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“Fyodor!” Dazai kicks one shoe off then toes the other down, before nudging them into loose place at the entrance way. “I’ve decided—I am going to kill myself.”
Fyodor’s eyes flick to Dazai.
“Oh,” he says. “Okay. Do you have life insurance?”
Dazai asks, “No protest?”
Fyodor makes a sound that could be a snort but comes more like a breathy snicker. “You didn’t marry me because I’m in habit of disagreeing with you. Certainly, you didn’t marry me because I’m different from you.”
It’s returned rather late—or quite early, depending how Dazai decides to count the time. Technically, the birds are all out and singing. Five in the morning means that through the slit of the apartment door Dazai has yet to close, the dawny gray of morning filters in over Fyodor in a way that casts him ghostly. He’s laid out along the living room couch, cocooned in a thin blanket with his laptop over his ribs and his wrists at an uncomfortable angle to type, and the tube of his IV snaking up out against his jaw, and his hair tangled—it looks uncomfortable, but it isn’t Dazai’s body. That’s the point, right?
What isn’t someone’s body isn’t someone’s business.
“That’s true,” Dazai says.
Fyodor is looking at his screen. “Life insurance, Dazai?”
“I’m working on it,” it says.
“Hmm.” Fyodor’s eyes move right to left to back again; the reflection of the screen in his irises and against his lashes does not move with it. “Wait a couple months.”
“Ehh?”
It makes a face.
“Line your shoes up properly,” Fyodor says. “There’s food in the fridge. Don’t even think of touching my fluids. And don’t make that face.”
Dazai hasn’t even made the face yet, but Fyodor surely knows that, too. Something itches up its arms and neck, under its bandages, a wave wave of skin-irritation; hives. “Let me guess,” it says, “you added something I’m allergic to into all your food and fluids?”
“You know the answer already.”
It’s a yes.
What a serious, mean work of a person.
It doesn’t say anything more when it goes to the kitchen. It opens the fridge. It doesn’t see anything wants to eat. It catches sight of itself in the mirror. It doesn't make any expression at all. It opens the fridge. It closes the fridge. It opens the fridge. It closes the fridge. Rinse and repeat. It opens the tea-drawer and takes out chamomile hojicha from Kouyou, then tries to remember if Fyodor can tolerate hojicha, then wonders why it matters, if nothing in the world matters at all. Then again, if nothing in the world mattered at all, Dazai wouldn’t be making tea, and wouldn’t want to kill itself.
It puts a kettle on. It drifts to the cabinets.
Two health cabinets in the kitchen. One for Dazai, the other for Fyodor. Dazai’s cabinet is less filled, and less potentially fatal in substance, but it is the one with a lock; the lock is not for Dazai.
It opens the cabinet. It closes the cabinet. Rinse and repeat.
“Thanks,” Fyodor says, when it comes back with two cups of tea. Fyodor’s has a plastic straw.
He sits up so his upper body slumps on a pillowed slope against the arm of the couch; the watch round his wrist ticks up from 89 to display 110 then 120 then 127. The blanket over his torso rides down below the peaks of his ribs to show the port of his gastronomy tube. It’s tied up round a necklace round his neck. His laptop shifts to the bones of his hips. Dazai perches on the arm of the couch and pretends not to notice the face Fyodor sends it.
It chirps, “So polite!”
Fyodor taps his wedding ring against the edge of his cup; the chime of metal-on-glaze is swallowed by the distant chatter of birds, and the awkward sound of Dazai’s breath pressing cold against his teeth, and Fyodor’s rasping up his throat.
“You can’t commit,” he says.
“I am bad at commitment...” Dazai twists its wedding ring. When that gets no laugh, it gives, “Why?”
“You made me a promise,” Fyodor answers.
Dazai says, “I didn’t promise you my life.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!”
“Tell me about it,” Fyodor says. For eyes such a startling shade of scarlet, they have a tendency to look terribly, terribly dark.
It and he have separate finances. They do not have separate living but they have separate—a lot of things, the things that would matter if one of them died.
“I feel so bad,” Dazai says. “I want to go outside. I don’t want to be in here. It smells—” like tea and illness. Fyodor smells like illness, too, but it settles different on him than it does the rest of the apartment. “I feel bad.”
Fyodor shrugs. “Then get out and take a walk. You married me because you like me. Call me and talk over the phone if you feel so bad about leaving me alone for half a day.”
“Nah.”
“Commitment,” Fyodor reminds.
“It’s not like I’m owned by the people who know me,” Dazai says. “There’s nothing about knowing me that entitles anyone to it.”
Fyodor waits. Dazai doesn’t really have anything more it wants to say.
Dazai watches its reflection in the clock. The way the lines of its skin form a face. Its friends like its face too much. It looks at Fyodor.
He asks, “Feel better?”
“How would I know?”
Fyodor hums. “Are you getting life insurance?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“Once you get life insurance you have six months of staying alive so there’s no threat the company accuses insurance fraud,” Fyodor reminds.
“Know that already.”
“Feeling better?”
Dazai deliberates. “Maybe.”
It makes Fyodor smile and Dazai almost grimace. But its husband touches the edge of its mouth with the pad of his finger and then taps the rim of Dazai’s cup. Fyodor’s already beginning to gnaw down the end of his straw between his teeth. Dazai bites the bullet and takes a sip. It’s warm.
It is what it is, Dazai thinks.