Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (19 page)

Truth be told, Yoshi was unsure as to why he bothered telling his brother such stories every day. It must be remembered that Shitai was practically brain dead, nothing more than a giant vegetable, one who no doubt was unable to comprehend what Yoshi was telling him. Perhaps it had something to do with guilt. Yoshi had lived a very full life (or he had prior to the death of their mother in 1970, the year he had become Shitai’s primary caretaker, and the year he had decided to move to Shoji). Shitai, on the other hand, had remained bedridden his entire life, had never really even experienced life at all. But Yoshi’s guilt was, in a way, multi-tiered, for there was a part of him that loathed his twin brother, and resented his very existence. For many years now, Yoshi had been fascinated by the Phantom Twin Syndrome, had been intrigued by famous people whose twins had died either in the womb or just after they were born, and were thus haunted by that twin for the rest of their lives (‘twinless twins’ was one term for such people). He would read about the birth of Elvis Presley, who had been born on January 8th, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi, and how Elvis’ older identical twin brother, Jesse Gordon Presley, had been delivered stillborn just 35 minutes before, and was buried in a shoebox in an unmarked grave (Jesse being immortalized in Scott Walker’s stillborn serenade “Jesse,” off his 2006 album
The Drift
, an album that Yoshi loved, having been a Scott Walker fan for many years). Then there was Philip K. Dick, whose twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, died just six weeks after being born, on January 26, 1929. Oftentimes Yoshi would feel as if Shitai was one of those phantom twins, one who had died stillborn, only in Shitai’s case he was a phantom twin who had somehow survived, by one of Nature’s cruel anti-miracles. This was something he thought about every day, usually when going about the tedious process of changing his brother’s tubes, and as he would do this he would also sometimes think that perhaps Shitai should have died in utero, and then have been absorbed by himself, such fetal resorption being known as Vanishing Twin Syndrome, or VTS. Every day, when Yoshi would visit the local Shinto shrine, he would pray for Shitai’s merciful death, and while it would have been quite easy for him to do the deed himself, he just could not go through with such an act. Besides, he was perversely curious as to which of the two would die first.

Every night, after telling whatever story he chose to tell to his twin, Yoshi would then climb into his own bed (which was located a few feet away from Shitai’s bed, to its left). Then he would close his eyes and quickly fall asleep. And then he would dream, and this dream was the same dream he had been having now for over 40 years, ever since he had become Shitai’s primary caretaker.

In this dream, Yoshi would find himself lying down in bed, in a room almost identical to the living room of their home, just with some slight variations in decoration and furniture. In this dream, however, it was Yoshi who was the bedridden one, Yoshi who was connected via tubes to a number of machines. All he could do in this dream was lie in bed and watch as his brother walked around the room, going about doing various chores. At some point in this dream, Shitai would eventually go to the front door, open it, and step outside, and for a brief moment Yoshi was granted a glimpse of the world outside the house, and what he saw was somewhat unnerving. For outside the house there stretched a black night sky that brooded over a monochrome landscape: Shitai would begin walking down a gray street, one that cut across a lake of spoiled white milk. Rising out from this lake in the distance was the head of an enormous snake with a rooster-like face, a bejeweled crown atop its scaly head, and sticking out from its beaked mouth was the bloody tip of a tail: an Uroborus taken to its logical and graphic conclusion. Meanwhile, hovering in the sky was a creature that in shape resembled the chalk outline of some ghastly malnourished lamb, its sinister aura bringing to mind the Bloody Touching Monster that haunted the Uboa Trap World in
Yume Nikki
. Yoshi would see all of this only very briefly, before Shitai would shut the door, blocking the outside world from sight. Hours would go by, and eventually, Shitai would return: then he would change Yoshi’s tubes, sit down next to him, and begin whispering into his ear, in much the same manner that Yoshi whispered stories into his brother’s ear during his waking hours. And the things that he would whisper in Yoshi’s ear were so horrific that, upon waking up in the morning, Yoshi would find himself unable to remember just what it was that he had been told, being left only with the gut feeling that what he had been told had been so awful that his memory had erased it to preserve his sanity.

Whenever Yoshi would wake up in the morning, he would reflect on his dreams from that night and inevitably feel quite disturbed. One would think that he would be used to them by now, seeing as he had been having variations on this same nightmare for over 40 years, yet still, such a thing had never happened. There were two reasons why they disturbed him, the first being the reversal of their roles: like Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, it made him ponder the possibility that what he knew as the objective world was nothing more than a dream, and that it was the grim nightmare world in which Shitai was the mobile one that was the true objective reality. The other reason why the dream disturbed him was because of the ghastly things that Shitai would whisper in his ear every night. Thinking about those things, Yoshi couldn’t help but compare them to the dark things of the world he was familiar with, and there were times in which he had to wonder which of the two twins lived in the actual nightmare. Yoshi would often read his brother stories from the newspapers, and it never failed to amaze him how awful many of those stories were. Why, just in the last week of May and the first week of June, there had been that man in Hackensack, New Jersey who had repeatedly stabbed himself with a 12-inch knife in front of police, throwing bits of his own skin and intestines at them. Then there had been that 21-year-old Michigan State University student who had murdered his roommate, dismembered him, eaten his heart and brain, then disposed of the remains in a dumpster behind a church. Then the day after that, the story of a former employee of a Swedish medical university who had cut off his wife’s lips, then eaten them, so that they couldn’t be sewn back on: that same day the CDC had denied the existence of a zombie apocalypse, and a woman in Houston had seen a likeness of Jesus in the bathroom mold of her home, and a massacre had taken place in Syria where the victims, mostly women and children, had been killed execution style, their heads cut off. It seemed to Yoshi as if blood and madness were the only true universal language of the world. And was it not the Aztecs who had believed that the spilling of blood was needed to sustain the Universe itself?

In any event, time went by, the seasons changed, but Yoshi’s life remained as stagnant as pond water in the stifling dog days of summer, as sessile as the gargoyles clinging to Notre-Dame de Paris. Every day he went to the forest to look for corpses that often hung from trees like morbid wind chimes, and every night he returned to his home and told his brother about his day. But then, one night in September of 2012, everything changed.

In most aspects, the day had begun like any other for Yoshi. Yet as he had left his house shortly before 9 o’clock that morning, something about the day had already seemed to be strangely off to him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but as he had gone about the routine of changing all of Shitai’s tubes, he had begun to receive the odd notion that this would be the final time that he would ever do this for his brother, a notion that that night, he would rid himself of his brother once and for all. These notions, which began as mere stray thoughts, eventually blossomed into deep convictions as the day had gone on. As he had made his rounds in the forest that day, he had come to the conclusion that, while he would never be able to kill his twin in a direct manner, nothing was stopping him from doing it indirectly.

Soon, night had fallen like the blade of a tenebrous guillotine, and with it, the end of Yoshi’s shift. He stayed at the local tavern a bit longer than usual that evening, and consumed more sake than was his wont as well, much more than he was accustomed to imbibing. Perhaps he had been subconsciously operating under the rationale that he needed to steel his nerves for what he had intended to do that evening. After he left the tavern, he had made his way home, not even bothering to stop at the Shinto shrine as he always did, figuring to do so would be pointless. For all these years now, his prayers had never been granted by the gods, so that night he would take matters into his own hands. He tried to assure himself that what he was doing was only just and humane, but he felt as if he were being watched by sinister authority figures, as if he were walking down not a normal village street but was instead wandering blindly through a hallucinogenic labyrinth whose walls were decorated with giant sculpted eyeballs. He kept shooting nervous glances up at the sky, which also had seemed more sinister than usual that evening: the stars seemed less like infinitely distant celestial bodies and more like white dots on an enormous sky-wide ebony-paged connect-the-dots book which, were they to be connected, would trace out the obscene shape of some repressed dropsical deity (perhaps Cloacina, the Roman Goddess of the Sewers and the Spirit of the Great Drain), and the crescent moon was like one of God’s fingernail clippings, forever embalmed in the black sky.

Yoshi stepped into their house and looked around. There was Shitai on his bed, bathed in red light, quiet as one of the University of Salford’s anechoic chambers, as sempiternal as day and night. There was his own bed, currently unoccupied and awaiting his presence. There was his bookcase, which held a number of titles, including everything ever written by Yukio Mishima, Osamu Dazai’s
No Longer Human
, Yasunari Kawabata’s
Snow Country
, various texts related to Eastern Religion, and their father’s prized possession, a signed copy of W.P. Mayhew’s classic novel
Nebuchadnezzar
(Pappas & Swain, New York, 1941). There were also many books by Jung and various spagyrical texts, for the twins’ father had been a psychiatrist of the Jungian school of thought, employed by a powerful Japanese company known as Chipco, who had sadly died in 1984 when the Chipco laboratory he had been stationed at had been mysteriously destroyed, reduced to nothing more than a giant crater shaped like the footprint of some titanic aquatic reptile. There was his record player, placed atop a cabinet, and in the cabinet itself was a shelf housing a number of records, including many of the opera LPs he had purchased during his trip to New York City in the 1950’s, along with many albums featuring Akihiro Miwa, who was Yoshi’s favorite singer. On one wall hung a framed print of Hiroyuki Fukuda’s extremely creepy painting
The Goddess of Meontology
, which had been in the possession of Yoshi’s family for many years now, and which Yoshi had always found to be somewhat sinister in its composition. Then Yoshi turned his attention to Shitai.

Yoshi stared down at his twin’s body with a grim look of resolution on his face, in much the same manner that Abraham, clutching a sacrificial knife, had probably stared down at the bound form of his son Isaac on the altar atop Mt. Moriah. But here, in this case, there would be no angel to stop Yoshi from doing that which he was about to do. He quietly went about unhooking his brother’s various tubes. Rather than replacing them, however, he instead gripped his frail brother in his arms and lifted him off the bed, which wasn’t too hard as his brother’s withered body weighed hardly anything at all. He then turned and walked right out of the house, still cradling his brother in his arms. At that hour of the night, the streets of Shoji were all but deserted, so he didn’t need to worry about running into anybody. He walked down his street and stepped into the forest.

For awhile, he walked through the woods, until he finally stopped in his favorite grove and carefully placed his brother down on the ground, in between the two conjoined trees. In the darkness, it was impossible for him to tell, by vision alone, if his brother was still breathing, or even if he were alive any longer, though he was pretty sure that once one was unhooked from those machines, death quickly followed. At the very least, his brother certainly looked peaceful. Yoshi said a prayer for Shitai, then walked off, heading back home.

Back in his living room, he stared at Shitai’s now empty bed, a bed that, for the first time in who knew how many years, was finally unoccupied.
This was the way it always should have been,
Yoshi thought to himself as he began putting away the equipment and machinery that he no longer had a use for. His 40+ yearlong coma vigil had finally come to an end. And that night, for the first time in countless years, he was spared the nightmare that had been plaguing him for so long: in fact, he didn’t dream at all.

But still, when he awoke that morning, he was still feeling guilty, which was only natural. And as he went about his rounds in the forest, he made sure to stop at his own Eden, the grove where he had left Shitai behind the night before. There, however, he made a strange discovery. Of his brother, there was not a trace. Shitai had vanished so thoroughly that Yoshi found it easy to believe that the forest floor itself had swallowed him whole. The conjoined trees, in the meanwhile, had undergone a mortifying metamorphosis: although they had looked perfectly healthy when Yoshi had visited them earlier the previous day, now they were both covered in oozing sores, their outer bark swarming with red and black ants, as if they had been kissed and thus tainted by the blistered lips of some corrosive Cupid.

And so reaches the end of my confession. Now that it is finished, I am unsure what to do with it. Perhaps I will send it to that visiting American I read about in the paper the other day, that pompous college professor who is compiling a book of modern-day Japanese ghost stories and legends. To conclude my story, I will say this: as I returned home that day, I knew that now I finally had something in common with the younger people of Shoji village: the harried, almost guilty expression on my face was now one with theirs, and as I walked back to my now empty home I couldn’t stop thinking about this question: what happens to the two faces formed by Rubin’s Vase when the grail that unites them is shattered forevermore?