night stand but not enough to constitute a fling. We had no idea what we were doing other than having sex. Good sex.
I still wonder if I was too abrupt. I could have waited. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend,” I told him breathlessly, his cock buried in my ass, just almost brushing the spot that makes the sweat, the stick, the potential regrets worth it.
He didn’t falter so much as pause, and only for a few seconds in which he processed years of sex and what it was worth to him. Our timetables had better alignment at the time. “Who says I am?” he asked, just as breathlessly, but cocky too, as if questioning how I could have thought otherwise.
That’s all it was in the beginning. And now look at the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re fighting over living arrangements.
I should have said no that first night he called after graduation, I decide for the hundredth time since that night. But by then I’d invited him drinking with me and Genma, had him over for the hockey games and ate burnt popcorn with him. We made it safely to friends.
The water isn’t running anymore. I can hear light morning noises through the open window, mostly squirrels going about their business of collecting nuts, and birds going about their branch-to-telephone wire route, gathering bugs and berries in-between. He left the door open wide enough to let all the steam out. I can see the bathtub, the white and green spider-webbed shower curtain drawing back to reveal a naked, drenched Iruka, hair plastered down his neck and cheeks. He looks good naked. He looks good with a towel around his waist, too, but he looks better naked.
He cooked naked in his kitchen for me once. Pancakes with gummy bears. Some textures shouldn’t be mixed.
“You’re awake,” Iruka says as he slips back into the bedroom. Not good morning. I didn’t expect his anger to evaporate during the night. Really, I ought to give up, let him stay as long as he needs. Be a good friend. I can’t though. I feel walls closing in on us. He has to leave soon, before we’re both forced to admit that time doesn’t stand still.
“I’m awake.” Awake and not at all ready to get out of bed and apologize for something I’m not sorry for saying. I want him to leave, sooner rather than later. It’s not even a lie. He gets ticked when I lie, and when I tell the truth. When I don’t say anything at all.
The truly funny thing about all of this is that he’s never asked about my rituals or habits since I told him I couldn’t talk about them.
He might never even ask what’s wrong with me. I ought to see that as less of a threat than Sasuke. Sasuke asked, for months on end at the cemetery. “Why do you talk to him?” he would ask, his nose scrunched up in confusion. “He can’t hear you.”
Such a naïve, simple question. Such a childlike question. And that’s it really. Right there. Sasuke is a child. He’s not an adult who has the foresight to see that I’m starting to lose it, who will insist that I do something about it. I can see how that’ll turn out now. I need therapy. I need a psychiatrist. I need to let go of the past and move on. Easy enough for him to say. He never killed anyone he loved.
That’s part of the reason I agreed to look after Sasuke in the first place. I commiserated with his brother.
No, he doesn’t ask anymore. But it’s there, in the sighs, the looks, the open window. He’s tired of me. And I don’t blame him. I’m hard to deal with and, as patient as Iruka is with me, I have a feeling he’ll crack if he stays here much longer. He’s seeing things that I didn’t let him see before, in addition to what I did. It’s going to be too much at some point. He doesn’t seem to realize that not knowing is infinitely better than knowing. I can’t even imagine how that would play out. “Iruka,” I would say softly, eyes averted. I wouldn’t be able to look at him. “I have conversations with my dead boyfriend. He died eight years ago. I can’t let him go. Oh, and I can’t throw anything in this house away because it reminds me of people I’ve never even met. You understand, don’t you?”
I must have laughed, because Iruka is looking at me quizzically. He’s in his boxers and a button-down left unbuttoned, looking at me carefully. See, he already thinks I’m a ticking time bomb. And he’s right. I’m going to blow us both sky-high.
Time is never on my fucking side. Or more likely, it just never agrees with what I need. Sasuke needed almost no time at all to accept me. Iruka’s still working on it. That’s why he can’t know about the cemetery. It sounds presumptuous and it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I know Iruka. I’ve known him for four years. He’s not the type of person who can work without an explanation. Iruka likes planners, directions, plot summaries, maps. I didn’t use a map on my road trip to Santa Fe. I took roads that felt westerly, roads that felt southerly. Iruka thought we were nuts. Considering we ended up in South Dakota some point along the way, he was right. But we made it.
“Would you look at that,” Asuma said as he lit a cigarette, the exit for Santa Fe a few hundred feet away. “The nuts made it to Santa Fe.” He took a deep inhale of the smoke that I used to smell like all the time. “You wanna be the acorn or the chestnut?”
I want him to understand and take me as I am, just as much as he’d like to know. But he’s not going to like what I have to say. What I do say makes no sense. He already told me once that I should have talked to a therapist after Asuma died, and he didn’t know about Obito then anymore then than he does now. Just one death. I can’t imagine for a one second that he would be okay coming with me every week, watching me, holding his tongue while I descend deeper into psychosis. Beneath all the muck of emotional and neurotic encyclopedia entries that explain why I’m such a commitment-phoebe, that’s what I dread the most: someone, anyone, suggesting that I should stop.
What if I fall for Iruka? What comes next? All secrets bared and an obligation to let him save me from myself? Therapy. Grief counseling. The whole spiel. And I’m just supposed to take it in stride because he loves me and wants only the best for me.
Stopping isn’t in my plan. Not until I tell him what I keep meaning to tell him. And for some reason, which Father Time might delineate to me when he feels good and ready, I think I need Sasuke to do that. I need what he gives me. Sasuke’s eyes, when he looks at me, are curious, often bewildered, and sometimes stunned, but that I can take. Iruka looks at me with concern, with worry, with caution, and, most distressingly, with disappointment.
Dig even further into my brain for an extra kick to the stomach. The people I fall in love with have a nasty habit of dying. So even if I’m wrong and Iruka does understand my neurosis, I’d live in the perpetual fear that he’d die, so I’d never be able to enjoy his company. I would rather Iruka stay alive and hate me for being a closed-off ass than stay with me and die. I’d rather not live with that hanging over our heads. I’d rather not lose the one chance I have to make amends.
So this is what I do, now that I’ve gotten myself deeper with him than I meant to, so far that I lost track of what we are. I take a deep breath as he leans over to get his watch from the table, smelling the wrong scent on him. He smells like my shampoo. He smells like me. He smells like me and I smell like him. It’s been like this for days. I touch his hair, the shell of his ear, meet those brown eyes full of worry and caution.
Exhale.
“I told you not to open the window,” I say just loudly enough to hear. I’m telling you everything, in my own way, Iruka. I’m telling you that whether or not you protest, we are going to end. I’m not going to give him up. You’ll be gone when you figure that out, even if I do let you in on my secret. See, baby, the violence is up to you.
Iruka bites his lips, looking over his shoulder at the window. There’s disappointment in his eyes. No smiles. “It’s stuffy in here,” he says as he picks up the watch and fastens it around his wrist. “You can close it if you want.”
He doesn’t see it because his back is turned, but I smile for both of us. I keep letting him down enough and he’ll catch on. I wish there was another way to break this cycle, but I’m not up to falling in love. There’s a hell of a lot to lose if I do.
*****
I’m sure it’s considered, by all accounts, childish to glare at inanimate objects. Like cursing at an armchair after you’ve stubbed your pinky toe. You are clearly at fault for the pain, whether by angle miscalculation or pure inattention. The chair didn’t do anything but sit there, waiting for the next patient to fill out its contours.
But, the way I figure it, coffee is made from a plant that was, at some point on a plantation in South America, alive. Therefore, my glare at the mug of Folgers on my desk is not entirely unjustified.
Psychologists call this phenomenon scapegoating, and ninety percent of the patients that pass in and out of my door are guilty of it. Including Itachi, who hasn’t occupied that chair for more than three weeks.
By all rational standards, I ought to drop him from my list of clientele. He’s shown no signs of progress. I’m not an impatient person, all things considered, and I don’t think I was all that rash during our last meeting. We just aren’t getting anywhere together. Short of blackmail, I don’t think there’s any way to get through to him. And it’s a shame. For both of us, it’s a shame.
At least I know that he doesn’t hate me, I think bitterly. That has to count for something.
It wouldn’t take more than a second to scribble the note for my receptionist. She’d tap a few keys at the computer, sending the court official notice, Itachi would transfer, and I’d have a free hour to myself tomorrow. I could go home early, have some leftover pasta, and watch the Thursday night game.
Every time I pick up the pen, though, I put it down again; allergic, suddenly, to ink.
Against my better judgment, I’m still hoping that the kid will show up and take his sullen place in the brown leather chair.
Curiously, even in my imagination he doesn’t talk about his problems. Something is different, nonetheless. I think he might be smiling. Which is crazy, because I’ve never seen him smile before.
I put down the pen for the sixth time.
Was I too hasty with him? Certainly, I don’t approve of how I saw him treat his brother, but a differentiation in morals is no reason to drop a client. Neither is my frustration or his unwillingness to cooperate. That’s my fucking job. I coax, lull into security. I don’t make an enemy of myself and, in return, I earn a bit of trust that he sorely needs.
He doesn’t. When I look into his eyes, examine his body stance, there’s no trust to be found. Still thinks I’m out to get him. I suppose, when it boils down, Itachi and I have drastically different ideas of what help entails. My version of help is to be nothing more than a confidant. I don’t have to say a word. I’ve had patients specifically request that I dole out no snippets of advice and just listen.
My pen taunts me. For being unable to admit to the basest of human emotions, and even more for infringing on one of the cardinal rules of psychiatric treatment: Don’t get emotionally involved with your patient. Feel for them, empathize with them, but don’t invest yourself in their lives outside of the office. Coffee may have taken me there, but Itachi should have kept me away. Psychiatrists are not meant to be friends, or even acquaintances, with their patients. Because here’s what happens: You run into one that doesn’t want to listen to you or be listened to, and all that messy stuff that friends have to shift through – the loyalty and backstabbing, the truth and the lies, the investment and drainage – all of it’s up around your neck.
I want to help him. He doesn’t want me to help. That hurts.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that I’ve gotten too close to him. The beauty of psychiatry is supposed to be the anonymity. It’s easier to spill your troubles to a random stranger than your father. Your father looks at you as if you should have known better. The stranger shakes your hand and says, ‘Nice talking to you and good luck with that. Hope it all works out.’
I want things to work out for him. I want someone to be the one to get a good reaction out of him, the right kind of anger at the right person. His father. Not me, and not himself. And the selfish, unprofessional part of me hopes that he can do it with me. Because I care about what happens to him. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it had to have happened beyond these walls. I’ve had stubborn patients in the past who didn’t get along with me and I had no trouble dropping them to let them move on, to find someone else who feels safe.
Itachi, in all his intractability, is not the problem. He’s just a patient. Granted, he’s the most difficult of the patients I’ve had in my two years of practice, and likely the most distrustful, but he’s allowed to be and, in the office, that’s precisely what he is to me.
Outside the office, it’s different. Outside the office, it’s harder to see him as just a patient. Things got personal when I saw him in a red apron, slamming biscotti down in front of me, hunkered down in my car, hand bleeding into my shirt. In a pizzeria with his little brother.
Our meeting was so random, too. How was I to know where he worked and how was I to know he’d react quite that badly? Maybe I should have known better, I don’t know, but I do know that I, accidentally and misguidedly, gave us a history. It’s not a good history, it’s not a bad history, but it’s there. It’s hard not to care about someone you have a history with. People bond through contact, after all. We’ve had more contact than is necessary for a doctor and a patient.
The dinner. That dinner was the best and worst of it. I should never have taken him out to dinner, let alone his little brother. Because it’s not his little brother either, and it’s not the way he acts around his little brother or what he expects from him. It was seeing it at all that’s turned out to be the problem.
I pick up the pen again, amazed, in spite of my education, at how complex and nonsensical human emotions can be. How is it that I can feel like such a prick and so self-righteous at the same time? I overacted but I’m glad I did?
“That’s not why I did it.” Those words of his keep floating around in my skull, the push and pull of my cynicism and optimism whacking them around like ping-pong balls. If for no other reason than Itachi is about as revealing as an Eskimo in the dead of winter, I’m convinced that there really is more to that story. There has to be more to the story. He’d tell me if there weren’t.
After all, I was right from the beginning. He never hated me. He just really, really wanted to. Now he’ll go on hating himself for not hating me, and I’ll hate him for being such an incredibly repressed, emotional, cynical mess, and then I’ll hate myself because I’m not supposed to be close enough to him to hate him for being a mess.
Mess. Big, fucking mess. All of it.
I hear a light clacking sound and realize that I’ve thrown my pen across the room. It hit the wall right under the signed poster of Ella Fitzgerald, some gem my dad found before I was born that became my birthday present the year I turned seven.
My office is filled to the brim with my personal effects. I know that a psychiatrist’s office, ideally, should host a distinctive lack of stimulation to maximize client relaxation. Soft colors, blank walls, dim lighting. Things that make you mellow. What I find, however, is that most of my patients didn’t mind the posters and the framed photographs. Those mean that I have a passion in life, an investment in something that doesn’t involve dissecting their brain. Some have roved the office from corner to corner, peering at the album covers of my childhood idols and those of my father in cheap jazz hovels in Boston. They’re intrigued by the sunglasses in the dark and the romanticism of novelty film students. Everything’s beautiful in black and white photography. A blonde told me so when I took her back to my apartment. She picked up the photo of my father at his piano, at the piano she thought was mine, and said, “I bet you play beautifully.”
That was about the time I moved my dad’s old things to the office. If I’d have known that would put people at ease in those few months after her kind words sent me into a tumult, I would have done it intentionally. Still, I’ve found these items fortuitous in putting my patients at ease; they ought to give someone the warm fuzzies, after all.
I guess I’ve become too accustomed to happy accidents to remember that there are such things as bad repercussions. His hand, last Thursday, ill will, they’re all bad for us.
Just as I’ve lifted myself out of my seat to retrieve my pen, because for some reason I never have pens that actually work in my office and I’m going to need it if I ever pluck up the courage to write down his name, there’s a soft beeping sound and the rapid blinking from the first red light on my answering machine. During office hours, I switch the phone from ring to beep in case a patient is in the room. The tone is set on low so as to not disturb their train of thought or startle them. I tend to forget to switch it back to ring on my breaks, thus all my calls end up going straight to voicemail when I could have been answering them.
Leaving the pen for a moment, I pick up the receiver and press the button for line one. My system is only rigged for two lines, one of which is the desk downstairs and one of which is my private line. I only give out my private line to patients in case of emergency. The light for the desk is the one blinking, so I patch myself directly to Izzy.
“That was fast,” she says as soon as she picks up. Her phone, which has more blinking lights than mine because she mans the fort for the other psychiatrist in the building as well, knows when I call the same way I know she’s called me. “Normally takes you a few minutes.”
“I was right at the desk,” I retort indignantly. “Didn’t listen to the message though, so I’m going to have to make you repeat yourself.”
She laughs. Izzy thinks everything I say is funny. “I have something for you. One of your patients dropped it off just a few minutes ago.”
I twirl the phone cord around my pinky finger, fondly recalling a night Dad actually called when he said he would. “Which patient?”
“He didn’t leave a name.”
The cord snaps back as I release and bounces loosely. I look at my watch. Five minutes left of my break. I have plenty of time to dash downstairs and pick up this mystery drop-off. It’s not like I have to deal with an elevator or mad rushes of people coming up and down the narrow stairwell of the converted Victorian. We’re very low key. “I’ll be right down.”
The wallpaper covering the room from floor to crown molding is a soft, pale pink, pinstriped with white. It’s feminine enough to remind me that there was a family living here eighty years ago, when all cars were Fords and candy cost a penny. Family portraits hung somewhere on these walls.
Every once in a while it strikes me that this is the perfect place to let go of ghosts and vendettas. They would simply join the ones the wars left behind.
Izzy smiles widely when she see me. She’s a small girl with brown hair and lots of freckles who looker younger than me but actually tops me by three years. No doubt she still gets carded at bars. I suspect she might be a victim of unrequited love for me, if those smiles are indicative at all. She doesn’t smile at Dr. Yamoto quite as broadly.
I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of paper, because I looked right over the cup Izzy motioned toward as she picked up the public line. I have to give the desk a second sweep before my brain readjusts to the correctional information. A cup. A cardboard cup with a familiar logo and an even more familiar aroma.
Hazelnut vanilla.
Tucked into the cardboard that protects my hands from burning is a piece of paper that looks like an order slip. I nearly smile, more interested in the note than the coffee. The paper is overly warm in my palm, feeling ready to burst into flames from heat exposure.
Itachi has neat handwriting. That’s the first thing I’m able to put together as I scan perfectly formed, even lettering. It takes a few seconds getting over the admiration of his penmanship before they make any sense. And even after they form real words, I’m not completely sure they make sense. This seems to be his version of an apology and I’m not quite sure I buy it. But it’s very intriguing.
Doctor,
Not this Thursday. And not in the office.
The Wok Grill, next Thursday.
Seven.
Itachi
I sigh before I can catch anymore professionally sticky implications. Will he ever call me by the actual name? Even Dr. Hoshigaki would do it. Doctor, remembering our first meeting, still sounds incredibly condescending coming from him. ‘You can’t help me, Doctor,’ he said. He was so sure nothing would come of me. Then I had to go and show up on his doorstep, and now I have his idea of amendment in the palm of my hand. Somewhere in between that and this, history recorded.
I pocket the note and thank Izzy for the message, blowing at my Red Lantern coffee through the slit on the rim. The hollow, reedy echo is this whole mess of ours reaching crescendo.
Chapter Six-Part 2
