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  The Devil here is trying to trick me to speak, I think, so instead I stay silent.

  “Take her now, join her here and hand over your tongue. Speak a word and I will take your tongue and reunite you with your own devil, her. I offer you eternity with her, and the tormentors, together rejoined. Just a word and your life is eternal and as I have so judged you already, then the choice is of your own. Live or die. The choice is ticking like grains of sand in an hourglass, we don’t have forever,” the Devil begins to laugh, “in fact, maybe we do.”

  It is with the thoughts of her, trapped forever in the flow of the afterlife, a never ending time filled with torment and horror, that I consider the sacrifice.

  “What do you choose? Immortalisation in the afterlife? Eternity with the love of your life? Take the choice. You can speak now.”

  I decide to break silent vows and respond. A mistake perhaps, but I have nothing left, nothing else to lose.

  “I have so much love for her, still today. I can, I suppose, be happy living for the rest of my existence that time allows. Happy living a life of loneliness and emptiness, because, I know I had something great just once. Some reason to live and smile and laugh. A reason to wake up every day and enjoy reality. Now lost, of course. But it was there, a feeling so strong that I can credit it absolutely to whatever love feels like. Whatever is contained within my heart or soul or the matter that makes up my person. Wherever my memory is stored, or wherever my thoughts disappear to and come from. They form somewhere and it scares me that I don’t know where, but, when I was with her, they appeared to flow from somewhere different. Somewhere more magical. Somewhere that the logic of science doesn’t agree to be real.

  “Those thoughts are gone, but occasionally, when I am sitting or drinking, they flicker through my mind. Images appear before my eyes in the darkness of dream. Shapes appear on closed eyes, colours and images of her. I want to save her. I want her to be real again, to be in my life again. I want to capture every last moment that we can possibly spend together, and relish in those moments once we are forever apart.

  “And in my complete and total misery, I am almost ready to let go. Almost ready to give up on everything I am, and everything I own. Give up on every last breath, however short. Ready to swim away in the dark waters of time. Maybe there is a light. A flickering in the distance. A beam that is ready to suck me in. But I am not ready to choose death or suffering. I am ready to forgive, and forgiveness comes before all that you have said to me, Devil.”

  “So be it,” he replies. “You still have love for that poor girl you call Liar. I can see that. But you have to give me proof. If you can offer proof I will let you both go, for I am a reasonable man. But, know this. If freedom for you and her is what you seek, and you can prove it with your words, then in death, I will take your tongue, an agreement I will confirm in letting you leave this place. If you cannot offer proof, I ask you to jump into the river of time, and let it flow you into the afterlife. So proof, now, you can speak.”

  I speak, “I have lost everything. Lost my reason to breathe. Reason to wake up. I have nothing now. Nothing left. I should probably end it and leap into the river, like you ask, but I am afraid. So completely afraid.

  “If life is this, I fear what the death you describe is like. I used to believe it was a peaceful nothingness, not even darkness or light, absent of thoughts or ideas. Even that is better than the reality we call here. But that place, that dark place that I can sense in the very reaches of my mind, fills me with more fear and emptiness. An endless vacuum of empty feelings. I have nothing here, and there will be nothing there either, and even if the place you describe is real, then it makes me wonder if there really is any reason to my being. Why I can think and have thoughts or suffer pain. There is no explanation; something I will never truly know.

  “When my world is so full of darkness and struggles, even the freedom offered by society does nothing to help. It lets itself down completely. A broken system. We can do anything we want to, but we don’t. Instead, we continue to suffer our slavery and endure the daily challenges of life. We continue to fall in love then just as easily we fall apart. We strive to be perfect and to make ourselves important; remembered maybe. Leave our mark on the universe and to give ourselves immortality in our death. An immortality that we can never observe or experience. A little pointless existence.

  “But, just like everything in the entropic cycle, all will be forever lost, eventually and certainly. Lost, decayed, and seldom resolved. And, any resolve also suffers decay. Our dying star our life and lost love. Everything dead, eventually.

  “The stage that makes up my existence in the other world is littered with problems, like a minefield in a labyrinth. Every direction I choose to turn is mapped out before me, but regardless of this, for each turn I make, I am still as always lost. Even when experiencing a moment of happiness, I feel an endless emptiness, like I am turning at every corner and finding nothing there but the landmines of my creating.

  “Every moment that endorphins of love are so craved, my brain returns them to me as a feeling, one that perhaps isn’t even real. An illusion of complete happiness existing only in a maze that tangles up with all other emotions and tricks the mind into thinking it is something else. But then, love must be real, people have loved forever and ever. But no happiness exists in their souls.

  “If somebody asked me last week if you, the Devil, really existed, I would laugh at even the assumption or possibility. Yet, when being swallowed up by the realms of impossibility, I still question the reality of this situation. I still question the reality of the concept of hell or even love. Nothing can be proven here. All sense is lost.

  “So there it is, I have no proof. I will just wait for you to decide, or to take pity, and even if you want more words, I can barely provide them, for now I am either fated to eternal punishment in silent immortality, or fated to return to the living world and to return here once more when resolution and closure absolve me.

  “All I want, more than anything else is to save her. Even if I can’t be with her, I will give everything for her. Let me save her, please. I will wait, in sadness, to be asked by another if everything is okay, or to be touched on the arm, or even kissed on the cheek. Those acts that make me feel alive for a single moment. A second. A skipped beat of the broken heart, they too can be ignored in the living world. So perhaps there is nothing, anywhere, nothing that can heal me. Nothing that can change my mind about the concept of love. But I don’t know where to find it in this maze of dizziness I so find myself trapped.

  “My disturbances offer no way out. I search hard for any remaining happiness or joy, but much like my love, it too, is forever lost. Lost in my utmost thoughts of ending everything and letting everything lost stay forever lost.”

  The Devil grins again, and begins to speak, “Take you words with you, and leave your tongue in death. The one you love is not up or above, she is swimming right here as we meet; in a time that nobody knows. But it isn’t too late now. She was fated, and hated. Gods’ will still judge her in eternity, but for now, you can have your resolve. I will free her, and in death I will have your tongue.”

  Seconds later I am standing again before the statue, and have no way of knowing if any of this is real or not. But that doesn’t matter now, I still have her, but, I will never know why, and, she might never know me.

  17

  The very fact that humans can think, can make discoveries, and have innovations. That we can walk and communicate, that we can destroy ourselves and take away the very freedom we strive to create, is proof that a god cannot really exist. If my thoughts and actions are known already, then there is no possibility that the choice that I am so often told that I have can even exist.

  Everything can end, love can vanish in a single moment. Happiness is short lived and cannot survive forever. A moment of joy vanishes suddenly and is replaced only by darkness. And, as I walk home, shrouded in a similar darkness that spreads and covers the sta
rless sky, I think, there is no god, there is no point. I feel that now, closure is all that I require, a way to say that everything is over; an action that goes beyond what I am capable of doing.

  I wonder where exactly I will end up. I wonder if it is true, that I am fated to an eternity of pain and suffering and in total silence. A deal made, and promises kept, for what? A life that ends and is never remembered. Just a suffering silence that keeps me bound to time, if only belonging to its history. I was here, once, and so too were so many others. The people before me and those that come later in time; I can never join them, I can never fit here now. Not once do I feel overjoyed by the ability of living. Breathing with heart beating, and an absent creator that so states that the path to the afterlife is about being good. I do my best and try and try, but for whatever reason, the world I live in is full of terrors and horrors and nightmares. I can’t close the door like this; my dreams are there, idling at its frame, waiting to be shattered by a faceless god.

  In all my moments of existence, I am never collected. Always fractured and broken and succumbing to the howl of the innocent wind, as it screams past taking with it my thoughts; scattering all hope into the æther.

  How did we end up in a place like this? Like animals going through the flow; fighting and arguing and wishing pain upon others. Hoping for disasters just to feel alive again. Breaking everything so we can climb back out of the abyss of our own creating, just to feel alive.

  And, what of gods’? Do they feel alive in their eternity of boredom? Forever watching the paths we choose to take, those paths that lead only to the suffering of self and others. We do this because gods’ watch from the distant skies and heavens, and if we are theirs, then why would they let us feel this illusion of existence and choice? Time carefully invented, crafted, so that some tongueless god can watch us suffer and die.

  I eventually return to the garbage strewn Nihontuzsumi streets. Left behind by the drunk, the homeless, and the most recently deceased man from the arcade. A heart wrenching misery hits me and for whatever reason I think of her. Her ability. Liar. She who can tell a lie without consequence, dancing from her fingertips and into the thoughts of others, a belief that only a character so strong can persuade, and only a repentance from another, myself, can truly forgive.

  It is again that I feel so incredibly miserable. A depression made up from a mix of whatever it is I am feeling. I can’t decipher whether I am just hungover, depressed to the point of anxiety, or have just been spat back into the world from a hell that I will eventually call my home.

  Schizophrenia is a troublesome world and a difficult word to comprehend in my state, and recognising it as an actuality is perhaps one step closer to proving it doesn’t exist here, inside of me, but I can’t be certain. I feel that from day to day I think with different minds, different thoughts, different feelings, and with different strengths to my emotions.

  Some of me wants nothing more than to do something for the world, be remembered after death, be remembered forever. Some of me wants to actively find joy in the small things in life, find joy in the mundane. Some of me is just scared. But even for us, the wanting to be remembered or the not wanting to be scared, we will disappear to dust too. Entropic times consume us all.

  Even the afterlife isn’t immune. Eventually there will be no hell, no heaven, no place to go. Everything will disappear like dust, like us, like the sand on a beach. We disappear too, we are consumed by it. There is no escaping it, time, it removes life and watches, like an eternal river as it does.

  Even when facing the end, a part of me wanted to jump into that stream of time, that eternal flow of the universe, but, I persuaded myself not to. I fought with both minds and deciphered the consequences. Even the consequences will fall apart. The choices that I make that lead me to new paths of existence, all of them will disintegrate until there is nothing left.

  But is living any better? At least in hell I can stay with my consciousness, despite how horrific that will be. But in life, I am still fated to die. Living with the worry that one moment, a skip of the heart is all that it takes to end the blood that flows through me. A brain that is weak and tired of it all can decide to stop, suddenly.

  I wonder if living in a foreign land is the reason for this effect on my mentality. Nightmares, ghosts of dead authors, stories of time, and losing forever the one I love; those things can change a person, change the chemicals that we were born from and that make up every thought and emotion. Even chemicals can change.

  Before, billions of years ago, all of the things that exist now were formed from the exact same point, perhaps the same atom. We were in embrace, but now scatted like pollen on a summers day; insignificant, lost, and waiting to seed and grow into something of grandeur.

  Even as I wander around without any aim or purpose or direction, as I try to distract my mind from the void, I often see someone that looks like her, Liar. My heart stops for a moment as I make eye contact with a woman who might or might not be her. She rides a yellow bicycle, as always. Walks slowly while wearing a black hat, as always. Each time, a beat or two becomes missed before resuming in timely rhythm. My mind floods with chemicals that fill me with such excitement, such joy; indescribable, again. That whole world of ours, created for that feeling, that moment, that absolution. I stand and watch as she crosses a road and vanishes, as I, at the same time vanish, swallowed up by the feeling known only as love.

  As I return to the steps, a broken illusion envelops me, a broken shattered illusion of dreams and promises. I am consumed by the thought of Yakuza Guy, and I wonder who the man that led me to my fate really was, or how any of this can be real.

  I return to my room and gather my possessions and stuff them into a bag. I have no regrets now but to leave this place, leave this life behind me. My broken torment repaired by the Devil with promises of an eternity of silence; yet one filled with such pain and wrath. All because I have so much love for her. A broken being that needs nothing but help, and that help came from me, and she will never know.

  My sacrifice perceived by the Devil alone, or the tongueless gods’ that don’t exist. They can watch and know, but they can’t change a thing. Only the Devil keeps his tongue, and with his words, he persuades and tricks and offers a fitting end to an existence of hell on earth. The existence of fools.

  18

  I wake up late morning, sand in my eyes. For the final time I decide to wander through the streets of Nihonzutsumi. A final goodbye to the place I used to call home.

  I pass a horse meat restaurant, and next door, a queue of people waiting patiently for famous fried vegetables and prawns. The people here are not locals. These two restaurants get the lunch time trade of salarymen from nearby offices, the sushi restaurant gets nothing.

  I pass a Pachinko parlour that quietly sucks away the souls of people; a smoke filled room of flashing lights, loud music, and the rattle of metal balls. These people will risk their last few yen on a chance to win big. Risk their food for the day in exchange for the excitement of gambling.

  Can Men, the harder working of the homeless pass me on old bicycles. Huge plastic bags full of empty beer and coke cans hang, salvaged from garbage bins beside vending machines. They will be able to get seventy yen per kilogramme of cans; barely a hot meal for their efforts. Or perhaps they too will end up with the swarms of addicts at the Pachinko parlour, full of false hope, always expecting more.

  I take a left and head to Family Mart for a can of beer, and after purchasing from the happiest lady that has ever worked at a convenience store—fake smile and thank you, welcome in and goodbye—I wander to the nameless red shrine for a final godless prayer.

  After praying, I head back into the arcade to see collapsed people in doorways, drained by the summer heat. The poor homeless living in desolate conditions. Some vegetables are browning on the ground, strewn from boxes during the early morning market where salvaged supermarket throwaway goods are sold for a profit. Lettuce marked with darkened footprints, w
aiting to be collected and consumed, as will eventually happen.

  As I wander to the end of the arcade, passing the Kangaroo Hotel, I feel lost. Like a complete outsider and a total stranger to the world. My head is so heavy that a giant might well be standing on it.

  It is here, as I cross the road and continue walking, that I begin to feel a certain dizziness. Like the ocean is in my head, and my ears are full of beach. I sip from my can and light a cigarette to calm down.

  After walking for ten minutes with a spinning head, I arrive at a new area that I have not previously explored. A small shrine that houses the Haunted Jizō. He would apparently speak to passers-by, despite being made of stone. The statue of this guardian deity of children, said to raise babies from the dead, wears a steel hat on his head. It is said that sometimes the hat would move, perhaps through some mystical force, or possibly rattling in the wind. Oddly, there does seem to be a familiar cold air around this area, much like the feeling I experienced at the Ichiyō Memorial Hall. It is a bit overwhelming, and I decide I am done with Tokyo for good.

  As I walk away, I don’t really know where I am any more. I have drifted and been pulled in directions of life that ten years ago, I never thought were possible. I live in a country that is not my own. Surviving, just; but without her it is the hardest thing. I don’t understand what I am doing here, I don’t even know if home has anything left for me either. I am completely lost to the world, and I don’t know what it offers me anymore.

  I could have lived my life like an ant, like the others. Following a path that was created for me, and perhaps finding happiness along the way. But, some trigger inside of me, some force that I can’t explain that can’t be based on previous experiences or memory, this force made me give it all up, give up that comfort and made me end up here; away from the path, lost in the woods, distracted and seeing the world, but with consequence. I don’t know how I became this person. How I became so far away from home, my comfort zone, and from the life that I left behind. But I am here now, still an ant, crawling upon the surface of life. Following orders and paths and religions and routes mapped out by false fulfilment. I have become trapped and obsessed by everything around me. A lone soldier in the battle against myself, and my innermost torments. A wounded soldier trapped by fate alone. Trapped by fate, alone. Impossible to understand and lost in the void again, as always, never to be found.