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Hifumi acts too well for someone who’s been muted.
He’s versed in this kind of thing—acting, pretending. Doppo knows. He’s been knowing since he was a kid in front of a nine-year-old Hifumi who was bleeding out from several places on his limbs after a nasty bike crash straight into the gutter against a wall, both wheels upturned toward the sky like halved vinyl disks. He’d smiled and made all that guttural red look like it came from roses instead of wounds, legs shaking to the point where he almost collapsed in Doppo’s arms as they were hobbling over to Doppo’s house.
And now it’s also like this again, after Honobono stole Hifumi’s voice: halved vinyl disks as Hifumi’s irises when he gives Doppo another one of his practiced smiles. Even when his voice fails him, he can still talk through his expressions, and when that fails, with his hands. Hifumi’s entire body is a language in itself, after all. So, Doppo listens and learns.
He learns that Hifumi touches his throat and swallows when he’s nervous, when he’s thinking about their battle again. He does it a lot. It’s almost a reflex at this point, when he opens his mouth to call out Doppo’s name and is met with silence instead. He’s not used to it, is what he is. He’s not used to this immobility, this muzzle over his mouth. And it’s like Honobono still has the leash around his neck; sound silence. He grips at it and finds nothing there in its wake.
When Hifumi hears tires screech against the asphalt or when the construction across from their apartment has metal ringing against metal, he jolts—a sharp tug at the leash in a reminder that’s been shoved between his ribs and lodged there in a memorial. He’s more twitchy when this happens. He blinks faster. His knees quiver. Halved vinyl disks at the sky, frozen in place. Anyone other than Doppo would have passed it off as a shiver from the cold.
He’s less active, more sedentary. Misses things. Thinking, thinking. At the dining table, on the couch, when he’s putting away laundry and forgets a fold, doesn’t add salt to the eggs for breakfast.
Doppo watches all this happen, days after he lets Hifumi take a direct bulls-eye from Honobono’s speakers. To everyone else, Hifumi is functioning. Been functioning, despite his loss of voice and the subsequent days off from Fragrance he’s forced to take. Doing chores around the house, doing groceries, doing normal things. To Doppo, this Hifumi harbors a grief palpable enough to make it feel like they’re both in the middle of being eighteen and twenty-two again. Back when Doppo could only stand at the sidelines and watch everything dig its hands into Hifumi all at once. Useless. Helpless.
(It’s happening again: all of it, all of this, whatever this is. And nothing’s really changed even after seven years, has it? Doppo’s uselessness, Hifumi’s suffering. They’ve only been dormant, practicing being unseen. Doppo leans back to look at the circular light above his room, and that, too, is like the memory of sunlight catching on the metal of Hifumi’s upturned bike tires. The halved vinyl disk scratches, rewinding. Unchanged.)
Now they’re sitting at the kotatsu while Hifumi peels another tangerine and feeds it to Doppo, one after the other like he’s trying to keep him quiet, like he doesn’t want any more to hear than the resounding hollowness in the wound breathing itself alive in his chest. So, Doppo stays silent and eats the fruit, bitter on the roof of his mouth as much as his guilt is underneath his tongue.
He stays silent and looks: orange clusters underneath Hifumi’s nails, a ribbon of white light graces his collarbone, the last sip of beer heavy on his breath, and Doppo realizes how many things Hifumi lets make a home within him. Maybe, he thinks for a fleeting moment as Hifumi places another piece of tangerine between his teeth, maybe Honobono’s also made another home within him all those years ago in high school. A deserted place, one that Hifumi takes a broom to every so often because he thinks of it as his duty. Maybe all the dust has been cleaned, and Hifumi’s tucked himself into a corner to try and understand why the place is still so empty. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for Honobono to take anything from him.
Doppo clamps down hard on the fruit with his front teeth, lips curled at the thought, juice leaking down his chin like the last mouthful of blood from a gun’s maw. Seeing this, Hifumi reaches over with his eyebrows furrowed and wipes the liquid running down Doppo’s face with a soft tissue.
“You don’t have to do that,” Doppo mumbles, shying away from his hand. Hifumi crumples the tissue into an unruly ball and gives Doppo one of his carefree smiles again. “Don’t push yourself more than you have to.”
Hifumi scrunches up his face into a pout, one that Doppo can’t help but huff out a light laugh at. He takes the notebook he’s been using since the incident and scratches a couple words onto the last of its paper, squashing it in the corner against his silly doodles of the two of them with blue ink. Taking care of Doppo-chin doesn’t hurt me at all!
“You should focus more on yourself, Hifumi.” Doppo takes another tangerine out of the basket situated in the middle of the table and peels it. He presses a piece against Hifumi’s parted lips. “You haven’t been eating much these days… And here you are, feeding me. I think it should be the other way around.”
Hifumi’s gaze flickers up to Doppo’s, and for a split second, Doppo sees the rare uneasiness creep out at the edges of his bloodshot eyes, red and livid. It seeps back behind his eyes just as quickly as it had come, hastening away with terror at its heels like it was afraid of having a body.
Doppo’s hand almost falters if not for Hifumi taking the fruit onto his tongue and chewing on it. Gimme more, he writes, a finger pointing at this mouth, unhinged wide open for Doppo to empty more tangerines into. Doppopo peeled it for me. I’ve gotta eat it.
“You have to eat more than just tangerines, though,” Doppo says with amusement. He drops another piece onto Hifumi’s tongue. “Sensei said it’s important to keep yourself healthy to let your voice come back to you naturally. I can—I can try cooking for you if you don’t feel like making anything…”
Hifumi doubles over in what looks like a laugh, but sounds more similar to the winter air seeping underneath their front door than anything else. His mouth splits into a grin as he tries to steady his hand enough to jot something down into his notepad. I’m super duper lucky to have someone like you!
A bunch of exclamation marks and a large heart overlapping Hifumi’s previous writings follows the message, and it’s all so Hifumi that Doppo can’t bring himself to smother the smile that stretches itself across his face.
“You can do way better than someone like me, Hifumi. I’m not that good at cooking.” Doppo takes another tangerine into his palm. This time, the skin’s warm against his own, and when he digs his nail into it, he accidentally punctures the flesh. Orange oozes from the opening like the first bead of rust out of an injury.
Hifumi wrinkles his nose. Scribbles down a couple of words. Pauses. The huff of disapproval he gives is the same as the one Doppo heard from a cat he passed by in an alleyway when it realized he had no food on him. He shakes his head, once, twice, tapping the back of the pen against paper. Then, with a speed that catches Doppo off guard, Hifumi raises his head and traps Doppo’s gaze in a deadlock. Like he can tell him what he wants to say with his pupils, like his eyes are another voice he knows only Doppo can hear.
It has to be you, Doppo, Hifumi’s written in shaky handwriting fit for someone overtaken by an incurable tremor. It has to be you. I don’t want anyone else.
(That night, after Hifumi’s gone to bed and Doppo’s left to wonder at the speed of the heater’s rumbling, he thinks about Hifumi, his words in uneven handwriting, and the last tangerine he peeled for Doppo heavy in his hand before he went to sleep.)
This goes on for a while: Hifumi continues to prepare food for Doppo; Doppo tries to get Hifumi to eat something, anything; they drink a couple of cans of beer the following Tuesday Doppo comes back early for once; they peel more tangerines together while sitting at the kotatsu. Hifumi writes about his day in a notebook; Doppo reads it. They exchange words like passing notes in class back in their junior year. It goes on for a while, until Hifumi stops all at once. Stops writing, stops eating, stops existing.
Just like the first time it happened when he was eighteen and blind, Doppo witnesses Hifumi’s collapse again. And just like the first time it happened, he doesn’t know the reason, doesn’t know why, doesn’t know how anything happened for Hifumi to relapse.
Doppo doesn’t even have the time to breathe when it happens—tomorrow crashes head first through the balcony doors and collides legs upward into Doppo’s chest, and he has to take it, he has to take it, and then Hifumi’s—Hifumi’s gone. Just like how their heater flatlined abruptly from choking on its own heat. Just like how their bathroom light snapped dead into black. Just like that.
It’s the same as how Doppo finds Hifumi: thumbed out at the edges by a cold, washed out blue same as the hue of dead skin. It presses imprints into his shoulders, denting them until he loses all mass simply by existing. He sits in the corner of the room with his legs tucked in to save the rest of what he has left of himself. Tonight, he’s the most transparent thing to exist in this world.
When Doppo reaches over, fingertips dying themselves in muted color, Hifumi looks at him in the way roadkill does the minute after it realizes it’s been hit—large, hollow eyes large enough for Doppo to put his hands and lose them in; limbs paralyzed similar to a patient’s after euthanization; a spasming throat quivering with the same impact that courses through the chest after being impaled.
Here, the pale light is here to kill. Whichever place it falls asleep on becomes an epitaph, meaning: most of Hifumi’s body is already half-dead as it is half-alive. In the hollows of his body, shadows curve homes into the skin, alive and breathing like they could paint him entirely gray, like they could be the last people to see Hifumi before he passes. Doppo reaches for these, too, hands around Hifumi’s shoulder to keep everything from becoming drainage into the gutter, as if he can save something else when he can’t even save himself.
Underneath Doppo’s arms, Hifumi’s body quivers as an unfamiliar hand does on a gun: not meant to hurt, but to plead. He can’t even sob, Doppo realizes with a guttural trauma to his head. Hifumi can only cry over his shoulder, staggered breaths wheezing in and out of him like they’re the only openings in his body. He can’t even sob, because he has no more to his voice.
Doppo can feel each terse muscle that constricts as Hifumi tenses with every pant and wheeze, hands clutching Doppo’s back with an intensity meant for desperation. For a moment, Doppo wants his hands to dig in harder until they break into his back to borrow his vocal cords. Hifumi can take them, and he can have them for as long as Honobono has his voice in her hold, if that’s what it takes for him to be happy again.
“Hel—” Doppo hears next to his ear in a scratched up, messed up kind of voice belonging to someone without a throat. “Do—Do—Hel—”
“Hifumi,” Doppo breathes out, holding him even tighter. He doesn’t know if there’s enough of him to stop Hifumi from shaking so much. “Hifumi, don’t strain yourself. Your voice isn’t back yet. Don’t—Don’t say anything.”
But Hifumi ignores him, shoving out half-syllables of Doppo’s name and working his mouth into a language he can no longer use until his lips split blood, dry with exhaustion. At some point in the middle of trying over and over again, coughs seize his body for their own, the only way of communicating that Hifumi has left.
And all Doppo can do is sit with Hifumi in his arms, the bitter tang of metal and violence on his tongue, and wait for morning.
Hifumi’s silent for days after that, devoid of the usual cheeriness that kept the apartment upright. Now the living room harbors a dullness to its heart, a film of gray draped over all the furniture like a funeral shroud. It’s quiet—so quiet to the extent where Doppo can hear his pulse like a murmur in his ear.
Whenever he comes home, Hifumi’s on the couch with the balcony curtains draped open to let the streetlights from below spill a pale yellow into the muted blue vignetting the room. The light barely touches the corner of the couch; it stops where Hifumi begins, right at his feet as he stares out the window blankly. It’s been happening so often that Doppo’s taken Hifumi’s reflection in the glass to be his ghost, something that should be transparent enough to be seen through.
But the problem is, Doppo can’t see through it. It blocks the rest of Shinjuku’s residential lights from the glass when Hifumi’s reflection struggles to take up space on the door, and maybe it’s not his ghost at all, but an imprint meant to tell Hifumi that he was still here despite lacking a voice.
Today, when Doppo comes home, he’s nearly taken aback by the sudden sound coming from the living room. On the couch, Hifumi sits staring not at the balcony doors, but at the T.V., turned on to the late night news. The volume’s set to two out of fifty—a vibrating hum along the walls. White from the screen airbrushes over the bridge of Hifumi’s nose, blurring into the dips in his face, flickering, flickering, flickering. Like something temporary, something without a name. The light encompasses him in the way that bereavement does to a person. It drapes off of his shoulder down his arm, over a small curve on his knee. Heavy. Weighed.
Hifumi’s eyes are half-lidded, trained on the T.V. and not on Doppo, even when he takes a seat next to him. The couch sinks under both of their weight. Hifumi blinks once, slowly. He hasn’t yet lost the warmth that Doppo remembers. It ebbs against Doppo in slow, thin waves, almost at the verge of disappearance, but still surviving. He heaves a light sigh of relief.
“Hifumi,” Doppo whispers. “Are you feeling better? You don’t have to say anything. Just give me a nod or whatever you want to do.”
Hifumi remains absolutely still, almost as if he’s the whiteness to a polaroid: hiding, the full picture glossed over. For a split moment, Doppo thinks Hifumi’s stopped breathing. It’s hard to tell when the T.V.’s colors blink over the creases in his shirt like two eyes fluttering shut for sleep, making each part of Hifumi shift slightly enough to make him seem animated. Alive. Doppo reaches a quivering hand toward Hifumi’s wilted bangs to sweep them out of the way. It stops, just centimeters from his hair as if it’ll find an answer there between all the matted strands.
When his fingertips meet the cusp of Hifumi’s ear, his skin and hair are cold. Almost freezing to the touch—a sharp chill that Doppo feels bite through his bone. Like his skin itself was deadly in the way that an animal’s is to defend itself.
“Shit, Hifumi,” he breathes out from behind caged teeth wanting to demand the truth, “you’re so cold. How long have you been sitting here? Did you—Did you sit out here after showering without drying your hair?” There’s no blanket near the couch, so Doppo removes his suit and drapes it over Hifumi’s body that is more of a thumbprint against glass than anything else. “You’re going to catch a cold like this. Or a headache.” He tightens the blanket over Hifumi’s chest, bundling all the material there like he could warm up a heart without touching, breaking it. “I’ll get you some hot water.”
Just as Doppo stands up, a sharp tug near his elbow has his voice jumping to the middle of his throat—strangled noise. The only noise. He halts, eyes catching the light over the bumps of Hifumi’s knuckles. A harsh highlight over sallow skin, wavering. Now, under the shade of his crestfallen hair, Hifumi catches Doppo’s startled gaze with pupils blown wide open, black holes that could make a new name for him.
“It’s desperation,” the news anchor mutters with an incredulous tone to his voice. The volume fuzzes into static for a couple seconds, scratching it out, rewinding. Those speakers never worked well when forced into a hush. Doppo swallows a lump that may just as well be the rest of unpredictability. “This desperation. It’s what keeps us alive.”
On a Thursday night at half past two a.m., desperation forces Hifumi to grip Doppo’s sleeve with a strength that bleaches his nail beds pale as the light that reaches out toward him from the balcony doors. And he holds onto Doppo like he’s also part of this desperation, like he’s also part of keeping Hifumi alive. He clings onto Doppo and pleads with his hands where his voice can’t.
“Okay,” Doppo says, softly, lowering himself down onto the couch again. He lets Hifumi hold onto the fabric keeping them apart, and maybe just hanging on to this, too, is Hifumi’s way of surviving. “Okay. I’ll just… I’ll just sit here. I won’t go anywhere. Don’t worry.”
Hifumi sinks into the couch again, the tension that once possessed him bleeding into the leather. Doppo knows, because he watches Hifumi shuffle underneath the suit jacket to twine his arm with Doppo’s and lean his head onto his shoulder. A frigid cheekbone against Doppo’s shoulder, icy fingers brushing over his hand, eyelids closed like they’re sealed shut by permafrost.
Doppo takes Hifumi’s hand in his own underneath the suit to rub warm circles over the stiff palm, to bring him back to life with just a touch. Please tell me, he thinks to himself, to the T.V., to the news anchor. How do you fix this? How do you bring back the voice of a person who’s no longer here tonight?
The T.V. flickers washed-out colors onto his face. The news anchor switches to the weather forecast. Doppo hears white noise.