The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[十九] VAMPIRISM!

Dazai thinks about you when he walks out of the shipping container, where it was once his humble abode, coming home from a long day of existential dread and suicide attempts and into the dull arms of the mattress.

He wondered how he slept on such a dingy, smelly thing. It was so thin that one could feel the cold, cold floor on their back.

He thought you were some sort of vampire, some sort of beast that was revived after being in hiding for so long. Vampirism is when a corpse comes to life and drinks blood from long, pointed fangs—wasn't that just you in a nutshell? You, deprived of what it means to be a human being but a killer, a deadman walking, shedding blood and having it practically swimming around in your eyes?

'Vampires don't have reflections,' Dazai thinks to himself. He wondered what you saw when you looked at yourself in the mirror. Would you see what could have beens, what couldn't have beens, what should have been? Would you see your child self, crying for being the Judas of the Twelve Disciples to Odasaku's children? Would you see your child self, in the aftermaths of rape, swollen and battered and bruised? Would you recognize you were rather an object than a person? Would you see the ominous hysteria rising in your voice whenever you spoke about Mori and his waning devotion to you?

Re: Vampires don't have reflections. There was this idea that Dazai had of you that monsters like yourself didn't have reflections in a mirror. And it was not that monsters did not have a reflection, but they were once human beings, denied access to any reflections of themselves. And growing up under the treacherous, stinging hands of Mori Ougai, you probably felt like a monster in some ways. You probably didn't see yourself reflected at all. The caresses that he had inflicted upon you were hieroglyphics of destruction, rendering you completely unreadable and undecipherable. You were wearing a mask of death, on survival mode, constantly living another day through excruciating effort in a black, black world, with all the colours fading away.

Smoking merely assuaged that effort by a teeny bit.

You were an interesting thing, he had to admit. He had learned to forgive you for the murders of those children and indirectly, Odasaku, knowing that you were just a child, younger than him, desperately seeking love from someone who did not see past your delicate age. You weren't fundamentally evil—you were simply made that way. And forgiving was difficult—that's why they had whole religions and confessional booths with dedicated priests. But he's learned to let go, accept it as it is, and let himself free from the cycle of revenge and hatred.

He would have to apologise for punching your nose in one day.

But he disagreed with your existence. Now that he was on the side that saved people, he could see, with hallucinational lucidity, how corrupted and dirty you were. You were a walking blood stain, closed off and standing by the edge of a crowd, staring in with the sad, sad eyes of a bloodhound. You were in the margins, marginality your forte from having been abused for so many years that you have learned how to detach yourself from the situation at hand. But he would have to tell you one day that the space of marginality was also a space of resistance—not as a site where one gives in and loses hope, but stays in and clings onto because it nourishes them to resist the mundanity of a normal life. It offered radical, new worlds from living from a different perspective.

But he wondered if you could look at the world like that after years of constant blindness and gaslighting—being told that what you were seeing was wrong and that the true reality lay in Mori's hands. You were essentially moulding clay, and the final piece had set into stone. To change you was akin to teaching a sparrow a new song, when it only knows one barbaric song, strange and dark.

In his heart he grew a feeling akin to almost...well, pity. How you were the example of Dolores in a Humbertian world, how you were the worst thing that could have possibly happened to a young girl: Parentless, raped, and ultimately, abandoned. He supposed your mind was a maelstrom of regret and pain, your memories a monster. You may forget, but your hallucinations, as you had said, didn't. You think you have a memory, but it is reversed; the memory has you. There is no way around it.

There was no way around it: You were a monster. Everything about you constituted as a monster.