The first interlude: Mai
After the carnival ended, I really thought I could be happy. For a few days, I was; just riding on a cloud everywhere I went. How could I not have been? Everybody that had died, that I had watched die, was alive. All of them. It was like the ending to a western action movie; the hero rides off into the sunset, with his (or, in my case, her) newfound lover, and they live happily ever after—or at least, that’s the assumption. In my Western Studies class at Fuuka Academy, we watched some western action movies, and I always loved that ending. I saw how hard the hero worked without even a single complaint, and in a moment of wild fantasy, I think I wanted to be them; wanted their happy ending.
Something the action movies never show is how the hero’s feelings change. How they are at all, really. We don’t know if the hero resents the woman for what she made him do; if the woman feels that the hero thinks of her as more of a conquest, hard-earned but a conquest just the same. We don’t know what kind of tensions they’ll go through, or if they’ll break up a week after they get together because it turns out they don’t like each other. There are no “Happily ever afters”. In some ways, I prefer Samurai movies to westerns because of that; at least at the end of those, the hero usually dies and doesn’t have to worry about whether or not some obnoxious brat with a crush and a “prior claim” will get in the way of what they’ve worked so hard to earn.
That sounds really bad, huh? I’m never this negative in public; I think that’s why I’m writing it all down. I sound really bitter, and I guess in some ways, I am. It’s just that I worked so. Fucking. Hard. And I sacrificed so. Fucking. Much. Not physical things, though; not really. I sacrificed a piece of my sanity at that carnival. A big piece. And I lost a big chunk of trust for all of my friends. How do you get over it and trust somebody who tried, very hard, to kill you and somebody you love very dearly and nearly succeeded? How do they trust you when you killed them or the ones they love instead? Even if it’s over now, it’s not really over. It’s like those Imperial soldiers still hiding out in the woods decades after World War 2 ended. (A/N: I looked fairly hard for a more Japanese perspective on World War II; something like what they referred to it as, but I couldn’t find it. If anybody has any ideas, I’d be happy to hear them, and I might even edit them in here with credit to you. --Veg)
I still remember seeing Mikoto after she killed Takumi and Tate—I guess that sounds worse than it is, too, but not by much—and I remember forgetting all the love I had ever felt for her. I remember suddenly seeing not her face, but her external and external carotid arteries, just pump-pump-pumping away that poison and shit she must have had for blood right into her head. I remember wanting to stop that. I remember wanting to find out if that thing actually did pump shit and poison.
That’s the thing about rage. Rage is extremely potent up to a certain point, and then you just overdose on it and suddenly, you don’t feel angry at all, just curious. You start thinking about really morbid things you could do to somebody. You want to do them really, really bad. It’s like being drugged. I’ve been drugged recently, too. A week after the carnival, after I fell off of my cloud, I had a nervous breakdown and I was hospitalized for a week. I kept seeing Takumi and Tate dying in my head; right in front of me. I kept feeling Tate’s lips press on mine; kept feeling how they felt strangely light and airy as they dissolved. How we never really got a kiss, because he vanished before we really could.
I remember at that time having visitors. Everybody from Chie to Reito to Midori visited me at least three times; I was more or less catatonic when I wasn’t screaming, so I have to admit, I wasn’t a very good friend at that point. The only person who didn’t visit me was Mikoto.
By the time we decided in the spring to go to the beach house—something I’m looking forward to a lot; I really think I can have a good time here, and maybe, with Tate…anyway—Mikoto and I were okay again; better than okay, really, but there was a lot that led up to that.
After a week in the hospital—actually, a nurse told me that it was almost a week to the hour—Mikoto showed up in my room. She didn’t apologize to me. No, she didn’t apologize to me at all. On the contrary; she was very, very angry at me.
I remember just thinking, get the fuck out of here…I just want to get the fuck away from you. When she walked in.
She walked in and we had a staring contest for about three minutes. I think I lost, but I’m not actually sure. Then she said, out of nowhere, standing at the door with her arms folded under her cute little breasts (wow, that came out way different than I wanted it to, but it stays anyway because that’s honestly what I thought) “If Mai is going to sit there fighting me in your head, then stand up and fight me for real so that we can settle this.”
That was the first thing that made me react. I looked up at her, and I saw that little artery again. Saw it pumping. Saw it pumping out Tate and Takumi’s death; saw that confused, resigned expression on her face that she had had as my brother and my ...(I’ll write it down here because I can’t say it out loud yet) lover vanished in front of me. On me. In my arms. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW IT FEELS TO HAVE SOMEBODY DIE IN YOUR ARMS IT IS LIKE TAKING A SHIT WITH THE DEVIL (Page is torn here).
That happens to me sometimes. I think it happens to Mikoto too, but she never tells me about it.
She looked down at me and said, “Go on. Get up. Fight me. Or I’ll kill them both again.” She spoke so coldly; that left an impression on me.
I remember actually standing up when she said this, somehow ready to fight her to the death, convinced that she was telling the truth. Once I stood up, she said, “follow.”
I did. I wasn’t walking quite right at that point, but to me it was like floating. My first activity in a week. At all. I remember the nurse just staring at me like I was a ghost. I remember being sucked back to that carnival; suddenly, Tate and Takumi were dead all over again, and I was going to kill that little bitch for killing them. I was going to fucking pop her, burn her into a little cinder block. I would have Kagutschi blow her up and then take an avian shit on her chest and then…anyway.
Mikoto led me to the waiting room, and suddenly something popped in my head, because Tate and Takumi were sitting right there. How was that possible? They were both dead. For that matter, where was Miroku, Mikoto’s big sword? They both just sat there, staring at me but glancing at Mikoto occasionally, looking for some kind of cue. Takumi told me later that this had all been planned out, right down to them just staring at me, by Mikoto and Chie.
Mikoto stepped in front of me, between me and them, and said, “What’s the problem? Can’t Mai get them out of Mai’s head? They’re dead. It’s just Mai and me now.”
“I…” I knew in some dim part of my head that Mikoto had planned all this out, and that this it was going exactly as she had planned it. I didn’t know what to do, just like I hadn’t known what to do for the past week, so I did the same thing I’d done for the past week: Sit there and stare.
“Or maybe,” she continued, “Mai’s problem is that they aren’t dead, and Mai just can’t stuff that into Mai’s skull. Maybe Mai can’t reconcile the fact that all of Mai’s hard work actually got Mai somewhere. Just like when Takumi finally got to go to that American doctor; Mai just couldn’t understand how things were really changing. How Mai’s work actually got Mai somewhere; how it wasn’t just something Mai did because Mai had to, with no hope of reward.”
I think I stuttered an argument, but she ignored it in any case.
“So choose. Fight me here, or fight Mai. But in any case, come at me. I’m getting sick of looking at you like this.”
Tate and Takumi stood up at this point to stand behind her, and they gave me a nod. I don’t know what that nod meant exactly, but I did what Mikoto said; I went at her. Slowly, stumbling, I tried to charge her, to finally get at that artery.
Mikoto sidestepped me and tripped me and I fell into Takumi and Tate, who caught me with ease. I was pretty light by that point, so I can’t imagine it would have been too hard; I hadn’t eaten much that week, and it was all by IV anyway.
I looked up at them, felt their skin (not dissolving), their warmth. Tate kissed me on the forehead (I would have liked more, but we were in public, Takumi was right there, and he told me later he would have felt wrong doing it; it would have been like kissing somebody while they were sleeping), “There. Now we’ve both kissed a dead person.”
I just stared up at him, and he grinned. “I’m only as dead as you are, Mai.”
Takumi said exactly the same thing, and something popped in my head again. It was my sanity, only this time, it was coming back to me.
Then I felt Mikoto—warm, alive, caring Mikoto—press up against my back, and she whispered into my ear something that she would repeat many times afterward: “Smiling Mai is the best Mai there is. Mai should smile, because they’re all alive.”
All that coldness, that evil that had radiated off of her was gone in an instant, and I wondered if it was ever really there. I think it was this that really brought me back: I decided that it wasn’t. It couldn’t be; there was simply no way for me to reconcile this kind, warm Mikoto with the bitch who had killed Takumi and Tate. Even if Mikoto had done that; it was gone now. All of it. Done. Gone.
Of course, even the nurse seeing me recover miraculously wasn’t enough to get me magically released from the hospital, nor was my sudden lucidity. The doctor knew—rightfully so—that I wasn’t all right just like that; I had another breakdown two das later, but I recovered from it quickly, with help from nobody at all. A note from Fuuka Gakuen’s head nurse, Youko Sagisawa, certainly helped my case there, (apparently Miss Sagisawa is fairly well-respected in the medical community), and the head doctor released me half a week later, with a prescription for antidepressants that I haven’t touched yet. Maybe they would make me feel better, stop the bad times that still poke out now and then, but I refuse to take them. Maybe I’m scared they’ll stop the good times, too.
So I don’t get a happy ending yet. But I didn’t die, either.
And I think that’s really what’s important.
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