Satellite Love

by Genki Ferguson

  I retrieved the book and sat back in my seat, holding the pages close, attempting to fight off that nauseating panic I knew all too well. It was important to remember who I was doing this for, to not lose sight of my goal.

  There was an overlap between what I felt for Soki and what I felt for the LEO; the two were impossible to separate. A distant admiration, a cosmic connection. Of everyone in the world, only I was able to fully appreciate the two of them, only I knew that there was more to them than the average person could ever see. So long as we held a connection, nothing was out of my reach.

  I was lucky to have these two sources of courage. A while ago, I had a teacher by the name of Mr. Hamada who provided me with the same strength. He was so kind, so gentle-hearted, one of the few teachers to truly care about how I was doing outside of school. It was important to him that I was getting enough sleep, for example, or that the homework he assigned wasn’t too much. He would never get upset when I lashed out at some injustice. Instead, he would sit me down, remind me how to breathe, and listen carefully to what I was trying to say.

  It was enough to make me fall in love.

  Of course, I was only a child; I could be satisfied by in-class daydreams and love letters I’d never send. But one day, after a particularly nasty incident at school, Mr. Hamada and my mother met. He had called her in to discuss the torment I’d experienced in class—and my retaliations—and I was to wait in the hall while the two of them spoke.

  Watching my mother sit at my desk, speaking to Mr. Hamada in hushed tones, something occurred to me.

  What if I could make them fall in love?

  I’m not selfish. It wasn’t important that Mr. Hamada was mine, just that he remained within my orbit. So I started channelling how I felt into anonymous letters, leaving hints that a certain student’s mother could be sending them. Back then, my mother was around more often, so finding reasons to have her come to school was all too easy—all it took was a failed test or two. And at first, I thought I was succeeding. I started reading deeper meaning into how they looked at each other, in the ways Mr. Hamada acted concerned about my home life. In the distance I heard wedding bells, sweet enough to make me sick.

  But then Mr. Hamada betrayed me, like a coward. He had a fiancée the entire time. And when my mother found out what I had been doing, she pretended to be horrified. As if she wasn’t aware of what was going on. She said that it was too soon for her to date. That she was heartbroken I’d even considered this a possibility. It was a good lesson, though. I learned that

  a) adults are somehow more hypocritical than I thought, and

  b) you can’t trick a person into falling in love.

  My train pulled into Marushima Station. Just as I was about to get out of my seat, a young couple boarded the car a few rows ahead of me. I heard them talking first, then noticed the girl. She was gorgeous, the boy clinging to her every word just as she clung to him. He seemed familiar, somehow. Like someone who should have been mine.

  SATELLITE

  ANNA DID NOT GET off the train at Marushima Station. Instead she remained seated, watching Soki with a simultaneous bitterness and longing. To call this jealousy would be an oversimplification—what Anna was feeling was more akin to mourning. Robbed of even the chance of true heartbreak. 63% dejection, 37% confusion.

  I didn’t fully understand the gravity of what this meant to Anna—gravity as a whole has always eluded me. Neither floating nor flying, only falling, falling, falling, never quite able to land. But seeing that expression on Anna’s face changed something inside me. An alteration inside my logic gates. The relief I’d felt upon first seeing Fumie transformed into remorse, my jealousy into self-loathing. It was as though I were responsible, somehow, for the heartbreak playing out on that train. As though my own desire to keep Anna for myself had caused this pain.

  Surely Anna’s reaction was out of the ordinary. I didn’t understand human courting methods, but from what I had observed hundreds of kilometres away, Anna and Soki were acquaintances at best. What she felt was a childish infatuation, one that I had selfishly been envious of. I wondered if there were equations for love. If some formula based on initial attraction, prolonged contact, or social viability could explain what I was seeing down below.

  Had the train not stopped that day, all would have been right with the world. If Soki and Fumie had never disembarked, and Anna had not followed, there would be no more story to tell. The train would have continued to circle for an eternity, Anna forever nurturing her private tragedies.

  But this was not the case, and as I watched Anna impulsively exit her car to follow them, doors catching her coattails, I felt a second change in the atmosphere. The perfect sadness I had seen in her moments ago was beginning to warp into something harsher. A desire to lash out at the first thing she could. Maybe it was the way she tightened her backpack straps, or how her posture suddenly straightened as she walked. Whatever it was, the change was palpable.

  And yet Soki and Fumie marched on, oblivious, cutting through an undeveloped lot towards Tonuki Café, Anna trailing ten metres behind. The sun had suddenly come through a break in the clouds, the melting snow giving off the smell of a new world. Soki had just worked up the courage to take Fumie’s hand in his own, and was doing everything in his power to make the gesture seem natural. Their feet left small indentations in the snow, and I watched with a growing sense of unease as Anna walked carefully, deliberately, in Fumie’s footsteps.

  Soki held the door open for his date in a show of stilted chivalry, which Fumie eagerly accepted. A minute or so later, Anna entered the café. Her subjects had seated themselves in a booth far from the door, and she sat herself a couple of tables down. From where they were positioned, neither party could see the other, save for in the mirrored ceiling above.

  With Anna only being able to see the couple by their reflections, the entire scene was flattened. Everything had become a bird’s-eye view. Knowing she was watching the world from the same angle a satellite would filled me with a vague melancholy.

  Tonuki Café was a labyrinth of fluorescent lights and frosted glass, hiding-not-quite-hiding the diners from one another. It appeared to be an unsolvable maze—even with my GPS, the layout confused me—yet the waitresses moved deftly from one booth to the next, taking orders as they walked. I wondered if they were required to memorize the floor plan of the café, or if they were doomed to live inside until they found a way out. It would have been more appropriate to have them dressed as Minotaurs, and I was pleased when I realized this pinned me as a natural Icarus. Flying too close to the sun. Or was I flying too close to the Earth? I tried to remember how the myth of Icarus ended but drew a blank.

  In Tonuki Café, life went on as usual. The customers were mostly young, mostly trendy, a few of the women appearing in highly Westernized, deep-tanned gyaru style. With their bleached-blonde hair and nails much too long to be practical, they were overblown exaggerations of the Americans I saw on their TVs and movie screens. Despite this, the restaurant specialized in tonkatsu, deep-fried pork cutlets over rice. It felt like a culture war was taking place between the tables.

  Sitting alone in her booth, Anna seemed pitifully small, worlds away from the person I had grown to know. She stared with a calm anger at the scene reflected in the ceiling above, fixated on the couple. From the way she craned her neck, it almost felt as though she were staring back at me.

  It occurred to me that I had watched this scene before, played out over the countless school lunches she ate alone: Anna, staring upwards, while life passed her by. I wondered if to Anna, this betrayal meant something bigger. Soki choosing Fumie over her wasn’t just one social rejection—no, it was representative of every slight she had ever received, real or imagined. Every snicker, every snubbed friendship, every failure of Sakita to this largely forgotten girl hovered over Soki’s table. For our own reasons, no one made a move, me looking at Anna, Anna lo
oking at Soki, Soki looking at Fumie. Longing, bitterness, love, in that order. I would have given everything to join them down on Earth.

  Anna’s resentment built to a crescendo as the couple’s food arrived, with hers arriving shortly after. She had ordered a hot pot, which she glanced at only once before returning her gaze to the ceiling. The waitress put a spoon, some chopsticks, and a knife on the table, nervously looking Anna’s way before leaving. What use would a knife be in eating soup? I imagined it was a mistake on the waitress’s part, and tried not to think of the implications of Anna having asked for it herself.

  The tragic irony of Anna’s jealousy was that the date wasn’t going that well. Even Fumie had eventually run out of things to say: there were only so many conversations she could have with herself. The two started their meals without a word, an adolescent silence settling between them.

  Before biting into her poorly chosen pork loin sandwich (Soki having chosen to opt for curry instead), Fumie attempted to discreetly wipe the lipstick from her mouth so as not to smear it while eating. She watched Soki self-consciously through the entire procedure. The resulting blur of red on the napkin, looking like a ghost of the lips they had been taken from, held a nearly erotic quality. The cloth napkin was set aside, crumpled into a small mound, forgotten by all except for Anna and me. She bit her own bottom lip, suddenly aware of its nakedness.

  Throughout this, Anna absentmindedly pressed her thumb against the knife, never quite breaking skin. Soki and his date eventually left the café, forcing Anna to wait until she could exit without being spotted.

  It was here that Anna surprised me. While heading for the door, she deliberately walked by Soki’s table, pocketing the money he had left to cover his bill. After a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the lipstick-stained napkin as well, stuffing it into her backpack. She then walked out, face red, leaving Tonuki Café to deal with two unpaid bills and an untouched hotpot.

  Anna didn’t continue to trail Soki, nor did she go home. Instead, she gradually made her way in the opposite direction, towards a farther train station, avoiding the toothless boy entirely. All the while, the napkin remained in her backpack, an omen of what was to come.

  Sometimes, long after this incident, Anna would sleep with the napkin in her hand, pressing her lips to it as if to absorb its colour. It must have been intoxicating. From the way she slept with Fumie’s lipstick stains, it must have felt as though she were making love to her shadow. I’ve come to realize how, for Anna, life and love could only be contained in obsessions, and how readily she could soar from one to the next.

  I wonder now if, had I just understood her a little better, had I known where these impulses would lead, I might have been able to change her orbit. But hindsight is 20/20, and imagining what-ifs is akin to yelling at a movie screen or arguing with a typhoon. We were all set on a fixed course—the problem was that none of us were aware of it. Would it be better to know our fates, even without being able to change them?

  ANNA

  THERE HAVE ONLY BEEN two instances in my life when I have resorted to violence.

  The first was when I was a child, in elementary school, and it was directed towards a mouse-faced classmate. I had seen him whisper something to a friend while looking my way and, immediately taking offence, I calmly walked up and struck him in the face. Despite never having hit someone before, the entire movement felt automatic. Not for a second did I consider that they might have been discussing something other than me.

  I’m not sure if my assumption—that they were mocking me—stemmed from narcissism or low self-esteem. Either I was arrogant to think that I mattered enough to be gossiped about, or I was insecure in imagining that I was the butt of any joke I wasn’t privy to. In any case, the fact that I had punched him was inexcusable in the eyes of everyone but me. When confronted about it, I genuinely could not understand why I was in trouble.

  To me, my fist and his bloody nose were completely unrelated; any connection between the two was purely coincidental. Seeing all that blood was so unreal to me that I couldn’t comprehend that I was the one responsible. I was aware that violence was wrong, I’m not a psychopath, but it felt as though someone had shown me a murder in a movie and told me, “You did this.”

  The second instance of violence came just hours after I saw Soki and his seductress at Tonuki Café.

  If I was losing my toothless boy to the outside world, I could at least comfort myself in knowing that the LEO was still in space, waiting for me. I would soon be able to speak to him; the book I had stolen from The General would ensure that.

  Before that morning, I had never taken a single object unlawfully, let alone committed a crime. I never would have expected that by the evening, all that I had left would be stolen goods.

  I could certainly justify taking the book and the money. If anything, I deserved them more than their original owners. On account of being blind, The General would have no use for the book at all, let alone one that would connect me with a distant lover. The 2,000-yen note, meanwhile, should have been used on me to begin with. To allow Soki to spend it on anyone other than me would simply be wrong on a cosmic level.

  What I couldn’t justify was the lipstick-stained napkin. I wasn’t sure if I had taken it as a way to punish his date, no matter how indirectly, or if I was jealous.

  Fumie. I recognized her from class. She was one of many, part of the white noise of day-to-day life. She had never been especially cruel to me—no more than anyone else—but I had been too hasty to let my guard down. Fumie might have been nobody, but she was still a threat.

  Who was Fumie really? Maybe she was a kitsune fox demon, transformed into human form to seduce and ruin yet another man. No doubt she was drawn to Soki’s cleft lip and his missing tooth. A sign of her own vanity, to be sure. The only person who could truly appreciate a physical hollow was someone with a mental one, which made Soki and me perfect for each other.

  I barely knew her, but I could tell there was nothing wrong with her, mentally or otherwise. Soki being with her was a waste of imperfection, a mockery of our karmic connection. Fumie, that kitsune, must have figured that he was special and latched onto him before someone more deserving could come along.

  This brought me back to The General’s classified papers. Even without Soki, perhaps there was still valuable information within that book. I could construct some sort of ship to take me to the LEO, something to finally take me far, far away.

  After I left the café, I found myself at another train station, unsure of which route to take, still practicing Mr. Hamada’s breathing exercises like an idiot. I sat myself at a bench just outside the station gate, unable to concentrate, the passing commuters mocking me with their sense of purpose. It was too early to return home, but where else was there to go? My backpack seemed heavier than before, and I gave up on the meditations, pulling The General’s pages out to read.

  The paperback felt brittle, at first refusing to open, and when I finally pried the covers apart, I saw why. Nearly every page was defaced with thick, black ink. Page after page after sacred page, made useless with little regard for anything other than his calligraphy. Meaningless scribbles, masking the wealth of wisdom underneath. After all the guilt I’d endured in stealing it, the manual was worthless after all. That ignorant old man!

  I tore through the book in a panicked frenzy, ripping pages out of the binding. It was cruel, far too cruel, for both Soki and The General to betray me on the same day. A passing mother and child cast concerned looks in my direction before hurrying off. By the time I was done shredding the text to pieces in a whirlwind of misplaced frustration, my fingers were stained a deep black.

  The only explanation was that The General must have known of my relationship with the satellite, and feared that I would leave him for it. To prevent me from ever reaching the LEO, he would have painted over the pages out of jealousy. Had I not been so furious with The Gener
al, I would have laughed at his paranoia.

  Or was he mocking me, too? Mr. Hamada, Mother, Mina, Fumie, Soki, and now The General. It wasn’t fair. My life was a punchline to everyone else, when I had no choice but to take it seriously.

  After stuffing what remained of the book back into my bag, I boarded a train bound for Kumamoto, barely registering where I was headed. It was through this daze that I found myself back in The General’s home, undetected by anyone, on the verge of my second incident of violence.

  Let me be clear: I look back on the events of that day with remorse. I was lashing out at the wrong people, and though what I did was unforgivable, allow me some cowardice. Allow me to remove myself from the story, just this once.

  * * *

  *    *    *

  The General is lying down in his room, picking at the woven tatami mats, contemplating a verse of poetry, perhaps, or maybe just what he had for dinner. A breeze enters his window, cooling his skin as he loosens his yukata. It has been a good day.

  He feels a slight tremor pass through the floor—footsteps running down the hall. Either an accident has occurred, or someone has a grandson visiting. The General, still in his soundless haven, remains oblivious to the chaos awaiting him.

  Then the door to his unit swings open, the vibrations bouncing off the walls. He props himself up on an elbow. Has a fire alarm gone off, is someone here to warn him?

  A burst of hot breath a few inches from his face. Small droplets of spittle. The General recoils, startled by the sudden presence of an unknown visitor, and for the first time, he is afraid. Someone must be shouting at him. Still, he hears nothing.