Chosen Path Ch. 02

The fact that I feel silly walking up out of the subway wearing a kimono bothers me. I am neither a woman who feels silly nor one who dresses for the benefit of others. The present falsity of both of those facts proves that I am not, as I also believe I am, a woman who does not make mistakes. I further find error in that belief as well because today I act to countermand a prior decision. Either I was mistaken to leave him, or I am mistaken to go back.

It must be Sunday. There are too many people on the street for a weekday. Also, I would be at work. My situational awareness is very poor. I must take care not to walk past Kosei's building. I know the insomnia also impairs my judgement, so perhaps I am wrong about doing this. I don't think I am. I know I have missed him ever since I left. I remember very clearly having been able to sleep occasionally since then and still missing him. I was wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things, and I know that now. I'm not just desperate.

Which of course implies that I am also desperate, which I am. I am desperate to be able to sleep again. I know that, and I still believe I am making the right decision. Being aware of our biases helps us to mitigate their effects.

I'm not just desperate. I do love him, and I was wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things. Kazaharu-san was right that I had been unwilling to make a decision between career and family. Lots of women juggle both, even with children, but fundamentally one or the other has to come first. For me it has always been career, without question, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I think today is Sunday. Between practicing law and entertaining, career easily devoured almost all of me. I suppose I had two careers. I suppose they did have all of me.

This is his building. The elevator code is still the same as it was years ago.

My decision is not which will come first. I have to give up one of those careers. I suppose that that, like many of my thoughts today, is untrue. He wouldn't mind me booking engagements as a geisha. Only the sex bothered him. But if you're going to play by the rules, why bother? It just wouldn't be the same. For me, the thrill was always the con-to see how far I could push a man's judgement beyond what he knew to be unreasonable. Approaching as a geisha was simply one of my opening gambits. Only sex can truly destroy a man.

I am ready to give that up for him, all those years of careful study and practice. I am ready to let go. I am ready to compromise. I am ready to love harder than I work. I am not ready to knock on his door.

How long have I been standing here? It bothers me that I don't know. Too often lately I realize where I am and cannot remember how I got there. Those must be the moments in which I sleep. It was a heavy thud against the inside of his door that woke me up. Put your hand down, Yumi. I caught myself preening like a schoolgirl. The door remains closed. Maybe there was no thud. Maybe I dreamt it.

No, it was real. Lightly pressing my ear to the door, I can hear a woman's heartbeat, no one I know. It's racing, and either she is very tall or her feet aren't touching the ground. A slight moan escapes her throat, and her body lurches against the door again. I recognize it now. It's him. It's the same intermittent cadence, the same pauses and shuffles. He never did that to me. I should be the one on the other side of that door. A reflexive twitch of lustful anticipation turns to resentment and anger and other feelings for which I cannot remember the names. I need to leave.

-

That must be my train that's pulling away. How long have I been standing here? There will be another train in 15 minutes. When you miss a train, another comes, not so with people. I can feel in my gut the hard truth that there is more between me and Kosei now than a door. I should have anticipated that he would be seeing someone. He is a handsome man. He is also light-hearted, relaxed, casual. I need that. I need him back. His bed was the only place where I ever felt I could rest-the only place I can still get to anyway.

I will be able to take him back from her, whoever she is, but it will require some preparation. I must first discover my adversary. Nothing can be left to chance. She could be anyone. I want him back so badly that I can smell his scent as if he were nearby. I've started seeing things lately too, little defects in the corners of my vision. It must be the lack of sleep. My situation is untenable.

"Oh, your kimono is so lovely!" I should thank the woman next to me for her compliment, but I already don't like her. It's only because I envy her. She seems so free and natural, so casual and peaceful. Maybe she only feels good because she just had sex. There is more than that though, maybe the engagement ring. It's a beautiful ring.

"Thank you so much," she says, "my boyfriend—my fiancee—just gave it to me today!" I wonder how much I said out loud. "It's a dream come true," she continued, "I've never met anyone like him. Is that our train?" Another is coming, but it won't stop here. The local just left.

"No," I answer, "the express." The slightest moan escapes her in her disappointment. It echoes in my mind with the sound of Kosei's lover, matching perfectly. I must be delusional, thinking this girl could possibly be the one. She is clearly too young, too frivolous, too modern. Her tank-top and cutoffs are generic enough, but she wears glitter in her nail polish and has a little tattoo of a turtle behind her ear. Kosei wouldn't be attracted to a girl like that.

She is also an idiot. She wears her purse far too casually for how expensive it is. It must have been a gift from another idiot, but she doesn't hold it as if it came from her idiot boyfriend either. The purse doesn't bother me. I've seen plenty of old money wasted on oblivious girls. I have always taken care not to be one of them, not to be oblivious. The turtle offends me. That particular design is a ka-mon, and it belongs to the Yoshimitsu family. I can only infer that she likes turtles, because this girl is no Yoshimitsu. Kids today have no respect.

She jumps a little when her phone chirps and the purse inevitably falls. Once she digs her phone out of it, she doesn't even stand before checking the message. It must be from her idiot boyfriend. His phone number is the same as Kosei's.

-

She screams as she tumbles forward, right in front of the express train. I've never actually seen it happen before, but suicide by train is not uncommon. I wish people wouldn't do that. It always throws off the scheduled service. It must make quite a mess for the maintenance people too. Deafening shrieks of emergency brakes crowd out the echoes of her scream. At least there is one less idiot in the world.

It doesn't make sense, though. She was so happy to be engaged. Why would she kill herself? She didn't plan to. Even delirious as I am, I would have noticed suicidal intent in her mannerisms. I feel sorry for her fiancee, for Kosei. He deserves better; I would never hurt him like she has. The thought of it makes me angry at her, but anger never solves anything. I wish I could go to him, to console him, but first I have to get rid of his lover somehow.

Wait.

What just happened?

I need to leave.

=====

Yumiko staggered backwards into a bystander who was innocently waiting for the train. She jumped in shock and turned, excusing herself, then walked toward the exit. Then she ran, but only one step. She walked the rest of the way to the escalator. As soon as her vision crested the escalator's horizon, she saw exit gates flashing through the intermittent gaps between people's walking legs. She knew immediately that she had made a mistake.

She paid her PASMO with a credit card. The exit gate would read it on the way out and know she had been there. Then it would know who she was. Then the two hard plastic wedges that politely gave way for innocent travelers would crush her. The entry gate read her PASMO on the way in. The exit gates would be ready for her, waiting to strike. There had to be another way out.

She needed time to think. She walked over to the side of the atrium and stood facing a system map. That bought her time but not much. People would start to wonder. Someone would ask her if she needed directions. Then they would ask her why she killed that woman. She needed to be alone. A bathroom might work.

She found one, entered, and walked up to a sink to wash her hands. Her PASMO would betray her to the gates, then they would know. It already had. It was too late. They knew she was in the subway, and they were guarding all the exits, waiting. She felt the room closing in around her like the slightly-too-tight tie of her obi.

The girl was right. Her kimono was lovely. It was Kosei's favorite, black silk, soft lining. Flames licked up from its hems, which she didn't particularly care for, but they morphed into a mix of petals and butterflies as they rose up her legs, flying into a black sky. Her obi accented the flames' colors. It bore the subtle texture of a dragon's skin, coiled around her waist. She had it in a drum knot that day, but there were painted accents on it so that if she tied it dangling, the ends would appear to be the dragon's head and tail.

She looked down at her hands, pruned from being held so long under the running water. She had leaned slightly over the sink to wash them. Then she stood and shook them once to dry. The dragon shifted as she stood. She could see it in the mirror, it's delicately patterned, silken weave seemed alive when it shifted in the light. It was too tight, and it was very wide.

As she watched, the dragon's coils expanded, deviating from their neat, overlapped paths. It slithered around her, deftly reaching out to encompass her arms as it turned. It crawled slowly down around her hips, frightening away the butterflies, diving between her legs to coil around one thigh then the other. It had her, but it toyed with her. The gates would have crushed her quickly, mercifully. As it undulated around her form in a single, sinuous arc of circumscription, it clung tight around her, not tight enough to crush her bones and suck the marrow, but tight enough to make her know it could.

It pressed hard into her as it turned, forcing its way around and over her breasts, climbing up along her shoulder, then down her back, then around. It teased her cruelly. The dragon was strong, strong like living steel. As it snaked around her form, it defined the limits of her body, carefully propagating each curve down its length as it slithered over her. It felt so strong and held her so firmly that its slightest mistake could accidentally tear her apart, forcing her flesh into some inhuman mold, squeezing her between its coils like dough between fingers.

The steady motion of its coils and counter coils sheered her kimonos into shreds, burning them in heat of friction against her skin, raising just enough smoke to imbalance the rising heat of an infinite sea of flame on which she stood into a whirlwind around her, sheathing her in fire and whipping through that nonexistent space between the dragon and her skin. The maelstrom whirled tighter around her, like the dragon, but fast and angry, buffeting her with the ashes and dust of butterflies, of flowers, of shredded silk, as it blew them high into the air.

The dragon's head rose solemnly behind her amidst that tumult. It flattened and widened, like a hooded cobra. It swelled and ascended like a hot-air balloon. Its eyes smoldered hungrily, and in a flash like lightning, its multiply forked tongue snapped down around her and blinked away, tasting her tender flesh. It licked her again, its tongue descending down around her head, enveloping her body like bonsai roots trained around a stone, branching into hairy tendrils to probe all her surface, looking for its meal.

The third time, it penetrated, measuring the rounds of her eyeballs and digging far enough under her toenails to taste the quick. Her scream only gave it another way into her, letting it push aside her breath to lick the disused corners of her lungs. The tongue pressed both sides of her eardrums, filling her ear canals and sneaking tiny shoots up her eustachean tubes. It burrowed through the deepest recesses of her sinuses, searching for direct entry into her brain. Its probing branches missed nothing, delicately attenuated enough to tickle her ovaries and so long and serpentine that two ends intertwined somewhere in her intestine.

All of those sensations slammed into her mind at once, bowling over all her thoughts and scattering them like autumn leaves before a winter wind. The flash of its disappearance left her consciousness hollow, echoing with gentle resignation to the inevitable permanence of all those sensations, deceived by their sudden absence. Then it licked and lingered for almost half a heartbeat, sliding slowly all over her for an instant before it was gone, testing every crevice, every poor, tasting her and judging. She welcomed its return and felt a twinge of shame that she had disappointed it when it left again.

The dragon's face loomed angrily over the earth like a thundercloud. It sent lighting, thick and dazzling along every path its tongue had tested, snatching her up naked from the ruins of her world, from its preparatory coils, from its whirlwind of fury. She slid along the peristaltic press of its throat, down into its gut. It had devoured her. She belonged to the dragon. She was part of it. It was part of her. She kicked and struggled in her tight, acidic sack like a fetus unready to be born while her flesh melted away. She was not dead. She was no longer anything at all.

=====

I have thought a great deal, a very great deal, about what went wrong, searching for the headwaters of my deluvial apocalypse. I have always made choices. For as long as I can remember, I have chosen my life. At least I thought I had. I certainly do not think I would have chosen my present circumstances, yet somehow I did. Here I am. There was one moment, on one day, on a subway platform, in which my life seemed to fall off the rails, yet I know now that that moment was neither the beginning nor the end of my undoing.

Everything fits together in a strange way. When I look for my first mistake, I always begin on that subway platform. I play the events of my life step by step, day by day, year by year forward and backward from there, yet I can find no fault, no sin of which I can accuse myself. I cannot remember the day that I was born. Perhaps it happened then. In any case, I feel certain, as one might consider fitting, that my deepest, darkest descent into despair and madness, when the world juiced me dry against its cruelest rasp, happened underground.

I woke in darkness, unable to feel my legs. To my right, I felt a ceramic, tile wall, to my left, faucet feeds and a drain trap. I sat with my back against a wall and my knees tucked under my chin. I grabbed an ankle in each hand and walked my feet out away from me until my legs lay flat along the floor. Then I righted my torso and pushed up, supporting my weight with my hands. The nonidentical twin sensations of prickling pain and cadaverous cold oozed slowly into my thighs. I was intact.

I was also impatient. Correctly supposing I was sitting under a countertop, I leaned forward and hooked my hands up over it. With that initial grip on reality, I pulled myself out into the floor of the bathroom proper. Though lucid, I felt confused and disoriented, a paradoxically comfortable condition for me at that time in my life. I rolled down onto my side and drug myself forward along the floor while my legs' intense and disconcerting pain soaked out toward my feet.

A faint glimmer marked the door of the large, commercial bathroom. I slid toward it and pushed it open. A single, lonely light had been left on somewhere in the station: not enough to push the darkness all the way out to its walls, but enough for me to remember where I was. I also remembered hallucinating in the bathroom. Truth be told, I had only achieved sufficient composure to hope it had been a hallucination. I lowered myself to the floor, pressing my cheek against cold, clammy concrete, and waited for my legs' excruciating resurrection.

I probably should have screamed. That might have been appropriate somehow, but I did not. I think I was afraid. I knew the sound would echo through the cavernous station and tunnels, and I did not want to hear even my own voice speaking to me, paralyzed as I was. I felt safer alone.

I wondered why a light had been left on in the empty, obviously closed, station. I suppose it was for my benefit, for safety. There is something inside us that we do not understand, some part of the human animal that makes us what—not who—we are. It is the seat of fear. The homunculus is afraid of the dark. We need to leave a light on in every space we have been in case we ever return. There are dark nights, dark rooms, pitch black voids like the bathroom in which I awoke, but even in those places, enough ambient light seeps in to tickle the retina and to give us hope. The only space in the universe where true darkness exists is the grave.

Once I was able to stand, I walked to the exit, clicking up frozen escalator steps in my wooden geta. The station had been closed for the night. Heavy overhead doors sealed it off from the street. They lowered electronically, and I couldn't find a control pad. I returned downstairs and stood at the platform as if the cargo-cultish ritual of waiting for a train would make one come.

Lit only by a single emergency light, the station felt unsettled, like a thick jungle on a moonless night. All of its features threw long, black shadows. Even the pips on a braille sign lit at a low angle of incidence seemed sinister and haunted, reaching out with their inky tendrils. That darkness you always see far away down a subway tunnel crept forward into the station, emboldened by the night. By day, the careless clamor of passengers ruled this domain, but by night, everything belonged to the darkness.

I wondered what to do while my eyes fought that darkness back. A wise woman knows when to wait. I do not. I bent down to grab the hems of my kimono and pulled it up, inverting its skirts until I could tuck the hems into my obi. If I let it hang freely I was sure to ruin it. Chill, damp air tickled the skin around my knees between the tops of my split-toed stockings and the bottom of my inverted kimono.

I could not see the rails well, but I knew they were there, about a meter down below the level of the platform. I turned and jumped down, landing on the near rail with one foot in front of the other. After recovering my balance, I began to walk.

=====

She walked slowly forward down the rail, holding her arms out at first as if it were a balance beam but lowering them to her sides as she became more confident in her steps. She could easily follow the rail with the platform right next to her. It felt like wading waist-deep in a train station.

As she entered the tunnel proper, she tracked her heading by judging her position with the amorphous loom of its walls and ceiling. Farther from the station, light became a memory. She walked within a void, her only anchor that steel rail beneath her. She adjusted her gait to probe the rail's edges with each footfall, keeping herself on track.

It seemed she walked a long time into that infinite gloom. The rail felt exactly the same under each step as it had under the last. She could see nothing through the increasingly thick emptiness around her. She could have been on a treadmill and never known. She had no way to witness her forward progress because she never looked back.

Everything feels very loud in the dark. Closing your eyes or wearing a blindfold is simply not the same. Your vision reaches out desperately, struggling to find some hold, some traction, but it slips, barely missing every surface like a repelling magnet. Your mind reaches out too, and you find sounds. Down within the foundations of a living city, you find plenty. None can you discern, none can you ignore.