Real World

by Natsuo Kirino

  It was kind of a snide remark, but Worm didn’t seem to care. Instead, he asked, “Hey, tell me something. How come you talk like a guy? I thought it was weird when we talked on the phone yesterday. But when I met you today, you’re kind of cute—although you dress like a guy. What’s up with that?”

  This was out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to say. I never really thought about why. I went to a girls’ school and was told I was kind of mannish, so as a kind of gag I started talking like a guy and then it became natural. Dahmer and Boku-chan also always used the rough word ore for “I,” and I think it’s the first-person pronoun that fits best. When I’m thinking about something or feeling something inside of me, I use the feminine word atashi, but someday I’m sure this will change to ore, too. Worm’s pointed question made me remember that incident—the one when the transvestite grabbed my chest, yelled at me, and roughed me up. This curbed the secret feeling of closeness I was starting to have for him. So he’s a guy, after all. The kind who hates women dressed as guys, who denounces them. Did that make him my enemy? I sullenly stayed quiet, but Worm went on.

  “A while ago I saw the evening paper at the convenience store. An article about me. I wanted to see, like, what the world’s thinking about it. It didn’t seem real. It was like I was dreaming. I looked up and there on the TV was the front of my house and some reporter babbling away. ‘What sort of ominous thing dwells in this suburban neighborhood? What happened to this boy who’s disappeared? Is the same darkness in this boy hidden in this seemingly quiet neighborhood?’ It felt so weird.”

  “D’ya feel like you wanna go back to the real world?”

  “I can’t,” Worm said coolly. “This is my reality now.”

  “So why’d you make a reality like that happen? It’s you who made things that way, right?”

  I was a little irritated. I suffered more than anyone else because my mom died, and because I’m gay—but I wasn’t responsible for these things. And now here was this guy who, just the day before, had created a new reality, one where he’d killed his mother.

  “I don’t know.”

  Worm didn’t want to talk about it. Just like when I’d met him.

  “I’d like you to pull yourself together and tell me about it.”

  “Why? Why do I have to tell somebody else? It’s personal,” he said.

  “I want to know.”

  “How come?”

  “I want to believe that if I’d been you, I’d have killed her, too.”

  Worm didn’t say anything. Silence continued for a long time. I looked at the windowpane, the curtain still open. My blank face, cell phone pressed against it, was reflected in the glass. The glass was perfect, not a scratch on it.

  * * *

  The first time Worm called my cell phone was after dinner, when my dad and I were in the middle of a fight. Dad was so upset he could barely speak, all because I told him I wasn’t going to take the college entrance exams.

  “Then what do you plan to do with your life?”

  How should I know? If I had to give a quick answer, all I could think of was working behind the counter of the Bettina, or else learning to be a transvestite. If I said that, my father would definitely cry. Dad’s proud of working in the media, but he’s actually a boring guy who’s pretty conservative.

  “So you’re going to be like Winnie the Pooh, huh? Knock it off!” He was really pissed. “It might sound good right now, but what about later? Stop acting like a baby.”

  I wasn’t acting like a baby. I really didn’t have a clue what I should do. After I went into high school and my sexual orientation became clearer to me, I was faced with two choices: either deceive everybody, or come out of the closet. But I still hadn’t decided which route to take, and so I had no energy to think about college. Those were the times when I was glad Mom wasn’t alive anymore. I didn’t say anything and Dad started in with one of his sermons. Grandma brought out some peaches she’d peeled and stealthily crept back to her room. I could sense that Dad was choosing his words carefully, aware that my grandparents were eavesdropping.

  “If you don’t go to college, you’ll regret it. I’ve known a lot of young people who didn’t go, so I know what I’m talking about. Once they go out into the world they finally realize how blessed they’d been and regret having thrown away the chance. The girl who’s my assistant is like that. She told me she doesn’t know why she didn’t go to the photography department at the Japan Academy of Arts. She failed the exam once and never took it again. But I admire her. She got a job and is doing her best. She’s found her own path in life, wanting to be a photographer. You don’t even have that. You haven’t gone out in the world. Once you do, you’ll be sorry you didn’t take this opportunity. But then it’ll be too late.”

  It’s not too late. I’m already out in what you call the world. A world of emotions that’s different from what my old man’s talking about. I wanted to tell him this, but that would mean revealing I was gay, and I wasn’t ready for that. Irritated, all I could do was pretend to sulk.

  “Anyway, you like the arts, so you should go somewhere where you can study that field.”

  “It’s too late,” I said, attempting a compromise. Saying it was too late was my way of buying time. I hated myself for it. Dad’s face suddenly lit up.

  “It’s not too late! You can go to a cram school. I’ll find out which one’s good.”

  From the next room my grandpa cleared his throat in relief. It wasn’t easy living there. After Mom died, even if Dad had wanted to move out and be free, he couldn’t. He has a twenty-year mortgage and had built a house for two families to live in. Even if Grandpa and Grandma passed away, the land would most likely go to the immediate heir: me. If it came to that, I might kick Dad out, a thought that made me feel a whole lot better. Just then my cell phone rang from in the pocket of my shorts and my father pointed to it.

  “Your cell phone’s ringing.”

  The screen said the caller was Toshi.

  “It’s from Toshi.”

  Looking somewhat tired and unhappy, Dad reached for his cigarettes. He seemed relieved it wasn’t a guy.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  I was surprised to find it was a guy. Phone pressed to my ear, I slowly eased my way upstairs. Downstairs, my grandparents had come out and I could hear Dad explaining things to them. “Senior year in high school is a tough age,” he was saying. “Hard to tell if they’re adults or still kids.”

  “Who the heck are you?” I asked the guy on the phone. “And what’re you doing with Toshi’s phone?” I waited until I was safely back in my room.

  “You’re Kiyomi, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Instinctively, I knew the guy had picked up Toshi’s phone somewhere and was randomly dialing all the girls’ names on it. My voice is so low hardly anyone ever guesses on the phone that I’m a girl. Besides, the name Kiyomi could work for either guys or girls. The guy apologized weakly and was about to hang up.

  “Hold on a sec, pal,” I said. “I’m a girl. But how’d ya get hold of that phone?”

  “I found it and thought I’d return it.”

  I told him all he had to do was dial the number under Home. “Got it,” he said, and then said this: “Hey—if you’re a girl how come you talk all rough like that?”

  This pissed me off, so I asked him, “How the hell old are ya?”

  “Seventeen. I’m a senior in high school.”

  “You’re a real loser, you know that?”

  I was just about to hang up when he said this:

  “I, ah—killed my mother today.”

  I thought this was a great joke, so I played along.

  “Yeah? I killed my mom three years ago.”

  This wasn’t a lie. I might not have done it with my own hands, but inside it felt like I had.

  * * *

  They found out Mom had ovarian cancer just when I entered jun
ior high in April. She passed away in October of my third year in junior high, so it was like my whole junior high school days were occupied by my mom’s illness. Cancer takes a long time to kill you, so it’s really rough on your family. It wasn’t like she came to terms with it. There were some days when she did, I guess, seem calm about it, but other times she wailed about her fate like she was possessed by an evil spirit. She was only thirty-eight, and most of the time it was the latter. Dad was hardly ever at home—it made me think he might be having an affair—and Mom was so emotionally unstable that the rest of us didn’t know how to handle her. One day she’d suddenly hug me tight and apologize, the next she’d push me away. We had to deal with these violent mood swings. I recoiled from this. I was worn out and had no idea how to handle it. On top of this was my dawning realization that I was a lesbian. I realized my mom was too preoccupied with her illness to think about my troubles, and I grew lonely, sad, and totally depressed. After agonizing over it for a while, I finally decided to abandon her. I decided in my heart that the moment she became sick was the moment she died. The person in the bed was a living corpse and nothing else.

  When my mother was close to death, my father came to get me, but I refused to come out of my room.

  “Come on. Your mother wants to see you.”

  “I’m not going,” I said.

  I held Teddy to me and kept on shaking my head.

  “I know you’re scared, but it’s okay. She’s dying and you should see her.”

  Dad was almost in tears, but I wasn’t going to fall for that. Say I did go see her when she was dying and I had this phony smile like everything’s all right, would that be it? What about my feelings? All kinds of outrageous thoughts ran through my mind.

  “But Mom will be sad,” Dad said.

  “So what? Everybody’s sad.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for her that she’s dying? You’re her only daughter.”

  Well, she’s my only mother, too, I wanted to tell him. I didn’t deserve this, either. I wasn’t aiming to get revenge, just to get my mother, at least in her final days, to think about her relationship with me. My father gave up and left the room, and soon after this I heard this ping at the window. There was a crack in the glass. A small pebble must have hit it. Teddy was frightened and was shivering. I opened the window and looked outside. The sun had long since set and the streetlights were lit. The street was deserted. Not long after this the phone rang with the news that my mother had died.

  * * *

  “So what you mean is that pebble was your mother?” this guy on the phone said after hearing my story.

  “I don’t know. It sounds too much like a ghost story, so I never told anybody about it. You’re the first.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want to. If I told them the truth, then—”

  I stopped. Why in the world was I telling all this to some guy I’d never met?

  “If you told the truth, then what? Tell me. I want to hear it.”

  He’d told me his secrets, so maybe I should tell him mine. I searched for the right words.

  “I thought my mother was blaming me,” I began. “That she hated me. When you hate someone like that, your spirit still hangs around and you can’t properly pass on. That’s when I started to get scared. Not scared of my mother or her ghost or anything. Scared of how strong the bonds between people can be. So when I decided I’d abandon my mother it felt like I’d murdered her.”

  “I know what you mean,” the boy agreed. “It’s the same with me.”

  “Did your mother really die?”

  “I already told you,” he yelled, irritated.

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  “I’ll tell you after I’ve got it all straight in my head. It’s hard to explain—it was like it just—happened. But I do remember this one weird thing. When I grabbed my mother by the hair, I thought, Wow, her hair’s just like a woman’s. I really felt like, Hey, she’s a woman. But the person in front of me was just this crabby, complaining old bitch who was talking nonsense. It was like I thought, Shut the hell up! and pushed the off button on a machine.”

  A chill shot up my spine. His voice sounded like it was filtering up from some dark whirlpool. Even if he didn’t kill her, I thought, I bet he beat up his mother.

  He was ending our conversation. “The guy’s making his rounds of the park.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Tachikawa Park.”

  “Can you stay overnight there?”

  “If I hide I can,” he said. “But the mosquitoes are terrible.”

  We agreed to meet the next day at the McDonald’s in Tachikawa Station. He hesitated a little, but I pushed him to agree. I had to hear the rest of his story.

  I knew beforehand from Toshi’s phone call that what he said was true, but I’d felt right from the start that he was telling the truth. Otherwise, I never would have told him what I did.

  When I actually met him the next day, he was sunburned, his red face all gloomy. He was skinny, too, like a string bean. His navy blue Nike T-shirt was kind of dirty, with bits of grass clinging to it. As he stood in the McDonald’s trying to find me, other people looked at him funny. ’Cause he stank. They’re gonna catch him any minute, I thought, and tried to think of how I could help him run far away.

  “You’re just what I expected,” I told him. It was funny how Toshi’s description of him fit perfectly.

  “What’d Toshi say?”

  “She said you’re like a worm.”

  “That’s awful!” He laughed. When he laughed, he was kind of cute.

  “You smell bad,” I said. “You gotta change your clothes.”

  “I’ve got only one change of clothes and don’t want to waste them. It’s so hot I thought I might as well just keep these on.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Worm didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring vacantly out the window. The sun was going down, but the asphalt was still scorching.

  “Is it true you’re going to K High?”

  Worm nodded, still gazing out the window.

  “Aiming to get into Tokyo University?”

  “I don’t think I can anymore.”

  Don’t think you can anymore? You better believe it. They’re gonna run you through a ton of psychiatric tests, turn you into some guinea pig, then throw you into juvie. Society’s erased you from its board, pal. You can forget about entrance exams and Tokyo University. What a moron! Still, I felt sympathetic toward this guy who just didn’t get it.

  “Have you got it all straight in your head now—about what happened?”

  “Not yet,” he said, looking out the window again. “I haven’t really searched my conscience yet, so I guess I can’t.”

  “Guess not.”

  Worm startled me by suddenly bolting straight up in his chair.

  “I gotta go. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve got to hurry.”

  “Where’re ya going?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. I just feel like I have to go somewhere, right now.”

  “Then you’d better go. Leave your bike, though. I gotta get it back to Toshi. You can take mine.”

  I motioned with my chin toward my bike parked outside. Worm looked kind of embarrassed.

  “You rode it all the way here for me?”

  I brought out a brand-new cell phone and laid it on the narrow little McDonald’s table.

  “You can have this, too,” I said. “But give me back Toshi’s.”

  Worm pulled out Toshi’s phone from the pocket of his dirty jeans and tilted his head.

  “Thanks. But why’re you doing this?”

  I had no idea. I was just waiting, and hoping, that he’d get his head together and let me in on something important, something I had to know.

  “You better get going,” I said.

  Worm shoved the new cell phone, manual, and charger into his backpack and stood up. He turned his sulky narro
w eyes to me. Birds of a feather, I thought, and waved to him. Worm clumsily made his way out of the place, bumping into the tiny tables as he left.

  I sipped my iced coffee and gazed out the window. Worm went over to where my silver bike was, let out the side brake, sat down, then raised the seat. He sat down again and turned in my direction. His eyes were desperate. I just feel like I have to go somewhere, right now. “I understand totally. Just don’t get caught,” I muttered, then slurped down the rest of my coffee.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WORM

  On TV once I saw this weird scene, a Japanese soldier getting pounded on the head with a hammer. He was getting completely worked over—besides the hammer, he was being stabbed with a sharpened stick and pummeled with flying kicks.