by Hiromi Goto
So very weak. The edges of the raging hunger roared, stronger than ever before. “Oh no,” he murmured, his voice high-pitched and slightly husky.
“Hurry!” Ilanna screamed. “Before your glueskin hardens! Take it back in!”
Gee pulled his lips inside his mouth, creating a tight seam. He slowly shook his head.
His mother staggered and crashed against the wall. Slid to the floor.
His mother. His father was beating her to death…. His father gripped his mother around the neck with one hand and forced her to her feet. He shoved her across the room and she stumbled over the empty baskets and skidded to the ground.
His mother was eerily silent.
Gee stared, his lips sealed shut, his dark eyes wide and uncertain. Why didn’t his mother fight back? he wondered. Why did she not speak?
Ilanna prodded Gee’s vomitus with her toes. It had cooled and hardened swiftly, like plaster of Paris. She screamed with rage. Batted the back of Gee’s head with Rilla’s muscular eel body. “You stupid rotten piece of SHIT!” she shrieked. “All wasted! Centuries and centuries of power! A millennium of growth! How could you let this happen? You don’t have rage enough to do what must be done!”
“What must be done?” Gee asked in his childish voice. His jeans were so loose they threatened to fall off his skinny hips and drop to his ankles. It would have been hilarious anywhere else…. Cracker would have laughed.
Succumbing to gravity, his jeans slithered to the ground. Gee stepped out of them, leaving his too-large sneakers behind as well. Hollow, he thought. Empty. He’d felt so powerfully hungry before…. Now the hunger felt like a creeping weakness, spreading from his belly, jittering inside his legs. He stood, barefoot, in the decrepit hovel as his father grabbed his mother by the hair. He watched them as he’d watch something on television. He felt nothing for them. It seemed unreal.
“After your father kills your mother, you must kill your father!” Ilanna screamed.
Gee held very still. His temples beat overloud, overslow, in time with his half-dead heart.
“That is how you first broke your original cycle,” Ilanna spat. “Your father beat your mother, and she birthed you as she lay dying. Even as you took your first breath of Life, your father murdered you. An eternity of birthing and dying, at the hands of your father, until you began to remember—through pain and death, through betrayal and evil, you remembered each time, growing, feeding your rage, until you were birthed, whole, come to term nourished on hate, powerful enough to finally kill the father who had killed you a million times before.”
Gee’s dark eyes were unfathomable.
Across the room, his mother groaned. His father was kicking her in the back. I am not a part of them, Gee thought. They are not a part of me.
“Now, they cycle without you. Unless you kill your father, you will never realize your true power, you will never be free. Destroying the destroyer determined your destiny! If you fail to kill your father now, you’ll be pulled back into a cycle that still seeks to return you into its pattern. Back into your mother once more. To begin a new age of suffering. Perpetual victim once again.”
Was it true? Gee wondered. His mother had both arms around her middle, even though she wasn’t pregnant with him, helpless to the nature of her original cycle.
His fa— That man. He kicked her and kicked her, with measured strength to prolong her suffering. Gee lowered his head so that his hank of hair covered his eyes.
To have sought his true parents—
To have to see them like this.
Black blood dripped from his mother’s scalp onto the floor. Her nose running, thick with mucus and blood. Her eyes dull, flat, dead from eternal suffering.
Do you think she feels nothing? asked the part of him that still remained a child. Do you really?
That man was killing her. Killing her on repeat for uncountable years. And he was Gee’s father? From death to death to death. Child of a murderer. Child of the murder victim. Gee gagged again, barely able to hold in his horror.
“Do it!” Ilanna screamed. “Kill him! You must kill him!”
The space around him torqued with excruciating slowness, sound stretching, twisting beyond words, beyond meaning. As if air were thicker than water and he was sinking, falling.
Gee clamped his hands over his ears. What was he supposed to do? If he killed his father, he became the monster Ilanna wanted. If he didn’t kill his father, he was doomed to die and die again.
His mother … she clasped both arms around the dim memory of her unborn baby and curled tightly onto her side. She guarded her baby as if it were her own life. His father was kneeling beside his mother’s prone body. His father was weeping, with hatred and a twisted, hideous love. “You see what you make me do!” he screamed as his hands began squeezing her throat.
She batted feebly against his wrists.
Gee stared down at the tableau. He is killing my mother….
Gee raised his skinny childish arms, the sleeves of his too-large T-shirt almost reaching his elbows. He wrapped his own fingers around his father’s neck, his glueskin elongating, stretching to form a perfect circle. He sealed the tips together.
Gee began to squeeze.
His father’s neck was sticky with sweat and filth, his skin loose with poverty. Half Life trembled in his throat like a sickly sparrow. The small flutter made something deep inside Gee quiver with delight. Small seams cracking, spreading outward, the darkness he’d held contained his entire life breaking apart to swamp his senses, his body, his mind.
Yes! It burst full bloom, like a carcass flower. YES! Gee tipped his head back and roared at the universe that had made everything so wrong.
“YES!” Ilanna screamed. “You are Mr. GLUESKIN!” She pealed with exultant laughter, shrieking with triumph. “My powerful, beautiful Mr. Glueskin returned to me!”
Free! Finally free! Glueskin shuddered with the intensity. Vibrating. His dark hair began floating, eddying around his pale face, rippling from root to the tips, the strands turning from black to white.
“I’m FREE!” Mr. Glueskin howled. “AWOOOOOOOOOOO!” His childish, monstrous laughter filled the air.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mr. Glueskin bent in close to whisper tenderly in his father’s ear, “Like father, like son.” He giggled. “It’s only right that a child surpasses the parent. Don’t you think, Father? Isn’t that every parent’s wish?”
His father, still choking his own wife, could not turn to see his attacker.
“It should be,” Mr. Glueskin gritted.
His father’s grip around his wife’s neck slackened as he struggled for air. She fell from his hold onto the hard dirt floor. He half-turned his body to meet the eyes of the one who strangled him….
“Oh, Father,” Mr. Glueskin cried out, with operatic pathos. “Only now do you see me. Only now you cast eyes upon your son.” He smiled too wide, his childish lips stretched to his ears, his dark eyes glinting like black marbles. “In death truth is born.”
His father began to flail desperately as his Half Life was slowly squeezed from him. Mr. Glueskin was faintly aware that his mother had rolled to her side. She was coughing. She was yet Half Living. Does it alter my destiny? he carelessly wondered.
His father’s eyes were beginning to bulge, black blood vessels spreading inside the whites.
“Death of the father,” Mr. Glueskin crooned. “Birth of the son….”
“Stop it, Gee!” a girl’s voice cried.
Pain seared. Razor-sharp. Across the back of his thighs. Startled, Glueskin dropped his hands from his father’s crumpling neck. The man slowly pitched, face down, upon the ground. He began whooping for air.
Mr. Glueskin stood still for several seconds, as if confused.
“No!” Ilanna shrieked. “No! No! Nooo! Finish it! Finish killing him off, you idiot!”
Mr. Glueskin slowly shook his head. Who had dared to attack him?
“You pathetic, hopeless fool,” a gritty voice
rose from the ground. “I told her it was a waste of time.” White Cat sat calmly. The cat’s tail slowly twitched from side to side. His grey eyes were narrowed in distaste.
Mr. Glueskin’s mother had curled up into a fetal position. Still half alive. His father was on his hands and knees, his head hanging, gasping for air.
White Cat flicked one paw as if trying to shake off something dirty. “I send you to seek your past, and you devolve to this.”
White rage bulged inside Mr. Glueskin’s chest. “HOW IS IT MY FAULT THAT I COME FROM THIS?” he screamed. “I DIDN’T ASK FOR ANY OF IT!”
White Cat’s voice was cold. Unrelenting. “There is no fault! No one has control over the circumstances of their birth. Can you not see this? You have forgotten too quickly what I have told you: your past does not have to become your future!”
Mr. Glueskin began to laugh, from deep within his belly. The sound, the fury, too dark, too awful, coming from his childish face. His preternaturally white hair. “You would deny me my birthright?” he asked. “You would deny me my legacy?”
“No, Gee.” It was Cracker. Supported by Karu’s arm, she stumbled into the circle of firelight that shone fitfully from the middle of the roundhouse. They were both wretched with exhaustion, though the bird man’s posture remained straight and proud.
Cracker clutched Lilla in one hand. The eel slowly wove from side to side, hissing softly.
The eel—she must have led them back to him. Why? It was too late. Too late.
“You don’t have to kill him.” Cracker’s voice was hoarse. “Leave them to their Half Lives. Now you know. You’ve seen them. We can’t do anything to make them change. Remember? Like my sister…. It’s too late for them. We can go home now.”
Mr. Glueskin smiled at the humanity shining from Cracker’s golden eyes.
“So full of care. So much feeling,” he admired. “As if anything actually matters. Do you think our lives matter? Look at this place! Even if we go back, we’ll only end up in Half World. And maybe your worst is yet to come. Maybe your worst isn’t failing your sister.”
Cracker cried out as if he’d stabbed her.
“What if your worst is far worse than you’ve already experienced?” Mr. Glueskin gloated.
Ilanna laughed at the look on Cracker’s face. “That’s right, stupid child!” she hissed. “So naive. Still having faith in Life, in hope. Freedom comes when we have no ties to Life, when we’ve killed hope!”
“Yessssss.” Mr. Glueskin smiled wide, his grin stretching from ear to ear. “Hope is the pathetic dream to which the desperate cling. Mewling. Whimpering. Pathetic!” As if their Lives mattered! It was charming, really. After he was done with his father, he’d have to eat Cracker up, all by himself! He wasn’t sharing with Ilanna, no! If the Half World rats felt so delicious, imagine how he’d feel when he consumed what was left of Cracker’s Life! White drool began pooling from his mouth and a bead dribbled past his lips to hang, suspended, from a long thin thread.
His father was shambling toward his wife with his hands outstretched, still caught in his recurring nightmare, knowing nothing else. His mother had only managed to push herself to her hands and knees.
“Don’t you feel sorry for them?” Cracker whispered. “They’re stuck like this, suffering. Even your father….”
Did he pity them? Mr. Glueskin wondered. He supposed a part of him did…. A terrible smile began spreading across his face. But feeling pity didn’t mean it stopped you from killing. Sometimes, killing was the most compassionate thing to do….
“Isn’t it such an archetypical act—to kill one’s father?” Mr. Glueskin asked, conversationally. “Our English teacher, Ms. Park, would agree. I’ll write a sonnet about it afterward—no, a tragic play. A musical! I’ll hold auditions at the lobby of the Mirages Hotel. It’s going to be a Half World hit production! But first things first.” He turned tenderly toward his father.
Something slammed into the square of his back. Air knocked out of his lungs. He was so much smaller, lighter than before that he staggered forward, crashing into his father. His father seemed not to notice. Dark eyes blank, he was reaching out his gnarled and filthy hands once more.
Mr. Glueskin turned, incredulous. Who would dare try to impede him?
White Cat stood with his back arched, fur standing on end, making him twice his already formidable size. “Control yourself!” he hissed. “If not for your sake, then for the sake of your popo!”
“Popo!” Mr. Glueskin cried. “POPO!” he bellowed. “POPO IS NOT HERE! POPO CANNOT SAVE ME NOW!” His chameleon tongue snapped out from between his elastic lips.
White Cat leapt, twisting through the air to avoid the sticky, bulbous tip and landing on his paws metres away.
Gee’s tongue whipped back into his mouth only to lash out again.
“I’ll deal with the cat!” Ilanna snarled. “Finish your father!”
Rilla shot to the end of her length, snapping her terrible jaws. She ripped out a clump of fur and White Cat yowled with rage.
Karu squawked as he moved toward Ilanna. She whipped her head around, mouth wide open. Her eel tongue shot out, straight for Karu’s eye.
So noisy, Mr. Glueskin thought. So very calamitously busy. Distracting him from the most important thing! Smiling, he turned toward his appalling father. Mr. Glueskin tapped his finger upon his chin. Instead of throttling his father first, perhaps he should just eat him up instead! No need to waste his Half Life. Not a nutritious starter, perhaps, but so richly symbolic! Ms. Park would find it meaningful, like a Greek myth. “Ahhhh, Ms. Park,” Mr. Glueskin murmured, “one day, you too will have your tragedy in Half World.” He smiled and began unhinging his jaw, his mouth dropping, gaping wide, down to his chest, like a gulper eel.
A weight clamped upon his back.
Two arms encircled his upper arms and clutched at his chest, two legs wrapped around his upper thighs. Cracker. Leapt onto his back. Because he had shrunk in size, the sudden weight almost threw him face down, but he staggered at the last minute and regained his balance.
“You can still stop,” Cracker whispered in his ear. “It’s not too late, Gee.”
Cracker was latched onto him like the Japanese ghost story. She clung, tight as a tick, and her weight seemed to grow. His knees wobbled.
“You don’t have to stay on this path. You can have a better life.”
Mr. Glueskin frowned, even as he spun to the left, to the right, to dislodge the girl on his back. “Gee is dead, stupid girl. And there are no paths in Half World. There are only cycles! You can’t change a cycle!” Unable to weaken her grip on him, Mr. Glueskin began elongating his arms, noodling them backward. They looped around to come up behind Cracker’s back.
“That’s right!” Ilanna shrieked. “Don’t listen to her! Your true cycle is the one that includes the death of your father by your hands!” Her words ended in a scream as Karu used his beak to rip Rilla out of her shoulder socket.
“She lies,” White Cat said calmly. He sat beside the dying fire, somehow still managing to look clean. “Your original cycle contained your death, not your father’s. You tore free from your Half World cycle only by becoming a murderer.”
Mr. Glueskin went very still.
The original cycle…. His original cycle, ended in his death. As a baby newly born, only to die…. Yes, that’s what Ilanna had said. He’d been trapped in this unfair cycle, never to live, only to die and die and die again. Until his rage and fury grew strong enough to kill the killer. In order to have a better Half Life, he had to kill. That was the lot that had been given to him. His fate. His destiny.
He deserved to live. Everyone deserved to live. It WAS NOT HIS FAULT!
“Don’t do this,” Cracker whispered. Her hoarse voice was full of tenderness. “Let’s just turn around and go home. It will be okay. We can make it okay, somehow.”
Realization was a sickly toxic light, the morning after the bomb had exploded.
Cracker was wrong. He c
ould not go back to the Realm of Flesh. His cycle was here, in Half World. Melanie had taken him out of Half World, out of sequence, out of sync…. It was the wrong time for him to be in the Realm of Flesh. Popo should have been smart enough to realize! How could they have done this to him? It would have been better not to know that there was a better life, only to have it taken away….
Love had made Popo stupid. Mr. Glueskin shook his head. It had made him stupid. Stupid and weak. No longer. He glanced down at Cracker’s hands that gripped so tightly at his chest. As if she would never let him go. Mr. Glueskin’s lips trembled. It was so very clear.
“Did you come back for me because of your feelings of loyalty and affection?” Mr. Glueskin asked.
“Yes!” Cracker cried, the pitch of her voice rising with hope. “We came to Half World together. You helped me find my sister. And now we’ve discovered your past history. We can go home now. I’m not going back without you.”
Mr. Glueskin smiled tenderly, though Cracker couldn’t see him. “Let me liberate you from these feelings,” he said gently, his obscenely noodled arms circling entirely around her so that the sticky pads of his fingers settled upon her neck from behind. Mr. Glueskin’s expression was dreamy, and white stringy tears began dribbling down his face as he sealed his fingers into a single thick strand.
Instinctively, Cracker tried to prise her fingers beneath the tightening elastic band around her throat.
Mr. Glueskin raised his arms high, lifting the struggling girl above his head, her legs vainly kicking the air.
A harsh cry escaped Karu’s beak when he caught sight of Cracker. He held Ilanna from behind as she whipped her head from side to side, far enough for eel tongue to snake back and bite the bird man’s face. Puffs of small feathers whirled in the disturbed air.
Rilla chased White Cat, followed closely by Lilla. White Cat yowled. In the twisted knot of black against white it was impossible to tell which eel was which. They rolled about the filthy floor in their desperate struggle.
“Dirty, dirty,” White Cat’s voice could be heard growling.