A Darkly Beating Heart

by Lindsay Smith

  I should apologize. But I’m too tangled up in my thoughts, my panic and confusion.

  I wrench my arm from Kenji’s grasp and storm from the honjin without a word.

  “She’s so creepy,” Mariko says behind me. “Surely you can find another photographer.”

  I whirl around, mouth flapping open. So Mariko’s going to turn on me now, too?

  “It’s the only way Papa’s paying for this trip. We need her.” Even as Aki speaks, she forces a sour smile my way. “I don’t care if we lock her in the room while we go do our real work. We just can’t let Papa know.”

  Papa.

  Then it hits me—why they’re talking about me this way. Why they’re talking about me honestly.

  Because they’re speaking Japanese.

  And I understand it. As clearly as I did in the role-playing scene.

  I really have lost my mind. It wasn’t just a game.

  As soon as we’re back at Mr. Onagi’s inn, I storm up to our room and grab my collection of pills. Uppers and downers. Inhibitors and relaxants. Antipsychotics. Every last one. “Reiko, what are you doing?” Aki calls to me in a singsong voice, but I don’t so much as glance up at her as I head for the communal bathroom.

  “Forget the weirdo,” Mariko says to Aki, in Japanese. “Let’s work on our project.”

  I kick off my slippers. Slide into my bathroom slippers—embroidered with the image of a golfer. Head to the nearest toilet.

  I listen to the sounds of electronic rushing water, coming from the toilet speaker box.

  And I flush down every last pill.

  I grip the handrail in the handicapped stall; the hypnotic swirl of the water as it flushes is making me dizzy. I slump forward and squeeze my eyes shut. Then I remember—my scars. They had disappeared. I fumble with the button and zipper on my jeans and shove them down to expose my thighs. My scars, my wonderful marks—

  They’re all there, standing in a row. Dark and deep, under the skin; fresh and hot red and cracked with scabs. I haven’t lost them after all. The relief hits me like a primal wind, staggers me back. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

  But I know they were gone, earlier. That my skin was smooth as cream.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I don’t know what to do with this new sense of wanting inside of me.

  It squeezes uncomfortably like the waistband of jeans that shrank in the dryer. (Like all of my clothes used to do.) It takes up room in my thoughts that I’d rather dedicate to hatred. I’ve lost my old familiar path, like it’s been blanketed in snow and I can’t distinguish it from other pathways through the trees.

  I don’t want to have this wanting. I don’t want to feel anything. Don’t want to think about anything except planning my revenge.

  But it tugs at me like I’m at the end of a leash. Miyu’s life was not my own—that seems abundantly clear to me now. But wherever—whenever—Miyu’s life exists, I need to get back to it. I don’t know why—she certainly doesn’t seem any better off than I. Her own father hates her; everyone I encountered as Miyu disrespected her. But I care about what happens to her. And this new hatred—this is a new and exciting path, and I want to walk it and wear it down.

  I’m restless through the afternoon, as Akiko rehearses for the festival. Restless as Mariko types away, drafting her tragic novel on her phone. As Kenji sketches me and everyone else. I peer over his shoulder, at the gaunt figure he draws, the dark hollows in her collarbones and wells beneath her cheeks. He’s made me into the spectre of death.

  But now there’s another world inside of me, too, and I won’t let him or anyone else catch a glimpse of it.

  * * *

  Sierra takes one look at Kenji and me sprawled on separate couches in the ryokan’s lounge when she arrives later in the afternoon and rolls her eyes. “You kids are pathetic.” She tosses her tote bag behind the counter and flops onto the couch beside me. Unlike the rest of the inn, this room is pretty modern, with a flat-screen television and a business station and concrete walls. “What’s the matter? Afraid to go out in a little rain?”

  Kenji doesn’t so much as glance up from the drawing he’s shading. “Aki is. She’s practicing in her room, so if you hear any cats screaming…”

  Sierra grins. “Yeah, I looked up her e-store between classes this morning.” Sierra squirts some hand sanitizer onto her palms and rubs it in vigorously. “Well, your e-store, I should say. The artwork and photographs … pretty amazing work.”

  “That’s all Kenji,” I say, at the same time he says, “You should see Rei’s real work.”

  Sierra’s eyebrows shoot up and she turns toward me. I shrink into the couch, wishing again that the earth could swallow me up like it did in my dreams last night. “I don’t—” My words feel lodged in my throat, like a piece of food I can’t swallow down. “I don’t do real work. I’m not an … artist, or anything.”

  “Your photographs sure looked like it to me.” Sierra shrugs. “The way you frame the shots, your sense of color and shadow…”

  “Aren’t they great?” Kenji says. “She should hone her talent more. I don’t know why she stopped.”

  “Well, Kuramagi’s a very scenic village. Seems like the ideal place to practice your skills.”

  “I don’t…” My mouth goes dry. “No. I can’t.”

  My head buzzes as I look from Sierra to Kenji. Why is he trying to talk me up? What does Sierra care about my art? I’m not an artist anymore. Chloe made sure of that. Maybe they’re setting me up to embarrass me, just like everyone else does.

  Kenji smiles back at me, like he’s trying to be nice. But I don’t need his kindness—or Sierra’s. I don’t want to be liked. I don’t want to be respected. I want—I want what happened to me this morning to be real.

  I know it’s not. I’m not crazy. I don’t know what it was, but I can’t get it out of my mind.

  “So.” Sierra starts playing with her rings, twisting them around her fingers. One looks like a raven or crow caught mid-flight, just a silver silhouette. Another one has the Zelda Triforce logo branded into the band. “You’re American. Right?”

  I glance at Kenji, but if she’s talking to him, he’s not paying attention. He flips the page on his sketchbook and starts the broad, loose strokes of something new.

  “Me? Um, yeah. Seattle born and raised.” I sink farther into the couch.

  “Seattle. God. That sounds so nice.” Sierra’s eyes lid, and she turns her face up, like she’s basking in the warmth of some dream. “I’m from Connecticut—at least, on my mom’s side. Dad’s family, though, they’re all military brats. Air force, navy. We lived in Okinawa for a few years before my folks got divorced.” Something tugs at her smooth lips on that last word. “Guess I just couldn’t stay away.”

  “You said you teach English, too?” I ask. Small talk always feels like forcing my way through a thorny trail. The more I try to pull the hooks off of me, the more snag me up. I have to deflect, deflect, keep other people talking about themselves. Don’t give them a chance to glimpse me at all.

  “Yeah, to a bunch of bratty junior high schoolers a few towns over. They don’t know I speak Japanese—don’t think I know when they talk shit about me.” She grins, a little bitterly. “It’s easy money, but I’m pretty much always either here or there. I’ve been to Tokyo maybe twice in a year and a half. I think I’m ready for a new adventure.”

  Adventure. I try to remember how it felt a year ago, before everything went sour with Chloe, when I looked forward to something new. I look at Sierra, the soft curve of her face, her smile so confident I think she could charm open any lock. Someone who still dreams of adventure. Someone who still believes there are new worlds to see. Someone who doesn’t want to sink into the dark tar of revenge and never find a way to climb out.

  “Where would you go?” I ask, throat raw. “If you could go anywhere.”

  She crosses her arms. “Oh, anywhere, really. I’d really love to live in Manhattan, I think, but travel
a lot. Learn even more languages, boss people around. I just always want to experience something new. There’s too much of the world out there for us not to live it, you know?” she asks, looking right at me.

  I don’t know. Before today, I didn’t want to experience anything ever again. But now I know Miyu. With all my familiar hatreds in a new puzzle, it feels like a first step.

  Like maybe I can actually see it through.

  “Well, anyway.” She looks away; only as she does so do I realize she’s deflating a little, like I’ve let her down. Well, welcome to life with Reiko. “My favorite show’s coming on. Stick around if you want—I’ll translate for you,” she adds with a grin.

  “Oh, you’ll like this show,” Kenji says, eyes flickering from his sketchbook to the screen and back. “Right up your alley.”

  He’s actually right—it’s an anime show about a kid who finds a notebook of names, and anytime he writes someone’s name in it, it makes them die. Deathnote, Sierra translates, though I understand the Japanese far better than I have any right to. What I wouldn’t give to have a book like that for myself. The names I’d write in it—Chloe and Hideki and my parents and half of the Saint Isaac’s students and administrators; Akiko and Mariko, too. And then, once I’d witnessed every last one of their deaths, gloated over their graves, I’d write my name in the book and be on my way.

  After the show is over and Sierra leaves, I ask Kenji what he was sketching. He’s depicted Sierra and me on the couch—her all brightness and bronze, loose, luxurious lines. But I’m shadow and iron, a thick-pressed hatch mark of darkness that sucks the life right out of the page. Well, maybe that is Reiko, a dense dead star collapsing in on herself. But I imagine Miyu as the white space around the sketch—a fresh, empty expanse for me to slip into.

  “She likes you,” Kenji tells me, a faint grin on his face. “Sierra.”

  I narrow my eyes. He’s wrong. And even if he weren’t—I can’t. I’m here for one thing only. Revenge. Yet my eye keeps tracing that white space. I can almost feel Miyu’s life surrounding me again, pulling me in. I wonder if I can return to it.

  “Come on.” I slide off the couch. “Let’s eat.”

  I’m ravenous tonight. At dinner I swallow down every bowl of tempura set before me, even the crunchy fried fish bones.

  “Are we going out again tonight?” Mariko asks while I inhale my food.

  “There’s nothing better to do,” Aki says with a shrug. But then her gaze narrows; she peers at Mariko from the side. “What’s it to you?”

  Mariko tugs her sweater sleeves down over her hands and ducks her head. “Well, I—I thought maybe we’d see those guys again. The ones who bought us the free drinks—”

  “Hatoshi. You like Hatoshi,” Aki says. Mariko’s cheeks go dark and she nods. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s so far out of your league. You’re better off with Junmei—the shorter one, remember? He seems like the kind of otaku who’d actually read a cell phone novel.”

  “Oh.” Mariko sets down her chopsticks. “Oh—yeah, you’re right. He was all right, too.”

  I no longer have room for pity inside of me. Mariko is worse than Aki. If she wants to snap toward Aki’s whims like a rubber band, who am I to feel sorry for her?

  “That club sucked. Not nearly enough cute girls,” Kazuo says. “Aside from Aki, of course.”

  Aki makes a show of rolling her eyes, but then both she and Kazuo glance toward Tadashi; he’s busy punching something into his phone. “They aren’t too bad. But they need my help. The aki * LIFE * rhythm brand. Let’s hand out cards this time. Direct them to the site.” Aki shoves away her barely touched plate of tempura. “Did we get any traffic bumps from last night?”

  “Not a huge bump, but it’s a start. Any luck on that interview, Tadashi?” Kazuo asks.

  Tadashi holds up one hand and continues typing.

  I hate you all, I want to say. I hope you claw each other’s eyes out. Keep causing one another pain. You all deserve it. And so much more.

  I stagger to my feet. “Have fun,” I tell the table. My head’s buzzing. A smile crosses my face, but I don’t quite know why.

  “Reiko?” Kenji asks. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Just a little tired,” I say. A total lie. I could scale the far mountain’s peak right now. I could leap from the ryokan’s roof and soar.

  I need to get back to Miyu’s life. The want inside of me is digging, digging in. I exit the dining room and slide the panel door shut behind me with such force it makes a sound like a rifle crack. I stalk down the polished wood hall of the dining wing, barely glancing out the row of windows that look onto the inner courtyard. I nearly slam into Sierra as she carries a tray of desserts toward another dining room.

  “Careful!” she cries, catching herself at the last minute.

  I don’t reply. I’m on a warpath for our upstairs room. The pressure in my head intensifies. I slide open the door and head to my camera, which I had tossed on my bed.

  When I pick up the camera bag, I see it. The stone I’d taken from the altar. I can’t believe I left it up here while I was downstairs all day.

  It gleams like something cold and condensed, nestled in a compartment of the bag. It looks like my hatred, compressed and fossilized. My heart settles into a steady resting beat as I dump the stone out onto my pallet, admiring the irregular shape. It’s like a comet, curving toward itself. A double-sided weapon—stabbing on one end and bludgeoning on the other.

  For the second time today, I pick up the stone.

  It nestles so neatly in my palm, the heavy round end in the meat of my hand while the tip curls up toward the base of my fingers. I barely have time to settle under the covers before it tugs me under, the drumbeat of my heart rattling under my skin—

  * * *

  I stand in a garden, on a covered walkway just outside the paneled walls. Water trickles down a slope of rocks at one end of the garden, pooling beneath a well-pruned ancient tree that curves, sheltering, over the pond. The sound of rushing water weaves together with a faint, chiming breeze until I can almost believe I am the only person alive in the world, and that the whole world is contained within these garden walls.

  I recognize this place: the interior courtyard of the honjin. I pad around for the hidden pockets of my kimono, which opens just beneath the obi wound around my waist. Sure enough, the stone is tucked inside.

  Relief and confusion clash within me. Yes, I want to be back here, but I still don’t understand how this can be. It seems too elaborate to be a hallucination or a dream. I haven’t stumbled on some reenactment for the cultural festival. Somehow, the stone is the key—it brought me to this world. Don’t lose the stone, Reiko, I chide myself.

  No—that isn’t quite right. I’m not Reiko anymore.

  I am Miyu.

  The world smells damp and freshly scrubbed from a hard rain, though I no longer hear the gentle patter of raindrops against the pond and the walkway’s roof. On the far side of the mountain valley, a dull, cloud-screened sun throbs and slices itself on the mountains’ edge. I move down the walkway onto the garden’s thick carpet of grass and stand for a moment, inhaling the wonderful scents. Then I glance up at the honjin. On the second floor, a silhouette against the window moves and backs away.

  Jiro and Goemon’s room. My face goes warm, and I hurry back inside.

  As soon as I slide the panel door closed, the aroma of sizzling meat washes over me. Yodo hunches over the cauldron in the center of the great room, preparing skewers. “Miyu!” she calls out, as soon as she catches sight of me. “Make yourself useful, impudent girl. Fetch us some herbs for the soup.”

  For a moment, hatred spikes through me, like a pinched nerve, but it also feels comforting. “Hai, Yodo-in.” I bow at the waist and leave my sandals at the door. I will not complain. This is where I wanted to be—in Miyu’s life. No ghost Chloe and Hideki and all the rest lurking just over my shoulder. No aki * LIFE * rhythm to peddle and perfect.

  A
ll the simple acts of Miyu’s daily life—finding the herb basket, donning my jacket—come to me so easily it is like I’ve always known them. I sling a woven basket into the crook of my arm and head for the streets of Kuramagi.

  I thought I had a decent sense of Kuramagi’s layout, but the subtle changes between this Kuramagi and the one I walked through this morning with Aki and the team are more disorienting than helpful. All the buildings look the same—a little grimier and more soot-stained, but otherwise, they are all where they belong with blue-and-white banners flapping in the breeze. It is the contents that confuse me—the tiny shop that sold funky ice-cream flavors (charcoal, green tea, chestnut) this morning is now a butcher’s shop, and a leathery old woman stands out front swatting a pig’s carcass with a towel to scatter flies. All the souvenir shops have faded into cloistered stands of indeterminate goods.

  As I walk down the street, I feel a strange magnetic push parting the crowds away from me. One man, a farmer with his hands soiled from the rice paddies, tugs his son up by the arm and steers him far from my path. Another little girl ducks her head at the sight of me and scampers to the other side of the street. A woman leans against her store’s wooden column curling her lip back and staring at me like a vicious crow.

  None of them say a word, but they don’t need to. The buzzing in my head swells and pops, and all the names they call me come gushing out: impure girl, fool, harlot, disgrace.

  My throat constricts. What have I done to offend them so? No, I remind myself harshly. What has Miyu done? Are we one and the same? Chloe used to ramble at length about reincarnation and past lives—am I living one now?

  I grasp for any memories, any clues as to why the townspeople are reacting to me this way, why I am so certain it is really me who is the target of their hate. Why can I remember only tiny details, nothing significant? Miyu’s life is like a puzzle being doled out to me piece by piece, the next one not available until I’ve snapped the previous one into the right place. When I try to remember who these villagers are, all I hear are the echoes of old words they’ve said to me, tossed out like slop from a cistern. Shameful. Idiot. Cursed.