What could Anna be hiding under that tarp? When I had asked about it, she brushed me off, annoyed that I would even ask such a question. The longer I lay there, tossing and turning with my restless mind, the more concerned I became. I had no frame of reference for sinister objects over 2.2 metres tall, body just as wide, and at one point considered the possibility of a yokai spirit trapped in a cage, requiring constant darkness to survive.
I wanted to see for myself what was underneath, but I knew that no matter how delicately I removed myself from the bed, Anna would immediately wake. Instead, I resigned myself to a night of torment, envisioning the mound coming alive, swallowing me whole, erupting into flames. Why flames?
Along with the numerous anecdotes Anna had told me during our walks, she’d also recounted a handful of myths—both Greek and Japanese. Staring at that mound, I was reminded of the story of Tantalus, who had stolen the food of the gods. As punishment, he was doomed to live in a pool under a fruit tree for all of eternity, the water below and the fruit above always moving just out of reach. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with the guy.
The sun’s rays were starting to filter through the room, finishing their 149.6-million-kilometre journey by making their way through windows inexplicably covered in sheets of ink-stained paper. I recognized these pages as being from the book Anna had destroyed weeks earlier, yet still couldn’t understand why they were mostly painted over in black.
“They’re from my bible,” she had told me while changing into threadbare pajamas. Even I could recognize that she was answering sarcastically, sharing an inside joke with only herself.
“You painted over, and ripped pages from, your bible?”
She paused for a moment, then answered with a smile. “If it’s my own religion, it’s not sacrilege, is it?”
I couldn’t argue against that kind of logic. And yet, when I pressed her for more details about her “religion,” she clammed up. I suppose she wasn’t a member of a proselytizing branch.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said, as though scolding a small child. “Go to sleep.”
As I watched the pages from afar, still confined to my bed-prison, I realized I could make out some details in the morning light. Diagrams, large enough to be visible. Rockets and missiles.
Dawn slowly gave way to its less colourful counterpart, and with it, the diagrams retreated back into their pools of ink. The shifting colours the sun cast upon the Earth, filtered through the atmosphere, felt alien to me. In space, it had simply been a sharp, blinding white.
Amaterasu continued her steady ascent, pulling back the night sky. And just as slowly as she came up, so too did Anna arise. Almost imperceptibly, her breathing began to speed up as she emerged from this peculiar hibernative state. Behind her eyelids, I saw something flicker.
“Good morning,” I said, rather pleased with myself. This, I knew, was the correct greeting for someone who has just woken up.
She looked up at me, grimacing, eyes only half open. Her pupils were still fully dilated, not yet adapted to the morning light.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Seven hours, thirty-seven minutes, and five seconds after midnight. No, six seconds. Seven seconds. Eight sec—”
“Perfect,” she said, cutting me off without so much as a smile. I felt a small amount of disappointment; I’d thought my joke was rather clever.
“You can catch the eight o’clock train,” she continued. “You’ve been up for a while?”
“I didn’t sleep at all.”
A 3.7-millimetre depression at the corners of her mouth. Confusion.
“Well, I have a favour to ask you. Actually, no. It’s a mission.”
“A mission?”
She nodded. “You’re going to help me do something monumental, something more important than all the rest of my life put together. I need your unconditional loyalty. Can you promise me that?”
I was taken back, the sudden gravity of her tone making me uneasy. She sounded like a newscaster reading off a teleprompter, or a dictator addressing the troops. Her speech felt rehearsed, as if she’d been planning her words for a long time. I should have found this funny, but in all honesty, I was terrified by this change. Humour mixed with fear.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be promising,” I said.
“Before we continue I need to know that I can trust you absolutely, no matter what. You need to prove it to me.”
“I need to agree to do whatever you ask, without even knowing what it is beforehand?”
“Correct.”
I realized, then, that love could be a threat. That the basic foundation for romance is knowing that the other could destroy you at any moment, yet trusting that they won’t. Mutually Assured Destruction. I wonder if Khrushchev and Kennedy fell in love during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I mention this only to explain why I let myself be manipulated so. It wasn’t out of fear that Anna would stop loving me that I agreed; rather, it was out of fear that Anna would love me less.
I didn’t protest Anna’s request, or take days to agonize before coming around. All that it took was a small tipping of the scales on her part, a slightly hurt look, and I hastily agreed to whatever terms she set. It’s incredible what a 20-degree tilt of the head, a 15-millimetre furrowing of the brow can do.
And so I agreed without question, fearful of what would happen if I betrayed my creator. Fearful of what would happen to us.
“Of course. What do you need me to do?”
ANNA
I WATCHED FROM MY bedroom as Leo left my house, noting with amusement how he didn’t check either direction before crossing the street. I suppose not existing removes any fear of death or traffic.
A part of me was disappointed when Leo accepted my mission, affirming yet again that he was but a product of myself. It was important for me to be able to trust him, but falling in love with a mirror is no fun. I needed him to go out, to experience the world on his own, to evolve as a person. I needed him to come back to me and fall in love of his own free will.
The Machine was my gift to him, my offering. It was a testament to my entire life thus far. More than a calling, it was a responsibility. No one else—not The General, not Fumie, not Soki—could create something of this magnitude. It was proof that here in Sakita, the kami hadn’t abandoned us yet, that we still existed. I could hardly contain my excitement, picturing Leo’s delight once he saw what I had been building in secret for him.
Once I made sure Leo was far enough away from the house, I closed the blinds and took the cover off The Machine. It was starting to take shape, pubescent in its development. You could see what its final form would be, the chassis twisting and turning as it outlined the body to come.
My machine held no human features, yet it was hard to see it as anything other than alive. When it was just the two of us, I swear I could hear it breathing. If I were to touch The Machine and imagine just right, the cooling tubes running through it felt warm with life…
I had begun building it from a solid core and expanded outwards as inspiration struck. This “core” was a narrow refrigerator I had repurposed as a cockpit, which could just fit two individuals. Everything else branched out from there, a mismatch of combustion engines at the bottom (junked from assorted cars), parallel reservoirs meant to hold gasoline and other flammable liquids, and copious amounts of wiring and tubing to stitch everything together, cooling, redirecting energy, and sending commands throughout the entire spherical body.
Attached to the cockpit was a nameplate, still to be engraved. I hadn’t thought of an appropriate name yet, and wasn’t sure if I ever would. Checking once more to see that Leo was truly gone, I returned to my work on The Machine, ready to hide its exposed body at a moment’s notice.
GRANDFATHER
I CAN’T SEEM TO find my keys. It’s the strangest thing
. They were in my hands a moment ago, but now they’re gone. I think I’m getting forgetful.
Take this house, for instance. I don’t know how I got here. My daughter Yoshiko and I live in a beautiful apartment, and I’m sure I’ve never seen this house before. And yet, there are photos of the two of us everywhere! There are other figures in the pictures too, including this alien-looking girl. Why am I in these photos? I’ve never met these people.
There’s a note stuck to the fridge from Yoshiko. It’s addressed to me. It says: Please look after Anna. I’ll be gone for a few weeks. There’s curry in the fridge. Buy milk if you remember.
Anna? I wonder who that could be. I don’t remember Yoshiko telling me she was going to leave, but I must have given her permission to do so. Still, she should be careful, she’s much too young to go out on her own. The fridge is already filled with milk, so I’m not sure why she wants me to get more.
I can hear some hammering upstairs. Has Yoshiko come back already? She must be working on something. I’m so proud of her. She’s always been adept with her hands—she could become an expert carpenter with time, maybe even better than her old man. Still, she’s causing a bit of a disturbance. I’ll go tell her to quiet down.
The layout of this Western home is completely new to me, but I follow the sounds up the stairs and to the room they’re coming from. I open the door, expecting to see Yoshiko, but a different girl is there instead. It looks like she’s building some sort of machine. It’s a pile of mismatched metal formed into a gigantic globe, even taller than I am. Whatever this object is supposed to be, it’s beautiful. The peculiar girl doesn’t notice me, too busy hammering a piece of sheet metal flat.
“Where’s Yoshiko?” I ask.
The girl puts down her hammer. “Mom’s gone for a few weeks. Did you forget again?”
Is this girl Yoshiko’s daughter? But I haven’t met her before! How could I have a granddaughter I don’t know about? The girl must have noticed me getting worried, as she immediately drops what she’s doing to come to my side.
“It’s okay, you’re just having an episode. Help me put the tools away and we can get something to eat.”
The girl hands me her toolbox and asks me to sort the screws. The handle has the name “Goro” written on it. What a coincidence, my name is Goro too! I tell the girl this, but she just looks at me gently. She has such a kind smile.
“I know. These are your tools, Grandpa.”
The girl leads me down the stairs, offering me her shoulder to lean on, which I accept despite being fine without her support. Such acts of compassion are rare these days, and it seems a shame to let it go to waste. I had the wrong impression of her at first—she looked so odd—but there’s a softness in her that’s becoming clear to me now.
I sit down at the counter and read over the note Yoshiko left. The girl hovers behind me, reading over my shoulder at the same time. I wonder if she’s the Anna that Yoshiko had written about in the note, but I’m too embarrassed to admit I don’t know.
“Do you want some leftover curry?” I ask instead.
“We finished the curry a long time ago,” she replies. “I’ll just order in some food. Mom left some extra cash. Want noodles?”
“Yes, but not the spicy kind. They disturb my stomach.”
As the girl orders through the phone, she checks the fridge for something to drink. How odd! The only thing she has in the fridge is milk! She chooses a carton at random and pours me a glass, finishing the order as she does so.
“…and not spicy. Yes. No spice. That’s important. Thank you.” She hangs up the phone and turns to me again. “Let me know if you get tired, and I’ll pull out a futon for you.”
I’m not tired. If anything, I’m more awake than ever. I keep thinking about that bizarre contraption this girl is building. It’s beautiful, like a swallow’s nest cast in iron. I wonder what it’s being made for. She’s gone off to find her mother’s wallet, but I’ll find out what that machine is once she gets back. It really is remarkable, I just need to remember to ask.
SATELLITE
THE TRAIN RIDE TO Kumamoto was long and weightless, and after not sleeping the night before, I could feel myself fading away. As I fought to stay awake, body swaying with the meandering of the tracks, I attempted to make sense of the mission Anna had given me. For some reason, I didn’t feel like I had the full picture.
“You’ve never stolen anything before, correct?” she had asked me.
“Aside from that business with the train fare, no.”
“You’re going to need to toughen up, then. Can you do this for me?”
I nodded, no longer feeling like I could back out. Anna’s room was becoming claustrophobic, its angled roof closing in. The look she gave me went deep into my core, as though she were staring into my individual (imaginary) atoms.
“I need you to visit a friend of mine. He lives in a retirement home in Kumamoto. Once you’re inside, you need to look around his apartment for books on space, aerodynamics, combustion, anything else of that nature. Do you understand?”
I told her I did, and she wrote the address on a small slip of paper, along with directions for how to find his room. I almost expected her to tell me to memorize and then swallow the note. At the bottom she had written his name: The General. I wondered how, exactly, he had received that title.
Anna quickly briefed me on the old man’s story, adding that he wouldn’t be aware of my presence, since he was blind and deaf. It helped that no one could see me to begin with. The devil on my shoulder told me to be relieved that the sting would be easy, while the angel reminded me that I would, in fact, be stealing from a disabled senior citizen.
“And one more thing,” she said, as I made my way out of her room. “Let me know how he looks. I’m worried about him.”
“What do you mean?”
She paused, clearly uncomfortable with my question. The mound, hidden in the back corner of her room, loomed over us.
“I mean, check if he seems lonely. It’s important that people visit him often. Make sure that he’s eating, too,” she said. “Make sure he’s okay. Some truly awful person hurt him a while back. Did something that they should probably be punished for.”
“I see.”
“The worst of the worst. Human garbage.”
By then Anna wasn’t really speaking to me anymore, was instead lost in that absolute introspection so typical of her. I slipped out of the room, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
The train came to a stop. Fukuro Station, the home of The Foreigner. No one got on, no one got off. I felt the benign embrace of sleep come for me; I no longer had the strength to resist it.
For the first and only time in my admittedly short life, I had a dream—stirred, no doubt, by the movements of the train. It seems like an anomaly now, as though it never should have happened to begin with. If my life were a hundred-piece puzzle, this dream would have been piece one hundred and one.
And yet if I, an imaginary boy, could have a dream, then maybe I wasn’t as imaginary as I had feared. I’ve kept this extra puzzle piece close ever since, and even now I’m not sure where it should fit. The dream went something like this:
A prince on horseback, riding through a desert, arid dunes rolling into the horizon. He was alone, his ethnicity vague.
Surrounding him were thousands of corpses, each brutalized in their own unique way. The uniforms and standards were mixed, making it difficult to tell which side had won and which had lost, let alone which The Prince himself belonged to.
The Prince wandered aimlessly for a while, his mount bored by its surroundings. In a few years the dunes would cover the battlefield entirely, the landscape would be erased and born again as though in a karmic cycle. The cruelest neutral.
Coming close to an oasis, The Prince disembarked and travelled on foot. The pool seemed to have once been a pure b
lue, but had been made murky by battle. A body was slouched in the water, one arrow sticking out of the back of its neck, another through the palm of its hand. The Prince stopped to consider how this could have been possible. The soldier must have seen a hail of arrows, tried to shield himself with his hands from the first wave, and then been shot in the back trying to escape the second wave. He hadn’t stopped to remove the arrow from his palm, so the two arrows must have been shot in rapid succession. Satisfied with his analysis, The Prince washed himself in the pool, a lone tree providing him with shade.
He lay back, refreshed, and noticed the tree he was under held some sort of dark red, swollen fruit. He gazed at the fruit curiously for a second, then realized with an almost painful pang of nostalgia that they came from his homeland in the north, which he had not returned to since he was a child. The Prince climbed the tree, as though possessed by that same energy of his youth, and pulled off the fattest fruit he could reach, about the size of a desk globe. He threw it and himself to the ground and cut into its thick skin greedily with his ornamental dagger, hands shaking. The air was already sweet with its nectar.
A short while later, he had eaten nearly every piece of fruit on the tree. None moved away from him. None denied him their taste. The juices were flowing down his torso, half of the pulp not finding its way to his mouth.
Just as he cut open another, the wounded foot soldier, not quite dead, stretched his arrow hand towards him.
“Do not eat those!” he shouted. “They have all been infected with parasites.”
What the soldier said was true. The Prince looked at the fruit again, and noticed for the first time hundreds of thin worms, which he had thought were fibres, swarming inside. They pulsed to an invisible rhythm, waiting for his next bite.
Satellite Love Page 13