The wind picked up below, and I worried that she might fall, but she held her position, unmoving, staring upwards. The girl’s thin hair fanned against her face, her cloudy breath peeking out in the nighttime cold. I wondered if she alone might provide me with the answers I was searching for.
ANNA
FOR THE FIRST WEEK after I met the LEO satellite, I barely slept at all. Instead, I would stand guard waiting for each revolution. The satellite was a constant in a volatile world—it always appeared in the night sky no matter what happened down below. If I didn’t go to school or leave the house for a few days, it would know. If a song on the radio brought me to tears, I could turn the volume all the way up and blast it straight through the stratosphere for the LEO to hear. Its steady gaze anchored me to the world, was a reminder that Anna Obata still existed, that she wasn’t being left behind.
One night, I stayed by the telescope until I could hear the first sounds of morning: the buzz of cicadas replaced by the hum of early traffic, the still-innocent laughter of children playing. I was filled with a melancholy that can only be found in the green haze of a sleepless dawn.
Watching my city begin the rhythm of a new day, apartment lights flickering on as though operated by the world’s laziest switchboard attendant, I felt utterly alone. It was the feeling of riding the last train home by yourself, of catching the scent of a perfume you recognize but can no longer place. This sense of isolation was intense and absolute. Pure.
I checked in on Grandpa, found him still asleep, and adjusted his blanket to fully cover his toes. He had been sleeping in later and later recently. Only a couple of years ago he would have been the first one awake, grilling a traditional mackerel breakfast for us despite my mother’s protests. The house would smell like fish when I woke up, which she complained was impossible to get out of our clothes. I think deep down, though, both of us loved that he was so stubborn.
That morning, as I fixed myself a bowl of cornflakes, I found myself missing the taste of the sea. Today was a good day for mackerel, I decided. Grandpa would be happy if I made some for him. After breakfast, I would embark on a mission.
I placed my bowl in the sink, dishes already piling up, and prepared to leave. As I slipped on a pair of Mizuno sneakers—converted to slippers by years of heel-crushing abuse—I noticed my mother’s shoes. Untouched for weeks, they were quietly collecting dust. I wondered what she would be eating for breakfast today. I reminded myself not to care. After brushing her shoes off and tucking them into the cabinet, I went on my way.
I left the house with the fish market in mind, turning towards the older half of the city, passing by abandoned lots and unlit homes. Echoes of a more optimistic Sakita.
Sakita: the city where time stopped, a place perpetually on the bust end of a boom-and-bust economy. After the rerouting of a train line that had once promised to bring industry to this cast-off corner of Japan, what was once destined to be a city of a half million rapidly shrank to twenty thousand. The resulting freeze in development created a surreal environment, one where urban architecture met on even terms with rural landscapes previously slated to be paved over.
You could almost pinpoint the exact year people lost hope here by the leftover fragments of late-eighties design: block concrete architecture, circular columns and windows clashing against sharp edges with a vaguely futurist flair. Signboards advertising long-defunct snack foods were the only beacon of colour in sight. This was a world of frozen motifs, a city of the “Lost Decade” that schoolteachers and politicians promised in vain would catch up with the rest of Japan. The new millennium was coming, but even I could tell that Sakita was painfully behind.
As I walked, I caught myself whistling a tune from my childhood. It was about a lost cat, and it moved at a fairly quick pace. You could easily walk in time with it, making it perfect for conquering the early-morning blues.
Lost kitten, lost kitten, where is your home?
I asked where you live, but you didn’t understand.
I asked for your name, but you didn’t understand…
In the distance, I caught a glimpse of the fish market’s brutal concrete walls, peeking above the tiled rooftops of surrounding homes. I had taken a shortcut through a residential area, and only now realized that I recognized this street. Mina lived here. Back in elementary school, I had gone to her house for her birthday party.
We had never been especially close, but I suppose everyone in the class had been invited. Unable to help myself, I turned away from the fish market, curious to see if I could still find my way to where she lived.
Back then, games of fantasy and make-believe were still popular, and while I retraced footsteps I thought I had forgotten, memories of our imaginary kingdoms came back to me. Memories of my first imaginary friend, The Prince.
As a child, I’d caught Lawrence of Arabia on television one night and, struck by the realization that there was a world beyond Japan, I became hopelessly obsessed with reliving those fantasies myself. While Mina and the others reinvented themselves as fairies or princesses, I imagined myself as the sidekick to a noble warrior, arriving on horseback from a faraway land.
The Prince had been muscular, dark, and unthreateningly handsome. An embarrassing fantasy, but at that young age, I hadn’t learned subtlety yet.
All the girls at school would huddle close and listen, mesmerized, as I told them about my Prince and the adventures he took me on whenever I went home. Too enchanted to interrupt, they would listen patiently, giving me their full attention as I told stories they could never dream of.
This was the only time in my life I can recall being popular.
As a child, telling fantastical stories and having a vivid imagination makes you likeable to others. Then you grow up, and suddenly these same people choose to keep a cautious distance instead, acting like you’re delusional, avoiding you for the same exact reason you were close to begin with. I will never understand why this happens. The world will always be filled with strangers for me.
A common misconception about children’s fantasies is that they wholeheartedly believe they are true. Naivete and stupidity shouldn’t be confused, and girls who dream of princes to whisk them away should be given the credit they’re due. I never believed for a second that The Prince actually existed; rather, I wanted to believe that he did. It’s the desire for belief that fuels these dreams so powerfully.
What had separated me from Mina and the rest of the group, however, was that eventually my Prince came to realize that he didn’t exist. My imaginary friend had become self-aware and would speak to me freely. After a certain point, I lost control of him entirely. He would label himself “fake” and me “real” and ask why I had created him in the first place.
These sudden existential questionings were way over my head, and frightened me immensely. The Prince was often accusatory, and when I told my schoolmates this in our daily fantasy sessions, they would act confused and quickly move on to their own stories.
It had been years since I last thought of The Prince, and no matter how hard I tried to remember him, he was nowhere to be found. I find it cruel that by the time many of us are old enough to actually need an imaginary friend, they’re impossible to bring back.
The smell of cooked fish brought me out of my reverie. Without realizing it, I had walked right up to Mina’s house, a cozy, renovated, single-family unit. It hadn’t been my intention to come this far, nearly peering through her sliding glass door. I saw a light on inside, maybe in the kitchen, and heard a radio playing from the upper floor.
I knew that standing there was dangerous—it didn’t take much to imagine Mina’s horrified expression upon seeing me at her house, the rumours she would later spread at school. And yet, the smell of her mom’s cooking wafting out to the street invited me to linger. She was smoking some sort of fish, sea bream perhaps, which I imagined with a side of rice and pickles. I pictured
the family sitting at the table: Mina, her father, and her younger brother waiting impatiently for breakfast to be served. As far as I remembered, Mina’s mom liked me, and I felt my hand twitch slightly, wanting to knock on that door, maybe ask for the recipe so I could cook it myself.
I turned and left, scraping the bottoms of my shoes along the curb as I stepped down onto the road. If I waited too long, the fish market would sell out for the day. At the end of the block, I stopped and craned my neck to the sky. It was too bright to see anything up above, and yet the satellite would still be there, flying far beyond my reach.
An A-347 telecommunications satellite with a titanium alloy body. I read somewhere that satellites don’t actually orbit the planet, that they are instead perpetually falling towards us, at an angle that skims along the natural curve of the Earth. The lack of air resistance just makes this descent incredibly slow. Endlessly falling, never getting closer.
Sometimes satellites get lost, too. If the signal connecting them to Earth is accidentally cut off, there is no way of reconnecting with them. After this, no one can know for sure what happens to the satellite. They either circle the planet until they can’t take it anymore, or burn up attempting to re-enter the atmosphere below.
Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, imagining the LEO sailing above me, to have another friend just like The Prince? Maybe this time they could take me farther than Arabia, farther than this world.
SATELLITE
THERE ARE BENEFITS TO being a satellite 577 kilometres above the natural world. I was able to watch everyone below with complete clarity, able to see through walls and rooftops as though they were made of glass. It was like an incredibly high-definition video, one which I could zoom in on forever. In a past life, I must have been a voyeur.
From my vantage point, nothing escaped my gaze: the smallest passions, the greatest tragedies. The entire world was my theatre, and I had the rawest forms of humanity playing out in front of my own eyes. An unflinching look at life on Earth. Or so I thought.
In all honesty, the human drama soon became tiring, and I’ll admit that I eventually used my powers mainly to peer into movie theatres for free—something to mix up the routine of never-ending orbits, I suppose. I grew rather fond of comedies in those days, which helped me understand how humans viewed their world. For example, humour occurs when misfortune falls upon another, while tragedy occurs when misfortune falls upon oneself.
Whenever I did observe the real world, I found my attention focused on a singular point in southern Japan. No matter how hard I tried to avert my gaze, I was continuously drawn back to this bizarre city and the 22,362 people who called it home. It was a half-built metropolis, abandoned as though possessed by some curse. The decaying storefronts and empty homes reminded me of the movie sets I had seen elsewhere, the city’s population merely its actors.
Even more eerie was the way the city sounded. I barely saw anyone outside, but the streets were filled with a white noise. It was so ingrained I hadn’t questioned it at first, a chirping that seemed to originate from the parks and shrines, from what little nature hadn’t yet been paved over. Did this dull throbbing come from abandoned industry, the aches and pains of machines left behind? In a more romantic mood, I wondered if the heart of the city had never learned of its fate as a failure, and still attempted to beat accordingly.
Over time I grew to know the city and its people well. Here, a lowly fishmonger who, after closing shop for the night, studies the languages of countries he’ll never visit. There, a lonely college student who lies to her mother over the phone so as not to worry her. And yet among them all—the street urchins, the functioning alcoholics, the local legends—I found myself continuously drawn to a single girl, the only one capable of returning my gaze. Anna Obata.
She was awkwardly tall, Eurasian, the kind of girl who hadn’t quite come into her own yet. Maybe with time this would change—she could grow into her unwieldy limbs, straighten her posture, and learn to make eye contact. For now, though, she was still an adolescent of the species, a baby giraffe of a person.
I found Anna amusing at first, even a little funny. She had certain quirks: a strange manner of trailing off when she spoke, a habit of losing interest in the middle of a conversation. There was always a far-off look in her eyes, as though she were staring through whoever she was speaking to. Her skin was much paler, too, either from having mixed ancestry or from anemia, and she had a bad habit of picking at her cuticles until they were gone. Even I had to admit that she had an uncanny feel about her. She gave off the appearance of something not quite from this world, as though the non-Japanese half of her wasn’t European but alien. In southern Japan, it didn’t seem like there was much of a difference.
Above all, I learned to read emotions from her. I calculated that a depression between the eyebrows demonstrated confusion, an increase in pupil dilation indicated happiness. As time went on, however, she began to lean closer to the tragicomedy side of the humour spectrum.
Anna lived mostly alone. An older male occupied the same house as her, but he appeared to be more reliant on her than the other way around. A couple of times a week, an adult female would enter the picture, spending a night or two at their home. Yet just as her classmates were cold to Anna, so too was Anna cold to this woman. The one thing that sticks out to me was how remarkably similar they looked.
Outside of her home, Anna was forced to spend the bulk of her time at school, in close proximity to other humans her age, when she clearly preferred to be alone. Rather than socialize or participate in class, she would sit still at her desk, mind wandering to far-off worlds, counting down the hours to the end of the day.
Those other humans (“students,” to use the correct term) only tolerated her at best, and for reasons that seemed arbitrary. It didn’t take constant ETM sensor surveillance to spot an outsider. A quick look at the way Anna was dressed was all I needed. Her uniform was never properly ironed, the pleats on her skirts worn out over time. While I gathered there were strict dress codes, her classmates managed to rebel against these with an occasional pin, hair tie, or bracelet. Anna simply went without.
There was, however, one exception to this. The only accessory I ever saw her attempt to wear was a customer loyalty pin from her local convenience store. I suppose she was attempting to fit in. She walked to school that day with an extra 3.2 centimetres of bounce in her step, before a classmate not-so-innocently asked why she was “advertising some dingy conbini.” Compared to the cartoon mascots the other girls wore, her attempt at fashion certainly stood out. The pin lasted a whole three hours and twenty-seven minutes on her uniform before she quietly took it off.
After I’d analyzed countless other societies, however, a pattern began to emerge. Scattered throughout the Earth were thousands of other Annas, whose only real purpose was to serve as an outsider, a warning against breaking unstated social norms. I wondered what Anna had done to deserve this treatment.
In other schools, I noticed that it was common for the backpacks of the bullied to be hidden between classes, for gym uniforms to “accidentally” fall into the showers. But on top of this standard treatment, there seemed to be an element of fear in the way Anna’s classmates dealt with her. The other students unconsciously made room for her as she walked the halls, for example, and would squabble among themselves over who would have to take Anna in their lab group, who would be stuck bringing school notes to her house when she was sick.
I have no idea what Anna was learning in class; her vacant stare certainly suggested she wasn’t paying any attention. I imagine she was doing the absolute minimum needed to get by, waiting for the clock to hit three before rushing home. No after-school clubs for this girl. Simply a short walk home, the occasional stop for groceries, then back to her stacks of obscure reading, her cast-open windows, her hand-me-down telescope.
Every night, without fail, I found myself on the receiving end of that devic
e. I made a point of returning her gaze, both of us trapped in our orbits, both searching for any sort of way out. If I existed, why was it that no other stargazers ever seemed to pay me any notice? If I didn’t exist, how is it that this girl could see me? All I wanted was to view the heavens through her eyes, to know what I looked like from down below.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find an answer. I could only find her.
Often, I would attempt to analyze those ambiguous expressions that crossed Anna’s face. I would come up with equations measuring the tilt of her eyebrows, the angle of her lips. Determine that she was exhibiting 12% more melancholy than the night before, 3% more yearning. Yet there was always something missing, something that eluded numbers. Her response to these emotions never followed a formula, defying any sort of logic I attempted to apply. Once, sitting across the kitchen table, the older man who lived with her paused between slurps of miso soup and told Anna a joke. Rather than laugh, however, Anna burst into tears. Why was her response one of sadness, when the correct answer should have been joy?
I didn’t understand why I was in space, rather than down on Earth with her. A part of me was concerned about Anna—I knew so little about human life, but I could sense that her trajectory was unsteady, perhaps even headed towards disaster. Never did I anticipate that she’d become infamous in Japan for years to come.
I eventually met this girl, and at one point I believe I loved her. While I may be getting ahead of myself, I remember she once told me that she wasn’t sure if she loved me or was obsessed with me. I now have a question of my own, one I never did find an answer for.
Did I ever truly understand Anna Obata?
Satellite Love Page 2
