For the past hour, he has been innocently minding his own business in the seedier parts of town, and everyone else has minded his business with him. (Artificially). He has been kicked out of clubs, kicked in his pride, and now he is kicked. He has been deprived of information, dignity, but not caution, or quarrel, and now he will be deprived of his money. And his camera.
It’s a digital. (His guts can’t take another punch, but if he throws up on his coat, on the pocket, the one with the nice heavy bulge and the nicer chain, his camera’ll live long and prosper.)
Young Man, who’s still trying to earn his next high, agrees. He agrees in uppercuts, and groans, and in shoving Sasuke forward, agrees in getting the rust of tile on his shirt, agrees in – “Fighting t’surrrrrrviiiiii… ve…we the… we… the…” – agrees in Queen lyrics.
It is a sordid agreement, the kind that won’t heal, that makes Sasuke bold and a little excited. Show’s over. Show must go on.
Front tickets: observe, the wild Sasuke in his habitat. He snaps.
Just like that, 180, role reversal, change the camera. The thing about druggies is – what you have to learn, if you spend five minutes on any street and none of them on the bus station is – they have no balance. Sasuke does the inevitable (slides forward emptily, recovers his arms, sidesteps, swipes Young Man’s feet clean by the ankle, breaks his fall with an elbow slid under the sternum, stopping his breath, then pushes. Crack. Something cracks before Young Man is propped against the wall in Sasuke’s stead, and it could be the wind (so cold, too cold), and it could be Young Man’s temple. (What was it in Sasuke’s hand when he hit? Was this a punch? Has Sasuke not been hit for a small army, and unlike him, well fed – a splendidly well nourished legion, and Sasuke’s taken all their hits, and here he is, alive, living, and here Young Man lies, out cold, despondent? How is it sensible for one man to go down after one hit, and another to take so long, so many?)
Young Man is limp when Sasuke rests his arm by the elbow on his chest to keep him stead, and ready, he is limp and luminous like a classical metaphor for an overly pretentious black and white movie about Growing Up and Moving On. Sasuke can see him now. Can breathe.
Young Man is young.
(Sasuke is young.)
He could be sixteen.
(Sasuke is twenty.)
He could be dying.
(Sasuke is –
Sasuke is tired. )
Distantly, he has been tired for a million years, and all of them long. Young Man’s throat is a pillow, and Young Man reeks. Sasuke breathes in – hard and sick for a moment – lets him slide down the wall until he’s a pastel breadth of grey-grey-black-white on the street. Crouches by, passing a hand over Young Man’s face, the bridge of his nose, the lips, then the brow, the lids, his lids, Sasuke’s finger pre – Does Itachi have your eyes? -presses.
“This was a delay.” He can still speak, though blood on his teeth signals rupture somewhere. Should have moved sooner. Should have got himself out of this, because it’s useless, it’s unreasonable, it’s an episode, and it brought Sasuke neither whim, nor information. He is no step closer to Itachi, to that day, to his schoolwork. He is not even remotely, pleasantly, enviably plastered.
He’s just a bystander.
There are things Sasuke has seen that no blind man should, no living man, no species. There are things that make him a very old soul, and his step on dirt older, and his strain. There are things that make him turn the TV back on, tape, rewind, always rewind, CNN and BBC and rewind and catastrophe. (He saw a hurricane on the news last night. Three times. The woman looked at him, looked him deep in the eye through a reflective lens, looked at him and no other, same woman every footage, and the teeth she’d scavenged were rotten and old, and she said – said to him, said, “We lost everything.” Said it to a world, and he wanted to tell her, “I can get it for you. I can get you Naruto’s number, and he’ll build your house from the brick.” So he switched channels and watched her on prime time again. Pleading.)
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