Chapter Text
The apartment was probably a little on the wrong side of what was healthy for their budget, but newly-wed Hajime Negi wanted to please his wife. What he didn't tell her was that the size of the mortgage was such that he would have to pull significant overtime at the office to ensure they met the repayments, and as a result would have less time to spend with her. Had he been confident enough to say so, his wife might have told him that they really didn't need such a nice apartment and that she would have been satisfied with something less up-market. Hajime wasn't a confident person.
To make up for his hours, he tried to make the most of their time together when he did manage to be at home. His wife was deliriously happy in the way that only new brides could be; she had always wanted a home of her own, and was having the time of her life cleaning and rearranging the furniture in the apartment. One day she asked Hajime to install some new shelves in the wardrobe in the room they were using for storage. Hajime had the suspicion that his wife envisioned turning that room into a child's bedroom. So, one afternoon on the weekend while his wife went grocery shopping, Hajime tried to turn his hand to carpentry. He managed to measure out the boards properly and mark the places where he was going to put the nails, that was the easy part. Then came the problem of actually hammering the nails in. Hajime wasn't much of a handyman to begin with and the awkward position he had to sit in inside the wardrobe didn't help. The first time he tried he missed and nearly hit his thumb. The second time he did hit his thumb. The third time he finally managed to hit the nail, but the nail went right through the back of the wardrobe and fell down.
Hajime frowned and forgot his sore thumb for a moment. There was a hole at the back of the wardrobe. Sticking his finger inside he realised that what he had thought was the wall was actually a false panel.
Curiosity made him more daring. Hajime hooked his finger into the hole he had made and tried to pull the false panel out. It shifted a little, shaking free a cloud of plaster dust that he made him sneeze. Finally the panel came loose and a crack appeared along the back of the wall about two feet from the ground. Frowning, Hajime inserted his fingers into the crack and pulled. The whole panel came out.
Carefully Hajime lifted the panel out of the wardrobe. Once he had placed it against the adjacent wall he returned eagerly to the floor of the wardrobe to see what he had found, his list of chores for the day forgotten. Inside the cavity was a chest. Hajime ran his fingers over it, and, finding somewhere to grip, heaved it out. It was heavier than he expected and he strained his muscles, but he managed. Once he had it in the open he inspected it again.
The chest was large, approximately half as wide as it was long, and about fifty centimetres deep. It was built of a dark wood, and when Hajime dragged his hand across its surface to wipe away the dust his reflection was swallowed in the lacquer. There was no design or pattern on the surface, nothing that might give a hint as to its origins, but it was elegantly constructed like a woman's jewellery box, its beauty lying in its almost stark simplicity. Maybe it was something the apartment's previous owner had forgotten and left behind. Or maybe it had been the owner before the previous, or the one before that. Whatever its history, maybe Hajime could sell it or return it for a reward.
Feeling a little like an intruder who has come upon a sacred temple, Hajime looked for a way to make the chest open. After a minute of careful scrutiny Hajime found the catch. There was no lock, only a silken black cord tied in an elaborate knot. Hajime made several attempts to undo it, but the knot was too smooth and he couldn't even find where it began. He was about to give up when the knot simply fell apart. Hajime thought that his attempts had loosened it.
Putting the silk to one side Hajime lifted up the lid and looked eagerly inside. At first he thought that the chest was empty, it was so dark. Then he realised that the chest wasn't empty, it was just that whatever was in it was black. Packed into the chest were several identical cases of such a size as to hold a small picture frame. They were stacked against each other like thick cards.
The underside of the lid also proved to hold something. There was a pocket there, not unlike those in violin cases where string and resin is kept, with a lid of black velvet. Unhooking it Hajime found his first hint of what this find could be. Set out in perfect organisation was a set of painter's brushes. There were several of them of all sizes, and judging from their worn and stained heads, had been in frequent use.
There was another smaller pocket beside this one inset into the lid. Opening that one Hajime had to move quickly as some things fell out. Pieces of silk, black silk, like that which had been tied around the chest's catch. Why they were there Hajime couldn't imagine.
He found a probable answer to that when he turned his attention to the cases that took up most of the chest. Picking one at random he pulled it out and felt something shift inside. The case was stiff and covered in dull black leather. When angled against the light Hajime could see that there was some design emblazoned on it, lines where the leather had been pressed smooth. He couldn't see what it was, but he did find a clasp on one side. It was held shut by a thin silken black cord tied into an elaborate endless knot.
Hajime frowned and looked at the other cases. All of them were tied closed in exactly the same way. None of them would open, except one. The knot on that one fell apart the moment Hajime touched it, slipping through his fingers like dark water. By now Hajime had come to the conclusion that he had gone too far to back out now, and opened the case without hesitation.
There was a piece of canvas inside the case. Hajime slid it out and spread it over the floor. He frowned. The canvas was a painting. Hajime knew nothing about art, but he was rather sure that this wouldn't be any kind of masterpiece. The painting was amateur, almost childish, yet there was a certain dignified quality to it that Hajime could only associate with an adult.
He looked at it more closely. Hajime became lost.
The background was slate grey but hardly visible since nearly all of the canvas was filled with white circles. Each white circle had a small black line at the edge, like a mouth. Now that Hajime though about it, the white circles seemed like representations of faces in profile, scores of them, without eyes or noses. There was only one that stood out. It was placed in the upper left-hand quadrant, and it was black. It had an open mouth and a pair of white eyes that stared directly out of the canvas. Despite the face's stylized simplicity, Hajime couldn't help but think that it was drowning.
Drowning, in a sea of faces that didn't notice or care.
Hajime didn't know how long he sat there on the floor staring at the picture. Suddenly there was the sound of a door unlocking. Hajime started, jolted out of a haze of passing faces on a street where he didn't exist. Shoving the picture into its case he stuffed it and the pieces of silk clumsily into the chest. He braced himself against the floor to use his legs to push the chest back into the wall cavity, then grabbed the false panel and put it pack in its original position just as his wife came looking for him.
His wife frowned. Her husband was sitting in the wardrobe. "Hajime dear, what are you doing?"
Hajime stared at her for a moment, pulling himself out of a swirl of white faces. His chest, he noticed suddenly, felt tight. Suddenly he leapt to his feet, and, crossing the distance between them in two steps, pulled his wife into a harsh embrace.
"H-Hajime?"
Hajime buried his face in his wife's hair. It smelt of apple shampoo. She fell quiet in his arms, then hesitantly reached up to hold him close.
"Dearest," asked his wife worriedly, "what's wrong?"
Hajime closed his eyes. "Nothing," he murmured, losing his voice in her hair, "nothing. I'm just … glad you're here."
It was the first time he had used the chest's contents. It had been sitting in its lair for years, never looked at or thought about ever since it had first been given to him just like it had been given to all those before him. It had come to him empty. He wondered if that was significant.
The brush lay heavy in his hand like it had done for the past two hours. Beginning is always the hardest.
Finally, with slow hesitancy, he decided on the grey. He wasn't sure the reason why, but he did. He poured a little paint out onto the plate and mixed in a few drops of water. Then he dipped in the brush and swept the grey over the canvas in precise lines, trying with every stroke to understand what this tension was, to give it a name, this tension that he had woken up with this first day when he had nothing to anticipate and no one to meet and wondering why he had bothered getting up because no one would notice if he did or not. The first layer done, he watched the paint dry then applied another. He repeated this a third time. After that he reached for the white and painstakingly filled the grey with circles. On the table beside him the clock ticked away as regular as metronome beats and as final as the drum at the execution ground. Eventually, he switched brushes and poured out the white.
It will be six hours before he finishes, six hours without break or rest. When done he will look at his work once and turn away. Before the paint dries he will put it in a box where it will never see the light of day and lock it with silk. He will never see that painting again, but he will know it's there, locked away and as comprehensible as the stars.
He won't care. The next morning he will get up like always. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that …