I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (38 page)

—
I think Tomo will be pretty surprised to see you, Junko said. I didn’t tell him I’d be picking you up today.

He followed her to the door. She knocked, but there was no answer.

—
He must be sleeping, she said, taking a key from her bag. When she opened the door, he saw that the house was dark. He stepped forward just as she reached for the light switch. For a moment the electricity flickered and he glimpsed a heavy shape suspended from the ceiling, pointing at the floor like a stilled pendulum. Then the light flashed on and the shape resolved ahead of him. Before his eyes Tomo’s body slumped in space, close enough to touch, hung from the neck by a dark black strand. His limbs hung lifeless, his face swollen as a frog’s.

Park felt Junko seize his hand. For a moment her nails bit into his skin, then she let go and screamed. He looked down at his wrist. Two red dents stood out against the blue of his veins like the twin prongs of an electrical cord. He’d never imagined that a woman’s hand could grip so tightly.

When he looked up she was clawing at Tomo, reaching for his face, or trying to pull him down, he couldn’t tell. He stepped forward and she turned back to face him, lips stretched taut in a rictus, her jaw set so tightly that he felt her teeth would shatter.

He tried to say something, but his mind stopped him. It felt as if spiders were crawling in his head, weaving threads too quick for him to follow.

He pushed past her into the hall and opened the sliding screen to Tomo’s room. The windows were open. As he’d guessed, all of Tomo’s paintings had been propped on their easels, the plastic covers discarded. Together they formed a triptych, a semi-circle facing the screen. The self-portrait stood on the left, its edges retouched, a deeper flesh-tone to the face. On the right, Park’s portrait had also been adjusted, the eyes tilting heavenward. In the center stood the unidentified canvas, the boy with fine bones and close-set eyes. This painting, which had once struck him as a caricature of his own face, revealed its purpose when placed next to the others. It was not his face — not strictly. Neither was it a self-portrait of Tomo. Instead it combined them into one, an impossible hybrid or child. Tomo had filled in the frame of Park's face with his own features, averaging out what wouldn’t fit the structure: the ears enlarged to match the brow; the slight sallowness of the cheeks contrasting the prominent nose. Park stared at it, repelled at first, then unable to look away. Whether Tomo had intended it or not, the painting reminded him of his own ideals, and he felt as if he had entered a stranger’s house and found something of his own among the shelves, something he’d misplaced.

A cry came from the living room. He made to enter the hall, then changed his mind and turned back to the painting. Looking at it, he felt himself drawn into its gaze. The open mouth was Tomo’s, but the eyes were his own, stripped of their usual context as if in revolt against him. He felt them staring back at him, accusing him of weakness, calling him a liar. But the accusations were marks on paper, a pile of rags, all useless. Even the painting’s eyes paled in comparison to the room and its faded posters, the shirts stacked on the dresser, the week-old trash in the basket. A thousand signs of Tomo’s presence surrounded him, but finally there was no connection between them, the painting and the corpse in the living room. He looked down at his hand and felt again for the red marks of Junko’s nails. They, too, seemed only an emblem, a desire for which there was no fulfillment, nothing.

From the other room he heard Junko cry out again. Ignoring her voice, his heart racing, he took a palette knife from the nightstand and slashed apart the canvas.

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