Waited until dark to begin. Didn’t want either of my parents to walk in and see me do this. Didn’t want to upset my mom, or gratify my dad. I cleared my desk off so it was just me and the love charm. It seemed much smaller all alone like that. Like a cornered animal. It was pink, with gold characters embroidered down the middle. Cheap fibres, uneven print. A white knot was tied at the top, held in place by plastic beads. It wasn’t the best quality, but I felt bad for what I was going to do. Still, I had no choice. I had to know for sure what was inside.
My fingers shook more than I thought they would, which made grabbing the string difficult. The knot seemed intricate, but with one tug it all came undone. I pulled the whole thread out, then looped it nicely and put it away. Still wanted to show some respect. Or maybe I was delaying the inevitable. I took a deep breath and opened the pouch up. Put my fingers inside—the back of the embroidery was rough, not meant to be touched. Felt something crinkle under my finger.
I pulled the prayer sheet out of its pouch, careful not to damage it. Realized then that what I had done was unforgivable. My heart wasn’t heavy, though. Didn’t feel a pit in my stomach or anything. Actually felt kind of light. Like I was hollow.
I unfolded the prayer and spread it across my desk. The paper was really thin, transparent even. Had all these tiny characters printed on it. I tried to read it but I couldn’t. The prayer was long, and the kanji was too advanced for me to read. In a way that was worse. I would rather there be no prayer at all than one I couldn’t understand.
I folded the paper up again and put it back into the pouch. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe I could still keep the prayer inside. I threaded the string through the top of the pouch and tried to re-tie it, copying the knot from another charm I had. But it didn’t line up. The knot was too confusing, too intricate for trembling hands.
Why was there even a prayer in that charm? It didn’t make sense for the factory that made these to go through the effort. The charm was basically just a souvenir, it didn’t really have any powers. So why bother? Why go through all this trouble for something so meaningless, so untrue?
Felt my face go hot. I wondered what Anna would think of this. We hadn’t spoken since the end of last year, but her words kept eating away at me. Believing alone is worth something, right? Whether the charm worked or not didn’t really matter. What matters is for people like Mom to believe they do. For them to have something to hold on to.
Why was I looking for proof in the first place?
I wasn’t sure what to do with my ruined charm. Maybe I should return it to a shrine and let them take care of it. Burn it in a holy fire. I was weighing my options when I saw a reflection in my window. Or a silhouette. Wasn’t sure who it could be. I stepped closer, to see if they would move away, but the figure stood still. I got close enough to make out their features, and realized it wasn’t a human, but a god. Or a painting of a god. Reminded me of those woodblock prints from the Edo period—totally flat colours, no perspective. Must be a reflection from somewhere, a trick of the light. I looked around my room to see where it was coming from.
I knew my dad had some prints hanging in his study, but he rolled them up a while ago. Said he was tired of seeing them. His biggest one was of Amaterasu. If anything, that’s who this reflection resembled. Same black hair, same empty eyes. But that wouldn’t make sense, for a reflection from his room to reach mine. I shifted my angle to see better, but then she was gone. Amaterasu shimmered and faded away. I moved back to my last position, but couldn’t make her reappear.
Then, all of a sudden, I understood. Maybe that wasn’t a reflection, maybe that was Amaterasu after all. She was forgiving me for opening the charm, for doubting Shinto’s powers. Amaterasu was telling me that it was okay. I knew then why she hid in that cave, thousands of years ago. I understood why she needed to disappear.
A warm light washed over my room, moving faster than the birds could start chirping. The sun was coming over the horizon. I must have been standing there for a while, in a trance. The clock by my bedside table had gone forward a few hours too. It was as though I had skipped over an entire night, like I had been pulled through time.
I kept feeling lighter, like my feet would lift off the ground. The water from the shrine hadn’t purified me, but the sun had. Amaterasu did that for me. She opened the floodgates, released her light. Cleansed me of the evil spirits I had brought to Sakita. She had wanted to give me my first holy experience. Or maybe she was just asking me to believe.
SATELLITE
MORNING WAS BREAKING. MY happiest hours with Anna were now only moments away from an abrupt end. Of course, in the thick of it, I didn’t have the slightest inkling of what was to come. Instead, we slowly made our way home from the drive-in, and each time Anna passed a stranger another convulsion of laughter would course through us. My face was still sore from smiling, long after I had come down from my high, and I now understood that there was a “good pain” that could be felt. All the while, Anna continued snickering silently, mumbling to herself.
“Tonight’s the night, Leo,” she said, unlocking the front door to her house. “We’re finally going to get out of here.” She was whispering, careful not to wake her grandfather.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I was afraid before—that’s why I didn’t act when I had the chance. But no longer. This was the perfect note to end on. You gave me the courage to leave.”
I tried to say something in response, but she put a finger to her lips, and motioned for me to follow her upstairs to her room. Her grandfather’s shoes in the entrance to the house hadn’t moved since the previous evening. A part of me wished someone would have noticed that Anna had been gone all night. We went up to the second floor.
Daylight had started spilling in through the ink-stained pages taped to the windows, giving her living space its familiar atmosphere of being inside a lantern. Tucked in the corner, untouched by this light, sat the mound. Anna approached her creation with the weight of ceremony, clearing the floor around it before pushing it slowly, painstakingly, towards me. My attempts to help were shooed away, so I opted to take a seat on her unmade futon instead.
She stepped into the centre of the room, baroque shadows dancing across her awkward form. The change in mood made my throat dry. I was finally going to find out what was under that tarp—it made no difference whether I was afraid.
“Okay, Leo. Take a guess. What do you think I’ve been working on?”
“I have no idea. A bomb?”
“No, I’m serious, no more jokes. What do you think this is?”
I thought for a moment, attempting in vain to get inside Anna’s head. I had only been half-kidding about the bomb, and since she wasn’t exactly artistic, I could rule out a sculpture.
“Oh! You’re making a satellite!”
Her eyes lit up. “Close! Partial points! But not quite. I’ve been working on something much more impressive. I present to you—the Tengu!”
She threw the tarp towards me theatrically, obstructing my view before it crumpled to the ground, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. Slowly, the twisted form of Anna’s creation came into focus. I had no idea what I was looking at. It was an orgy of contorted metal, arbitrarily melded together, reaching out perversely in different directions.
Tubes of various sizes crawled through the main body like worms scouting out a piece of rot, and wedged into the centre of it all was a fridge, its door half-pried off. The materials were mismatched, looking like the product of a deteriorating mind.
“What is it supposed to be?”
She looked at me with unfocused eyes, as though she had been waiting her entire life for someone to ask her this question. “It’s a ship, Leo. You and I are going to outer space.”
“It’s a spaceship?”
She nodded slowly without breaking eye contact. “This world is rotten, Leo. You and I ne
ed to escape.”
I wasn’t sure how seriously I was supposed to take her. There was no way this contraption would fly, and I was nervous about what would actually happen once it was activated.
“How does it work?” I asked.
She launched into a lengthy explanation, none of which made sense. It dawned on me that she didn’t fully know what she was talking about either. She had cobbled together a few ideas she had about how rockets worked, and randomly attached to those what she could understand from her research. The haphazard way in which she had created her own school of rocket science mirrored the resulting creation perfectly.
“…and once I manage to get all of the fuel in, I start the primary energy reserves, which transfers a signal to the gas tanks. This will begin the fuel-burning process. Three engines on the bottom will propel the body upwards, with you and me both inside the cockpit.” She motioned towards the fridge. “It’s not really spacious, but it’ll have to do.”
I walked around the Tengu a couple times and found the gas tanks she was speaking of. They were filled to the brim, and covered by an ill-fitting lid from which a long, thin wick emerged. A handheld lighter was fastened to the side of the metal drum.
“This is how you’re going to ignite the engines?”
“It’s a little makeshift, but it’ll work.”
I stepped back, feeling nauseous, as visions of Anna’s demise filled my head.
She would ignite the fuse, fire catching on her sleeves from the gasoline that would inevitably spill out of the unsecured tanks. She would panic, attempt to fan the flames out, knocking the rest of the fuel canisters over, and become engulfed in liquid fire. After a brief struggle, maybe a short cry of surprise, she would feel the heat burn through her flesh, her tongue, her eyes, cutting off the brain’s ability to communicate with the world. She would be cremated on the spot, all 163 centimetres of her reduced to a pile of ash.
Or Anna would drop the flame into the pool, immediately causing the gas tanks to explode. The shards would cut through her like putty, severing her spinal cord, paralyzing her. She would be frozen in place as the rest of the Tengu collapsed onto her frail body, or if she managed to crawl out of the fridge in time, she wouldn’t be able to find help before the loss of blood killed her.
Or she’d manage to light the gasoline safely—in spite of the Tengu’s design—starting the engines one after another. All three would gradually overheat, not having proper ventilation, and would begin emitting a black smoke, thicker than death herself. People would watch curiously as Anna closed the door to her cockpit, maybe even move in to get a closer look. Then the rumbling engines would set off like firecrackers, one after the other, sending flames and shrapnel through the crowd. Anna would emerge safe, minutes later, wondering why she hadn’t launched, only to find herself surrounded by bodies arbitrarily scattered about by her ambition.
Did Anna realize how fatal her ship was going to be? I strongly doubted it. There was still much I didn’t know about my creator, but I knew she didn’t have a death wish. To her, it was irrelevant that human bodies don’t have heat-resistant gold plating, that they don’t have Whipple shielding to protect them from flying debris. None of that mattered if the dream of space was even remotely within reach. Revulsion turned my stomach when I looked at her future coffin, a metal body unbefitting of her human form. I knew I had to stop her, but to argue with her directly would only push her farther away.
“This is what you’ve been secretly working on this whole time?”
She seemed puzzled, not understanding my desperate, incredulous tone. “What do you mean? I made it for you. We can go back to space, and you can return to your A-347 titanium alloy body.”
“Anna, I looked that up. There’s no such thing as a A-347 satellite! This is all just part of some fantasy.”
“No, you don’t get it, I researched and—”
“You don’t know how anything like this works! None of what you’ve said makes any sense. You don’t actually think that’s going to fly, do you? It’s built like a fucking rock!”
She winced at my use of profanity, and I realized I had never heard her curse. Where had my knowledge of that word come from? At the time, I was too worked up to care.
“Tell me you don’t plan on activating this thing. Just seeing all that gasoline makes me nervous.”
“Leo, I made this for you.” Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears.
“I never asked you for a spaceship. Get rid of that thing. It’s going to kill us both.”
After a brief hesitation, Anna went to gather the tarp with trembling hands. She bunched it against herself, coating her clothes with dust, before attempting to throw it back over the ship, heaving her body to come up with enough force. The entire time she kept quiet, focusing on the task at hand, trying her hardest to avoid looking at me, trying not to cry.
What I should have realized is that there is a point where sadness becomes anger. No creature, no matter how strange or how small, allows itself to be backed into a corner indefinitely. Tears are ultimately a defensive mechanism, an attempt to elicit sympathy, and when this fails, aggression is the only answer. And still I wonder, had I just managed to keep calm for a moment longer, would Anna have been saved? Was there a secret combination of words, an algorithm I should have employed, that could have reached her?
“I’m not trying to attack you, I’m just worried about the safety of it all.”
She finally managed to cover the Tengu and began tying the tarp in place.
“You’re not mad, right?”
She rolled the Tengu away from the centre of the room.
“It’s probably not that unsafe. We could work on it together, maybe even have a test flight?” I regretted going back on my word so quickly, disappointed in my lack of conviction.
Anna was pulling at the thick rope attached to the main body of the machine, wrestling with a creature three times her size. The wheels the Tengu were mounted on seemed to have difficulty supporting its weight. She must have planned out the mobility from the beginning, and built from the wheels up before the rest of the ship became too heavy to lift. I felt oddly proud of her for not forgetting the details.
She continued struggling with her ship, lips trembling from what I thought were tears. It was then that I realized, with a slow dread, that she was moving the Tengu towards the only exit from her room. I positioned myself to block the doorway.
She looked up, as though noticing me for the first time. “Move.”
“Where are you going?”
“Move.”
“Are you going to launch this?”
“Move.”
“Let me come with you, we can go together.”
We were like a pair of stubborn children, one of whom was in possession of a potentially fatal ninety-kilogram bomb.
“You were supposed to be my friend,” Anna said softly.
“I am your friend.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t trust me. I can tell.” She was shouting now, trembling not out of sadness, but rage. “The Prince and Soki and The General and you. You’re all garbage. Rotten rotten rotten.”
“The Prince?”
“You only exist because of me. You should be grateful, but you’re just like everyone else. I could make you disappear in a second if I wanted to. And if you don’t move, I will.”
“Anna, please.” I was nearly begging now, pleading to the part of her that was long gone. “I changed my mind. Let’s go together. We’ll take another look at the Tengu, make sure everything works, and then—”
She abruptly pulled at the Tengu, cutting me off with a metallic clang.
“Leo, you’re dead to me now,” she said, in a tone numb from betrayal.
I felt a familiar lightness in my body, as though I were in danger of floating away. The brief moment of weightlessness as a plan
e leaves the ground. Colours were losing their intensity, moving into a wash of light blue. I heard cicadas chirping from somewhere far off, the radio static of my life. They sounded peaceful. Had a solar flare gone off somewhere? Beyond this, I don’t know what happened to me.
“You don’t exist anymore.”
And just like that, I didn’t.
GRANDFATHER
I WOKE UP EARLIER than usual today. The sun isn’t fully up yet, so it must be five or six in the morning. My sleep was disturbed by the sound of someone yelling. A female voice, furious and raging at someone, or something. Even though the voice was coming from the top floor, I could hear her from where I was sleeping below.
I thought the shouting would last forever, before it suddenly went quiet. Who could that have been? I thought only Yoshiko and I lived here. There’s that other girl as well, I suppose, but I can’t remember how we’re connected. It’s embarrassing, so I don’t want to ask. I haven’t seen Yoshiko in a while, now that I think of it.
The shouting seems to have stopped, but then I hear a loud rumbling from upstairs. Yoshiko must be trying to rearrange her room. I’ll tell her to give it a rest, I need to sleep. Someone as young as her would never understand.
I’m about to go upstairs when I find the stairway blocked by the most peculiar thing. There appears to be a giant machine of some sort wedged at the very top! It looks as though someone has taken a car and turned it inside out. I’m not sure what it is, or how it got here, but it seems familiar somehow.
“Grandpa, you shouldn’t stand there. It’s dangerous.” There’s someone speaking from behind this contraption, unable to get around it. And just like the metal behemoth above, I vaguely recognize the voice from somewhere. From a past life, perhaps.
Satellite Love Page 18
