At this, The Prince realized that death was imminent; he had eaten far too many infected fruits to resist their impending takeover of his body. He stood up proudly, thanked the mortally wounded soldier for his warning, and left him his ornamental dagger, as though their shared fates linked them somehow. He then mounted his horse and rode away from the oasis.
The whole time, The Prince didn’t betray a single look of fear. He and I both knew that the parasites were burrowing deep inside him. He could feel them. And yet, all that he said as he rode off were three short words.
“Namu Amida Butsu. Namu Amida Butsu.”
Within the dream, I recognized these words as a Buddhist chant. They meant “Save me, Amida Buddha,” and were often recited when someone was faced with death. A final invocation to open oneself up to Amida Buddha, that Lord of Immeasurable Light.
The dream ended here, abruptly, as the lurching of the train woke me from my sleep. We had arrived in Kumamoto. I never did see if The Prince met his end or not.
So why did I have this dream to begin with? I had no home to feel nostalgic for, no glory to look back on, no religion to take refuge in. I had never even heard the words Namu Amida Butsu before, and yet I immediately understood them. What I had seen and heard required a past, which I did not have. The dream took place in a time before technology, before satellites roamed the skies. I must have imagined it into existence, a symptom of the illogical human brain I had been gifted. Since when was I able to create?
I got off the train, head filled with thoughts of fruits and parasites, wondering if it was possible for a dream to have had a dream.
* * *
* * *
Skyscrapers and camphor trees. Cigarette smoke and moss. Kumamoto was a larger city than Sakita, yet it maintained its ties to the natural world much more elegantly. In Sakita the two went head to head, whereas in Kumamoto they lived in harmony. Salarymen and office ladies walked to work, Edo-era castles visible in the distance. A rain so fine it could be mistaken for mist. In a city of 660,000, I saw no litter on the ground.
The General’s retirement home was an unimposing building in the suburbs, cream-coloured and built in a traditional style. Asphalt shingles were omitted in favour of tiled roofing, sliding partitions instead of solid walls. Some of the other residents were outside, enjoying the cool air with well-earned leisure. Their aging bodies fascinated me. I walked in unnoticed, following Anna’s directions through the halls.
He was much smaller than I’d imagined. From the reverential tone Anna had used when she said “The General,” I assumed he would be a behemoth of some sort. Instead of the twelve-foot-tall warrior I was expecting, I was met by a man barely reaching five feet, sitting alone at a low kotatsu table on the tatami-mat floor, struggling to get rice porridge into his mouth.
Anna had told me that The General would most likely be meditating, and so I was expecting to bask in the presence of a holy man. The tragically domestic scene I came across instead made me feel as though I was pulling on a thread better left alone.
Regardless of The General’s diminutive appearance and lunchtime struggles, I had a job to do and set out searching his piles of books accordingly. As usual, I found myself mostly immaterial, phasing in and out of reality, able to exert as much influence as a breeze. How exactly did Anna expect me to bring books back? I was limited to staring at the spines, reminding me of my time spent above Earth.
Judging by the abject mess around him, the old man was either an anarchist or his room had recently been broken into. Some of the tatami I walked over had been torn; one mat was stained with a beautiful blue ink. The pieces of a dismantled bookshelf had been piled by the front door, destined for the dump, with the resulting stacks of books covering the floor instead. The first few piles I glanced at turned up no results for texts on rocket physics, and I was about to move on to another pile when The General suddenly addressed me.
I had grown used to The General’s presence, and was no longer as worried about being caught. And so, when I heard Morse code being tapped out behind me, I assumed it to be an eccentricity of a hermit and continued my search, neck tilted to read the spines I couldn’t touch.
“Are you Anna?”
The General was driving these words into the ground with a cane, and if it were possible to attach emotion to a physical action such as this, I would say it was done with sorrow.
I turned to face The General, surprised that he could sense my presence, something I thought only Anna was able to do. He stared at me with unseeing eyes, mouth trembling.
The General approached me as rapidly as his body would allow, somehow knowing exactly where I stood frozen in fear, and took my hand. The metaphysical implications of this action were immense, too large for me to process. It felt like a solar flare had worked its way through my system, overwhelming my circuitry to the point where I couldn’t move. If The General could see me, were there others?
He tapped the words frantically into my palm—“Are you Anna?”—fingers flying in all directions, making him nearly impossible to understand.
Maybe it was the shock of finally being caught. Maybe it was a destructive streak I didn’t know I had. Or maybe I was curious about what it would be like to be my own creator—but rather than pull away from his grasp, I decided to engage with The General.
“I am. I wanted to see you.”
“Wanted to see me?”
“I also wanted to borrow some books.”
At the word “books” The General flinched as though being struck, then nodded his head knowingly and walked into the next room. When he returned, he was slowly pushing a large pile of texts with his feet.
I had already checked that stack, but made a show of looking through it nonetheless. I wasn’t sure how much he could see, after all, and I wanted to be as polite as possible after breaking into someone’s home.
I was between a book on Heian pottery and a collection of Rampo’s stories when The General addressed me, or rather Anna, again.
“I forgive you. Don’t be ashamed,” he tapped.
Forgive?
“You can start visiting me again. I promise, I don’t hold anything against you.”
I felt the desperate urge to speak to Anna, to hear the truth about what had happened to this old man. I knew that I was being lied to. My creator was keeping secrets from me, leaving me no choice but to doubt her.
I looked up at The General, the first human other than Anna I had interacted with. The varicose veins crawling through his skin saddened me, reminding me of the fragility of man. When satellites die, they eventually fall from orbit, burn up on re-entry, and mercifully turn into dust. Humans, however, wither away. Their skin turns transparent, and the very bones that served them all their lives are no longer able to prop them up.
And yet, I was jealous.
I stood and took his hand in mine, unsure of how to handle it, so unlike the only other hand I’d held. Male, rather than female. Old, rather than young. His grip was much stronger than Anna’s, yet still felt as though it might collapse in my palm.
“You forgive me?”
He seemed relieved that I had turned to him, had joined his world.
“Nothing important was broken, and the rest were just things. The bruise you left went away in a week.”
A wave of revulsion passed through me, a decidedly physical feeling. The General’s hand now felt unbearably warm. To make matters worse, his expression was all-forgiving, almost Buddha-like. It would have been easier had he hated Anna for what she did.
He missed her. The days since they last spoke must have felt like an eternity to him. I decided to change the topic, a conscious decision to fight off the growing disappointment—or was it disillusionment?—I felt towards my lonely god. Surely there was a logical explanation? I shouldn’t have to feel this way about the girl I loved.
“Tell me a story about us,” I said.
The General smiled softly, and motioned for me to take a seat.
ANNA
I WAS NEARLY DONE with my day’s work when the name I should inscribe on The Machine came to me. I grabbed a penknife before the inspiration could escape, and engraved a single word onto the nameplate. The roughness with which I carved each stroke struck me as being the antithesis of The General’s loose calligraphy. Here instead were sharp, cruel angles, meticulously planned.
The Machine would now officially be called the Tengu, after the mischievous creatures of ages past. Part crow, part goblin, these long-nosed spirits had dominion of the mountains and the forests, were harbingers of war and discontent. The Buddhists consider them yokai, supernatural monsters, while the Shintoists know them as kami. I imagine the truth is somewhere in between.
The Prince I had imagined as a child had taken me on countless journeys across dunes and deserts, riding horseback on a steed I had named Tengu. It seemed appropriate to give my machine the same name—soon Leo and I would be taking journeys of our own, after all.
For the first time in years, I found myself reminiscing about The Prince.
The root of our falling-out stemmed from his realization that he was, in fact, imaginary. That outside of my mind, he simply didn’t exist. Over the months that followed, he gradually became increasingly bitter about his unreality, asking questions far beyond my comprehension as a child.
Why couldn’t I grant him free will?
Why did I want him to suffer?
Why had I given him this existential pain?
Eventually, these questions started to overwhelm me, and I would make him disappear. Since he was imaginary, I could forget about him temporarily by concentrating on the real world. When I did this he would fade away, leaving me with some peace and quiet, until I inevitably brought him back once again. It’s difficult having a falling-out with an imaginary friend.
The last time I saw him, we were riding out across the desert on another adventure, and were being approached by our hundredth group of bandits. The Prince had been acting cold towards me all day and had brought me along begrudgingly. He got off the horse to confront our enemies and motioned for me to follow without looking at me once. At that moment I realized I despised him, and felt a cool detachment take over. Rather than dismount and join him in my own fantasy, I took the reins of Tengu myself and turned to leave. When The Prince saw what I was doing, he cried out in surprise, cursed, and gave chase in a futile attempt to catch me. Alone, there would be no way for him to fight off the incoming aggressors. The galloping of my horse was so loud I never heard the last words he said to me.
Of course, this was all in my imagination, but it was what I told my classmates had happened the next time they asked about The Prince. I’ve never been outside of Japan, let alone left someone for dead in the middle of a Turkish desert. I can still see the looks Mina and my other classmates gave me that day, of barely hidden amusement with a hint of contempt.
It became clear to me then that everyone else had moved on. I was the only one still playing with her imaginary friends. My classmates asking me about my latest adventures with The Prince didn’t come from a place of genuine curiosity, but of cruelty. It became a running joke for them to listen every Monday morning to the ridiculous new story Anna made up, the fantastic life she tried to pass off as her own. I tried not to care, and continued inventing stories even though the real Prince was long gone. At the very least, it meant I was being included.
Sometimes I wondered what happened to my Prince. Had he really perished in that desert? After that incident, I was no longer able to summon him, my imagination searching and coming up blank. Not even I knew what happened to dead imaginary friends. Perhaps he still existed, waiting, the quietest of voices deep inside. A murmur from the heart.
Naming my machine the Tengu seemed an appropriate resolution to the way things had ended with The Prince. No doubt what I had planned for Leo and me would finish on a much higher note, should the Tengu fulfill its purpose.
It was painful to think that my first imaginary friend should have realized he was imaginary. And yet Leo was in the same situation now, and I feared that, like The Prince, he would also become disillusioned with existence. That he, too, would lose faith in me.
I covered The Machine with the tarp. The physical body of the Tengu was complete; all that it required now was fuel. Fuel of any kind would do; neither of us was too picky, so long as it provided the combustion the Tengu needed.
It was getting dark, my eyes no longer able to work off natural light alone. The slight frosting of snow over Sakita amplified the absence of sound outside my room. It would still be a while before Leo returned.
I set out to complete the final step.
SATELLITE
ANNA HAD TOLD ME that after The General was removed from his cave, his single bolt action rifle had gone missing from the scene of the battle. It turned up some time afterward in a local’s shed, where it was being kept as a wartime memento. When The General became a minor celebrity, a petition was started to reunite him with his gun: a symbol of the old man’s resistance. It eventually came back into his possession, firing mechanisms removed for safety’s sake, and now hung, gutted, above his dining table.
As I watched The General take a seat across from me, deciding which story to tell, I considered how his and his gun’s fate were inexorably tied. I wondered if the cult-like aura Anna had given him ever truly existed in the first place.
“Do you remember the day I first made your acquaintance?”
I cringed slightly at how long it took him to Morse out acquaintance; surely there was a more concise way of putting it. I lied and said I did remember, but asked him to remind me anyway. He began.
“I was told of a visitor who wished to see me. I asked Nurse Yamada who it was, but did not recognize the name. When I called you in, I believed you to be a reporter of some sort, though I was curious, since interest in me had died out long ago.” At this, he motioned towards his gun. Although blind, he had memorized the layout of his home.
“I was somewhat right, I suppose,” he continued. “You were not a reporter, but you were here because of my story. I was quite touched to find that you had learned Morse code just to speak with me. Where did you learn about my case, might I ask?”
“I saw you on TV,” I guessed.
He frowned at this for a moment, long enough to make me worry that I had blown my cover.
“Was I ever on TV? I can’t recall. Either way, I remember your touch was the gentlest I had felt in ages, despite how aggressive your questions were. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but even years after my isolation ended, female touch still makes me nervous.”
“What did I ask you?”
“You spoke some nonsense about becoming my disciple, which I thought was charming. One blind man leads many blind men. Surely you no longer feel this way.”
He chuckled. I assumed the previous line to be a proverb of some sort, judging by the archaic Japanese he had used.
“You asked me hundreds of questions, and from the way the table shook, I assumed you were writing my answers down. I don’t remember exactly what you asked, but they mostly had to do with glory, sacrifice, meaningless ideals such as that. I felt as though you were expecting me to still have the fighting spirit of my youth.”
The General gripped my hand a little tighter, as if worried I would escape.
“There was one question, though, that I still remember. In all my years I had never been asked it before.”
“Oh?” I let this out verbally, to deaf ears.
“You asked me, ‘Do you ever wish you had been killed in the Philippines?’ ”
He took his hand from mine and massaged his palm gently; it had cramped up halfway through the story. I took the opportunity to wipe my own hand against my pan
ts. I had been sweating without realizing it, a human trait I was still getting used to.
He reached for me again.
“Anna, why would you ask such a morbid question?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I still have no answer, so I suppose it was good to ask. When I was younger, I thought I desired glory, Valhalla, death by battle. Then the police pulled me out, and I realized that all I wanted was to go home. Alas, the home I had dreamt of was long gone, or never existed in the first place. The fallen blossom never returns to the branch.”
A soft breeze came in through the window, carrying with it the scent of roasted sweet potatoes. One of the other residents must have been attempting a barbeque, in defiance of our light winter. The General turned his head slightly towards the aroma. It was a comfort to know that, at the very least, he could still experience the world through smell.
The General excused himself, saying he would fetch a caretaker to bring us some tea, and left me alone.
Anna had told me there had been controversy regarding his past, many believing him to simply be a delusional hermit who had never actually fought in the war. It was these suspicions that ultimately killed media interest in him, leading to his second period of isolation. Bearing witness to one of the old man’s passionate lectures, however, made it difficult to doubt him. In my mind, any reservations regarding his rank, age, or supposedly non-Japanese heritage were erased.
While I waited for The General, I kept myself entertained by counting the vast number of books, paintings, and World War II memorabilia he kept in his apartment. The smell of sweet potatoes had disappeared, and as a result the room felt much emptier. I made a mental note to prepare a barbeque for Anna sometime.
I was surprised to find that, in contrast to when I first entered The General’s home, I was now able to touch the various objects strewn about. The books I had initially passed through now felt solid against my skin, although I didn’t quite have enough influence to move them. The paintings which covered the tatami, painted on a rice paper lighter than air, were much easier for me to hold.
Satellite Love Page 14