"I close my eyes harder and I still see nothing."

It is a vast nothingness you walk down, a long narrow road that you make narrower with your feet and by the way you sway from side to side in your walk. You choose to walk that silly, because it makes you who you are.

"I don't like it. Feels like I'm going to tip over and fall on my head."

You're not doing so well. Not at all...
 

The young man opened his eyes, hearing himself mumble unintelligible words. He had been talking to someone but even now he still could not make out who it had been. There was no one in the room with him, and he did not remember asking anyone over. He must have been dreaming one of those dreams where you talk and kick and feel silly when you wake up.

He moved his head to clear the images of the fading dream. He shook his head harder, not understanding what had happened last night. He was sure he had been moderate in his drinking.

Some mornings you wake up screwy and time makes no sense. Well, don't be such a lazy bug and hurry up out of bed. Time's flying and you ain't got... He stared at the radio as it blasted with its cheerful morning chit-chat. A song soon followed about a young man trying to beach a whale and his lover asking him to quit. Yoji rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

"Good morning?"

The silhouette of Ken Hidaka appeared at the door. The sudden intrusion on his privacy made Yoji startle, but Ken did not notice. He was smiling at him and he entered to light up the lamp by the bed.

"You sure get stuck on those covers, man," he said. "Have you any idea what time it is? A bit more and you would have broken your record."

"Ken? What time is it?"

"3.00 PM. I was beginning to wonder if you had not died in this bed or left some stuffed animal in your place. But, why would you want to do that?"

Ken's body became a shadow of movement as he shifted from one side of the room to the next, picking up the clothes they had left lying in the floor last night and tiding up the place. He had a sort of nervous tick, Yoji though, about the way rooms looked. Ken couldn't leave a place looking messy even if they paid him. Every now and the he'd look at Yoji as he dressed slowly, and wondered what was wrong with him. There was something wrong, he could tell.

“Don't suppose there's breakfast, ah, Ken?”

“You're blowing my whistle, bro,” Ken laughed and bent down to pick a stray sock. “That's been done ages ago. The leftovers aren't even around anymore.”

“Swell, bro.” Yoji stared at the reflection in the mirror. It sure looked sick, his hair a mess on his head and dark circles under his eyes. “Swell.”
 

He had been following him for a long time. Following him blindly as if it were some unknown steps he were taking and he could be nothing without him. Asleep, awake, he was always following, and he could feel the moment when he got up and decided to follow.

Aya stood by the counter with his hands inside his jeans, waiting until the register would return his change. He always wore the same jeans and sweater it seemed to Yoji. It looked so comfortable on him that it made him look twice whenever he'd wear something else. So unlike himself, who wore outlandish clothing just for the thrill of knowing people stared at the outlandish. He stood outside, trying to look smug with his cigarette in his hand, watching the ashes fall as the butt smoked itself.

Finally, Aya stepped out of the bistro, clutching his bag under his arms. He didn't look suave or cool, merely like a person who just got a bag of things he likes to eat and makes a casual walk down the street. Part of the city and the bustle and the walkers, part of the unknown language spoken by the hissing smoke coming out from under the streets through the manholes.  For a while, Yoji stood silent watching him walk towards him, while he looked at the receipt and then stuffed it in his pants. Yoji didn't feel part of anything.

“The price of everything rises and rises,” Aya said halfway to himself. “I wonder when I'll have to pay six yen for the same cup of coffee?”

Yoji fell in step beside the young man, watching him produce the coffee cup and the straw from his bag. Aya did not look at him and continued to walk, knowing that Yoji was beside him. He stopped as a yellow taxi crossed the street they were crossing, but Yoji kept on walking just like the rest of the people who continued down the street as if cars didn't cross there at all. Aya skipped a step and caught up with Yoji and began to drink the hot coffee. Yoji took another slug of his cigarette and blew the smoke at the grey windows of the buildings they were passing.

“You think about where it's going? All of it?”

Aya looked at him and took another sip. He looked at the street where the cars where bumper to bumper behind busses, and people rushed up and down the sidewalk they had taken.

“No,” Aya said. “I know it's always been here and will probably be here when we're gone.”

“Only coffee will be a lot more expensive.”

“And people paid more, so it'll still be the same.”

Yoji tossed the burnt butt into a crumpled trash can hanging from the dark metal post sign for walk/no walk. They stopped and waited for their turn. The people behind them stopped as well, each minding their own business. The newspaper they were reading, the conversation they were having with the man or woman near them, the distant look they carried just as their hands carried their briefcases. Yoji wondered what would happen if he'd step out into the street now, without waiting for the ‘walk’ sign. The people behind him would step off as well, he thought. That would be a sight.

“It's red Yoji.”

The young man snapped out of his daydream and stared at Aya's back as the red head crossed the street before him. His hair swayed in the breeze from the ally the street lead to, where it branched into a million more streets with people and cars.

He was following him. Always following him.
 
 

“You sleep too much in the mornings, Yoji.”

Drawing his shades over his eyes so that no one could see his dark circles, Yoji ignored the commentary. He always felt tired, he wanted to say, but he kept it in himself. Maybe some people were born with weak bodies and always felt tired for one reason or another, but they might say that was a lot of stupid excuses. Maybe it was an excuse, but he sure didn't feel any different.

“Maybe you need my chicken clock.” Omi splattered some strawberry jelly  on a new cookie and started to munch on it. He had decided to join Yoji in a short 3.00 PM breakfast. “I know when I need to wake up, I always use that clock. Makes me jump right out of bed.”

“Yoji needs to chicken clocks then,” Ken said. He closed the refrigerator behind him and brought the tuna fish can he brought out to the table. “One to wake him and the other to remind him that the ‘few more minutes’ he's taken are done.”

“Funny Hidaka,” Yoji said. He took a bite from the bread sandwich he was eating. “I must have fallen asleep too late last night. What sort of a guy am I, ne? I can't remember for the world what I was doing.”

Omi frowned, reaching out for the Fruit Loops box on the left side of the table. He didn't like the way Yoji's hands were moving. He seemed so tired and restless. Maybe he'd make him go back to bed after all.

“Aya didn't come back last night either,” Ken said. He dug into the tuna after making a disgusted face. “Makes me wonder what sort of life you guys lead.” He swallowed hard.

Yoji frowned. Aya hadn't come back. He was sure he had heard the sound of the car last night as the red head returned from the random underground comb of the city he had been sent off to. But, he wasn't sure he had been himself last night at all. Baarman had never told Yoji what he was doing. Not much was ever said when it concerned Aya's case.

“He said he'd send me a message if he needed anything,” Omi said, ashamed that he still feared so much over his friends as if they would disappear into thin air. “He's fine. You know he likes to handle his things alone. Persia sama asks him to be that way.”

“Yeah,” Ken said. He gobbled down his glass of orange juice to keep himself from gagging on the tuna. “He's creepy by nature, just like Yoji's sleepy-headed.”

He was lucky his shades hood the angered look he shot Ken, or Yoji would've regretted it. He reached out and took the cereal box and poured himself some. The box looked too full of colours, like rainbows painted over oil and sparkling loudly at the sides of your temples.
 

“I had a dream…”

He was silent. They were both silent. In the darkness, they were near, so near; their warm bodies. The young man closed his eyes, shutting out the grey dark ceiling so he could feel the darkness behind his eyes and the red shadows the warmth cast in them. Naked limbs entwined in the darkness.

 “Dream?”

“You were gone… It felt like you had left the room…”

Silence.

“Yoji…?”

He looked out at the darkness, almost seeing the reddish strands of hair standing in every direction. Yoji closed his eyes and pulled him closer, wrapping both arms over his body. He felt the red head's breathing slow down, brushing against his skin, and felt his eyes close.

“Do you sometimes feel it too? The emptiness…?”
 
 

“You wanted a nightmare and that's what I gave you.”

Yoji tried hard to remain silent and look just as smug as when he entered the old woman's room. He leaned sideways, resting on his slender hips, and looked at the shaman as she moved in the room, taking some herbs out of a pot and placing them into a mortar on her table. The Comanche smiled at him, though, letting him know she was not angry.

“I guess I don't understand what you gave me,” he said. He wrinkled his nose as he caught the smell of one of the things hanging from a nail on the wall. “I don't think I understand much of what you do.”

“You don't have to,” she said. As she might have done countless of times, she mixed the herbs on the mortar. Her serious face made Yoji wonder what she thought about as she mixed her medicines, but he kept quiet. She was looking at him. “Didn't you say you were a scientist?”

Yoji could feel the red on his face burn through his skin. He regretted saying that at all; it must've sounded like a bunch of hullabaloo to her. Like some sort of silly string of nonsense. He wasn't a scientist; he was an assassin.

“The minute you become involved in the inside of what I do, you're no longer a scientist.” Yoji lowered his eyes. “At least, that's what you've heard in the classrooms you visited. But, that was a long time ago and those spirits are well off resting wherever they are.”

“I don't regret being part of the FBI,” Yoji said, feeling the words come out as a whisper. He felt the sound recreating the shadows of the memories, but it had been so long ago. “I met some very interesting people there, some which never left my head, like the man who said that. And my close friends.”

The old woman had stopped mixing her medicine and was staring at him. Her eyes grew warm, even if they still looked imposing and serene. Yoji blushed, finding himself staring into their darkness. He didn't. He didn't regret the past at all.

“Those spirits are resting wherever they are,” she said. Smashing a piece of stone with another, the shaman squashed a root. “But, the nightmare you are having is what you wanted.”

“I'm sorry,” Yoji said. He leaned against the central post of her room, careful not to disturb the skins hanging there. “It was quite an experience, but not quite what I wanted. Dreams -"

“Scare you.”

Yoji didn't look up. He stared at the earthy floor and his feet. The old woman squashed a few more roots with the rocks.

“They scare you a lot.”

"So make them go away. I don't want that kind of mess in my life. There's enough there already."

"I do not cause the dreams to come to you," the old lady said. She crushed two rocks together as if she were not concerned with Yoji's talk anymore. "You cause them to yourself. They cannot go away until you send them away yourself."

Yoji crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the earth again. He was getting angry, like he always got when he didn't understand and when things didn't go his way. He looked at the old woman and watched the way her long braid of hair swung from side to side as she pounded with her rocks. He wished he was like her, a happy shaman living freely and studying herbs. He wished he had nothing to do with anyone at Schwarz anymore, not have to see any more blood. He wished he could stop wishing for things to go differently.

"I don't know what to do," he said angrily. "I'm not good at this." He came closer to her. "You can cure me, I know so. Use your crushed roots, use your chanting, talk to Thunderbird, use your  puha… Just cure me." He sounded like a child. Like so much stupid rain falling over rocks.

The old woman looked at him silently for a moment. "Is that all you regard my  puha to be?" Yoji lowered his eyes. "I've told you, my friend, I cannot do anything. The dreams come to you because of you and they will only leave because of you. In such things my  puha is not enough."

The young man raised his head to look at the old shaman, almost as she were his mother. "Forgive me," he said. The Comanche lay her hands on his shoulders to let him know that she had dealt with many young men with such impatience as his. Still, she did not smile.

"They scare you that much, eh? I feared they would scare you so."

Yoji felt his body tremble under her arms.
 
 

"We become substanceless air when we reach the top of this city. Don't we?"

Aya looked up from the article he had been reading. He had got the magazine at one of the stores they had visited that morning just after he finished his coffee. Yoji frowned, wondering if he had even heard him.

"I suppose we disintegrate up there," Aya said in a low voice. "It must be impossible to survive in all that chemical disaster up there."

"Gods. How many people do you think live in this city? I cannot count them all, nor do I have any idea why they look so much like rushing tornadoes."

Aya frowned and closed the magazine. He ran his thin finger on the edges of the soft pages, and looked out at the street before the café where they sat in which cars were still bumper to bumper. A woman was yelling at a younger man so he could hurry with her bags. Noisy.

"So many people can feel so alone. So empty."

Yoji lowered his head, glancing at his friend from the sides of his shades in which he was nothing more than coloured rainbows across the blue tint. Aya's eyes had become small slits, almost as if he had closed them to keep the sunshine out. He returned to his article and ignored Yoji and his smoking. There was something in the air that bothered him, something in the sound of the cars and the distant talking of the people. Yoji watch him turn him off almost as if he had used a button to switch him off. He took a drag at his cigarette and blew the smoke at the passing people.
 
 

"What did you take asshole?"

 A bang hit his body as hands pressed his sides. Doubling over in pain, he clutched his belly as he felt another wave of nausea and his body retched again. He was cursing under his breath, and pushing the hands away. He let his head hang in the mouth of the toilet and shut his eyes tight.

"Yoji! You imbecile, tell me what you took."

He couldn't speak. He couldn't answer at all. He was suffocating, and running out of strength. All he could feel was the vomit coming through his throat and the banging in his head. Aya's hands were not helping him and he knew he was going to make dark marks on his back from where he was hitting him so hard. Aya… Aya…

"Stop… hitti- hitting me…" Aya drew his head from the toilet seat with his hands. He reached down and combed the hairs from his face, drawing them back with the palm of his hands. But he didn't look at his friend. He wanted to clean his mouth, but he didn't have a cloth.

Yoji laughed dryly, not able to understand why his body seemed to be swimming under him and why his head banged from side to side. He felt his mind weightless in his head as if his body were devoid of himself. Aya gripped his shoulders and steadied him against the wall. Reach out. Reach and hold his shoulders and touch that white face. Make it stay. Make it stay.

"It was that funny tea," Yoji breathed out as soon as he found his voice again. His body had broken into a horrible sweat which he could not brush away. "I don't know what was in it…"

Aya noticed the bowl Yoji had been using lying in the tatami a few steps from the bathroom door. He looked at his friend's face and frowned.

"Funny… funny little mushrooms…"

Aya didn't know what he was talking about. He mopped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. But he didn't say anything. He frowned again, this time deeper. He wished Yoji would hurry up and snap out of the sickness, whatever it was. If the punk boy had gone off and tried some weird herbal tea, he didn't want to be stuck with the aftermath of his stupidity. He rubbed his chin and crossed his legs, ready to get up, hoping Yoji was done with retching.

"Asshole," Aya said under his breath, his eyes full of anger. "You gone off and killed yourself with some fucking mushrooms?"
Yoji's head swam in pain and Aya became shots of colours in the room. He clutched the sides of his head.

"Shit!"

Aya smashed the back of his body as Yoji doubled over and threw up, hardly missing the toilet. He closed his eyes tight. He was dying. Dying inside a bathroom, and Aya didn't much care. Funny. Funny mushrooms.

Aya.

"I don't want to follow you anymore!"

"I want a mind of my own. I want you to get away from me. It makes me sick to have to follow you like I needed you. You don't need. I don't need me. You don't need me. I don't need you."

You chose to follow. You didn't make that decision under force, you wanted to be near … in the darkness... in the emptiness, in the alone.

"Quit screaming. Please, it makes me sick. Makes me angry. Makes me want to tear my skin off…"

You ever tell him that? You ever tell him anything that you've seen in your dreams? Or are you like the shadow of an ant and the echo of the wind.

"Curse you. Curse your little mushrooms… Take it away from me. I don't want to see these visions… hear these voices. I left them behind. You said so yourself. I left them all behind… their faceless heads… their names… I told you, take it away. Take it. Take it. Take it!"

Silence.
 

"Aya!"

Yoji's woke with a start in the bed, his hands gripping the sides of the mattress. Empty. He felt this emptiness around him as if the room had disappeared. The covers were wet from his sweat and they were half pulled off from their place.

Aya was sitting at the edge of the room in the chair by the desk they used for research. His head was lowered and resting over his chest, as if he were asleep. The red bangs of his hair hood his features.

"Shoot out of the window," he said, barely a whisper. "Walk out of this door."

Yoji stared at him silently, not knowing what he was talking about. He heard the sound of his heartbeat booming in his head. Aya was staring at him from under his long, red bangs.

"I'm not stopping you."

The red head rose from the chair. He had spent all night sitting there, Yoji could tell, the sleeves of his shirt were crumpled like when he sat for long hours in the seat of Ken's van when they drove for miles to reach different cities he didn't much like to see. Dark circles surrounded his eyes and his mouth, and his body trembled from tiredness.

"Aya…"

"Leave, Yoji. Out the window, out the door. I won't stop you."

He could feel the air stuck in his lungs, his mouth clogged with saliva and sweat. Yoji couldn't move his body. He was so weak from throwing up and crying. He felt the back of his head screaming, his mind demanding that he rise from the bed. He needed to stop this. Somehow, he must still be in the dream… still be dying in his sleep…

"Yoji… fuck you…"

He could see them. He could see the tears running down his cheeks and into his lips. The grey body shook, but the red head reached out to hold his arms together and still. He stared at him, his eyes wide, his mouth twisted and gasping for air.
Yoji felt his own tears run down his eyes and into his mouth. He couldn't say anything. Couldn't say anything. He shut his eyes shut as Aya's hands gripped his pillow. And kissed him.
 

"I had a dream…"

Silence.

"I woke up and the bed felt so empty." He could hear the words drift away from the bed and the covers and hit the walls and the darkness outside. "For a moment, I thought the bed was so huge, and empty…"

Silence.

"So I reached out … and touched you… So I would know that you were still here."
 
 
 

Author's Note

May 27th, 1999. That's it. That's the end of it. This story was written out of sheer silliness, I suppose. It features many things that seem silly to me now that I read it again. Why did I write this? The Comanche shaman is the result of Dr. Jones's Magic, Religion, and Rituals class, which me and my friend (Aya!) are taking this summer. This is why the story got full of references to magic, rituals, and dreams. Puha, by the way, is the Comanche word for the shaman's power. Quite fascinating. Take the class if you ever have the chance. But, the story is also very personal, so excuse me if you didn't like it. Once, my best friend told me in a letter that whenever I felt as if he were going away, I just needed to look at the river. He'd be there in a boat, coming back. That letter still makes me cry today. Why am I telling you this? I have no idea, but I do know that I hope he likes this story I wrote for him, because it sure beats the heck out of why I wrote it. Please tell me what you think?
 

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