Satellite Love

by Genki Ferguson

  The floor shakes. A bookshelf has been pushed over, followed by another, and another, until there are no more bookshelves to be toppled. He feels a wetness under his palm, and realizes that a bottle of India ink has been spilled. For a brief moment, he thinks of his last painting, calligraphy characters swirling as if in the Milky Way.

  A hand grabs The General’s own, jolting him back to the present, violent moment. Morse code is tapped into his open palm. He recognizes this grip as belonging to an old friend. He relaxes slightly, although still inwardly alarmed.

  “Where is the rest of the book?”

  The General pauses, not sure what this could be referring to.

  “What book?” he asks.

  The hand becomes angry. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  The General smiles. She’s impatient as always. Even still, this is another teaching moment. There is another Buddhist proverb ready on his lips.

  “Cause and effect are like a wheel. Be careful with what you do next, child.”

  Her hand leaves his, and, once again, the world goes dark. He doesn’t feel any footsteps, however, and so he knows that she’s still sitting there, processing what he’s just said. With a characteristic patience, he sits in place, waiting for her to take his hand yet again.

  Instead, a blow. A weak, adolescent, unfocused blow, but a blow nonetheless. The General is more shocked than hurt.

  He lets out a shout—clear as the day forty years ago when it was first released.

  “Valhalla!”

  * * *

  *    *    *

  The General’s cries snapped me out of my trance, or at least enough for me to understand what had just happened. I had never heard him speak before. He was blind and deaf, but it never occurred to me that his choice to remain silent was just that—a choice.

  I looked around the room and assessed the damage I’d done, attempting to quell the fear bubbling within. In legal terms, I had committed a break and enter followed by an assault. But even worse, I had broken into the home of my only friend, destroyed what little he owned, and struck him out of rage. I had severed the only valid human connection in my life, over a betrayal I wasn’t even sure had occurred.

  The bloody nose of my classmate came back to me. I understood all the individual parts—fist, face, blood—but couldn’t piece together the causation. Did the face lead to the fist leading to the blood? Where did the responsibility lie?

  Vandalized apartment, ink-stained palms, screaming veteran. Which came first?

  “Valhalla! Valhalla!”

  Seeing The General, eyes bulging in fury, demanding his right to death by combat, I was reminded that at some point he too had been young. Had we been the same age, I wondered if he still would have been my friend.

  “Valhalla!”

  The General locked his sightless eyes onto mine with a surprising accuracy, and a wave of guilt, karmic in scale, washed over me. At such moments, it was difficult to believe he truly was blind. I tried to hold his gaze but, despite knowing he couldn’t see me, I had to turn away.

  I fled his room and ran into the cool Kumamoto night. His neighbourhood was quiet at this time, the model families that lived in these homes all on the same schedule. I could picture the children, already asleep, while their moms and dads talked quietly in the next room, unaware of how grateful they should be for such ordinary bliss. In Sakita, I would have been met with the dull throb of traffic, or the dying cries of cicadas. Here, I was greeted with a devastating silence, a low hum I could feel echoing inside the hollow in my chest.

  I ran as far as I could, trying to distance myself from the cries of The General. I ran until the street lights turned on, until I tasted copper in my mouth, until that hollow inside threatened to swallow me whole. Even still, I could hear his voice ringing in my ears, unending, no matter how hard I tried to drown him out. I prayed that the satellite hadn’t seen this. For once in my life, I didn’t want to be observed.

  “Valhalla! Valhalla! Valhalla!”

  Later that night, after taking the last train home, I looked at the stolen book once more. I finally understood what he had been writing in ink all these years. Valhalla. Written over and over, his own secret mantra.

  I hid the book under my pillow and tried to sleep, stifling any sobs with a lipstick-stained napkin. It tasted sweet.

  SATELLITE

  THERE ARE DAYS WHEN it is difficult to look at the world.

  I realize that observing is all I am capable of, 577 kilometres above Earth, but sometimes it feels impossible. At first, I fell in love with the people below me, drawn to a goodwill I honestly believed could be found in anyone. The humans were deeply flawed, but I believed they wanted to be better versions of themselves. It was a futile struggle, one they shared and hid from one another at the same time.

  I still felt sympathy for the humans, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being tied to them any longer. Was that wrong of me? The very struggles which had at first drawn me in became too heartbreaking to watch. I couldn’t find an equation to solve their melancholy. Self-actualization multiplied by love, divided by years left on Earth? Being alone was unbearable, yet companionship only brought more suffering. Of all the people I observed from space, not one of them could find a solution for this innate pain. Some days, it is hard to make jokes.

  I found that everyone, at some stage in their admittedly short lives, experiences their own breaking point. A small, personal tragedy made inconsequential for the same reasons it is unique. Still the Earth continues to spin, breaking points be damned.

  My breaking point came on the same day as Anna’s, my one anchor to the realm below. The moment I knew she had lost her struggle against the world was when I watched her sitting alone at that train station, shredding a book I didn’t understand the significance of into pieces. The pages she tore scattered into the wind, 83 scraps in all. They floated through the air briefly, before gravity’s inevitable embrace pulled them down.

  Tragedy doesn’t exist only in the extremities of life. It doesn’t take a massive blow to knock someone out of orbit. Up in space, I had been blessed with aluminum alloy plating, protecting me from a barrage of space dust at any hour. Yet all it takes is one micrometeoroid, one microscopic piece of space debris, to find an opening for it all to be over. The smallest intrusion can fry circuits, disrupt navigation, cut power off entirely. Seeing Anna with nothing to protect her soft skin from the orbital debris of the world, I was surprised this meltdown hadn’t happened sooner.

  The scraps of paper Anna pulled from that book found their way through my plating, too. The sadness she exuded wasn’t self-indulgent in the slightest; it was so pure only immaturity could produce it. Earlier, when I’d watched Soki choose Fumie over my creator, I had felt relieved. Now, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been complicit in Anna’s heartbreak. That I had betrayed her. At what point had I learned to feel guilt?

  For the first time, I acted against my set programming. Before Anna could finish working her way through the book, I looked away, cutting my communication off from the world. Rather than continue ETM surveillance of life below, I turned my sensors upwards, farther into space. Up into the heavens.

  What I saw haunted me, was so beyond my comprehension that it seemed unreal. Floating beyond my orbit, like a cosmic miasma, were clouds upon clouds of dead spacecrafts and space debris: metal plates, thermal blankets, half-burnt boosters. Satellites from years gone by, simultaneously my brothers and ancestors all at once. They had been there all along, just outside my old field of view. While I had felt in control of the Earth, pinning it under my gaze, these empty vessels had been watching me the entire time.

  This membrane of space junk surrounded the Earth, covering every possible angle with its indifferent gaze. A couple stalled satellites, mostly whole, hovered above me. The writing on their sides was unfa
miliar, written in harsh box letters or drawn-out scrawls. Babel’s children.

  Somehow, I only felt more alone. I attempted to reach out to them, half-heartedly sending Morse messages into their midst. Not a single one responded, either uninterested or no longer in commission. Knowing that I wasn’t unique pained me somehow. I had imagined myself as having sole reign of the sky, as being the recipient of a divine gift. Did the thousands of celestial bodies above me, now lifeless, once have the same thoughts, worries, and questions as I did?

  Even still, this feeling of insignificance was intoxicating, the balance of power reversed. As long as I was looking beyond my orbit, the world no longer existed. Wars could break out below, and I wouldn’t care in the slightest. At first, I promised myself I would only keep my eyes closed for one revolution of the Earth, until Anna recovered—but one circuit stretched into ten stretched into one hundred. I found that I was much happier this way, fully blind to the world below.

  Occasionally, I felt twinges of guilt, as though I was abandoning the people I had spent so long observing, but those feelings soon faded. I was all-seeing, but I wasn’t all-powerful. There was a limit to what I could be expected to do.

  If I looked away long enough, everyone I knew on Earth would be replaced by a wholly new set of people, and I could enjoy a fresh start. A new world. Maybe this one would be without delusional teenagers and toothless schoolboys. Unlike them, I hadn’t been cursed with mortality. Should every last human disappear, their clocks would still run for a while, and I would continue to orbit, unfazed. The indifference of the machine—my greatest advantage.

  In the end, I only managed to look away for 111 revolutions, or 9.86 Earth days. Not even long enough for the snow to completely melt from the ground. It was such a pointless exercise, I began to wonder if I had become human myself. I was disappointed to find the world unaffected by my decision to abandon it. My absence had no real impact: people still lived day to day, carrying miniscule tragedies, searching for titanic distractions. The Earth remained the same, silently turning in the vacuum of space.

  The only difference I noticed was in Anna. She had withdrawn even further, no longer venturing outdoors, rarely even out of her own room. School was no longer in session, and her social sphere had shrunk to just her grandfather. Unlike her classmates, who escaped to sunnier parts of the country over winter break, Anna was left behind. Sakita’s abnormal winter continued, snow piling up around the house, slowly burying her in a cruel white.

  She moved sluggishly, listless, as though her very existence depended on expending as little energy as possible. She reminded me of the lone fishing boats I would see off Japan’s eastern coast, paint peeling, adrift under the starry sky.

  The attic room she lived in had changed form as well. It was still cluttered with half-built model airplanes and trading cards, but the previously exposed wood-panel walls were now painted over in a purgatory beige. The most visually demanding objects were her telescope and an ominous mound about 2.2 metres tall, pushed into a corner and hidden under a tarp. The mound hadn’t been there the last time I saw her. What had happened in those 9.86 days?

  The Anna I saw now was no longer the same Anna I remembered. She was no longer an awkward child, but wasn’t fully adult either. The intense feeling of loss I felt caught me by surprise.

  How could I explain my apprehension towards her growth? Melancholy is sadness mixed with nostalgia, despair is sadness and hysteria. Anna was once a tragicomedy—sadness and laughter—but was now sadness and fear. What word could I use to describe this?

  This suggestion of adulthood made me worry that perhaps I was the one being left behind. I could clearly picture a future when she would no longer watch me through her telescope, when she’d be out of my reach, no longer in need of space.

  I watched Anna in her room intently, anxious that she would do anything other than return my gaze. I had just abandoned her, but I would never forgive her if she forgot me for even a single night.

  But maybe I should have feared the opposite. It never occurred to me that becoming attached to humans could be more painful than a solar flare, more dangerous than space debris. That night, rather than ignore me, she did something unexpected. She spoke to me.

  A flashlight, pointed at the sky, blinking at erratic intervals. Morse code.

  “Meet me in Valhalla.”

  Part 2

  ANNA

  THE DAY AFTER I attacked The General, I vowed to make changes. Anna Obata was deficient, and this simply wouldn’t do. I wrote out a manifesto, nearly a hundred pages long, scribbled out in dark black ink.

  …learn to meditate when upset…

  …find out what other girls do during the weekend…

  …stop picking at your lips…

  …laugh even when the joke isn’t very funny…

  …do radio calisthenics every morning…

  At one point I even visited a clairvoyant, an arcane healer who claimed to be able to see through the skin to find the source of illness. I went to her with a single question in mind: what was wrong with me—my brain or my heart? If she were to put her hands over my body, perhaps she’d be able to sense which of the two separated me so much from the world. Maybe she could even find that hollow in my chest. Ultimately, I was turned away, my age prohibiting her from charging money for such an esoteric service.

  I placed my manifesto on top of my dresser and out of sight, just to be safe. I was embarking on what I knew to be a nearly impossible journey, and needed guidelines to help me reach my destination. Before I cut myself off from The General, he’d advised me to meet my long-distance lover, no matter how far he might be. Although The General had been unaware I was speaking of a satellite, I held what he said as true, and decided to make the monumental effort needed to bridge the distance.

  My plan was twofold. First, I would attempt to speak to the satellite every night through Morse code. Second, I would build a rocket to reach space. I no longer needed to prove anything to Soki. I was going to the LEO of my own volition.

  While I had no experience whatsoever in what was, quite literally, rocket science, I hoped the book I had stolen from The General would help. Despite the pages being covered in ink, I discovered that if I taped them against my windows, the light of dawn revealed the characters beneath his “Valhallas.”

  Winter break had started, which thankfully gave me time to work out my plan. I was unaware of any dangers to come, blinded as I was by love. I went through those days in a trance, and while the end result was far from what I had hoped for, I still believe in the spirit of what I did.

  It took more than a week for the satellite to finally acknowledge my signals. For whatever reason, I had stopped feeling his gaze. But on December 31, the night before the new millennium, something changed.

  I had been anxious about that day, knowing that I was more likely to encounter one of my classmates or even Soki during the shrine visit for the New Year. Still, if I were to make contact with the kami, then I would have to follow the rituals of old. I decided to take Grandpa to a small neighbourhood Shinto shrine, one without any elaborate ceremonies or crowds. A single wooden hut, with nothing more than a brass bell and an offertory box out front. It was only a few blocks away, in the back lot behind a shuttered home, and had been built by whoever had lived there long ago.

  The sun was finishing its final descent of the millennium, still faintly lighting our path. Beside me, I heard Grandpa stifle a yawn. Everyone else in Sakita would still be at home, it being customary to make the first visit after midnight. I didn’t imagine Grandpa would be able to stay up that late, however, and decided to leave a few hours before. We held hands on the way there, and I remember wishing the shrine would move farther and farther away so I’d never have to let go.

  As we walked, I heard the Buddhist temple’s bell ringing from deep in the city, reverberating once every few minutes. The Bu
ddhists say that there are 108 earthly desires to cast off, and as such, worshippers strike the bell 107 times before midnight. Right as the new year comes, it is rung once more. Number 108, the last sin brought into the twenty-first century.

  In past years, my mother had insisted that we make the journey to the main temple, while my grandfather would push to visit the Shinto shrine instead. In all honesty, I saw little difference between the two, and preferred to visit the shrine on account of it being closer. I suppose I preferred the quieter ceremony as well—Shintoists ring the bell only once, offering prayers rather than somberly casting off sins.

  When we arrived at our neighbourhood shrine, we washed our hands in the purifying spring before ascending the stone steps. I handed Grandpa a five-yen coin to throw into the offertory box, and had nearly begun my prayers when I noticed him staring at me. His hand was still outstretched, unsure what to do with the coin in his palm. He had forgotten how to pray.

  “First, you have to throw in the coin,” I explained.

  Grandpa didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, so I threw both of our coins in and rang the bell. The chime our shrine bell made was much quieter, and much more hollow, than what we heard in the distance.

  After you offer the coins and ring the bell, you’re supposed to bow twice, clap twice, pray, then give a final bow. Grandpa and I did the first bows and claps correctly, but when it came time to pray, he hesitated.

  “I don’t have anything to ask for,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m perfectly happy today,” he continued, cheeks red from the cold. “There’s nothing more for me to want. What are you going to pray for?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Grandpa noticed this—he can always see right through me—and smiled.