Clear water gushes from my open mouth. Coursing through the rough beard. Blackening as it washes across my skin. I shake my head in disbelief. Not just clear but icy cold. Mountain streams crossed by forty-two winter hikers. Water rising over the bootlaces. Embrace nature. No one falls behind. We keep walking because everyone else does. Our teeth chatter and our fingertips lose feeling. We show no emotion, just prescribed determination. They expect us to suffer. Nature is the highest state. It is the making of us. As long as we all suffer the same. That night: back at the camp-site. Forty-one elementary school children shivering. Forty-one too-thin blankets. The lights are long off. We see the flashing red and blue. Chinks of ambulance through the shutters. The driver turned his siren off long before. They must have told him. We hear teachers’ voices. We hear Erina coughing. She began after the first stream. We hear the voices rise and fall. Tree branches flailing before the storm. The ambulance doors slam shut. A radio squawks. The voices die as the ambulance crushes gravel. A teacher collects Erina’s things in the morning. I try hard, but can’t remember his name.
I know there are two worlds. My own and outside.
The shock of the cold focuses my thoughts. I try to close my mouth. The water pressure forces my teeth apart. They ache with the cold. My tongue flops uselessly in the current. A life raft too far off to reach. Level dropping as the flood steals away. Down from my eyes. Through my throat. I feel it seeping from me, draining away. Consuming my dust and dirt as it vanishes. There is no puddle on the carpet. My clothes are dry. My skin has shed its defensive crust. It is my thoughts she is after.
She has stripped away my carefully cultivated armour. Four plus years of half-hearted towelette dabbing. Only when I feel like it. Most days I only wipe features. Eyes, ears and nose. The rest of me armoured, only sensors accessible. There was a comfort in the grime. Knowledge that I had created something. A sign I was finally my own man. I feel hatred welling. Replacing the water with hot resentment. How dare she? She is trying to break me. Smash me into fragments for society. Sweep up and shovel. Flip the bin top, drop me in. Tear me like tissue paper. Return me to the fold. This is no introduction but an act of war. I hammer at the door with my fists. She has twisted the cell bars around. Now I am the one who is trapped.
I crumple in disbelief. Beaten by a girl. An imp in pink and white socks. I can no longer call myself a man. Does that matter? Is this how I react? Maybe just how I am supposed to. I want to hurt her. Just as she has hurt me. To feel the pain, the helplessness, the agony. I feel it now. She is trying to stop my work. She doesn’t know what it is. They have sent her. I don’t know who they are. Every time you walk down a city street. Someone is watching you. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. We watch without realising. Stuff ourselves on a Viking banquet of faces. Our appetites are relentless. One day back then I counted. In the time before. Thirty-seven people between my parents’ apartment and school. Face. Click. Forgotten. Face. Click. Maybe remembered. Face. Strange ears. Click. Stored. A whole class of people discovered and discarded. The next day, I counted forty-six. I realised how many people were watching me. Each and every day. One way glass on both sides. That worried me then. The pressure to perform was constant. I stopped being a child. I began to feel their expectations. They were watching me around the clock. Waiting for...waiting for I don’t know what. A mistake? A failure? No-one remembers the good things we do. “Boy smiles in street” is not newsworthy. Not when so many other things are happening.
I slide to the floor. The hammer’s certainty is reassuring. Metal and wood cannot judge, only serve. I tiptoe on my fingertips. My face approaches the slot beneath the door. I plan where to strike. The hammer will smash down. Pink and white will become red. Her voice will ring out again. She will scream as she hops away. Leaving only her footprints in the hall. Back to them: then they will know. I will not be stopped. I cannot be. Cheap wood and unpolished metal. Nothing by themselves. How little they know. I am nearly there. Eyesights are ready to lock onto their target. Lower, until I can smell the dust. Lower, until my nose touches the mat. Lower, as my face turns towards the light. And sees hers.
No set of cotton-wrapped five. No choice. Just one cheek, cartoon smooth. No features. Her makeup glitters, sparkles. The dark inside the light outside the darkness. I have not made a sound. I can’t look away. Too many things I don’t understand. But that is impossible. She cannot be. But she is.
“Hello, Masa-kun.”
Spoken from six inches, but minutes to process. My features can’t make out hers. These are words I cannot ignore. She knows I can hear her. The skin I can see is clean. Her cheek distorts where it touches the floor. There is something wrong with her fringe. It isn’t regulation.
I never understood my teachers’ obsession with hair. Boys must have theirs cut high. Above the ears, above the collar. Straight and naturally coloured. No bleach, no dye. No life but what it started with. Same for girls, just not as short. Tie it back tightly, away from the face. Let us see who you are. We know what you are thinking. The others never realised what was happening. They were stifling our receptors, cutting our antennae. Someone told me that the school-issue hair ties had been treated with a chemical compound. That’s just crazy talk. They stood by the gates each morning. Looking for a stray lock, a hint of curl. Offenders would be picked out, marched away. Ordered to remedy their distinction. We can’t have you standing out. Hairnets were issued where warnings were insufficient. Toshio tried to hide his bleaching. He only used a cap. He never had a chance. They picked him out and pulled it off. The rest of us looked away. It was easier not to know him then. We were scared without a reason to fear. Our hair was straight, black and military short. Toshio got a week’s suspension. Three dates from girls in our class too. He returned to school with a crew cut. A small scar above his right ear. The barber had gone too close. Rumours that the head cut it himself. In his office during maths class. There were a lot of rumours back then.
My thoughts darken, fading to black. Toshio’s scarred scalp simpers out of mind forever. I open my eyes to more darkness. Familiar gloom replaced by a featureless nothing. I am submerged in a tank of ink. For minutes, it seems like nothing will happen. My ears imagine some barely discernible current. Submerged and vanishing in the deep, dark liquid. I have no sense of movement. No feelings or known future to play with. Shapes form in the nothingness before me. An invisible pen drawing in fluorescent pink. Realisation dawns long before the drawing is completed. No Japanese could ever mistake or forget it. Try as hard as you might. It won’t make a difference. I know then that it is her doing. The sign that she must be defeated. She has left me with the cartoon cat. The face has launched a thousand shopping trips. Two softly pointed ears. Six afterthought whiskers. A bow stuck to the forehead. The eyes are no more than solid pupils. Lenses damned to remain forever open. The nose is hollow. There is no mouth. That avoids both temptation and complication. Kitty-chan: the symbol of a nation. The goddess of a people. Totem of a nameless girl. Resplendent in pink and white socks.
The cat’s head burns itself into my vision. Blazing within the black emptiness. Finally, it too fades, and there is nothing. She is gone.
I cannot work that night. Bad deeds go unrecorded. The virus continues to spread. Post-work shoppers and tired schoolchildren thronging defenceless streets. Immune systems weakened in the factory schools and sterile offices. Eroded by hours of rote learning and climate control.
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