It was raining again. 

Black rods of water came spearing out of the sky, onto the roof, into his brain.  His eyes were fixed open, seeing nothing here but still seared with the image of There. 

The image of There was not to be entertained. 

He put the pictures out of his mind, stuffing the forbidden photos under the mattress of his rationality;  it was only a matter of being strong.  Be strong, Genjyo Sanzo;  think about something else.

So another picture came into his mind.  A pale hand and a green eye and the sound of an empty, hungry voice asking for forbidden fruit to feed upon.

He tried to put these other pictures also out of his mind, these pictures of the night that Hakkai had tried to reach for him. 

It had been raining that night as well, so both of them were tormented by their own muscular demons.  As Sanzo preferred the noisier idiots to plague each other when there was a need to share rooms, Hakkai and he were long past offering any explanation for the exhibitions of suffering.  Suffering when it rained had become neutral, a status quo. 

They had found lodging in a tiny hamlet, high up in the mountains, because Hakkai had warned that the weather would change.  Sure enough, after dinner, the first drops of water sounded loudly of the thin roof, drum beats to the emotional scaffold.   The rhythm was always the same, “I – could – not – pro – tect – him – I – could – not -”

When they retired for the night, Sanzo had glowered like a curse, nursing a cigarette in the window, and thrashing his guilt within an inch of his life, feeling the moisture from the climate painting him more and more savage as the Marlboro burned down in his hand. 

Hakkai, lying on the bed, was floating in a malignant pool of despair, where the steady tug of loss was pulling him under by inches.  The difference between them, this night, had been that Hakkai’s unhappiness did not extinguish his awareness of his companion;  Sanzo still figured for Hakkai.

Sanzo, on the other hand, needed his aloneness to participate in his own variety of rain grief.  He was wholly absorbed within, and he felt intense shock at Hakkai’s intrusion.

With uncharacteristic abruptness, or so it had seemed at the time, Hakkai had pushed himself into Sanzo’s attention.  Probably there had been signals – noises, movement, Hakkai gently trying to make himself noticed – but Sanzo had not been conscious of anything outside himself, except for the rain.

Suddenly, then, there was a hand on his hunched, twitching shoulder.  Sanzo had turned, shocked as much as if he had been struck in the face.  Hakkai’s pained eye and bared smile were so close that they were almost touching him.

“Don’t you think we could try something together to make this feel less bad?”

Sanzo had stared at him.  At a time like this?  Was he suggesting what Sanzo thought he was suggesting, at a time like this? 

“What the hell do you mean?”   His voice sounded as distant and frozen as the rest of him.  Damn - damn Hakkai. 

The practised hand of the healer on his shoulder started to move against Sanzo’s body, shaping the curve of his back and neck, trying to encourage relaxation out of flesh that was as brittle as ice. 

“Well, I’ve already broken the rules against forbidden degrees of union, Sanzo.  Ha ha - a high priest doesn’t rank as any more forbidden than a sister.”  And Hakkai had taken the monk warmly in his arms, was already bending into the softness of the clean, golden hair which framed the startled features that were confronting him.

With the immediacy of Hakkai’s misery reeking its emotional infirmity at him like a contagion, and with Hakkai’s grip constricting his breathing, Sanzo had given in to panic.  He flung the other man away and turned desperately for the door. 

He remembered feeling the handle – a dark corridor – another door and, then, the cool, wet blackness of the rain.  Ah – how his face had burned in the rain!  The rain had clung to the white heat of his confused and exploding sensations;  tendrils of rain had clung to the private world of his inflamed and overwhelming feelings, as closely as Hakkai had been trying to stick his own unhappiness into the intimacy of the priest’s personal universe of suffering.

Outside, with his head thrown back, Sanzo’s eyes and ears had slowly filled with water.  If only he could drown, he would have to feel nothing.  Why was he cursed with this ridiculous capacity for awareness and reaction?  Morons didn’t know how lucky they were.  Stupidity was a blessing.

He knew that, inside the room, Hakkai would be carefully picking up the cigarette which Sanzo had dropped in his hurry to leave.  Hakkai would be touching the cigarette, touching it with a consciousness of holding what Sanzo had been holding, would even be putting his lips where Sanzo’s mouth had kissed the filter.

At this point, another tide of reaction had risen through Sanzo like a blush, bringing a flotsam of anger, frustration, briefly disgust, pity and – the final, lasting and surprising impression – gratitude. 

He knew that Hakkai, the usually un-forward Hakkai, had wanted to give them both something;  Hakkai had wanted to give Sanzo something.  There were not many people in the world sufficiently generous to take the risk of offering Sanzo a gift, and, for that, Sanzo had been grateful.

He was aware that his rejection hadn’t exactly looked like gratitude, but he’d since made it up to Hakkai in some measure – under the silent weight of irony that even a gift to him resulted in a greater effort for him to make, more anxiety and work, more of other people’s fingerprints rubbing away at the bloom of his own identity.

Hakkai had tried to offer a way for Sanzo to be less unhappy, but – did Hakkai still not understand? – there could never be happiness for Genjyo Sanzo.  Surely, Hakkai had known him long enough to see that.  He shouldn’t need to be told.

It was one of the immutable laws which governed Sanzo’s existence – like apples not falling upwards – that happiness was for other people.  Happiness was only for other people.

In his careful way, he had never let the apples fall.  He never let the apples fall, but they changed from food to poison in his fingers;  and it was less painful to refuse the gift of fruit in the first place, than to watch beauty, and hope, and wholesomeness turn rotten in his hands, again and again. 

The more precious the fruit, the more important it was for him not to take hold of it, the more important to forbid himself the benefit of the gift – for the gift’s own sake.  It was better to keep his hands closed tight around his own heart, unpractised in the act of receipt. 

So, - so it had become, always, less painful to refuse. 

For he knew, now, that this was the most that he could hope for: not happiness, but the absence of pain.

And when the rain came, even that absence was gone.