by Hiromi Goto
It plummeted so fast. A blur of motion. Splat-thud. Splashing. Into the fountain. Dark droplets pattering on his bare arm.
A body. The skull exploded. A mass of splintered bones. Black blood spreading. Cracker screamed several seconds too late.
“Don’t look,” Gee said hoarsely. He wrapped his arm around Cracker’s head and covered her eyes with his hand. Virtually holding her in a headlock, he pulled her away from the fountain. They could have been struck. It was so close. Gee’s heart thudded slow and loud inside his head. What happened if the living died in Half World? He didn’t want to find out….
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Cracker’s voice was high-pitched. “The jumper. The one who jumped off the fire escape!”
Oh, god, Gee thought. She was right. Unable to stop himself, he looked back.
The man’s white shirt was black with blood. It spread like paint beneath the ruins of his body. Gee’s nostrils flared. Two dabs of black blood on his upper arm. It smelled rich, like melted chocolate, slightly bitter, and sweet.
His tongue whipped out, a chameleon flick. The soft white tip soaked up the blood. Back in his mouth before he could think, before he could stop. His eyes widened and his lips trembled.
What have I done?
Disgust and horror, twin snakes, twined with a growing giddiness. The blood tasted so delicious. A harsh sound escaped from his mouth. Oh god. They had to hurry. He was starting to lose it. He couldn’t even control his thoughts. His actions. It was starting to slide away.
“It’s okay.” Cracker tried calming him between rasping gasps for air. “We couldn’t stop him. Don’t look back, Gee. I won’t look either. You can let go now.”
Gee realized he was practically dragging Cracker along a narrow passage. His breath snagging in his throat. A panic of air and pain. He slowed to a stop and released her. He sank onto his haunches. He covered his nose and mouth with both hands and rocked back and forth.
Mmmmmm, mmmmm, good, the voice inside him crowed. Eat. Eat like you want to. Eat to make you big and strong. Ohhhhh, so powerful. Beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Power is delicious tooooooo.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Cracker croaked.
Hands still covering his mouth, Gee shook his head.
Cracker’s worried face remained etched with exhaustion. Lines were beginning to form alongside her mouth, and she had double bags beneath her pale gold eyes. She looked as if she was close to forty. Not a sixteen-year-old.
“Maybe,” Cracker’s voice was hoarse, “you should wait here. By the hotel. I can go look for my sister by myself, and come back later.”
“No!” Gee cried, his hands falling from his face. “No. We made a promise, remember? That we’ll see each other through. We have to stick together. Or something bad will happen.” Unable to help himself, he began to giggle. He sounded like he was five years old…. Stop it! he told himself. Get a hold of your emotions. They were all over the place. Uncontrolled. Irrational. When his entire life he’d been able to control them.
It’s my turn now, the nasty voice crowed. MY TURN!
“This place is bad for you,” Cracker said gently. “You’re changing, Gee. Sometimes … sometimes your eyes go funny. Your energy changes.” She hadn’t said she was afraid of him.
The carefulness of her words touched him more than he could say.
Gee dragged his palms down his face. “We need to stay together,” he whispered. He needed to stay near her. Her goodness was all he could hold on to. There was good still left inside him. But without her, it would run out more quickly. He could be good, longer, for her than he could for himself.
Grandson….
Gee could almost hear his grandmother’s strong, kind voice. And for you, Popo, his little child heart cried. “We have to hurry,” he said.
Cracker nodded grimly. “The water’s no good here.”
“What!” Gee cried. “Are you okay? Are you sick? I told you not to drink it!”
Cracker shook her head. “No, not like that.” She swallowed hard. “It didn’t take away my thirst. It’s like I haven’t drunk at all.”
Gee stared at her face. “Maybe because it’s Half World. And everything here is only here after death…. Maybe the water’s dead, too.”
He would not think about his own lack of thirst. Why he only felt hunger, and she did not.
“I’m okay, still,” Cracker said. “We can survive. Humans can survive at least three days without water.” A weary sound escaped her determined lips. “I’m so tired, too,” she admitted. “I wish I could get some sleep.”
Gee stared at his pale hands. He felt no need for sleep. Had he ever felt sleepy? He couldn’t say. Maybe he’d only ever had the habit of sleep, but without the actual need….
Seventy-two hours.
That’s not very much time, Gee thought. But are we even in time? If Half World is timeless, then why did she even need water? He squeezed his eyes shut. Half World was illogical. It was irrational. So it was stupid to use measures from home as a way to understand it. If Cracker was thirsty, she was thirsty.
If you’re hungry, you’re hungry.
“Three days is enough time to find my sister and your birth parents,” Cracker said. “If we knew which way to go.”
“No maps,” Gee whispered. “Not the laws of space and time that we know….” There was something just at the edges of his memory. A piece of information. Was it something White Cat had said?
Gee drew the stone figurine out of his pocket. He glared at the inert cat sitting on his palm. “Help us!” he hissed. “Tell us where! Tell us how!” But the cat remained stone.
Who had said it? Something about the workings of Half World…. Was it Ilanna? What was wrong with his memory? It used to be so good. Why couldn’t—
“Memory and pain!” Gee cried out.
“What?” Cracker rasped. She was leaning against the dark brick wall. Her eyes partly closed.
“Half World is made out of memory and pain. Everyone’s memory and pain creates a part of it, for themselves. That would explain why all the maps you saw in the Archives were completely different. But if the sufferers make their own little Half World, if the pain they feel is shared, then they must share that moment.”
“What are you saying, Gee?” Cracker’s voice was thin.
“I’m saying you have the memory of where your sister is inside you. You just have to sink into the pain. And you’ll go there. You can find her.” Gee was almost smiling. He was right. The truth of it rang like a bell inside him.
“Oh, Gee.” Cracker was shaking her head. “That’s a terrible place. I’ve worked so hard not to be stuck there.” Tears filled her eyes.
“Look,” Gee said, torn between compassion and frustration. “No one is forcing you to go to Klara. We can just search for my birth parents instead. You don’t have to see her.”
Cracker dragged the back of her hand across her eyes. “I’m conflicted, Gee. That’s the human condition. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it.” She grabbed hold of his hand. A small warmth remained.
Warm, the way bread dough swelled, sweet, yeasty and delicious….
Gee took shallow breaths through his mouth as they began walking.
Cracker didn’t notice. She closed her eyes even as they continued. She walked blindly into pain, reliving memory.
“Gee?” Her voice was small.
“Yes.” Gee was curt. Their footsteps rang loudly. The buckles on Cracker’s boots sounded like chains.
“If I fall too deep…. If I sink too low, please don’t let go.”
Gee’s heart clenched. She trusted him. She was counting on him.
“I promise,” he whispered.
Chapter Twenty
They seemed to be walking in a city, but a city without system or design. Devoid of colour, everything fell within the shades between black and white. Grey buildings seemed to grow out of the ground like deformed plants. The streets and passageways meandered and spiralled, pedestr
ian bridges that went nowhere. Cars and buses sometimes sailed pass, sirens wailing, the clattering clamour of horse-drawn carriages careening on cobblestone. Neon signs flashing in white and greys, Hotel! Girls! Girls! Girls! Pizza! Early Payday!
Sometimes explosions shook the air.
They walked on and on, concrete morphing into worn cobblestones fading into dirt paths that solidified to pale grey concrete. Piles of garbage lay in rotting mounds and narrow unlit passageways sometimes glinted with eyes, the scurry of claws. The air was heavy with the reek of raw sewage, decaying meat and smoky fires, a distant droning and roaring like an enormous factory.
Shadows sometimes called out to them, asking for spare change, a hand, a piece of bread, their voices cagey and pleading. But most people were trapped in their Half World cycles and didn’t seem to see them. Most of them looked human….
Gee and Cracker ignored them, not daring to meet anyone’s eyes. They walked as quickly as they were able, though sometimes Cracker clung to Gee’s arm as her strength faltered.
The echo of their footsteps chased their heels. The faint jangle of Cracker’s boot buckles. As time, as space, seemed to stretch, elastic and ungoverned, uncertainty gnawed inside Gee’s chest. “Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked.
Cracker did not answer.
Gee glanced at her face, worried.
Cracker’s eyes were glazed. She stared straight ahead, but she didn’t seem to see anything at all. Had she even heard him?
“Soon,” she finally whispered. “Close.”
Gee tried to pick up their pace.
The jangle of her boot buckles grew louder. The cobblestones beneath their feet were uneven and exhausting. Gee looked over his shoulder.
A shift … perception slipping, between physical and emotional…. The air was thick. The air was thin. And though they stepped forward, Gee felt like they were sinking. It took all he had not to let go of Cracker’s small hand, to grab hold of anything solid, the lamp post, the walls, to break the nightmarish fall.
We are not falling, Gee told himself. It only feels that way. He closed his eyes so that his senses wouldn’t confuse him.
“Klara,” Cracker whispered. “Klara, I’m coming.”
They didn’t notice the shadow that followed in their wake.
“Oh!” Cracker gasped.
Gee opened his eyes just as he was placing his foot.
The ground wasn’t there. The sense of falling, slow and dreamy, down the flight of stairs into a dark unfinished basement….
Cracker jerked him back.
Gee sat down, heart thudding slow and loud. Willing the vertigo to fade.
“Oh, god,” Cracker whispered. She yanked her hand free of Gee’s grasp and staggered up the stairs.
Gee heard her thudding across the floorboards, the wheeze of her breath. “Wait!” he called too late. He climbed the stairs to the main floor. Into a big shiny kitchen…. Large pots gleamed, hanging from hooks above an island stove. All the countertops were made of thick slabs of marble. Even the faucets on the sink looked expensive.
Lilla’s coils flopped heavily around his ankle. Gee glanced down at the eel. She was losing her lustre, her muscles growing slack. “Eaaaaaaats,” she hissed sadly.
Gee’s gut writhed in agreement.
The sound of Cracker’s footsteps running up a second flight of stairs.
Gee gently unwound the eel from his leg. “Wait here,” he said, setting her atop a high stool at a long marble counter. “I’ll come back.”
The eel rested her head on her topmost coil, her eyes dull. She was silent as Gee ran after his friend.
He hurried through the house, looking for the second staircase, self-conscious about his grubby shoes stepping all over the polished hardwood floor. The house was uncanny with silence. Heavy, and awful. The stairs to the second floor were carpeted, and his footsteps were swallowed. He caught up to Cracker, who stood, frozen, just inside an open doorway.
“Cracker?” Gee rasped.
She did not respond.
Gee stepped around her into a large messy bedroom. A vanity covered with hairbrushes, blow dryer, makeup, perfume, rubbish and empty mugs. The musty smell of weed. Clothes strewn over a desk and chair, a small two-person couch. Cracker’s sister wasn’t in her empty bed, the blankets and bedcovers slumping toward the floor.
Cracker wasn’t looking about the room. She was staring at a tall wooden wardrobe set against the opposite wall.
“What is it?” Gee asked gently.
Her eyes were wide with terror. Gee moved toward the wardrobe.
“Stop!” Cracker screamed.
Gee froze.
Cracker began panting, as if she were running, about to collapse.
“Is your sister in the wardrobe?” Gee’s voice was low, soft.
A small moan escaped Cracker’s lips. Tears were streaming down her face, her hands clenched into tight fists.
“You don’t have to look,” Gee said. His eyes moved back and forth between Cracker’s suffering and the two closed doors of the wardrobe. “You don’t have to do this. We can leave.”
Cracker swallowed a harsh sob. She shook her head furiously. “I—” She swallowed hard once more. “How can I go back without having tried? I can’t. To fail, twice. I can’t.”
Gee strode to the wardrobe and pulled the doors open.
Cracker gasped.
Klara hung from a belt cinched around her blackened neck. Her grey tongue protruded; the reek of faeces and urine rolled out of the enclosed space.
“Oh….” Cracker’s voice broke. “Oh no, oh no!” She began to scream.
Gee slammed the two doors shut. Swallowed back a surge of nausea. He grabbed Cracker and dragged her out of the room.
“Get her down!” Cracker sobbed. “She might still be alive! It takes twenty minutes to die! I looked it up! I read about it. We might get her down in time!” She fought against Gee’s hold, twisting, kicking, to get back to her sister.
“She’s dead,” Gee said. “I’m sorry, but she’s dead! She wouldn’t be in Half World if she weren’t!”
Cracker, beyond reasoning, twisted free from his hold and ran back to her sister’s room. Gee wearily followed.
Cracker flung open the wardrobe once again. Klara remained, motionless. Dead.
Cracker stepped half-inside the wardrobe and wrapped her arms around her sister’s middle to lift her up. Her weight was too great; Cracker couldn’t hold her aloft. Klara’s body just swung from side to side as Cracker grew more desperate. “Help me,” she begged Gee. “Please!”
“You’re too short,” he said. “Get out of there.” Cracker stepped out and Gee wrapped his arms around her sister’s middle. Her cold, lifeless weight felt awful, and the stench of her soiled clothing filled his nostrils. Gee’s stomach heaved and he had to turn his head to the side.
“Hurry!” Cracker cried.
Grimly, Gee lifted Klara’s body. He raised her a few inches, but it wasn’t high enough to create the slack needed to undo the buckle digging deep into her bruised flesh. Klara’s weight began listing to the side.
“I’ll find something to cut the belt!” Cracker said. “Just keep on holding her!” She ran out of the room.
Gee tried to gain a little more slack. Klara’s dead weight spun to the opposite side.
So futile, he thought. To die like this. What did Klara suffer in life that she would rather end it all? What was the point in living, he wondered, if we all die just to end up in Half World, only to die and die again?
White Cat’s head popped out of his jeans pocket.
“Uhh!” Gee exclaimed, almost dropping Cracker’s sister. “Don’t do that!” he cried. “What’s taken you so long? Come out and help us!”
White Cat wrinkled back his mouth to expose his sharp teeth in a cat grimace. “Release that dead person,” he snapped. “She is cycling through her Half Life as she is meant to. You do her no greater service by interfering in this way, for Spirit’s
sake!”
Tight bands of pressure squeezed Gee’s temples. He could feel his heavy heartbeat throbbing inside his head. He spoke slowly. Carefully. So his rage would not spill out again. As it had in the hotel, with Cracker. “If there’s no point in trying to help Cracker’s sister, why is there any point in my meeting my parents?” Gee whispered. “Why must I go see my Half World family when Cracker doesn’t have to?”
“Idiot!” White Cat yowled with frustration. “Because you were born of them in Half World! You are not truly alive, as Cracker is! Can you not accept this? And the longer you waste your time with her sister, the more you’re frittering your idiot friend’s Life away! Ohhhhhh!” the cat hissed. “Ming Wei! It’s all your fault!”
Gee’s heart lurched. “What do you mean? Does Popo have something to do with all of this…?” Not Popo. It couldn’t be.
White Cat completely ignored him. “If you had told him the truth years ago, he wouldn’t be blundering around now, an idiot in fool’s clothing!”
Relief washed over Gee, and with it his arms’ strength gave out. Klara’s body flopped horribly once more. Gee closed his eyes. Popo wasn’t a betrayer. His lower lip trembled.
The cat’s words filtered in. “Hey!” Gee exclaimed. “Who are you calling an idiot?”
“And you!” White Cat accused. “You grow ever weaker, you reek of it. You must meet your parents before you have too little strength remaining to do that which must be done.”
“What must I do?” Gee asked. “Tell me. Please.”
The cat’s large fluffy head began pulsating with a weak glow. “Leave your friend if you must, but go quickly to find your birth parents. Someone has followed you here, and you cannot waste your strength fighting them. You must go!”
White Cat’s head surged like light before contracting, tight, back to stone. He disappeared into Gee’s pocket.
Gee’s arms fell to his sides.
“What are you doing?” Cracker cried, as she ran into the room with a pair of scissors. “Raise her! She’s choking!”
“White Cat said that someone’s followed us. We have to leave!”
