I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (6 page)

Miyabi picked up her toothbrush and looked at the bristled head. Then she squeezed on a drop of toothpaste and brushed her teeth, slowly.

She turned off the light and stepped outside. There was a fly in the hall, somewhere. She scratched her thigh. Momo was up; she could hear her downstairs already.

Another drama was playing in her room. Miyabi thought she’d turned the television off, but perhaps she’d only imagined it.

Perhaps the cockroach had been in her room as well, had crawled on her face as she slept. She imagined it poised on her cheek, an explorer in the soft wilderness of her flesh. Its antennae brushed a strand of hair, it shuttled down her neck: lost on a plain of heat and tendons.

She pitied it.

•

Momoko was upset about Yutaka.

—
I don’t know about him anymore, she said. She was sitting on the edge of Miyabi’s bed. That wasn’t like him. I feel like I’m just wasting my time now. I mean, it’s not that I don’t... I still have things I want to do, I want to travel and I want to maybe teach overseas. I’m still young, I...

—
Uh, Miyabi said.

—
I was talking to Chinami about it today and she thinks he’s really off-base but she thinks I should just forget about it. I mean I couldn’t believe it that he just said that. And Chinami was saying that when she first got her driver’s license she passed on a double line, and she got pulled over and he asked her why she did it and she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even have to be anywhere. But it’s completely different from that.

—
Yeah, it is.

Miyabi was thinking about peanut butter.

—
I think the problem is that people take advantage of me, Momoko said. Everyone always takes advantage of me. He told me that right after I told him that I was going in tomorrow. I told him I don’t get home until seven, I have to take care of my sister, I can’t just drop everything.

She picked up the remote and changed the channel. The news came on.

—
He thinks I can just drop everything.

—
Uh huh.

Momoko turned to her.

—
Do you think Chinami was right, though? she asked. I know I should just forget about it, but if I hadn’t said anything I know he’d think he could just do that any time. What do you think?

Miyabi imagined God crafting Momoko. In God’s hands, Momoko was a model airplane. God’s fingers slotted the pieces into place, and then she was hung from a string, spinning in circles. The care was detached and obsessive. Miyabi felt that God loved Momo too much.

—
The thing about Yutaka is that he’s a very serious person, she said. I think you’re forgetting about that side of him.

Momoko turned off the television.

—
Yutaka is a serious person. Are you even listening to me?

Miyabi felt her sister’s thoughts sliding towards her like a snail. The room felt soft, as if in fog. She looked at Momo. Through the fog, Miyabi could feel the touch of her slow, soft horns.

She made her facial expression grave, stopped blinking and slitted her mouth.

—
Yutaka is the kind of person who jokes around a lot so he can cover up all the things he doesn’t want to admit to himself, she said. Miyabi had taken this line from a drama.

—
Are you joking? I hate it when you do this! I can never tell when you’re joking.

—
No, I’m completely serious, Miyabi said. Now she looked disgusted and moral.

—
Did you think he could just apologize right out and look stupid in front of you? He can’t live without dignity.

—
I don’t know, Momoko said. I never thought of him like that. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right, I just... I don’t know.

—
I have to go to the bathroom, Miyabi said.

—
All right.

—
No, I mean... I might be a while.

Momoko got up.

—
All right. Have you started looking for a job yet?

—
No.

—
I already told you I can’t support us. You have to find something.

—
Okay.

She waited for Momo to leave, then walked to the bathroom and sat down on the tiles and played with the toilet paper, pulling it down and spinning the roll until it wound back into place.

She wondered who Yutaka was.

•

Miyabi sat in bed with her back to the wall. She was watching a drama with the sound off, speaking the lines to herself from memory, not bothering to shift the pitch.

She imagined herself first as lover, then beloved. Opening one’s self, she thought, was a great restriction, the only action of any interest. Even alone, in her room, she resented the weightlessness of her speech. To respond in kind to a confession of love was like being tied to a stake, she imagined, while beneath her, a fire was starting; and as she opened herself more, speaking, the flames rose to her feet, charred them. She felt she could fall in love with anyone at all as long as they would tie their hearts with words, feeding the fire, until both of them were dead.

She scratched her thigh.

Momoko hadn’t come back yet. She was out, somewhere. Miyabi had told her about the flies, that it was important she buy something to get rid of them. She told her to write it down. It was ten-thirty.

Miyabi was looking at the spaces where the walls came together.

She got out of bed. Momo had said she’d bring her something back, but it was ten-thirty and she was hungry. Miyabi tried not to eat, mostly, but she knew Momo had a jar of peanut butter somewhere. There was no need to eat anything else if you had peanut butter.

She crossed past the bathroom, to the stairs and, placing her hand on the railing, she walked down, slippers tapping against each step. It was the first time she’d been downstairs in three weeks.

The lights were off. Momo had moved the couch; the living room television seemed smaller. Papers were scattered on the table, and Momoko’s coat had been draped over the couch, still on the hanger. Miyabi didn’t know why, but she was certain there had been strangers here recently; there were no effects she could see, nothing out of place, but the living room had changed. Now she was a stranger herself.

She went to the kitchen, heard the faint faucet-drip sound of the sink through the freezer’s static hum. She found the jar of peanut butter in one of the side-shelves. There wasn’t any bread that she could see, so she took a spoon from a drawer beside the sink and went upstairs. By the time she reached the top, several deep spoonfuls had almost emptied the jar. Miyabi licked the back of the lid, sucked the spoon clean. The peanut butter was delicious. Firm from the fridge, it stuck to her tongue.

Crossing the hall, she saw that the door to Momo’s room was open. The luminous square of a monitor stood out in the darkness. After glancing down the stairs, she walked in. The room was a mess: clothes on the floor, bed unmade, bras slung everywhere. The mirror was smudged and dusty. She had to step over plates to make it to the computer.

There was a message on the screen.

Miyabi didn’t recognize the names, but thought: something is happening somewhere. Momo was outside with someone else. Something was happening.

She looked up at the walls, saw the photographs pasted on the large whiteboard. Some were from their childhood, others were recent. She wondered when they’d been taken. In them Momo posed with strangers, smiling. Tiny names and messages decorated the edges.

Miyabi looked at the board for a long time. She couldn’t recognize any of the faces, but she knew Momo — knew the modulations of her voice, how she carried herself under stress, a thousand possible desires and reactions. What could anyone think of Momo, she thought... what would anyone think? She pictured meeting her for the first time, imagined the distance, the restraint. It was a quiet feeling. She thought of Momo now with love and pity, as if she were already dead.

Miyabi loved this feeling, and it had been a great thrill for her as a child to imagine her parents struck down by cars and planes and tumors. When she was seven a heart attack had put her father in the hospital. Visiting him with her mother and Momo, who insisted on bringing a school book, Miyabi found her attention drawn to the enormous television above her father’s bed, fixed to the wall by a set of struts. He was watching a drama, but the reception sparkled with static and his eyes struggled to trace movement. She followed Momo to his side. Under the white hospital gown her father’s sagging flesh presented itself with the purest immediacy. A calm radiance paled everything. She had wanted nothing more than to linger in the shadow of the bed, holding her father’s limp hand and watching the interference patterns play on the slanted square of the television screen.

She left the room and lay down on her bed. Staring at the ceiling, the taste of peanut butter filled her mouth. She wanted to brush her teeth, but there was nothing to be done now. She closed her eyes and rolled onto her side.

In Miyabi’s dream the stars broke. She was still in bed; the light through the window shimmered a cold pearl and the stars were broken. She reached for the blinds; a patch of violet light struck her hand.

The breeze rustled her hair. She sat up naked and went to the window. A haze of purple clung to the screen.

She switched on the lights, tossed on nightclothes, ran downstairs. Scarlet shadows darkened the ground. The street stretched before her like a peacock feather.

Outside others were gathering, standing dazed in robes and nightgowns, movements slow as sleepwalkers. The stars flooded their faces with banana yellow and beetle-shell green, russeted beards and returned color to greying heads, reflected in eyes a palette to match the night sky’s wild circus colors.

The refractions were down. A kaleidoscope turned in the ruin of the heavens.

The moths orbiting the streetlamps became fantastic, impossible butterflies. The trees replayed the seasons in moments, a flicker from summer-green sheen to the brown of a light-wrought autumn. The moon caught madness from the sun; its face reddened in shame, whitened with fear, sickened with green. A woman was crying somewhere; Miyabi turned and saw her smiling. Rivers of yellow and green trickled from her eyes as the broken starlight silvered her hair. She read subtle blues and pinks in the line of her lips; a vein in her breast lit up with a cool fire before fading to burnished gold.

All around her crickets chirped in the twilight. She saw a fox dart from a pole and then stop, dazed by an orange flare from the moon.

The refractions were down. In the streets children played with mirrors, flashing fresh-caught starbeams onto darkened windows, streaking neon rainbows over the midnight pavement, turning pools of rain to emerald mines and blood-soaked trenches.

Then the moon began to fade. Blurry face of the crying woman, plain pools of rain.

She looked ahead. One by one the street lamps flickered and died. Above, the constellations were disconnecting, lazing out of place, dwindling to pinpricks. Below, children groped for lost parents; somewhere further off the barking of a dog ceased. She walked on, into the distance.

•

Taku had always had beautiful shoulders. Even now, mottled by streaks of sunburn into shades that ranged from scab to peach, they stood out arched and even.

—
Your sister calls me all the time, he said. She says you never come out of your room. And you steal peanut butter.

Miyabi pulled a strip of dead skin from Taku’s arm. Beneath, a new layer of lightly tanned flesh had formed. She tapped it.

—
Ow. Sensitive.

—
Did she tell you to come here?

Taku looked away and lifted the mug of tea to his lips.

—
She wanted me to talk to you.

—
So that’s the only reason you’re here.

—
I wanted to come see you. I haven’t seen you in...

Miyabi turned up her lip.

—
Yeah. You don’t care about me anymore.

—
I didn’t see you around, Taku said. I mean... most people don’t stay in their room for six months.

—
Well, they don’t have any ambition, then.

Taku started again as Miyabi tore off a strip in a single sharp motion.

—
What are you doing, it’s still healing!

—
I like the sound it makes. It sounds just the same as when you open a pack of chocolate pudding.

Miyabi pulled his sleeve further up and felt a bicep tense. Taku’s arms were long and thin.

—
I’d go out if there was anything worth trying out for, she said.