Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Old Man and the House

- Old Man and the House -

I had lost track of how many times it had been. It must have been at least a week of the same treatment. There was no food, no water, only intravenous drips. I could feel my body weaken and lose fluid and weight, drying up like a raisin. Growing lighter and lighter until I could feel my physical form degrade into nothing. More things escaped me than I could keep count. It was as though they were squeezing paste out of a tube until the tube itself flattened and crumpled beyond recognition. In this state, I didn't want Shizuka to see me at all. Neither did she want me to see her. I had begun to like the darkness.

At the start, I still craved for her company. I was more anxious about her losing all recollection of me or the history we shared, whether objective or subjective, than my own pain. I relocated all remaining ability to think of her consciously, like a girlfriend at home left behind in war. But she began to feel more like an idol to whom I had no reach. How could such a pretty person exist? How could I ever have known her? The image of her slipped in and out of my mind, sometimes appearing intact, sometimes I can only imagine her hand or her hair. The more I tried, the more she fell apart, as though I'm trying to put together puzzle pieces on a vertical surface. I began to doubt that I even met her at some point. Every moment I could gather after recovering from each appointment - which was not much - was spent in desperation but slowly she slipped out of my grasp, for longer and longer periods of time. The only thing constant was the porcelain cup. But even that started to be replaced by something else. I could only see it from on top, like a capital Q. Eventually, I had to wonder why I recalled such a letter. And Shizuka became a lost artifact. In the end, we were returned to the same cell for some reason but we didn't talk much.

There was a session in the morning, one in the evening, in between, there might be one or two depending on the results and readings they receive. Each time, my whole body would freeze over, and my system shut down, just in anticipation of it. Then I would worry about death and dying. Surely I might die from all this, I would think, if only just from the pain. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

It occurred in stages. First, there would be the sensation of being buoyant in the middle of a sea for a long while, until a horrific sucking right in back of my head took its place, so powerful my brain might have been physically threaded out bit by bit, like spaghetti, like how the Egyptians would extract the brain during a mummification process. Aside from this mental agony, simultaneously, far away and in someone else's body it seemed, there was genuine physical pain, burning fire rushing through bloodstreams and convulsing seizing muscles. I could tell it was real because I found it hard to breathe and my pulse palpitating jaggedly. But yet I was more concerned with the sucking of my brain. It was a strange feeling, something rushing out from out of me, but I had no idea what it was. It felt like I was leaking air.

About four or five sessions later, it shifted, and it was no longer this sort of discomfort - it was much more concrete. Something within broke apart, with a sickening wet crack, and started to separate from my body. With the feeling of bones breaking and being skinned alive, a second self, something that contained everything I ever had, emerged, peeled itself off and walked away. It was visible, in some form. I could see the sinews and nerves, each strand of red muscle coming undone between us, unravelled and pulled until they snapped and dangled like torn rotting sails. Whether this was solely within my mind or I had already been transported into a simulation module, I couldn't tell. But I couldn't retain it no matter how much I had screamed and tried. I grabbed onto its arms, its legs, sometimes falling prostrate on the floor but its determination to walk away was unshakeable. It looked like me yet it was distorted, twisted looking. If I stared at it longer, the more painful it became; it looked more and more grotesque, limbs out of proportion, bones jutting at odd angles, muscles twisting, eyes wild and full of hatred - no, maybe I had hated it. I could no longer tell who was at fault. Maybe in its eyes, I was the anomaly.

In the beginning, when I tried to hold on to it, it would become a physical struggle. Every time the other would subdue and grapple me to the ground effortlessly, hitting me over and over in the face with bloody fists. Its face contorted in something like a mix between a snarl and Munch's painting, The Scream. At the same time, I felt I was the one actually contorting with a snarl. Gradually, after a few more sessions, it would make it so far away I couldn't make out its form anymore. Nor did I try to. It was gone from me, it seemed. I felt naked and empty, left writhing and searing with pain. The further it went, the more tormenting it was. Either way, this removal of the self became the most excruciating pain I had ever endured. The pain wasn't physical, but it engaged all the physical senses. Beyond that, it was spiritual, emotional and mental on all planes of my solitary existence. All at once. All my senses warped and mixed such that I could taste blood in my ears and was screaming in my own eyes. Consciousness faded in and out but each time I lost consciousness it would come roaring back like an enormous waterfall.

Then came the images, the memories, the emotions, the thoughts, all that I had ever experienced - it was strung out for this remnant of me in full detail in rows and rows, like a million television screens, playing at breakneck speeds in the distance. They were no longer part of me but only things I could watch. I saw myself, I saw Shizuka, I saw Shirayuki, all at once, flashing by. As if actors on set. And one by one, they were set on fire, shattered, people slaughtered brutally before my eyes, over and over. But they were only fictional. Shizuka who looked like Shizuka, Shirayuki who appeared to be Shirayuki, but it surely couldn't mean anything if they were killed in fiction. It was only fiction, I apparently surmised, it had nothing to do with me. But all the same, I could hear each of my thoughts at the time, occurring in multiple places altogether, like rising gales and hurricanes, loud and ceaseless, filling whatever space was around me, ricocheting and battering my head, mixing past, present and future, such that I couldn't distinguish what I was thinking anymore, because I was all of it, yet I was none. And after which, they were replaced slyly little by little with newly fabricated thoughts and memories. New images replicating it all in what seemed to be an accurate manner, yet, rewriting important details. My mother had killed my father, Shirayuki had died by a gun I had fired, Shizuka had slept with the Fox, I had personally beat a woman with a crowbar wearing a black suit, Shizuka was the one who jumped from the roof seven years ago, Morikawa is my dead father, Mrs. Kaneko is Shizuka's biological mother, I am Shirayuki and then Shirayuki stabs me in the gut, Shizuka is a tabby cat, Shirayuki becomes a rabbit, Mi Hyun appears on the yearbook, the high school is burned down, I was alone on top of Cosmo Clock 21, and I realized I had been alone all the time - one by one, the people in the images began to disappear, flickering out like glitches as if they had never existed before, and I started to forget who they had been. As they disappeared, I felt each organ in my physical body extracted, without anesthetics or proper tools. It was wrenched from their cavities with bare hands, blood spilling and flooding the ground and my entire vision became cloudy red, before I lost consciousness.

This carried on for another few days. I learned not to think, at least pretend I wasn't thinking, to clear my mind like Shizuka had once taught me to. That way, the pain was less if I had no attachment to what I was seeing. Perhaps I had advanced another stage, or regressed, as a more appropriate term, because at some point, one day, I suddenly entered a house. And all was still.