I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (2 page)

Each person has a differently shaped mind because, in Justin’s fiction, mind is a biological reality, like body. Whatever physical reality is, it is obdurate with hidden workings, such as instinct, over which we have no control. However, the physical constitutes a kind of battleground for different perceptions, like bacteria competing for domination within the system of a host body. In a sense, the underlying reality of the body is not changed at all by a victory one way or the other. And yet, there is a hint, or more than a hint, that perhaps the subtlest turn of events in this bacterial warfare might make all the difference there is, producing a body of reality either ravaged and broken or ravished and shining.

Perhaps I have framed this too crudely. One thing that Justin’s fiction is free of is crude philosophical system, despite — because of, I should say — its strong intellectual engagement.

Since I can only fail if I try and make a system out of Justin’s writing with this introduction, I will attempt a more impressionistic approach to describing his work, with a list of images that come to mind when I try to generalise ‘Justin Isis’ as a literary entity, a few tiny bubbles blown from a larger and endlessly generative one:

An iridescent boot in the heart of the brain, kicking the pineal gland.

A question mark fashioned out of razor blades.

Casanova inventing time-travel.

Aesthetics as a form of WMD.

Robots vomiting in order to attain religious experience.

Alex and his Droogs as parapara dancers.

An orgy in the court of King Midas, at which his affliction becomes the most contagious STD in history.

Sentient ice cream.

Sifow searching for blue crystals on Metebelis Three.

Takamoto’s
The Aesthetic of Chôgen
recorded in the grooves of the Voyager Golden Record.

Quentin S. Crisp, Totnes, 2010

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Unauthorized Egg Model Book Cover

He started meeting Satomi after coming back from his supplementary classes. His parents were getting him to improve his English; at night he sat in front of the mirror and repeated the stock phrases until they stopped meaning anything. Then he repeated his name until it lost its meaning. He thought of it as ‘becoming English.’

He saw her standing on the platform at Hibiya; it was three weeks before he managed to say anything. She was the kind of girl who had probably had good skin as a child, but it was ruined now. Beneath the gauzy surface of her concealer makeup her left cheek was dark with acne. It took on a luminous quality in the glow of the fluorescent lights overhead. He had to be very close to notice it; even from a foot away his eyes took up the illusion of perfect smoothness.

He rode back by himself and walked to his parents’ flat. After four weeks he knew the route well enough that he didn’t have to think. When he woke at dawn and went to catch the train, he could see pink light breaking in the white sky. It rose in a soft haze. He could feel it cleaning his mind.

When he talked to Satomi his facial muscles stalled in the same rigid position. She talked with her head slanted to the side. When she smiled he saw the chipped edges of her teeth; when she turned the light caught the left side of her face and her makeup shimmered. He wanted to lick her face like a dog until the concealer came off on his tongue and all of her acne broke open.

He took care of his grandmother on the weekend. She looked nervous all the time because she couldn’t remember who anyone was. When they were alone she called him his uncle’s name. She kept asking when they were going back to Saitama. One time he pretended to be her father; he started calling her by her first name. She nodded and smiled very wide, looking at him with terrified horse’s eyes.

He wanted to live in a country where it was always dusk and the sun was never solid. He wanted it to exist as a cloud of pink light breaking against the white. He thought of it fading somewhere far off, beyond the ocean.

His parents made him be interested in the violin. He started practicing it between practicing English and attending regular and supplementary classes and working in a restaurant and cleaning the judo club room and taking care of his relatives.

He started changing history. He told his grandmother it was 1945 and took her around the city on ‘missions’. He took her to a grocery store and told her they were buying rationed rice. On different days he became her cousin, son, husband, and brother.

If Satomi wasn’t at the station he waited and missed his train. When she shifted in her seat he could see her thin white legs. They seemed sad somehow. He thought: a clean pink light; a mindless dog licking her face; more freedom than the kings of the earth—

He started getting his little sister to masturbate him. He told her it was a game. She laughed when it was over and he washed her back in the bath. Her fingers had the puffiness of a baby’s but were beginning to thin and lengthen. He held them up to the light and watched their tips turn white.

He had dreams where he lived with Satomi and his grandmother on an island where there was no time and space. There were no calendars or clocks so they never knew what time it was or what year they were in. If they wanted to live in a certain year they decided on it and it became that year. If they wanted to live in a country they changed the name of the island to the country. They forgot their real names; if his grandmother looked at them and called them certain names then they became the people behind them. There were enough names in her memory to keep them going for years. Satomi’s face dried out in the sun and her acne turned into hard white diamonds. She looked like an African queen with pearls sewn into her skin.

He held the violin up tightly to his shoulder; he wrote a list of stock phrases for answering his parents; he started memorizing the history of every country on Earth; he woke up fifteen minutes earlier each morning to find a different shape of the sky; his sister’s lengthening fingers joined in his mind with the thin whiteness of Satomi’s legs: a clean, white light.

Nanako

When he was a young man he’d known a girl called Nanako who reminded him of a Buddha. His group of friends hung out with her mostly as an afterthought: after they assembled, as they were about to leave, someone would remember to call her, and they’d wait for a while, staring at the pavement, sharing lights, until Nanako wandered out in a heavy winter coat and gave a stunted wave. She was always overdressed.

Nanako was short and stubby and vague. Most of her face seemed to slouch away from the pig’s nose at its center and collect at the edges of her cheeks, her hair crushed to her skull by an invisible cap, falling on her shoulders in limp clumps. Her teeth were bunched and beige, her smile arresting in its lack of proportion — both beatific and somehow inappropriate, like watching clowns kiss. When it happened, her eyes closed and her lips became redder, almost viscid, an exaggerated sensitivity caught in the taut crooks of her cheeks.

She spent most of her time in her room; they saw her only when they called her, or else in the city, by herself, on one of the obscure errands which distinguished her — trying to buy a birthday cake in a food court, perhaps, or a pair of sunglasses in a pharmacy. At these times they always redirected her — solemn and solicitous, dismissing her thanks — and sometimes rode the bus back with her in silence while she stared out the window, adjusted her hat and blinked, slowly. Stories of this kind were common, and he’d always given his opinion.

—
Nanako is great, he’d said. She’s my favorite person ever.

This kind of light condescension had been essential to appreciating Nanako’s presence — if Nanako made an observation, everyone was certain to laugh, and smile tolerantly, and feel that Nanako was increasing their estimation of each other just by existing, because Nanako had no opinions, no humor, no malice. And he imagined that, somehow, she had escaped from something — even if she cried, then his momentary sadness was greater than hers, because he was intelligent and political. If he imagined that loneliness made her sad, he would feel as if he were watching her inside a snow globe, a little doll lost in winter. Then he would want to hurt her; would imagine opening himself to her sadness, as if it could infuse him like a saint’s blood. He felt that in the future, somehow, without even trying, he would hurt Nanako — and he found himself anticipating it whenever he saw her, whenever he thought of her. This premonition of an infinitely forestalled torture made him love her, in his way.

Two instances stood out for him.

At first, he visited her by accident. He was looking for one of her friends, a girl he was interested in — someone he’d forgotten now. They were roommates, and he suspected she was using Nanako in the same way everyone used her. It had been some time in August, he remembered.

Nanako met him at the door. She was wearing a winter coat and looked to have just come in.

—
Oh? Hello... she said. He’d only met her a few times before, but she always greeted him like this, smiling with gracious conciliation as if he were a neglected pen-pal.

He asked if the roommate was in.

—
No, not back yet.

—
Oh.

—
Ah, but, she should be back soon.

Nanako spoke slowly — her voice was too deep for her size, and the words seemed to crawl from her mouth like autumn caterpillars. He saw how short she was, how she had to stare up at him to answer. He leaned against the railing and looked down the stairs, not sure whether to wait.

—
Did she say when she’d be back?

—
I think soon...

—
All right. Well... how are all your classes going?

—
I’ve been very busy.

He talked to her for a while until the girl came back and noticed him. Surprised, she called him by name.

—
What are you doing?

He turned around.

—
Just talking, Nanako said.

Nanako looked at him, and he felt that she was happy somehow: it was her pronunciation. The slowness of her speech had settled, had taken on a kind of whimsy. The girl — Aoi, that had been her name — began to sink inside herself, drawing up to her full height. He looked at her shoulders. She was like him, he thought: suspicious of everything. He complimented her on her scarf. She walked him back to the bus stop.

Hours later he remembered Nanako’s face and its gentle canine happiness — how, at its most relaxed, its muscles settled like sediment, the blood thick in her lips. He wanted to make her happy again, wanted to hold her hand and dress her in the morning, walk beside her, and, after catching her out of the shower, eyes closed, face foetal — to tear out her hair and strip her hidden nerves.

Then he was at someone’s house, another friend he’d forgotten. He was going with Aoi now; they rode the train together each morning. Sometimes he sat across from her. She had a deer’s legs; he wanted to see her running from arrows.

They were seated in the living room; a couple were dancing in the corner; someone had brought cakes. He was drinking too much, as usual. Someone’s phone rang. He checked his pocket: nothing. When he looked up he saw Nanako speaking into her small purple mobile. He poured himself another drink.

Then Nanako was making an expression — a kind of constricted smile — and her eyes were wet. He was watching her through a filter, he thought, putting out his cigarette on the table. Aoi left his side. Nanako was crying, but he felt that it was he who was manipulating her expression, a drunken puppeteer jerking cords at random. It would explain the instability, he thought: the clumsiness of her emotions, so different from Aoi, Aoi who was now taking Nanako’s hand, blocking her face—

—
Her grandmother just died, he heard someone say.

As Aoi took Nanako outside, he realized she was concealing an unbearably pornographic sight, and he stood for another glimpse of her, for a view of the face past the fringe of flattened hair. Nanako’s tears, thick and inelegant, stained her cheeks like dribbles of semen. It was her unawareness of an audience that produced this emotion, he decided, imagining that she cried in her room, alone, sometimes — he needed to masturbate. He remembered reading that a baby’s tongue was more sensitive than an adult’s, so that everything was slightly unbearable — and Nanako was like that innocent tongue, tasting everything and constantly burned.

He needed to masturbate.

In the bathroom he locked the door and unbuttoned his pants. He hadn’t come in weeks; his semen was so thick it seemed tinted, a translucent yellow like refined pus. Someone found him passed out an hour later.

—
You okay?

—
Yeah... what happened to Nanako?

—
She went home.