Satellite Love

by Genki Ferguson

  “It seems that way…”

  “How bizarre. It reminds me of the Philippines; the village I hid near used to cook those constantly. It nearly drove me insane with hunger, and to tears more than once.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “It never came up.”

  He saw me eying the rifle on his back and smiled, then offered to let me hold it. After I declined, he sat down on his knees formally, legs folded underneath him, and removed the rifle from his shoulders. Like The General, it showed no signs of wear, which became even more apparent as he began to dismantle it methodically, cleaning every part with a cloth pulled from his back pocket.

  “I never told you exactly how I was captured, did I?” The General looked down at the pieces that were once his rifle and continued. “When I was fighting those police in the mountains, every six hours, without fail, a woman would sing the national anthem for them.”

  “To signal them to change shifts?” I asked.

  “I believe so. It was the harshest pain of my life, hearing that voice taunt me twice a day. Her voice was so charming, the first warmth I had felt in years. But it also had this edge. You’re too young to understand, but there was a harshness to it that made it all the more appealing. I decided that, even if it would be the death of me, I wanted to see the woman behind that voice.”

  “And did you?”

  Whenever The General spoke about lives gone by, a wistful, melancholic expression would usually fall upon him. This time, he remained sharp, staring me straight in the eyes as he finished his story.

  “When I heard their squadron coming for me, after I ran out of bullets, I had the option of running. It wasn’t much, but I knew the jungle much better than they did. I could escape if necessary. And yet, when the time came, my desire to meet that voice overpowered me. I figured I could fight my way out later, but first I had to meet her. Can you guess what she looked like?”

  “Beautiful?”

  The General gave a pitying smile, as though I had been the one subjected to his pain.

  “On the contrary. After I was detained, I told my captors I would speak only to that woman. It took a while for them to understand who I was talking about; they told me there were no women among them. But when I began humming that national anthem, when I described her piercingly clear singing, they started to laugh. They explained that the voice I had heard twice a day wasn’t even live. That every six hours a recording would play over the radio, a voice singing through the machine.”

  The General turned his gaze to the gun and began putting it back together. He had laid each part on the ground carefully, and was rebuilding it faster than he had taken it apart. Once completed, he propped the rifle against his shoulder and pointed it at me.

  “I forgive you, you know,” he said, staring at me through the scope of his unloaded weapon. “Of course, it doesn’t fire anymore.”

  “You forgive me?”

  “For when you destroyed my home. You’re young and confused. I did much worse at your age. I even enlisted in the army to get it all out.”

  “I thought you said you were fourteen when you enlisted.”

  “Those are just details, Anna. My forgiveness comes with a condition, however.”

  “What would that be?” Even knowing that his gun was barely more than a prop, being at the barrel end of it made me nervous.

  “Come back to the real world. You’ve been playing make-believe for too long, and soon you won’t be able to return. The blind man does not fear the snake.”

  He pulled the trigger, my heartbeat quickening as I heard the click, despite having seen that the gun was empty moments earlier. And with that sound, the implications of what he was saying became clear. I had been called delusional by The General, by Takuya Aoyama, a soldier whose actual status as a soldier was shaky at best. Here was a man who didn’t exist in any military records, who had been too young to actually fight in the war, who wasn’t even Japanese. Up until that point, I believed that he and I existed in a state of mutual misunderstanding, trusting that neither would question the other too far. By asking me to “join the real world,” he had broken this sacred trust.

  “What squadron did you belong to?”

  “Unit 24 based out of Okinawa; I was a captain under General Oogumi,” he recited. “I was never a General—you’re the one who began calling me that.”

  “What was your mission?”

  “I was part of a classified guerrilla combat squad, tasked with maintaining choke points vital to Japan’s defense of her peoples.”

  “A choke point in rural Philippines?”

  “It offered a tactical advantage. You wouldn’t understand on account of your inexperience, but—”

  “There’s no record of you anywhere. General Oogumi doesn’t exist, neither did Unit 24.”

  “We were classified, so of course there’s no record of us anywhere.”

  “Don’t you ever call me delusional again. You screamed for Valhalla even though that was the first battle you fought, wasn’t it?”

  He stood up, leaving his rifle on the ground.

  “I haven’t thought about Valhalla in a very long time.”

  “That’s because you don’t deserve it. You were never a warrior.”

  The General glanced at the rifle by his feet, savouring the perfect words he had on the tip of his tongue.

  “I envy you. I never made it to Valhalla, but you will,” he said, his tone ceremonial and befitting a man of honour.

  “I will?”

  He nodded, and for the first time, I caught a glimpse of the force of nature he had once been. Standing before me, finally, was The General I had always imagined, capable of holding out in a standoff for days on end, too preoccupied with glory to fear dying in battle, eagerly anticipating his own death. Here was The General who believed in the purity of ideals, unafraid to sacrifice his own body for an abstract thought, whether it be duty, love, or obsession.

  When he spoke, it was as though he had purified me, cleansed me of the blood spilled between us. The anger I had felt moments earlier had washed away, as smooth and clear as water, and was replaced with a profound sense of duty. I suppose if I were to attribute a single word to this sensation, it would have to be epiphany. The General was giving me my final mission; all that was left for me to do was obey.

  “I can smell the death on you. Your time is coming. The next time we meet will be in the hall of Valhalla. Maybe your imaginary boyfriend will join us, too.”

  As he spoke these final words, he began to lift off the ground, gently, just as Leo had. He was beginning to fade, but rather than a look of pity, the final expression he shared with me was one of trust. It took less than a minute for The General to fully disappear, entering that hollow space inside me where Leo and The Prince now lived. Left behind in his place was a blue hitodama, slowly floating higher and higher until I could see it no more.

  I found myself suddenly, painfully, alone. Leo, The General, and The Prince had all succeeded in abandoning this rotten world. Only I had failed to escape. My only hope was to be reunited with them up in space.

  The Tengu was waiting for me, its lights pulsing with promise—an offer of safety, an offer of fate. As I walked back towards it, I could feel my face was wet with tears. I quietly said my goodbyes to this world, a psalm lost in a sea of noise.

  SATELLITE

  ANNA WAS GONE AND I was alone.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been missing from the world. I only knew that I had passed over a threshold into another reality, a holding room of sorts. I will never know death the way actual people—people such as Anna or Soki—will. All that I will know is this other place, a world held in radio static, where imaginary people such as myself wait. It reminded me of my time in space before Anna called me down to Earth. All that I could do was think.

  I wondered wh
at would have happened had I recited Namu Amida Butsu before Anna cast me off, as the Prince in my dream had done before his death. During my time in Anna’s purgatory, all I could think about was The Prince, my sole stake in individuality. It was a mark of autonomy, something that separated me from her. As long as I could be sure The Prince was my creation and not Anna’s, I could maintain my free will. If only I had thought to recite Namu Amida Butsu before death.

  Then, as suddenly as I had entered this hazy realm, I was pulled out. I found myself in Anna’s room, with not even The Prince to keep me company. The same quality of light I had seen that morning was filtering through the papered windows, this time not from sunrise, but sunset. I was at peace, but more than anything, I was grateful to be back in this imperfect world. I didn’t know why Anna had brought me back, or if she was even aware she had, but none of that mattered now. I had returned.

  This feeling of calm lasted only a few minutes before I realized that both Anna and the Tengu were gone. There was only an outline on the ground where dust had settled. I wasn’t sure how much time I had before she launched, but my continued existence told me that Anna hadn’t blown herself up—yet. With her actual passing would come mine. If I could find her before she detonated her ship, I could prevent her death, the deaths of anyone in her proximity, and, more selfishly, my own as well. And yet I could think of no suitable place to launch from, nowhere close enough for her to move the immense Tengu to, with enough open space to properly prepare for lift off. Why hadn’t I thought to ask where she was bringing The Machine? I began rummaging through her room for any sort of clue to her whereabouts.

  To create something of this scale, Anna would have needed a plan, a guideline to follow. A survey of the papers covering the windows yielded no results, nor did the unmarred books on rocket science. It wasn’t until I thought to dig through her personal belongings that I managed to make progress. Shoved atop one of her dressers I found a stack of notebooks, water-stained pages warping the spines. While the outside covers had school subjects written on them—Arithmetic, History, and Science—a quick look between the covers revealed them to be something else. They were the workbooks in which she had tracked her progress on the Tengu. Anna may have been skipping school for the most part, but the few days she was compelled to attend, she would continue to work away at her designs, undetected by her peers.

  While the log read straightforwardly at first, containing only technical notes for the structure of the ship, the further I went the more unpredictable, more frantic, her entries became. Details about her personal life began to seep through, musings about what she felt the rocket represented, what she was accomplishing. Her handwriting slowly warped into an illegible scrawl, spilling over the margins, as though every word was being chased off the page.

  I had failed to realize, maybe even refused to realize, the full extent of Anna’s deterioration. As if in penance, I began going through those notebooks, reading the cries for help she had written right under my nose. Eventually, it became clear that Anna had no idea where she was going to launch from either. How was I supposed to find out where she was headed if she didn’t know herself? Still, I was convinced the answer was hidden in those workbooks, even if only in subconscious hints. I just had to look.

  There was one entry in particular which struck me. It was from the day she’d sent me on my mission to visit the General, then waited for me at Lucky Ginseng, smelling strongly of gasoline. Until this morning, the only time Anna and I had been separated was on that day, when I can only assume that she had been gathering fuel for her machine. It was logical for her to have scouted a location at the same time.

  The entry was long and rambling, starting with a string of dubious equations to calculate fuel use, before continuing as follows:

  Went to Fumie’s home to steal gasoline today, and met Leo at Lucky Ginseng after. Surprised it was only ten minutes away. Now, the Tengu has all the fuel it needs. Fumie, that kitsune, was the last suitable target I had. You steal from, you get stolen from. It’s only fair, and judging by the home Fumie lives in, it doesn’t look like she’s ever lost anything in life. She’s walking-distance to a pool, which must be how she keeps her tan.

  6 degrees Celsius. Overcast Weather. Threats of snow.

  I recognized Fumie as the name of the girl Soki had been with at Tonuki Café, and was suddenly faced with the question of how deeply I understood my own creator. Was Anna aware she had built a bomb, even if only vaguely? Was she aiming to kill herself? Even worse, was she planning on taking someone else’s life as well? The Anna I knew would never commit such an act, yet after reading that passage, I couldn’t help but worry that she was aiming her launch directly at Fumie. Imagine my horror when I turned the page and found Fumie’s lipstick-stained napkin stapled to the back.

  I quickly compiled a list of locations with possible significance for Anna, but only managed to come up with a few. Her orbit was much less predictable than those of other humans. The first place I wrote down was Tonuki Café; while it was far for her to move the Tengu, I imagined that with an entire day she might have managed it. If she was looking for a symbolic revenge against Fumie, the café would make the most sense.

  The second location on my list was Fumie’s home. I had no idea of its actual whereabouts—and without her full name I couldn’t look up her address—but I knew from Anna’s workbook that it was nearby. I checked the phone book that Anna had been using to prop up a desk to search for any pools in Sakita and found one that was close by. Wherever Fumie lived was ten minutes away from Anna’s house and near a pool, so if I were to comb that area, finding a sixteen-year-old girl with a 2.2-metre-tall bomb should be manageable.

  I had no idea how much time I had left, but all I could hope for was that Anna would wait until nightfall to launch. Tonuki Café or the pool: I only had enough time to check one of the two. I decided on the pool. As I ran out the door, a memory from days gone by passed through me. A conversation I once had with Anna.

  “Did you know,” Anna had asked, “that most ghosts are women?”

  Where and when did this conversation happen? I couldn’t remember. It came to me as fragments from a dream, two voices hovering somewhere inside my consciousness. I chose to remember it as taking place in outer space, to make it easier to picture. Anna and me, floating above the Earth, orbiting each other. They say that space smells like hot metal, but all I could smell was her strawberry shampoo.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Do women die more than men or something?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so,” she said. “I guess you don’t know how ghosts are made, then.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “When people die, usually they just move on to the afterlife. Only those who have suffered or hold grudges turn into ghosts.”

  “And women suffer more than men?” It felt nice to be weightless again. I swam around Anna a few times for good measure. I wasn’t wearing any metal plating, yet even in my human skin I felt safe. Somehow, space debris and solar flares couldn’t hurt me here.

  “I would say so. We don’t forgive as easily either,” she said.

  “I’m surprised you know so much about what happens after death.”

  Anna moved her gaze from me to the Earth. “It’s pretty obvious. The answers are all there, you just need to look hard enough.”

  “Do you think you’ll become a ghost when you die?”

  She looked back to me. “I’ve been unhappy enough, so it would make sense for me to become one. I won’t, though.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I found pictures of these ghosts in my books. They usually have long black hair, high cheekbones, beckoning hands…”

  “And?”

  “They’re gorgeous. I’m not pretty enough to be a ghost.”

  * * *

  *    *    *

  When I reached t
he public pool, it was already dark. No one was out at that hour, and there were no signs of Anna or her machine, either. I searched for her everywhere, shouting her name as I struggled to make sense of Sakita’s streets. The pool was surrounded by thick tangles of suburbia in every direction, a much larger area than I had planned on searching. The hopelessness of my efforts dawned on me. It would be impossible to find Anna in this neighbourhood, and if she was at Tonuki Café, it was far too late.

  I sat down by the edge of the road, determined to meet my end gracefully. I had no idea when my death would come. Up until that moment, I had only thought of my passing in abstract terms; now, I contemplated whether it meant returning to that unnerving empty realm. As I waited for my second passing, a Shiba, chubby from love, waddled up to me. I stroked her head and wondered how Anna was feeling. I would never get the chance to say goodbye to her, my flawed creator, to whom I owed everything.

  The Shiba tried to jump up on me, perhaps wanting to play a game. Maybe in my next life I would be a dog and not a satellite. At least then I could interact with the real world; be more concerned with trips to the vet than micrometeoroids. The novelty of that image brought a smile to my face as the Shiba turned over onto her back, demanding belly rubs. Her fur was soft, unlike any sensation I had felt before. Perhaps I could spend my last hours on Earth counting every hair on her body. I understood now why so many people kept dogs as pets—unconditional love must be difficult to go without. She snorted lightly in response to my touch, just as I realized what that meant.

  The dog was able to see me, and more than that, was able to interact with me physically. I kept stroking the Shiba’s stomach, stunned, afraid that if I stopped I would break the spell. First The General had been able to communicate with me, and now this Shiba could as well. I was slowly entering the real world, independent of Anna. I was tempted to provoke the dog into biting me, to see if I could be hurt by the real world as well, but decided against it. I already knew I could.