Dream 01 → First Principles
Feb. 25th, 2010 07:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
irregularWarnings: Angst. Lots of it. Based on a canon event that is never canonically described. Head canon in effect throughout.
Dream Effects: Confusion from the start, only intensifying as the dream progresses. A growing sense of helplessness, frustrated anger and sadness, and finally a near-overwhelming feeling of hopelessly misaimed guilt.
It starts small.
It starts with the clinic and a lazy late summer afternoon trapped just outside the windows, and Ken home from kindergarten with a clay pot in his bag and his mother by his side and the admonition to be good for the doctor still fresh in his mind.
The doctor is rolling up his sleeve, wiping alcohol on his upper arm. Ken, sitting on the edge of the examining couch, curls his fists in the front of his shirt and bites down hard on his lip. He isn't going to cry. The last time they'd done this to him he'd cried but that was for babies, not for big kids of five and a half who started school in the spring-- He manages only to gasp when the needle bites into his arm: a sudden stinging pain, like the sting of a giant insect. He didn't cry, though. Babies cried.
"That's a brave boy you've got there," the doctor says. "You must be very proud of him."
Ken grins up at the man through a film of tears. His mother gives him a fond smile and ruffles his hair; there is something in her eyes he cannot begin to understand.
"He is," she says. "I am. Doctor? Can I speak with you a minute?"
After that, it's never quite the same.
*
He's not quite sure how much longer it takes to sink in that something is the matter with Mama. Perhaps the third, maybe the fourth time in as many weeks they take the bus down to the clinic and sit there and wait on uncomfortable waiting-room chairs, with Ken swinging his legs and yawning in boredom and Mama looking more and more anxious by the visit and nobody even thinking to ask him to take his shirt off and sit blinking on the couch while a stethoscope is pressed to his chest. The third, maybe the fourth time, he realizes that if he's not sick then Mama must be: he has a book about people who work and that's what doctors do, isn't it? They make sick people better.
He wonders how that can be when she isn't coughing and isn't staying in bed. Mama doesn't look ill. Just sleepy, and she doesn't seem to want to play with him very much lately...
She seems to be hugging him more.
*
"Where are you going?"
The first time she vanishes, she's gone for a long time. They don't tell him where, just that mama's not well and needs to go away for a while so she can get better. She looks pale and tired and, he thinks, not so big as she once did as she puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him, as his father carries her bags to a taxi, to be brave. He would have to be brave and try not to trouble his grandparents, because things were going to be a little difficult for them right now as well.
"Mama? When will you be back?"
She doesn't reply. She simply pulls him into an embrace, she kisses his brow. She says, "Be good."
*
Something is the matter with Mama. She's different when she gets back. Thinner. She wakes late. They'd told him she was going away to get well again: now here she is back home and, for the first time, Ken can tell that she really is sick.
Mama stops taking him to kindergarten: she hands the job off to Auntie Yamada. Auntie isn't really his auntie, of course, she just lives upstairs and has a little girl who goes to the same kindergarten he does, but Misaki is three and she has stupid pigtails and she thinks Ken is mean. Ken hates Misaki because she's whiny and refuses to talk to her all the way there, and while Auntie is nice to him she's not Mama, so Ken can't help disliking her a bit too.
Mama scolds him for it when he gets home and Ken is almost too angry with her to care because she should be there and she isn't and they won't tell him why. Why won't she get better? Wasn't that why she went away?
She's tired all the time now. It's all she can do to drag herself through the day; some mornings even getting out of bed is enough to exhaust her. Dinner comes from the freezer or from boxes; Papa goes to work with his shirts inexpertly pressed; Ken can't remember the last time they went to Mass as a family and even there he can't escape it. His father has started lingering after the service: though he feels guilty for even thinking it, Ken doesn't want to go home. Maybe Papa doesn't want to, either.
Advent Sunday and Hinarin's talking to him and he wishes she'd leave him alone.
"Is your mom gonna die?"
"No. Go away."
"But my dad says she's got cancer."
"No she hasn't."
The denial is reflexive. He only realizes after he's said it that he doesn't know what cancer is.
The girl purses her lips into a frown; she says something else, but he's no longer listening. Ken gets up and walks away, out the church doors and out into the postage-stamp-sized churchyard. It's cold outside, and he watches the breath curling from his lips as he kicks the leaves out of their neatly-raked piles until the sexton yells at him to stop.
He doesn't want to go home.
*
It has a name now, the thing that is wrong with Mama. Ken hoards the knowledge guiltily, well aware that the grown-ups think he doesn't understand. They don't discuss it in front of him. He's not supposed to know.
After Christmas he asks Hinarin what cancer is, but she doesn't know either.
*
Spring comes and Mama's hair falls out. She wraps her head in brightly-colored scarves and it doesn't help. Her skin's gone a funny color and the paintbox shades of her headscarves just leave her looking iller. Ken takes to tugging at his own hair in secret, but it stays stuck to his head as firmly as ever. He doesn't get it. He caught Misaki's cold just from walking to kindergarten with her but he still hasn't got the cancer from Mama. He wonders if maybe she ate something funny, or if she sat next to a bad person who was out without a cold mask. He wonders why God has spared him and Papa, but let her get sick. He crawls onto her bed after kindergarten, shoes still thoughtlessly on, and she holds him in her arms and murmurs soft things to him.
She goes away again, then again, and every time she comes back looking more and more ill. Papa's barely home and when he is he's preoccupied, dazed. He talks in whispers on the telephone and his conversation is choked with difficult, bad-sounding words Ken doesn't understand, words like terminal and palliative. Ken wants to know what the words mean but he doesn't know who to ask. None of his friends know, and Papa won't tell him.
(Aren't doctors supposed to help people? The book said they made sick people well again. Why won't they make Mama well?)
He's starting to feel scared. Really scared, all the time. What's happening to Mama? Why won't it stop?
And yet every morning he still half-expects to wake up and find her better. It doesn't happen the day he starts school, either, and it's disappointing all over again. Ken, a new rucksack slung over his narrow shoulders, stands by the side of her bed as she fusses with the collar of his shirt and struggles to smooth his hair, and he wants to tell her it's okay not to because it seems so hard for her, but the last time he did she'd cried and cried until he was crying, too. Ken doesn't want her to cry again so he gives her a clumsy grin and says he'll be fine by himself and she's not to feel bad, and as tears stand out in the corner of his mother's eyes he wonders why it didn't work. She strokes his hair, pulls him into an awkward hug. She tells him to be good.
All the other kids have someone with them. A couple have their fathers, but most of them have their moms. He alone is separate and they stare at him, children and their parents both.
"Where's your mother?" The boy sitting next to him asks.
"She's tired," Ken says. Then, "Go away."
*
The sixth time she vanishes they tell Ken she'll never be coming back and he doesn't understand, he doesn't understand a word. She always came back before, didn't she? Why should this time be so different?
It is late May and already uncomfortably hot: less than a year since he sat on the examination couch clenching his fists in the hem of his shirt and telling himself he wouldn't cry. Mama is gone. He's a few inches taller, longer-limbed; he can count to a hundred and write his own name; his eyes are grave. The rest of the first grade think he's weird and Ken doesn't care as long as they leave him alone. It already feels like he's been at school for years and years; already he wishes he could stop going. He'd come home one afternoon (walking, as always, alone) and she'd just gone: Papa's bag was in the hall, but there was no sign of his parents. Auntie Yamada had come and taken him back to her apartment, and she'd made him some food and looked at him so sadly it made him cross.
Mama had told him to be good, and he hadn't been. Maybe that was why she wouldn't come back.
They've been to Mass; they're dressed in black. The scent of incense is still heavy in Ken's hair, even now they're walking home. Church was interesting today and pretty with all those flowers, but Mama still hasn't come back. Everyone else was there and they all talked about her, but she is nowhere to be seen no matter how hard Ken looks.
"Where's mama?" Ken asks.
He's been asking it a lot and he'd stop, really he would, if only someone would give him a proper answer. For a moment he thinks he is in trouble, and is going to be shouted at. Instead - after a long, giddy moment of near-fear - he is pulled to his father's chest, held so tightly it squeezes the breath from him: Papa, that hurts--
When he's finally freed from the snare of his father's arms, the collar of his shirt is damp.
*
Mama is dead: Ken knows this. He just wishes he understood what that meant, apart from sleeping for ever.
He goes back to school and, now that it's far too late for it to matter, they have taught him how to write the words for what he has lost. He clumsily traces the characters over and over, resenting every single awkward stroke, and Miyazawa-sensei tells him he's still not holding his pencil correctly and shows him, again, how his fingers should grip it.
Now they tell him to draw his family, and for the longest time Ken simply sits there and stares at the paper they gave him. The boy next to him has a mother and a father and a big sister on the swim team, and a new baby brother and a cat and a goldfish and Ken hates him for it, and wonders what he did wrong that that boy didn't.
"Ken-kun," Miyazawa-sensei scolds him, "Why aren't you drawing your family?"
And Ken says, "I don't want to."
[Ken wakes up, but the only sign of it is his open eyes. For a long while he simply lies there unmoving, then closes his eyes again and wipes at them angrily with one hand.]
Dream Effects: Confusion from the start, only intensifying as the dream progresses. A growing sense of helplessness, frustrated anger and sadness, and finally a near-overwhelming feeling of hopelessly misaimed guilt.
It starts small.
It starts with the clinic and a lazy late summer afternoon trapped just outside the windows, and Ken home from kindergarten with a clay pot in his bag and his mother by his side and the admonition to be good for the doctor still fresh in his mind.
The doctor is rolling up his sleeve, wiping alcohol on his upper arm. Ken, sitting on the edge of the examining couch, curls his fists in the front of his shirt and bites down hard on his lip. He isn't going to cry. The last time they'd done this to him he'd cried but that was for babies, not for big kids of five and a half who started school in the spring-- He manages only to gasp when the needle bites into his arm: a sudden stinging pain, like the sting of a giant insect. He didn't cry, though. Babies cried.
"That's a brave boy you've got there," the doctor says. "You must be very proud of him."
Ken grins up at the man through a film of tears. His mother gives him a fond smile and ruffles his hair; there is something in her eyes he cannot begin to understand.
"He is," she says. "I am. Doctor? Can I speak with you a minute?"
After that, it's never quite the same.
*
He's not quite sure how much longer it takes to sink in that something is the matter with Mama. Perhaps the third, maybe the fourth time in as many weeks they take the bus down to the clinic and sit there and wait on uncomfortable waiting-room chairs, with Ken swinging his legs and yawning in boredom and Mama looking more and more anxious by the visit and nobody even thinking to ask him to take his shirt off and sit blinking on the couch while a stethoscope is pressed to his chest. The third, maybe the fourth time, he realizes that if he's not sick then Mama must be: he has a book about people who work and that's what doctors do, isn't it? They make sick people better.
He wonders how that can be when she isn't coughing and isn't staying in bed. Mama doesn't look ill. Just sleepy, and she doesn't seem to want to play with him very much lately...
She seems to be hugging him more.
*
"Where are you going?"
The first time she vanishes, she's gone for a long time. They don't tell him where, just that mama's not well and needs to go away for a while so she can get better. She looks pale and tired and, he thinks, not so big as she once did as she puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him, as his father carries her bags to a taxi, to be brave. He would have to be brave and try not to trouble his grandparents, because things were going to be a little difficult for them right now as well.
"Mama? When will you be back?"
She doesn't reply. She simply pulls him into an embrace, she kisses his brow. She says, "Be good."
*
Something is the matter with Mama. She's different when she gets back. Thinner. She wakes late. They'd told him she was going away to get well again: now here she is back home and, for the first time, Ken can tell that she really is sick.
Mama stops taking him to kindergarten: she hands the job off to Auntie Yamada. Auntie isn't really his auntie, of course, she just lives upstairs and has a little girl who goes to the same kindergarten he does, but Misaki is three and she has stupid pigtails and she thinks Ken is mean. Ken hates Misaki because she's whiny and refuses to talk to her all the way there, and while Auntie is nice to him she's not Mama, so Ken can't help disliking her a bit too.
Mama scolds him for it when he gets home and Ken is almost too angry with her to care because she should be there and she isn't and they won't tell him why. Why won't she get better? Wasn't that why she went away?
She's tired all the time now. It's all she can do to drag herself through the day; some mornings even getting out of bed is enough to exhaust her. Dinner comes from the freezer or from boxes; Papa goes to work with his shirts inexpertly pressed; Ken can't remember the last time they went to Mass as a family and even there he can't escape it. His father has started lingering after the service: though he feels guilty for even thinking it, Ken doesn't want to go home. Maybe Papa doesn't want to, either.
Advent Sunday and Hinarin's talking to him and he wishes she'd leave him alone.
"Is your mom gonna die?"
"No. Go away."
"But my dad says she's got cancer."
"No she hasn't."
The denial is reflexive. He only realizes after he's said it that he doesn't know what cancer is.
The girl purses her lips into a frown; she says something else, but he's no longer listening. Ken gets up and walks away, out the church doors and out into the postage-stamp-sized churchyard. It's cold outside, and he watches the breath curling from his lips as he kicks the leaves out of their neatly-raked piles until the sexton yells at him to stop.
He doesn't want to go home.
*
It has a name now, the thing that is wrong with Mama. Ken hoards the knowledge guiltily, well aware that the grown-ups think he doesn't understand. They don't discuss it in front of him. He's not supposed to know.
After Christmas he asks Hinarin what cancer is, but she doesn't know either.
*
Spring comes and Mama's hair falls out. She wraps her head in brightly-colored scarves and it doesn't help. Her skin's gone a funny color and the paintbox shades of her headscarves just leave her looking iller. Ken takes to tugging at his own hair in secret, but it stays stuck to his head as firmly as ever. He doesn't get it. He caught Misaki's cold just from walking to kindergarten with her but he still hasn't got the cancer from Mama. He wonders if maybe she ate something funny, or if she sat next to a bad person who was out without a cold mask. He wonders why God has spared him and Papa, but let her get sick. He crawls onto her bed after kindergarten, shoes still thoughtlessly on, and she holds him in her arms and murmurs soft things to him.
She goes away again, then again, and every time she comes back looking more and more ill. Papa's barely home and when he is he's preoccupied, dazed. He talks in whispers on the telephone and his conversation is choked with difficult, bad-sounding words Ken doesn't understand, words like terminal and palliative. Ken wants to know what the words mean but he doesn't know who to ask. None of his friends know, and Papa won't tell him.
(Aren't doctors supposed to help people? The book said they made sick people well again. Why won't they make Mama well?)
He's starting to feel scared. Really scared, all the time. What's happening to Mama? Why won't it stop?
And yet every morning he still half-expects to wake up and find her better. It doesn't happen the day he starts school, either, and it's disappointing all over again. Ken, a new rucksack slung over his narrow shoulders, stands by the side of her bed as she fusses with the collar of his shirt and struggles to smooth his hair, and he wants to tell her it's okay not to because it seems so hard for her, but the last time he did she'd cried and cried until he was crying, too. Ken doesn't want her to cry again so he gives her a clumsy grin and says he'll be fine by himself and she's not to feel bad, and as tears stand out in the corner of his mother's eyes he wonders why it didn't work. She strokes his hair, pulls him into an awkward hug. She tells him to be good.
All the other kids have someone with them. A couple have their fathers, but most of them have their moms. He alone is separate and they stare at him, children and their parents both.
"Where's your mother?" The boy sitting next to him asks.
"She's tired," Ken says. Then, "Go away."
*
The sixth time she vanishes they tell Ken she'll never be coming back and he doesn't understand, he doesn't understand a word. She always came back before, didn't she? Why should this time be so different?
It is late May and already uncomfortably hot: less than a year since he sat on the examination couch clenching his fists in the hem of his shirt and telling himself he wouldn't cry. Mama is gone. He's a few inches taller, longer-limbed; he can count to a hundred and write his own name; his eyes are grave. The rest of the first grade think he's weird and Ken doesn't care as long as they leave him alone. It already feels like he's been at school for years and years; already he wishes he could stop going. He'd come home one afternoon (walking, as always, alone) and she'd just gone: Papa's bag was in the hall, but there was no sign of his parents. Auntie Yamada had come and taken him back to her apartment, and she'd made him some food and looked at him so sadly it made him cross.
Mama had told him to be good, and he hadn't been. Maybe that was why she wouldn't come back.
They've been to Mass; they're dressed in black. The scent of incense is still heavy in Ken's hair, even now they're walking home. Church was interesting today and pretty with all those flowers, but Mama still hasn't come back. Everyone else was there and they all talked about her, but she is nowhere to be seen no matter how hard Ken looks.
"Where's mama?" Ken asks.
He's been asking it a lot and he'd stop, really he would, if only someone would give him a proper answer. For a moment he thinks he is in trouble, and is going to be shouted at. Instead - after a long, giddy moment of near-fear - he is pulled to his father's chest, held so tightly it squeezes the breath from him: Papa, that hurts--
When he's finally freed from the snare of his father's arms, the collar of his shirt is damp.
*
Mama is dead: Ken knows this. He just wishes he understood what that meant, apart from sleeping for ever.
He goes back to school and, now that it's far too late for it to matter, they have taught him how to write the words for what he has lost. He clumsily traces the characters over and over, resenting every single awkward stroke, and Miyazawa-sensei tells him he's still not holding his pencil correctly and shows him, again, how his fingers should grip it.
Now they tell him to draw his family, and for the longest time Ken simply sits there and stares at the paper they gave him. The boy next to him has a mother and a father and a big sister on the swim team, and a new baby brother and a cat and a goldfish and Ken hates him for it, and wonders what he did wrong that that boy didn't.
"Ken-kun," Miyazawa-sensei scolds him, "Why aren't you drawing your family?"
And Ken says, "I don't want to."
[Ken wakes up, but the only sign of it is his open eyes. For a long while he simply lies there unmoving, then closes his eyes again and wipes at them angrily with one hand.]
[Ancient Chinese]
Date: 2010-02-26 02:23 am (UTC)Excuse me?
[Engrish]
Date: 2010-02-26 02:26 am (UTC)[... yeah, Ken's English is so hit-and-miss he's not sure if the problem here is that Nakago doesn't speak English or if his English is JUST THAT BAD.]
[Ancient Chinese]
Date: 2010-02-26 02:28 am (UTC)[Nakago is guessing as to what the question is but he doubts he's wrong.]
[Japanese] [1/2]
Date: 2010-02-26 05:11 am (UTC)[Japanese] [2/2]
Date: 2010-02-26 05:12 am (UTC)[Ancient Chinese]
Date: 2010-02-26 05:20 am (UTC)