Hey Mortality (16 page)

Some children showed up and wanted to play on the swings, so I hopped off and left the park.

***

Years rolled on and on, flickering by like the quick skipping of pages in a book. Me counting days, drinking too much, drinking to cleanse my mind. I bought a house by the beach in Beppu, and as the years rolled by, in 1994, I bought the Monkey Park.

I still had so much money that I decided to offer an anonymous donation to research into counterfeit money fraud, and donated specifically to a new start-up company owned by my father.

Some days I would simply kill time by sitting, staring at the Time Stone. Its slick black shell contained the fate of the entire universe. Distracted by the thought of travelling again, I could escape to somewhere far off in the past or the future, end the boredom and leave this world. But what of the consequences? My whole purpose now was to keep the order. Keep the balance of time and save the universe from inevitable collapse.

***

One day I remembered something the Duck Man had said to me before I took the leap, something about sending monkeys back in time, three monkeys I think he had said. Perhaps that was my next task.

Late one night when the Monkey Park was closed and the staff had gone home, I waited. That night, I took out the Time Stone and left it for the monkeys to experiment with. For some reason, the monkeys didn’t seem too interested in the darkness of the sphere. Eventually, one monkey keenly walked over to it and hesitantly touched it, but nothing much happened. I suppose it was difficult to communicate to a monkey that it needed to imagine travelling back through time. Did monkeys even know the concept of time? If not, they were a lot luckier than I was.

My thoughts drifted back to what Lucy had said on the bus those years ago about bloodlines. If only Pure Beings from our bloodline could use the machine, how was I going to send a monkey back? I tried for a few nights, always leaving the Time Stone laying around to see if any of the monkeys would figure things out, but nothing ever transpired.

Eventually I gave up and put it all down to my own lies, a simple story I had told myself to convince me to time travel. With fate unchangeable, regardless of my failure, I would undoubtedly tell my younger self the same story about the monkeys and the made up research.

***

As quickly as my new life in Beppu had begun, and with me beginning to look more and more like the Duck Man every day, years became months became weeks, and it was almost time.

Eventually the year turned to 2009, the same year that my wife would sadly die.

There are certain things that at the time, people don’t talk about. It never occurred to me when I first met Lucy, to pry further into the details of her mother’s death. I didn’t want to upset her by digging up the past. I never asked for the date that Amanda died, or where she was living when she died. Perhaps it was that same house I had bought in London, or perhaps she had sold up after I left and gone and lived somewhere else, somewhere free of the memory of me. It was pointless trying to work it out. It had simply never occurred to me to ask.

I kept checking the obituaries of the newspaper websites in London, those that covered the area in which we had lived, but nothing ever surfaced. Maybe she changed her name, maybe she had nobody in her life that would take the time to write about her. I knew that Lucy went to the funeral, I could have tried to find her, find out where she lived, follow her for a year until one day she would leave for the airport, and then I would know. But, as those thoughts of wasted time filled my days, I decided to simply do nothing.

I wanted desperately to go back to England for the funeral. Pay my final respects to a woman that I had loved. A woman that gave me a daughter. A woman that I unfairly abandoned those many years ago, but I simply couldn’t. Instead, I just waited alone. I thought about death, cried about what I had done, and decided that I hated the universe for killing people, hated the universe for making life so absolutely miserable. I came to despise time more than time itself.

***

The years drifted by like a Bullet Train, and in the summer of 2015, I went back to Tokyo. I arranged for fake identification to be made for myself, and for my younger self. I sold all of my investments and took out all of my money. I invested half in the future of the Monkey Park, a place I had grown to love. I made a will leaving everything else to Lucy, Keiko, Jun, and my parents. At least after I was gone, after I had mysteriously vanished to never be found, I would be declared dead, and some people would have a decent life after all of this. The universe would carry on spewing out misery, but providing the people I loved the most with some financial support, might just provide them with a better life than my own.

One day, I wrote a note to myself. As I wrote the words I realised just how ridiculous they sounded. I was obviously in a bad place when I read them those thirty-eight years ago, in any other state of mind, I would have screwed the words up and thrown them in the trash, not giving them a second thought. They read:

For answers that you only dreamed of.

Meet me at Takasakiyama Monkey Park.

Next Tuesday at three. I will wear a hat.

***

The day I intended to post the note through my own door, I reminisced about my life. The life working for my father. Was I truly happy back then? I realised that I probably was.

Outside my old apartment I saw Lucy emerge with her bag. That was the day that she had left me. Ready to take our unborn child away from me, and disappear from my life for good. Seeing her brought back a flood of memories, but the pain of her leaving was now long gone. Those memories were once again of that different kind of love that a parent has for their daughter, a love that can never be destroyed, one that can only grow stronger.

I found that I had difficulty breathing as I watched her walk away. Like my heart had stopped suddenly, completely.

***

Two days later, I went back to the apartment and posted the note in a sealed white envelope. Afterwards, it was back to Beppu to wait. All that I was missing, other than the life I left, was a cream suit and a duck hat.

I purchased both from shops in Beppu, and headed back to my house to wait for four days. Soon, I would come to visit. I had to remember the words I had spoken to myself back then.

Eventually the day came, I waited at the Monkey Park in the exact place he had stood, thirty-eight years ago for me.

“Nice to meet you. I’m the Duck Man, and you’re late,” I said, with a certain degree of smugness.

“I’m very sorry, but there was a mix up with the trains.”

I had forgotten just how polite and honest I was back then, innocent even. If only he knew.

“Nishi-Ōita Station?” I asked, as if finally being rewarded for the wait, finally getting to say that line to myself. As I spoke the words, I struggled to contain my grin.

“How do you know that?”

“Don’t worry about it, it happens to us all.”

I went on to tell the same story I had previously told myself, verbatim. About the experiments, the made up research, all the while keeping a straight face. Finally, I arranged to meet myself again a few days later.

***

Events occurred as if dictated by the flow of time. Choices were made but never chosen. Life drifted on to the sound of predetermination. I met with myself a second time at the Monkey Park, to hand over the Time Stone and to set events in motion that would lead to that exact moment. I would have made the sacrifice if I could. Changed the words I had said, but those new words didn’t form. The words always stayed the same, the words flowing out of me without thought. Like water rushing down a stream, colliding into the rocks of life along the way. No way to change the river’s flow, until those rocks became completely eroded. Maybe then time will change. Maybe fate can be altered but only for the last car on the track, the last loop of the roller coaster, the last time that this loop occupies us.

Fate was now more powerful than love, the younger me bound by his. A future planned for him that I couldn’t possibly change. But for this other me, life was offering choices, choices he thought he was making alone. Completely oblivious to fate, and what world was about to come.

After he left the park, I was once again alone, returning to how I always ended up. It was then that I began to think about my death. My life was almost up, and soon I would be taken away, sucked into the void of time. That week, a new life would start, a life for me all those years ago. Living, losing, and forever repeating; over and over again. This near perfect loop we had created, our ouroboros, our world. The only solace I could take was that for everything outside of that loop, for people like Jun, their world would carry on afterwards, beginning as it once did some years ago, and inevitably ending like everything else touched by time.

***

The next day I made a telephone call to Lucy. His Lucy.

“Hello,” she answered, her tone nowhere between sadness and joy, completely flat.

“It’s me.”

“I’ve been waiting,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry that I left you.”

“I know. I think I understand.”

“You will, don’t worry.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Yes. One last time. The day I left.”

The phone went silent for a while.

“I love you, Dad.”

My face began to tighten above my cheeks, as if just for a moment tears were ready to start forming, but I somehow pushed them away.

“I love you too, Lucy. Listen, you need to visit Beppu cemetery, plot 241.”

I could hear her gently sobbing on the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say but goodbye.

“Goodbye, Lucy.”

“Goodbye,” she eventually said, almost to directly mimic the sad way I spoke.

***

After the phone call, I went down to the beach in Beppu with a bag of documents pertaining to my own burial, and a little bit of money for funeral arrangements. There, I hid behind a tree and watched myself kneeling peacefully on the sand, blissfully unaware. I was there for two reasons, one was simple curiosity. I wondered how it would look when somebody is completely erased from time. The second reason was to retrieve the device and take my own final leap.

I waited, watching. Eventually I saw that younger version of me simply fade away to nothing. Like he turned, for a brief moment, into a ghost, before dissipating into the evening air. Nothing else, the whole thing lasted about three seconds. And then he was gone. And then I was gone.

It was at that moment that I started to feel unwell. My body began to tighten, my chest began to pull, like those thousand demons had returned from a faraway land and wanted revenge for being cast away for so many years. They weren’t just after my heart but had instead spread to the whole of my body, causing damage wherever they could.

Perhaps years of alcohol abuse and drug taking without side effects had all come washing over me at once. Years of pain and bodily torture, waiting, lurking, like a beast in the dark. Now it was time for the horror to take me, destroy me.

I walked, slowly, and with great difficulty, stumbling toward the beach and to where the device lay. Back aching, pain like I had never felt before in my life. Right then I would have happily taken numbness, leprosy, anything to rid me of the way I felt.

Each step proved more difficult than the last. My breathing became shallow. My lungs wheezed and screamed with each and every breath. Skin burning off, as if enveloped in a giant fireball. Fired into the sun; blistering.

I reached the device, and as I bent over to scoop it up, I heard the sound of my back cracking, as if bones had become broken, spine twisted, tortured by the waiting game of time.

The device was as heavy as usual, no temperature change, just a Time Stone, like it always had been. I couldn’t do it there though, I had one last thing I was fated to do.

I struggled one foot at a time off the beach and to the nearby cemetery where I would soon be buried. Every part of me was hurting, but I had to go on.

Eventually, as I reached my own grave, I let out a brief sigh of relief. From nowhere, a wry smile, though appearing only rather briefly, spread across my face. The apple tree was massive, and fruit hung from its branches. A lot of the apples would provide dinner for the hovering crows, but I didn’t mind, I wouldn’t be eating any food for a while.

I placed the Time Stone on a patch of overgrown grass beside my grave, and took one last look at the world around me.

Not wanting to take the ground with me, I placed my hands on the Time Stone and stretched out, the most painful stretch in the history of stretches. I balanced, putting all of my weight on my left foot, and visualised. I wanted to get there exactly two days before myself. Even though that other me had only leapt moments ago, I would arrive before him, and end up there, in that hospital bed, in room 405. Waiting for him and waiting to die.