The Thousand Year Beach

by TOBI Hirotaka

  It’s irritating, loathsome.

  Yes, I feel bad for Felix. Yes, it was all my fault. But what else could I do? Everything changed on the day he handed me that first Eye. It gave me virtual eyes of my own. I was stunned. It was very nearly love. I can hear Felix now, making the same old complaint. “Oh, so you love the Eyes more than me?” Yes. Yes, I do. For a thousand and fifty years, ultimately I have lived within my own senses. The Eyes were my only companions in life, such as it was. It was the Eyes that made up for what I lacked. The scenes I glimpsed through that window were wider than all other sensations combined.

  When I saw my husband for the first time that day, even I was surprised at how little I felt.

  I could not even muster hate for him, let alone love.

  And then I understood at last. I had been living in a world of my own all along, and would probably continue to do so, being unable to live any other way. My husband had been a sensory accessory and nothing more. A means of checking my own sensations. That cold recognition that I could not justify no matter which angle I viewed it from was me. Scared of myself at that moment, I gasped. Felix noticed, and I am sure he misinterpreted it. The inferiority complex and the arrogance he used to hide it were what defined him. It is within that gap that he preserves a pure kindness. Pure, and very fragile. And so I understood at once how he had misinterpreted my gasp. But his error was, if anything, convenient for me. It would raise an impassable wall between us, I thought, and those calculations were correct. My husband’s hate made me freer than ever. He had never been more than a distorted hand mirror for grasping the outline of my own sensations clearly. Where once I had used sexual excitement to obtain those reflections, I now had simply to use hate instead.

  And the sensual delight I lost I could replace with the Eyes.

  I was a slave to them.

  I cannot justify it. I accept that it was wrong. That is why I accept my husband’s criticisms without argument. If I appeared elegant or tolerant, it was for that reason alone.

  And now we see the result.

  The time has come to settle all the accounts I put on hold the day I discovered the Eyes.

  My husband once acted as my outline, and now his hate seeks to breach my boundary as a kind of web. I have long since ceased to feel anything, any connection to him, but his devotion and disgust have become this loathsome thread that seeks to wind itself around my internal routines and organs. Properly, this time.

  So that we might never be parted again.

  Why Felix’s lingering regret should look so much like hair I do not know. The work of whoever stands behind the Spiders, I assume. They dissected him, transformed his clingy personality into this sticky thread. Whether he still felt some devotion to me, or whether they used a remnant of something similar for purposes of their own, I do not know.

  He is trying to subdivide himself enough inside me to possess me completely. To occupy my senses—my all, my treasure—properly this time, and make of me what he wishes. He will unleash violent storms of sensation within me in an attempt to force my submission. Or perhaps he will steal my sensation to taste the sensory joy I have cultivated. That, I think, is what he sold his soul for.

  The very person I always used to settle my boundaries

  will rob me of those boundaries altogether …

  The three sisters turned their faces away. Presumably due to the invasion of the threads, most of what Yve was thinking had leaked to the outside where the thoughts could be picked up easily. Ideas that had been safely tucked away inside her oozed out like a slowly spreading pool of wastewater at their feet.

  Felix’s black hair moved as if to devour entirely the delicious flesh of her white body.

  Donna was put in mind of a plate of food with masses of hair stirred in. The hairs would curl in complex filigrees around stewed meat and vegetable fiber, catching on the inside of the mouth, on the tongue, on the teeth. The same sort of thing, she believed, was happening inside Yve.

  Anna thought that Yve was being consumed.

  She could no longer move of her own accord, but the surface of her body still squirmed here and there. She must already be liquefied under the skin. At that moment, her body began to deform, no longer able to resist the tension of the hair. Her limbs were drawn in, her back bent grotesquely. She became rounder and rounder.

  Luna, for some reason, thought of an eyeball. The round, white, female body was glossy and slick with sweat, and the black net of hair looked like the pattern of veins on the white of an eye. But this eyeball seemed to have lost all will to see. It was an eye for looking inward, Luna thought. Felix must have had some unobjectionable qualities too, but this hair-object had been made by extracting only his black obsessions and seemed solely focused on putting down roots in Yve. She, for her part, had never had any interest in anything other than sharpening, forging and enriching her own sensations.

  “That’s enough, I think,” said one of the sisters. Felix’s attention was now devoted to his final prey. It seemed unlikely that the infection would repeat its explosive spread. In a way, Yve had sacrificed herself at the last to stop him in his tracks.

  “Let’s go.”

  “You’re right. We still have work to do.”

  They left the room and headed for the Chandelier, where Old Jules was waiting.

  José followed suit.

  The air was oppressive and smelled of mold.

  It was dark.

  The only sound Jules could hear was Julie’s attempt to breathe silently beside him. No—that wasn’t a sound. It was the sense that air was slowly moving, being alternately drawn together and released.

  After thinking for the tenth time that he could no longer bear it, Jules finally spoke.

  I think it’s gone, he said, quieter than a whisper, with the movement of his lips alone.

  I think so too, Julie replied in the same way. Just the movement of her lips in the darkness, but her meaning came through all the same.

  The two of them rose to their feet.

  After descending (falling) to the second floor of the hotel, the two of them had gone sideways, leaping into a handy guest room. Expanding Cottontail’s field into a sphere, they had pasted the darkness and moldy smell of the room onto its surface, hidden inside, and hoped for the best.

  Now they removed that sensory barrier.

  They couldn’t see the moon from the window, but they knew it was out from the brightness of the night sky.

  Where are we?

  Beats me, but it feels like a pretty big room.

  Jules extended his senses beyond the reach of the light.

  This didn’t let him see any farther than before. He simply let the basis of his senses radiate outward and then interpreted what was reflected back to him, like a bat using its sonar. This was something he could do on his own, of course; he was using Cottontail’s powers. It felt like an elaboration of the Sound made by the Singing Sands. It was also how they were speaking without making any actual sound.

  The room, he learned, was very large. Surely much larger than even the largest suite at the hotel.

  It was also fully furnished.

  Jules’s sensory sonar picked up not just the size, shape, and location of the furnishings, but also their texture and color, as if he were holding them in his hands.

  Fireplace, sofa, table, display shelf. The wall was hung with paintings, the floor was carpeted, and there were lampstands and candlesticks here and there. All of the finest quality, but old.

  This was no guest room. In furnishings it was partway between a lobby and a reception room, but it did not give the impression of being “in use” in the normal sense.

  Oh, right!

  Jules and Julie both realized where they were at the same time. This was the Clement Memorial Room, re-creating one of the rooms in the old mansion. The mansion itself, once one o
f the grandest in town, no longer existed (and had not since the Realm of Summer opened for business).

  They crawled out from under the sofa. It was big enough for two adults to lie on together. They sat on it side by side. Jules put Cottontail on his lap and they both peered into it.

  Its beauty was phantasmagorical in the dimly lit room. Instead of its fuzz of light or usual creamy white color, it looked like a meticulous scaled-up model of a cell done in glass and resin. Inside the translucent ovoid floated a still more transparent core with various tiny components alongside it. An intricate network of patterns was wrapped around the core.

  Jules recognized the patterns at once.

  Inside Cottontail, the TrapNet had been preserved intact.

  Julie had been up to her mischief again.

  She had touched Cottontail to the Chandelier just as they had “lit the wick,” so to speak, of the TrapNet after Yve booted up the program in the lace. Cottontail had promptly downloaded the net’s structure into itself. Not every detail, of course; the net was too gigantic for that. But the framework had been preserved, and the rudiments of its functionality were in place. Now that the actual net was a ragged wasteland, this copy was all that remained of the marrow of Jules’s idea.

  The two of them had been using it to guide them, a feat that was possible because it also, of course, contained the structure of the hotel.

  Do you think we’ll find him this way?

  No idea.

  They called out with the thinly spreading sensory sonar.

  It was José they were looking for. They held their breath and waited for the echo to return.

  In that moment, Jules wished they could stay this way forever. Just the two of them in the darkness, sitting together, thinking identically. Time stretched and slowed.

  No reply came back to them.

  Still silent, the two of them sent the weak sonar signal out again and again. Jules was reminded of a moonlit night spent tossing stones into a pond.

  There was no reply.

  The two of them were pressed close to see into Cottontail together. Jules’s expanded senses caught the lithe silhouette and firm texture of Julie’s body clearly. It seemed like years since they had come together on the Singing Sands.

  The wet warmth of her kiss.

  All at once he felt it vividly.

  He touched his own lips without realizing it.

  And then the sensation came over him again.

  Not just on his lips

  but something like a warm breeze

  that passed through his entire body

  boiling, simmering

  sweet, salty

  a sensation that made him shiver with anticipation for something that seemed about to happen.

  His heart pounded erratically.

  Jules raised his eyes.

  Julie was gazing at him too.

  They realized it together.

  They had both felt that kiss just now.

  But it had not been the kiss in their memories.

  Not their kiss.

  Nor had it been a premonition of the future.

  It was a kiss two people had exchanged here long ago.

  Is somebody … here?

  Yes.

  The room was not unoccupied.

  The air was rich with the sensory traces of somebody from before, like the lingering smell of incense. These sensations had come to them on the echo of the sonar, pressing against them in the dark.

  Loaded with the sensual world of a stranger, Jules felt his temperature rise. Julie’s face beside his was blushing hotly too.

  He realized that his bottom lip was caught between hers.

  The feel of her tongue, her piercing.

  No.

  No.

  That wasn’t all.

  Right then he was kissing

  a different woman.

  Clouds flowed.

  They covered the moon.

  Darkness fell even more deeply, enfolding the two like bunting in black.

  The Mineral Springs Hotel was the finest resort hotel in the area. It also had the longest history.

  By the time the Realm of Summer opened for business, it had been in operation for 170 years.

  Fifty years before that, a geologist had come to the quiet fishing village that was all that had been in the area then.

  Like most geologists at that time, he was an amateur scholar who lived off the holdings of his wealthy family. Having taken ill while studying at a university in the city, and generally weak of nerve besides, the twenty-four-year-old was hoping that an extended stay somewhere with different scenery would help him recuperate. But as he gazed from the window of his carriage at the form of the land caught between the mountains and the sea, he was struck by a sudden hunch. His vigor restored in an instant, he ordered his driver to stop and sent his traveling companions and servants to make inquiries of the locals. After listening to each of their reports, he pronounced his judgment.

  “There are hot springs to be found here,” he said. “We must stop and investigate.”

  There was only one household in the area that could accommodate the Clements, a wealthy family who owned most of the area’s mountain forest. Although she would be one of the Mineral Springs Hotel’s founders fifty years later, Catherine Clement had not yet been born, and so it was her grandfather who welcomed the geologist instead. The young master of the Clement property was then in his mid-thirties.

  Clement and his wife were immediately fascinated by the geologist’s urbane charm and endless stock of anecdotes about the many countries he had visited. The geologist, in turn, was impressed by Clement’s rude health and fearless gaze, not to mention his wife’s lively wit and silvery voice, and soon opened his ailing heart to them. Thus was a devoted friendship born.

  The Clements gathered additional statements from surrounding residents for the geologist, and within two weeks of his arrival, the men they had hired struck mineral springs in the east bay, as it was known even then. One of the geologist’s traveling companions was a physician and chemist, and he duly declared the hot springs both potable and ideal for bathing. That evening a great feast was held, and late that night the geologist and Clement’s wife were passionately united while her husband dozed.

  The geologist eventually moved on to the sanatorium that had been his original destination, but soon returned to build a house of his own and lay claim to the springs. On the day of his home’s completion, Clement’s wife, Régine, approached him, her beauty burning brighter than ever. The baby at her breast was the child they had conceived in sin, she said, showing him his daughter’s face for the first time. She had named her Nadia, and one day she would be the mother of Catherine, who would found the hotel.

  Clement’s wife—his widow, now—looked into the geologist’s eyes. Her eyes had grown many times more beautiful since their night of sin.

  “My husband is dead,” she said. “An accident. His hunting rifle went off in his room.”

  It seemed to José that he remembered the story.

  The whole turbulent history of the hotel’s opening was an epic, spanning three generations and a full century. A threepenny opera for the masses.

  The string of episodes was quietly baked into the Realm of Summer like a secret ingredient.

  Guests who grew bored during their stay in the Realm could uncover this tale and replay any part of it they wished. Of course it was not the Realm’s main story line. It was a minor attraction tucked unassumingly away in the corner of a gigantic theme park, waiting patiently to be noticed and enjoyed. Some text data; a few grainy, sepia-toned photographs. But the total volume of embedded episodes like this was considerable.

  “What do you think of that, José?”

  The voice rained down from above, breaking his reverie.

&
nbsp; He realized that it had been speaking for some time. Telling him the origins of the Mineral Springs Hotel.

  Then he checked his own condition.

  He could see nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  He had slipped out of the TrapNet, it seemed. He was lying on what felt like a hard stone bed. No—it was not level. There was a gentle slope; his head was higher than his feet. A chair reclined back as far as it would go, perhaps?

  In any case, he doubted that he was still on the ocean terrace.

  Where had the boy Langoni gone?

  On second thought, he probably hadn’t gone anywhere. He must be within José himself. José could not hear the boy or his voice just now, but he sensed him all the same.

  “Well? I mean, the Mineral Springs Hotel is the accommodation symbolizing the whole Realm of Summer. There must be some meaning in its having such bloody, sensual episodes threaded into its origin story, don’t you think?”

  It was so dark that José’s eyes were useless to him. That voice. It was all he could hear. It was so charming, so refined; it made him think of the finest maple syrup, leather gloves, a walnut desk, the amber tone of pine resin… It was the voice of a man, low but with a halolike gleam to it. Whose voice could it be?

  “What do you think? Doesn’t something deep in your soul resonate with that story? The Clement family chronicles might be written in a refined register, but at root they’re tales of obsession. A bit like the Realm of Summer, don’t you think?”

  José sniffed at the cool air. He smelled water. Was there water nearby? No—actually, it seemed that his legs were immersed. It was warmer than well water, cooler than his skin. Water that had been warmed by the sun. The lapping of the waves. José tried to gather his scattered senses. Yes, he still had a very poor sense of his position, the temperature, what the sounds he was hearing were. Under normal circumstances, the nonvisual sensory information he received would be placed within the context of what he learned about his location through sight. His legs knew the water, but he would not be able to believe it until he saw it with his eyes. It was only in seeing his legs and the water together that he could identify the sensation as that of water striking his legs.