by Aaron Lee
***
The most recent days of the week are gone, but my memory of the day before those was only all too clear. The alcohol wasn't enough to destroy the brain cells holding that memory, or to burn away the chemical pathways to utter misery.
It was dusk when I got back to Chidorigafuchi. Still warm, so I decided to sleep on my sleeping bag on the sidewalk near the intersection, right next to our spray-painted messages. The streetlights for several blocks around were all out and the dusk camouflaged the blood on the street into near blackness until I got out of the car with all of my gear. It was a long, drawn out streak, like when you squash a mosquito against glass and drag your thumb. At the end of the streak was half of a blue t-shirt, largely untouched by blood except for a few spattered drops across the Quicksilver logo. I sat down hard on the pavement, my legs suddenly gone. Airi had bought that shirt on our trip to Hawaii a year a go. More drops of blood growing larger until they were splashes, like someone was carrying a bucket of paint down the street that was too full. Until, in one particularly large splash, I saw a shining glint of attenuated moonlight reflecting off a clear bright gem. It was almost invisible in that puddle of black, but I saw the diamond heart pendant that I had bought for her third anniversary present, and it was still attached to the delicate white gold chain, even though the clasp was broken.
The splashes and splatters led down the street and pulled me up through the steps of a hospital, carried there no longer by my own will. The body of a teenage boy wearing a black high-school uniform lay on his stomach on the steps, his arm gone at the shoulder. I followed the splashes down the dark hallway, only the meager moonlight from the open front doors lighting the way, my stomach knotting tighter and tighter around what felt like a chunk of sharp ice. After a minute or so, it was too dark to see anything but faint outlines glinting off shiny corners or surfaces. I slipped and landed on top of something soft and warm. I fumbled out my flashlight and the red light from the plastic-filtered lens picked out an arm holding a towel covered in something that could only be blood, but was muted and bleached of color in the red light. I unscrewed the red filter and saw that I had slipped in a puddle of blood next to the towel-holding hand.
I suddenly found myself licking my dry lips with an even drier tongue. It was almost impossible to swallow, but my throat kept convulsively trying on its own, even though I wanted to stop. I aimed the beam down the hallway straight ahead, past what was possibly the receiving desk, but saw no more blood as far as the light could show. I flashed it down the corridor to my right, which was shorter but branched off again. I still could see nothing in that direction either, and the floors looked free of blood. Moments stretched on into infinities. It felt like the clicking in my throat, the twisting cramps in my stomach and the pounding of my heart erased all history that had come before that moment of indecision. Should I take the right or go straight? For all I knew, I could have been standing in that hallway forever, and everything else I experienced could have been created in my mind. Another thousand years waiting and I ran down the hallway to my right, the light strobing on the walls, ceiling and floor.
At the branch, I caught a small hand print of blood on the wall, just at the junction of another corridor. I took that short stretch at a sprint and turned the corner to trip again. This time there was no blood, but there were three bodies, all with similar expressions to the four I had left hanging off the sign in Kabukicho. They lay in a jumble of limbs and torsos, some parts already excised and partially dissected.
I picked myself up again and saw in the bright white LED beam of my flashlight, a pair of maroon New Balance sneakers, one lying on its side. The exact same ones Airi had bought a few years ago. I picked one up and it had the streak of discolored leather where I had used detergent to clean off the seagull droppings that had splattered on the shoe a few months ago while sitting on the beach in Odaiba. I carried it a short distance down the hall to an emergency exam room where more blood disappeared underneath a door. Again, here I was standing at a door where a bloody trail led. This time I was so much more afraid of opening the door. But I was compelled, driven by a need to know, no matter how black the nightmares were waiting for me behind the wood paneling. I held my breath and pushed it open.
The beam from my flashlight picked out the other half of the once blue Quicksilver shirt on the floor, now drenched in blood, and the mangled form of a body on an examining table. It was a girl, but the face wasn't Airi's. Fingers, surgically cut and bloodless lay on the floor a few feet away from the shirt. They were slender, female fingers, but the girl on the table had all of hers on both hands. In the corner of the room, underneath one of the tables, just barely hiding, was one more finger, almost missed by my flashlight, with a wedding ring still on it. I don't remember feeling or thinking anything in that moment. All went black and I opened my eyes later to find myself with a splitting pain in my forehead and my cheek pressed against the hard, cold hospital floor, a wet stickiness soaked into my shirt. My wife, my best friend was dead. There was nothing left to look for.
I don't remember how long I lay on the floor. I guess I must have slept for some time. At one point I opened an eye and saw sunlight intruding on the corridor outside the exam room, leaking under the door. It picked out the slender white lines of fingers on the floor. Fingers I once held, and had woken me up at different times in my life over the last few years. Sometimes brushing my lips, sometimes just touching my face. I wanted to take them with me, to have something of her no matter how grisly. But I couldn't bring myself to touch them, other than to lay the bloody shred of t-shirt as a covering.
I woke up outside, still in the t-shirt with the blood dried on it. I must have gotten the whiskey at a grocery store nearby. I still don't remember. The bottles tipped over on the pavement in front of my last spray-painted message, one shattered against the side of the police car. The windshield of the car was spider-webbed with cracks, but I couldn't remember if it was from when I fell off the car roof in Shinjuku or because I broke it while drunk. Again, a break in time when my memory faded, whether from mercy, stress or alcohol, I didn't know.
This last time I woke in the hospital, laying across the cracked vinyl seats, still in my dirty clothes from days before. It seemed I had the presence of mind to bring my duffel bag with clothes and disposable wet paper towels with me, so I stripped my blood-stiff jeans, shirt and tank top off, kicked them into a corner. I cleaned myself off with the wet towels since I still didn't trust the tap water. I wiped her blood off my chest where it had soaked through the shirt, and some off my face and arms, and as I saw the darkened towels, a hollowness spread in my chest, and started fighting its way up my throat. It felt like spiders trying to crawl out of my mouth.
I put on clean jeans, my last clean tank top and a button up shirt Airi had bought me. I cleaned her necklace, careful to get every spot of red off the diamonds, then dried it on my clean pants and folded it neatly in the clean shred of her t-shirt and put it into my pants pocket. As soon as it was in my pocket I sat down in a waiting room chair in near total darkness without any fear, and cried. I have never cried so much in my life, not even when my father died a few months after my sixteenth birthday. Every last bit of me, all of myself leaked out of my eyes and onto the linoleum floor, evaporating into the hospital corridors. It mingled with the disease and death saturating the walls, with all of the families on the long waiting end of a terminal loved one's surgery, with the hopelessness of a patient who would never walk again, with the pain of splintered and reset bones, until it was no longer just mine, and no longer just Airi's. It was a part of all the suffering and fear and loneliness this building had ever seen, and nothing would ever make it go away. It mingled with the ghosts of patients who had died on the operating table, sons whose fathers would never recover from chemotherapy, and women who walked in with hope and love and morning sickness, and walked out without ever being mothers. Like those lonely ghosts wandering the halls searching for peace, I could stret
ch my life for the next 10,000 years and never find Airi no matter how much I searched. Because she was now well and truly beyond my reach.
I was gone. I felt emptier than the hospital. Emptier than Tokyo. Emptier than the world. My only motivation for walking around this dead city had just evaporated, and now I had absolutely nothing to do but sit on this bench in this dead hospital until the end of time, or until the Uncles got me. I saw the structure of the building rusting, tiles falling off the ceiling, plaster cracking and dropping away in the dust of centuries while I sat silent and still, a mummy that hadn’t yet shriveled up and died. Time sped up until it had absolutely no meaning, where the space between my heartbeats could have been measured in geological ages. It wasn’t the worst thing I could think of, to sit here until the end of time, and I didn’t feel like I had the strength to get up and do anything else. So I would sit here and wait to die. It felt right.
But Airi wouldn’t let me. She was gone, but she spoke in my thoughts in whispers as if I had just found her. I wasn’t dumb enough to think her ghost was talking to me, I knew there were no such things. But it was as if she were there, ready to hit me in the face for giving up. She didn’t want me to. And Trying to ignore her was like trying to ignore gravity. So I had to find something to fill the void.
Vengeance. Vengeance would do nicely. I would fill myself so thoroughly that I reached a state like criticality in a nuclear reactor. A self-sustaining violence that consumed and contaminated just as thoroughly as ejected core material. A red mist in my eyes and destruction in my hands could make me forget for a few moments how much the yawning abyss of Airi’s absence hurt. I didn’t hear her whisper at that moment, and I knew she would be satisfied. Whatever kept me going, breathing, would be enough for her. Vengeance would be easy to hold onto. I would start with this hospital. Then the building next door. Then whatever buildings were close by. I would burn everything down.
Day XX After
That night, I walked around with my lighter just setting things on fire. I wasn't safe about it, I didn't think of keeping exits open or giving myself enough time to get out. It was like Airi’s whisper led me to start burning things. First was the row of seats I had been sitting on. Then, stacks of files and paper on the receiving desk which quickly spread to the nurse sitting in a chair, upright behind the counter. After came supply closets which burst into pale blue flames when bottles of alcohol ignited. The sprinkler system lay dormant, and everything kept burning nicely. I walked around to as many rooms as I could find, almost in a daze, just setting things on fire until I realized how hot it was getting and ran outside with my duffel, dropping it in the street as I screamed and screamed, running as fast as I could down the street away from the police car and hospital. It was a blind, insane release of anger and grief. I collapsed halfway down the street and just lay on the ground watching the light from the flames grow brighter as the hospital was consumed. It felt like hours. I felt the throbbing on the back of my head from falling off the police car, and the sting of my cheek from my spill in Shinjuku days ago. I just lay, feeling pain that seemed to create a body for me, and make me remember that I was still alive when I wanted to be dead, listening to the sounds of glass breaking and the structure snapping in the heat, the fire reflected off the walls and windows of the nearby buildings.
A loud pop, and the large tree on the grounds of the Indian embassy next door to the hospital caught fire. After seeing the hospital go up in flames I felt different, but not better. The need to run and scream was over, at least for now, and I got up and hopped over the bushes bordering the Budokan and walked back toward Kudan hill and my car. The heat from the hospital fire was intense enough to make me run by it and sit on the hood of the car for a while. Sitting there I felt the rage boil up, and I started to see red, like a fine mist floating before my eyes. My pulse throbbed loudly in my years and with each thud came a painful hard, dry ache behind each temple, like I was badly dehydrated. Seeing red like this was sure to hurt me, but at the moment all I wanted was to keep it, use it to do harm, to break something, kill someone, and smash something. I truly believe in that moment that if I had the ability, I would have burnt all of Tokyo to ash without a single regret.
Instead, I grabbed the wooden sword out of the car, ran across the street and broke all the windows in a Dotour coffee shop. When I was done, I sat down on the sidewalk with bits of glass in my hair, and blood on my knuckles. I still didn't feel any better even after all the glass was knocked out of the frames. I pulled out a Molotov cocktail, lit it and threw it through the broken windows to watch it explode against the espresso machine at the back of the store. I went across the road, grabbed a can of fluorescent green spray paint and made a big X on the street in front of the building I had just vandalized.
I didn't know what it meant at the time. Maybe I was just trying to say that I did this. It was me. I didn't care if anyone left alive ever knew who I was or what I had done. Maybe I wanted them to know. Those things who killed nearly everyone on the planet, probably, and who had taken my wife away from me. Maybe I wanted to tell them that I was coming to burn and break and destroy everything I could, because I had nothing left. I knew how stupid it sounded, even as I thought it, but I wanted them to feel fear. I wanted them to hate me. More than anything, I wanted to be hated and loathed. I wanted them to see me coming. I knew they could. I wanted to give them nightmares. I wanted to hurt them.
I didn't sleep at all that night. I drove from block to block, setting random fires until all of my lighters were dead, jumping out of the car when I ran out of fire and using the wooden sword to break windows on shops, cars, police stations, banks, clothing stores. It was probably my imagination, but I thought I saw the shadowed figures of deranged Muppets in-between buildings, watching me, like they were afraid to step forward and into the light of the burning buildings. Every time I swung that sword and it bit into something hard and smashed it, I felt her heart pendant in my pocket just barely digging into my leg. Maybe she was proud of me.
Day XXX After
I drove all over the city setting more fires, breaking windows and putting an X on the street in front of each one. I had no direction and no real method. The circling shark beneath the surface of my consciousness had fled for deeper and darker waters, and Airi’s whispers were only barely audible. That void was overflowing with the need for violence, and I was happy to sate it. If I saw a building that gave me a weird feeling, I got out and tossed in a sake bottle filled with gasoline and powdered laundry detergent. I got a dozen or so bottles of sake and replaced the contents with the siphoned gasoline from a few cars. I also filled the three plastic reserve gas tanks in the back of the car.
I sat out in front of Super Racer Cafe eating a pile of Snickers bars. I couldn't remember the last time I had eaten before the hospital. In the frenzy of burning and smashing things, trying to forget, I suddenly collapsed in Yotsuya, right before I was I was about to smash the window of a St. Marc's Cafe. I fell to the street, suddenly all of the bones in my body turned to jelly, and watched the McDonald's across the intersection burning brightly, pouring out black smoke that marred the pink dusk sky. I could barely move and had to crawl back to the car. It could have taken me a half hour or five minutes, I couldn't tell.
I finally made it into the back seat of the car and felt the sharpness of a completely empty stomach that I hadn't noticed in the past few days. I ate a package of instant curry that was cold, without anything else, just tore open the foil packet and swallowed the whole thing. I nearly threw it up right away, but just managed to keep it down by drinking some water and lying in the back seat. I didn't want to eat, didn't care if I ate anything again, but my body was commanding me in stubborn refusal to let me kill myself. I didn't even remember driving over to Super Racer Cafe from Yotsuya. It was like those times driving at night in the winter dark in Massachusetts, when I would suddenly realize that I was hours away from home with no memory of the drive, and no idea how to get back. I almost
thought that if I stood up on the roof of the car and looked behind me I'd see a dark road, lined with trees from another hemisphere, stretching back into nothing, with dirty snow drifts on the sides of the road.
When I got to Super Racer Cafe, I fully intended to break the windows and set it on fire, but I found myself staring at the garage-themed interior, the Union 76 sign and '50s diner-style tables, and I couldn't do it. Tracy and I had talked about coming since it reminded us of the States, two American transplants in Tokyo wanting to reminisce about home. But every time we tried, it was closed, and we ended up drinking and eating a half-dozen spicy dishes at the Red Chili a few blocks away. He lived a few blocks from here and I thought for a second that I could go check his apartment. That would have been a bad idea though, I was sure of that. I hoped he had taken his family back to New York, but it wouldn't have made a difference. I didn't know if it was easier to think of a friend who was gone rather than my wife. It was a choice I couldn't make.
And suddenly I was back in the States, on a trip we took to New York. We stood on Pier 17 drinking lemonade from plastic cups looking across the river to the Brooklyn skyline. We walked in the cool soothing rain in Manhattan as we looked for our hotel, talking about light sabers and the Force. We took the bus home to Boston from Chinatown, and the ten dollar seats were so uncomfortable that the four hour ride home nearly erased every other memory nodule of the trip, the physical sense blotting out the purity of good memories. The bleeding cuts on my knuckles and my soot burned eyes were testament to that now. Yet while on that bus reading Haruki Murakami, I thought of Bill when he had called me and asked: “Is it a bad thing that I’m more depressed over my iguana dying than my girlfriend breaking up with me?” Which was, I realized, the last interesting thing Bill ever said. Living in his trailer with an iguana named Iguana, dead in a black plastic trash bag. Those parts of my life felt more like something out of a book than anything that had happened since. I supposed there was no chance of Bill having made it through this either. I looked at the dark interior of Super Racer Café, the bodies on the side walk a block away, and missed the days when I thought that a half-asleep bus ride home from New York was surreal.
Tears on my cheeks. What was I doing? How would any amount of fire and destruction make me feel better when a memory of our life together could come out of the blue and reduce me to tears, render me useless? Why couldn't they just come out of the shadows now and take me away? Up until that moment in the hospital my memories had sustained me, given me fuel to find Airi again. But here I was, alone, sitting on a battered car with close to two dozen buildings burned in one day. Each building I set on fire only seemed to make me angrier, never any better. I could barely hear Airi’s whispers, but I knew that she would want revenge. No matter how little satisfaction this madness brought me, I wanted to do this for her.
I stood up and grabbed a can of spray paint, and put a T for Tracy's name instead of an X in front of Super Racer Cafe. I didn't know if the store or he was safe, but I didn't have it in me to check either the cafe or his apartment down the street. Maybe someday I could come back and do both.
I wondered if it would make a difference if I could find the person or people who spray painted “CLEAR” outside the book store in Kanda. If we could join together and set the whole city on fire so those things had no place to hide. I still had so many questions, so many things that didn't make sense in all of this, and despite the leaden weight of my wife's death, I still wanted to know.
For the first time since everything happened, I dreamed. I was walking through Harajuku by myself in the Tokyo that was, when I turned around and all the hustle and bustle of Tokyo vanished. I stood alone in a summer back street, between Arktz skate shop and what looked like a store that sold used jeans. A girl stood in a bright doorway of a shop and came running at me, silent but fast. It was the girl who had tried to climb in the car window, the one who looked like Airi. She tackled me and held me to the ground, and I couldn't move. Then I realized I was pinned to the pavement by a knife grafted to her wrist stump. She opened her mouth, red, raw and horrible and brought it down on my face, and all of a sudden she was Airi, and even she was trying to kill me. The power lines were hung with half-living victims, all twitching eyes and grasping hands, and when they started screaming I woke up.
I lay stretched out across the front seat of the car, panting for a full minute. I rubbed my face, feeling like there were a thousand pounds of sand beneath my eyelids, and wishing I didn’t have to sit up and face another second of life without Airi. The ache in my chest and throat had mercifully subsided for a bit, but somehow I missed them. I didn’t want to get over her that fast.
I sat up and looked into the rearview mirror. I've barely looked at myself in all this time and now the person who stared back wasn’t me. It wasn’t some drastic transformation, or a gaunt shell of the man I used to be that stared back, but it still wasn’t me. The two weeks of beard masked my usual face a bit, but the dark circles that had always been under my eyes were gone. No matter how much sleep I've gotten over my life, they've always been there. Genes, from my mom it seems, since she always had them. I haven't lost any weight despite the little I've eaten the whole time. I looked refreshed, alert and dangerous, even though I didn't feel like any of those things. Did the Uncles do something to me in my sleep? Or was it something else, whatever had killed most people had messed with me enough to manifest in some kind side effects that affected my sleep? I remembered back to the first day after when everyone was dead, and I found myself walking around with no idea as to how I had gotten there. My memory hadn’t been working well since everything had happened and it only seemed to be getting worse. I looked for an answer in the eyes that stared back at me, and at themselves, but they told me nothing. I listened for a whisper from Airi, but all I heard was the breeze blowing some trash around in the street. What did the Uncles want with me?
When I had shone my lights on them going into Atlas Towers, they had run away looking like they were trying to escape. Maybe I’m stupid, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation. But I wondered. Were they somehow afraid of me? It didn't seem possible that things capable of causing such palpable fear could be afraid of anything. They were stalking, crouching nightmares. I wondered if I had even killed any of the ones in that building. I never saw any bodies or anything that looked like remains in the ashes of the building. I needed to think. If was ever going to kill enough of those things to make a difference, I needed to watch them, try to find out where they were coming from.
