Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(65)

She didn’t reply.

“If I’m here,” he said, “it’s because your spirits decided to choose me. I’ve been thinking of myself as an imitation yoki-hijo, and that was wrong. I have been chosen just as you were. It merely happened to me a little later in life.”

He went through the next soap, which was colored red and came as a powder. It scraped the skin, and he had to stand in a shallower part of the pool to reach his lower portions.

As he was stepping back into the water, Yumi sighed and turned around to face him, sitting on the edge of the pool. Painter hesitated because of his state of undress, but she was staring down at her feet trailing in the water, not at him. Besides, it was only Yumi. He continued on to the next soap.

“You claim,” she said, “that you have started to care about all of this. You respond by breaking the protocol?”

“If I’m chosen by the spirits,” he said, “can’t I make decisions like this? Isn’t that my right?”

“It is,” she said, “but you can’t.”

He shook his head. “That is (lowly) hypocritical, Yumi. If I can make the decisions—if I legitimately can—then you have to let me do so. Liyun has to let us do so, even when she disagrees. Otherwise they’re not decisions. Otherwise, what she says about us being the ultimate decider? That is an untruth.” He glanced at Yumi. “And I know how you feel about those.”

Finally, she sighed and pulled off her bulky nightgown—he had no idea how they slept in something made of such thick cloth in this overly hot world—and undergarments, then slipped into the bath. He held the plate of soap out for her, so she could make spiritual versions. She liked that, for the familiarity of it, despite it vanishing from her fingers after a few minutes.

They turned to their standard ritual, bathing back-to-back in the ten-foot-wide pool, close enough for him to periodically float the soap plate her direction.

“I can’t refute your words,” she said. “Because the logic makes sense. Even though I know you’re wrong.”

“That’s because you’ve lived this so long,” he said. “It feels normal to you. It sometimes takes an outsider to point out how broken something is.”

He heard her sink down to wash out her hair, then stand up again. He scooted her the soap as she glanced at him, then she wiped the water from her eyes and pulled her hair back. “So this is the mysterious thing you said we ‘agree on’? You made me wait a day to find out that—for some bizarre reason—your ‘revelation’ is that you should ignore propriety and piety?”

“We agree,” he said, washing his own hair, “that it’s okay to relax a tad. You went to eat with the others. I decided to eat on my own.”

“Opposite actions.”

“Done for the same reason.”

“I think it’s a stretch that we agree on this.”

“Well, it felt fun to say,” he said.

“This much confusion is worth a chance for you to make a little quip?”

“Well, obviously.” He smiled, glancing over his shoulder at her. “I thought it was funny, at least.”

“Funny? How?”

He shrugged. “Just…funny?”

She shook her head. “That is not what humor is like, Painter.”

(She was, of course, dead wrong. Remember what the poet said: “Never let something trivial, like a sense of humor, get in the way of a good joke.”

The poet was me.

He said it right now.)

Afterward, they both rested on their backs and floated for a time to soak, and didn’t say much. Eventually they climbed out of the bath. He held the clothing toward her so she could make a copy. This, fortunately, did not vanish once donned. They didn’t know why. (It has to do with them automatically incorporating the clothing into their vision of themselves at the time, but that’s beside the point.)

The two turned back-to-back as a token nod toward modesty as they dressed. Which was amusing, since putting on clothing wasn’t exactly the immodest part of the experience.

Painter found it aggravating how difficult it was to tie the bow on his outfit. He pulled it too tight, then tried it loose, and then looked flabbergasted at Yumi, who had tied hers into a basic knot like she often did. She shrugged.

“At least,” she said to him, “I didn’t dismiss the people who could have done this correctly for me.”

A valid point.

A short time later, the attendants dropped them off at the orchard shrine, where trees drifted and bumped against one another like people in line for concert tickets. Painter felt bad every time they came here, as he knew for a fact they were interrupting the work of the orchard keepers. Then again, maybe the workers wanted an excuse to take a break.

Liyun was nowhere to be seen—the yoki-hijo was supposed to be alone during meditation—but she had done as Painter had requested, leaving a scroll, some painting ink, and a small brush for him. Judging by the symbol on the leather sheath for the brush, she’d commandeered them from the scholars. Well, they were probably too busy trying to make their machine work to bother with writing anyway.

“So why this?” Yumi asked, gesturing to it.

“Well,” Painter said, “you keep telling me I need to clear my mind while meditating—”