Authors: Luke Kinsella
I still had one million yen to spare, so that would be used for my survival for the next few months. Eventually, I would make enough money that I would never have to worry about my finances ever again.
After getting my investments in order, it was time to reflect. There I was, trapped in 1977. My future uncertain to me, but perhaps already mapped out by a previous incarnation of myself. All there was for me to do was enjoy my life, despite my failure to keep the Duck Man alive.
***
The months sailed past, and I left the sulphur of Beppu, and moved north, to Fukuoka. I spent most days there simply overindulging in alcohol and food. There wasn’t a lot else left for me. I would keep my eyes focused on the markets, every now and again I would call up my financial advisor and have him shift some of my investments. I sold the ones that I had profited from, and reinvested most of the proceeds into my next venture.
At twenty-eight I was still young, and with a wealth of knowledge of future events, I was always tempted to use it to my advantage to get with girls. I never did, however. If I started predicting earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or politicians’ untimely deaths or the next person to be kidnapped by the Koreans, people would start thinking that I was some kind of shaman. History tells us that witches get burnt.
As it turned out, the women in 1977 Fukuoka were somewhat freer than 2015 Tokyo. I never needed to lie or trick my way into a woman’s arms, and a series of meaningless one night stands followed. All the while though, Lucy was there, like an itch, somewhere in the back of my mind. Loveless sex, late nights and parties. Life was good, but always seemed to lack any real purpose or direction.
Despite drinking every day, and being able to enjoy myself thoroughly while inebriated, the next day I would never once get a hangover. Like the nurse had said back at the hospital, it was like a miracle. It was as though I was invincible to any bad feeling, untouched by pain or excessive alcohol consumption.
***
As time went on, I grew even more curious. I wondered just how far I could take it. Whether I could actually be hurt or feel pain, I wasn’t even sure any more.
I recalled a conversation that I had had with Jun, thirty odd years from now. We were talking hypothetically about what special ability we could have, if any. One wish. Jun had chosen the ability to speak every language in the world, at native ability.
“That sounds like a bit of a waste,” I had told him.
“Think about it. You could speak every language in the world. You could get any job anywhere as a translator, work for rich Saudi princes, translate for the Prime Minister, be able to communicate with women from anywhere on the planet. You could enrich yourself in culture you would never have been able to understand. If people were talking about you on the train in their native tongue, then you could flash them a glance that told them you understood, just for the satisfaction of seeing the shock on their faces. You could listen to songs in any language, songs you wouldn’t have understood before in your wildest dreams. Read thousands of years of untranslated literature. The opportunities would be endless.”
Jun did have a good argument, but a part of me thought he might have been over-thinking it a little.
“How about you?” he asked.
I gave it some thought, “I would choose to never feel pain, never be injured.”
“Pointless,” he said, his one word reply didn’t seem to offer much agreement.
“Pointless?”
“Yeah, if you didn’t feel any pain, you wouldn’t feel anything. You would be numb. Think of it like this, when you go outside in the winter without a coat on, you feel cold, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“And when you put your coat on, you instantly feel better.”
“Right, but why not just leave the house with my coat on?”
“Exactly, leave with your coat on, feel a bit cold. Leave without your coat, suffer for a while, before dissolving that suffering with a coat. It’s like your no pain. Without some pain, you will never appreciate the feeling you have when you are in pain. If you were never cold when you went outside, what’s the point of wearing a coat? The coat is part of the experience, you need the option to put on the coat or to take it off. Embrace the cold, or cast it aside. Without the option you end up completely numb.”
I never quite understood Jun’s analogy. It was as if he was arguing my point for me, or at least that’s the way it seemed to me. Before I had a chance to mention this though, Jun had already started speaking again.
“And what about leprosy?”
“What about leprosy?”
“Well, imagine this, you’re walking along barefoot, and you cut open the sole of your foot on a shard of glass. You don’t feel any pain though, just continue walking on. Eventually the foot gets infected because you didn’t tend to your wounds. You didn’t even realise you
had
wounds!”
“Why would I be walking barefoot? I have shoes.”
“Right, but hypothetically.”
“And wouldn’t I see the trail of blood?”
“Depends. It might be dark out, you could be out walking your dog at night. Anyway, so your foot gets infected and you have to get it amputated.”
“Okay, but at least when they chop off my foot, I won’t feel any pain.”
“Every cloud,” Jun said, with a familiar grin.
Thinking about that conversation, I felt a bit hollow. I always enjoyed my talks with Jun. He was always up for a good debate about any subject. Now, conversations were empty and about meaningless subjects. But perhaps there really was no physical pain in the world for me. I decided that I needed to test it out.
***
I went to the library and started studying medical journals. I was interested in finding the best place to injure myself, a place that wouldn’t cause long and drawn out side effects or pain. My research indicated that the best place to be hurt was either in the hand, or like Jun had alluded to, in the foot. As long as I avoided all major arteries and vital organs, infection would be minimal.
I was staying in a hotel close to Tenjin Station, a classy place, but I could easily afford it.
On the way back from the library, I had stopped off at a specialist knife shop, the sort that offers engraving services at a sky-high fee. I had bought a thin and sharp
Yanagi
, a double sided knife used for slicing raw fish. I thought about paying for the engraving, but decided I had no words.
In the hotel room, I placed a towel on the floor. I took out a thick felt pen and drew a small black cross on the top of my left foot, between my big toe and my index toe. I gritted my teeth and positioned the knife within six inches from my foot.
I had never been one for pain or the sight of blood, and perhaps that was why I couldn’t go through with the act of self-harm. After hunching over with a knife in my hand for about five minutes, I gave up. It became apparent that there was no way, even if I couldn’t feel any pain, that I would thrust a knife into my own foot.
Still wishing to experiment, I instead made the tiniest of cuts on my little finger, no bigger than a small paper cut. It hurt, but not half as bad as the foot would have. A thin trickle of blood spilled out. I went to the bathroom and rinsed my finger and the knife under the cold tap for a time.
I then went and sat on my bed, examining my injured finger. I didn’t really know what I was expecting to happen. Perhaps the wound would magically heal up before my very eyes, or the blood would stop coming, or the pain would instantly disappear, leaving behind only a faint trace of memory. But none of those things happened. My cut was real, the pain, albeit slight, was also very real.
A thought crossed my mind. What if that event always happens? If every version of me existing there, sent back through time, always cuts his finger, then there would be no reason for the wound to be immune to pain. There will always be a cut, and the cut will always cause pain. This would happen to the me before, and the other me afterwards. We all cut ourselves in that hotel room in Fukuoka, and we all almost stab ourselves in the foot.
My head started to spin like a washing machine that contained forgotten coins in the back pocket of some jeans. The little pieces of metal slipped from the pocket and began smashing into the side of my brain as they whirled around to the tune of a spin cycle.
***
I woke up to find that the cut on my finger was still visible. So much for not being able to get hurt. I decided I had had enough of Fukuoka, and with Japan offering little fulfilment, I decided to board a plane for the first time in my life. I had enough money to continue travelling indefinitely, or I would have enough money, just as long as I kept shuffling my investments.
I decided on Hawaii. A relaxing break on a sun swept island, thinking that the peace would be enough to distract me from my caged existence.
I booked a Japan Airlines flight out of Fukuoka Airport to Tokyo. From there I would fly out to Hawaii. I thought it was best to start slowly with a small domestic flight, just to see how I coped.
***
Landing at Tokyo Haneda Airport, I felt that flying was a natural beast; nothing at all to have been worrying about. The only part I didn’t like was when the wheels of the plane crashed down onto the runway on landing. The plane felt like it had bounced slightly, as if crashing into a frozen lake before coming up to the surface for air.
***
After enjoying a month in Hawaii, doing very little but calming my thoughts, I flew to Paris, where I spent two years studying French and a little English, when I had time. When I wasn’t busy studying, I would go out to various parties, drinking far too much, and always flashing my money around. It was fair to say that things had paid off, and I was enjoying a stress-free lifestyle of debauchery and fun.
Toward the end of my second year in France, I began to experiment with drugs. I found from personal experience that the best choice was LSD. Side effects were non-existent the next day, so I would take a few blotter hits before partying into the night. During the come-up, I forgot the world, and the world forgot me.
It was that year, in 1979, when one of my closest friends in Paris died. Sara was her name. We had coupled on several occasions, but nothing too serious ever came from it. Not that I was sure I even wanted anything serious at the time.
Sara was the sort of free-spirited, happy-go-lucky girl who strived for peace on earth, among other things. When I first met her at a random party, I was instantly drawn to her. Pink hair, tie-dyed clothes that she made herself. Thick dark eyelashes and eyes wider than golf balls.
She was living in an abandoned warehouse with six other people, scouring the back alleys behind supermarkets for expired food each night; not a franc between the seven of them. How she got invited to that high class party was beyond me, and who she was with I will never know.
The food the seven of them gathered they would share equally amongst themselves. The warehouse she lived in wasn’t a nice place at all. She took me there once to show me what squatting was all about. An old motorcycle manufacturing company once operated there, but a fire took with it the company and half of the roof. Perhaps it was far too expensive to repair. Instead, abandoned forever, and left only for the rats and Sara and her friends.
I later found out that Sara’s father was a billionaire. He owned a real estate company and a string of other successful businesses. Sara once told me over too many drinks that her father could buy up the whole of Paris if he wanted to. Perhaps an over exaggeration, but I let it go.
I asked her once why she didn’t just ask her father for some money; she could live a normal life and move to a proper house, not living in some garage or abandoned warehouse.
“What would be the point of that? There’s more purpose to life than being handed everything on a plate. People should learn to do things on their own, and besides, the way my father makes money is by exploiting the people below him. Those people he exploits are my people too. Why would I want to hurt my people?”
Sara was the reason I started to take drugs. She told me once that, “Drugs are nature’s way of telling us to have a good time, and forget about all the other crap going on around us.”
I started spending a lot of time with Sara, we wouldn’t really do anything in particular, just experiment with substances, talk about philosophy or feminism or how people on earth now forget that we were once monkeys living in trees. Always conversations that were significant at the time, but never resurfaced the next day.
Sometimes she would come to my hotel, stay the night. We made love on only three occasions, but it didn’t matter. Just being with her made me forget who I was before, eradicate my love for Lucy, and often, when in heated discussion, she would remind me of my best friend Jun.
Then as if too suddenly, everything changed. Everything faded away.
Sara didn’t wake up one morning. She lay there still on that cold warehouse floor. The rats crawling in the space around her corpse. A needle clinging to her arm.