I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

by Isis, Justin

  Park turned the page and came to a sketch of a crow, its outspread wings detailed in thick black ink.

  —What weapons do they have? Tomo asked.

  —Not anything too complicated. One machine gun, maybe, but everything else would be spears, swords, knives and forks.

  —So they all have to fight to get the machine gun.

  —Yeah. Would an air war be better, do you think.

  —What do you mean?

  —Their airplanes crashing over a desert somewhere. A dead girl is wired into the cockpit and her airplane is sticking out of the sand, so the straps are holding her body in place even though the airplane is standing straight up.

  —Are these young girls trained to fight this war beforehand?

  Park closed the sketchbook.

  —Some of them are, some of them aren’t. Some of them are taken from their families with no previous training and put under the command of older girls, maybe the oldest is nineteen. And these older girls are the survivors of previous wars.

  —What happens if they have their period?

  —That’s the thing... there would be so much blood staining the ground that it wouldn’t matter. But, no, they wouldn’t be allowed to wear any kind of pads for that, they’d just have to deal with it.

  Tomo looked at him.

  —If I had control of this war, Park said, then I’d have all the survivors put into two final armies and then I’d have the walls start closing in, and just as both sides were getting ready for the final war and mentally preparing themselves to fight... then I’d drop an atomic bomb on the battlefield.

  He smiled.

  —That’s pointless, Tomo said.

  —Of course.

  They were interrupted as Saya came over. When Park asked where Mutsumi was, she told him that she’d gone to apply for a job.

  —At the salon?

  —I think so, yeah. She didn’t tell me.

  She took out a small hand mirror and adjusted her hair. Without Mutsumi there was nothing for them to talk about, and he felt this awkwardness in every movement she made. He wished he could leave. But Tomo was staring at him intently.

  —Look, seriously, why don’t you think I could improve my paintings?

  —I didn’t say you couldn’t. I just think... isn’t this some kind of way for you to get attention?

  —That doesn’t have anything to do with it.

  —Then why’d you ask me about it?

  —I just wanted your opinion.

  Saya got up and excused herself — she was meeting some other friends soon. Park said goodbye to her before turning back to Tomo.

  —All right, if you finish something you really like, I’ll look at it.

  —I never know whether to believe you.

  —If I tell you I’ll do something, I’ll do it.

  —Yeah, but half the time you ignore my messages.

  —I don’t really reply to anyone’s messages.

  —I know, but it’s me.

  Park looked at him.

  —I never know what you’re thinking, Tomo said.

  —I tell you what I’m thinking most of the time.

  —Do you think I’m ridiculous. Do you think I’m an idiot, or something like that.

  —You’re not an idiot.

  —You think that, right? Or you get sick of hanging out with me. Do you want me to not send you messages so much?

  —You can send messages... you don’t have to take it so seriously, I’m just busy recently.

  —With Mutsumi.

  Park shook his head.

  —I don’t really think about her that much, if I’m not with her.

  —Yeah? Have you guys, like, done anything yet?

  —Yeah.

  —Well, I’m sorry I bother you all the time.

  —Why are you apologizing?

  —I’m an idiot. I should’ve realized I sent you too many messages and bothered you all the time.

  —You’re getting dramatic. You’re not usually like this.

  —No, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just being weird.

  Tomo looked away. After a few minutes of silence Park excused himself, mentioning the urgency of an unfinished assignment and a commitment at the florist after that. In fact, he was meeting Mutsumi in Shinjuku at eight. He’d meant to confirm the meeting place with her in person, and since she wasn’t coming there was no reason to stay in the refectory. He looked back at Tomo as he left, eager to be outside. It seemed that the more time he spent with someone, the more he tired of their presence. He felt as if he were constantly escaping from one person to another. And although he had been with Mutsumi for less than a month, he was already thinking of leaving her.

  He made it through the rest of his classes and left the grounds immediately after, reaching Shinjuku Station at seven fifty. Mutsumi arrived fifteen minutes later, carrying a heavy shopping bag. She took his hand and they walked towards Kabukicho.

  —Have you already eaten? she asked him. I’ve already had dinner but we can get something, if you want.

  Park said he wasn’t hungry.

  —Well, let’s go to karaoke then.

  They walked to 747 and booked a room. Park took her shopping bag as they climbed the stairs, and they passed through a narrow corridor to a room at the far end of the floor. After a few minutes the waiter came in with their drinks. When he left, Mutsumi took a bottle of vodka from the shopping bag and poured some into the glasses. Park lit up a cigarette and watched her flip through the electronic register, glass in hand. Eventually she took the remote and typed in a number. The screen hummed into life, and Mutsumi started to sing. Her voice was thin and wavering, but Park was looking at the song title appearing onscreen; it was “Can You Celebrate?” by Namie Amuro. The opening melody reminded him of his primary school years. Thinking back to them, he felt a series of nameless emotions, like layers of wet gauze dampening the clarity of his memory. It occurred to him that he had always hated Namie Amuro, but now, hearing Mutsumi’s voice rising above the beat, he came to associate her with a period of stability and peace that he knew had never existed. Gradually, the past was slipping into fiction, and everything seemed better in retrospect.

  When the song finished Mutsumi filled her glass again.

  —Sing something in Korean, she said.

  —I don’t know any songs, Park said.

  He listened to her sing for most of the night. Occasionally he picked up the second microphone and joined her, but mostly he let his thoughts drift, focusing on her voice only at the appropriate moments, after she finished a song, when he would clap and express his approval. As she drank more and more, she started to rock against him, the weight of her body warm against his, her voice close in his ear. She went on for a few more hours, stumbling through songs whose words she barely knew, insisting that he sing with her, the bottle emptying between them. Towards midnight he felt her slumping into his lap, and he lay there for a while, stroking her hair and smoking a final cigarette. Mutsumi had stopped mid-song, and now the beat continued to the ghost whisper of the backing track. He let it run down, then put out his cigarette and began to shake her, gently at first, then insistently, until she murmured and shook her head. He pulled her to her feet and guided her to the door.

  Downstairs, he paid for them both, then walked to the exit with his arm around her waist, her head nodding against his shoulder. When she drank like this he became aware of her body as a physical object, and it seemed almost grotesque, a blind stumbling thing, tottering about on two thick legs. And he knew that he was no different from her. How would he appear to a cockroach, skittering and hard as armor, or a cat, with its carefully calculated movements? Half-drunk himself, thoughts like these took on a sombre urgency, and he dragged her through the streets as if carrying out a mission, his face flat and expressionless.

  Realizing they wouldn’t make the last train, he scanned the neon signs ahead of him, looking for a love hotel. Most of them were full, but eventually he found a f
ree room in a squat grey building past the main block. He took the key from the counter and helped Mutsumi to the lift. As soon as they entered the room she collapsed onto the bed. He took off his jacket and hung it up in the closet, then poured himself a glass of water. He tried to get her to drink, but she pushed him away and the water spilled on the sheets. After moving her body to the dry side, he took a towel from the bathroom and spread it out on the bed. Then he turned off the light and lay down beside her.

  When he awoke, he checked his watch, taking it to be mid-day. It felt as if he’d slept forever, but he saw that only four hours had passed. Fragments of a dream hovered at the edge of his thoughts, but the scene outside the window caught his attention. Through the blinds, the first light of morning filtered through the darkness, patches of slate sky tinged with pink and white. A haze had settled over the buildings, and the world seemed stripped of form.

  He looked over. Mutsumi was sleeping on her side, mouth open, her fringe covering her eyes. She’d wrapped herself in the blanket, so that only her shoulders showed through the folds. A slow exhalation sounded from her lips in a steady rhythm. He reached down and brushed back a strand of her hair. Asleep, her body seemed richer somehow, concentrated in itself, as if her silenced mind infused every part of her. Her limbs stretched out carelessly, it was true, but he felt something of her self revealed, carried across in this lack of grace. He wanted to lie down next to her again. But he put on his clothes, and after leaving her a message on the nightstand, took the lift down and paid for the room.

  Outside, in the morning air, his dream came back to him. He’d met his father in the ruined city and followed him to an abandoned house, away from the central district. When they reached the gate, his father took a key from his briefcase and opened it, and after crossing the grounds to the main entrance, they passed through a series of antechambers, coming at last to a wide room lit by paper lanterns. At the exact center of the room was an enormous glass case, led up to by a series of steps. He moved closer and inspected it. A dense condensation misted the surface of the glass, but when he touched it, it began to clear. Through it he could see, like a mirage forming from fog, the naked body of a young man resting on a bier. He strained for a glimpse of the face, but a purple stain obscured it. As his father climbed the steps and stood next to him, he saw that similar stains covered the young man’s body, draping themselves across his legs, covering his groin, spread at his throat like lace. Not stains at all, he realized: flowers, great purple flowers with black pistils and broad petals, dark spots dappling their edges. Refracted through the glass, the swaying light of the lanterns cast watery patterns across the corpse, so that the flowers seemed to swell on its skin like coral growths on a drowned man. And although the young man was dead, the flowers were still living, blooming on his body, their petals flecked with fetid dew. That was the source of the condensation, he thought — the breath of flowers fed on death.

  He turned the dream over in his mind. In the pale light rising behind the buildings, the color of the flowers stood out in his memory. It was, he knew, the same color as the flowers of a hanged man, the purple-black blossoms of his swollen tongue and penis. He’d seen them before, in books and photographs. There was nothing mysterious about that.

  But as soon as he dismissed the dream, another thought rose in his mind.

  If a man was to be hanged, well and good. But what would blossom from the body of a woman? That would be a different kind of flower, a rose of extremities, brief and unsurpassable. A rose with a broken stem.

  Walking back to the station by himself, he imagined them spreading through the whitening sky and the signs’ bleached neon — the hidden colors of the rose, its slickened petals opening in darkness.

  •

  Towards the end of April he started to see Shiho walking with a boyfriend — not anyone from their class, he realized; probably a student from Keio or Nekketsu or one of the other schools. They met each other outside the main entrance every day and he watched them walk past the gate, towards the station. The boyfriend was tall with close-cut hair, his face calm and passive. When he walked his stride was long and unhurried; when he met Shiho he smiled only briefly. When she took his arm she held her shoulders high and square, her boots clacking against the sidewalk. Though she held him tightly he let his wrist fall slack, his other arm dangling useless as a cripple’s. He seemed an extension of her, this boyfriend, a kind of secretion, her rigid shoulders displaying the tremendous effort needed to keep him in existence. Only her left wrist hung limp, supporting the weight of her handbag. Against her jutting forearm her hand seemed hopelessly light, as if it had fainted.

  He thought of the boyfriend ejaculating in her eyes, imagining the strands of semen caught between her lashes and the play of gravity as it pulled them past her lids, a single pale rill running down her cheek. All trace of him exhausted in the desert of her flesh, the shelf of her back so seamless that even if he were to slash his throat before bending to kiss it, the flow of blood would leave as little trace as the lacquered finish on polished bronze... she shifted her legs and two brief ribbons of pink lace appeared at the end of her black silk socks, barely visible beneath her boots.

  If a high-caliber bullet were to shatter the back of her skull, the immediate disorder would coexist with the residual delicacy of her fingernails, so that he could hold her hand and feel its warmth just as the skull-shard flower bloomed over her chest, the tops of her golden breasts dappled in grey... if the two of them were hanged from the same branch of the same tree, their spasming corpses would brush against each other like two hands reaching across a chasm... if they were left to rot in the wilderness, the foxes and crows would gnaw away their faces, remnants of mind and self scattered to the sands, a perfect compassion descending through beak and claw, in the beetles crawling from her rotting cunt... daydreams like these were the only way to endure the boredom of daily life. But outwardly, his composure never cracked. He wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d moved to the front rank of the class.

  In the face of this boredom he went on with his old routines, finishing his assignments and meeting Mutsumi on the weekends. At work, on the train, he kept on reading the Bible, even as its passages palled. His only interest now was to imagine the faces of the Twelve Disciples. They would all be ugly, he decided: a pack of peasants with doglike eyes, scrounging outside their master’s tomb.

  On television he saw a program about the sokushinbutsu or self-mummifying monks, Shugendô Buddhists who starved themselves to reach a point of purity. For years they ate only nuts, seeds, and bark, subsisting in isolation. After their rigorous physical training reached its end, they would lock themselves in their own tombs and drink poison, vomiting the last drops of water left in their bodies. Most of them failed: despite the measures, the years of training, the bacteria survived and the flies found them. But when the tombs were opened on the few who succeeded, there was no trace of rot. The corpses sat perfectly preserved in postures of meditation, their calcified organs intact. Each was immediately made a Buddha. Park imagined a group of awed novices opening the doors to find their master transformed, someone they had known in life now become a god. Images of the opened tombs filled his mind, and he passed a class dreaming of the petrified faces of fleshless saints, mummified monks like human diamonds.

  On Saturday Junko called him and mentioned that Tomo’s sister had just come over from Kyoto. They were all looking forward to seeing what dish he would bring, and did he want to be picked up at the station or come directly to the house? Having forgotten about the dinner, Park stumbled over his responses, barely paying attention. Then, hanging up the phone, he turned and saw Sujung standing in the doorway.

  —Was that Tomoki’s mother? she said. I’ve already started cooking. You don’t think they’ll be bored with kimchi rice, do you?

  —I forgot it was today, Park said.

  Sujung looked at him and not-really-smiled.

  —That’s what I thought. I don’t know wh
ere you get that from. Your father had an excellent memory.

  —I’ve been busy recently, Park said.

  —Come down and help me.

  He followed her downstairs. The kimchi rice was almost finished, so he took a pan and started frying eggs. By the time he was done, Sujung had already taken two large plastic containers from the shelf and spooned in the rice.

  —Do you want a ride to the station?

  —It’s all right, I can walk.

  Park put the eggs in the containers and pressed on the lids. He had another two hours before the dinner started, but wanted to get out of the house. After saying goodbye to Sujung, he caught the train to the station nearest Tomo’s house. While waiting for the bus, he stared at the intersection across from him. The trip out had only taken him forty minutes, which meant he had another hour or so to spare. But instead of looking at the shops, he stayed on the bench, watching the commuters. Eventually he felt himself drifting into a kind of trance. By the time he got up the air had cooled and the sun was setting.

  He caught the bus and got off a block from Tomo’s. When he entered the house, everyone was already seated at the table, the plates set out in front of them. Junko looked pleased; Tomo’s sister had recently announced her engagement, and the two of them sat side by side, discussing plans for the wedding.

  —I know it’s so soon after Yuka, he heard Tomo’s sister say. When she saw Park come in she greeted him. He’d met her before, but had barely spoken with her at the time. To his disappointment, she looked nothing like the younger Junko he’d seen in the photograph.

  —Happy birthday, Park said, nodding at Tomo. Seeing the plastic containers, Junko got up and took them from him.

  —This looks wonderful, she said, as she went to heat up the rice. She seemed genuinely happy.

  —I heard you’re getting married, Park said, taking a seat. Congratulations.

  Tomo’s sister smiled.

  —We’re planning it for spring next year. I’ve already told Tomo you’re invited.