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There’s a heron in the pond outside his window.
They ask him in the hospital what happened. His vision blurs and his ear rings. He isn’t sure he can hear out of it, or if that’s just a side effect of the concussion he gave himself.
“I tripped,” he says. The fingers that gripped the rock are stained and he curls them into a fist.
An old man stacks blocks over and over again in the day room. Mahito stands and watches him for an eternity. On the wall, the minute hand of the clock completes three cycles and starts on a fourth.
“Do you want to know what I’m building?” the man asks. He balances a sphere impossibly between a rectangle and a cylinder.
“No,” Mahito says.
“You’ll have a scar,” the nurse says.
That had been the point, but he doesn’t bother telling her that.
“And we’ve made a mess of your hair,” she continues, apologetic.
An unfortunate side effect.
Mahito’s mother had died in a hospital.
His room overlooks a pond. It’s the best view in the hospital and he gets it all to himself. Occasionally a nurse or a doctor deigns to share it for a sparse few minutes while they change a bandage or try to coax words from his mouth. They never bother to look out the window though.
They never see the heron in the pond.
“Does your head still hurt?” a doctor asks.
It would hurt to shake his head so Mahito just shrugs.
“It’s been two days since you last spoke,” the doctor says.
What a stupid thing to say. How could he possibly know if Mahito had spoken or not? It’s not like the man lives in this room with him.
Mahito shrugs again, because he knows it will make the doctor angry.
The old man stacks the sphere on the very top. Mahito waits for it to roll off but it stays still.
“Do you want to know what I’m building?”
The minute hand starts a new cycle. It is a hot afternoon and the curtains of the dayroom are closed to keep the heat out. The air conditioning is artificially cold. Mahito can’t see the pond from here.
He leaves because he doesn’t want to keep waiting for the sphere to fall.
The hospital his mother had died in had been different from this one. Her hospital was for sick people- truly sick people. Mahito’s deep gash is scarring over and he’s allowed to sleep through the night without being woken up to ensure he hasn’t passed away. He isn’t hurting like that anymore.
He goes back to his room each evening and watches the heron in the pond. He thinks he might hate it.
His father arrives and they go for a walk. He keeps a careful hand on Mahito’s shoulder and they both pretend this is the sort of normal thing a parent and a child would do together. From the front steps of the hospital, a nurse keeps her eyes firmly fixed on them.
His room has the best view but the worst air conditioning. Mahito wakes in a sweat and doesn’t move for the rest of the night. He blinks and it’s morning. He blinks and there’s another doctor waiting. He blinks and the heron is gone from the pond.
“Your hair is growing back,” Natsuko says. She places a slice of apple on a plate for him. A game of pretend where this is the hospital for the truly sick people and this apple will cure his ails.
“I’m going to cut it again,” he says. It is the first time he has spoken in three days.
“What happened?” the lady asks him. Mahito doesn’t know who she is, but he can tell she’s different from the other doctors. She speaks like they’ve been friends for an eternity. She speaks like Mahito is the one who forgot their history. She speaks like she expects him to answer.
“I tripped,” he says. The fingers that gripped the rock are freshly washed and he curls them into a fist.
The lady pretends to consult a sheet of paper that Mahito thinks might actually be blank. “No grazed palms,” she says. “No skinned knees.”
“I guess I forgot to catch myself,” he says. He makes a fist with his other hand and prepares to defend himself.
“That was pretty stupid of you,” she says.
The heron is fishing for dinner. Mahito watches it swallow a fish whole. On his bedside table lies his untouched tray of food.
When he asks, the nurses delay giving him an answer. He’s not sure what the problem with a haircut is. It’s not like he’s going to be the one doing the cutting.
New words from the old man today. Mahito isn’t sure why he keeps coming back to the day room. Today the blocks have barely assembled anything. The sphere sits on the table and a square with a pyramid on top is the only structure in place.
“Would you like to build something?”
“I’m not a child,” Mahito snaps.
“Neither am I,” the old man says, quite pointlessly. Nobody is mistaking him for anything but the relic he is.
The heron has its head tucked under a wing. Sleeping, most likely. The meagre ceiling fan whirrs ineffectively above Mahito’s head and he doesn’t close his eyes all night.
The woman is back. She has black hair, like Mahito’s mother had. Hers is short and choppy though. His mother’s had been long and sleek and elegant. When Mahito was younger he’d been allowed to brush it. Most likely a way to keep him entertained, since it took ages and ages to do properly.
It had probably burnt quickly.
“You wanted a haircut?” the woman asks. She has another piece of paper that is probably blank. Mahito is more interested in the bag she has with her- the perfect size for scissors and a brush.
“Yes,” Mahito says.
“What do you want?”
Mahito reaches a hand up to where the hair falls over the bald patch of his scar.
“What I had before.”
His father misses visiting day. Mahito sits on the steps of the hospital and watches the heron wade through the pond. A nurse hovers behind him, like she thinks he might take of running if she isn’t there.
“You have to eat,” a doctor says.
“The food tastes bad,” Mahito says. These are the first words he’s spoken since this morning.
“Everybody else eats it,” the doctor says.
A solid argument. Mahito reaches out and pushes the tray a little bit further away.
“Do you know what happens to people who don’t want to eat?”
What a stupid thing to say. Mahito wants to eat. He just doesn’t want this food.
He doesn’t speak to the woman for a week, but she keeps coming. She asks him where his voice went. He shrugs, because it makes the doctors angry. She smiles instead.
Weirdo.
Natsuko has come and gone. Mahito pretend to be asleep during her visit. She leaves behind the scent of her perfume- the same type his mother had worn- and a book. Forgoing reading the cover or even a page, Mahito holds the book instead, testing its weight. When he glances over to the window he sees the heron in the pond. It almost seems to be staring at him. He raises his hand higher, preparing to throw when-
A letter slips out from the pages of the book. Mahito doesn’t recognise the writing. He sets the book aside and reaches for the paper.
He will regret this very soon.
“What have you done?”
His room is destroyed. The mattress has been thrown across the room and the bedframe is flipped on its side. The window has been slammed open so violently that the glass is cracked. The little bedside table lies where it had been knocked over and the lamp that resided on it is beyond broken.
He sits in the middle of the mess. The fingers that gripped the rock have done more damage. They are stained with blood once more, cuts from the glass he has held.
Outside, the pond is empty. The heron has flown away.
The woman is back. She wants him to go for a walk with her. She doesn’t care that he’s supposed to be isolated in the empty room where there is nothing for him to break except himself.
“We’re going to a different floor,” she says. “You can walk, right?”
Mahito doesn’t think telling her otherwise would change anything. He follows obligingly, because she always talks like she knows him and she has black hair like his mother.
Natsuko’s hair is brown.
She leads him to a part of the hospital he’s never been allowed in. Through a long window of uncracked glass, he sees a row of tiny little cots and their even tinier occupants.
“Cute, right?” the woman says.
Mahito looks at the babies. “Why are they here?” he asks.
“We’re helping their mum’s,” the woman says. “They’re goin’ through a hard time so they come here. Just like you.”
“They don’t want to be with their babies?”
“No,” the woman says. Mahito should stop pretending he doesn’t know her name. “Sometimes people can’t be there for their kids.”
Mahito turns to look at her. She keeps her eyes on the glass.
“Natsuko is going to have a baby,” he says.
Kiriko nods. “I know.”
He spends three more days in the isolation room.
“Is the heron in the pond?” he asks Kiriko.
“Yes,” she says. “When they’re done fixing your room you can see it again.”
“I hate that bird,” he says.
Kiriko laughs. “It’s just a heron.”
“I don’t like the way it looks at me.”
Dinner that night is toast with jam and butter. Both the doctor and Mahito are surprised when he eats it.
When they let him out, he goes to the day room. The old man has a new configuration for him to scoff at.
“What are you building?” Mahito asks.
“A universe,” the man says. The pyramid teeters on the edge of a rectangle and threatens to fall.
“Pretty fragile universe,” Mahito says.
“Aren’t they all?”
He goes back to his room. It looks exactly the same, as though he’d never set himself upon it. Mahito curls his fingers around the tiny crisscrossing scars on his hands. When he glances out the window, the heron has its back to him.
His father makes it to visiting day. They sit in the day room and both watch as the old man stacks block after block.
“What’s he doing?” his father asks.
Mahito shrugs. “Building universes.”
He wonders if there’s one where his mother is alive.
“Natsuko is going to have her baby,” his father says. “You’re going to have a brother.”
“No thank you,” Mahito says politely.
He leaves his father sitting there and goes back to his room.
He asks to cut his hair again. They ask why he doesn’t want to hide his scar. He doesn’t have an answer for them yet.
Kiriko takes him to see the babies again. Unlike last time, one of the cots is empty.
“Did they go home?” Mahito asks.
She looks sad, and doesn’t answer him.
The heron and Mahito stay awake all night.
“I would like a knife,” Mahito requests. “I want to kill the heron.”
They put him back in the isolation room.
Dinner is stew and fresh bread. Mahito dips torn pieces into the sauce and eats it all. This food is much better and he wonders how they suddenly know what he likes.
They let him out of the isolation room.
The book Natsuko brought is sitting on his bedside table. Mahito can’t sleep and the heron is staring at him like it can see through him and so Mahito looks at the book instead.
How do you live, the title asks him.
Mahito opens the cover rather than let the question eat him alive. There’s writing inside it that isn’t typed. Mahito recognises it. Once, every birthday card he received contained this elegant scrawl.
He has to close the book before his tears ruin the last message his mother left him.
“Why do you keep bringing me here?” he asks Kiriko.
“Just want you to remember how small you used to be,” she says. “And how sometimes even when someone loves you, they don’t get to stay with you.”
“I know that,” Mahito snaps. He knows that better than most people.
“That doesn’t mean everybody stops loving you though,” Kiriko says.
Mahito pauses.
Mahito sits in the day room and watches the old man build.
The heron has moved closer. Mahito reads the book his mother left him and pretends he can’t see it.
He returns his empty tray to a nurse. She moves to leave the room but he holds up a hand, a silent wait.
“Why is the food so good now?” he asks.
Her face creases in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I used to hate the food.”
“Oh,” her face clears. “Your mother told us what you like to eat!”
Mahito brings the book with him to see Kiriko. His mother’s message is a weight in his mind he can’t lift off him. “I have a question,” he says.
“Ask away.”
“Do you think if people knew how they were going to die, they’d want to do things differently?”
“Dunno,” Kiriko says. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, what if knowing how you were gonna die meant you didn’t get to be alive.”
Mahito scrunches up his face. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Neither does what you asked.”
“Yes it does,” he says. “My mother…she probably knew she was going to die. She was really sick.”
“But she didn’t die from that sickness,” Kiriko points out.
Mahito thinks of fire and of how his mother always insisted on being the one to coax flames out of wood and coal when they lived at their old house.
“She burned,” he says. “She liked fire and she burned.”
They sit in silence for a long time.
It is dark and Mahito can’t stand to be in his room any longer. He waits until the nurse on night watch leaves and then he sneaks from his bed and down the stairs until he is outside. He buries his feet into wet grass and starts for the pond. He can see the heron sleeping, head tucked under its wing as though all you need to do to ignore everything that is going on is hide.
“What are you?!” he yells at it. The bird startles awake. Its wings flare and its neck lashes and its beak snaps. It screeches at him and all Mahito can think to do is yell back. He bends into the grass and searches frantically for a rock but he can’t find one. There is nothing for him to do harm with. All he has is his voice and he screams and screams and screams.
The heron takes to the sky and Mahito watches it go helplessly. It’s just a bird. It’s just a bird and the pond is just its home. It is no more a cruel being than fire or death is. It’s just a heron.
He curls his scarred fingers into fists and stands there until it is morning and a nurse finds him.
“Natsuko is coming here,” his father says.
“To see me?” Mahito asks.
His father hesitates. He turns to watch the old man stack another universe into existence. The blocks are getting awfully grubby now. Mahito wonders if it’s easier when they’re cleaner.
“No,” his father says finally. “She’s struggling. She needs to have her baby somewhere safe.”
Mahito thinks of rows of babies and of Kiriko’s watchful eyes.
“It’s good she’s coming here,” he says. “This is a good place.”
His father relaxes and behind them, the old man balances the sphere on the cylinder and smiles.
The heron is back in the pond. Mahito waves at it tentatively.
He has read the book three times now. He thinks maybe he’s starting to realise what his mother was trying to say.
“We were studying the war before I came here,” Mahito tells Kiriko the next time he sees her. They haven’t gone to visit the babies today. Mahito thinks that probably means Natsuko has arrived.
“Yeah?”
“I felt bad for the soldiers. It’s not their fault they had to go somewhere they probably didn’t want to be. But all the people in charge made them go. It was a stupid war and I told everyone that.”
“Bet that was an unpopular opinion,” Kiriko says.
Mahito shrugs. “I fought with a boy. His grandfather was a solider. He pushed me. I tackled him.”
“And that’s how you got hurt?”
“No,” Mahito says. He rests scarred fingers against a scarred head. “I found a rock and I did it to myself.”
Kiriko nods. “I know.”
Of course she knew. They all knew. He wouldn’t be here if they didn’t.
“Why’d you do it?” she asks.
“I was angry.”
“And are you still angry?”
Mahito thinks of an old man building universes and a hospital that burned down and a father who moved on too quickly. He thinks of a woman struggling to have a son and a baby, and he thinks of a heron.
“Sometimes,” he says. “But not right now.”
The heron isn’t in the pond. Mahito wonders where it goes when it isn’t there.
His room has the best view. The glass of the window is fixed and the scars on his fingers are starting to fade. The nurses bring him food he eats and the doctors stop bemoaning his lack of voice. The heron comes and goes and Mahito watches it in between reading his book.
His hair grows and he lets it.
“Natsuko has had her baby,” Kiriko tells him. “Would you like to meet your little brother?”
Mahito is sitting on his bed watching the heron fish for dinner. His own plate is empty.
“I would,” he says. “Can I?”
“Natsuko asked if you would. And I’m asking for her.”
They leave the room together.
Mahito has never held a baby before. He isn’t sure how to do it properly. Kiriko laughs and shows him how to support the head properly. He’s so small and yet so heavy in Mahito’s arms. Not even Natsuko has held him yet.
He writes words for Kiriko when his voice leaves him. Less and less it happens, but sometimes he swallows it too strongly and it would take too long to bring it up again.
“This is a new one,” Kiriko says. He’s written malice over and over and over again. “What are you trying to tell me.”
Mahito shrugs and like always, it makes Kiriko smile. The word malice feels better than anger. More mature. He’s a big brother now. He’s growing up.
The old man stacks a block onto another block and glances over at Mahito. Mahito thinks this particular arrangement is flawed, but he’s not about to get up and try it. He isn’t in the mood to create another universe for himself.
Natsuko’s long hair is bedraggled and tangled. Her son- Mahito’s brother- sleeps in a cot. She watches him fearfully. Mahito wonders if she sees the same thing he does; a cot on fire, the soft downy hair burning.
“Can I?” he asks. He holds a brush up for her to inspect.
Her eyes water and she nods.
It takes an afternoon until the brush runs smoothly and her hair drips like silk. Neither of them speak a word to each other. It is quite possible the best day Mahito has had in a long time.
“Are you angry today?” Kiriko has taken to asking.
“I’m not always angry,” Mahito snaps.
“And when you are, you beat yourself with rocks and scream at herons in ponds,” Kiriko says. “I gotta keep an eye on that sorta behaviour.”
“Not anymore,” Mahito says. “It’s just a bird, you know. No point yelling at it.”
“I have a budgie,” Kiriko says. “I yell at it all the time.”
“I don’t think it’s listening to you.”
“Brat,” Kiriko says. “Are you listening to me?”
“Of course I am.”
Mahito falls asleep watching the heron wade its long legs through the water.
The doctor pushes aside his hair to examine the scar. “I don’t think it will fade,” he tells Mahito.
Mahito shrugs, for old time’s sake. Let it be a reminder of what he did to himself. Let it be the proof of his malice.
He shuts the book and holds it to his chest. He doesn’t know the answer to the question it asks yet, but he supposes you probably don’t ever know truly. You just do your best and if you start to forget, you reach for someone you love instead of a rock. You find them in the present or you find them in a memory. You find them in a heron that watches you with clever eyes.
It is Mahito’s last time in the day room. He is waiting for his father to arrive. Today he is going home. All three of them are. The space around his scar will most likely be bald forever, but his hair has grown enough to flop over it. The tiny cuts he gave himself when he destroyed his bedroom are faint to the point of whiteness, and only he and Kiriko truly know they are there. Natsuko has held her sons and she has whispered dreams of the future to them.
The old man stacks the sphere between a pyramid and a rectangle and looks up Mahito.
“You should build one,” he says. “A universe.”
“No thank you,” Mahito says. He reaches over and knocks the stack over. “I like the one I have.”
The heron in the pond watches them go.