Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

Drones cycle overhead. Insurgents huddle together in a mass of sweaty support. Someone leans into your missing arm, igniting a tremor of pain that rings in your ears and harmonizes with the drones. A cicada brushes against you. Explosions rock the building, but so far it remains intact. Aluminum tubing rolls down the scrap pile and nearly hits you in the head.

  When your fear crests and peaks, you don’t push back. You always ride the fear like a wave, let it move through you. I fall a little bit in love with the way your hand grips your thigh when the terror becomes almost too much to bear. Every time. Sometimes you draw blood.

  Thoughts turn to white noise amidst pain. Drones sound like nothing more than wind inside your head. You take a measured breath.

  Peace lives there, for a moment.

  Lucas

  “This anemic solar activity points to the weakest cycle in recorded history,” they say. “We have to get some NASA quotes.”

  Your boss wears a shirt the color of a bruise, his heart-shaped face perched atop it like you could just flick his head off his shoulders. Annoyance swells in our throat. You want to throw your old copy of The Stand at him; it’s the only thing on your desk that’s not too heavy to pick up and toss. Your finger twitches, but you resist.

  No one listened when you talked about the wrongness of the light. Alice. Your doctor. The physics department at ASU. The light has changed, you told them. It’s bad, and it’s getting hotter. Has anyone else noticed? Sit down, they say. Rest. You’re ice cold. You are in pain.

  Lie down, sweetheart.

  Here, have another analgesic, sir.

  Get out of my office.

  But the light.

  Anxiety textures your words like a razor. No. One. Listens. They believe you’re wild with grief over your injury. They have no idea. It’s not the lost eye you mourn. It’s the thing inside you. It’s the sun in its death throes.

  It’s dying. It’s dying inside me.

  You can’t say that part out loud. Not yet.

  Of course no one believes you. We would know if the sun were dying. A star doesn’t just up and extinguish in the middle of a main sequence. We have billions of years. The oceans will evaporate long before our star blinks out. Our planet will look more like Venus than Earth and we will be dead. We won’t have the chance to see the sun die.

  Your coworkers are excited about this anemic sun business, because science news means science blogging and ad clicks. Your boss effervesces around the office as if we aren’t all going to die.

  Just look at him, you tell yourself. Site traffic on the brain while our star withers away.

  Ad clicks are meaningless now. Bylines are obsolete. Purple Shirt is thinking of Christmas bonuses. A trip to Tahiti he’ll never afford. All these insipid concerns while you dream of building a planet-sized bomb shelter. A massive solar shield. A network of underground tunnels and genetic enhancements for underground survival. A new, synthetic sun.

  You empty your ideas onto the Internet. You and so many of my others. You speak a secret language in videos and on message boards that have existed for decades. You call yourselves a think tank to legitimize your effort. Others call your kind the sun-kin, and it’s a joke.

  There’s a shaky desperation around the edges of your posts, a caffeine-fueled jitteriness. The sun is dying. We are dying. We’re losing time.

  We have always been dying. You can see that now. You congregate in digital spaces to share the evidence you’ve found. Sun possessions are an ancient tradition because it’s happening all at once, a nonlinear apocalypse. Have you seen the old missives, written in blood? Parchments etched by the nails of monks? Coffers filled with illuminated manuscripts, their marginalia mourning a dying star? Diaoqi lacquer, gold-threaded tapestries, ivory inlays. Anything humans can find to express their fear. The sun has been dying, is dying, will die. Your great nonsensical conspiracy casts a shadow across time.

  You work seventy-hour weeks. Eighty, ninety. Purple Shirt thinks you’re dedicated. He thinks you care about ad clicks too. He thinks you still dream of becoming a department head. His respect for you rises while you consider heavier desk objects to hurl. How can he be so naive? You haven’t written an article in weeks.

  Mitsu

  You clean up coffee grounds near the warehouse compost bin. You imagine your mother spilled them on her way out, leaving for the next district. You imagine she took your father’s advice and walked across the old shinkansen lines instead of curling inside his arms and covering his ears and burning alive.

  Burn. Torch. Scorch. Scald. Cook. Roast. Melt. You have a well-developed conflagratory vocabulary.

  Of course, you never use your vocabulary on anyone but me. You don’t want to lower morale by dwelling on losses. Grandmothers have lost granddaughters, sisters have lost each other. You are all orphans; you have all watched your families unmade. Publicly, you keep your burning words tucked beneath your tongue and worry them against your cheek when no one is looking.

  Privately, you are always on fire, limned in orange and gold.

  Blaze. Ignite. Bake. Char. Incinerate. Immolate.

  燃

  え

  る

  Lucas

  Sometimes you dream of taking your independence back. Ripping me out of you somehow, like a physical thing, a growth. Shocking me out, drowning me out, cutting me out. You consider making yourself sound dangerously distressed in the hope that if they deem you insane, they’ll do something to strip me from you.

  Sometimes you try to crowd me out with rational explanations. I am your subconscious grappling with the inevitable. I am your Jungian nightmare, your attempt to reconcile your death anxiety. I am what happens when mortality meets the road and rips out your eye.

  Days left now. Two, maybe three. Fifteen or so tabs clutter your browser.

  You click refresh while my distant body balloons toward our death.

  It’s Wednesday. Or Thursday. You can’t remember. Sweat darkens your shirt. You take off your shoes. Purple Shirt is wearing green today and talking to someone outside your office door. There’s a stain on his collar. When he catches your eye, he tosses you a salute. You’re certain he’s mocking you.

  You are not a man anymore. You are a single coiled nerve.

  The less time you have, the harder you want it back. You hate the things you’ve surrounded yourself with. You want the life you didn’t choose, the options that never occurred to you.

  You forget to call Alice before you fall asleep in your chair, waiting for another email notification from a physicist in Denver. She has ideas for your sun shield. You don’t know that she’s gone home to her wife, her Alice, and left the sun-kin behind. Or is it her Camila?

  A shield can’t be designed and built in a matter of days.

  Your eyes roll closed but your hand stays steady, poised atop your phone. The scent of stale coffee permeates your dreams. Your unconscious brain conjures absurd images, generational starships fueled by corporate coffee houses, oceans of fetid drinks sloshing in engine rooms. Starships drift away from the earth like dead skin.

  You don’t want to die at all, but I just don’t want to die alone.

  Mitsu

  You’ve programmed me into the shape of a girl, modeled after an old lover. Obsidian skin opens in fissures over the musculature of my nanobuilt form. Plasma licks up through the cracks before cooling and smoothing over. Tendrils of light disconnect and drift away into the darkness, and the process starts up again elsewhere on my body, sparing nothing, not even my face. This is the picture of me in your mind, projected onto your illegal digital canvas.

  We’re in a box the size of your bedroom; it’s just a performance piece, a game. You know we’re dying, and you don’t resist that, but you do keep fighting alongside your people. Between skirmishes, until the world ends, there is art to be made.

  You arm me with a howitzer and p
oint me in the direction of the invasion forces and their drones. I play along with your creation. I occupy the burning body you made for me, I operate the artillery, I slaughter the digital troops. Together we wipe them from the face of Osaka and spend hours rebuilding the city from the ground up. Their blood hardens into shining red obsidian, and the sky blazes in a violet iridescence that cradles the sun like a pale pearl. I shoot the remaining enemies while you weave your hand through the coronal loops rising from my arms.

  The nouveau digerati have long denounced insurgent artwork like this, so of course you birth it with an incessant, manic devotion.

  Your Osaka is a dead alien landscape burnt clean of human violence. Solar prominences rise where the obsidian crust splits, a mirror of my digital body. Plasma filaments flick and twist around you, whipping your hair. The world is a maelstrom of fire with you at the center: a glorious demon of light and shadow.

  I decide I miss you. I snap back into your flesh, shattering my obsidian-self into dust and taking the installation with it. Tomorrow your programmed swarm will etch your piece onto walls across the city, where it will loop endlessly until the occupied forces wipe them clean. But not before your people have seen them. Your murals will link them all together, a band of humanity threaded through the occupation. That is Japan now.

  Now we are alone within your body, within the white paneled room, within the warehouse. You are warm, alive, dripping with sweat and wracked with the pain of your dying country and your dying sun. You lie on your back and count the seams in the ceiling, pressing your hand against your chest to hold me in. You think of the people who made this room and wonder where they are now.

  “My mother said the drones don’t spend much time on Yakushima.” You close one eye and trace a finger down the seam in the center of the room from afar. “Not enough people there. No industry and no cells because we don’t want to ruin what’s left of the island. I feel like you should see the yakusugi. You know. Before things happen. We should see the trees and say goodbye.”

  I would like that. I can’t tell you, but you know.

  Silence swells up inside the room until you feel like you can’t breathe.

  “My parents didn’t believe in the kami.”

  Lucas

  “If everyone else had known, we’d have done something.” We are sitting in your bedroom, staring at the empty hangers in Alice’s side of the closet. “We’d have ships waiting to take us somewhere. We wouldn’t just be sitting here waiting to die.”

  You are fragmenting. Fear pours through the cracks, and there is no one around to catch it. Your bottom lip is gnawed to hell.

  “Tell me,” you say out loud, finally. “Tell me what it feels like. Tell me where we’re going next. What’s going to happen?”

  Tell you? With what words? I am electromagnetic data. I am born from ionized hydrogen cascading along magnetic fields. This is not The Exorcist. I have no control over your synapses and no mouth of my own.

  Resignation unspools inside of you, making you sick. You understand: I don’t know what will happen any better than you do.

  How does entropy end? We will find out together. Death is a constant unknown.

  Mitsu

  The warehouse is gone, along with most of Osaka. Fifth generation assault drones tore it from Japan like another fragile limb. They’ve started using the cicadas to track insurgents, like you always knew they would, so you’ve ripped out your implants and left a bloody pulp behind. The pain is a sharp stillness we both appreciate.

  Even the air tastes like metal and blood.

  We stop at Shitennoji on the way out. The temple is little more than a field of debris, but you want to stay the night. Your mind is caked with sentiment, thick veins of it wending through the constant fear. You take in the dying land, the rotting architecture that casts harsh shadows in the livid sun. Hot wind kicks up garbage and dust. Visual overlays show you ancient structures on your glasses mapped beneath broken modern installments. You think of the people who built them, centuries gone. Together with you and your colleagues, your lost family, your enemies overhead—you imagine you all form a web of fusion and light that stretches over the land. It will reach up to meet me on our final day.

  Sorrow pinches your heart.

  “I’m sorry. We will not make it to Yakushima.” You touch the sticky gash on your leg where an implant used to be. Referred pain radiates through your hip and lower back. Even the longest-lived pain is a transient thing. A product of cause and effect. Nerves and neurons. It’s there in a blinding flash, begging to be seen, and then it’s gone. Trustworthy in its impermanence.

  You reach into your pocket and pull out the lychee candy your father gave you before they burned (immolated, conflagrated, baked). You press the stale thing against the roof of your mouth, letting the rice wrapping dissolve like snow.

  Lucas

  Waves of blistering wind sweep over the valley, vaporizing any moisture it finds. Plastic warps and bends, taking your think tank and your evidence with it. There are no ships to carry you, no sun shields to shelter your people. There is only the desert, lost in a photospheric blaze of light.

  You are all sun-kin now. The outermost shell of my body reaches for us all. I am cauterizing the earth across time, a final sunrise that has always been happening, will always happen.

  You think of a girl, turning her faces over in your mind like a jewel. She is every girl. She is Alice. Camila. Alice. Camila.

  In the light of my death they are young again, and so are you.

  The girl becomes everyone: she is your boss, your physicist, your think tank. They are wisps of plasma sailing up into the dark. They are the cotton that burns on your chest, the blisters on your face.

  In the pain of the light you never lost anything.

  You abandoned the think tank before it began. You did not make your home at your desk beneath the flickering fluorescence. You stayed beside Alice and you called Camila. You cooked them both dinner and taught them each other’s names and made fun of your old blog posts to make them laugh, and they looked at each other with knowing smiles.

  In the ecstasy of the pain you are not alone.

  You are burning. Endless orange skyfire crests over the mountain, loping like a sizzling beast into the Salt River Valley.

  You are looking at the edge of the world.

  Alice. Camila.

  You close your eye and swallow their names like oceans.

  Mitsu

  You walk out onto a war-devastated landscape of twisted metal. Your glasses polarize, so you take them off and crush them beneath your boot.

  Pulsing heat envelopes you, your people, your occupiers. Convection cells consume the sky. Arcs of plasma lick the barren world. Time shatters.

  There is no obsidian to harden around you, no paneled room to hide in, no cicadas to swat away. There is no scavenging, no gunfire, no waves of fear to ride. There are no drones.

  There is nothing but flame and you and me and a billion other deaths hiding beneath your tongue. You are all that has ever been and you are standing outside Osaka, you are standing in a fixed point in time, you are standing in Phoenix and you are floating 149 million kilometers away.

  In the violent red you see your mother and father, all blackened bone and stardust in a furious hydrogen storm.

  They open their arms to you. They sing to you like cicadas. They are lychee candy, they are a scorched temple beneath your feet. They are the last thing you see before the fire takes your eyes.

  You open your mouth.

  燃

  え

  る

  There was a hermit on a certain mountain who was devoted to the Lotus Sutra. The mountain was too remote for many alms to reach him, but there was a hunter who supported him.

  One day the hunter came to the hermit’s hut with a bag of rice, and the hermit said, “I have remarkable news, n
amely that the Bodhisattva Fuden has been appearing to me every night! This is the culmination of a lifetime’s hoping.”

  The hunter had a good heart but little regard for asceticism, and knew that the mountain was plagued with various magical creatures, so, showing nothing, he asked if he, too, could witness this prodigy.

  That night he sat by the drowsing hermit as the moon rose and set. Beyond the ring of their candlelight the mountain was pitch black. Suddenly there was a bright pale light, and there, right before them, was Fuden, radiant in his strength, floating in the air. The hermit raised his hands up to the light.

  “This is too convenient,” the hunter said, and he picked up his bow and shot an arrow at Fuden, who immediately disappeared.

  “What have you done?” wailed the hermit.

  “Just wait,” said the hunter, who went out and found blood on the stones before the hermit’s hut. He followed the blood trail by candlelight until he came to a gulley where a badger lay dying with an arrow in its breast. “Just as I thought,” snorted the hunter, and departed.

  When he was gone, Fuden cast off the shape of the badger. Weeping with pain, he knew that his agony would only be compounded by breaking the hunter’s heart.

  I am a book. A text, unfolding continuously.

  I am an algorithm programmed to output the account you’re about to read. I’m quite complicated compared to the average bit of code, but like any program, I was written to behave as I do. A book spawning books. Even if what follows seems a touch ironic from time to time, or sentimental here and there, rest assured that there is no one behind the curtain. The output only makes it seem there is.

  End of disclaimer. Now I can say it.

  May my soul rest in peace.