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Like a prequel to a thunderstorm, the clicking of Kei’s pen bounces off from one wall to the other. The dust that has collected between the shelves smells like Akiteru’s old blazers, unstitched at the hems. It reminds Kei of a summer stolen from outstretched hands and dry elbows, the sound of cicadas and reflections trapped in murky water. Behold, Narcissus, Kei says, and Akiteru laughs.
He is half a world away now, half a word away. Kei scribbles half-eaten questions at the margins of his letters, practices calligraphy in the empty pages of library books. Why don’t you just e-mail? His brother grins at him through the screen, and Kei shrugs. What did Hegel get wrong about Antigone? Professor Kageyama asks, and Kei wants to say, it was never about her, it was about her brothers.
They don’t get to be protagonists in tragedies. They laugh at Aristotle, chew mimesis apart between fanged teeth. Perhaps Nietzsche was too drawn to the Dionysian, Professor Haiba grins. She raises an army of cynics and pretends she doesn’t have lines of Sappho in the original Greek tattooed on her skin. Have you ever been to Lesbos?
Kei doesn’t expect much out of a classics degree. He’s never lived in the future. Dead languages shackle you at the ankles and pull until you cave in, until you live in a past so long so long so long ago that you forget the tomorrows when there are countless yesterdays in your pocket.
Kei hates Shakespeare, but he’s memorized so much of Macbeth it feels like a damned spot that won’t wash away. Ten years from now, he’ll be clad in tweed with a cigarette at the tip of his lips, and he will still feel at the edge of twenty. Tetsurou will tell him, your Latin’s a disgrace, and Kei will reply in ancient Greek, pulling at the same strings.
There is no Tetsurou yet. Don’t worry, he makes an arrival in act two.
First, there is Hegel, and there’s no me without you and no you without me, and there’s the cold as it seeps through poorly insulated windowsills. Kei speaks five languages, and two of them are buried deep in trampled graves. Who reads Death in Venice, still? Kei will ask Koushi. He won’t have an answer— modernism students, the whole bloody lot of them, they don’t have an answer to anything, Joyce got your tongue?
Why do you want to join this programme? The interviewer asks. It is summer, rewound to the sound of pen against paper. There is no avoiding the question, not with the right qualifications, not with the proper answers. Must there be a why, Kei has said to Akiteru a thousand times, and the yes of it all makes him feel like Ariadne, keeper of mazes. He doesn’t have her thread, so the minotaur becomes the question, eats Kei alive.
I have read the Bacchae a hundred times, Kei says. Release of limbs and communion through dance. My brother used to weave crowns made of leaves, Kei says. I waited to be wrapped in the gentle, gradual shadow of ivy-cool sleep, Kei says. He recites the play like conversation threaded with the brutal simplicity of mortality. He has collected his yesterdays, and he has sacrificed them to the sound of pens and keyboards and annotations in messy scrawls.
Fast-forward back to the present, Kei’s pen stops in its place, stuck in the in-between of time and void. I mean, it’s not Ibsen, Keiji argues in response. They’re in an overcrowded bar where students take shots in the middle of arguments that go nowhere. Kei takes a shot, and counters with it’s not supposed to be Ibsen. Next to Keiji sits Tooru, downing his fifth drink, ready to add another twenty pages to his thesis.
You’re too harsh on the modernists, Tsukki, he pouts. Kei doesn’t bother to correct the nickname, but wants to hit Tooru with the anthology of post-structuralist thinking that he knows is safely tucked away in his messenger bag. Cry me a fucking river, Kei rolls his eyes, I’m not waiting for a Godot that won’t show. Tooru laughs.
“Who’s shitting on Beckett?” A voice rises like magma to the surface from behind Kei’s back.
Ah. Yes. The antagonist.
Kuroo Tetsurou comes to Kei’s life in quotation marks, in the form of stretched space. Kei’s seen him before. Despite the smaller size of graduate classes, Kei doesn’t know his name, yet— sit still, it will become a prayer, gradually. No me without you and no you without me. The doublebind that stitches Kei to Tetsurou.
“The inherent homoeroticism of existentialist theatre,” Tooru hits his fist against the table. “Tsukki’s being mean to Keiji-kun.” Without five different drinks in his blood flow, Oikawa Tooru can have three different conversations at the same time. What is already flammable becomes a full on fire risk when you add the alcohol.
“I’m not being mean, I’m being rational.” Tooru laughs again, and this time Keiji joins him with an amused smirk. Dionysus incarnate drapes his body next to Kei’s, and his laughter is whiskey-gold. He smells like burnt sandalwood.
“You’re in my tragedy class.” It is half question half poetry. Kei hums, annoyed of his body’s instinctual response at the stranger. He says, “Antiquity in Transposition, Kageyama Miwa.” more to Tooru and Keiji than the stranger. He becomes an acquaintance when he offers his name, like a secret that adds fuel to the fire. Kei holds that moment in his hands, constricts and stretches it, lets time eat at the edges, lets memory preserve the middle.
“…I’m in the theatre programme.”
Kei decides to look. The first gaze is always electric, and it becomes lighting when sight meets sight. “Sounds about right.” Questions bubble up in the middle of his throat, but he refuses to let them boil over. Tetsurou raises an eyebrow.
Kei doesn’t answer. It’s touch by sight that speaks between them. It feels heavier than having skin against skin. Breach of spatial existence, Professor Kageyama will explain, and the class will pretend she’s not talking about Professor Haiba.
“We’ll have a showing of Marat/Sade,” Tetsurou says, a week later. He hands Kei a flyer. Kei’s not surprised to see Tetsurou’s name under Marquis de Sade, Tooru’s under Jean-Paul Marat.
“Not sure if I can make it.” Outside, he can hear the laughter of northern winds as they rattle the windows, making fun of him. Give me space to annotate on the margins, he thinks. He’s never believed in bigger things— but maybe Aphrodite will hear his whisper of a prayer and pity him. Tetsurou smiles in response, and it’s not cocky, and it’s not insecure, it’s just sincere.
Kei makes it.
Clad in his outfit of anarchy and sadism, Tetsurou appears sharp-toothed. Kei has seen Tooru act, before, so it’s not a surprise when he demonstrates his absolute dominance over the words, the speechlessness, the irony of Weiss’ imposter of a Marat. Tetsurou, on the other hand—
He has laughter in every step. Theirs is a low-budget recreation in the form of a two-hander; it is magic, violent and ruthless. Kei’s breath freezes in the corridors of his lungs, and he releases it only when Tooru and Tetsurou hold hands, bowing to an enchanted audience. Afterwards, Tetsurou strides over to him, with leaves in his hair.
“You’re cruel,” Kei accuses. Tetsurou grins, a bloody, impossibly red thing.
Antiquity in Transposition. It’s always about movement. Tragedies never end— it is motion forwards or backwards, circling in a loop of translation without meaning. Antigone, half-buried, screaming between dog-eared pages. Her voice cracks differently in each re-read, in each language. In English, it is a soprano that bleeds through the pages. In Japanese, it is more of a baritone, like a dagger through the ink. In the original Greek, it is silence, amplified. Motionlessness is an action itself. Is, as. The sounds fit together like mismatched puzzle pieces. The result is static.
Tetsurou’s laughter is lightning in a bottle. The glass shatters. Between each full-stop is a space of anticipation. Kei has sworn off of translation— too much is lost in the movement. He would trap the tension between his palms if he could, but you cannot translate what is already moving. Tetsurou never pauses, never gives space. Never annotates the margins.
Kei cannot stop himself. The words bloom from his lips. “We begin in the dark—“
“—and birth is the death of us.” Tetsurou completes. Professor Kageyama grins, dangerous and amused. She makes a prophet out of Anne Carson, and Kei agrees. Eros is bittersweet, there is no me without you and no you without me. They cannot exist outside the endless struggle between life and death, only in-between. An entanglement without escape. Once the other breaches the boundaries with sight, with touch, there is no me. Not now, not then, not ever.
Eros delivers.
(or is it Thanatos? It doesn’t matter. If you bring up Freud in this conversation, or any conversation, I will get up from this table and leave. Enter laughter track. Audience claps. Antagonist goes off-script, the walls start to crumble. The floor melts into a pool of magma. Desire blinds audience. The camera lens shatters.)
Kei gasps at the drag of Tetsurou’s teeth against the curve of his neck. “Mine isn’t a noun.”
Tetsurou mumbles into his skin, teetering at the edge of prayer and curse. “It is if you capitalize it.”