Hit Parade of Tears, page 20
He stopped walking. He seemed to be figuring out what to do.
He needs to look upward, Mari thought. He looked upward. She was nineteen and he smiled at her on that street corner.
The man who had got on his bicycle and left her was there, polishing his glasses, then looking at her balefully. Surely you don’t hate me that much? No, but I can’t be bothered with it. With what? she asked. Coming up here? That’s right, he replied. But I’m here for professional reasons, so I gotta be bothered.
With that, he climbed to the upstairs level of the house. What about all those alarm devices?
“They won’t sound at the moment,” he whispered. Almost seemed like he was still figuring out what to do next.
“Are you here to steal stuff?” Mari asked foolishly.
“I hadn’t intended to.”
He seemed confused.
“To rape me?”
“I don’t feel like doing that right now,” he said, looking puzzled, before laughing at Mari.
“You’re the new model, right?” he asked, almost too casually.
“Yes.”
“Alright, so how about you come along with me?”
“I’ve got a job to do.”
“It’d be helpful if you could put off that job, or cancel it even.”
He grinned unabashedly.
“You make it sound like it’s not up for debate.”
Mari was serious.
“It’s not up for debate, in my case.”
He sat down on the bed.
“Aren’t I so cute anymore?”
Before realizing it, Mari had asked him a question that implicated him in her own past.
“No, you’re still very cute.”
He hadn’t twigged. He reached out his hand and stroked Mari’s cheek.
“I can mostly guess what you used to look like … Right, first thing once we’re out of here, let’s go get coffee or something. I’m kinda frazzled.”
Jebba would be unsettled. At least, he wouldn’t just shrug it off. He’s here for professional reasons too, after all.
“Are you married?”
“You’re kidding. If I had a wife she’d kill me for chaperoning girls like this.”
He was telling the truth, but his manner betrayed a certain vanity.
How was it that she fell in love back then? He would’ve needed to be pretty proactive to cut through to a shy type like Mari.
“Shall we just get outta here for now? I hate to leave this lovely air conditioning, but…”
“What’s it like outside?”
“Frigging hot, stuffy and muggy too. Everyone comes out at night. Aren’t people crazy here? It’s only after midnight that they really brighten up. Then you’ve got crowds flooding the streets.”
“Why do people come out?”
“I guess they’re looking for something interesting. Same for everyone. So they go somewhere to listen to music, dance, meet people, drink.”
“What about people who don’t go to places like that?”
“Guess they’ve already given up.”
There was a strangely deep kindness in his voice.
She was starting to take a real shine to this guy. In movies, it’s almost a given that a man and a woman develop feelings for each other as soon as they meet. This feels like a movie, Mari thought. The circumstances were somewhat unromantic, but there was no doubting she liked him.
“We best get going. Hey,” he prodded the back of Mari’s neck.
“Hmm…” she responded wordlessly. I have to go to that mental hospital, she thought. I have to meet the woman putting so much effort into making up such utterly unrewarding love. Because love isn’t like a house you can just kick back and live in once it’s completed. No, it gets more worn and tattered day by day. So unless you keep on making it up, day by day, it disappears in all but name.
“Do you have any money?” No way could she use the check Jebba gave her.
“Got a little,” he said warily.
“Alright, I’ll come.”
Mari figured that Luana’s cosmetics business wouldn’t exactly go bust without her, anyway.
“Okay.”
They went downstairs. Mari heard something switch on automatically. Then the sound of a film reel running. She thought it was strange to film people only to lose track of them the moment they stepped out of the house.
It was dusk and Mari and the man were in a café.
Didn’t seem like anything would happen. Also seemed like anything could happen.
Mari remembered the short, disturbing dream she’d had during the day. All the woman wanted was for that man to be by her side, as compensation for everything until now.
When someone just can’t stand things anymore it means their heart has exceeded its capacity. That’s when Meelians depart. They kill themselves. Whereas Terran hearts turn into something else. They turn toward a sort of hellish torment.
His hand rested on top of hers. She didn’t try to pull away. Mari just sat still and drifted deeper into thought.
A selfish telepath was tormenting her.
He was gone. Despite the depth of their love.
The past six years felt like they would be the last ones of her life, these six years without him, and as she looked back on her own life, fervently seeking fulfilment, she found she had never once been satisfied.
Stuck in uncertainty, nothing reaching resolution.
Always tense and strained.
Mari’s mind was often blank when she first woke up. Still, he would sometimes try to start a conversation.
“Hey, my love…”
After the attempt to jump out of the window of a hele-taxi soaring high in the sky, something finally clicked. She fully realized how much she clung to him.
“Won’t a love affair get you into trouble?” Jebba called to her on the street in the drizzling rain. Mari slowly looked up. It was like seeing someone she’d known a hundred years ago.
Mari had gone out to buy milk, bread, and cigarettes, and now she was getting soaked walking in the rain. There weren’t so many streets anymore where you could still walk and get wet like that. She didn’t know that Jebba would be so familiar with these dilapidated gangways.
She’d posted the check to Luana’s address.
The man had introduced himself as an aspiring novelist. He said he’d write about their romance, and sometimes he did indeed sit down at his voicewriter.
The pair would talk for hours on end, piling up ideas and concepts. They considered their relationship worthy of a detailed account.
“Well, make sure you don’t start looking like a woman who’s finally got her claws into a man.”
Jebba flicked away his cigarette and walked behind Mari.
“But no, that’s not you. You still got that thirty-’n-flirty face going on. We kept filming, by the way. You know he was on the team before we signed the deal. Once he saw you, he lost interest in the job. Total weirdo, bit of a pompous snob. Right up your alley, I bet, knowing your girlish tastes. We’re pretty much finished with the shoot now, so the job’s done. All that’s left now is the edits. You got a bank account?”
Mari shook her head.
Jebba handed her a plastic card.
Luana had probably planned it this way all along, to give it a more natural feel.
But if Mari hadn’t met him after that awful little nightmare, none of it would have happened.
“I’m going to visit her,” Mari said one day.
She didn’t want him coming. But he tagged along all the same, like there was no question about it.
Mari stood on the lawn outside the clinic, shaking with nerves.
A thin, middle-aged woman came out of the greenhouse, unkempt and dressed in a shapeless shift.
Emma’s hair was held back by a wide hairband, a few loose strands dangling from her brow and the sides of her head.
For a moment her wide, keen eyes looked alarmed to see the two visitors.
There was no longer anything beautiful about Emma. Her gaunt face was unpleasant, and in front of other people her lips trembled slightly so the nonsense she talked didn’t even come out clearly.
“I’ve come to meet you. I’m Sol’s sister. Well, he died six years ago…”
Emma looked puzzled, as though she hadn’t expected someone else to ever pronounce his name.
“…Sol?”
“Yes.”
“Sol. I remember him. Not just remember, more than that. But I do wonder who he was. Once I say it I’m not sure. You are a pretty girl, aren’t you?” Emma said this with envy. Her lips squirmed oddly. “I feel like I saw someone once, yes, long ago. Someone who looked like you.”
The doctor had warned Mari to be careful and avoid mentioning Sol, because she’d get fixated and start acting weird.
“Sol … I miss him.”
Emma frowned like a sulky child.
“It was before the war had even started. We truly belonged to one another. Sol was a terrifying man, you know. He would grow calmer and cooler the more I blew up in his face. He was like a quiet beast. Sometimes I was so unbearably scared of him. He was eerie, creepy, I guess. He’d be silent and just glare, face like a dragonfly. He got skinnier and lankier, grew feverish, and there he was, just glaring with those eyes. Perhaps he was doing drugs … No, he was doing drugs for sure. I myself never touched the things.” Here Emma was lying. That slurred speech of hers obviously came from taking tranquilizers for over twenty years. It was also an expression of her low self-confidence, sure, but still. “Honest.”
Emma gave a sloppy laugh and started drooling. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand and led Mari to an air-conditioned meeting room.
Her movements were jerky and she seemed as unstable as a puppet doll. Sometimes she’d screw up her face and a net of fine wrinkles would pull in her thin lips, bringing an ugliness to the lower half of her face that made her look even older.
She mumbled and whispered things that made no sense, occasionally darting glances in unexpected directions.
“What sort of a person was he?” Mari chose her words carefully.
Emma seemed troubled and looked up, searching for something to pin her eyes on.
She then looked away and gazed through the glass at the summer grasses outside.
“I am sometimes glad that he’s not here. That way he can’t see how hideous I’ve suddenly become.”
She sighed and grumbled on.
“Why can’t I sleep, why can’t I stop smoking? When I wake up in the middle of the night, my skin is so bone dry, I feel like twenty new wrinkles appear each time.”
This woman couldn’t have been much more than thirty. It made a cruel contrast with Mari’s peppy beauty.
“I’ve grown old and crusty being locked up here, haven’t I?”
Emma’s pupils slowly sank down until they met the edge of her bottom lids. She remained like that, staring at the ground.
“He had his charm, there were things about him anyone would love. But he himself had very dramatic likes and dislikes. He would always pick out one woman he particularly fancied and draw strength from obsessing over her. Tell the truth, it was only just before he died that I started to positively like him.”
Mari wished Emma would stop doing the weird thing with her eyes.
“I got you something,” Mari said. She opened the paper bag she’d brought and took out some gifts for Emma: a necklace, a bunch of plastic flowers, a pair of delicate sandals. Emma smiled and tried everything on.
“Might sound a bit strange at my age, but … What I really want is a hat with a wide, absolutely massive brim.”
“I’ll bring you one next time.”
But Mari knew she wouldn’t be visiting again. This old telepath had no idea that she was tormenting some Meelian woman—her powers were just running, without her realizing. Mari desperately wanted to find ways in which she was different from her, this Terran woman trapped in her own distant memories. Emma was like a malignant growth, a cancer—the mother of some invasive parasite. She was Mari’s exasperating mother, no doubt about it. Possessed by an intruder, but all the same.
And she was singing her song of ruin.
The man went to the shops to buy sodas.
“You’re going to die soon,” Mari told Emma, firmly and spitefully.
“Perhaps. I am suffocating. But people can’t live forever. It’s what I’m hoping for.”
Channeling Sol, Emma saw herself, too, growing weak with age and living.
“But since I’ve already died once and come back to life…” Emma went on. “You’ll die in a bed, that’s what Sol said to me. Because I didn’t die in the war. Not even a nuclear missile finished me off.”
“You will die.”
If she could pick up telepathic messages, she should also be able to send them. Mari channeled her strength into her eyes, straightened her back, and kept talking.
“You have died.”
Emma closed her eyes. “Yes, I know.”
“You can’t go on suffering forever. You must die. Your love story has ended.”
Mari sensed that Emma’s telepathy was scrambling the connection between them.
Emma mumbled, her lips wriggling: “It hasn’t ended. Some stories never end. But, oh, how I would like to put it to rest. Each day that I love you just wears me out. I lose the strength to keep living. You’re not here anymore, for god’s sake.”
The old woman opened her eyes.
Thick, muddy tears and mucus dirtied her face. She wiped it away with her hands and looked straight at the green face before her.
“Sol, let me ask you one more time. Have you already forgotten me?”
Emma suddenly looked like a little girl.
“I’ll never forget,” Mari replied without thinking. She regretted it, but it was too late.
An animal-like cry burst out of the aged woman’s body. She stood up, writhing, turned around and blundered out. An automatic door in the rear swung open to reveal a long corridor.
Emma fled down the corridor at breakneck speed, screaming and crying.
An opaque door closed and hid the sight of Emma struggling with some orderlies. Her animal cries continued. Mari could hear the footsteps of several nurses behind the door.
Mari stood alone in the meeting room.
“He won’t forget. Yes, that’s right. We can’t help it. We never forget. We can’t forget. Some things will never be forgotten, even in death.”
The grass outside was limp from the sun.
The man came back carrying some cold drinks. He entered without saying anything, then crinkled his forehead, trying to understand what was going on.
“What happened?”
“I told her.”
Mari slumped onto the sofa, all strength drained from her body.
“Told her what?”
“The truth.”
“What did she do?”
“It must’ve triggered a bad seizure.”
“Weren’t you supposed to avoid subjects like that? What did you say?”
“I told her we never forget. You get it, right? Meelians die when their hearts reach full capacity. That’s because we never forget the things that are important.”
“Right.”
“That’s why we never have changes of heart. Because we never forget, not even in death.”
“Let’s go,” he said. A single gold sandal lay discarded on the rug.
A few weeks later, Emma burned to death in a fire at the mental hospital. The fire started in her room, of all places. She’d lit twenty candles and retreated back inside her memories.
HIT PARADE OF TEARS
“Dinner,” his wife called.
He was busy reading Villains of Japanese Cinema. Without looking up, he stretched out a hand.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I want a ginger beer or something first. A coke would be fine. I’m thirsty.”
“You’re having a laugh,” she reproved dryly. “You really think we have stuff like that at home?”
She was in a very complicated mood. So complicated that it’s hard to describe in what way it was complicated.
“Go buy some then, out there somewhere.”
“Nowhere around here sells drinks like that.”
She spoke softly and a little gloomily this time. She was standing in the doorway, looking into a bare room lit by a single, unshaded forty-watt lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Her husband sat hunched over on some unmade bedding on the floor. Judging by his appearance, you’d put him in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties, difficult to be any more precise. He was wearing a shiny shirt with a wide collar under a loose, extra-long suit jacket tailored to fit his sloping shoulders. His pants tapered toward the ankles and were bunched up at the hem.
He made his wife use her sewing machine to run up garments in this unique style of his. On the streets, everyone wore jumpsuits. He couldn’t stand the lack of individuality. Maybe it was a trivial issue. But he couldn’t stand what he couldn’t stand.
“What about vending machines?” He closed his book and stood up.
Through the window, the huge, spectacular flames of the steelwork’s furnace burned against the dark of the night.
“We do have a bottle of concentrate,” she sighed.
“Why didn’t you tell me before? Dilute some and bring it to me!”
She gave a wordless response.
When she came back, he had a meek look on his face and was searching under the pillow.
“Have we got any pills? Any ludes or soma? Anything?”
“No.”
“Don’t waste your words, do you? The pink ones will do. I’d even take some bromisoval.”
“It’s hard to get hold of that stuff now,” she said calmly. “I can always go buy some solvent.”
“No way. Puff on a plastic bag of glue? How embarrassing. Solvents actually ruin your brain cells, you know.”
“Aren’t yours pretty ruined already?” She laughed.
“Look, I’m just not into that loafer hippie shit. Those kids just check out, they’re so apathetic. Nothing to salt their wounds. Nothing stimulating.”
“So what’s stimulating then, pharmaceuticals? They do the opposite for me. Just make me glaze over for a bit. I’m through with them.”
