Tadashi’s Apartment
Atlanta, GA
United States of America
December 2009
It happened again.
Tadashi couldn’t find the will to move from his current position. Lying curled up on the bed, he couldn’t help but wonder about the work he was already missing. A quick glance at his phone a few minutes before told him that he should have been at HQ ten minutes back. Despite this knowledge and despite knowing that his phone would buzz much later with messages and missed call from his co-workers, he couldn’t find the strength to move, the capability to do anything except lie in bed, drift in and out of sleep.
It was fine. It had been two days already. It was fine.
The bedroom was dark. The lights hadn’t been switched on for more than a day at that point; there was the running of the heater, but that was all. Silence was his only company, and he found that as sad as it seemed, it was exactly what he wanted. Silence was alright. Silence was enough. Silence was fine.
Dressed in some thick shirt and dark sweatpants, he could only roll over from time to time, sometimes glance up at the ceiling. Sometimes reach out, reach towards the ceiling as if there was something calling his name from above; all while this happened, he wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t do anything else. Tadashi kept in bed, the sheets only half-covering his figure, with an arm outstretched as if wanting to chase for something that was no longer there.
He found himself doing that again. One hand reaching upwards, eyes trained on the ceiling. There was nothing there. There wasn’t anything to reach for. There was no one looking down at him. There was no one else in the room. There was no one else to wait for.
So he dropped his arm, rolled over, and tiredly tugged the sheets up again. Tadashi shut his eyes, gripped the spare pillow in his arms even tighter, willed for himself to fall back into shallow, murky sleep. It happened, at least; he felt his subconscious slip from reality and fall into somewhere a little more appealing. He felt like was drifting in-between dreams and reality. One minute he remembered what happened, and another minute he escaped towards the greyscale dream world in his head.
There, at least, he could reminisce on happier times.
He reached out again. Tadashi reached out, grasped a shoulder gently. Felt his mouth open to speak, felt the words tumble out a little clumsily. The person turned her head, met his gaze with brows raised but an almost playful look on her face.
“I thought you wouldn’t come.”
“I always do, don’t I?”
“Hmm.” She thought about that for a moment, looked at him intently, and Tadashi could only stare back. There she was. There she was with her shoulder-length black hair, with her inquisitive eyes, the silver necklace she always had around her neck. “Yeah,” she said after a period of silence. “You do.” She turned, fully facing him this time, and reached out herself.
Tadashi felt warmth against his cheek.
There she was. In front of him, expectant but not really, a little wry but at the same time a little hopeful as well. There she was.
For a moment, he forgot that the world was in greyscale.
“I miss you.” Warmth. Gentleness. Softness. Everything. “Come back.”
A half-smile. “If only it was that easy, Seong-hui.”
He opened his mouth to speak. “Wait—”
“Seong-hui?”
He saw color. Tadashi sat up immediately, gasping; there was dampness on the back of his neck and his hands were clammy, fingers trembling. The world was desaturated around him but there was the faintest semblance of color; his brown coat hung on the closet door, the tan walls stood out only slightly through the dark, there was the slightest crack of light from the bedroom door. There was color and there was the sound of the heater running, the sound of knocking—
Knocking?
“Seong-hui? Are you inside?”
The question was enough for him to nearly leap out of bed, almost trip and end up sprawled all over the bedroom door. “Shit,” he cursed; Tadashi slid on a pair of slippers, ran his fingers through his unkempt hair, managed to make it out of the bedroom and flinched at the sight of the rest of his apartment. There was an unwashed bowl in the sink and the files on the kitchen table were scattered, but there was obviously no time to clean it up. “Hold on,” he called. His voice was a little raspy, a little dry from hours of being unused. “Hold on.”
Tadashi’s trembling fingers managed to take hold of the doorknob; he unlocked it hastily, swung the door open. Immediately did he meet a concerned pair of deep eyes.
“Good afternoon, Seong-hui.” Gaius Ayodele greeted. The man shifted slightly, dressed in usual work attire but this time with a dark grey coat thrown on. He blinked. “Is this a bad time?”
“Afternoon?” It was afternoon. A little before one, he realized. The dream sequence had apparently taken a few hours despite it feeling like mere minutes. “Ah, yes. Afternoon—no, no. It’s not…not a bad time.” He stepped to the side, let Gaius step inside his apartment. Again did Tadashi flinch upon realizing that his home was, arguably, like its owner: in a state of mess.
Gaius noticed. “I’ll only be here for a short while,” he reassured Tadashi, moving towards the couch. Tadashi followed hastily. “I just wanted to check up on you. The whole admin, actually. We all wanted to check up on you.”
“The admin,” he repeated. “All four of you.” He sat across Gaius on the other couch, watching a little nervously as the other slid off his coat, folded it neatly, and set it beside him. Fuck. It had to be about his skipping work. Tadashi swallowed, opened his mouth to speak; “Sir, I—I apologize. The apartment is a mess, I haven’t really been doing much the past few days, hence the home attire and everything—”
But Gaius lifted a hand and he found himself silent. “I didn’t come to reprimand you on your appearance, Seong-hui. Far from it.” He glanced quickly at the scattered files on his kitchen table, “Again: I merely wanted to check up on you.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“Are you?” Gaius looked at him then with piercing eyes. Tadashi couldn’t help but look away. “I know it’s been months since the…incident.”
Incident. Not ‘failure’, not anything like that. Just ‘incident’. It was, if anything, a way to tiptoe around the fact that two people had died in the past months and one had quit abruptly. Tadashi didn’t answer, gaze fixed elsewhere. He heard Gaius sigh. “How have you been holding up?”
“…things could be better.”
And that was the truth. Tadashi didn’t say much as he looked back at him. Gaius seemed to understand this. “Things like these are never the easiest to deal with,” he admitted. For a split moment, Tadashi thought he saw some kind of weariness in the older man’s gaze—a weariness similar to his own. It was the look he saw on his face every time he bothered to look at himself in the mirror. It disappeared instantly when Gaius continued to speak. “And we deal with the grief in our own ways. No one really has the right to judge us for whichever coping mechanisms we choose to take.”
Tadashi found himself under Gaius’ gaze again. He swallowed. It seemed like reprimand was coming anyway despite Gaius assuring him that there would be none. “I’ll be back to work by Monday, sir. Nine o’clock sharp, and I’ll assist Eri or Ross with anything that has to be done.”
“That’s not why I’m here, Seong-hui.” Tadashi watched as Gaius took out his wallet, fished for something in one of the many spaces. He thought he saw a picture in one of the spaces; a group of a smiling, younger bunch. He took his eyes away when Gaius extended a hand towards him. “Many…many of us have experienced loss. Especially in our line of work.”
There was a card in his hand. Small, white, rectangular. Tadashi hesitantly took it. “We all have our own ways of coping,” Gaius repeated in a softer, calmer voice. “But…it might be for the best if you give the number a ring.”
Tadashi found himself nodding, and they talk more after that. Gaius updates him on matters Tadashi’s missed; it takes him a bit for him to remember that the kind-voiced man in front of him was a member of HQ’s administration. What takes longer to sink in is the fact that he wasn’t being fired, wasn’t being scolded.
It was a little jarring, but he took it anyway. Gaius leaves the apartment fifteen minutes later wishing for him to feel better; Tadashi merely thanks him for coming.
When the door closes, it’s silent once more. The heater runs, filling the room with both silence and the sound of it. He stands there by the door, unsure of what had just happened. The card feels a little heavy in his hand—oh, right. The calling card. Tadashi glances at it, reads the black text, sees a name written in formal, readable font.
There’s a name, an address, a number, the name of an office. It doesn’t make sense to him, not quite. He knows that Gaius meant well, but at the same time, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t.
Tadashi ends up back in bed ten minutes later with the card left on the kitchen table as well. The room is dark, the colors are desaturated, the only sound he could hear was the running of the heater. The mattress beneath him is soft, the sheets on top of his figure only the slightest bit comforting. Exhaustion sinks in again. So he curls up under the sheets, releases a short, almost shaky breath.
The same dream happens. The same person appears. The same exchange occurs. The world is as greyscale as it had been the last time. There she was. There she was. There she was.
And then, gone.
…
(When Tadashi wakes up, the first thing he does is stumble out of bed and immediately look for two things: a telephone and the calling card.)
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