Hey Mortality

by Kinsella, Luke

  For answers that you only dreamed of.

  Meet me at Takasakiyama Monkey Park.

  Next Tuesday at three. I will wear a hat.

  ***

  The day I intended to post the note through my own door, I reminisced about my life. The life working for my father. Was I truly happy back then? I realised that I probably was.

  Outside my old apartment I saw Lucy emerge with her bag. That was the day that she had left me. Ready to take our unborn child away from me, and disappear from my life for good. Seeing her brought back a flood of memories, but the pain of her leaving was now long gone. Those memories were once again of that different kind of love that a parent has for their daughter, a love that can never be destroyed, one that can only grow stronger.

  I found that I had difficulty breathing as I watched her walk away. Like my heart had stopped suddenly, completely.

  ***

  Two days later, I went back to the apartment and posted the note in a sealed white envelope. Afterwards, it was back to Beppu to wait. All that I was missing, other than the life I left, was a cream suit and a duck hat.

  I purchased both from shops in Beppu, and headed back to my house to wait for four days. Soon, I would come to visit. I had to remember the words I had spoken to myself back then.

  Eventually the day came, I waited at the Monkey Park in the exact place he had stood, thirty-eight years ago for me.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m the Duck Man, and you’re late,” I said, with a certain degree of smugness.

  “I’m very sorry, but there was a mix up with the trains.”

  I had forgotten just how polite and honest I was back then, innocent even. If only he knew.

  “Nishi-Ōita Station?” I asked, as if finally being rewarded for the wait, finally getting to say that line to myself. As I spoke the words, I struggled to contain my grin.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t worry about it, it happens to us all.”

  I went on to tell the same story I had previously told myself, verbatim. About the experiments, the made up research, all the while keeping a straight face. Finally, I arranged to meet myself again a few days later.

  ***

  Events occurred as if dictated by the flow of time. Choices were made but never chosen. Life drifted on to the sound of predetermination. I met with myself a second time at the Monkey Park, to hand over the Time Stone and to set events in motion that would lead to that exact moment. I would have made the sacrifice if I could. Changed the words I had said, but those new words didn’t form. The words always stayed the same, the words flowing out of me without thought. Like water rushing down a stream, colliding into the rocks of life along the way. No way to change the river’s flow, until those rocks became completely eroded. Maybe then time will change. Maybe fate can be altered but only for the last car on the track, the last loop of the roller coaster, the last time that this loop occupies us.

  Fate was now more powerful than love, the younger me bound by his. A future planned for him that I couldn’t possibly change. But for this other me, life was offering choices, choices he thought he was making alone. Completely oblivious to fate, and what world was about to come.

  After he left the park, I was once again alone, returning to how I always ended up. It was then that I began to think about my death. My life was almost up, and soon I would be taken away, sucked into the void of time. That week, a new life would start, a life for me all those years ago. Living, losing, and forever repeating; over and over again. This near perfect loop we had created, our ouroboros, our world. The only solace I could take was that for everything outside of that loop, for people like Jun, their world would carry on afterwards, beginning as it once did some years ago, and inevitably ending like everything else touched by time.

  ***

  The next day I made a telephone call to Lucy. His Lucy.

  “Hello,” she answered, her tone nowhere between sadness and joy, completely flat.

  “It’s me.”

  “I’ve been waiting,” she said.

  “I know. I’m sorry that I left you.”

  “I know. I think I understand.”

  “You will, don’t worry.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes. One last time. The day I left.”

  The phone went silent for a while.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  My face began to tighten above my cheeks, as if just for a moment tears were ready to start forming, but I somehow pushed them away.

  “I love you too, Lucy. Listen, you need to visit Beppu cemetery, plot 241.”

  I could hear her gently sobbing on the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say but goodbye.

  “Goodbye, Lucy.”

  “Goodbye,” she eventually said, almost to directly mimic the sad way I spoke.

  ***

  After the phone call, I went down to the beach in Beppu with a bag of documents pertaining to my own burial, and a little bit of money for funeral arrangements. There, I hid behind a tree and watched myself kneeling peacefully on the sand, blissfully unaware. I was there for two reasons, one was simple curiosity. I wondered how it would look when somebody is completely erased from time. The second reason was to retrieve the device and take my own final leap.

  I waited, watching. Eventually I saw that younger version of me simply fade away to nothing. Like he turned, for a brief moment, into a ghost, before dissipating into the evening air. Nothing else, the whole thing lasted about three seconds. And then he was gone. And then I was gone.

  It was at that moment that I started to feel unwell. My body began to tighten, my chest began to pull, like those thousand demons had returned from a faraway land and wanted revenge for being cast away for so many years. They weren’t just after my heart but had instead spread to the whole of my body, causing damage wherever they could.

  Perhaps years of alcohol abuse and drug taking without side effects had all come washing over me at once. Years of pain and bodily torture, waiting, lurking, like a beast in the dark. Now it was time for the horror to take me, destroy me.

  I walked, slowly, and with great difficulty, stumbling toward the beach and to where the device lay. Back aching, pain like I had never felt before in my life. Right then I would have happily taken numbness, leprosy, anything to rid me of the way I felt.

  Each step proved more difficult than the last. My breathing became shallow. My lungs wheezed and screamed with each and every breath. Skin burning off, as if enveloped in a giant fireball. Fired into the sun; blistering.

  I reached the device, and as I bent over to scoop it up, I heard the sound of my back cracking, as if bones had become broken, spine twisted, tortured by the waiting game of time.

  The device was as heavy as usual, no temperature change, just a Time Stone, like it always had been. I couldn’t do it there though, I had one last thing I was fated to do.

  I struggled one foot at a time off the beach and to the nearby cemetery where I would soon be buried. Every part of me was hurting, but I had to go on.

  Eventually, as I reached my own grave, I let out a brief sigh of relief. From nowhere, a wry smile, though appearing only rather briefly, spread across my face. The apple tree was massive, and fruit hung from its branches. A lot of the apples would provide dinner for the hovering crows, but I didn’t mind, I wouldn’t be eating any food for a while.

  I placed the Time Stone on a patch of overgrown grass beside my grave, and took one last look at the world around me.

  Not wanting to take the ground with me, I placed my hands on the Time Stone and stretched out, the most painful stretch in the history of stretches. I balanced, putting all of my weight on my left foot, and visualised. I wanted to get there exactly two days before myself. Even though that other me had only leapt moments ago, I would arrive before him, and end up there, in that hospital bed, in room 405. Waiting for him and waiting to die.

  The very last time I occupied the
future. Everything else in my life now fated to happen before that very moment; the last second I existed in the present.

  With those thoughts pouring into my head, I was forever gone.

  ***

  I woke up in a hospital bed. That same room as before with its yellow stained walls. The pain was gone; they had most likely pumped by body full of chemicals. There was no calendar. No nurse. No concept of time any more. Only the empty room.

  I began to think a lot. Every waking thought could be my very last. No way of knowing when it would end. I thought briefly about myself, trapped now forever in that loop we created. That loop that protects the universe from ending. Eternity. Myself, almost never happy and set up for a life of misery. Destined for loss. Unable to steer his path. Unable to change his fate. He has my life now, without knowing. But there will be some good times, the thrill of making money, the joy of playing music, the birth of his daughter. Other things won’t be so good, Sara’s death, Amanda’s death, his daughter’s death. Our death.

  I wished I could be awake when he visited, tell him how things go, but I knew I couldn’t. I had no choice but to let his life slip into that comatose cycle that we were destined to live by. But why should he not get that choice? The choice between love and eternity, the choice between life and death.

  I stayed in the hospital bed for what felt like months, I knew it was just a few days, but emotions there moved a lot slower than time.

  At night I had those weird dreams again, the first time I was the man shouting, holding the sign outside the Bank Building. Shouting at myself in the future to never go back. Live your life there, don’t take the leap. My words, it seemed, could not be heard. Futile attempts to bring myself happiness. Erase all that I had done.

  In my waking state I knew how those dreams turned out; unchangeable, incomprehensible.

  In my second dream, I was a man without a face. I tried to explain what Lucy had told me about the universe splitting apart. Relay the things to myself at the Bridge at the Centre of the Universe. I don’t think that the younger me understood the relevance.

  I laid in bed also thinking of the relevance of those dreams. Our lives now a continuous loop that bound together the fabric of time. The universe could no longer fall apart; tied together by the loop we created.

  I kept on dreaming, always the same, as if sending off messages to a faraway place.

  One day, the dream was strange. A different place. The sky fell in and one of the ducks got killed. Was that the universe falling apart? Did I do something wrong? I wondered.

  In my waking state, I looked at the possibilities of mistakes. Was the loop we created actually perfect? Would it come apart like a badly tied knot; fraying slightly and getting looser and looser each time, with each and every cycle? And what of Lucy? She would be the next time traveller, Keiko most likely the one after her. Were we all part of Lucy’s loop, or if not, then would Lucy do enough to mend time? I thought about all of that. Thinking about those things, I drifted away, and slept for the very last time.

  ***

  In the final dream of my lifetime, I was walking on a thin carpet of shallow ice. A blue hue lurked beneath the surface. Young or old, I had no concept of my appearance. The ice offered no reflection, no confirmation. I looked at my hands, they were smooth, soft, like a child. Perhaps not my hands. I delicately touched my cheek with my right hand, my skin also soft, absent of any facial hair. Perfectly smooth and seemingly young.

  I began to walk on the ice, walk toward an image sitting somewhere on the horizon of that vast plain of blue glass. A woman. She was wearing nothing but a black hooded top, hood up, legs exposed. A perfect whiteness of legs that too displayed no indication of age. Legs kneeling on the coldness of ice.

  As I got closer, I could make out the face of Lucy, but I couldn’t tell which point in time she belonged to. Lover or daughter, Lucy displayed no age; just a face shrouded by a shadowy hood. Somehow I knew it was her though. The contours of her face, her blonde hair, short this time. White teeth that sparkled and reflected the invisible moon.

  As I wandered toward her, I felt the ice cracking below me. It started with just sound, the sound of breaking ice, stretching off in every direction. Eventually, I could see the cracks forming around my feet, like lightning bolts firing off from the floor around me.

  A second later, I was consumed by the cold, enveloped by the icy water as I fell through its surface.

  Moments passed, a length of time that couldn’t be measured. Lucy pulled me out from the clutches of the cold, dragged me back to the surface. My breathing as shallow as the ice itself.

  My breath left a trace of smoke, white breath, like on a cold spring morning. Her arm around me like the arm of a loved one wrapped around me as I slept.

  I reached my frozen hands toward her, wrapped them around her. We shivered together, rocked together, trying to keep warm, and trying to protect each other from the cold my dream had created.

  We held that position for a time, embracing that hug; our last hug. As my nerves rejected the cold, my body became completely numb. I could no longer feel her touch, she undoubtedly, could no longer feel mine.

  As we froze to death together, I woke up.

  ***

  I laid in that hospital bed, but not for the last time. My body was still icy cold, numb, as if still consumed by the frozen water of my dreams. Death had his hands fastened tightly around my throat. I was alone for the very last time. Conscious for the very last time, I could feel it. I had very little left. I had nothing left, except perhaps time itself. But even my time was about to slip away; on fine ice.

  As my mind connected with my final thought, I knew that everything would go on, almost forever, until there was no sand left on the beach.

  13

  I read the manuscript with a shaking head and a hungover heart. I might have skipped the odd page here and there, and I must have blacked out midway through; as the night has faded and I can see that the morning has crept into Tokyo, leaving behind any trace of last night.

  Hey Mortality, a strange title, but I think I got the general idea; a story about time travel.

  A part of me considers travelling to the other side of Japan to look for a specifically marked tombstone, hell, there is nothing left for me here in the slums anyway, and I could do with the distraction.

  I decide to enjoy the cover of clouds on what is a warm day, and wander over to Asakusa to get my fortune from the temple.

  Despite not knowing who delivered the story to my letter box, if anyone, the mystery really doesn’t seem to matter to me in my half asleep state. I am not even sure if I did sleep last night. Regardless of sleep, I am in good spirits as I amble past prostitutes and brothels, before arriving at Sensō-ji Temple.

  The temple is packed with tourists and Japanese alike, snapping photographs of the five-storied pagoda, or wafting incense in their general direction to help free them from the wrath of evil spirits.

  I join the end of a small queue of four women waiting to collect their fortune. When I reach the front of the line, I take a wooden stick from a metal tube with an octagonal lid, before matching the Japanese characters with those written neatly above a small wooden drawer. It is inside this drawer where my fortune is contained. It says:

  “Bad Fortune. Number 100. Your happiness in the past was hidden among the clouds, like you lost all your dependence. Going over a mountain with a harp means that you have hidden yourself from the world. If you can’t meet a hermit, after climbing up mountains, you will not feel yourself at ease. You will be completely at loss with your empty heart.”

  As fortunes go, this one is quite accurate. Perhaps there is some truth to Buddhism after all. I keep my fortune, despite the custom of tying a bad fortune up and letting the gods’ carry it away. I keep it, fold it neatly in my wallet, and search out my metaphorical harp.

  With little else to do today, I decide to check the huge map of the area, and am instantly drawn in by the name of the Drawin
g Light Temple.

  As the morning sunshine creeps through crowds and clouds, I spend thirty minutes wandering the huge complex of temples and shrines that make up the Sensō-ji compound, before I eventually find a rather obscure looking tunnel with overhanging plants and flowers of a nondescript nature. Oddly, having visited this area many times in the past, I have never before seen this tunnel.

  Hidden beyond the foliage and on the other side of the tunnel sits a huge temple, the Drawing Light Temple. Built in 1609, this temple houses the goddess of protection from drawing light images. Luckily, an English sign serves to remove any confusion, and tells me that, “The goddess in this temple protects against photography, portraits, and reflections.” Ironically, photography is allowed here.

  As I read the signboards about the history of this place, it becomes instantly apparent that if this temple was built in 1609, like the sign states, then it precedes the very first photograph, making it impossible for the goddess that resides here to know what she would be protecting against in the future. My mind quietly flickers to the manuscript I found, the photograph, and time travel, before settling back in this holy place of imageless beings.

  Inside the grounds of the Drawing Light Temple, a statue of a cow sits next to a sign that says, “Look closely.” I stare at the cow, not really sure what I am supposed to be seeing. Everything here looks perfectly normal, just a statue of a cow. Below the sign there is a description in Japanese, which again has a handy English translation, stating, “As a way to protect the stolen soul, in the cow, your image will be hidden from the drawing of light.”

  I take a photograph of the cow, and oddly, my image isn’t present; very strange. I take several more photographs from various different angles, yet, each time the scenery behind me is visible, but my own reflection is mysteriously erased. Why a cow has been chosen to symbolise the absence of reflection is beyond me, but some sort of wizardry is at hand here. A trick of the light perhaps, or am I actually invisible or dead.