In the Miso Soup (21 page)

“For me, that was the first time, my own Mama’s blood,” Frank said gloomily. “The blood itself is no big deal—not particularly good-tasting or bitter or sweet or anything—so it’s not as if you get addicted to the flavor.”

I sat with my chin down, hugging my knees, nodding from time to time as he talked. The fluorescent lamp cast its light upward in an inverted pyramid, leaving the floor and the mattress we were sitting on in darkness. Now that my eyes were used to the dim light down there I could see that the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust and alive with bugs. The bugs were of a sort I didn’t recognize, and they congregated at these dark patches that stained the floorboards here and there. I figured Frank had killed somebody in this ruined clinic. Or killed them somewhere else, then brought the body here to cut it up with some of the medical equipment scattered around. Maybe this was where he’d found the long, thin knife he used in the omiai pub.

“After I bit Mama that time, my parents took me to a child psychologist, and he came to the conclusion that because I hadn’t nursed much as a baby I had a chronic calcium deficiency that made me emotionally unstable, and also that the splatter films my older brothers took me to had been a bad influence. They didn’t use the term ‘splatter film’ in those days, but both of my brothers, who were quite a bit older than me, loved horror movies, as about ninety-nine percent of American kids do. Later, after I killed those two people, the police found a lot of gory film clips and posters and rubber masks and things at our house, and the media decided that was what had made me do it, the influence of horror movies. They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there’s no
reason
a child commits murder, just as there’s no reason a child gets lost. What would it be—because his parents weren’t watching him? That’s not a reason, it’s just a step in the process.”

It was almost 4:00
A.M
. now, and the cold was getting harder and harder to bear. Frank didn’t seem to notice it, though. I had my overcoat on, but he was wearing only a thin sweater and corduroy jacket. In two nights with Frank, I’d yet to catch him showing any real sign of being cold. He saw me cupping my hands together and blowing on them for warmth and said: “Chilly?” I nodded, and to my surprise he took off his own jacket and tried to drape it over my shoulders. “No, you need that!” I said, pulling away. Frank told me it was okay, he never got cold, and pushed up his sleeves to show me his wrists. Just as I’d noticed in the omiai pub, they were ribbed with countless suicide scars. I wondered what, if anything, the scars had to do with not getting cold.

“After that first time, I became obsessed with the thought that I might do it again, drink somebody else’s blood, not because I liked the taste of it but because I was haunted by the act itself, because it’s extreme and abnormal but imaginable. Human beings are the only creatures who have the power of imagination, and that’s why we survived. Physically we were no match for other large animals, so certain things were needed to keep out of danger, like the ability to conceptualize and predict and communicate and confirm, all of which are possible only because of the power of imagination. Our ancestors were capable of imagining all kinds of horrors, which they had to try to prevent from becoming realities. And modern people still have the same ability. When it’s used in positive ways you get artists and scientists and so on, but when it’s used in negative ways it always turns into fear and anxiety and hatred, and it can cause a lot of damage. People often point out how cruel children can be, because they’ll torture or kill little animals and insects or smash their own toys. But kids don’t do things like that for fun, they do it to release the anxieties of the imagination out into the real world. If they can’t bear the thought of torturing or killing bugs, they feel an unconscious urge to actually do it and reassure themselves that the world won’t come tumbling down. In my case, I couldn’t bear the stress of imagining I might lap up somebody’s blood again, so when I was four I slashed my wrists. That was the first time I’d ever really tried to hurt myself. Everybody flipped out, and they took me to a shrink again, but again he just told them not to let me watch horror movies. It’s true I was fond of that sort of movie but not to the extent my brothers were. Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That’s the real reason we have horror films—they act as shock absorbers—and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the anxiety of the imagination. And I bet you’d see a big leap in the number of serial killers and mass murderers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news, right? From the age of four to six I cut my wrists about a dozen times, and I’ll tell you something, Kenji, you don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body. My parents finally hired somebody to watch me, this ugly woman, and eventually she caught me trying to cut my own throat and beat the living hell out of me. So one evening in autumn while she was in the bathroom I stuffed my brother’s hunting knife in the waistband of my pants, pocketed some madeleines Mama had baked that morning, and left the house and got lost for the first time in a long, long time. I just marched on up the street, and when I came to those good old streetcar tracks, I remembered how I used to walk along them when I was smaller. The street was asphalt mixed with crushed seashells and had the rusty old rails half-buried in it. The bits of seashell were pretty, the way they glittered in the setting sun, and I just kept walking on up the hill. I’d done that many, many times before, set out for the top of the hill, but had always stopped halfway up. The street started getting narrower, and I was already lost of course, but I never stopped to look back. I was afraid that if I did, I might find that everything was gone, because I had this feeling that one or the other of the two worlds was going to disappear. So I made up my mind not to look behind me and forged ahead. The knife was so heavy it was hard to keep it from slipping down my pants. I pressed my hand against it and walked along just staring down at my feet and the rusty rails and the seashells in the asphalt, and then suddenly the rails stopped. This shocked me to the core, because I’d always thought they never ended. I remember standing there for a really long time staring down at the spot where they stopped, thinking this must be the actual edge of the world. And then I looked up and realized I was at the top of the hill. In front of me was a pond, and when I turned to look back I could see the whole town laid out below in miniature, like a diorama. I’d never seen this view because I’d never made it to the top before, but there it was, the whole town, with clusters of houses and shops on the slopes of the valley, and in the center were bigger buildings and churches and parks, and from there to the harbor were the factories with their smokestacks and warehouses, and the giant crane at the shipyard, which I recognized from one time when my brother took me there, but which now looked like a toy. Beyond that was the sea, gray and hazy, and I could smell the salt in the wind, and behind me the sun was a huge ball sitting on the horizon, and I felt this overwhelming sense of power, and at the same time this extreme panic and anxiety. It was as if the whole world was bowing down at my feet, but also as if I alone was cut off from the world, and I just stood there thinking,
Holy moly
. I was overwhelmed. It was like receiving a revelation from God. At the top of the hill was an old, abandoned, open-pit coal mine, and the long, winding trenches had filled with water to form the pond. Dozens of swans were there, migrating from their summer home in Quebec or somewhere, and I walked around the edge of the pond, where all these reeds were growing, and found a big rock and sat down on it and took the madeleines out of my pocket and crumbled them up and threw little pieces into the pond. I didn’t know if swans would eat madeleines or not, but they came gliding over the water toward me, a whole flock of them. I knew that if I reached out to them they’d back off, because I was like that myself in those days—if somebody or something came at me with no warning, I always assumed they were the enemy and ran away. One swan came right up near me, a young one that wasn’t as wary as the others yet. I still remember the graceful curve of its neck, and how its white feathers were tinged with orange from the setting sun, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to knock my teeth out. I had to keep telling myself: Not yet, not yet. The swan swam into the reeds beside me, to where I could have reached out and touched its long, slender throat, but I still just sat there not moving except to flick crumbs into the water with my fingers. And then I pulled the knife from my waistband, very slowly and quietly, and removed it from its leather sheath. It was heavy and really sharp, my brother’s knife, and I thought: This will put everything right. I thought it would reconcile my sense that I was cut off from the world with my sense that the world was at my feet, make those two feelings merge into one inside me. The swan was just inches away from my rock when I slowly raised the knife, rested the blade on my shoulder, and then in one quick motion slashed down at the base of its neck with all my might. I didn’t know there were bones in a swan’s neck, but I heard the sound, like a dry twig snapping. The knife went right through, and blood came gushing out. It wasn’t like Mama’s blood, it had a sweet taste, and at the time I thought it must be because of the madeleines. I drank an awful lot of it, more than you’d think would be in a bird that size. Nobody ever found out I’d killed the swan, though, because the coal mine was a place where a lot of bad things had happened, rape and things, and people almost never went up there.”

Frank stopped for a minute, bowed his head, and covered his eyes with his hands. I thought for a moment he was crying, but he wasn’t. His eyes hurt, he said softly.

“I haven’t slept, and when I don’t sleep for a long time my eyes get tired. All the rest of me is fine—but my eyes, they really hurt.”

I asked him how long he’d gone without sleep. About a hundred and twenty hours, he said. A hundred and twenty hours added up to five whole days. I wondered if he was taking speed or something. I have friends who are hooked on speed. Jun says there are girls in her class who are, too. Speed freaks can go for days without sleeping. I asked Frank if he took drugs, but he shook his head.

“Later, in the same town, the town I was born in, I killed two people, and when the police questioned me they decided I was insane, so they put me in this mental hospital that I believe was run by the military. The feeling that the world was at my feet and the feeling that I alone was cut off from the world, the sense of power and the anxiety, had both stayed with me ever since that evening at the pond. In the hospital they gave me a ton of medicine, mixed up in my food. They had me on a liquid diet and fed me through a tube, a plastic tube with a little knob at the end made of silicone, which they’d force deep down my throat. I guess it was designed for people with throat cancer or something, who couldn’t swallow. Ingenious design. But they fed me way too much, and that, along with the side effects of the medicine, made me fatter and fatter, until my face got all pale and bloated, and it began to feel like this body wasn’t even me, like I was stuffed with feathers, or just liquid, a liquefied human being. That was with me for years—feeling I wasn’t myself. And I do think I wasn’t my real self then. Of course, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it—slice yourself open and all you’ll find is blood and muscle and bone. . . . A year later I was released from the hospital fat as a pig, a physical wreck. My family had moved to this little town in Virginia, and they came and got me, but from that point on Daddy and my brothers hardly ever said two words to me. About ten years later, when I went to prison as an adult, my oldest brother came to visit and explained about those days. He said they hadn’t known how to relate to me or what to talk about, not because I’d killed people but because I was so fat I looked like a complete stranger. I first started going without much sleep, just taking naps sometimes, when I was in the mental hospital for the fourth time and they cut out part of my brain. I was fifteen. In the operation, they open a small hole in your skull and insert an instrument like an ice pick into the white matter and sever the nerve fibers, which usually makes you very quiet and docile. Americans love to mess about with the brain—that’s why they’re at the forefront of neurosurgery. I was already into black magic by then, and I’d met a lot of people in the hospitals and reform schools who taught me things like how to cut someone’s throat without spraying blood around and where exactly to slice somebody’s Achilles tendon so it’ll make a high-pitched twang—useful stuff like that—and I learned hypnosis too, which came so easily to me I couldn’t believe it. I’m not saying I feel
fulfilled
when I kill people. When it’s happening I often think there must be something else I should be doing, and sometimes I feel like I’m right on the verge of discovering what that something else might be, because the interesting thing is, when I’m killing, that’s when I’m the most focused on life, the most clearheaded, but . . . Have you ever been in a mental hospital, Kenji?”

The things he was talking about were fundamentally creepy and disgusting, and a lot of what he said made no sense to me, but it was all sinking in. It was like listening to music, rhythmical and with a sort of melody that seemed to get inside me directly, through my pores rather than my ears. I’d surrendered to his storytelling, I guess, and when he asked if I’d ever been in a mental hospital it didn’t even strike me as an outrageous question. I just said no, I hadn’t. Listening to him, I’d ceased to think of Frank as insane or not insane. I felt like someone listening to an ancient myth:
Long, long ago, when men used to kill and eat one another
. . . I wasn’t sure I knew any longer what was right and what was wrong. It was a very precarious feeling, but it hinted at a sense of liberation like I’d never experienced. Liberation from the countless little hassles of everyday life. It was as if the border between “me” and “not me” was dissolving, leaving me in a sort of slush.