I consulted Anna’s notebook again, scouring it with renewed interest. The Shiba looked on disappointedly as I freed my hand from her belly to go through the pages, flipping desperately to find one of her final entries.
Went to Fumie’s home to steal gasoline today, and met Leo at Lucky Ginseng after. Surprised it was only ten minutes away.
I had misunderstood the passage. I had thought that Fumie’s house was ten minutes away from where Anna lived, but reading the entry again, I realized that it was Lucky Ginseng that was ten minutes away from Fumie.
Lucky Ginseng was the ideal launch site: near enough to travel to by foot, with a parking lot that would be spacious enough to fly from. More than anything, it had a full view of the satellites she saw at night—a clear shot at her objective.
I left for Lucky Ginseng, sure that Anna would be there. The Shiba followed me, nipping at my ankles, before eventually howling and giving up in protest. Her plaintive cries echoed through the neighbourhood, a reminder of what it meant to live on this Earth.
ANNA
FROM WHERE I SAT, waiting to launch, the Tengu’s form was silhouetted delicately against the night sky. There was a rhythm to its grotesque form, a certain beauty in its deformities which, when projected against space, was breathtaking. I noticed that there were more satellites than usual flying above that night, making it the ideal time to join them.
I had decided to launch the Tengu at exactly midnight. There was no specific reason for this, it was just the romantic within telling me what to do. I checked my wristwatch. It was 11:33 p.m. I would leave this world in less than half an hour.
I went over the Tengu one last time, made obsessive by my impatience to launch. The string lights I had threaded across the outer shell, combined with the light from Lucky Ginseng’s neon signs, provided a soft fluorescent glow for my inspection. After finding nothing out of place, I entered the cockpit, shutting the door tightly behind me. Inside, it was pitch-black and difficult to breathe, but the few holes I had cut into the vacuum sealing around the fridge door made it manageable. The slight claustrophobia only excited me more, reminding me of the greatness of what was to come. It took a few pushes to get the door to open back up, and I welcomed the clear air from outside.
It was now 11:42 p.m.
A goodbye cut short is much better than one dragged out, I firmly believe this. So what was I supposed to do with my remaining eighteen minutes on Earth? I had to fight off the sadness that could jeopardize the entire mission. There was nothing left for me on this planet; moving on to greater heights was the next logical step. For the final time, I regarded Sakita’s skyline, the full moon silhouetting its jagged spires. The city was as ugly as ever. I was starting to cry again, and turned away to hide my tears—but from who? How pathetic it was to miss a city more than its people.
11:47 p.m.
I knew that if I were to walk a little farther from Lucky Ginseng I would end up in Fumie’s neighbourhood. This was the most important part of the plan: I had agonized over whether the explosion from the Tengu could be seen and heard from her home. Her luring Soki from me was the last time I’d ever let the cruel and the mundane take what was rightfully mine. Would she eventually tell Soki of this, too? That she had seen the night sky light up, as though the sun had suddenly chosen to rise? And would Soki know to feel awe, rather than fear? Despite how things ended between us, I had confidence that he, of all people, would understand the significance of my act.
What a shame it was to go on this journey alone. Even with the stress of preparing to launch, I still felt a twinge of loneliness. I had built this ship for two, but Soki and Leo had chosen to stay behind. I hadn’t planned for a solo escape. Of course, none of this would matter much, as I would soon be gone, far into space, away from this rotten world.
11:55 p.m.
I could hear someone running towards my location, feet bouncing off the pavement at a wild pace. I was worried that if they got too close, they might be injured by the explosion of takeoff. Their footsteps echoed sharply through the midnight air, sounding familiar, as though coming from a dream. Or was I the dream and those footsteps reality? I was curious about who they belonged to, but I was running out of time. Two minutes to launch. I began to prepare the Tengu.
SATELLITE
ANNA ONCE TOLD ME that when people go through periods of extreme crisis, time slows down. The world comes to a halt, as though everything revolves around that very instant. In the midst of an emergency, the brain stores all the details that would normally be forgotten, and in retrospect, the sheer amount of information retained throws the entire event into slow motion. A simple, yet potent, quirk of the human brain. A quirk painfully absent as I locked my sights on Anna, too far for me to reach.
The sight of Anna crawling into her ship, then, occurred in double-time, confirming that I was not yet human. Someone had set the metronome to a tempo I couldn’t keep up with, my footsteps struggling to stay on beat. By the time I reached the Tengu, she was already locked inside, fighting for air in her refrigerator cockpit. I’d been 17.5 metres too far, 4.3 seconds too late. The air outside of her makeshift rocket was freezing, and I was surprised to see clouds of my breath come out in sudden, harsh bursts. I was becoming more and more a part of reality. The Christmas lights she had strung around the ship cast my shadow in blues and reds, a shadow that had not been there that morning.
Thankfully, in Anna’s haste, she had entered her chamber prematurely and neglected to light the fuse, leaving the Tengu lifeless. I stood outside the refrigerator door, pressing my forehead against its cool stainless-steel shell and catching my misted breath. The feeling of the metal against my sticky human skin made me nostalgic somehow. Like I was going home. I could hear Anna muttering to herself inside.
“Can you breathe in there?” I asked.
“I can, don’t worry.” Her tone sounded uneasy, as though she were trying to discern any ulterior motives on my part.
“You’re not cold, right?”
“I’m wearing a spacesuit. If anything, I’m a little hot.”
“Too hot?”
“No, not really.”
I tried opening the door and only succeeded in opening it an inch. Whatever was holding it in place was secure, though I still gave it a few more violent pulls. My hands began to pass through the handles, my body not quite able to decide whether it existed or not. In a couple of instances I was sent flying backwards, suddenly finding I had nothing to hold on to. I gave up only when I saw that I was shaking the entire machine. It might all topple over, Anna included.
“I locked it from the inside. I don’t want the door to blast open when I take off.” Her voice was muffled, and I could tell she was struggling for air. I held the fridge open as far as I could to let more air in, not sure if I was making any difference.
“Anna, come out. Let’s talk this over.”
“Talk what over? I’ve already decided. I’m leaving.”
“Your ship isn’t going to work. You’re going to kill yourself.”
She held on to her silence for a moment. “Please don’t fight with me, Leo. Don’t let that be the last thing we do. I’m not going to come out.”
“Okay, what do you want to talk about? Just speak to me.”
“You don’t have to speak. I’m happy just knowing you’re here.”
So we didn’t. We didn’t talk. I wouldn’t have known what else to say. At the very least, her soft breathing told me she was alive. When I look back on my time with Anna, I realize now that our relationship was one of silence. Our conversations were punctuated with it, both of us content with just being side by side.
I kept holding the door open until my hands passed through the handles once more. My body was flickering in and out of existence. Anna was trying to forget me, but couldn’t do it. I could feel our collective memories seeping in and out of me, my creator wanting to hold
on as much as she wanted to let go.
We were at an impasse. Anna could only activate the Tengu by getting me to light the gasoline reservoirs, which I would refuse to do. She could only launch if I left, and I would only leave if she wouldn’t launch. We were locked into orbit, with neither gravity nor weightlessness strong enough to make a final decisive pull.
There was no way to remove her from The Machine, so I had to come up with a compromise. Anna was running low on air—the less time she spent inside her cockpit the better. I devised a plan stemming from my newfound ability to interact with the real world. Up until that day, I’d been completely ethereal, passing through whatever I touched. In the last hour, however, I had managed to pet a portly Shiba, see my own breath, and watch my shadow dance across the ground.
If I joined Anna in the cockpit, I could remove the lock and then, moments before the Tengu detonated, throw her out of the ship. The key was to act at the last possible moment, to ensure the Tengu would be destroyed without any chance of relaunch. Should I throw Anna out before she lit the fuse, she could simply make me disappear before trying again. The problem was that I had no way of knowing how tangible I had become, or if I was still transitioning between realities. My odds were fifty-fifty. I prayed that when the time came, I would be able to grab on to Anna and not phase through her instead.
“Anna, how many satellites are out tonight?”
“Thousands, millions. It’s a shame you can’t see them. You must be nearsighted.”
“Tell me about them.”
“They’re calling for us, telling us to come and join them. Up there, everyone is kind, people are friends. Don’t you remember any of this?” Her voice was growing softer.
“And how are you going to meet all of these satellites? Don’t you want someone to introduce you to them?”
“That would be ideal, but I have no choice. You didn’t want to come.”
“If you open the cockpit, I’ll join you.”
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
The door to Anna’s ship opened soundlessly, and I thought how odd it was to enter my own casket. The Christmas lights, mixed with Lucky Ginseng’s fluorescent glow, bathed Anna in an artificial lustre. She was wearing a makeshift spacesuit, its construction as dubious as the ship itself—a mismatch of reflective materials sewn into a poorly fitted costume. Light played off her, reflecting erratically, giving her a holy aura.
“Come in,” she whispered.
The cockpit was surprisingly small, although I managed to fight off the claustrophobia by reminding myself it was Anna I was pushed up against. Our faces were touching, noses overlapping on each side. When she spoke, I could feel her lips brush mine, every breath sending heat down my neck, every blink tickling my eyelashes.
“Should I light the Tengu?” I asked.
“No, it’s my responsibility. I’m going to open the door, light the gas reservoirs, then quickly shut us in, okay? If I time it right, we’ll be able to secure ourselves before launch.” She spoke firmly. I was amazed by how little fear her voice betrayed. Unlike her, I wasn’t prepared.
“Just give me a moment. Please, just one more moment.”
She waited as I ran through a list of things to say goodbye to: katsu curry, rickety trains, drive-in movie theatres. The smell of incense, of gasoline, of perfume. The feeling of asphalt under my feet, of snow on my face, of Anna’s hand in mine. There wasn’t enough time. Even with thousands of devotions, I would never run out of final goodbyes.
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I failed, or even if I would fail. I needed to act with complete clarity of mind. My first mission was to save Anna; my nerves could kill us both. The faster I acted, the greater my chances of saving myself as well. Now wasn’t the time to worry about the metaphysics of death, or where my soul might be heading. All I needed to do was stop being afraid.
“I’m ready,” I said, trying to imitate her confidence.
Anna leaned out and reached for the lighter, unstrapping it from the side of a fuel tank. It was slightly more than an arm’s length from the cockpit, and she had to stretch her whole body out the door to reach it. Almost as an afterthought, I recited Namu Amida Butsu to myself, as The Prince had. Anna heard this and turned back to me, delaying our launch just a moment more.
“What was that?”
“Namu Amida Butsu? It’s a prayer.”
“A prayer?”
“You say it to protect yourself.”
“Huh.” She looked at me quizzically, turning her head slightly to one side. “I’ve never heard that one before.”
She’d never heard that prayer before? What did that mean? The implications were profound, but I had no time to consider them. Anna flicked on her lighter, pulling the fuse close with her other hand. She held the two together, as though offering a prayer to some obscure god. We had passed the point of no return; there was nothing I could say now to prevent the launch. The flame caught the end of the wick, moving upwards and into the tanks, erupting into blue rings atop the pools of fuel. She shut the door, but hadn’t yet locked it. It was the exact moment I needed to act. If I threw her out now, the Tengu would be destroyed, and the two of us saved. I moved quickly to push her from the ship before she trapped us both.
My hands passed through her. I had lost my physical form, had ceased to exist. She never even noticed what I had failed to do as she closed the latch with an audible click. We were locked in, waiting for her machine to activate. My biggest regret is that I never thought to take one last look at the world.
On January 31, a half hour past midnight, the Tengu detonated.
GRANDFATHER
I HAVE AN AWFUL feeling about tonight. Something in the sky bodes badly for the future. Still, the air is refreshing, though I’m not sure where I am walking. I seem to be in a suburb of some sort.
I must have gotten confused. I have moments like this sometimes, episodes where everything seems unknown and I forget where I am, who my daughter is, who my granddaughter is. It takes a while, but eventually these memories come back to me. I suppose the only issue is that these periods of confusion have been lasting longer and longer lately. I’m concerned that lucid is no longer my usual state.
Oh well, I’ll just have to wander around until I find my way home. It’s almost midnight; a beautiful full moon is floating in the sky. There’s a statue of Jizo by the side of the road. How lovely. Whoever stacked the stones here was really committed—it’s more of a mountain than a pile. It goes all the way up to my waist! Surely the child spirit these stones belong to will have no trouble moving on to the next world. I bow my head briefly, happy for their luck.
The sky is so vast tonight, it feels as though it could swallow up this entire world. I miss the stars from my childhood, the time before light pollution washed out the heavens. I once heard that it takes so long for starlight to reach our insignificant planet from space that some of the stars we see now already perished millennia ago. What glitters above us instead are echoes of an older universe, a time when the humans craning their necks upwards regarded what they saw as gifts from the gods, and not as explainable scientific phenomena.
Looking up now, I can count only a handful of stars, maybe twenty at most. I wonder which among them still exist.
Ah, this night sky brings back memories of stargazing with Yoshiko. Or was it Anna? I can’t recall now who I spent those nights with, whether it was my daughter or granddaughter who I had raised through a telescope lens. In either case, I always felt a profound sense of pity whenever I looked upon her young face, thinking of that casually cruel world about to open up to her. For her to live a full life with no regrets, that was all I desired. I was already a full-grown man by the time humans landed on the moon, and I wish my life had taken a path that would have let me make discoveries of my own. I suppose I didn’t want that child to feel the same regret.
Suddenly, I hear a great roar coming from the depths of the Earth. It’s accompanied by a bright flash, illuminating the entire neighbourhood for a half second. The ground shakes. A gas pipe must have exploded, or maybe even a bomb. Whatever caused that eruption was big, and I don’t want to be caught up in it. I need to get home as soon as possible.
Already I can hear sirens. I’m about to turn around when something unusual happens. I see a blue orb of light appear above where the disturbance was. It is floating in the air, as though suspended by a string hung from space. The ball is splendid, luminous, bathing everything in an azure calm. In all my years on Earth I have never seen such a thing. I feel a profound tranquility rush through me, grateful to have witnessed such beauty.
If only Anna was here to see this.
SOKI
THERE’S ONLY TWENTY-THREE PEOPLE in my class now. We started off the year with twenty-five. Then Anna got caught in that explosion, and Fumie moved to another school. So now we’re twenty-three.
There are funeral flowers on Anna’s desk, which strikes me as strange. She’s not dead, just sleeping. When I mention this to Ms. Tanaka, though, she just gets upset. Tells me I’m being insensitive. But it’s everyone else who’s being insensitive. It’s not like Anna is gone, she’ll be back. You can’t sleep without waking up, right? Even if it takes months more than it already has, she’ll wake up.
Fumie is gone too. She said her mom was worried for their safety. Apparently, Anna detonated her machine near their neighbourhood. The explosion woke the entire family up, and for a couple seconds, the night sky went blue. Don’t know if they moved homes, too, or just schools. Maybe they aren’t even in Sakita anymore. Either way, I think they overreacted. Anna isn’t dangerous. Still, if they’re afraid then that means they have faith Anna will wake up. If she slept forever there’d be nothing to fear. That’s not too bad, then. Knowing I’m not the only one who thinks she’ll get better is reassuring.
Satellite Love Page 21