Felled by Ark

by Aaron Lee

  ***

  It felt like late afternoon. I had lobbed a few more cocktails in buildings as I made my way to Shiba Park and now I was sitting, marking locations in my map book where I have set fires. I thumbed past to Bunkyo ward and a picture of my brother fell out of the book. He was about twelve years old in the shot, and leaning on a railing looking out over the outside courtyard of a hotel. My mom must have taken the shot from far away with a telephoto lens because it looked like he hadn't noticed her. He looked sadder and more tired than any twelve year old had a right to be. All of us remember having such a good time on the trip, laughing at mom as she mispronounced words on the menu from Pizza Hut, yelling on rides at Disney and just enjoying a vacation together. But in all of the pictures we looked distant and sad, and we didn't smile in a single one. Did the camera just snap us at moments when we weren't smiling? Or had our memories lied, my father's death showing on our faces like a bloodstain that wouldn't quite wash away? I put the picture in my backpack, not sure why I kept it all these years, but absolutely unable to get rid of it.

  I kept thinking about going back to my house, but I doubted I could bring myself to walk through the door. Too many memories there, too many things she touched and wore. It'd be like claustrophobia. The walls of memories all closing in, the years of happiness suddenly compressed to a weight that would knock me down and crush me lifeless. Someday, maybe before I got myself killed, I wanted to go back for some pictures. I would want them someday. I still had a picture of Airi in my wallet, taken when we were dating. I hadn't looked at it since before the hospital, but it made me feel better knowing it was there. Airi would have been furious if she knew I wanted to give up after all this was over, but what else was I supposed to do? I didn't think I could kill myself, but I couldn't bear the thought of walking around for the rest of my life in this ghost town metropolis, trying to find something to do. I suddenly wondered if I had died before all this happened, would they have laid me out in a white kimono? Or would it be a suit, because I'm not Japanese? The thoughts blurred out the dead world in the background until I saw something that brought it all back into sharp focus. I saw what looked like blue spray paint on the sidewalk a block away.

  It was impossible to tell for sure, but I couldn't help but think that this message was spray-painted by the same person who did the bookstore in Kanda. This time it said “Look for old buildings. They come out of those first”. This was written in Japanese in front the charred husk of what was probably an old-fashioned Japanese sweets store given the barely legible sign. I remembered seeing it on TV, that show where some famous person takes a train line through Tokyo and gets off at various stations, wandering around and finding interesting stores and sights. Through the crumbled storefront I saw a similar smooth hemispherical depression in the floor. I could have argued with the old buildings part of the message, because I have only seen them come out of fairly new ones, but the arsonist who burnt this place obviously knew what he was talking about. This person had a system, unlike me, just setting things on fire at random out of anger and frustration. I wanted to feel some hope from that, knowing that there was someone out there trying to fight back, but I couldn't. It just made me want to hide. Old buildings. I thought of the neighborhood near my old house, whole streets full of them, and I could work my way toward even older buildings in Asakusa from there.