Stage One: Between the Folds of the Kimono

"We're not even. You're here because we're not even."

"Except this time, I don't owe you anything."

As my fingers traced the cold metal of the prison bars, I watched chips of rust float helplessly to the ground, patched and in shambles like the lacquer of my nails. The way the skin peeled away from the blisters on my fingers, the handle of the katana stained with my blood; I remembered how hard I held it, how desperate I had been to hang on, like the memory of my life slipping away between my fingers. That memory of how I lived was evil and like poison to my mind.

The room was a dark cast of yellow, the candles battling with the shadows. Reflections of the lacquered bamboo and wooden slats on the floors and walls caught the slightest bits of light. It seemed always dark here, always night when we were both together, just the looming blackness of the world we created. Between the flicker of the candle flame, I saw his life as it was; a drop of yellow melting with a bead of red and drawn out glow of white between pale lips. His eyes like a cat, his mouth like a corpse, and his teeth like a snake. I stood with the kimono closed, obi tied behind me, a lacquered comb holding back the windblown and frostbitten parts of my thick damp hair. I could feel the blush on my body, hidden under decency, when exposed, my skin would shine blue with a coldness only left dying in the glow of the dawn. My hand left over my cheek to dampen the sting of the slap he laid upon me.

"I see a whore in myself, Seishin." My glare was only brave enough to show between my fingers over my face as I listened to him speak. His eyes were slatted with lines of contempt where the stars reflected as he struck me again, my breath leading a shallow existence. "That's what you are, but you made a fool of me. You made me your slave."

I didn't see past the silver specs after I felt my body hard against the floor. The pain was everywhere, but so dramatic that it was nothing. The sting in my face, the cold pinpricks of my nerves. There were stars exploding behind my eyes, but I didn't care. I looked back. His fingerprints would burn blisters on my skin. There were lines that flamed angry red as I could feel blood surfacing in an instant, an arrangement of red and white. Skin, and vitality.

"Say something!"

A fist in my hair, wrenching. I sunk at the voice, letting my head be pulled back as he manipulated me to look at his face. There was a shadow, I reasoned. A shadow dark enough for the black of me, because I was used to this pain, and there was enough hatred in me to exercise like a demon. He forced me to look at his eyes. I thought about the beginning of this evening, when the snow had been falling softly to cover the footprints leading to my room, a promise of a night with pleasure when he visited me. The night I found myself experiencing, however, was far from pleasure. The snow fell at first to conceal the caller in my room from the watchful eyes of the gods to protect my soul, but it simply began to cry for me instead. If I died that night, the sky would be the only thing that cried for me.

The Gods I prayed to by the alter whispered that this new year I was beginning would erase the sins of the life I crawled through, and give me wings to soar through the next. But it gave me obstacles; nets to tear my feathers, spider webs to blind my eyes, floods to skim my feet in the waters. December 31st, 1638, in the middle of Edo, the village slept in the still and dead night, but I was alive. He came to me to make wishes with me, to be infected with the hope I had and paint the night sky with it. My incense was reaching tendril fingers into the room, the embodiment of the Gods that would touch me, and I breathed in those fingers to let them course through my spirit. Inside, I would be cleansed, like my name. Seishin. Spirit.

"I fell in love for you."

A love and satisfaction tainted with a spell cast over the shine of a recollection where a brighter dawn broke over the horizon. And all at once there was nothing but the sound of the slap on my cheek, echoing out into the night's darkness. I could hold back the words, I could cry, but in the end the devil in me broke loose through the barrier of my conscious. That devil of my guilt; the guilt reflected in every corner of the imaginary box where my praise and reputation was wrapped. That incense had long since been snuffed out, withdrawn from me by the kisses of the devil that melted out of the shadows.

"I don't know what love is to you, Seishin."

Whether I cried or raged, my mouth was dry, my voice was cracked in five million pieces, and he kicked the pieces farther out of my reach as I stretched for them, laid myself out barren on the floor and whimpered my prayers. And that box with my guilt in it was wrapped in red to offer when the moon was highest in the sky. At midnight, the new year was meant to rain down on me with stardust and touch me with less bitterness. I was meant to be contented, held with understanding. But that box, with my hope and innocence inside, would stay wrapped. I wouldn't give it away, maybe I would burn it over the open flame of a candle.

"But love to me is a tempting hate without a reason." An attachment so deep that it was painful. A pain so penetrating that it blocked all airways. And it all turned to hate because the only thing left to do was to run.

My eyes fought to close, but I wouldn't let them. The hem of his kimono swept through the trails of blood on the floor. Was it blood, or had my reason been so soaked with anger that it leaked from my pores? A finger drew in the spreading fluid, dragging out ridges that collapsed again thinly. He knelt before me, and I strained my eyes to look at him. It was still Sugai, still the one I trusted, still the one that could justify me when my body would let go, when I was spent of will or vigor. He was still a familiar body I could reach to and know protection would follow. If I kept his vision of a perfect world, if I played along and became his doll, my role was pointless, his liberty would chain me, and I would kneel and beg for his praise.

"You call this love?"

His fingers closed around my hair again, twinge of pain in my temple numb to the cold winter air. Pulling, my eyes were too close to him, out of focus, stained. His features were somehow slimmer, cast a longer shadow in the dark, all in contrast to a softness leaking into the way he moved.

"You stand there and watch so stoically." His grip tightened, a tear slipped out of my control. "The perfect voyeur, aren't you? Is that how you last so long?"

I clenched my eyes shut.

"You're so stone to it, it takes two at once? Or three? And one to watch and moan in your ear?"

He shook me once. Tired of his game, he threw me down. I watched while he licked the blood from the tip of his finger, a string of saliva hanging on. But when I opened my eyes again, the room was brighter; my escapes lay under him and writhed, but couldn't stand on their own. I was trapped under the weight of my own body, lifeless, empty.

"And you want me to have you for an eternity after death? To keep you immortal?"

His tongue had become tearing, like a rough cat's tongue, against the weak flesh of my neck. "I would have half a mind to leave you dead." Whether it was his performance, or if I could blame his devotion, I couldn't tell. I was a mouse in that moment, and he was unmistakably the cat.

Grip desperate, and I matched it around the folds of his kimono hanging at his side. A dagger burning white hot through the reason in my mind, as the daggers of his teeth sunk effortlessly through my skin. I couldn't remember anything sweeter, more delicate, another lie that I could have saved myself from screaming my righteousness into gasps and breath. There was a moment I was blind. There was a moment I could feel every inch of myself; the sweat between my fingers, the cold in my toes, the blood rushing. The world around me had become a barren place I didn't recognize. The howling of the winter wind against the window ceased, the moon had long since burnt into darkness, and the blue spec in the sky where it should have floated flickered with the beat of my heart. I saw a child. A child, standing the corner of the room, over his shoulder. He was watching, slight, with a pout, half naked and only the strong black of his hair set him apart from the veins running red and white in the wood. I gazed at him there, waiting, knowing if I looked away for an instant, the child would vanish with my fleeting smile. And suddenly, I opened my mouth to speak, uttered a single word, and I remembered myself in a time of innocence as he was. "Arigato", I said. Swallowed by shadow as the world began to move again, a breeze of a scent like talcum touched my face, the child was nothing more than imagined, and I remembered the pain of a thousand lives I lived in the distance past, and would in the distant future. Silence seemed to swallow me, strangle me, and I was sure for those passing minutes, hours, that everything would just linger and fall in the end.

A few drops of warmth fell to my lips. The flash flood of whitewash melted in presenting him there again, his wrist hovering over me dripping blood from a wound, his eyes downcast and shallow. "Drink."

His voice suddenly softened, as my eyes focused again on the appendage. "Drink, or you'll starve." I connected to my body again, with my mind in focus, and everything ached for energy.

The thing about love songs is that they go on forever. After the last note sounds, there something still lingers, floating softly through the twinge of light on a crystal tear. And that tear is soaked blue and dingy with the smoke circling around, and those eyes cast a lonely red shadow over the white of the words barely remembered. There is a moment you can't recall a thing to have happened prior, during, twenty seconds before, and yet there is a certainty that you will rise from the seat you're edged upon, walk to the door, and leave behind those echoes of a world you only thought you knew. I used to believe such tender things about songs, poems, any manner of reason to believe, because I was a performer. I danced to it. I wanted to believe in those pretty definitions, and I lived through them, a life over and over in my head that would only manifest itself there, in secret, and in elusion. And still perhaps it wasn't enough, in the mornings I would wake and find myself alone again, reminiscing on the night before when I had been left cold all along. My existence ran shallow, like the nature he said still flooded my eyes, my breath. For a moment, it was only a dream enough that I could deny. For the next, I would face a reality I wasn't already willing to bear, and rest upon those secret prayers another hour when a love song could wrench those tears from me.

If I could have been an angel for one second longer, I would have reasoned the trails in stains of crimson were molding into that other me I felt boiling within me. That innocent other maybe inside, maybe mourning now with the death of the questions of Sugai's love; but another being that I had no control over, that was for sure. That heart beat next to mine in the morning, sung softer by noon, and by dusk whispered a lullaby in my ear in time with my breath. It told me that heavy hearts don't fly on wings that shine; and I bled for two that New Year's night, myself and a demon that some time ago tried to possess me, but found me far too entertaining to waste. Binding both my ankles was a red string. I was for myself.

Even if in the darkness, there were no lies this night, I could see and I knew the truths were wearing far too thinly. There was a moment that I discovered I had no fears, no regrets, no guilt, as my fingers came away dotted with blood, I knew no gods would visit me tonight, tomorrow, or any sunset later.

"No." I turned my head away.

"What do you mean, no?" He leaned closer to me, so I could feel his breath. He whispered harshly. "I should have possessed you the moment I laid eyes on you. Now you can understand what anguish you've made my existence."

I gathered what strength lay left in my body through the heaviness of the pain. Reaching with one hand, nails scratching through the weak finish of the wood. Shoulders crushed between a world with no up or down. His weight left invisible bruises on my legs, those only healed in denial, only showing through the thick skin of my beauty.

Though now my gaze was turned from him, I could feel him shift. His body was suddenly foreign; not the warmth, the tight pulls of skin, not the man he had been and I remembered. As he took the sedated aura with him, my elevated hips fell and I was face down on the floor, the blood we had shed from each other spread out beneath me, my pool of light to bring me to Heaven.

I didn't watch him leave, but even as the silence engulfed and deafened me, solitude was heaviest upon my back. I dared not look. I didn't have the strength to uncoil from the position tense against the floor, clinging to it, I knew not how much time had passed as I lay there. I knew only that my vision was clear, and the thought of moving sent a surge of pain through every muscle.

"Sugai?"

I tried his name. It still tasted sweet as it passed over my tongue, like the sweat that collected at the base of his spine, the tears from the pores of his skin. There was that something still lingering, that I was eternally grateful for, that something called "love" I never cared to admit. I somehow wished to die.

Then I realized.

"Master?"

But he was gone. And I knew he would forever be a shadow on my heart.

There were moments where I couldn't breathe. Moments when I was blind. There was a greedy lust of something I couldn't recognize, a thirst I couldn't quench. In the shadow created by the corner of the room, my back was against a solid place I knew was real, where I could see the rest of the room, how the light chased the patches of dark, the candles flickered against the walls, and fire pot seemed to house an animal caged through wrath. The wrath was the me I danced with, the me for my pleasure, the me locked away and never again released. The teacup against my lips burned blisters, the blood left stains on my chin where it warmed through the cold sensation of the lava inside the cup, but I didn't care. I didn't feel the pain of the blisters, and I didn't taste the bitterness of the tea. I needed something to quench the thirst. I could feel the blush on my cheeks burning with a sensation I had never felt the need to harbor, and embarrassment I wasn't used to even left with the sharp sting of pain when coins hit my back. There were moments I was free of myself, and I hovered there with a barren passion when I was blind, and I wondered over this monster in my mind, this monster praying, drawing through the blood on the floor, drawing through the rich abandon.

My fingers dug sharply into the wall with the sound of thunder, not leaving a mark, as the splinters parted from it. I could see myself standing, as I dropped my head between my arms, splashed against the reflecting lacquer on the floor. I didn't want to see the light in my eyes, the flush in my cheeks, the blood on my lips. I couldn't place a reason for the scent of blood to give me power, greed, as rising to my lips again, the tea was almost undetectable amongst the cloud of red behind my eyes. My lips, mouth, and throat were all burnt to numbness. But the thirst was ravaging, like a cooling rain dried to the bones of the land and kiss to the lips of a stranger.

I had been trained to be silent.

It was deep inside meditation before I let the last cup rest upon the floor. Seven lined the firepot, parallel to the lines in the floorboards, as the last embers perished with my heavy breath. Seven now empty cups, each for a sin I had committed and never repented, each for a thought of desire I considered that night. Each was a brew of tea with water so eagerly boiled, the holiness escaped as steam through the spout of the pot, funnelling every inch of heaven further from my reach. A heaven that stirred the searing air at my feet and rose to drag trenches through the skin of my thighs. But still, I had thirst. Still, there was some hunger in me that I couldn't fulfill, couldn't even touch.

My fingers tangled in the strands of ebony hair that obscured my eyes, of their own will, their own grace, so deeply set with their prints on the edges of my consciousness. When they pulled, I obeyed, I looked up, and saw myself there in the mirror of the vanity. The darkness behind me seemed to swallow everything around me, and out of the remaining sparks of light caught in the dew upon my lips, the blood shimmered with a new life I so lusted like that secret I kept in the night. Witnessing it there, in a caress, a luring scent like the musk of flesh, drew my attraction still to the mirror. I placed my tongue over the reflection of the blood, and drew a trail through the mist of frost of my breath on the glass. Tears of black stained my cheeks to mix with the crimson at the corners of my lips, and in that moment, I never thought myself so beautiful.

He had tainted that razor blade left sitting atop a stack of paper money. I could see his fingerprints illuminated over it in the moonlight, his scent spiralling in tendrils like the smoke of the incense. Something attractive lay barren there, waiting for a spark to set the lusting fire ablaze, a breath so soothing to make it heat and swell. Smoothing over the steel still not yet warmed by the resonating thickness of the sweat in the air, I felt him there, as if it was his fingers with mine. The hand in my hair wrenched upwards, forcing my gaze to the mirror again as the razor lifted almost against my will. Across my cheek, a sharp sting spread where he touched me, running the tip of the blade, his finger, scoring the skin again and again.

There was a pattern of parallel lines running from corner to corner, the blood seemed to defy the fingerprints smeared and burned into the white that glowed amongst the rose stain in the air. A soiled night of love, a dirty secret kept in the colour the pain marked me with, and I didn't consider that marking myself with him would erase the tarnish already spread and frosted. There was no use for him to continue, there was no use for me to cry.

But I was blind to it. Matching on the outside as my veins tangled on the inside, squeezing every inch of the light from my halo until it was drowned with the blood on the floor. And with it, I placed the blade above my charcoal-stained eyebrow. I drew downwards, until I felt time slow when the tip rested in the crevasse of my eye set deeper than the rest. I could hear the flesh part, like the strike of a match, the lightening in the distance. But I could still see it. Palm to one eye, blade set within the confines of the crevasse. Strength to press. Breath slow, mind racing, and the only thought was the cold of my fingertips, and the warmth his gave back. One eye for passion, glazed over, cast aside, covered with the hand that pleased me. The other for love. Below the brow, I watched while my fingers shifted, index now atop the metal, and bit my lip.

He had asked what love was to me. By his hands, love to me was now bleeding for my life.

The wood of the floor was soaked to the comforting softness of my illusions, where I saw myself in the shine of the blood. My head was cradled, that was enough, and the dawn I knew, would break on the horizon like it always had.