Lonely Hearts Killer

by Tomoyuki Hoshino

  “You were one of them.”

  “Well, not really. Even in the midst of the comeback crowd at work, I was more lighthearted. For every person who was spirited away, there was a specific reason why. Before today’s State Funeral began, all the people I saw in His Majesty’s woods were opening up their hearts and praying so sincerely that I thought His Majesty wouldn’t be able to rest in peace.”

  We fell silent again for a bit.

  “I don’t really see how His Majesty would have trouble resting in peace simply because lots of people were praying for him,” I posed.

  Mikoto glanced at Iroha. Her exhaustion showed, and she said, “If you want to talk about it, go ahead and talk about it.”

  “I’ve been through this with Iroha a lot, so she’s sick of hearing about it, but since you asked ...It’s also hard for me to talk about, because I don’t remember what it was like to be spirited away all that well. And, at any rate, all the words that were in my head at the time are gone. I learned that memory pretty much relies on words.”

  As someone who records light and sound, I wanted to object and say, “not necessarily,” but I didn’t say anything.

  “You do understand that not everyone who was spirited away was so because they were sad over His Majesty’s death, right?”

  I nodded.

  “The breakdown caught me unawares, like a sneak attack. I don’t remember clearly, but I thought something to the effect of this is nothing more than one person’s death, and when one person dies, somewhere another is born, and it doesn’t change anything. Then, I suddenly lost the will to do anything.”

  “Because the same thing goes on for eternity?”

  “Up until that point, I’d been amazed by the concept of eternity. But this was different. What I felt was, first of all, what I’d just thought had been a lie. The end of one life wasn’t going to be replaced by the beginning of another. Because, at least in this Island Country, more people are dying than are being born. I can count the number of friends or superiors in my life who have kids. Inoue, I’ll bet you’ve never even touched a child.”

  “Now that you mention it, no, I never have.”

  “See? Children are a rarity these days.”

  Leaving behind her camera, Iroha got up from her seat. I thought maybe she was going to the bathroom, but she disappeared back into the kitchen. Mikoto sealed his lips in seeming agony. In an effort to end the conversation, I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry in other people’s business. I’ll go get her.” I started to stand, but Mikoto stopped me.

  “It’s a misunderstanding. I’m a man saying this, and it might sound like I’m criticizing Iroha, the woman, and I acknowledge that, but if I can’t say it honestly, I’m not going to be able to express what I’m feeling. And with every word I say, I hurt Iroha more, so I can’t get past my reluctance.”

  “Do you want kids, Mikoto?” I aimed my camera at him. He didn’t flinch.

  “I know it sounds that way, but that’s not what I’m saying.” He sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question. Iroha and I never make it through this discussion without stumbling. Ever since we started living together, I thought to make the world real, you had to contribute to future generations, so I’d ask things like whether she wanted kids or what she’d do if she got pregnant, which could happen no matter how careful we are, but that was all theoretical for me, and I don’t know how I personally feel about having kids. Of course, no one really knows until they become a parent, but that’s not what I want to say. What interests me is whether parents are necessary, whether it matters if I have kids and become a parent. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Because, you see, can kids even be a possibility if I don’t feel like I’m really living? It’s hard to believe the future will go on after me. When I say that, Iroha goes ballistic, demanding that I come to some sort of decision and then say whether it would make the world real to me if I wound up with a baby I had to raise on my own. And when she puts it that way, I can’t sort it out myself.”

  I was extremely uncomfortable. I couldn’t believe he could speak so frankly about subtle relationship problems to someone he’d barely met. Iroha is who she is, so she forced me to watch “Infinite Hell.” Why did someone outside the mosquito curtain like me have to be privy to all this? Was he telling me all this precisely because I was on the outside, uninvolved, and thus couldn’t be hurt?

  Regardless of whether or not he was oblivious to my revulsion, Mikoto kept talking.

  “If everyone felt like I do, nobody would have kids. When His Young Majesty died, you see, this world was actually dying. It felt like a world of the dead to me. The notion that the human race will continue on for eternity has been drilled into us, so we believe it; that’s all. At first, this realization immobilized me. But I also thought we have to find a way to change the things that allow us to keep believing our society is alive. But then if the communities of the living are shrinking anyway, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “But the overall global population is rising.”

  “That’s another point. Do you think all those people are satisfied with their lives? Don’t you think the reason babies aren’t being born in this Island Country might have something to do with the fact that the people who could become parents feel like life has no value? Now, let’s suppose people in those overpopulated places start feeling the same way. Then the population there would suddenly drop too. For the majority of the planet where the population is rising, the reasons why life has no meaning are different than here. It’s a question of time. You don’t come to this awareness on your own. It’s the will of the world.”

  Mikoto stopped, looked at me, saw that I wasn’t responding, and nodded his head to himself. His eyes were welling up with tears. I was shocked. What he’d been saying didn’t amount to much more than simple, hypothetical trash-talk, but he was emotionally invested in it nonetheless.

  “Even though it’s something you can’t see yet, I really do believe the world wants to die. When His Majesty pointed this out through his death, it clicked for me. Why His Majesty died is beyond explanation. He would have had the very best doctors giving him regular checkups, and still his heart just stopped. I’m convinced that was His Majesty’s intention. When I was in the grip of despair and had lost my ability to speak, Iroha showed me the film of countless Mikotos watching the monitor, right?”

  “Yeah, I saw that too. Iroha called it ‘Infinite Hell’.”

  “Right, that’s it. ‘Infinite Hell.’ Every day, another me was watching the screen and we multiplied one at a time, and nothing changed. The same thing repeated over and over again, and nobody was trying to get away and escape that repetition. It’s a horrible film.”

  Memories reeled through my skull. I had a hard time breathing. I wanted Iroha to hurry back. All the better if she came back with Mokuren. But neither of them appeared, so I was stuck having to listen to Mikoto talk. There I was, sipping Pu-erh without a clue as to what to do with myself.

  “And then, while I was watching something like three hundred of me trapped in the screen, I came to my senses. I knew we had to escape, that we had to break out of this endless cycle. His Majesty died in order to say that.”

  Mikoto’s face lit up for a moment, and he said, “You’re thinking I’m full of it, right?” He sighed. “I don’t have the facts about His Majesty’s death. Like I just said,it’s truly beyond me. But some of your footage runs at the tail end of ‘Infinite Hell’, right? Not a soul was speaking on those quiet, busy streets. Every person you filmed looked like a Majesty to me, and I don’t mean that allegorically. Of course, I don’t mean they were actually Majesties. Just that they looked that way to me. But that’s what’s important, that I saw them like that. It got to where I wanted to count and see how many of them there were. Actually, . . .” Mikoto paused to pull a college notebook out of his backpack and flipped through the pages. It was the same notebook in which he’d scribbled in “Infinite Hell.” “F
our hundred and eighty-three people. Not that there’s any significance to that number, but I wanted to count them to verify my perception that there were four hundred and eighty-three Majesties. I felt like if I could quantify them like that in numbers, they’d all be the same. It’s like when you’re counting beans. There’s no meaning in the individual bean. In the same way with those four hundred and eight-three people, there’s no meaning in the individual person. Each one of them was just another Majesty. You could even say they were copies. It’d be like all those three hundred of me in “Infinite Hell’ each existed with a difference face. But in reality, it’s just one person. And that person is The Majesty.”

  “You mean there are millions of Majesties?”

  “I mean there’s no difference between a Majesty and us. Check this out, no matter how hard a Majesty works, no matter how seriously he takes his role, he’s not going to change society. At most, he’ll die and that’ll make some people feel sad or whatever. Basically, you could say that, like us, a Majesty isn’t a part of society. The environment he finds himself in isn’t something we don’t know. Or maybe we’ve put ourselves in that kind of environment to be like a Majesty. All I’m saying is that a Majesty isn’t a part of society, so we don’t have to be a part of it either.”

  Mikoto handed the notebook to me. On one page were a bunch of similarly shaped giraffes that didn’t differ a bit even though they were clearly drawn freehand. On other pages, there were things like fava beans, turtles, strawberries, somebody’s nose, and a freakishly realistic-looking hand, all multiplied until they filled up the pages. As the pages went on, there was a portrait-like sketch of Iroha, one that was maybe what he imagined I looked like, and while it didn’t look at all like him, one apparently of His Majesty, all drawn on the same page like they’d been stamped there. None of those copies exceeded their bounds and trespassed onto another page. And on the last page was a cityscape without people. It was probably the neighborhoods in Shinjuku I filmed. There wasn’t a single person in the geometric late afternoon city that was shaded in contrasting light and shadows. The weird part was that the sky was completely filled in and totally black.

  “What are these broken lines?” I pointed at a page that wasn’t like the ones with illustrations. This one had disconnected zig zag lines stretching horizontally like a graph.

  “That’s music. I don’t know how to read or write music, so I tried writing lines that reflected the relative highs, lows, and lengths of the notes in my head. I can still sing it.” Mikoto showed me by humming some random notes without a melody. It was that chant-like humming. It was excruciating. I was feeling the agony Iroha must have felt all that time.

  “You were practically on a fast at that point, weren’t you?”

  “You can say I was confused or describe it however you’d like. Whatever works for you.”

  “Did you show these drawings to Iroha and explain them to her, too? Did she get it?”

  “She does her best to understand the perceptions and images of the world that course through my body. But we end up talking about different things. She’ll get angry and say something like, ‘Okay, so you’re saying that I can save the world from dying if I increase the population?’ Or she’ll get sad and say that even if the world does have a will of its own, can’t we still have our own different will? And all I was trying to do was communicate something.” Mikoto sipped his Blue Oolong tea. I gulped the watered-down dregs of my Pu-erh.

  “The number four hundred and eighty-three includes Iroha. And you and me, of course. We are also Majesties. And if we can’t find a way out of the recurring cycle of Majesties, there won’t be any of ourselves left. That’s what His Majesty showed us with his body. He said that we should cut ourselves loose and run away. Those words flashed before me when I watched the footage you filmed, and I could speak again.”

  “Just like with the Ten Commandments. The light of heaven carved the words in stone.”

  “I can see why you’d want to make fun of me. I could have been hallucinating, but I am sure that the message I took away was something his Majesty literally bet his life on. It’s intuitive, not logical.”

  “Sounds like a divine revelation to me.”

  “You’re wrong. There wasn’t anything divine about it. That message came from a human being we call His Majesty.”

  “All those spirited away people were caught up in that message.” I started to stew. Something wasn’t sitting right with me.

  “I already told you it was different for me than the others who were spirited away. I was more lighthearted. I understood the extent of that difference when I talked to the others who came back to work. They said so themselves, that they’d had to realize how up until then, they hadn’t ever had to think about who they were, because His Majesty had carried that burden.

  Even though I’m actually a member of this Island Country, I’d taken the stance that I was nobody and that life didn’t matter, so I hadn’t invested any personal effort in living my life here. His Majesty had been quietly supporting me. The only person carrying the weight of one hundred million slackers was His Majesty. It’s such a luxury for us to say we don’t feel like we’re alive. Because when His Majesty died, there we were, frightened that we could die too. I realized that the essence of life was being alive even when you don’t feel like you are. It was the first time I’d felt grateful for not having died. The reason we could get by without any hope or despair was because His Majesty had taken on the despair for us. He’d turned it into a world in which it wasn’t necessary to have hopes.

  They were sick at the thought they’d killed his Majesty, that the tremendous responsibility had worn him down. And they were even more distraught over losing the person who’d connected them to this land. Now they’d have to withstand the despair of being a person of this Island Country on their own. They collapsed because they felt like His Majesty’s load had suddenly been placed on their shoulders. They’d been living their lives unconsciously dependent on His Majesty. And they were shocked to see how apathetic they’d been, because, to them, that unconscious reliance had been natural, like air.”

  “You’d been aware of it?”

  “Oh, I was aware ... that I wasn’t depending on His Majesty. That’s why I didn’t misinterpret his message. Everyone talks about being spirited away, but we were the ones hiding away His Majesty. We pretended not to see the kind of world he was trying to show us, and we concealed his true meaning. I wondered why we hid him and why we were spirited away. And I concluded we were copies of His Majesty, and he was telling us to escape that. I took his appeal to heart. But if we’re imitating him when we run away, we’ll still be copies, right? We all have to decide for ourselves what precise course of action to follow in order to meet with His Majesty’s approval. I’m thinking that instead of being spirited away, this time I’ll try to hide from myself.”

  “Is that some kind of new spin on playing tag?”

  “You’ve been twisting my words around from the beginning. Are you afraid of hearing the most important parts?”

  “I don’t know whose most important parts they are, but I suppose I got the gist of being spirited away. What matters most to me is that I wasn’t even in the market to get spirited away.”

  “Well, there’s always the question of timing. And you were already hidden behind your camera. When a person who is already hidden wants to hide, there’s really no need to be spirited away, is there?”

  “I watched ‘Infinite Hell’ and I didn’t get even a hint of the kind of coded message you’re describing. There was no invisible ink secret message or anything missing. Things that can’t be recorded as sound or light simply don’t exist. I don’t believe in anything except sound and light.”

  “That’s fine if that’s the case. I’m not looking for other people to believe what I’m saying. I only want to convey the information I got as accurately as I can and let someone know that I plan to follow His Majesty’s lead.

  “Do yo
u think you’re The One? Isn’t your religious background a little different from His Majesty’s?”

  “You’re the one who’s been using sacrilegious metaphors, Mr. Inoue, not me.”

  “Quit being so pretentious. You’re older than me, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry. But age doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No, but were you trying to be condescending?”

  “Why do I feel like you’re trying to pick a fight with me?”

  “All I’m saying is drop the attitude. It’s pissing me off.”

  Mikoto clammed up and glanced towards the kitchen. I felt something like vertigo swirl through my head. I started to get woozy, and it felt a little good.

  “Sorry, but if you’ll let me finish....” While Mikoto’s mouth was still open, a power surge rushed through my body. I stood up, grabbed him by the collar with both hands, told him to “say it outside” and pushed him all the way up to the front door.

  The automatic door opened, and a sandy gust of yellow wind pelted my eyes. I muttered, “Don’t preach to me, fuckin’ sand” and pushed Mikoto down onto the ground. When he tried to get up, I shoved him back down, spit, and turned on my heels to follow my steps back inside. He let out an intense and high-pitched wail at my cruel back: “His Majesty’s message was that this world is the otherworld, so you all should die too! Stop trying to use force to run away from it like a coward. Face the truth head-on. If you can be brave enough to do that, I’ll still be your friend.”

  Looking back, I used muscles I’d never before used in my life to wield power over Mikoto like a demon. I couldn’t believe myself when I let loose a war cry and, with all my might, kicked over a huge motorcycle parked nearby.

  Inside, Iroha and Mokuren had heard the ruckus and returned to our table. Iroha filmed me as I drew closer. Unable to open my eyes, which had filled up with sand, I quietly packed up my camera and things. “Fuck,” she said. “Stupid… embarrassing.”

  I felt horribly sad through and through. I was sure I’d break down if I tried to answer.