Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  AI, WIL, TEL ZEM, TU DU, BETR.

  4

  After the president departed for the board of directors meeting, the worker should in theory have been able to spend some time alone—his first in a very long while. Even with jobs to do such as knitting nerve nets and taking care of dependency tanks, idle times were practically holidays for him, and more importantly, he knew that if he didn’t give his body a chance to heal he would never make it through the post-Festival rush when casualties would be carried in in rapid-fire succession.

  However, a seriously wounded auditor from the fishery was brought in while the president was away.

  Although the surgical procedure needed was clear from the explanation of the disassembler who had accompanied him, the worker still could not quell the anxiety he felt. Visible inside the auditor’s face and extending down to his chest was nothing other than the upper half of an assimiant’s body, gripped in a full nelson hold by the auditor’s articulated ribs. Skin remained only in places; the muscles and organs were exposed. Every time the worker moved around the room, those clouded eyes would follow him with a slight lag. The fishery worker was being used, apparently, as a stopgap life-support system for the auditor’s organs. There could be no clearer example of what would have happened to the worker himself the other day if that client’s delivery of goods had been unsuccessful.

  As he was unaccustomed to the job of connecting nerve fibers, the surgery turned out to be one difficult problem after another. The work was completed in four days, the auditor sent away before he awakened, and then the president came back. Once again, cruel and hectic days commenced.

  Even now, the injuries the worker had sustained from the canvassers were not healed, and his physical condition was hardly satisfactory. With his broken ribs, his chest was still terribly uneven, and the bruise on his solar plexus had swelled up horribly with pus that stained his clothing. His spine had bent into an arch from favoring the cracked bones in his knee and ankle. And maybe he had just taken too many stupa-toad eggs, but a strange pressure had started in his abdomen which was growing in strength day by day. He always felt like vomiting whenever he moved around, and as before he would be seized with coughing fits and vomit blood. In spite of this, there was no change in the amount of work he was called upon to perform, and perhaps because of his misery, outbreaks of lice and egg cases began to occur even during the daytime. When the president noticed, he would suck them off with his fingertips.

  Had water started pooling in the worker’s abdomen? It had expanded to an unbelievable size, until he was no longer able to even bend over. Abscesses emitting foul odors were breaking out everywhere, and he often grew forgetful to the point that it interfered with his work. The president never grew indignant, however, nor would he send for that quack physician anymore.

  Those old memories he could never be sure were dream or reality became altogether impossible for the worker to recall, and locked into a cycle of depthless, two-dimensional days, his work came to be a merely reflexive activity, like the nervous twitching of a spine.

  But then one day when a frightful amount of blood had appeared in his stool, there came a sign that he might soon be freed from that cycle—it was a part of his swollen stomach that had begun to protrude outward—and move.

  He touched the surface with both hands, and as he caressed it, it dawned on him that he was with child, and without the slightest reservation, he accepted the fact that she was female. She could even feel a vague sense of her past as a female. She gave herself over to a joy that rained down from above and bubbled up from within, and no thought crossed her mind for the obvious question of whose child this was … or of those immature reproductive organs of which she had always been ashamed.

  From the time that she realized she was pregnant, the worker would often sit in a chair in the workshop and, taking care not to put pressure on the fetus, doze off into slumber with her hands gently resting on her stomach. She was no longer in any kind of condition for working. She was not even in condition for walking.

  With her jacket pulled up to her solar plexus and her pants pulled down away from her stomach, her exposed, whitish belly looked like an enormous peeled boiled egg.

  Having perhaps awakened to a newfound respect for workplace safety regulations, the president turned down the next work order that came in. As if that were not enough, he even went so far as to display concern, making sure not to run out of the stupa-toad eggs that had become the worker’s only source of nutrition. Cracks appeared on her stomach, making watermelon patterns as the belly swelled to three times the size of the pregnancies in her memory, covering and concealing her withered legs.

  The eggs also had medicinal effects, and it was during a long day spent dozing in and out of drowsy slumbers that she suddenly vomited, and the birthing process began.

  From the rounded surface of her stomach, amid scattered bits of undigested toad eggs that trailed threads of saliva and stomach acid, blood and body fluids erupted from around the abscess on her solar plexus, and something as black and as glossy as wet crow feathers rose up out of it and opened its eyes. After they had stared at one another for a time, her new self came suddenly sliding out. It was as though she’d beheld her own decapitation.

  The worker’s body twisted with an agony she had never known, and in that moment her upper body was rotating around its own center of gravity. Her spinal column broke, bundles of muscle tore loose in rapid succession, and the ceiling and floor exchanged places. A grated pattern spread out across her field of vision. Its dark squares slammed into her face, and her front teeth cracked open, her nose was crushed, and her blood went flying.

  With her damp nose pressed against the grated floor, clinging to the pain that pierced straight through to her parietal bone for proof that she was still alive, she turned her head to the side. She saw a newborn worker there, bending over backward as it was pushed from a stomach that now bore a shocking resemblance to a sleepsac. The president—when had he come in?—took it by the back and the nape of the neck, pulled the rest of its body free, and laid it down on the workbench.

  The voice of the worker as she begged for help was not even a moan, but the president came over to her nonetheless. His face descended, made a noise that sounded like, “GyoVuReU’UNN,” and just as this was answered with a sound of creaking iron, the worker was flung down into the gloom beneath the floor.

  She fell like a soul that had slipped out of its true, flesh-and-blood body, and going down the worker surely saw it: the truth behind the parrots that hung by both arms from the grated floor plates through which they wrapped their fingers.

  That was me. That, and the sleepsac too, used to be me.

  The dim light from the workshop fell farther and farther away. She was in an empty space with nothing she could struggle against. So empty that even when the end suddenly came, she wasn’t aware of it.

  Chapter 2: The Disassembler Searched On

  1

  When the on-site disassembler came to the synthorgan factory carrying his packing case, he stared for a moment at a worker who had assumed an awkward attitude toward him, apparently puzzled upon seeing another of his kind for the first time. He must have been born quite recently—his hair was jet-black and glossy, and his skin was fresh and young. The cycles sure run fast here, he thought with pity. He had just started to introduce himself as a worker from the fishery, when the young worker’s face twisted into a severe expression.

  “That’s my name. I won’t have you referring to yourself as ‘I.’ ”

  Just the same as before. The old memories didn’t come back right away, so there were many cases where self-identification didn’t go very well. They probably couldn’t help latching on to a word that would provide a definition of who they were.

  “I’m the on-site disassembler,” he added simply, and then got down to work.

  When the disassembler had finally finishe
d disassembling the placoderms and was covered in oil, he requested the president’s signature on the paperwork. The body tissues of presidents and directors were injected into his skull as recording media. By way of his eye socket, that swollen finger came feeling around inside his head, and he wet himself.

  He had a headache as he got into the lift, to which clung the corpse of a coffin eel, its body still wrapped around all four walls as though trying to climb up on the nearly four-meter-tall cage. The cage shuddered and slowly descended. From between gaps in the elaborate ribs surrounding him on every side, the skeleton of an assimiant who appeared to have been swallowed whole was peeking out.

  The lift stopped. He stepped off onto an island of rotting flesh and was loading his packing case on the flatboat when his eyes paused upon a small, steeply ascending island located directly beneath a vertical drainage pipe. It seethed with the gases of decomposition.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the pilot.

  The disassembler turned his short neck and indicated it with his jaw.

  “You’ve tried how many times already? It’s hopeless. It’ll just be a parrot this time too.”

  “I know. You’re probably right,” the disassembler said as he started walking out into the shallows of the putrefying muck.

  “That gas is dense. You watch yourself.”

  He waved a hand lightly behind him and pulled his scarf up over his nose. After crossing over to a tiny island covered in bas-reliefs of bones and organs, he sank to his knees in putrid filth that teemed with cockroaches and nematodes and headed toward a figure that was buried to its chest on the side of its highest hill.

  It was looking up at the underside of the faraway deck. Its face was exactly the same as that of the worker he had met just moments ago. When, breathing heavily, he made his way to its side, its eyes moved. They turned toward the disassembler and stared.

  The disassembler knew full well, though, that this was nothing more than a reactionary response. The magatama was always passed on to the newborn worker, so nothing of their former intellect could remain in those who had turned into parrots. The disassembler lifted up the parrot’s half-body, and they regarded one another, face-to-scab-covered-face.

  “Hey there, you remember me?”

  Rows of sparse teeth began to quiver.

  “ ’Ey … member me?”

  The disassembler’s eyes grew moist. He recognized his tears as a form of self-pity.

  Suddenly, he heard the sound of someone whistling with his fingers. It was the pilot urging him to head back.

  “All right,” he said. It was as he was setting the parrot back down, however, that the disassembler’s fingers detected a small, hard bulge in the body’s breast pocket. He undid its button and stuck his fingers inside. What came out was a magatama that gleamed with an emerald light.

  2

  At first, the worker thought himself—the pregnancy being little more than a biological and existential misunderstanding—submerged in water. This was because everything appeared distorted to him. He wondered if he had perhaps finally awakened from a nightmare in which he worked at a cruel synthorgan factory. After all, the room he was in looked a lot like the rooms in which the people of his hometown had lived. However, the familiar furniture and household appliances that were lined up against the wall were far too numerous, haphazardly pushed up against one another like animals snapping at each other’s throats. The dim light was coming from a torchburr. Had there been a room like this at the base of the synthorgan company building? The terror of when he had been thrown from that structure came back to him, and he tried to get up, only to discover that he couldn’t move in the slightest. It was as though he were buried to his neck on a sandy beach.

  home> nothing>deep>depths>·
  Suddenly lonely thoughts such as beggared his imagination came welling up, and his eyes filled with tears. Without spilling over, they remained quivering on the surfaces of his eyes, only to be swallowed up in waves of concentric circles emanating from the midst of his field of vision. From somewhere, he could hear a sound like a backed-up sewer pipe.

  sign> flow> marge> destruction> ·
  Days spent in longing for a return from that place of exile beyond the bounds of society—days enough to turn boulders into sand. He could remember them as his own. Is this somebody’s memory again? He was thinking that it was, and the chain of thoughts that nested around the axis of that single point grew outward in every direction, forming a shell all around him, until they began both to complement and overturn one another.

  Only in scattered fragments could he unlock their meaning, and when consciousness returned to him in that room, he could practically taste the presence of someone standing on the other side of the wall, of the disorderly layout of a multilayered, labyrinthine housing crystal lying farther in behind him, and even of the corpses that were sealed inside it.

  Someone started walking toward him. It was not a worker from his own company; he looked a lot like the disassembler from the fishery. Though hadn’t he just been wondering where he worked himself? Coaguland … number four, it was the Fourth Coaguland Reaffirmation branch. He felt a pressure near his retinas, and the wall appeared again, and the disassembler appeared from a doorless entryway, confusing the worker.

  “You were pretty slow to wake up. I’d just about given up on you.” The voice that came to him sounded like it was passing through water. “We are presently located inside a vintage landfill stratum. The metabolism’s slow here, though, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Fwaa ii zii—

  What is this? was what the worker had intended to say.

  “It must still be hard for you to speak. Can you tell, by the way, that you’re being preserved inside a director’s body?”

  Images rose up in the back of the worker’s mind of a director caught in the grip of several canvassers … of organs and multiple yoked-in brains being smashed one after another. A shudder went through the corpuscyte that covered his entire field of vision, causing the disassembler’s face to waver about.

  “This director took fatal injuries in a canvasser attack. They brought him in to the synthorgan factory right away, but there was no way to restore him, so they threw him out. Yeah … no hope of helping them once they’ve had their brains destroyed.”

  No, that isn’t right. Those yoked-in brains are internal prisons that greatly limit the functionality of cogitosome-bearing corpuscyte.

  “You’d turned into a parrot and were buried in an island of rot. For some reason, you were carrying a magatama. During pregnancy, the magatama moves to the embryo, so what you were carrying most likely belonged to someone who was swallowed by a coffin-eel. Magatamas govern the intellect and memory of assimiants like us.”

  They were not merely memory organs for individuals. In great detail, they reminded the workers of all kinds of things they had no way of learning by themselves, and in much the same way that landfill strata created counterfeit copies of things using eide from the past, they had succeeded in making those things real.

  Now he stood unmoving in a dark alleyway, staring silently as many of his kind began to come and go along a street where time had frozen over. One of the parishes that had once flourished in the inner world of the canvassers—which had long afterward remained compressed and frozen inside the magatama—was unpacking into his neural network like a tightly folded paper being opened to reveal a completed diagram.

  “Since you’re using some stranger’s magatama as a foothold, it isn’t clear whether you’re the same worker as before.”

  The worker started walking. He was twice as tall as everyone else, but nobody seemed to notice. He tried touching a pedestrian on the back, but his fingers merely sank into him and got tangled up in the strin
gs of letters there. It dawned on him that an assimiant was something chosen out of the collected data of the fifty thousand people that a canvasser’s magatama contained. That data was then modified and forcibly incarnated. He realized also that while here in this parish, he was himself in a comatose state.

  “If you’re wondering who it was that merged you so splendidly with the director’s body, why that would be your newborn self. Not that he understood what it was he’d accomplished, mind you. I had originally hoped to play the role you’re playing right now myself.”

  As he advanced forward, spatial distortions began to appear here and there, and the worker noticed that the space around him was dotted with gaps.

  “Should’ve known I wouldn’t be brave enough to be sealed alive in corpuscyte, though.”

  The reason the warps and the gaps were appearing was that in regions where the medium differed from the rest—most likely near things like the cogitosomes that were scattered throughout the director’s body—only space constructed through classical physics was being generated.

  “At the fishery, I couldn’t even try to use a parrot unless I took it apart for disassembly practice.”

  The worker was headed toward a place of extreme distortion. It was a park where sunlight dappled through the trees. There a man in a white lab coat was sitting on a bench, nodding at no one in particular as he stared intently at a cliff face towering above the treetops. There was no mistaking that the cliff was made of landfill strata. Was there something special about the cogitosomes handling its construction? It appeared that they were showing him space from before the end.

  A man in a suit appeared to his right. He held a can of coffee out to the man in the white coat and spoke: “With things having come to this point, I find it odd that you aren’t getting registered for transference.”