Rubik
Page 6
—Those participating in this semester’s play may attend rehearsal now. The rest of you have a reading period.
The teacher has scarcely finished his sentence when a third of the students scrape out of their seats and race to their cubbyholes. Over the morning the children’s costumes have accumulated here—cardboard snouts, triangular ears stapled to headbands, mosquito-net wings. Pikkoro unwraps her brown parcel and wriggles into her octopus poncho: though it is woollen, the weave is loose enough to keep her from becoming too warm. Pikkoro runs out of the classroom with the other costumed students, her extra limbs bouncing, down the stairs and across the corridor to the auditorium.
On the stage, a cluster of senior students are riffling scripts and reciting lines, while others are assembling a giant backdrop made from flattened cardboard boxes.
—Ah, the extras from Class 3B are here! Eh? Those costumes are pretty neat! Come on, Kyo-senpai will show you where to stand.
—Everyone get ready for Act II, Scene 4!
The senior boy called Kyo leads Pikkoro and her classmates up the stairs to the wings of the stage.
—Remember to remain quiet while the lights are off. The actors will have a few lines. Then when your lights come on, jump up and make your best animal sounds! Be as loud as you want! You can move across the stage but don’t get in the way of the actors. Okay?
Away from the tedium of silent reading, the students from Class 3B are thrilled into obedience.
—Places, everyone! Alright, from the top!
The lights dim abruptly. A boy and a girl hobble in from stage left, clutching each other.
—Where are we, Cumbersnatch?
—I don’t know, Honey, but something fishy is going on here.
—Where has the doctor gone? Where are all the other passengers?
—I’m telling you, when we get back to Hawaii...
—Eep! Did you hear that?
—Hear what?
The lights boom on, and the animal students break out across the stage, screeching and hooting and snarling, beating their arms, stomping their feet, charging towards the protagonists.
—Eeeargh! Savage beasts!
—Cumbersnatch, quick! We have to do something!
Pikkoro isn’t sure what sound octopuses are meant to make in the wild, so she spins around the stage, her extra arms flailing, making a kind of bubbling, warbling noise. There is no scalar consistency across the animals the children have chosen, so a duck cavorts alongside a cardboard-finned shark, a rabbit lunges after a rhinoceros, and Honey and Cumbersnatch cower with heartfelt conviction.
The door to the auditorium snaps open. The drama teacher walks in, flanked by two men in brown suits, and the students quickly contain themselves. Pikkoro’s mouth twitches into an O when she notices the HarvestTime™ loveheart tree stitched onto the smart leather briefcases of the brown-suited men.
Kyo steps in front of the group and bows slightly.
—Excuse us, sensei. We began rehearsal while you were in your meeting. Since the extras from Class 3B are here, we are practising Act II, Scene 4.
The drama teacher dabs at his mouth with a white handkerchief. He glances at the brown-suited men. They both nod.
—Students, I am pleased to make an announcement. It has come to my attention that our play is terrible. That is why we will be rewriting it.
The senior students gasp. The drama teacher casts a critical eye over the ensemble. He gestures with a stern hand at the children in their homemade animal costumes.
—We cannot use any of these. These costumes are no good. No, the extras from Class 3B will be supplied with new costumes. They will be dressed as fruit—as pineapples and grapes and watermelons and figs. Then the play will be excellent. I am confident of this new direction.
Pikkoro and the other children look shell-shocked. The senior students are so speechless that they must collaborate on their response.
—Sensei... you want Honey and Cumbersnatch...
—to stumble upon...
—an island of giant fruit?
A girl in a penguin jumpsuit begins to cry.
Pikkoro and Tako walk home from school. The brown paper package, laid across Pikkoro’s arms like a dead pet, is lumpy and folded wrong. Pikkoro and Tako stop at the pedestrian crossing.
—Must I make you a new costume?
—No. Sensei said they’d give us new ones.
The green man appears, and they cross the road. They round a familiar corner, but as Pikkoro looks right and left, she does not see the HarvestTime™ truck from yesterday.
In the apartment, Pikkoro watches her ramen grow fat in the steaming soup. Tako unwraps the paper parcel, folds the octopus poncho neatly, rewraps it, and walks to Pikkoro’s bedroom. He slides open the wardrobe. Places the parcel on the top shelf.
Was it only yesterday that Pikkoro saw the truck on the way home from school, the mango on the road? Has her life always been this charged with moments of significance, relentless as an assembly line? Pivotal moments advancing from a conveyor belt, delivered with suspicious regularity—some dire newspaper from the cosmos headlining the same cryptic warnings in large black typeface? Pikkoro can’t quite discern the lettering, much less read between the lines—can only understand that there is some threat hovering, spreading a shadow over her tiny life, as she lets herself sink like a waterlogged noodle to the murky bottom.
—Where are we, Cumbersnatch?
—I don’t know, Honey, but something fishy is going on here.
—Where has the doctor gone? Where are all the other passengers?
—I’m telling you, when we get back to Hawaii...
—Eep! Did you hear that?
—Hear what?
The stage explodes with light and a boy dressed as a raspberry overbalances and—whump! The other fruits totter uncertainly across the stage. The effort of negotiating the costumes’ awkward angles neuters the children’s ferocity, and the actors stutter through their lines, surrounded by the thump of falling fruit students—
—Oh look, Cumbersnatch! There’s every kind of fruit here!
—We’re saved!
—Cut! Cut! Hang on a second, wasn’t there a mango before?
The piccolo—trill! A part of the stage becomes translucent—and there’s Pikkoro, curled up in a mango suit. She sighs, and rolls onto her rotund stomach. The fruit costumes even come with enlarged oval HarvestTime™ stickers. Pikkoro scratches at the edges of hers, but it’s stitched into the fabric.
That senior boy Kyo’s voice is strained.
—Sensei... are you sure about this plot direction?
For the thousandth time Pikkoro is poring over her little collection of facts—such as the truck that swerved around the corner near her home, the mango gleaming on the asphalt, the loveheart tree, those two silent men with their briefcases... and that infuriating slogan, It’s HarvestTime™. And for the thousandth time, Pikkoro thinks: Honey, something fishy is going on here.
—Once again! From the top!
Pikkoro scratches at the fake It’s HarvestTime™ sticker on her side and puck! One of the stitches snaps. She wriggles her finger under the hole and keeps on ripping—puck-puck-puck like subatomic fireworks—until the fake sticker peels off. It curls away like the lid of a sardine tin.
There, exposed to the grimy light of her hidey-hole, is a tiny black mystery nestled in the fabric, shaped like a jellybean. Pikkoro struggles to sit up, craning her neck. Yes, there it is—tight as a parasite, inseparable from the costume. It will not be prised away, not like the fake sticker.
Pikkoro decides that now’s the time for action. She wriggles like a caterpillar shedding old skin, kicks free of her costume, and crawls away.
Later, at home, Tako and Pikkoro investigate the HarvestTime™ mango on the kitchen counter—large, innocuous, so deeply yellow that its fragrance is very nearly visible. Pikkoro itches off the It’s HarvestTime™ sticker. Denied sunlight, this part of the mango’s skin retains an oval
lighter than the rest. Tako takes their sharpest knife to pare back the skin, opening a window to the mango’s flesh. It’s difficult to see but Pikkoro knows it’s there—she slides a square magnifying glass over the wound—a black spot, so small as to be mistaken for a fragment of seed. A flaw in the mango’s perfect design.
—Tako-sama.
—Yes?
—Was it bad of me to sneak away from the play like that?
Tako doesn’t reply right away. He floats to the sink and rinses the knife.
—You felt unsafe somehow, following the other children.
—I don’t like what’s happened to the drama teacher. It’s like he’s been brainwashed.
—Did the men try to brainwash anyone else?
—No. Well, I’m not sure.
Pikkoro sees the drama teacher again, dabbing his mouth with a white handkerchief.
—The fruit is poisoned.
—Poisoned?
—Or bugged.
—Bugged?
—Well, something isn’t right about it.
—Something isn’t right about the convenience of your discoveries.
—Hmm?
—You found a mango on the road, and you were cast as the mango in the play. Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?
Pikkoro slumps down into the kitchen counter, pushes her face in her arms.
—I don’t know about that.
Tako extends a brown tentacle over Pikkoro’s shoulder and picks up the mango. He brings it closer to his small eyes, inspecting it like a jeweler.
—Tako-sama.
She reaches out, takes one of Tako’s spare arms in her hand.
—You have to help me.
The next day, Pikkoro sets off to school alone. She has packed light. All this business with HarvestTime™ has meant that she has not completed one stroke of her homework, but she is ready to accept the penalty. She takes a moment to gaze at the slope leading to her school. Her eyebrows tip towards her nose in determination. She struggles up the hill.
She endures the roulette of the morning period, in which her teacher calls on a random student for the answer to each question of their night’s homework. One by one all the students around her are called upon, but somehow not her. It’s not even lunchtime and the day is already ringing with portent for young Pikkoro.
At eleven o’clock, after recess, the teacher says:
—Those participating in this semester’s play may attend rehearsal now. The rest of you have a reading period.
Pikkoro remains in her seat a little longer than the other students. She has come too far to falter now, but there’s no hint of fear in her eyes. She pushes back her seat.
In the auditorium, the older students help the younger ones put on their fruit costumes over their school uniforms. The drama teacher and the HarvestTime™ men oversee the preparations with grim faces.
—The mango girl.
—What about her?
—She isn’t here.
The drama teacher shrugs.
—They are third grade students. I am not responsible for their whereabouts.
The drama teacher is paring the skin from an orange with a small knife. The HarvestTime™ men watch him. Those thick curls falling. One of the men turns to the other:
—The girl will come.
Kyo stoops on one knee and picks up the unclaimed mango costume. The sticker must have been resewn overnight, for the costume is bright and unbroken. Kyo holds the costume as his eyes trawl the room in the manner of a cop late to the crime scene, clutching a thief’s calling card. The boy dressed as the raspberry practices walking. He takes bow-legged sumo steps.
One of the senior girls approaches the drama teacher.
—Sensei... would you like us to begin rehearsal now?
The drama teacher peels the final strip of skin from his orange.
—Please hold on for one minute. Not everyone is here.
One of the HarvestTime™ men flicks back his suit sleeve and consults his watch.
—Where is the mango girl?
Kyo frowns at the HarvestTime™ men and back at the mango costume. The drama teacher licks juice from his knuckles. He lifts the orange to his mouth. The raspberry boy has found a walking rhythm that his legs can tolerate—ichi, ni, ichi, ni, he chants—but then as he wobbles, throws out his arms for balance, he catches something in his unsteady gaze. He points:
—Octopus!
SHHIIIING! Pikkoro stands at the auditorium’s back entrance, hands on her hips. The octopus poncho seems to flare in the borrowed light, and she raises a hand:
—Sensei! Don’t eat the fruit!
The drama teacher looks up. A bead of juice slides over his fist. All of a sudden Pikkoro’s right there next to him; she snatches the orange out of his hand. The students gasp. Pikkoro lifts the orange high and flings it hard onto the auditorium floor. Her foot comes down a second later.
SPLAT!
Pikkoro lifts her foot. The orange is a wet, juicy mess. The acid sizzles.
Everyone is silent. A girl in a banana suit begins to cry. The HarvestTime™ men fiddle with their neckties, push their glasses more firmly on their noses. The drama teacher clenches his teeth. He is shaking a little, trying to form syllables: k. . .k. . .k. . .
—What is the meaning of this?!
Pikkoro rests her foot back on the ground. It is unclear who precisely the drama teacher is addressing—Pikkoro, with her loose posture, seemingly satisfied that some great threat has been squashed into the auditorium floor, or the HarvestTime™ men, who are as rigid and inexpressive as the students’ cardboard stage scenery.
There’s a sound coming from outside—like bells, far off, growing louder and closer. The adults and senior students shift nervously, but the children, swiftly availing their memories of the current peculiar situation, light up. Wild understanding dawns in their eyes. The bells reach peak volume, echoing closer and closer, and then, visible through the window, Tako’s ice cream truck pulls up at the auditorium’s outdoor entrance. The children lose it—they gallop to the doors, cheering, straining their arms through their fruit costumes as Tako announces through the loudspeaker of the ice cream truck:
—Hello! Hello! Students of East Elementary School! Principal Matsumoto rewards you for your hard work today!
One of the children manages to wrestle open the doors and they all pour out, swarming Tako’s ice cream truck.
—A free ice cream for each student! A gift from Principal Matsumoto for your hard work today!
The senior students hardly know what to do, but the children aren’t questioning this ridiculous twist, grabbing ice cream cones with eager hands. One of the senior girls exits the auditorium to find another teacher. Meanwhile, understanding is dawning for the drama teacher too, as he gazes tight-lipped at the pandemonium, at the squashed orange. At the HarvestTime™ men clutching their briefcases.
—W-What’s happening here? What happened to my students’ play? Why are all the children dressed as fruit?
And finally, darkly:
—Who authorized you to come to this school?
The HarvestTime™ men do not reply. One of them readjusts his necktie. They turn to Pikkoro, who is so small in this chaos, peeking out from her clever coral-red octopus hood. One of the men twitches his lip—in disgust perhaps, or with smug inside knowledge. He steadies his glasses with two firm fingers. And then, the HarvestTime™ man intones:
—Sugimura Pikkoro.
For the first time, fear colors Pikkoro’s face—gentle as the broad, omniscient stroke of a paintbrush, darkening at the edges, expanding like water. Pikkoro asks:
—How did you know my name?
Tako senses trouble and climbs out of the ice cream truck, while the drama teacher stands up. The teacher is smaller and older than the HarvestTime™ men but he looks incensed enough to take them both on. The senior students are still frozen in wide-eyed trauma. Everywhere, children are licking ice cream.
THWACK!
Pikkoro screams:
—TAKO!
Transformation! Tako takes to the air with a powerful whoosh!, arms thrashing, sinuously electric. They lock into place—two for the handle bars, two for each wheel—as his suckers shine like polished military brass, his eyes protract into headlights, and the soundtrack rises sharply, crackling with guitars and snares and fluttering woodwinds as Pikkoro jumps onto the seat formed by Tako’s webbing, grabs the handle bars, revs hard and speeds the hell out of the auditorium.
The ice cream truck bumbles down the hill and Pikkoro and Tako hurtle after it; the limp arms of Pikkoro’s poncho fly backwards like kite tails. It’s a chase scene that has everything that can be crammed into a chase scene—tight corners, screeching brakes, near misses, ruffled civilians, blasted horns, dogs springing free of their leashes and barking ecstatically into the street. The vehicles successfully clear, in white-knuckle sequence, a pedestrian crossing, two red lights, a speeding train, a clamoring boom gate, and, for the climax, a rising toll bridge. The ice cream truck makes the leap—the giant novelty cone cracks away from the roof and plummets into the river. SPLASH! Trumpets groan. The drums fumble while the truck crunches onto the road and skids back into action. Tako leaps after the truck, and for a moment, Pikkoro, hanging only by the handle bars, feels her poncho parachuting open, the arms streamlined perfectly for flight. Red-cheeked, lightning-eyed, so far away from school, home, the ground—Pikkoro has never been so precariously alive.