Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

The Start of All Things

I take her to the clearing one day for a change and up its hill under an afternoon sun. The sun has just passed its zenith and hangs like an over-inflated balloon. As before, the sky is startlingly clear and blue, but the air is much hotter, the beginning of summer. There's a strong breeze, but it does nothing to stifle the heat. It's like a blow dryer turned on full blast. Sweat wets our brow yet all around the grass seems to be entirely unaffected, vibrant green overly saturated. The tree tops stretch out towards the horizon, in this strangely flat way. As if a giant printing press had mass-reproduced the image. We hear the cicadas whine and birds dart by above. Weeds rustle. Trees swell and billow. But in this kind of viscous temperature, everything takes on a sluggish pace and sound travels slower, as if the world is retreating to a safe distance away. When I ask if she recalls this place, she tells me she isn't sure. There's a feeling, she says, but like the faded markings on an ancient ruin with no context.

"Everything I once knew, seems to recede away. At nights, I cry and wake up from nightmares I never knew I could have, and when I wake up, I don't know what it had been. And I don't know who I am."

Her voice fades away in the wind.

Then she shakes her head. "I know what's happening. I know I'm dying."

"You'll never die to me."

"You'll forget everything too. The Free Energy current is still there, no matter where we go. Even though here, we are free from physical repressive state apparatuses and cyclic performance, it's all like remote control, invisible wires or something, there's always something there to remind us we are connected to something more powerful than us. We had a little delay, a minor detour for them, like a vacation to someplace far but the System naturally owns us. The flow of the universe takes away everything little by little."

I say nothing.

She sighs. "But it doesn't matter to me anymore. Perhaps I've finally begun to accept it. Each day the inevitable fact grows a little duller. Less cruel. A little more comforting." She lifts her hands and drops them again, as if a half-hearted attempt at flapping wings, "you know what, I really don't care anymore."

She looks at me. I look at her. She leans her head against my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her. She's warm and soft - different from before - a fragment of the past.

"Things come and go," I say. "Even if we don't remember it, it all still happened. Even if we lose ourselves and die and become nothing. If our soul transcends to the Collective, it still had happened once, and is eternally written down somewhere. Inaccessible, but written down. We perceived everything happening in some form, reality, pseudo-reality, delusion and dream-state, and we worry it had been only limited to our consciousness, only in our minds. But if we are taken away, that means wherever it flows, there it will be remembered."

We stay silent for a while.

"I guess that's fine with me. All I know is that I'm here with you right now. And if you say so, I'll believe it." She concludes.

There on the hill, under the sun, she lays down and we make love, as a historic testament to complete the entire course of things.

*

Afterwards, we live each day as pleasantly as we could.

Every few weeks, the old man from the Seven Eleven would see to it that supplies are sent through the mythical gate, but we could never catch when it had opened. We would have omelettes and salads, smoked salmon and pasta with homemade sauce, canned soup and loaves of leavened whole wheat bread. One of the families grew vegetables so we had a decent supply of food. Sometimes fresh fish from upstream at a natural reservoir. We would never be bloated but there was always enough to go around.