kagablog

Nobody mentioned the incident in the garden. She woke up later, on a soft tatami mat in a quiet room of the vast, rambling house. Somebody had cleaned her, wrapped her in blankets and left food beside the bed. She slept through the night and returned to her room the next morning. She met several of the girls along the way, but everyone simply smiled and behaved courteously, as though nothing at all had happened. She could feel that they wanted her out of the house, but didn’t care. The house was enormous and silent. It was haunted by cats and quiet women in traditional garb. Everyone ignored her, or treated her in a polite, yet deferential way. It had been too easy for her to slot into the exquisite clockworks of routine and slowness. She was like a creeper who looks for something to grow around, who will settle for almost any system to quieten her mind. In the routines of the house, her thoughts had finally slowed, like snails racing each other across the blade of a dying leaf. The house enclosed the central Switchboard Control for Japan and Jennifer went to work there each morning, in white. She only tentatively explored the city, on one or two meaningless jaunts to the local festivals or tourist sites. Her imagination had deserted her on a sorry coast. It was good to have escaped her former life, but the sensation of being a stranger left her stranded and unfulfilled on the cusp of unexplored beauty… One day, by chance, she discovered a smack pipe in one of the toilets. She investigated further and befriended a dour girl called Mitsuo, who began to supply her with heroin. Her memory began to disintegrate, as she hoped it would. She didn’t see the Oracle after arriving in Osaka, and after some time, she ceased to care whether she saw her again. She became a perfect cog in the house, performing her duties with detail and care, sleeping deeply and watching fish for hours in the gardens. She became almost content in a way, and began to forget the strangers whom she had known so savagely, in that blue house by the sea. She began to see it all as a dream of a film of some kind. The sort of film you half-watch when you are young and half-forget as the years wind on. She now had more money than she knew what to do with, but could find nothing to spend it on except heroin and elaborate sweetmeats. All her needs were taken care of by the machinations of the house. At some point she was asked to courier blackboxes to the offices in the city. She would don black designer clothes on these escapades and descend into the neon surge of the city like a ghost of her former self. She would stay in ridiculously expensive hotels and eat alone in elegant restaurants. She missed Anita the most on these little jaunts. The temptation to call her was so great at times that it made her scream out behind the impenetrable, mirrored visor of her face. She knew that it would take just one word from her to Anita would make her return. But despite what she felt, she knew that she could not survive the re-contamination of the blue light which haunted her dreams. The blue light which shone from Anita’s eyes and navel and fingertips like faery fire…Jennifer had became a true mannequin in a way. A mechanical robot; even more of a machine than Anita had ever been. The psychic-plastic had hardened, rendering her sexless and emotionally impenetrable. She knew without a doubt that she would never engage in sexual relations, make love or even kiss or be affectionate with anyone again. These were things which now belonged to a former life, a half-forgotten filmreel of a fast-forward life. She was as dead and beautiful as a seashell, and content to live in this nun-like state for good. She accepted that her wings had burned off in the flame and that she would now have to crawl to paradise. She began to see it as a fair trade, the price she must pay for her sins, and the empty, material paradise which her sins had paid for. This paradise in which she has found herself a stranger.