I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

by Isis, Justin

  He held the violin up tightly to his shoulder; he wrote a list of stock phrases for answering his parents; he started memorizing the history of every country on Earth; he woke up fifteen minutes earlier each morning to find a different shape of the sky; his sister’s lengthening fingers joined in his mind with the thin whiteness of Satomi’s legs: a clean, white light.

  Nanako

  When he was a young man he’d known a girl called Nanako who reminded him of a Buddha. His group of friends hung out with her mostly as an afterthought: after they assembled, as they were about to leave, someone would remember to call her, and they’d wait for a while, staring at the pavement, sharing lights, until Nanako wandered out in a heavy winter coat and gave a stunted wave. She was always overdressed.

  Nanako was short and stubby and vague. Most of her face seemed to slouch away from the pig’s nose at its center and collect at the edges of her cheeks, her hair crushed to her skull by an invisible cap, falling on her shoulders in limp clumps. Her teeth were bunched and beige, her smile arresting in its lack of proportion — both beatific and somehow inappropriate, like watching clowns kiss. When it happened, her eyes closed and her lips became redder, almost viscid, an exaggerated sensitivity caught in the taut crooks of her cheeks.

  She spent most of her time in her room; they saw her only when they called her, or else in the city, by herself, on one of the obscure errands which distinguished her — trying to buy a birthday cake in a food court, perhaps, or a pair of sunglasses in a pharmacy. At these times they always redirected her — solemn and solicitous, dismissing her thanks — and sometimes rode the bus back with her in silence while she stared out the window, adjusted her hat and blinked, slowly. Stories of this kind were common, and he’d always given his opinion.

  —Nanako is great, he’d said. She’s my favorite person ever.

  This kind of light condescension had been essential to appreciating Nanako’s presence — if Nanako made an observation, everyone was certain to laugh, and smile tolerantly, and feel that Nanako was increasing their estimation of each other just by existing, because Nanako had no opinions, no humor, no malice. And he imagined that, somehow, she had escaped from something — even if she cried, then his momentary sadness was greater than hers, because he was intelligent and political. If he imagined that loneliness made her sad, he would feel as if he were watching her inside a snow globe, a little doll lost in winter. Then he would want to hurt her; would imagine opening himself to her sadness, as if it could infuse him like a saint’s blood. He felt that in the future, somehow, without even trying, he would hurt Nanako — and he found himself anticipating it whenever he saw her, whenever he thought of her. This premonition of an infinitely forestalled torture made him love her, in his way.

  Two instances stood out for him.

  At first, he visited her by accident. He was looking for one of her friends, a girl he was interested in — someone he’d forgotten now. They were roommates, and he suspected she was using Nanako in the same way everyone used her. It had been some time in August, he remembered.

  Nanako met him at the door. She was wearing a winter coat and looked to have just come in.

  —Oh? Hello... she said. He’d only met her a few times before, but she always greeted him like this, smiling with gracious conciliation as if he were a neglected pen-pal.

  He asked if the roommate was in.

  —No, not back yet.

  —Oh.

  —Ah, but, she should be back soon.

  Nanako spoke slowly — her voice was too deep for her size, and the words seemed to crawl from her mouth like autumn caterpillars. He saw how short she was, how she had to stare up at him to answer. He leaned against the railing and looked down the stairs, not sure whether to wait.

  —Did she say when she’d be back?

  —I think soon...

  —All right. Well... how are all your classes going?

  —I’ve been very busy.

  He talked to her for a while until the girl came back and noticed him. Surprised, she called him by name.

  —What are you doing?

  He turned around.

  —Just talking, Nanako said.

  Nanako looked at him, and he felt that she was happy somehow: it was her pronunciation. The slowness of her speech had settled, had taken on a kind of whimsy. The girl — Aoi, that had been her name — began to sink inside herself, drawing up to her full height. He looked at her shoulders. She was like him, he thought: suspicious of everything. He complimented her on her scarf. She walked him back to the bus stop.

  Hours later he remembered Nanako’s face and its gentle canine happiness — how, at its most relaxed, its muscles settled like sediment, the blood thick in her lips. He wanted to make her happy again, wanted to hold her hand and dress her in the morning, walk beside her, and, after catching her out of the shower, eyes closed, face foetal — to tear out her hair and strip her hidden nerves.

  Then he was at someone’s house, another friend he’d forgotten. He was going with Aoi now; they rode the train together each morning. Sometimes he sat across from her. She had a deer’s legs; he wanted to see her running from arrows.

  They were seated in the living room; a couple were dancing in the corner; someone had brought cakes. He was drinking too much, as usual. Someone’s phone rang. He checked his pocket: nothing. When he looked up he saw Nanako speaking into her small purple mobile. He poured himself another drink.

  Then Nanako was making an expression — a kind of constricted smile — and her eyes were wet. He was watching her through a filter, he thought, putting out his cigarette on the table. Aoi left his side. Nanako was crying, but he felt that it was he who was manipulating her expression, a drunken puppeteer jerking cords at random. It would explain the instability, he thought: the clumsiness of her emotions, so different from Aoi, Aoi who was now taking Nanako’s hand, blocking her face—

  —Her grandmother just died, he heard someone say.

  As Aoi took Nanako outside, he realized she was concealing an unbearably pornographic sight, and he stood for another glimpse of her, for a view of the face past the fringe of flattened hair. Nanako’s tears, thick and inelegant, stained her cheeks like dribbles of semen. It was her unawareness of an audience that produced this emotion, he decided, imagining that she cried in her room, alone, sometimes — he needed to masturbate. He remembered reading that a baby’s tongue was more sensitive than an adult’s, so that everything was slightly unbearable — and Nanako was like that innocent tongue, tasting everything and constantly burned.

  He needed to masturbate.

  In the bathroom he locked the door and unbuttoned his pants. He hadn’t come in weeks; his semen was so thick it seemed tinted, a translucent yellow like refined pus. Someone found him passed out an hour later.

  —You okay?

  —Yeah... what happened to Nanako?

  —She went home.

  —... oh.

  He cleaned himself up and got to his feet. Only a few people remained in the living room; only one noticed he was back. He breathed in the haze of smoke and sat down.

  An absurd fear came to him — that Nanako in her weakness was alone with Aoi, and that she would eat Nanako’s tears. He’d seen her putting on her makeup that morning, and imagined that her entire face would crack, that a tongue would come from her somehow, sinuous and grey as an eel — he made it to the hall before he vomited. In front of him light was coming through a tall, rectangular window. It would be dawn soon; he could hear birds.

  He broke up with Aoi a week later.

  In the years after graduation he saw Nanako in glimpses. He was staying in Mizonokuchi, and caught the Chuo Line into Shibuya every day. Once, while changing to the Yamanote Line for Shinjuku, he saw her on the platform, sitting at attention — a little primly, he thought, noticing her cardigan and hat. Nanako had always dressed conservatively, but the addition of a few years seemed to have hardened her tastes. Her makeup was professional now, and there was
a fresh blush to her lips — but he remembered seeing her in her pajamas while staying with Aoi, her unpainted face soft and shapeless and kind. There was a perversity here: wanting to speak to her, he had already seen her, and so he could not bear to surprise her, to break the calm cast of her eyes. He could only watch her from the side in the few moments before the train came, the brim of her hat just touching the top of her seat.

  He recalled seeing her at a friend’s wedding reception, and in a photograph someone showed him — but the years went past him and he forgot her. He had new obsessions, new interests, new jobs. He became more important. He began to draw: dark, cramped abstractions on vast canvases, elaborate cross-sections of interlocking machines. There were eyes in some of them, staring from the cracks. Sometimes he would add a patch of color: a bright splash of green, perhaps, or a sudden red smear. But he stacked them in his apartment, showing no one.

  It was a morning after he’d forgotten her. He’d been sunken in sleep for hours, giving himself over to those serial dreams whose stitches held meaning through the little gaps of waking. At the end of one of them he found himself staring down at a vast depthless horizon the color of sunlight shining through ice. In this void a single chime rang, and, half-awake, he curled in upon himself, as if the sound had come through the open window. But the weight of the blankets muffled the ring, and he returned to the dream, letting his mind dissolve into smoke.

  Now he was watching the void through the shuffled frames of a broken projector. He caught glimpses — an eyelash, the edge of a smile, the soft tip of a squashed nose — but the design at its base remained hidden. Trapped in a funnel, it was impossible to tell whether he was falling in from the edges or already caught at the center.

  Then Nanako’s face threw off its veils and he saw it from beneath, a vast planet sunken in the well of its own gravity. Now every fixture of feature distorted under microscopic attention: the domes of her cheeks reared out like the surface of a polished moon; in her irises, taken for black, shone subtle splinters of hazel. Unable to assemble what he saw, he was left only with the vaulted lashes, the spread, sluggish lips and the tear-shaped corners of her eyes, pink as the lining of a shell.

  Although from her angle she should have seen him, he noticed that her eyes were fixed on a point beyond him. Her gaze was still and her pupils wide, almost filling her eyes, as if she were staring at the heart of a light. Even the strands of her hair did not rustle in any wind of the void, but hung down dead as a doll’s.

  What was Nanako looking at? There was no way for him to tell, as he could not look behind or above him, and before long the void receded and the warmth of the blankets woke him.

  He sat up. Pillows on the floor, sheets disordered. Rare for him to move in his sleep, but he’d changed position now, nearly turning himself right round, so that his head hung over the side and his bare feet brushed the headboard. The blankets covered him. He got up, pulled the sheets straight, made the bed and went to the kitchen. He thought: even before Nanako’s name came to him he had recognized the outline of her face as if it were an ideal, unconscious in the dream of any history between them; and even now he had to remind himself that Nanako was still alive somewhere, perhaps near, and working, or married, or both—

  If he were to meet her again in reality — on the platform, perhaps — he would revel in the chance to observe her, so closely, unwatched. But the Nanako he had seen was only a phantom, and in the freedom of the dream he should have taken her easily, taken her face in his hands. It troubled him that in his own mind he had been incidental to Nanako’s vision, peripheral as an ant.

  There was a call from his sister, and then his latest canvas needed attention — the shading was off. He took out his pencils and tried to ignore the excitement in his mind, the way it was already making plans without him, connecting traces of Nanako, so that by the early afternoon, without having formed a clear plan, he already knew he would find her.

  It was not an unprecedented whim. Some months earlier he had taken up with reunion, after a meeting on the bus — a high school friend with a new job in Tokyo. Nothing came of it, but he continued for a while, looking through photos, searching for addresses. At the time he hadn’t thought of her. Too intrusive: pointless. The Nanako he had known was long dead, buried by the woman now with her name.

  But now, beginning with the phonecalls — their prodding and feigned interest — he considered this woman, faceless and hypothetical. From Aoi (married, office in Chiba, cigarette-strain of her voice) he learned that she was still in Kanto; another friend suggested the north. No word of her job. Forced into research, it took him until the afternoon to find her details. He waited an hour before calling, looking down at the number and imagining her changed.

  —Hello.

  A stranger’s voice.

  —Is it Nanako?

  —Yes.

  He introduced himself.

  —Oh, it’s you.

  She didn’t sound surprised, but he dismissed any thought of the dream, and arranged, in his calmest voice, to meet her.

  —I’m busy this week, she said. I could make time tomorrow, if—

  He was imposing now, he knew.

  —Only if you don’t have anything on, he said.

  She didn’t.

  He hung up and sat at the kitchen table. In their conversation Nanako had revealed nothing of herself or her situation, and although it could have been the phone’s fault, he felt her voice had been without the light tone of its old reticence. There was a harder undercurrent, a flatness. Probably, he’d changed too.

  He considered gifts, flowers, old photographs — but there was nothing for him to prove. Neither the Nanako he had known nor the voice on the phone was likely to be moved, so he ate dinner, sorted some accounts from work and adjusted the edge of his canvas. The shading still bothered him, and the figure’s top — the apex of the geometric construction — remained indistinct. For a week he’d outlined its edges without the top’s shape presenting itself. It troubled him, but there was nothing to be done now. He slept early and didn’t dream of her. The next day, when he caught the train, all he carried with him was an umbrella, his phone and some cigarettes.

  He got off at Omotesando, taking the Chiyoda Line to Hibiya. As he walked through the park, across to the benches, a light rain fell. He sat next to the pond and watched the crowd putting up their clear plastic umbrellas, narrow rivulets sliding between the struts. The benches filled. In a moment the heavy rain started and a curtain of water fell over the roof. Through it he watched the rain strike the edge of the pond, scattering a school of goldfish. A turtle floated by, and further ahead he could see a great black fish drifting beneath the surface. He’d come here as a teenager, he remembered.

  On the bench across from him an old couple sat next to each other watching the pond. Further along a young girl paged through a picturebook. When the rain stopped she waited for a while, then jumped onto the grass. He got off the bench and walked past the pond. The turtle had moved towards the center, but he couldn’t see the black fish. The girl and her father circled the pond and as he watched the father bent down and tied his daughter’s laces.

  Someone brushed past him and he reached to guard his pocket. He folded his umbrella and walked back to the station.

  It was dusk when he arrived at Kita-Senju. The rain had stopped and there was no wind, but he felt a strange lightness as he left the station, as if he could join the crowd or drift out of it; there was no need to separate himself from the crowd but neither was he hurried, instead he seemed to drift on the crowd’s momentum, carried along by a calm sadness. He extended his umbrella and looked over the railing before descending, watching how the streets narrowed like nerves. A neon sign cast light on an alley to the north, and he could make out a distant pile of newspapers sunken in the faint rose light.

  Already his expectations were catching up with him, and the imminence of disappointment made him smile, a little. On the street now, he caught sight of his
reflection in the bar windows, in the gutter’s broken glass. Young people passed him by and he walked close to the windows to avoid them. He looked down at the map he’d drawn and crossed the two blocks to Nanako’s flat. There was a repair sign on the elevator doors, so he climbed the stairs. On the third floor he stopped at the balcony, taking in the night view of Kita-Senju. He heard footsteps and turned; a young boy had followed him up the stairs and now ran past him, cap in hand. He watched the boy disappear into a doorway. A woman stood at the far end of the balcony smoking.

  He walked over and rested against the ledge. A crowded warmth from somewhere; perhaps he’d overdressed. The earlier rain hadn’t picked up, and already he felt a torpid stillness settling over the night. He looked at the woman, caught her profile: its open mouth, lined eyes, the framing tresses of tea-coloured hair. His age, maybe older, he thought; probably an office worker, probably the boy’s mother. He took his hand off the railing and moved closer, taking the cigarettes from his pocket.

  —I’m sorry. Could I...

  She held out her lighter and he cupped his hand around hers.

  —There’s no wind, she said.

  He took his hand away.

  —Force of habit.

  The woman smiled and looked sideways at him before flicking her ash off the ledge. Something about her smile made him stop, and he looked at her again, meeting her eyes. Then he felt pointed and obvious and a little resentful, as if she’d noticed him without permission. He’d wanted to compose himself more, form his smile, affect the necessary carelessness. Now he seemed laboured and transparent.

  —I’m sorry, it’s Nanako, isn’t it? I mean, you’re...

  She looked at him.

  —You are, aren’t you?

  She called him by his name then, and in her smile, the way her lips settled against each other, he thought he saw a shadow of the smile he remembered. Then nothing: the same restraint he’d heard in her voice.