Kitsune: The Flip Side

By now, Louis had more than enough time to think and remember. In fact, that was pretty much all he did. The drugs they were pumping into him probably helped. He’d become very balanced, calm, almost airy inside. Empty and light. They didn’t tie him up anymore. He hadn’t been shoved into a psychiatric hospital either. He’d told them he’d escape, whatever the cost. So they simply moved him to the neurosis ward—or whatever it was called—in the same hospital. Small mercies. The cuts were slowly healing, scarring over. Louis wanted to go home. But scarpering wasn’t an option yet. For one, his shell-shocked parents were insisting he finish the treatment. Pfft… treatment for what? You can’t cure love… Unless you perform a lobotomy. Become a vegetable with a permanent case of drooling—now that’s a pretty picture. Secondly, this ward had bars on the windows, and you weren’t getting past the orderlies on duty. A mini-madhouse. Tom… that little bastard… he’d been talking to Kit, knew her phone number, and hadn’t said a word to him. Lou asked him why. Kitty had asked him not to tell, begged him, actually. She’d hoped it would help Lou forget her faster. She just wanted to check in occasionally, find out how he was doing… If only he’d known. Though… what was the point in finding someone to blame? It was his fault. His alone. Then there were these drugs that stripped you of will and desire. And those obnoxious group therapy sessions where, for some godforsaken reason, you were expected to blab in front of everyone about what made you harm yourself. He just snorted and flipped them the bird in response to their stupid questions. He had no intention of being nice… he just wanted it all to end. He didn’t even have a phone. No calls. No scrolling through the internet. Pure boredom. So he remembered. Today, for instance, he remembered his last meeting with Kit. It was after she’d already told him it was over. He didn’t give a toss about blocked phones and Skype… he flew to her. He ditched his band’s gig. Had a massive row with the manager and the lads. And he flew. He made it to the club for her performance. Kit—talk about bloody self-control! —acted as if she couldn’t see him at all. During the whole set, if she glanced his way even twice, it was only in passing. A mere flick of the eyes, as if she were looking at a familiar object—a table, for instance. And he was suffocating, shaking, catching those glimpses… every limb was trembling, every nerve responding to the chime of her bells between songs. Then she stepped off the stage like a deity from Olympus. She looked at him sadly and asked him not to come again. She repeated that it was over. He’d brought flowers—some exotic things, Lou didn’t even know the name of them—and she wouldn’t take them. She turned and walked away… He watched her go and hated her for those words. His heart was breaking—every throb was a punch of pain. Hurry up and just burst already, he thought… better to die than endure this. But it kept dutifully serving its time, and Kit was leaving… he bolted after her. Her bassist, nicknamed Moloch—head and shoulders taller than Lou and twice as heavy—blocked his path and rumbled that she didn’t want to see him. Lou was ready to kill him… But Moloch gripped his shoulder with fingers of steel and turned him towards the bar: “Come on, let’s have a drink… She’ll cool off, you’ll make up eventually. Don’t push her for now.” He spoke English well enough, and Louis, surprisingly even to himself, poured out all his sorrows—everything that had happened between him and Kit. “I’ve known her ten years…” Moloch rumbled back. “Maybe longer. But I couldn’t tell you what’s going on in that head of hers. She’s proud. And… she’s always different. Like the sea. It’s always water, right? But it’s never the same water that just splashed onto the shore. I was in love with her myself… head over heels. But I realized she’s out of my league. You know what some people in the scene call her? To her face, mind you. God. Just like that. Not a goddess, but God. There’s something to it…” Louis was floored by such poetic comparisons coming from a giant like him. And it was true… he called her a demon. What was the difference? Demon or god—a fickle pagan deity, punishing and pardoning mortals at their whim… he couldn’t explain her power over his heart any other way. What heart? He belonged to her entirely, lock, stock, and barrel! Anyway, Moloch had said: “Wait. Maybe she’ll change her mind. She left a guy she’d lived with for two years for you.” Louis hadn’t known that… she’d never mentioned it. They’d swapped numbers. Lou called sometimes to ask how Kit was. Mostly, he was terrified of hearing she’d found someone else… but Moloch stuck to brief answers—she’s alive, she’s well, we’re rehearsing—and Lou was grateful for even that. Time passed. Kit didn’t appear. No word from her at all. Lou felt the full weight of what it means when your deity turns their back on you. How many circles of hell are there? He’d run all of them, more than once. He swung from one extreme to the other—from wild partying to dead depressions. He drank himself into oblivion. He’d lie for hours staring at the ceiling, listening to his dead soul rot and fall apart inside him. He could physically smell the stench of its decay. But he didn’t touch the drugs. He’d promised… promised her. Though Kit had become his hardest drug, and kicking meth back in the day had been a million times easier than trying to forget her now. If Tom only knew how much it hurt, how everything inside had rotted away… he wouldn’t be surprised at what Lou had done to himself. And now, he felt better. Not from the pills. But because Tom said Kit was asking about him… It meant she loved him. It meant life went on. And he’d nearly died without ever knowing. Absolute prat. That evening, he decided he’d had enough. He knocked a syringe out of a nurse’s hand and spat out his pills so they splattered across the hospital wall like a colorful mosaic. He said he was done—he was checking out. While they were turning him into a vegetable here… she was out there! She didn’t even know where he was or what was happening to him! They swaddled him again. Louis fought the orderlies like a demon, but unfortunately, the odds were against him. He bit a nurse’s finger when she tried to pry his jaws open—him already tied down—to force medicine into his system. Everything temperamental that lived in him and made him a rock star suddenly rebelled and surged out. The doctor came, shook his head. What a difficult patient I’ve landed, oh dear… Lou cursed him out in Russian. Kit had taught him. The doctor decided a demon had possessed the tattooed scrawny kid and prescribed a heavy dose of some “happy juice.” The medicine turned out to be quite trippy; Lou started having multicolored glitches. Incredible creatures skipped across the walls, making the sheep-dragon he’d given Kitty look like a common house pet. And when his old school geography teacher, bald Mr. Simmons, peeked from under the hospital bed and started singing a song in Japanese, Lou was almost surprised. Then he blacked out. So when the next day, after his injections, the ward door opened and the bright red head of the Kitsune peeked in, Lou figured it was just more glitches. He was always happy to see Kitty, but greeting a hallucination—well, that’s proper mental, isn’t it? My apologies… let’s just admire her in silence. But Kitty didn’t start crawling on the walls or singing Japanese songs. She let out a quiet cry, slipped into the ward, jumped onto the bed with her feet up, and began showering him with kisses, stroking him, hugging him, and sobbing. Alive. Real. Warm! Smelling of that sharp perfume and something else, something of her own, something mind-blowing that always made Lou lose his head. “Kit! Kitty!” He lunged up on the bed, trying to free his hands. “Louis, my little fool, what have you done to yourself…” She was yanking at the straps, in a hurry. She saw the row of coarse, crimson scars on his forearm and burst into tears. She kissed them one by one. Lou pressed his love to him, stroking her, squeezing her, inhaling her scent until he was dizzy, catching her lips, covering them with greedy kisses. Where did the strength even come from? “Kitty—kitten… My love… How did you get in here?! They don’t let anyone in!” “Tommy told me… and yesterday the doctor called your parents to say you were completely wild and bois…terous? Right? And that you need to be moved to a clinic. They said yes! And Tommy called. He doesn’t agree.” “And I don’t agree! I’m healthy, look, everything’s healed! And they’re stuffing me with pills that make me stupid! I’m sick of everything here, I’m not ill! I love you! Get me out of here, Kit…” “Okay!” she agreed easily, as if she’d spent her whole life kidnapping patients from special hospitals. She freed herself from his arms, grabbed a backpack she’d dropped on the floor, rummaged through it, and pulled out normal clothes for him—jeans, trainers, a t-shirt. Then she said: “Hurry up, it’s already started out there!”