Hey Mortality Read online

  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.

  The coroner’s report said that Sara had died at half past three in the morning from a heroin overdose. When I heard the news I cried. Cried tears that were so painful, tears that forced my jaw to shake and my mouth to scream. Escaping anguish that made it sound like I was laughing, but laughter was the last thing on my mind. Just a pain so strong that it crashed through me more than once, passing through my body, shaking my limbs as it made its journey. Nothing to wash it away, nothing to make it right. Lost all over again.

  It was a day after the events in Paris that I decided to stop taking drugs and leave France behind. The next day I was up in the air again, bound for England.

  ***

  In the sky, my dream of a place that was left behind some years ago finally resurfaced. As if triggered by the shock of the events in France. But this time, everything had become very different.

  The fog had got thicker and seemed to have spread in every direction. Every inch of that place was now shrouded in a gloomy smoke filled sheet. I wandered into town, passing what was once a stone archway. Decaying yellow flowers lay on the floor surrounded by soil. There was no scent of bread. Only the smell of dirt, loss, and destruction.

  In the middle of the town the buildings were completely reduced to rubble. The only light came from a small lamppost standing alone; as if a lone survivor of whatever cataclysm had been unleashed upon the town. The lamppost sat there, illuminating a small area close to the river.

  I wandered to the light to find that the bridge was still standing, as if untouched. A gloomy shadow approached as I stared into the river. Two of the ducks were happily quacking about on the dark water below, the third duck, however, floated on its side, like a dead animal washed up on the beach. Still, lifeless, dead.

  “What happened to that one?” I asked, pointing at the dead duck.

  “Her? Oh, don’t worry, she’s just dreaming,” the shadow said.

  I looked up and realised that the man had a face now. The same face as the man I had met in 2015 at the Monkey Park, and the same face I saw in a hospital bed in 1977. The man, of similar build to the man that was here once before, had the face of the Duck Man.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am you.”

  “And where are we?”

  “At the Bridge at the Centre of the Universe,” he reminded me.

  “Are we dead?”

  “There is no such thing as death.”

  “But people die all the time.”

  “Do they?” he said, a touch of suspicion filling the air around his words, as if questioning the possibility that the notion of demise could even exist.

  “They do.”

  “Well, if you perceive it that way, you are, of course, free to do that. The way I see it, you might be dead in one thousand years time, but right now you are alive. At some point you were alive. Therefore you are alive now, and will be alive in one thousand years time, even after you die.”

  His words were cryptic and didn’t make very much sense.

  “I’m not following,” I told him.

  “Look at it this way. Let’s say that you are some nameless character in a book. And that book is floating around somewhere in infinity. In the book you are born, and you die. Your whole life, or story, happens in that book. You are finite, already written.”

  “I understand that much.”

  “Good. Now let’s say that someone reads that book. For the reader, your life is already done, over, mapped out, finished. Nothing will change that. The events of your character in a book can’t be altered now. So for the reader, sat blissfully in infinity, all of the events in the book have already happened before they start to read it.”

  “Okay,” I said, half prompting him to carry on, half pretending I understood what he was saying.

  “Now, that reader, the outside observer, he could read the book from page one, and finish it on page two hundred and ninety-five, that would be the normal way to go about things. But, nothing is stopping that reader from starting on, say, page thirty. The reader is not bound by the same laws of time as you. For you, your life is written from start to finish. Everything happens as is written, and nothing can be altered. This point is true for the reader too. The events always happen the same, but they can be perceived in any order. Events don’t have to occur the same way around.”

  “So I am a character in a book?”

  “That’s not relevant. This is just an example of life, the reason why there is no such thing as death. If your life is finite, then for the observer watching on in blissful infinity, your life all happens at the same moment, because, at least as far as a book is concerned, they can choose for it to happen at the same moment. The life you have, life you had, for them, all events must occur simultaneously, because they are observing a finite life from infinity.”

  “I think I understand,” I said, shaking my head, as if to shake away the feathers in my brain.

  “So, even though you do indeed die, for the reader, you might never die. The reader may never read that part of the book. Or the book might remain in time somewhere, and be picked up again in one thousand years. So even though you are dead, you are always very much alive. Take this river, for example,” Duck Man said, pointing at the water. “This river has been flowing forever, infinitely. In this place things are finite. Everything except for the river. The water has flown through here and watched the town crumble. But because the river is infinite, it is for the river to decide at which point in time it is observing. For us, this time is right now. The river is watching us at this moment, but that isn’t to say that this is the only moment in time to exist right now. Only for the river is this moment happening right now. If the river chooses to, it can change the point in which it is observing. That wouldn’t mean this moment is gone, just not being observed any more. One day the river will watch this point again, so we are never quite gone. This moment is always preserved because the river chooses to return to it.”

  “So my life exists right now at this moment, and this moment will exist when I am long gone?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why am I here now, at this momen
t?”

  “Because this is the moment that is being observed by the river. To go back to the analogy of being a nameless character in a book. It is this moment that is currently being read about. If the reader skips this section of the story, it won’t cease to exist, it still occurs, just not for that reader at that time.”

  Silence consumed us for a short while, as I tried to comprehend the words that the Duck Man had told me. My thoughts fractured like a broken jigsaw puzzle in my head; all of the pieces were there, endlessly swirling around in my unconscious mind, but the pieces didn’t quite fit together. They never fit together. Unanswered questions, lost pieces, faces hidden from view.

  “Why did you send me back in time?” I asked abruptly and to break the silence.

  “That’s enough for today. I have to wake up.”

  With that the Duck Man faded into darkness.

  I decided to stay a while longer, further processing his words. I climbed up onto the bridge and took a seat, allowing my feet to dangle over the side. Two ducks quacked intermittently, and the third duck continued to float around, looking entirely dead; pulled this way and that by the flow of water and time. Dead, but only in that moment.

  I woke up just in time for the plane to hit the runway, my least favourite part of flight.

  ***

  I bought a small but expensive house in London. Money wasn’t an issue, and despite the size of the house, space wasn’t an issue either. I always preferred smaller spaces, that was just how I was, so the house suited me perfectly.

  My biggest problem with life was filling in the days to forget about the past. I found that time was difficult to kill when I didn’t have work to go to, or anything to do. Some would think that with all the free time in the world, I would be truly happy, but that wasn’t the case. My own thoughts tortured me, and my boredom tore me apart.