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There is a ghost in the echoing, empty halls of a family home. It drifts, noncorporeal, across tatami mats and cold, gouged floors. It doesn’t feel the grooves against its feet, nor the glide of glass against its fingers as it presses its hands to the windows. In the courtyard the laundry hangs to dry, pillow cases and clothes waving listlessly. The window is a mirror, and the ghost sees itself in a pair of threadbare linen pants, in the neglected flower beds that only bear weeds, no matter how much they till the soil.
We’ll have to burn it and start fresh. Don’t worry, flowers are morbid like that.
When they take down the clothes they go back into the courtyard and fill it with acrid smoke, letting the rotten growth burn while keeping the fire from crawling through the windows and haunting the rafters of the house. Neither of them speak, and the air that is sucked out of the courtyard suffocates the fire and them.
They kneel side by side in the ashes, stirring up the soil first with their trowels, then with their hands. Spring has only just come, and the fire did nothing to warm the soil. They push through it like they’re digging out of a grave, like the oxygen has never returned to the courtyard and they know they’ll suffocate in their grave dirt if they don’t reach bedrock. They buried each other, close enough so their skeletal fingers could still find their complement.
Do you think this counts as a second chance -- for the flowers, I mean.
It counts as a resurrection.
Sometimes he thinks remaining a ghost might have been preferable, especially as he rubs his frozen hands raw under a stream of burning water. The water runs clean eventually, and he stares at his red splotched skin as if seeing it for the first time. He does not look up, into a mirror that still seems more like a window to him. Surely that isn’t him, a creature with sunken eyes and vivid, ugly scars. Surely he is still as Satoru describes: a little older, a little slower, but still the same foolish, foolish man.
Each of his scars makes him slower in some respect. His right arm is nearly useless with how stiff it is, and relearning to write with his left seems an impossible task. Satoru is the one to reach up for heavier or more delicate things now. He is the one who writes letter after letter of appeal, hunched over a desk that is still too small for him but that he doesn’t feel the need to replace. His handwriting has always been beautiful, but these days he can nearly see the rage dancing through the ink, angry and violet. Satoru’s skin has always been strangely cold, and he presses his aching head to his palm, his cheek, his back, any exposed flesh he can find for a chance at relief from the headaches that plague him.
When she had finished glaring at him through the veil of her cigarette smoke, the first thing Shōko had said to him was that he would never be able to let his guard down. The thing in his skull was dormant, not dead, its cursed energy the sole thing responsible for the firing of his neurons and the working of his muscles. If the curse was exorcised he would die, and if he lost his hold on himself they would likely never be able to get him back. It was purely the strength of his will that was holding his soul to his body. He joked that he was so strong willed he’d once thought he could kill all non-sorcerers, and when Satoru laughs it sounds like his lungs are full of blood, the alveoli waterlogged.
Later that night, he asks Satoru if he would be able to kill him again. How many times could you burn a garden and expect resurrection? When Satoru opens he chokes on each syllable. They gurgles in his throat and bubble out of his mouth like foam, and he admits that he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. That he only had the first time because he thought he could be selfless. The weeds could choke him for all he cared. There would be no more controlled burns.
The next spring brings windows that appear to be windows and mirrors that appear to be mirrors, a man who is not a weed eaten garden nor a ghost in his own home.
They go out again and till the soil, planting seeds in divots carved from the curves of their knuckles, sealed with the calloused tips of their fingers. The irises and balloon flowers won’t bloom just yet, not like the redness that blossoms over their hands as they dig into the still-thawing earth. They are the garden and they are the gardener, and the flames have wicked away the suffocating weeds. Satoru no longer drowns every time he speaks, and he no longer references his death every time he speaks.
There is a man in the mirror he recognizes, whose eyes are less hollow and whose scars have turned to lines and points of spider silk across his forehead. His hair grows longer, and when he cuts it for the first time since he died -- how strange that he is still dead to most of the world -- he cuts it to his shoulders, a length it hasn’t been since middle school, since his mother had cut it at the kitchen table. Satoru sets down the scissors and catches him as he collapses to the floor, the memory too much for a man whose hands still smell like blood and his mother’s perfume, no matter how much he washes them.
There had been a care package of food on the kitchen table when he’d gone into the kitchen to kill his father, washing dishes. It had his name on it and Satoru’s in parentheses, to explain the candy. It’s his turn to drown as he presses this confession in between Satoru’s heaving ribs like a knife, catching on ventricles and filling his dry lungs up with blood. They make a bed out of his fallen hair and sleep on the floor, neither strong enough to pick themselves up. An arm a pillow, a leg a blanket, they clutch at each other like vines to a trellis.
When they wake the irises have broken through the dirt, a half inch of green growth that they feel like ants alongside. Satoru feathers out his hair before they sweep, and they debate between burning the hair or spreading it like ashes. They end up dumping it into the kitchen trash, covering it with egg shells and the butcher paper wrap from a fillet of salmon.
They eat breakfast in the garden, the dew seeping into their pants as they pretend that spring means every day is warm and lovely and they aren’t freezing, watching over their irises to pray that they have the will to continue through the cold. They pray for the flowers and the flowers pray for them, because they know that the next time fire tears through this home it will mean no more resurrections. The weeds will eat through the floorboards and consume each fallen hair, each well healed scar just as easily as they will consume the irises.
If I ever tire, he says one early morning into the sleeping mouth of the truest love he has ever known, I won’t ask you to be selfless. Instead, let me be selfish, that way you only have to forgive me for leaving you. Satoru swallows, snuffles in his sleep, and he takes it as an assent.
The irises bloom in the summer, their anatomy unfolding and spilling petals onto the earth. It looks, they both think, like the blood of a curse.
They fill the garden with detritus, with things that the previous heads of the Gojo house would’ve made as much of anyway. Trellises go up along a wall and fill with roses over the next few years. Scars are earned in the garden as they braid the tender new stalks into the latticework. Eventually the lattice seems to grow too, over the courtyard, which they fill with chairs and tables and chimineas. Each month there seems to be a new hazard for Satoru to avoid as they bob and weave to their table to share breakfast. A hummingbird feeder, a lantern, more wind chimes than there could ever be wind, ribbons, refuse. Behind Satoru’s place at the table, a planetarium mobile, given to them by two of Satoru’s former students after their child had outgrown it. Behind his own, a hanging sculpture of dragonflies and flowering lily pads, the patina chipped where it has brushed against its neighbors.
They have been in the garden for years.
The roses reach the top of the trellis and need pruning now, so that they won’t choke the flowers on the ground from the sun. Satoru calls it a bonsai, while Suguru reminds him that bonsai must be trees, not bushes. Satoru gets a student to send him a small palm tree and prunes it meticulously, smiling triumphantly as he creates the world’s most embarrassing bonsai.
When they have been at the house for nearly forty years and Suguru can no longer stand steadily on the stepladder to prune the roses, Satoru prepares. Shōko had told them that a body ripped apart and put back together would likely not last as long as it might have otherwise. That he has held his mind for so long is in itself a miracle, though one that has become easy to forget as Suguru’s scar faded and was subsumed by the lines of wrinkles that slowly etch themselves across his face.
The mind is a terrible thing regardless of who owns it, and he learns this when Suguru wakes in his arms one day and asks him where they are, if they’ve gone to a hot spring for their break. When he looks at himself in the mirror, Suguru seems momentarily like a cornered animal. He brushes his teeth with them bared in a snarl, as if ready to lunge for the throat of the old man who looks back at him. He doesn’t recognize the gold band on his finger, but he recognizes enough of the significance of its twin to know that he has forgotten something like a life. Suguru doesn’t know why it only feels like a life instead of… What is there instead of something like a life?
Before he can forget more he falls, having forgotten that he was no longer steady enough to prune the roses. He lands on the irises and thinks for a moment that they must have speared him through. Then Satoru is at his side, taking inventory of bones and blood, sinews and muscle. His eyes are the same marble as the cloud splattered skies Suguru sees through the latticework, and Suguru can see dirt under his fingernails as he hoists him up and helps him to the bed. Surely he hadn’t forgotten something so important as Satoru becoming finite. He certainly still carries him as if he weighs nothing, as if the summer heat has taken more of him than he thought it had.
Satoru paces their room, a phone pressed to his ear and his mouth a pantomime of words. The windchimes had been so loud before he had fallen, but the fall had quieted them, the sound leaving the world at the same time the breath left his lungs. When Satoru sits beside him on the bed, his phone call done but his brow no less pinched, lets the new concavity of the bed draw him in, a black hole as he wraps his thin, trembling body around a man he does not remember exchanging rings with but whom he doubts he could ever forget loving.
The gravity of their singularity draws them both in, and Satoru sinks into the bed until they are curled around each other, entwined. Uzumaki. Suguru doesn’t know why the word comes to mind, but he thinks it too ugly a thing to apply to the hands that span his aching ribs or the lips that press against the skin behind his ear.
Though he feels the vibration of words in his palms, in the chimney of Satoru’s throat and the billows of his lungs, he cannot hear anything but his own thoughts, loud and discordant in a mind he has never seen as purely his own. Why would his mind not be his own? Because his heart belongs to Satoru or because of the faded scar that sometimes aches when a storm approaches?
As night falls and the sky darkens, Suguru watches the movements of Satoru’s lips, trying to ascribe meaning to something he can no longer replicate. What would he say if he could? Something foolish. Embarrassing. Deeply and unrepentantly loving. He stills Satoru’s lips with his own, notices that Satoru’s are warm against his, and the last of the sun drains from the room.
In the garden the broken irises begin to rot.
It only takes a year for the roses to block the sun and smother all that remains.