Chapter Text
Part I Unable to Remember
Looking back now, my childhood seems unreal. I can never really remember things happening to me. Whenever I try to remember, all I can evoke are vivid pictures of a wall corner, a door handle, a floor board. People come to me as the edges of skirts and the folds of pants. I can't see their faces, because they look as if someone has erased them, and their voices are an indecipherable babble.
Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I hear the wing moving through the forest, and i think I can make out words, that I can finally remember something in my past. But when I try to put the words into a coherent pattern, I can't remember them anymore. Very soon, my past seemed like a photograph, and photographs seemed unreal.
I'd stare at the faces looking back at me from family rooms and warm, summer beaches, and Mother would tell me it was your Uncle Himito and Aunt Atami. But I could never quite believe those smiling people really existed. I harvored an odd idea that maybe they were trapped in there. That's why I was scared when I first saw myself in a photo. I was sitting in the backyard, bundled up for Christmas, and holding up John when he was just a puppy. But that isn't me, I'd think. Once, I clawed at the picture, to see if something, anything, would come out of it. Nothing did. But I never trusted pictures since then. Pictures were unreal.
Maybe my inability to remember was a blessing for me, though. Because, even till this very day, I can't remember the last time I saw my Mother.
Most of what I can remember is the way the light from the street lamps reflected on the car's metal buckles. We were driving to the airport, I think, because Father and Mother were leaving for Mexico. Father must have been very excited. I don't know this because I can remember his words, or any pictures of his excitement, but only because even today he gets excited over Mexico, and it's plausible that he would have been thrilled upon first visiting it. I wasn't very excited. Mostly, I was annoyed because I had recently gotten a new pair of boots, and I knew they'd drop me off at the Fudo's, and the Fudo's would keep me inside all day, eating muzumi balls.
The boots were a sort of pride for me. I had never been permitted to buy my own shoes before. I spent a complacent four years not knowing what I wore, and a fifth birthday in tight black shoes Mom seemed to replace at the precise moment when I had reached a bond of understanding with the pair. So when on my sixth birthday Father let me chose my own shoes, I had been thrilled. I quickly picked out a pair of white boots held together by a miraid of buckles. The streets lamps zooming by reflected off those buckles, and I spent an enjoyable ride just staring at them and turning my foot over and over.
I realized later that I should have been looking at Mother. I should have been listening to her jokes, watching the way the edges of her hair were dyed red in the darkness, illuminated by the lights coming from the car's radio. I should have gazed at her with childish love as she toyed with the rings in her hand, memorizing her laugh and the way she'd moved. Instead, I had been staring at a pair of white boots which are now hidden, rusting away in some closet.
Even at the airport, I never realized how important that moment would be. I'd gone to the airport many times before, and I'd never stayed near my parents. I always ran to watch the bags give rounds in the baggage claim, or to stare up at the huge signs that read: Terminal A Bag Claim Terminal C Gate 18. Mom's hand was like a steady pressure one got used to in time. I wish to God I had looked up that night, at least once.
I cannot even remember what she said to me as she messed with my clothes and hair before following Father into the plane. I think she waved. She must have waved. The Fudo's had come to get me at the airport, and they were messing up my dress as well. It seemed that I always dressed wrong. I was annoyed at them. I was trying to wave under a torrent of gloved hands and yanks at my sleeves, and starring at a cockroach in mute fascination.
Somehow, that's what I can remember with most detail from that day. The cockroach. That little copper-coloured thing climbing the gate wall, clicking its velvety wings, waving its thin antennas in a slow, hypnotic dance. I stared at it for a long time, entranced by the hard body, the gleaming thorax, the veined, pulsing wings, flapping spasmodically as it twirled its eyes... That fucking cockroach. The only thing I remember from a day I should have treasured, and observed, held on to so that I could call it my last memory of my Mother. The day when I saw her last, that day when she last woke me up, and held me, and pinched my nose...
But I did not live that day. I let it pass through me in a torrent of lights, baggage, tiled floors, pants. And a cockroach on a wall.
Part II Reality-1961
"No! No, John, get away from there!"
I laughed uncontrollably as i watched my best friend, Akira Fudo, rub towards my dog, John, who was about to dive into the Fudo's prize bird bath, a dainty contraption of glazed terracotta perching imperiously on the lawn. Akira grabbed John's collar and began to pull frantically, burrowing his feet into the yard's mud for balance.
I had spent most of my childhood with the Fudos. Although Mister and Mrs.Fudo were also archaeologists, and had collaborated in many projects with my parents, they didn't travel as much as mine did. They worked in the local museum, and sometimes they would take Akira and me with them. We had met, in fact, in the museum's main office, one day when Akira had rushed in, tripped, and tipped a base over. We must have been about four or five, but, for some reason I could never understand, not even years later, we had a certain empathy between us. It was as if being friends came natural to us, as if it were our destinies.
We went to school together since the primary years. We'd copy each other's assignments, mostly mine, by the way. We lied for each other, and shared our lunches. Unless, of course, Akira brought muzumi, in which case I blatantly refused any of it. He was my best friend. And whenever Mom and Dad would leave, I would be glad to be here with Akira. I never told him any of these things, though.
"Hit him over the head," I called out to him now.
I was sprawled on the front porch, affecting a pose of unconcerned spectator. Turning the pages of the anime magazine we had been reading slowly and drowsily, I pretended not to care when Akira yowled and cursed at John. Pretty soon, he became aware of what I was doing and began to curse and shout at me too.
"Animal! You did this on purpose! I saw you kick John while you were reading, and don't you deny it!"
"Bakana. Why would I want to destroy your bird bath?"
"You're not helping me out here! That's pretty big evidence that you want me to suffer at the hands of your dog!"
"Ok. All right, all right. Hold on, I'm coming to your aid, O Intrepid Fudo Akira."
With a battle cry, I leaped down from the porch and towards John. I took off my coat as I advanced and waved it above me in circles.
"Come on, boy. Come on," I called, "get the coat."
John turned around from his grip on the bird bath and stared at my hand for a while. I kept spinning the coat till I was sure he was completely absorbed by it. Once he was, and he had crouched down on the ground, salivating and ready for a new game, I released the coat. John tore after it in a flash, jumping over rose beds and blue and green lawn chairs.
"That dog hates me," Akira pouted. I smiled and punched his arm. Akira rubbed it and stuck his tongue out at me. I stuck mine out right back. Akira kicked me, and so I kicked him as well. Then he lunged forward and knocked me to the ground. I brought my knees up and sent him rolling. Pretty soon, we were scuffling all over the yard, while John barked and ran around us in excitement.
A few minutes later, we let ourselves fall onto the grass. Akira spread his arms out wide, and I could see his breathing was deep and exhausted. Beads of sweat lined his face, but he was smiling. I folded my hands under my head and watched the white clouds race by. It was a perfectly wonderful day. I sighed in content.
Akira lifted himself up, propping himself on one shoulder. "Penny for your thoughts," he said.
"Nothing, really," I answered, watching a turtle shaped cloud crash into a fluffy dragon.
"Not so!" Akira said in a sing-song voice. I frowned at him in mock anger and growled at him to stop being such a pest. He just gave me an impish smile and began to sing-song even louder.
"I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking."
I tried to cover my ears as he began to skip like a moron around me, aware of just how moronic he looked and how much it annoyed me. I shouted at him to grow up, to shut up, and to take a speedy trip to Hell, but he didn't stop singing till I bellowed out:
"All right! Enough! You know what I'm thinking. So what is it?!"
Akira stopped skipping and squatted down in front of my face. He threw a mock punch at my nose and giggled. I wanted to strangle him.
"Your parents return today."
I sighed and let my head fall back into the grass, turning on my back. I could hear Akira saying, in a superior tone of voice, how he knew he'd know what I was thinking. Beneath me, the grass tasted like mud and glue. I felt really foolish suddenly.
"Not that I missed them," I mumbled to Akira. I heard him begin to laugh. Then his laughter moved away from me, and I heard his steps on the porch. I heard him swing open his front door.
"Hey, Mom," he called, "Ryo says he doesn't miss his mommy, and I saw him circling today's date on the calendar yesterday. He's a liar. A liar, liar, liar."
His sing-song liar liar charade disappeared into the house, and I heard the front door slam. When I figured enough time had gone by, I flipped over on the grass again. With my hands behind my head, I looked up at the sky once more.
I fancied I saw a plane up ahead.
Part III Descent
There was a crack in the ceiling of my bedroom. It began by the edge of the windows and spread out tired fingers towards the front of the closet. Diminutive fungi was forming around its edges, and little drops of water fell to the floor from where the crack squinted out into the sky. They formed an ochre puddle on the floor, urine yellow and sickening. I looked at those falling drops like a demented patient who has tired of struggling in his straight jacket and can only lay still, exhausted. One by one they fell, and one by one I saw them drop. Drip drip drip. I continued staring at them even when darkness came and I could no longer see them. I heard them. I heard them splashing down into their thickening puddle.
And I pretended I couldn't hear the people downstairs. The clink of glasses. The rasping of chairs. The murmured shit nobody really meant. I tried to shut it all off with the incessant dripping. And for a while, enveloped in darkness, feeling my bones become stiff and the mattress become grinding stone, I managed to block them out. I couldn't even hear their shiny autos leaving, although I saw the headlights rush to the corners of my room and hide by the door.
I lay in my bed perfectly still. Perfectly numb. Hearing the dripping water. I became lost in a train of idle thought that whistled in my ears. It came to a crashing stop with my drowning in a room full of water drips, still staring at the ceiling. My throat hurt so much, and it was becoming so hard to breathe, that for a moment I thought it was true. But it was only my nose full of mucus. Maybe I'll die, I thought bleakly, maybe I'll choke on my own saliva and acfixciate with my mucus... Maybe this stone bed will shatter my bones. Maybe that crack will give, and this whole house will bury me.
The door groaned then, and someone forced it open. A thin line of light ran forward and jumped into my curtains, wrapping itself around them.
A voice, a voice that sounded like my Father's, floated in after it. It warbled about being all right and seeing her and coming down and see you. I remained impervious to it. I didn't even stir. A wicked thought made itself into my pulsing brain, and I hoped the voice would think I had died too.
It went away then, and pulled the white light along with it. It clawed at the floor, until it squeezed under the door and was gone. But I didn't move. I just lay there, the echo of the spoken words becoming meaningless noise in the back of my head. I could feel small, wet larva begin to crawl along my legs. The stone bed had pulverized my hands, I could not feel them anymore. Moths began to dance inside my belly, their wings scrapping across its walls. A giant sloth was trying to come out my mouth, pushing itself out, bulging in my throat, slimy and pulsating. Salt crystallized in my eyes. I heard someone moan.
But I just stared at the drips falling to the floor. I lost myself in the little ochre drops, until I thought my eyes would burst, sprinkling salt over the bed.
It was then that the sloth emerged from my mouth, and I heard it scream. It was a horrible sound, helpless, maddening. And it rang in my ears long after it had faded away. The loneliest sound in the world.
Part IV Sound and Fury-1969
Monday, 4:59am
And where have you been at this hour? It's almost 5 am for God's sake...
None of your business, old coot.
Watch your tongue. Are you drunk?
Why should you care?
I'm your father!
Oh, ha ha. That's rich. You're hardly around... I was beginning to believe I had no father. Thank you for setting me straight. Now get outta my way.
Where are you going?
To my room! To the Bathroom! Where I else? Shit, I've got this fucking headache, damn it all...
You're drunk. You're drunk, aren't you? Come back down here, young man. Let me see you!
Why don't you come up here? You rooted to the floor?
What's wrong with you? Son, what is it!?
You should know, Mr. National Geographic. You're so frigging smart, figure it the Hell out.
Now wait a minute, young man. Don't you dare talk to me like that. I'm your father!
And little do I care...
Son? Son!? Come back here! Son!
Monday, 7:00am
Stop playing with your breakfast and eat it.
I'll eat at the airport after you leave.
You'll do no such thing. Eat up. And stop looking at me like that. I don't know what's happened to you lately. You're only fourteen and you're acting like a common slack. Either you shape up or I send you to boarding school.
You wouldn't dare. Mother never wanted me to go there. Mother never made me do anything I didn't want.
You were six years old back then. Now you're almost a man. You look more like a baby. Your mother would be ashamed.
Yeah? Well Mom's not here now, is she, Pop? She's D.E.A.D. She's buried twenty feet underground and rotting.
Stop that son. Eat.
Larva are feasting on her putrid skin. Her eyes are masses of blown gunk resting on the rims of her sockets. Her skin's peeling off slowly, so slowly, in little green clumps of slimy muck, crawling with ants...
Son. Stop.
...She's turning to dust even as we speak, falling apart in a heap of bones. Her blood has already flowed out into the cask. Her stomach's burst out of her mouth, pulsing and nauseous. A spider lives there now, buried in its bilis. Her bones are tearing out through her wasted skin, twisting in their sockets...
Stop it!
...She's dead Dad! She's dead because she went off to see some stupid Mayan mask. Because you're an arqueologist and she had to go with you because she was your loving assistant! And why couldn't I go!? Why could I never go!? I would have DIED too! And then I wouldn't have to live with you! A miserable excuse for a father. A horrible father! An invisible fucking idiot!!
STOP IT!
I hate you.
Friday, 12 midnight
I knew I'd find you like this someday. Dead drunk. Look at yourself! Lying on that bed like an idiot. You don't even greet me when I come back. And for some odd reason, the car's out of the garage. I won't ask why until later. Now get up! Clean up this mess. This place looks like a pig-sty. And a fine pig you make, too.
You're a disgrace, you know? Ever since your mother died you've done nothing but mope and rebel like some jerk. It's a miracle I haven't found any drugs yet. You probably don't bring them home, do you? You're an imbecile. Any other idiot would have gotten over his mother's death already. It's been seven years son! What's wrong with you!?
You're not the only one who's sad. What? Do you think I don't miss her!? I miss her every day of my life. But I've gone on with my life, and I've tried to make the best of this mess. And of you. But, oh no, you have to play the martyr! You've wasted seven years moping around, getting drunk, coming home late, and acting like a jerk. A real jerk, you know?
I'm ashamed of calling you my son. In fact, get up! Come on. Pack up all of your junk. Classes begin tomorrow at the state boarding school. If we go tomorrow, it won't be too hard to get you in, and get rid of you for once and for all. Maybe you'll shape up. Frankly, I don't care, as long as I don't have to see you again. Come on! Get up! I've had just about enough of your little charade--
It ends now.
Part V Dreaming Awake-1970
I leaned against a wall for support. My throat was hurting again and, try as I might, the burning of salt wouldn't leave my eyes. I took several deep breaths and thought savagely at my throat that either it calmed down or I ripped it out. It obeyed me reluctantly, but I managed to calm myself enough to continue on my way.
The voices around me sounded the same as all the voices had sounded in Fumeki College. Girls shouted and hurried by whispering, swinging their book bags and prim as anything in little blue sailor suits. Boys threw books across each others heads and called out dirty jokes, leaning against their lockers and battling against the high neck of the school uniform. Some had removed their jackets and were leaning over carefully tended flower arrangements, talking to pretty girls with pigtails and bows.
I missed Akira. In every shouted joke and nervous laugh, I thought I heard him. I'd look up then, and hope to see him. Then these hateful uniforms would be gone, and I'd be in Fumeki again. But that would never be. Sadly, I turned my eyes back to my boots. One foot in front of the other and white floors smelling of disinfectant. That was my world now.
It was by complete mistake that I made quite an impression in this school. I had arrived late for my first class. I ran down the unknown and much too orderly halls, completely disoriented without the living human tumult of Fumeki. My books were beginning to slip from my hands, and I had abandoned any attempts at actually buttoning my jacket's neck, so it hung loosely and limply over my shoulders and collarbone. It wasn't until I reached the classroom that I was aware of what a stir I was causing. There I was, blond, wild haired, blue eyed, with an open collar, breathing deeply and pausedly as the teacher admonished my tardiness, wrote out my name on the blackboard, and was greeted by a chorus of suppressed sighs and giggling on behalf of the girls. I was a bit bewildered. No one had thought much of me at Fumeki. Especially not the girls.
I didn't pay any attention to them, other than a stray look of immense puzzlement. They thought I was so wonderful, so cute, so cool, so sexy... It was beyond my grasp to see myself as any of those. I didn't see myself as much of anything.
So I became known as a cold heart-breaker. Girls regarded me with awe and hate and contempt and desire, while the boys held me as a complete jerk and entertained fantasies of my being homosexual. I quickly learned to care very little about any of them. I just kept to myself and stared at the floor. I never realized how completely conceited I appeared to everyone. But I learned to smirk and hide everything I felt that year.
I did reasonably good in class. I was so depressed thinking about Mom and my old life, that I dived into the comparatively safe haven of academics. But once the projects were done and the tests past I'd fall again into my reveries. I thought about okaasan constantly, desperately trying to remember her, only to discover I could not evoke anything further than her dark silhouette at a door. I couldn't remember her voice, if she'd said something important to me. Nothing.
Once, I took a snapshot with me to school. One of the few personal belongings I had taken to boarding school with me was an old photo album, the one with all the snapshots of me and Akira and John. The photo I held in my hand was older. It was taken at a flower fair in 1959, or so the banner hung above us read. Mom wore a large, rice picking hat and a white kimono. She held a cherry blossom branch in her hand, and I was hugging her legs. I forced myself to remember that day. I tried so hard that my head began to hurt. A knot formed in my throat, and I put the photo to my cheek, hoping to feel okaasan's kimono. The photo's edges scrapped against the crystallized salt around my eyes, and I could feel the hateful sloth battling to escape from my throat again. I swallowed hard. In an instant of blind rage I punched the wall. I heard my knuckles crack and the scrape left blood on the white wall, but it didn't seem real either.
I stared at the blood, red and wet on the concrete wall. Feel it, damn it, I thought. Life is real. Why don't you live?! I looked around me. Students were walking by me, staring at me. My brain felt numb. I scraped at the salt sticking to my cheeks. My chest hurt, a throbbing was beginning to lodge at the sides of my head, squeezing out my breaths, pounding till I couldn't stand it. I felt as if my heart would burst. Blindly I tore through the staring students. I had to get away. I couldn't bear their stares, the unreality of it all. I wanted to remember my Mother. I wanted to be six years old again.
The passages swirled around me. I heard someone laugh and mock me. I kept on. I felt the stairs slip by me and my fingers were numb on the handlebars. I almost tripped on the last step, the sharp contact of my knee bone with concrete shooting sparks under my eyelids, but I never stopped. I wanted to keep on running till my heart broke.
I was amazed when my body saved me. I collapsed in the empty soccer field and lay panting into the grass. Why whole body shook. It seemed forever before I picked myself up and leaned against the Gym wall for support. The white clouds rolled on, lazy and content, above me. The world moved on around me, mocking me with its bright sunlight and laughter. I closed my eyes, a sob escaping my lips.
It was like that for almost three months. But no one knew. The few who did thought I was just crazy. None of the teachers suspected something was wrong with me. Only one girl approached me one day while I ate my lunch.
"I saw you crying in the Gym yesterday," she said. She didn't sound mean, so I looked up at her. I was disappointed to see her blush, but I didn't tell her off. I merely shrugged.
"You're a strange kid," she said. "You must have horrible problems..."
I moved away as she sat near me. I turned my head away and tucked it a little so my bangs would cover my eyes from her.
"Would you like to tell me about it?"
I remained immobile for a while. She sounded so caring, so concerned. I was struck by a desire to tell her everything, about not remembering, about the sloth, the drips, my Father, everything. But as I looked at her pale green eyes, I knew I wouldn't.
I had become used to my pain. I realized that as I watched her leave sadly. I had been living for so long now with my self pity that I didn't know how to stop feeling sorry for myself. It was as if I had accepted the role of a depressed hero in some play. A tragedy where the hero was undone by his own depression. Years later, staring at what I would make of my best friend, at how I would tear apart all of his sheltered life, I would still be the actor willingly accepting the role of doomed hero.
That month, when the green eyed girl had approached me at lunch, that was the month I fainted clear away in the middle of a crowded hall, my head throbbing, the sloth biting into my trachea and blocking my breath, a warm drop of blood trickling down my chin.