A one-shot based on "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot and "Coming Out" by Ogata Megumi.

Readers should be well-advised it took on a whole new life of its own. Think of it as an extended nightmare.

Reviews are particularly appreciated for this story, as despite appearances, it's quite personal. I'll respond to anyone who'd like to talk.

Oh, and I lost about five pages of this. Guess where.

What April Breeds (Tiresias)

In retrospect, I'd have to declare all of this Seta's fault. I mean, the seeds may have been inside me for a while, but he was the one who made them sprout. If he hadn't come into my life, I could have gone on in ignorant bliss for much longer. Would that "me" have been better than the "me" I am now? I can't be sure, because there's no way to change the past. However, there is still the opportunity to delegate the blame, and Seta? It's all going on you.

When did it all begin? Well, to trace the roots of a tall tree to their origin, you have to go deep into the ground. Would you like a moment, then? I'll give you a few. I warn you, this is no happy chronicle, nor is it one for the innocent. There's something I want to share, though, because if I share it, it will stop being a secret. I wish I could write better. Here's one truth.

Suwabe-sempai always smelled like sawdust. Some people thought he worked a construction job, despite the way he conducted himself- that is, as if he possessed a dragon's horde of riches. My friend Minako said he probably bathed in sawdust, just to get attention for it. I really hated that idea, though, because dust has always made my eyes hurt and my nose close up.

Even Suwabe-sempai's girlfriend had no idea about where the smell was from, so she cast a tarot card reading during class one day. Most of the kids in the class clustered around her, drawn by the sound of her mysterious voice and the flair of the flick of her wrist, sending her arcana flying. Our teacher, a professor who taught a completely forgettable class, droned on, content to do so even with himself as his only audience.

I think that girl, quiet Tomoe, really was something special. A regular on the volleyball team but not a spectacularly good player, I still don't know how she could have faked the surprise in her eyes as she turned over her first card. She'd decided to do a reading for past, present, and future, major arcana only. Her first card was the Past, The Moon. When I asked what it meant, she said that he'd been hiding. The moon meant the subconscious, mystery. She was so intent telling me this, I can't even try to portray the intensity she had then, her passion. Jungian, probably, but I think Tomoe really believed what she was saying.

No one was very affected by this except her, though. Some of the guys started to talk about boning this college girl while she cast the Present. It was Judgement. When she cast the future, she found The Fool.

People at my high school distinguished themselves only by being special. My special quality wasn't anything of my own making; I had been born beautiful. I was the kind of person who always won Most Photogenic. I was a freshman in the best school in the Kantou district, but I'd already been elected the academy's official "ice prince."

I don't know why people labeled me that. I had always been distant from people my age, but with the way I looked, especially being a boy, I couldn't really help it. And as for the way I treated girls? Maybe that was cold. I'd never had any sympathy for the legion of admirers I always possessed. People said I was like ice because my pretty face never changed when a girl confessed to me, but why should I have given them anything? They didn't know anything about me besides my appearance, so what right did they have to say they loved me? What right could any of them ever have hoped to claim?

All the people at my forgettable school thought me intelligent, thought my mind was as clear as my pale skin, my wits as sharp as the slant of my eyes, thought the completion of advanced work as effortless for me as the fall of shiny hair over my shoulders. When we read foreign literature in first year, though, when my class read Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan und Isolde, works of great love and tragedy, I didn't so much as open a single one. Just like my history and geometry and everything-else teachers, my English teacher gave me 100's for anything, for a look of promise, for a finger in my mouth, for a flash of skin between my white uniform shirt and black dress pants, perfectly untouchable.

Although I loathed my girlfriends, they had their use as well. My unfortunately destitute mother never had to pack me anything for lunch, because I received a homemade bento every day from a blushing female. Once a girl even took me with her to London, London and Paris and New York. England was cold, raw, and full of trash, even the Thames overflowing with evidence of summer days past, and I had to kiss the nameless girl for it, which was unspeakably disgusting.

I'm a tough guy, which might be surprising. I like war movies and war stories, because they're really easy to understand, and lots of people get blown up. Guys never tried to touch me after a few days in a school, after the nurse's office was filled with groaning upperclassmen with dislocated fingers. Even though I'm "Mizuki," my mother says that water can be crueler and more efficient than anything else.

As student council president for the freshmen (a position I hadn't wanted but had been elected for anyway), I had to go help out at the senior graduation. Suwabe-sempai played a long saxophone solo that night, tone not smooth but rough and hacking, the fake gold of his instrument dirty. I stared out into the audience of bored seniors and bored relatives, a faceless mass of people-uglier-than-me, and the sax song cut straight into the sick, gray, stupid feeling that squirmed in my stomach, understanding, and I pressed my legs together.

The seniors left the auditorium still in their black robes, entering Tokyo clad like aliens or priests. I was the only one left to clean up, left to pick up programs and napkins. I could have gotten out of it if I'd wanted to, but I'd felt too apathetic at the time. Suwabe-sempai stayed to clean out his saxophone and linger over it. He didn't have a party to go to, or at least one he felt like attending, but if he went straight home, he'd feel like a loser.

"Izumi, right?" he asked, snapping the clasps on his sax case shut.

"Yeah," I said shortly, not interested in talking. "I'm Izumi Mizuki." Yeah, I hate my name, too.

Suwabe-sempai sat down in one of the folding chairs I was supposed to be checking under. I don't know why, but then I had sat next to him and was asking about his music. I wasn't shy, and I wanted to know, like that one time I went to church, the one and only time. The pastor had railed about the Earth going up in flames, and I'd asked him why he couldn't have confined Armageddon to a homily.

The janitor didn't come to kick us out like I thought he would, so Suwabe-sempai played another song, this one just for me. It was slow, but it wasn't sad. It was pure jazz, low and sultry. I didn't know what it was called, and he didn't tell me, so I still have no idea. Lots of band songs for high-schoolers don't have names, or else they're called Etude #9 or something like that, so it doesn't really matter.

"Hey," Suwabe-sempai breathed, letting go of his sax mid-note. "Izumi-"

He leaned forward, our faces only a few inches apart. His breath smelled like his instrument, mint and rust. He kissed me, not my first kiss, but the first one I remember very well. It was all intensity for just a second, warmth and the amazing feeling of his desire, then I'd pushed him away and my fist had flown into his nose, my body knowing exactly what to do. He jumped up and cursed, his nose starting to bleed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I snapped, trying not to do something I'd regret.

Suwabe-sempai held his nose and tilted his head back in an effort to stop the bleeding, making his voice sound distorted. "Aw, come on," he said, face an unholy grin. "Aren't you gonna give me a graduation present?"

I got to my feet and walked out of the big room, his eyes on my back. "You know, Mizuki," he said, "The only thing that would make you more beautiful would be if you had beautiful eyes."

The progression of laughing people through of the neon lights of the city felt unreal, the hum of all their voices unreal. None of them were human, not a single one. My knuckles were red, hands shaking. They were shaking because they wanted to touch something.

I wanted him.

***

It was only natural for Coach Kanzaki not to let me play. I was only a second year, and I wasn't brilliant, and there was the way I looked more than anything, so of course he wouldn't put me in. So what if any shot I put up would go in, so what if I was faster than anyone out there? He wouldn't put me in a basketball game because I didn't belong there. It happened match after match, matches our school would have won if I'd been inside. It was hard for me to keep up my skills, so I guess I really started losing my drive then, detaching myself from the team I'd joined. When you're ashamed, it's hard to make yourself want to do anything.

One game, though, so many players were sick or injured that Kanzaki had to put me in. I was forward, and it was four minutes into the second quarter. Our team started with a throw-in after subs, and I was open at the angle. The guy with the ball wasn't going to toss it to me, though, he was pointing it towards the point guard, all the way back in the corner. I ducked down and stole it from both teams in mid-air. The basket I made was a clean swish.

One quarter and 16 points later, I was the one who'd scored them all. I didn't know what was going on, but I really loved myself like that. I felt invincible. The enemy was passing. I pushed in and stole it. Chance. Breakaway, right? Yeah. Alright, Mizuki? Alright.

The guy I'd robbed it from stumbled, and then PAIN! My lungs stopped working and my middle exploded. His knee had slammed into my stomach, my body collapsing around it like a limp rag doll. I felt like he had stabbed me straight through.

The ball fell out of my hands, movement, my vision blurring, and I doubled over, gasping. The whistle blew, stopping play, but I couldn't hear like I usually did. The crowd was screaming, I don't know if they were happy or sad. The guy who'd nailed me seemed smug, and was doing a bad job of hiding it.

There was pain around my chest, helplessness, anger, my nose running again. I thought of a setting sun pounding on my eyes, arrogant gold filtered through the window of my mom's crappy car. I thought of the flow of high and low through Suwabe-sempai's saxophone, the bad-tasting dirt residue the ball left on my flawless hands, and felt cold.

What shall we ever do?

The scene snapped back into focus. I got to my feet, ignoring the hands of my teammates, and punched the guy in the mouth. I heard a crack, which was his nose breaking, the crack-like screams of all the pesky little girls in the stands who idolized me.

The school never let me play basketball again.

***

Even my old-fashioned parents accepted the fact that I'd be a model once I graduated high school. Why do anything hard, after all, when I could get rich and famous without doing anything? Besides, it fit, because I was a narcissist, a huge one. Of course, with narcissism comes the corresponding self-hatred.

I took the summer after senior high off to lie around and do anything. The one thing I accomplished was obtaining an agent, and not just any agent, a really well-to-do one with some of the most-wanted as her clients. I liked my agent, Aizawa Mami, a lot better than most women. She wasn't attracted to me. My face wasn't something to get excited about, it was something to exploit. Those days, at least in Japan, beauty was beginning to completely define a dimension of society. The faces on magazine covers were becoming insanely popular in themselves.

I took my first jobs when I was 17. I achieved instant success, partly from Aizawa's guidance, but mostly just because of my own aesthetic merit. I know just how stunning I am now, after all, so I can say that with utmost confidence. I was cold and disdainful to the agency I worked for, to them and their models both, at the most fake-nice and polite, but they paid me so much that at 19 I was already exorbitantly rich. A girl I worked with a lot said that people would sell their soul to me after just one look into my blue-violet eyes. I think that statement says a lot about me, because my eyes are really black, I just wear color contacts.

Everyday I went into the agency's skyscraper and took my chosen work. There I was, the same as I had been, except rising, rising in every possible way. I thought I was still getting taller. Sometimes, though, chatting amiably with my fawning colleagues, I felt such a dangerous sense of dissociation from my surroundings. I don't belong here. I want to get out of here. Something is wrong with me. This isn't me. This can't be me. I don't want this to be me. What am I missing? What am I doing to myself?

This is all establishment, facts and self-indulgent battle. My good old horny English teachers would have called all that the exposition, but I don't think so. This is the concealment. The change to come is the real revelation.

I suppose it would be stupid for me to ask for pity. I guess I don't really need it now. I wonder if you can feel the sense of superiority I have over everyone else. I feel superiority.

***

I stared at myself in my principal mirror, a full-length antique one, gold and silver and jewels eager to frame my reflection. I could have been appealing to the magic mirror of Snow White, asking who was most beautiful, but I already knew the answer to that question.

'My favorite person in the whole world is me. I'm the only one who understands myself. I'm the only one who's nice to me. I'm the only one I can completely control. I'm the only one who fully wants what I want, and wants it for me. I like my family and my friends, but I feel so detached from them. I just love myself so much more. I hate myself, too, but it only makes my ego swell that much more from that delicious self-absorption, self-indulgence, self, self. Even the girls I take to my bed don't mean anything. They're dirt. I just like the idea of someone wanting me, and giving themselves up to only me.'

I stared at my reflection, the sight in the world I've seen the most. I didn't have my contacts in yet, eyes black. I spent a few seconds changing them to purple, a process that got easier every time I did it but somehow still confounded me. I liked to pretend they were my real color, though. They added to the whole picture. 180 cm, 60 kg. I didn't look like a normal person, I looked like a god.

I found a growl ripping itself out of my throat. I was suddenly very angered by what I saw. I wanted to be ugly. I wanted to be normal.

I pulled on a T-shirt and shorts, the elusive ordinary clothes. Sometimes it got boring being remarkable. I left my veritable mansion and found a street to descend. I wanted to play some basketball, an urge that I found unstoppable once it had asserted itself. My agent had never wanted me to play sports, but fuck her.

I went to the courts at my old high school. Normally there weren't that many people there on a Sunday morning, if any. I don't know why, the courts are nice enough, not really beat up or anything, and it's not like there isn't always a ball or two lying around waiting to be coaxed into bouncing. Maybe guys just don't wanna play at a high school.

I walked in and picked up a ball, dribbling it absently. The feeling of it thudding off my fingers, the beat of it on the concrete, they were so refreshing that my mind almost magnified them. I stared into the sky, bouncing the ball automatically, wishing there were a few less clouds. I hate white skies. I started to play by myself. It's the way I was most used to playing.

I took a variety of shots, hook, lay-up, foul. I got most of them, but missed a few, too. I shouldn't have, but I'd gotten really out of practice. Still, putting the ball up was something that came naturally to me, naturally as always.

I raised my arms, bent my knees, and sent the ball out spinning. It went in, but I missed the rebound. Someone else had come in, sneakers making squeaks that were just enough past inaudible to alert me. The new guy was twenty-something Japanese, brown-dark hair and eyes. Looks were, of course, the automatic criteria for adjudication. The red-blue jersey and shorts he wore revealed an athlete's arms and legs, tanned under the caress of dark hairs. His face wasn't that good, but it looked sort of like an American cowboy, rough and confident, honest.

"Hey," the guy said, surprised, "No one's here."

I was there, you know. I tossed the ball to him, and he caught it. "You can play me," I snapped. "Best of three."

The guy snorted. "What are you, in high school?"

Shit eater. "No," I muttered, then turned on him. "What are you, scared?"

The guy laughed. He actually laughed at me. "Of a pretty boy? No way. Alright, let's go."

I walked to the center of the court and started to dribble, eyes on him, not on the ball. He jumped for it, and I dodged around him. A running lay-up, so one point, me.

"Scared now?" I asked, grinning nastily. I'd missed this.

Something about the feeling of that guy's eyes on me make my breath clog in my throat, made my stomach churn, a dangerous, exciting feeling. "Maybe," the guy said, and I bounced him the ball. He was sweating just from that day's heat. I bet he'd played on his high-school team. He could have been a mature-looking college student.

He attacked, and we started to play. The slam of feet and labored gasps, the whoosh of air and the pounding sun, and I'd won the second game. "Two out of three," I said, getting my rebound. "I win." He actually didn't look pissed at this. I think he was still riding on adrenaline.

"Let's play the last one anyway," he said, and I agreed. I shouldn't have.

Center court. Dribble, dribble, dribble. He switched the ball around his legs a few times- figure eight. Dammit, I hated that pretentious bullshit-

Then I'd been pushed out of the way, and he'd jumped. I hissed, the sun stinging my eyes. A weird feeling, this impulse-

The deafening crash of a slam dunk.

***

It's here that the story really begins. I mean, sorry for the wait, that is. The thoughts were there, but I couldn't get them out. It's kind of like the real core component of basketball: that is, endurance. Or would that be the basket?

"Izumi-san!"

"Izumi-san!"

"Excuse me, Izumi-kun-"

"Hey, Mariko," I said, pushing my way through the hall's morning crowd to get to my boss's office. "Yo, Kano. Oh, Kairi, your skin looks awful!" I cried, stopping to tease her. "You were up all night partying again, weren't you?"

"Oh, Izumi-kun, you're so horrible!" she laughed, pushing me playfully.

"Ha ha!" I laughed back at her, pleasantly distant. "Ah, I've heard we both have early assignments for today..."

I disappeared into the crowd, leaving her where I'd found her. I made my way through, people parting to let me by, just as was natural. Into my boss's office, and there was someone there with him who I didn't recognize. It was supposed to be an ad or something, so I guessed it was a freelance photographer, not one of ours.

"Izumi-san!" Boss yelled, reaching out and pulling me in. Okay, he seemed to be in one of his you-should-be-early moods that day. "Kasumi-san, this is Izumi, one of our top models. He's what you wanted, right?"

The guy in the suit turned to look at me, and I felt like someone had just socked me in the gut again. Kasumi was the man I'd met at the high school courts, only not dressed down or sweaty, but suited like everyone else.

"We've already met," Kasumi said, and smiled at me all friendly.

I nodded. "Yeah," I said, extending a hand and putting on my ice face. "Izumi Mizuki."

"Kasumi Seta," he said, and we shook hands. Boss looked kinda bemused, but he was on a tight schedule, so he sent me right off with Kasumi.

"You're a model," Kasumi said. Well, duh. "It figures."

I ignored his remark, demeanor stony. "What are you shooting for?"

"A perfume ad," he said offhandedly. I had to physically struggle not to make a face.

"A big-name one?" I asked. I assumed so.

"This ad will be going in about every magazine published in Japan." I sucked in a breath. That was... a lot. We got into the elevator, and Kasumi pressed the button for the ground floor, a long way down.

"You're that famous a photographer?" I asked neutrally. I found my eyes drawn to his sharp-knuckled hands, the trace of stubble under his chin. I couldn't stop staring.

"Maybe," Kasumi said. "You're probably more famous, if you haven't heard of me, because I heard of you before."

"Whatever," I said. "What's the spread gonna be? Sex?" You get really blase about that stuff after a while.

"Well," Kasumi said. "It's for men and women. Smell called 'Distraction.' You take a long, hard stab in the dark about what the ad's gonna be like."

Long, hard stab, huh? "Well, do I meet your specifications?"

"Exactly," Kasumi said. "Well, I asked for a girl, but I guess they found somebody better." He grinned at me again. Everything about him made him seem like a really good person, talented and wholesome. "I still have to beat you at basketball, you know."

"You can try," I shot back, feeling flustered somehow. "What role am I gonna play?"

"Schoolboy," Kasumi snorted. "Not my cup of tea, but I'm a professional."

"Not loving the queer Lolita thing," I snapped. My eyes locked on his jacket's frayed cuffs. He didn't have very good fashion sense.

"No, it's not like that," Kasumi said. "Just... distraction. How old are you, anyway?"

"22," I lied, not hesitating for a second.

"Are you sure?" Kasumi asked, and I nodded, pretending to be offended.

It's at that time, that weird conversation with Seta, that an idea struck me. I found Kasumi Seta a hell of a lot more attractive than any girl.

Shit. Come to think of it, maybe that explained a few things. Maybe I was...

I decided, for the moment, to just not think about it.

We went into a new skyscraper, almost identical to the one my agency was situated in. All the same status symbols inhabited it, the Greco-Roman statues trying for sophisticated and just achieving out-of-place, the lush green jungle plants, half of which were most likely fake. No matter where I went, my surroundings all seemed the same, except for the sunrise I'd seen that morning. I'd been walking to work, because I hadn't felt like taking the subway.

Lots of people said hi to Kasumi, which was okay, but way too many tried to get my attention as well. Not only did I have no idea what any of these people's names were, I couldn't recall having seen a single one of those faces before in my life. I ignored them, fixing my eyes forward-sideways to the door at the end of the hall, the studio we'd been appointed. There were a bunch of nobody-looking people outside, but I could just push through them.

I hadn't felt like taking the subway because it has unpleasant connotations for me. I picture the biblical exodus out of Egypt, panicked and pointless and thoroughly boring, just a hell of a lotta slaves. The subway is an unattended coffee, sent flying and pouring out to scald a tired, lumpy OL. It's the giggles of schoolgirls, way too high and piercing for so early in the morning, lurches and anonymous limbs, the boom box of some black guy who I want to kick out the window. The boom box, not the guy. If I had taken the subway, I wouldn't have seen the sunrise.

I shouldn't have been rude to the toadies without first making sure one of them wasn't important, but, yeah, bygones. I shoved Kasumi's friends to the side like they didn't exist, and he was either really pissed or really amused.

"Did you get lots of fouls called on you in basketball?" Kasumi asked wryly.

I shrugged, trying to impress him. "I got kicked off the team for fighting."

"That's not something you should brag about," Kasumi muttered, and then the makeup and wardrobe people abducted me. They even stole the clothes I'd been wearing right off me. The head lady, in between ogling my abs, told me to think of them as having been temporarily nationalized.

The colors of the powders before me were the same tints as those the sun had given the clouds that morning. I mean, I hadn't believed it when I'd first stepped out onto my apartment's balcony. The clouds were pink and orange and gold, unspeakably brilliant, changing every minute from the position of their sovereign, intensifying silver. And there was had been this baffling mass like a precipitation spaceship, darkly entwined orange and blue, as aesthetically singular as me. As I walked, the images replaced each other in circular motion, as if the sky was a snow globe. Shake us, I said, speaking to the hand holding us in place. Come on, lose your grip.

I wondered if I'd ever get this over with. I hadn't even seen Kasumi behind a lens yet. Maybe the clothes I'd been given were of a nicer material, maybe were more flattering, maybe were more like a suit than my old high school uniform, but they made me look just as younger, younger if you saw my eyes. The camera brought my normal confidence to the forefront. Kasumi being there, ready to instruct me, made me feel dangerous. When I was a kid, I'd been conflicted and weird. Nothing got attention more than something unique.

There was a fake tree, like the one we'd all had to lean against for our cheesy middle school pictures. Kasumi had me lean against it, just like I had back then, and apparently autumn leaves were falling from the synthetic sephiroth, because I'd caught one in my hand.

Kasumi wasn't satisfied with me. I just wasn't giving him the mood he wanted for the shot. He wasn't mad, though, he just went over and turned on some music. I frowned at the girl's melancholy words.

"Kono mama de ii kara..."

I looked away from where I'd been instructed to, fixed my gaze instead straight on Kasumi. Questions- what did I want to do? What was it that I really wanted?

Hey, baby. I'd really like it if you-

Click went the camera. Click, flash, click. I bet Distraction smells really bad, I hope no one makes me wear it. Because I, really-

After we finished, I went to lunch with the whole wardrobe department, eight overly-made-up women. I tried to stare at one of the girls' extensive breasts and just kept drawing all these unlikely fruit parallels. I still thought they all were hot, though. Wow, cantaloupe. Come on, world, throw me some virgin sacrifices. Volcano, right?

I had the rest of the day off, so I went to the basketball court after lunch. No one else as there, so I just went home. My mom called as I was coming in, the exact second. She's the kind of creepy lady who seems to have ESP about my whereabouts. I still love her, despite all my theories about the tracking device she put in my baby food and never bothered to tell me about. We talked for a while, and I told her I had a beautiful, sweet girlfriend who I might want to marry someday. I liked making her happy. There was nothing on TV.

A girl with an engagement ring had met Kasumi to have lunch with him. They had kissed upon sight. She was the girl he was engaged to be married to.

I called up Meifu Tomoe, and she wasn't actually doing anything either. She's my friend, so she agreed to drive over on short notice. I awaited her arrival, steadfastly focusing on not eating the box of chocolate bars a fangirl had sent me.

Tomoe showed up 13 minutes and 6 seconds later. Technically, six and a sixth seconds, if want to count the time between when the doorbell is pressed and when the ringing sound announcing an arrival is made. There are really too many variables involved to pinpoint something like that exactly. I dragged myself off my way-too-comfortable couch, reluctant to move. Another 33 seconds until I'd wrenched the antique door open. She walked it, a little less gracefully than usual, and I noticed she'd gained some weight. If only I was allowed to do that.

I gave her the box of chocolate bars, which she munched on while getting her cards ready. I asked for a three-part reading in the major arcana: past, present, and future.

I told her I thought I was bi or gay or something. "I don't know," I sighed, stroking her beautiful strawberry hair. "It's all so fucked up."

"Here is your past," said Tomoe. "The Sun. Ultimate happiness."

"But, I mean," I continued, groaning in self-pity. "How can anyone be sure about anything these days?"

"Here is your present," Tomoe said. "The Tower. Irreversible change."

"If I pursued this," I asked, "Do you think I could be happy?"

"Here is your future," Tomoe said, and faltered for a second. "The Moon. Fear."

***

I'm always trying to make myself feel good, but soon I think "am I happy?" Well, I know I'm not, and it's a little scary, because it makes me so angry. My mother is always saying I'm so selfish, the condemnation no one else has the courage to damn me with. Once, she said my insatiable greed for everything was why my father left us, once blamed that misfortune on me, immediately taking it back.

No, you psychoanalysts, you god-wannabes, I don't have a complex about it. I don't care, actually. There are some things you should feel but you don't, and I'm an expert in that. Am I happy? If I'm unhappy, it's no one else's fault.

I got a sour Italian ice from a vending machine as I left Tomoe, letting her abandon herself to her accounting paperwork. I sat on a bench outside her building and ate it slowly, pondering the nuances of the fake blue raspberry, the cherry I wished was strawberry, the way they tasted as they mixed together in a hue that deserved to be purple but didn't come anywhere close.

I wondered what my aura color was. I know, I was into shit like that, but it was because I really had no idea about the answers. Maybe it was the ice, and the sky I couldn't look up at, because the sun was honking away light in all its mid-afternoon offensiveness. Being as thin as I was really sucked, a wind blowing abruptly that cut through my jacket and sweater and through my skin and bone marrow and United-States-length worth of intestine tubing and all the same on the way out, no fat was there to keep me from shivering. I felt better than I had for a while, despite the bloody lot of good Sol up there was doing for me. I wanted my aura color to be the dark green of an ugly SUV that speeded past me, sending mud-soiled sakura suicide-diving at me.

I knew I had a much better-paying assignment the next day, the cover for a jazz album about Tokyo blah blah blah the same as always. I found myself shoving the glorious sweet tangy crap down the hole in my face almost ravenously, modern society's version of a savage wolf tearing into raw meat. I thought about showing up to the assignment as a 300 pound-blob, and felt sickly pleased. I closed my eyes to burgundy-crimson and asked myself, was I happy?

***

I liked Mizusawa Mary. She was cool. "Want to date me?" I asked her.

"No," Mary the toadie laughed. "My boss would feed me to the unemployment lines if I did. You know he's crazy about you, the big fag."

I was currently working for Suwabe-sempai, actually. He was her boss. He was the jazz guy. I should have known from the freaking Tokyo obsession I'd heard about. I mean, what's the deal with that? It's an ugly pothole crammed to breaking with fucking psychos!

He was still as Suwabe-sempai as ever. His sax had changed into something that could send Jericho's walls kowtowing in seconds, and no, I'm not exaggerating. He made up for the talent, though, with being a certified shit-eater. I liked his assistant, Mary, though. She had red hair like Tomoe's, and was very plebeian.

Who knew? Maybe she was right, and Suwabe-sempai was crazy about me. He sure seemed to be prolonging the photo shoots way past all reason. Though who knew, maybe it was just his personality to procrastinate and be indecisive. He still hadn't come up with an album title yet.

Mary and I went to coffee together after another unproductive day, and she told me about her convoluted relationship with her sister. Once again, I thanked the gods I was an only child. When I told her I didn't have siblings, she said I seemed like it. She couldn't explain what exactly that meant, though.

She gave me her walkman and headphones and one of Suwabe-sempai's CD's. I listened to it, and she started to laugh as she watched me. I don't think I was the ice prince anymore. Mary said my eyes showed every single fragment of my thoughts. I started sucking on my thumb, licking out mocha residue from the cuticle, the taste probably just coming from my tongue anyway. Everything was so abrupt and inconclusive and pointless.

Mary's boyfriend came to take her out dancing. He was ugly, so I freaked him out by pretending to mack on Mary. Then I told him I wouldn't dare to violate the virgin mother of Christ, would HE? I was glad she had a boyfriend, actually. That's always the best kind of girl. They don't tend to hit on me, so if I don't wanna fuck them I don't have to take their undignified overtures. I hit on Mary's boyfriend a little, too, which sent him running and screaming. As she left, Mary swore she'd text message me, and she really did.

Suwabe-sempai was standing above me, standing while I sat. He asked if I wanted to come with him, and the clock in my head started rewinding, but going backwards was much quicker and easier than progress forward. I agreed, but when he tried to put his arm around me, I pushed him away. I finally could name the way he smelled. Sawdust.

Suwabe-sempai took me back to his apartment with him that night. He played the saxophone for me for the second time. This time, though, he played a song of his own. He didn't just sound unusual anymore, he was unearthly now. Listening to the notes did funny things to me, made me feel awkward and uncomfortable and miserable.

Had there been someone I played basketball with, one time? I couldn't remember his name, something with a K, a last name the same as a girl's given name.

What the hell was wrong with me? I had no idea what was happening to this world, what the meaning of this endless circular motion was- yet even the rondo has sections A, B, and C.

I felt restless, my fingers twitching, toes on my feet wishing their way out of their sloppily laced up shoes. My right knee bounced up down, the ball of my foot the bottom of a basketball. Suwabe-sempai had put on a T-shirt and jeans, so I felt stupid in my western costume, the haughty sophistication of a renaissance-age aristocrat. Suwabe-sempai stopped playing his chosen lament and started playing with me instead, creasing and un-creasing the leather gloves he'd chosen for me, thick and warm but rank and yellow-brown-smelling from sweat. I let him, squirming involuntarily in his grasp, weak and phlegmatic, offensively blaring red,.The muscles of his face looked strange, tired in the harshness of the flickering artificial light, wolfish but lax, a leer called freeze tag- stop, then go.

I couldn't put my finger on it. I reached up and touched his face, pads skimming and bumping over thin, chapped lips, and I saw the major arcana of the tarot in the grinning skeleton face that wasn't what made me so nervous, and I didn't have the strength.

Forgive me, God. I don't have the right, and I don't have any faith, but will you forgive me?

A blue-tinted shadow crossed the orange wine glass he'd tossed me, flicker-bounce, and I sucked the rest of the wine out, strangely bland, almost salty, like the oregano I put on pizza, a pineapple lollipop dropped into wet sand castles. Some of it splattered on my shirt, as if I was only a child, the sick slimy too-tactile slither of it going straight to my head and making everything clear. Way too clear was everything, suddenly, Suwabe-sempai in my hands frozen, caught in mocking stagnation, so I reached over and tore the azalea into dual neat sticker halves, tore into the oozing violet blackness, and decided that eternity was loneliness.

The saxophone squeaked itself back to life, reviving the prehistorically-engendered melody of a car revving through a sterling black midmorning, and pleasure pleasure pain. Realization is the dirtiest kind of anticlimax.

I've damned this entire universe to nothing, but-

It's not MY fault. Mary says that plastic people like me aren't ever held accountable for a single thing.

*

**

Rúmí- "Divine Beauty"

Kings lick the dirt whereof the fair are made,

For God hath mingled in the dusty earth

A draught of Beauty from his choicest cup.

'Tis that, fond lover- not these lips of clay-

Thou art kissing with a hundred ecstasies,

Think, then, what it must be when undefiled!