He walked slowly out onto the terrace. His feet clacked against the wood. I watched him slump down onto the bench. It was the same artless gesture I had seen so often back then, the way he walked over and sat there. He used to welcome me home from school, chat with Yoji beside him about something or other. Sometimes, he would sit there with me, holding my hand amiably, and talk about school. I’d thought that he alone would never change.
He looked back at me and waved innocently. His lips moved in the shape of “Goodbye.”
The eastern sky gradually grew brighter.
I stood up and slowly went out onto the terrace. Mustah looked up at me in surprise. I sat down heavily next to him, like I so often had when I came home from school.
“Let me be here too. Please, Mustah.”
Hey. It’s okay, right? My Bamboo. Please.
He nodded like he had no choice. “But, like, it won’t look too good, y’know? I mean, I am going to burn.”
Shivering, I remembered that burning, shrinking face. “I know.”
“You do…? Oh, that’s right!”
“I want to be with you. Um, okay, I…”
I’ve always loved you. Ever since I was ten years old. The truth is, I never wanted to let anyone else have you. Not a man, not a woman, not Yoji, not some stranger. No one but me.
Half a century has passed since then, and now here I am, finally alone with you.
But I couldn’t put that into words. Even now, at this age, my feelings for Mustah were too hot, too chaotic. Love, sadness, hatred, pain, and yet so blessed. Alive, it was like my own small face was crumpling, burning with the heat of an invisible love.
Silently, I leaned my head on his shoulder. And then hurriedly pulled it up again. I was worried that I might put that troubled look back on his face. But when I glanced at his profile, he was smiling, carefree. I was relieved from the bottom of my heart.
“Hey. Hey, Mustah?”
“What? Are you a little kid now?”
“…I’ll get to see you again soon, right?”
Right…Mustah. In that place. In the peaceful sky. We get to see all the people who’ve gone before us again, right?
Mustah. Yoji. My sister. Mr. Yu. My wife. My son. My first love. Niita. All the people I’d loved.
And then I was sure I’d be able to say all the things I never could before. Apologies, words of love, appreciation. Tell them how I’d missed them. It wouldn’t be too late for anything. There’d be no sin I couldn’t atone for. Because I’d get to see them again.
At some point, the time came for each of those flames to go out. And what if, on that day, they flew into the peaceful sky…
Now, with the passage of time, I wanted to believe that. Otherwise, it was too much to have lost. I loved the things I’d lost too much. In the past, and now too, I kept losing people.
Mustah finally grinned at me. “I guess so! We’ll meet again!”
“Mustah, Mustah, Mustah!” I simply said his name.
“Ha ha!” He laughed fondly, slowly stroking my hair. “So we’ll say goodbye for a little while until then. Kyo, really, thank you. For coming to us. For making me and Yoji so happy. For showing us your wonderful flame. For warming up our frozen days. For calling me your Bamboo. Okay, you take care, Kyo, hon. I love you too, y’know. Whatever happens, you’re my son, my best friend, my lover, y’know.”
Dawn began to break.
“So, basically, you were just one human being, y’know?”
“Mustah. Mustah, I love you!” I finally said it.
He laughed delightedly. “Me too, Kyo!”
At last, the sun rose up over the horizon onto the water.
Peach
It was me. I did it.
Little old me.
No one knows.
(Since then. A hundred years.)
The fog’s thick tonight. A good night for hunting!
I stood atop the telephone pole on one leg and looked down on the road below. The flashing lights. The downtown back alleys. Everything stained and sooty.
A golden cat raced by, a stray. It was of a foreign breed and had probably been pretty expensive. A man and a woman strolled past it from the other direction. A sleepy-looking middle-aged man and a skinnyish girl wearing glasses. The man was saying something. The girl nodded at the right moment and lifted her eyes my way for a second. A winter wind blew and set her scarf flapping uneasily.
That gust pushed the fog away, and the moonlight from above threw me into sharp relief on top of the telephone pole—a girl standing on one leg, a scarecrow. I winked and waved saucily with my right hand at the girl below. I didn’t have a left arm, so the sleeve of my coat fluttered emptily.
When her eyes found me, Momo—“peach”—nodded with what looked like relief. Her lips moved. Ma. Ri. Ka.
The gusts of air carried with them the hustle and bustle of the main street, the flirting lilts of the girls, the rough singsong of the drunks. Pounding music wound its way toward us. The honking of an irritated driver.
I’m jumping! The wind roared in my ears. Sudden drop! Night bird style! I had been living for more than a hundred years as a Bamboo, so I was used to this by now.
From behind, I swept down toward the strange man walking alongside Momo. Going into stealth mode, even my breath subsonic, I flew in at a low altitude, almost crawling forward, my belly scraping air. My long black hair flew up like a mane around me. The hem of my trailing black coat flapped and fluttered, the cloak of the god of death herself.
“…Having lived this long, I think human beings…life is a series of choices…I don’t regret anything…But…sometimes, well.” The man was speaking passionately about something.
I drew in quite close, nodding slyly with a serious look on my face. Seeing me, Momo sneered secretly from behind her black-framed glasses. A small smile, malicious and mischievous, but somehow timid.
“I have no regrets, but…I guess it was just after I turned forty. I started thinking that life gets revenge on you for the choices you made in the past. Like, if you hadn’t done this that time, it would’ve turned out like this, you know? Every day was like that.”
“You said before,” Momo replied, in a quiet voice, “that you didn’t go out with anyone in high school.”
“Yeah. I thought I was fine with that. But now, that choice is really getting its revenge. Which is why I’m doing this with a young girl like you,” he said, turning back toward Momo.
And then, in the blink of an eye, a third head between their two. He finally noticed my presence and took a sharp breath. Whatever else I might be, I’m Bamboo, so I offered up a creepy smile, very aware of my monstrous appearance.
The man stared at me, long and hard. He then looked at Momo, comparing my face with her suddenly demure look. “Ha?” He let out a shallow breath.
I’m way cuter than Momo. My eyes are wide in the center, round, with a particularly sharp outline. Before all this happened to me, I was probably not bad looking. But now the tip of my nose had been shaved into a pointed blade, two small holes peeking out from below, and when the wind picked my hair up, you could see my left ear had also been cut off, gone forever. My left arm had been ripped off too. I don’t show up in mirrors, so I haven’t seen myself in a while, but when I show myself like this, pretty much everyone…
“Unh! Aaaaaaaah!”
…screams like that, so I’m fairly certain I’m pretty frightening now. Although Momo seemed fine with the way I looked. Maybe she was just used to it, though.
The man pitched forward, almost falling in his attempt at escape. I watched him go, still hovering about twenty centimeters off the ground. I mean, this kind of thrill’s the whole point of the hunt! Beside me, Momo yawned very deliberately as if to make that point. I guess it was already time for her to go to bed. That yawn was basically like she was telling me
not to have fun with this, to just hurry up. So I’d better get to it, then.
I kicked at the air and flew. I stretched out my right arm and left leg. Sudden ascent! And then sudden descent, spinning at high speed, tumbling! Thwk! I landed in front of the running man, and I slowly looked back at him, the hem of my long coat flapping.
The man looked even more surprised, almost like a small child, an innocent. His face said he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He believed that nothing bad could ever happen to him.
A hundred years since then. And I’ll never get used to seeing it. I can’t help but get excited. The look on his face. In his eyes. Dear God. It’s like I’ll never be able to tear my eyes away from this. A hundred years, and still…
I sprang up and perched like a bird on his solid shoulder. I chopped my heel into the back of his neck, bringing it down like a judge’s gavel. The man crumpled to the ground with a thud.
The ephemeral flickering of the electric lights. The alley of the shopping district. The foggy night. Cold. Cold. Very.
Momo approached sluggishly, took the man’s wrist, stuck the needle in, almost bored with the familiarity of the act, and drew out the arterial blood. The syringe comically large, like our bodies had gotten smaller.
The man grew pale. “Unnh,” he groaned, regaining consciousness. “W-why kill me? If it’s my wallet…take it!”
“Yes. Naturally, we’ll also be accepting your wallet,” Momo said, calmly. She was so collected, a doctor in the making.
“What…are you doing?”
“Well, we’re taking your blood.”
“…What?”
“Five hundred milliliters.”
“W-why?”
“Oh, we simply must have it,” Momo said, giggling softly. She was having fun, a mischievous child up to no good. Adopting a singsong tone, she chanted, “Weee are a paaaair of wannabeeeee gods of death. That. Is. Why!”
I heard quiet footsteps from a ways off. Men, from the sounds of it. Several of them. Young voices laughing. Carefree, fooling around. Maybe they were drunk.
I met Momo’s eyes, and we nodded to one another. She pulled the heavy syringe up and tossed it into the rucksack on her back. A motion she, too, was used to now. The rucksack sank heavily and bit into her overly slender shoulders, almost cruelly.
Momo stood up and looked down on the man. “Catch! And…”
“Release!” I finished.
My voice was husky and old, in stark opposition with my face, totally different from Momo’s vibrant, youthful tones. Here alone, my age showed through. After all, I’d made it past the hundred-year mark and was still alive. The same as always. Forever immature.
The men turned the corner and came into view. Kicking at the air with my right foot, I planted my left foot hard on the man’s back. It was like I was kicking a soccer ball toward the goal. His body danced up into space. I held Momo on one side with my right arm, and she suddenly giggled soundlessly—a childish coolness to show that she wouldn’t be impressed no matter what she saw. Her heart wouldn’t be moved; she had decided life was nothing. Swallowed up by the fog, we—a pair of would-be gods of death—disappeared.
The men noticed the human figure on the ground and stopped. One of them looked up our way. Momo shuddered in my arm, and I panicked, ascending rapidly. To space! Cold, cold space. Dark blue. The chill air of night crept into the two caves of my sculpted nose, and a single tear spilled from my eyes.
We rested briefly on the roof of an old mixed-use building, alighting like little birds. Momo pulled the heavy syringe out of her rucksack and handed it to me ever so carefully. Then she sat formally on her knees and set out for herself a triangle sandwich and a can of coffee purchased at a convenience store.
Supper alone, together. A night like any other. I relaxed and sat down, cross-legged, before drinking the blood. I’m an elderly Bamboo, after all. I can’t keep going the way I used to.
“Hey. We should get going, you know?”
The words came at me, and I gasped. A serious chunk of time had gone by. I staggered to my feet.
Momo, always the considerate one, decided we should take the stairs down to the ground instead of flying. Each floor had a bar on it, and the laughter and flirtations of the people inside wafted out to us in the stairwell, riding a wave of music.
Momo hung her head sadly. We couldn’t go through any of the doors. I mean, no one was waiting for us inside or anything.
“What should we do, Marika?” she asked, once we were outside again.
“What do you want to do?”
“Huh? It’s up to you. You’re the boss of me, after all.”
“Okay, then. How ’bout we head out to a different town?” I grinned as I showed her the wallet I’d taken from the man’s coat pocket.
The tension drained out of her. She looked relieved somehow.
“What? What’s up?”
“You’ll take me, right, Marika? However far away, wherever you go. You’ll take me, right?”
“Of course.” I was baffled. “What’s going on in your head, Momo? For starters, how would I lure my prey without you? I keep telling you, I need you too.”
“Good.” Momo started walking again, swaggering a little now.
I staggered after her, hiding my nose under a surgical mask, the kind you wear when you have a cold. Turning toward the station, we held hands as we walked down the main road, the seductive voices of women flirting and the music from the various bars growing louder, vying to drown the other out.
Momo’s been with me for the last six months. Before she came along, I’d been alone for a while.
Long hidden away in a mountainous region of China, Bamboo are monsters of the giant grass, botanical vampires. We live by drinking human blood. After a time, those original Bamboo were driven out of their idyllic, isolated village deep in the mountains, the kind of place found in the old Chinese fable “Peach Blossom Spring,” and criminals and whatnot were among the Bamboo who eventually drifted all the way to this island country. They hid themselves here and there, occasionally attacking humans.
When I was fifteen, a Bamboo killed my family, but he didn’t quite manage to finish me off, and I was the only one to live, infected as one of them. It’d been nearly a hundred years since then. Now I was a Bamboo through and through. A Bamboo uncomfortable with other Bamboo. A monster all alone.
It was almost a coincidence that I met Momo. I wanted to light some incense for a friend who’d died—a human—so I went to the wake. He and I went way back; he’s the reason I look the way I do now, scarred within an inch of my life. His house was in some impoverished and corrupt village at the tip of a certain peninsula. When I got there, I found his adopted daughter—a high school girl he’d taken in and raised as best he could—huddled up in one corner of the room, sobbing pathetically, naked, her body covered in bites, cuts, and traces of blood.
Momo.
At the time, I’d never even imagined we’d become close. I simply looked at her out of the corner of my eye and silently lit the incense. In that town, danger was a matter of course; it was unthinkable that a child or a girl of marriageable age could live there without anyone in her corner. And now that Momo’s adoptive father was dead, she needed someone to watch out for her sooner rather than later. I rolled my eyes. That’s just how it was in that town.
I’d flown into the room, so Momo was naturally surprised. She kept her eyes on me through her tears.
“Um!” When I moved to leave, a trembling voice called out as if to stop me. “Are you a Bamboo?”
“You know the Bamboo?” I looked back, and Momo was smiling, almost flirtatiously, despite the fact that she’d been crying up until that moment.
Her parents had never been a part of her life, and an incident in the house that had taken her in left Momo alive, a
nd alone, and then scooped up by another Bamboo man. This Bamboo had then asked a human he trusted to become her adoptive father. So she had made it this far in life because there were people of all kinds helping her. Left to her own devices, Momo would have died long ago.
Momo was weak. And because she was weak, she was pretty good at latching on to people who appeared to be strong. She followed me silently, without so much as a glance back at the home of the adoptive father who had done so much for her.
Our situations were oddly similar, and we were about the same age in appearance. When she started to walk beside me, I got the feeling we might get along. It was the first time I’d had a girl by my side, but I got used to it pretty quick.
And now it had already been six months.
We got on the night bus and huddled together in a ball in a corner seat.
“Go to sleep, Momo!”
Momo nodded. When she was sleepy, she was as docile as a child. She took off her glasses and put them in the pocket of her gray duffle coat.
Our seat was dark. The bus was full but quiet, like all the other passengers were ghosts. A bus that ferried the dead.
Cold. Cold. Me and my body that generated no warmth. And hadn’t for a hundred years now. Me, a girl who had died ages ago that night. A member of the walking dead. Momo fell back in the seat as if she were the dead one. Her warmth came through to me, and I shivered.
Momo.
Momo was alive. She was living, a life always right beside me. Maybe that made me happy, but being happy was dangerous.
“Hey, Marika?”
Daybreak was approaching. I could hear the soft breathing and snores of the people asleep on the bus. They slept easily, unaware of the Bamboo in their midst. The red taillights of the cars in front of us flickered like will-o’-the-wisps. It was still chilly inside the bus.
“Marika?”
“Hmm?”
A Small Charred Face Page 12