Real World (14 page)

* * *

I’m not sure when my mother, now out working, began to change. Maybe in the early spring, just after I finished my second year in junior high. All of a sudden she stopped coming home at night on the weekends (as a freelancer, she often worked on odd days). When I asked her about it, she said that they were busy at work and often had to pull all-nighters. Did any of us work up the nerve to go to her office to check out her story? No way.
I started to feel anxious about the way Mom began to speak and act, the way she just sort of stared off into space half the time. I sensed that when she was home, her mind was on some destination far away from us, and it started to scare us. The reason being that, like I said, Mom ruled at home. Perhaps our life had changed because of
her
desires, not Dad’s. Plus, there was the fact that Mom had way more charm and personality than Dad.
Every time Mom went on a trip I was afraid she’d never come back and I had terrible nightmares. I can still remember one in which she was dead. Dead, but still talking to me, repeating this one line over and over: “I’ve got to go.” I thought I’d never see her again, which made me so sad I couldn’t stand it, and in the dream I tried to stop her, and was crying. I still needed her.
My mom always came back from her trips, but she seemed sad and didn’t look like herself. I sensed something was going on with her, but didn’t have the courage to ask her directly. When I saw her and Dad going at it, I imagined she was sad because she wanted a divorce, but I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to leave him so much. He was stubborn, to be sure, but other than that was a pretty decent person. Adults did such stupid things, yet they remained a mystery, making me suffer. That’s when I decided I had to do some investigating if I wanted to really know what was going on.
One day, in my second year of high school, I stole her cell phone from her handbag while she was asleep. There were tons of e-mails from this one guy.
Sorry I couldn’t call you today. I was so busy at work I couldn’t find a moment to call. Next time we meet I have lots to talk about. All I think about is you. Good night. Love you!
I’ve been thinking about you, and about what you said. The two of us are like air plants. Our roots don’t grow in the soil. Which makes me wonder what’s keeping us together. Can love alone nourish a life? I don’t know. I love you.
So Mom was in love with some unknown man. Finally it dawned on me that she’d totally abandoned us all—Dad, me, and my kid brother. She was no longer the mother I used to know. I struggled like crazy to find traces of the former phantom mother in her, because now she was living in a world made up of only her and this guy. Once I found all this out, I wrote down the man’s name and cell phone number and phoned him.
“I’m Mrs. Terauchi’s daughter,” I told him straight out. “What sort of relationship do you have with my mother?”
The guy didn’t know what to say.
“I work under Mrs. Terauchi,” he finally replied. “I’m happy to be able to work with her, and respect her very much. That’s the only relationship we have.”
So the man was a younger guy who worked at her office. I remember Mom saying he was a nice guy, who had a daughter Yukinari’s age. I suddenly felt empty.
“I understand,” I said. “That’s fine.”
I didn’t ask my mom anything, so the man must have gotten in touch with her about it, because she came to my room soon afterward and said, “It’s not what you think. Don’t worry, there’s nothing between us.”
Her eyes betrayed her, but I went ahead and nodded. I had all the proof I needed. The e-mails. The fact that she didn’t come home. That sort of drunk look in her eyes. Those secretive conversations on her cell phone. The curt, abrupt way she and Dad talked to each other.
But it never came to anything. I didn’t want to lose my mother, so no matter how much pain and humiliation it involved, all I could do was give in. So I chose humiliation.
“It’s okay. I get it,” I said.
“Well, that’s good to hear.” She looked uneasy, but once she realized there wasn’t anything left to talk about, she left my room.
Now, a year later, Mom’s still coming home really late. Mom with her lies, me pretending not to notice. Maybe I’m being childish. No, that’s not it. The last thing I want to hear is the sound of our relationship—Mom’s and mine—cracking in two. I can’t trust her, but I
have
to trust her to keep on going. Maybe I’ll have to rework this whole trust thing.
I started to avoid Dad. The hatred I had for Mom spilled over to him. I couldn’t express the hatred I felt for her directly, since I didn’t want to lose her. Dad being Dad, he probably directed his own hatred for her toward me and my brother for the same reason. Back and forth with this twisted, misdirected hate, and it’s choking me.
I’ve hidden my distrust of my mother and am doing my best to trust her and love her. But it might not work out. Because I love somebody I don’t trust anymore, I’ve lost all faith in myself. I bet it’s like this when parents abuse their children. Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore. Check it out, Worm. This is what I mean by something
irreparable.
Not murdering your mother.

I checked my watch. Eleven p.m. The air was smoggy, the sky around the sliver of moon all distorted. Mom still hadn’t come back. I took a telephone card out of the desk drawer. Ever since I got a cell I haven’t used telephone cards much and this one was unused, with a hundred units on it. I stuffed the house key, cell phone, and telephone card in my pocket, went out into the hallway, and listened to what was going on in the rest of the house. My kid brother was in his room, surfing the Web as usual, while Dad was snoring away in the living room, a lonely sort of sound.
Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, I opened the door to our apartment. The night was muggy, without a breath of wind. Everybody must have been in bed in the neighborhood, because there was no one else out. But over in Karuizawa, Worm and Kirarin were still awake, planning how they were going to murder his father. In my heart, I’d murdered my own mother long ago, over and over.
I walked down the road, looking for a pay phone, my sandals slapping as they stuck to the hot asphalt. The road still hadn’t cooled down. There were two pay phones, one next to the other, in front of the station. They were lit by a faint bank of fluorescent lights, and three taxis were lined up beside them, waiting for fares. Would they be able to trace the call? I turned around and looked for a pay phone in some darker corner of the neighborhood and spotted one next to a convenience store. Through the plate-glass front of the store, I could see several customers milling around among the rows of goods. I took a deep breath and pulled out the phone card.
“This is nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
A middle-aged guy’s nasal voice, full of suspicion. I took the plunge and spoke.
“I have something I want to tell you about the boy who killed his mother with a bat.”
“What is it you want to report?”
I noticed, with a bit of happiness, how his tone of voice turned serious.
“I know where the boy is right now. I heard that he’s hiding out in a vacant cottage in Karuizawa.”
“And what is your name?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I hurriedly hung up. I had to get out of there or else they’d trace the call. I was concerned about leaving fingerprints on the receiver, but figured what’d it matter—when Worm and Kirarin got taken into custody, they’d check their call list and find my name on it, anyway. I hadn’t given the police Kirarin’s name, though, hoping that somehow she’d escape before Worm got caught.
When I got back to our apartment building, there was somebody standing in front of the elevator. My mom. She had on a black sleeveless sweater and white slacks. When I got near her I noticed a soapy fragrance that wasn’t the smell of the soap we use at home. I averted my face.
“What are you doing out this late?” she asked.
“I made a call and ratted out somebody.”
My mom turned pale when she heard this.
“Who did you call?”
“Does it matter?”
I slipped my arm inside my mom’s stiffened arm. I really shouldn’t hurt her, I thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN

KIRARIN, PART 2

A
round nine p.m. we went into a small ramen shop along Highway 18. I wanted to go into a regular family-style restaurant, but brightly lit places like that would only show how shabby Worm looked and I didn’t feel like going there with him. I guess I
was
starting to act pretty cruel to him. To me, Worm was a fallen idol.
The AC in the ramen place was going full blast and was so cold I got goose bumps. My bare arms were freezing. But the cold didn’t bother me as much as my hunger, which tortured me and had me gulping back my saliva. Worm was just sitting there drinking a glass of water, but I was starving and ordered two bowls of pork ramen.
Since last night, Worm’s been moping around, but I’ve been feeling great.
They passed the bowls of ramen to us across the counter. I did like guys do and sprinkled in a lot of garlic flakes and red pepper, pulled over the bowl of minced scallions and red pickled ginger and dumped in some of those as well. Mixed in everything in sight that was edible and then stirred it all together with my chopsticks. From the light pink soup I untangled some of the noodles. Even before I could stuff some in, my mouth was watering so badly that drops of saliva plopped down into the bowl. I’ve never been so starved in my life. I was impatient to gulp it all down but controlled myself and sipped some of the soup. I started to sweat and wiped this away with my hand, downing the noodles without chewing them. I was so desperately hungry it was a while before I even began to taste how good the ramen was.
I left home yesterday in the early afternoon, so this was the first food I’d had in over thirty hours. No wonder it tasted so good. Normally I never touch the fat on the pork slices, but now I gobbled it all down. I ate it all—the pickled ginger with its unnatural red color and all the additive-laden soup as well, glistening with fat under the fluorescent lights. But Worm, seated next to me, just sat there, staring at his bowl, disposable chopsticks still stuck together.
“What’s the matter?”
I didn’t ask this out of kindness but because I figured if he didn’t have an appetite I could help myself to his ramen. He didn’t reply.
“If you’re not going to eat that, let me have it.”
Worm had been spacing out but now he stared at me. He looked at me like, “Are you still here?” Of course I am, I thought.
You’re
the one who kidnapped me, remember? You’re the one who assaulted me back at the love hotel, so what the hell are you
talking
about? But Worm had no confidence—he was clumsy, slow on the uptake, didn’t have enough guts to seduce me, a lousy kisser, plus he couldn’t even get me naked. A total loser. An absolute clumsy oaf. Damn. Why was I wasting my time with a guy like this, anyway? I despised him and had already lost all interest. The cool-looking Worm pedaling away under the blazing sun had long since disappeared.

* * *

Last night, all that threatening me and making fun of me made him a little nuts. He was able to get on top of me, but once I stiffened up and he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere, he suddenly yelled out:
“Why can’t things ever go my way?!”
“Of course they’re not going to,” I said. “What do you expect?”
I was pissed. I mean, come
on.
When had things ever gone the way I wanted them to in
my
life? The guys who try to pick me up are all jerks, and the guys I do like won’t give me the time of day. That’s the way it is for everybody—running back and forth between desire and reality, tossed about by life. All of a sudden it made me really angry to have someone like Worm make fun of me, to have a lowlife like him put me down.
“I wouldn’t sleep with you even if you threaten me with your butcher knife,” I said. “I’d rather die first. You’re the biggest loser I’ve ever met. Hurry up and kill me already.”
I was sure I was about to get stabbed, but instead I just heard this pitiful voice.
“How come?”
In an instant the tables had turned. I sat up and sent him flying. Worm fell headfirst onto the grubby stained carpet. I sneered at how stupid he looked. I felt full of courage and power and yelled some more.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, you virgin! I only sleep with cool guys. You’re stupid and gross. If you wanna kill me like you did your mom, then be my guest. If that’s what you have to do, go for it. It’s easy. Blood will spurt out, I’ll suffer, and die, that’s it. I’ll die hating you. So go ahead—I couldn’t care less. I decided to come see a jerk like you, so I’m responsible. Which makes me different from Terauchi.”
Worm was silent, crouched down in the dark. Soon I heard sobbing. What a wimp, I thought. Blubber away. I pulled out the flat box from his backpack that had the butcher knife. The source of his pointless confidence. The guiding principle behind his stupid hopes and dreams. I let the box, knife still inside, slip down in the space between the bed and the wall. No way I was going to let him straddle this bed again. Or get hold of the knife.
“You’re such a loser,” I went on. “You killed your mother, won me over, acted all cute with Terauchi, and said you’re going to go murder your father. You think girls are all pretty dumb, don’t you, and you’re so much brighter. The whole world revolves around you. What a total jerk.”
“Don’t—don’t be stupid.” Worm moaned listlessly. He raised his pointy chin at me. “So what do you want me to do?”
“I’m going to phone my old boyfriend and I want you to threaten him. If you do a good job, I’ll give your butcher knife back. And I’ll pay for the hotel.”
“But what should I say?”
Worm had turned into a good-for-nothing robot. I was ecstatic that I was the one pulling the strings now. It feels good when some guy with an inflated ego gets cut down to size. I felt I could do anything now—no matter how dumb, low, or evil. I picked up the old-fashioned phone from beside the bed. It was this awful pearl pink. I pushed the number for an outside line and punched in the phone number, which I still had memorized. Wataru’s cell phone.
“When this guy named Wataru comes on,” I explained, “tell him this. Say: ‘You jerk. If you don’t watch out, I’m gonna kill you. Better go see if your older sister’s back home safe and sound. And your girlfriend—her, we’re gonna gang-rape. So you better watch your step!’”
I didn’t have time to check whether Worm had gotten all that, ’cause I was dying to hear Wataru’s voice. The voice I still loved.
“Hello. Who is it? Hello? What number is this?”
I suppressed the desire to hear more of his voice and shoved the phone toward Worm. He hesitated at first but after I urged him on, he spewed out all this in a low voice:
“Is this Wataru? Me? I’m a murderer. No kidding. I offed my old lady. It’s true. Smacked her with a bat. Crushed her skull good. You can’t say you haven’t heard about it. It’s in the papers—check it out. What about you? Ever killed somebody? I doubt it. Me, I’m screwing your old girlfriend right now. You don’t know who I’m with? She hates your guts. She wants to kill you. You and your whole family—your old man, old lady, your sister, and your precious girl and all your buddies—she says she wants to annihilate the lot of them. Since you betrayed her, she says she wants you to vanish from the face of the earth. That’s her one desire in life. And she wants me to do it for her. You listening, Wataru? Yep, damn right, I’m serious. Bet you didn’t know someone wanted you dead this much. You thought you were just like any other guy, huh? Don’t make me laugh. After I heard what you did, I’m definitely gonna kill the lot of you. So you better prepare yourself, ya jerk.”
At first I thought, Serves him right, as I listened to this, but Worm went on and on and it started to creep me out. Signaling him we should hang up, I grabbed away the phone and found Wataru had hung up a long time ago. What an ass.
“He hung up. Redial it.”
I punched in the number. At this point I didn’t care whether they traced the call or he reported us to the police or whatever. No matter how much I let it ring, though, Wataru didn’t pick up. Damn—I started to feel really upset and took it out on Worm.
“It’s all your fault,” I said. “You got me involved and it’s made me twisted. You’re the root of all evil, you know that? You’re the cause of all this trouble. I’ve had it. I’m going home. Back to the ordinary world you’ll never be able to return to.”
“The world I can’t return to?” he said. “You mean I’ve been kicked out?”
Worm raised his head and gave me a hard look. In the dark, his eyes glittered.
“But you’re the one who decided to leave that world,” I said.
Worm sighed. “I’m—frightened,” he said. “Please—I need you to stay with me.”
This was the second time Worm had surrendered. What a wimp. How could I not feel superior? Worm was weak, and I was strong—it was as simple as that. This night had been a turning point that had really changed me. I felt victorious, like I’d defeated an enemy. But still I was kind of uneasy. Maybe I’d entered Worm’s world after all. Maybe that’s why I’d made that threatening call to Wataru. But—was this really me? Was I really such an awful person?