The Language He Left

 

 

Chapter 1: Uesugi Tatsuha

 

            He had a lot of scorn for the books he wrote and the people who read them, but the truth was that Yuki Eiri was addicted to romance writing.  When he was in his real life--in the real, ugly world and in his own messed up head--he craved the fantasies he could create.  The imaginary worlds where there was only beauty: poets and their muses, spirits of departed lovers who reached beyond the veil for one last kiss, classical musicians married to others and forbidden each other who made love through their music, the ladies of Versailles in their sweeping gowns, their heads intact.  In the stories he wrote, love was always good and always enough.  Love was always pure, never confused with sex or power.  Love was always the final world and the jumping off point, the edge of the cliff. 

 

            If he could have, he would have spent all his time there, but there were always interruptions.  In this case, his younger brother Uesugi Tatshua who was reading over his as he tried to write, offering a steady stream of obscene commentary. 

 

“You called her boobs creamy in the last paragraph.”  Tatsuha pointed out helpfully.  “Why do you still write boy/girl stuff?  Everybody knows you like dick.” 

 

            “I’ll get around to that once I’ve used up my vast reserve of heterosexual experience,” Eiri muttered.  So much for the world of beauty.

 

            “I have the perfect plot for your first guy-on-guy novel.  There’s this sensual yet infantile rock god who’s won over by a well-endowed young monk…”

 

            “I’m not writing your perverted fantasies about Sakuma Ryuichi.”

 

“Aw, come on, bro, it’ll be a bestseller,” Tatsuha said as he reached over his brother and started picking letters out one by one.

 

“Idiot,” Eiri snarled.  “If you’re going to mess with my keyboard, at least learn to touch type.”

 

“Touch type, sounds sexy.” 

 

“Everything sounds sexy to you.”

 

Reaching for the keyboard, Tatsuha was close to him--a lot closer than he liked anyone he wasn’t fucking to be.  So close he could smell his younger brother’s scent.  Temple incense and cigarettes, familiar but not comforting, and under it the perfume of the cheap soap their father had been buying for as long as Eiri could remember.  Sweet, almost cloying jasmine but under it almond sharpness and something flat and sour like bad wine. 

 

Flower, bite, old wine. 

 

He smelled it … then he saw, felt, remembered.  On his knees in the shower stall of his father’s house, the smell of that soap strong, almost too strong.  Tatsuha, not as he was now but as he’d been a couple years before, a scrawny little kid.  His hair wet, he was close.  Why was he so close?  His arms were around Eiri’s neck.  “I love you,” the boy said. 

 

Eiri couldn’t breath.  He was cold, but he was sweating.  He could hear Tatsuha talking.  “What the fuck.  You didn’t have to knock me across the room.” 

 

“Get out of here,” Eiri managed to say.   

 

“What’s wrong with you?” Tatsuha demanded, then he saw his brother’s face and he got out. 

 

They were so similar, Eiri and Tatsuha.  They looked the same except for Eiri’s lighter coloring.  It wasn’t just physical resemblance, either.  At sixteen Tatsuha was every bit as sophisticated--or was it jaded--as his twenty-two-year-old brother.  He drank, he smoked, he screwed around.  Usually with Eiri’s hand-me-downs, before Shuuichi had come along.  Tatsuha was as sarcastic and predatory as Eiri, but the thing was Eiri was that way for a reason.  When he was sixteen, he’d been nothing like he was now.  He’d been good and kind, sweet, polite, naïve.  He’d been a fucking angel till he got smashed down to ugly reality. 

 

            Maybe Tatsuha got smashed, too.  Maybe he was the one who did it. 

 

            When he came back from New York, he was messed up for a long time.  He probably should have been in a hospital.  If he’d had anyone else for a father, he would have been.  He didn’t remember most of it.  Anything could have happened.  Tatsuha had only been ten years old.

 

He didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t stop. 

 

            He locked himself in his study for most of the next three days, ignoring Shuuichi’s timid knocks and his small, beguiling calls of “Yuki.”  He tried to write, but the beautiful world was seriously disrupted.  He’d been writing about a ballet dancer falling in love with a composer.  By the third day, he had her disemboweling him and doing pirouettes in his guts. 

 

            He decided he’d better talk to Tatsuha before he completely lost his mind. 

 

            He went to the family temple in Kyoto.  His brother was out in the garden in his monk’s robes and beads, smoking a cigarette. 

 

            “Tatsuha-kun, do you remember when I first got back from New York?” Eiri asked. 

 

            “Who can forget?” Tatsuha said, scowling a little.  “You were fucking crazy.”

 

“Yeah, I know.  Did I do anything to you?  Did I do anything sexual?”  It was blunt, graceless, but he had no other way of getting to it … no other way to ask that wasn’t ugly and hard.  Pirouettes in his guts.

 

“No.  That’s gross.  I was like a little kid.  Ugh.”  He seemed genuinely shocked by the whole concept.  “What the fuck are you asking me that for?”

 

“I don’t remember much for about two years after I came home from New York City, but the other day I remembered something.  Or I thought I remembered something.  The two of us in the shower together, really close to each other, and you saying you loved me.”

 

“That did happen,” Tatsuha said flatly.  “But not like you think.  Dad was busy; it was some festival day.  I can’t remember which.  You were in the shower for hours.  Really, all morning.  All the hot water was gone, but you stayed in there.  Finally, I went in.  You were on the floor with the water on you.  It was ice cold by then, and you’d used up like five bars of that cheap-ass soap dad gets.  The whole bathroom reeked of it.  I had to go in and turn the water off.  I got soaking wet.  After I turned it off, I could hear you.  You kept saying you were dirty, that they’d been inside you, and there was blood on you and no one would ever love you.  I put my arms around your neck, and I told you I loved you.  After that you came out of the shower, and you were sort of normal until dad got home and started giving you a hard time.” 

 

He snubbed out his cigarette in the hand of a statue of the Buddha.  Ever the dutiful monk. 

 

“I didn’t remember it,” Eiri said.  “Then it came back to me, and I couldn’t think of another reason why we’d be that close, why you would have been saying that to me.”

 

 “That was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done up to that point,” Tatsuha went on.  “It was the first time I ever told anyone I loved them.  I mean, I’d only ever heard it about three times in my life.  Dad doesn’t have the slightest idea how to be affectionate, and Mika tried but she’s not exactly the warm and fuzzy type.  But I said it that day, and I thought it made some kind of difference.”  He laughed without humor.  “Don’t worry, you weren’t molesting me.  It was sort of the opposite of that kind of thing.” 

 

“I’m sorry,” Eiri said.  Tatsuha’s brows knitted together darkly.

 

 

“That Yuki Kitazawa guy still owns you, doesn’t he?  The way you see things, the way you understand things, it all goes through what he taught you.  You think in the language he left you, and the word love is all tied up with dirty secrets and punishment and weird control.  I’m not blaming you for what happened to you in New York.  None of that was your fault, but it’s over now and you don’t try to change, you don’t try to get away from what that guy did to you.   I don’t think you want to.  You took his name like you married him instead of blowing him away.”   

 

Silence hung over the garden.

 

“How come you’re so much like me, Tatsuha?” Eiri finally said.

 

“I wanted to be like you,” his brother said.  “After you were done being crazy, you seemed kind of cool.  Being the way you were looked like a lot of fun.  It didn’t occur to me till pretty recently that you weren’t having a good time.”