I still see him sometimes.
He frolics, a boy who doesn’t feel the weight of the place where he lives. His hands toy with mine. He doesn’t hold things, holding my hands is the wrong word.
Can hands kiss? he asks. Questions are his favorite form of play.
I don’t know.
I think they can. His laughter rings in beats of three, all the way down to his fingers. Our hands are kissing.
He settles in his bed during the painful hours. Needles protrude from his body, tubes and machines with names too difficult to pronounce attached. He’s a machine of his own. A broken one engineers deemed doctors take a crack at.
His nerves protest, sharp, like a jab in the ribs. I see their symptoms in his twitching face, the shifts, and subtle groans. None inhibit his curiosity. His mind, while his body cannot, frolics all the same. He continues to play with my hands in any way he can. He laughs when his ribs allow it.
Needles are swords, he says. Pretending. His most glorious of games. Pills are gems.
What are gems? I ask.
They’re stones, he says. Very pretty stones. Some even shine. Like the sun.
Aren’t all stones pretty?
No, he says. His voice shifts with his body, into a territory where playing takes too much energy. He empties, little by little. The disease drains him and weighs him down.
I feel like a stone, he says, sinking into the bed.
I interlace our fingers and move along the joints so that he knows I’m still there. Our hands kiss.
You’re a gem then, I say. Like the sun.
He likes touching in the same way he likes pretending, asking, talking, even when he has nothing to say. It makes him feel like he has a greater purpose than just to be kept from death.
He smiles for me, but his face twitches. He shifts, rustling the sheets, looking out his window.
The sun rises every day, he says, light affectionately caressing his skin between the blinds. Do you think it rises because it fell?
He didn’t understand that I could’ve never answered him at the time.
I never knew any more than what he taught me. I knew that hands could kiss, and that I wanted to caress his face as the light did.
He was my light. He was my sunset. Violent with color. Submerged peacefully by the dark.
That was a long time ago.
He lives in my memory now. Buried. Rebellious, as he was before. He emerges, sometimes, in the corner of my eye, his laughter lost in a crowd, remnants of his questions still waiting for answers in the night.
The truth is, I don’t fear the night at all.
I live in it. Your eyes adjust, your hands become used to not being kissed, and your heart settles in the numb. The night isn’t the enemy I make it out to be. It’s the natural state of things when your sun burns out.
So color me surprised, when years after mine has long set, a beam of yellow rises from the stairwell and eclipses the gray…
Yellow.
Her hair is yellow. Not blonde or flaxen, yellow. Like dandelions and lemons. The color crowds dark roots just enough that you know it’s a choice, framing her face with the glasses perched on her nose. The eyes behind them flicker and I can hardly breathe when they land on me.
“Eric!” Sony spreads her arms and legs out as if it’s possible to conceal foaming beer bottles and cigarette stench by puffing her feathers. “Would it help if I told you your shoes are just stunning!”
While still holding the door open, Eric makes a throat-cutting motion across his neck. Sony promptly shuts up in response.
“Hikari,” Eric sighs, “This is Neo, Sony, C, and Sam.”
Hikari.
Does Hikari know she has suns in her eyes?
“Hey there!” Sony yells, waving with an open mouth while C waves more subtly, and Neo just nods his chin.
“Hi,” Hikari says. Her voice is liquid, streaming, sultry and cool like shade spooling over the edge of her mouth on a hot day.
“Wow,” Sony says, making her way into Hikari’s personal space. “You’re pretty.”
“Sony,” Eric scolds.
“It’s fine,” Hikari says, like she’s amused, enchanted even by Sony’s enchantment with her.
“Are you fun?” Sony asks. “You seem fun.”
“I like to think so.”
“Hikari,” Neo says, pensive over the syllables as he rolls his chair deliberately in front of Sony. “Are you from Japan?”
“My parents are,” Hikari says. “I’m from the suburbs.”
“I’m from the suburbs too,” Sony coos.
Neo rolls his eyes. “Didn’t know the suburbs were in hell.” He deservedly gets flicked on the temple for that statement. “Hey!”
“That’s Neo,” Sony says, patting his head. “He’s our baby.”
“Your captive is what I am!” Neo smacks her hand off. “Hikari, you’ve got legs. Run for it.”
“Oh dear God,” Eric sighs into his hands, and I now wonder if they teach babysitting in nursing school.
“That’s C.” Sony points. “His name is big, and French like him, so we just call him C.”
“Hi, Hikari. Do you need any help to get settled?” C leans over Neo’s handles, propping his upper body weight on them. The wheelchair tips back, Neo nearly falling out of it. He hits C’s arm with his notebook till the wheels reconcile with the ground.
“I’ll help!” Sony offers.
“No, you will not.” Eric grabs her and C by the sleeves, using his foot to keep Neo in line.
“But–”
“I don’t wanna hear it. And cigarettes? Really? Have some class.” He starts pulling them toward the door held open by a cinder block. “Go to your rooms.”
“But Erriicccc–” Sony whines, trying in vain to return to her newcomer. “What about initiation? I haven’t even told her my jokes–”
“Get downstairs– Hikari!” Eric’s face changes instantly, chin hooked on his shoulder, welcoming grin beaming. “Sam will show you back to your room. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Bye Hikari!” Sony says, waving her arm straight out over her head. “We’ll find you when we escape!”
“Keep walking!”
The door shuts, locking my friends’ and their captor’s voices behind its creak. Hikari stays put, only turning once there’s nothing else to face but me.
I can’t move. Because for the split second that she turns her head, I catch someone else’s shadow in her place, someone else’s expression, someone with the same eyes and the same voice from a different lifetime.
“You’re Sam,” Hikari says, half a question balanced on her lips.
“Yes,” I breathe, half enthralled, half stunned, fully terrified.
Hikari cocks her head to the side, gaze traveling about me as if I’m wearing a map for clothes and she’s reading the landmarks. She smiles with a crooked edge. “Are you shy, Sam?”
“I–uh.” My voice stutter–treacherous thing. “I’m not shy–I don’t think. I’m just bad at existing.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just–I guess this body never felt like mine.”
Hikari’s smile stretches rather than fades, that earlier amusement playing with her features.
“Did you steal it?”
Hikari is a patient, and from the glossy white band on her wrist, she’s going to be here for a while. This can only go one way: We keep exchanging these pleasantries. I offer to help however she may need. She accepts a bit and declines most. Then we part ways and become backgrounds to each other. That’s how it always goes. That’s how the part of me that’s terrified of her needs it to go.
“Would you like me to show you around?” I ask, recoiling, trying to stare at the ground instead of at her. “I could show you the cafeteria or the gardens?”
Hikari laughs, three beats worth, roaming the roof with a slow, coquettish step.
“No,” she says.
“No?”
“No, I’m not a fan of small talk,” she says. Her baggy white t-shirt doesn’t quite fit, and the skirt that bares her legs flows with the wind as her hair trickles like liquid gold down to her forearms. There, bandages conceal her from wrist to elbow, and though I want to ask what led her to the hospital, Hikari has other plans.
“I have an agenda,” she says. “Not to mention, I like exploring one thing at a time.”
“You’re exploring the roof?”
“I’m exploring you.” Hikari hooks her chin on her shoulder, her mischief grinning back at me. “Didn’t you know, Sam? People have stories written on them, around them, in their past, in their futures. I like to unravel them.”
As invasive as that sounds, the wind catches her scent and distracts me with it, a sweet yet forceful thing. I almost lean into it before catching myself, but Hikari notices. She smirks, and I’m starting to realize, as she eyes me like a book she wants to tear off a shelf, that she may be more of a trouble maker than any of my thieves.
“Sam,” she says, not to me, to the sky, testing my name, like a lyric she can’t place. “It’s funny. I feel like we’ve met before.”
My heart leaps into my throat. I swallow, unable to speak in anything past a whisper. “Maybe in a past life.”
The wind disturbs us, knocking the glass bottles into each other. Hikari’s gaze drifts to the ash marks and spilled alcohol at my feet.
“You stole those cigarettes and beers, right?”
“Technically, Sony and C stole the cigarettes and beers.”
“So you’re just an accomplice,” she says, her suave nature replaced by a long sigh. “Well, it looks like you’ll have to do.”
Without another word, Hikari flips her hair into a ponytail and treads to the door.
“Wh-where are you going?”
“I’ve got something to steal. And you’re going to help me.”
“I–but–” I stutter, but ultimately the gravity of my infatuation is stronger than that pesky shadow on my shoulder telling me this is a bad idea, so what can I do but follow her? “Where did you say you were from?”
“An infernal little town in the middle of nowhere.”
“Nowhere?”
“The kind of place everyone wants to know everyone else’s secrets.”
“Well, that sounds like everywhere.”
“Where are you from, Sam?”
That’s a question I often find difficulty answering. Not to mention following Hikari down the stairs and waiting for an elevator, there isn’t much to do except look at her and every time I look at her, my thoughts no longer begin or end, they jumble together until I’m an incoherent mess of flustered attitudes trying not to stare so long that my cheeks flush and butterflies make a funhouse of my stomach.
I clear my throat. The elevator arrives, and Hikari leads the way into it, pressing the button for the ground floor.
“I’m from here,” I say.
“The city?”
“The hospital.”
A less amused expression finds Hikari. She holds onto the back railing as I do. So little distance remains between my hand and hers that I wonder what it would feel like if they kissed.
“Sam.”
“Hm?”
“What do you have?” Hikari asks, and for such a serious question, it is so softly said.
This is a scripted moment between sick people. A rule of sorts. It states that when you meet someone within these walls, you are to ask one thing. What do you have? Who is your killer? It’s a different outfit, but it’s the same question. What she’s asking is why I’ve been confined to the hospital for so long that I view myself as an extension of it. She wants to know to what degree I’m dying.
Looking at her bandages and the otherwise healthy nature of her being, I want to ask her the same, but–
“You’re not supposed to ask that,” I lie. And rather than nod or say she understands, another easy fit of laughter shakes Hikari’s chest. Three beats again. As if her heart is laughing with her.
“What, like prison? What are you in for, Sam?”
“Apparently, I’m an accomplice to petty larceny.”
“Good,” she says, the word paired with flirtatious endnotes. “Then this won’t be your first time.”
The elevator doors open, but neither Hikari nor I make a move.
I told you I like to watch people, but sometimes I struggle talking to them. When you’ve lived in the same place as long as I have, you find that people don’t know what to say to someone they think is dying. People feel awkward around the sick, so they pretend the sickness is invisible. They avoid the elephant in the room so blatantly that you can tell it’s all they’re thinking about. They create distance without even meaning to because distance is comfortable.
But not everyone gets stuck in that pattern. Hikari thinks I’m dying. I know she is. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be here needing a tour guide who’s been convinced to help her commit a crime instead. Yet somehow, whatever distance I create, Hikari wants to close it—with her curiosity, her teasing tone, her pretty looks, and her even prettier language.
“You’re not very skilled at conversation, are you, Sam?”
Crap. I was staring again.
“Um–I–sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” she asks.
We step out of the elevator’s mouth onto the ground floor. She stops to sightsee the atrium, the light pooling through the windowed ceiling, and all the faded colors to pair it. When she looks at me again, that playful manner returns to ghost over her smile. “I’m plenty good at it for the both of us, and it’s actually kind of cute how nervous you are.”
My face heats, and suddenly I can’t form a single syllable, let alone a sentence to respond.
Hikari smirks. “There’s a library here, right?”
I nod, and because I know I won’t get any answers from her before I do, I lead her there. The library is different from the atrium, more secluded, less central and medical. It’s where patients can come to read in the plush chairs and find little worlds to escape into.
“Excuse me, ma’am? I can’t seem to find this book,” Hikari says to the volunteer behind the counter. She says a random title and author so out there I’m not certain either exists. “Do you think you could help me?”
The volunteer nods curtly and says she’ll look in the back.
“I don’t think checking out a book is stealing unless you intend never to give it back,” I whisper.
Hikari quirks a brow. “Why do you steal, Sam? You and your thieves.”
“Don’t ask why.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in reasons.”
“Why not?”
I narrow my eyes at her inability to suppress her teasing.
“We made a hit list,” I say. “We steal to fill it.”
Hikari catches me glancing over her shoulder.
“Coast is clear?”
“Huh?”
It dawns on me that a book is not what Hikari sets her sights on. She doesn’t waste a second hopping up and over the counter to the other side. My jaw drops, neck craning side to side frantically to make sure no one is looking.
“What are you–”
Without care, Hikari undoes the electric pencil sharpener on the front desk and uses a pen to dislodge the sharpener part. I cringe as it makes a noise like breaking glass. Hikari holds it up to the light, testing the authenticity of the blade before frowning when she realizes bolts still bind it to some of the plastic.
“She’s coming back,” I whisper, and Hikari doesn’t bother looking. She takes a few pieces of paper and a pencil, concealing her spoils beneath them. Then, she hops back over the counter, grabbing me by the sleeve of my shirt.
I panic. Every nerve in my body pulls taut. The finite distance left between her skin and mine is so slight that I can practically feel the heat radiating beneath her bandages.
“Hurry,” Hikari laughs, letting me go and winking as she starts running away with me in her shadow.
I gaze at the papers she holds tightly without crumpling. “Are you an artist?”
“Of sorts,” she says, looking over her shoulder and giggling as the volunteer looks around to see where we’ve gone. She storms an empty elevator, using her foot to keep it open so I can catch up to her. Once the doors close, she throws her head back, exposing the columns of her throat. A scar I can’t help but admire peeks from her collar as she searches for her breath.
“A hit list?”
“Hm?”
“You said you made a hit list,” Hikari repeats, her eyes softer now, diluted in the darker color, as if a wave of something comfortable and tired just hit her.
“To kill our enemies,” I say.
“How poetic.”
“You condone stealing because it’s poetic?”
Hikari smiles. Contagious smile. It doesn’t catch my lips, but its crook certainly tries.
“There’s nothing more human than sin,” she says, shrugging. “Now, where might I find a screwdriver, my dear accomplice?”
Being called anything of hers brings back that warmth to my face, making me stutter. “Why do you need a screwdriver?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in reasons.”
I can’t help the laughing breath that escapes me. I shake my head to scare the smile away. I rarely smile, rarely even for my thieves, but even this fear I can’t explain has no power compared to her.
We reach the floor where her room resides. The whole path, our distance, becomes a plaything.
Out of the multiple maintenance employees, there is one who always leaves his supply bag unattended, and though he’s taken numerous falls from a faulty step ladder, he has not learned his lesson. Hikari and I peek in the supply closet I knew he’d be in. He’s fixing a lightbulb, his back to us, wobbling as the step ladder threatens to give out again.
I put a finger to my lips. Hikari nods and watches me carefully step into the closet. Tools spill out of the bag, a screwdriver in the corner. I grab it as quickly as possible, but a draft buckles the step ladder. The maintenance employee falls to the floor, almost onto me.
“Hey!” he yells. I jump over him as Hikari shrieks and shuts the door behind me, the two of us making yet another run for it.
“You were holding out on me,” Hikari laughs.
“I never do this.”
“You never steal?”
“I never run.”
“Well,” Hikari breathes, “you ran for me.”
Under the hall light, a pack of doctors storms through, interrupting us. They rush, residents, the tadpoles of the training pool, following an attending. Hikari and I step back against the wall like cars pulling over for an ambulance. Whitecoat wingtips wave past, two nurses in tow, one with a stethoscope around her neck, another looking at her beeper. Their expressions are unreadable–part of their training.
Hikari follows the responders with her gaze, worry there. I don’t waste time. The patient they tend to is in his own limbo. Our wondering will do nothing for him.
Hikari doesn’t relax once they’re out of sight. If anything, her habit of observing doesn’t stray. The way I resume our escape like nothing happened strikes her more than it should.
“You’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you?” Another half question. This time the assumption speaks for itself. I told you that I see the same things day after day. Apathy is a symptom of repetition. I pay running doctors the mind you would pay a breeze.
“Life,” I say, “may not be the right word for what you’re thinking of.”
It finally dawns on her. That I may not be exactly like other patients or other people she’s met. Narrators are a natural part of the picture until you take a second glance at them.
“Who are you, Sam?” she asks and when she does, yellow flairs dance in her eyes. “Something tells me you’re more than just a familiar stranger?”
Look into a person and see someone you used to know and ask yourself if you believe in reincarnation. If you believe a soul is never truly dead, only passed on to another body, another mind, another life, another reality. If you do, I must ask, what do you think makes someone real?
Is it the ability to touch them? To feel the palpable nature of their heat, the texture of their skin, the pulse thrumming in their veins? Or is someone real simply when their name is said aloud? When you breathe it into otherwise empty air, and it fills with their notion?
Hikari moves closer, and an old fear I know all too well wraps its claws around my shoulders.
It may not make sense to you, but I’ve only ever known one person who could compare to the light she emits. You may think she looks like him, acts like him, and that’s why I’m so enthralled.
He’s dead. He’s a ghost, and so is what we shared, so I don’t compare the two. I compare only what they are. And sometimes suns are so bright that you’re forced to look away.
The fear takes over as it did when I caught her color on that bridge and whispers its rules:
If she is what I think she is, I must not, for any reason, fabricated or not, say her name. And I must not let us close that distance for any custom, invitation, or temptation. I must not let her be real.
“I’m–”
“Hikari!” Hikari’s face falls into an annoyed scowl. An older couple, each wearing visitor badges, calls for her, stomping down the hall.
“Sorry, stranger,” she sighs. “Fun’s over.”
“Give it to me,” I say. Hikari looks at my outreached palms, confused. “I’ll tell them it was my fault. That I stole them,” I say. “I’m an accomplice either way. You might as well let me take the blame.”
“Trying to be a knight in shining armor, are you?” Hikari slips the stolen artifacts into her pocket save the papers, which she uses to hide the bulge of the screwdriver and sharpener. “Don’t worry. One day you’ll have the chance to steal for me again.”
“Hikari!” her mother begins, worry wounding her face tight, her words coming out as loud scoldings in a language I don’t understand. Hikari doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even seem to care that she’s getting yelled at.
Although when her mother turns to me, frowning harder, and starts to say something, Hikari stands in front of me. She talks back to her mother with crossed arms, coming to my defense. I wish I could follow her when she gets taken away by the hand.
All I can think of the further she gets taken from me is that the more Hikari gets to know this place and the more it becomes a part of her, the more she’ll come to realize the truths only our killers can teach her: No matter what you steal, the nights are long and one day is as much an illusion as reason.
“Sam!”
Sony doesn’t always need her oxygen therapy. Her single lung fluctuates in efficiency, but she certainly isn’t supposed to run. Not ever. So when she and C come storming down the hall without a wheelchair following them, my stomach drops.
“Why aren’t you in your rooms?”
“It’s Neo,” Sony says. “He’s going into surgery early.”
“What?”
“His parents are here,” C adds, and all three of us know that if we aren’t quick enough, it’ll mean disaster.
