Christopher Barzak - The Love We Share Without Knowing

CONTENTS

For Tadashi Mizuno,
who opened the door for me.
When I walked through,
this is what I saw.

My loneliness, what makes me really lonely,
Is that I cant feel by my side a single will to halt this drift to ruin,
To get to the root of loneliness, to join the rest of the world.
Thats all.

Kaneko Mitsuharu, Song of Loneliness

I had no doubt youd cross my path one day. I waited for you calmly, with boundless impatience. Devour me. Deform me to your likeness, so that no one after you will ever again understand the reason for so much desire. Well be alone, my love. Night will never end. The day will never dawn again on anyone. Never again. At last. Youre still destroying me. Youre good for me. Well mourn the departed day in good conscience and with goodwill. Therell be nothing else for us to do but mourn the departed day. Time will pass. Only time. And a time will come when we can no longer name what it is that binds us. Its name will gradually be erased from our memory until it vanishes completely.

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour

The Love We Share Without Knowing

Realer Than You

E verything you think you know about the world isnt true. Nothing is real, its all made up. We live in a world of illusion. Im telling you this up front because I dont want you thinking this story is going to have a happy ending. It wont make any sense out of sadness. It wont redeem humanity in even a small sort of way.

My name is Elijah Fulton, and unlike so many things, this actually happened. It happened in Japan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I was sixteen and my parents forced me to leave America. It happened in Ami, a suburb an hour away from Tokyo, on a trail in a bamboo forest.

I was running that day, as usual, because running and biking were the only ways I could get anywhere. You had to be eighteen to drive in Japan, so all of a sudden I was a kid again. Without a car, I was stuck in our tiny house with my thirteen-year-old sister and my mom as they learned how to cook Japanese food with Mrs. Fujita, the wife of my dads boss. Mrs. Fujita was always calling from the kitchen for me to come taste whatever weird thing they were making in there, like, Come taste this delicious eel, Elijah! and I wasnt having any of that. So I ran to get away from everything. From my parents and their friends, from my little sister. From Ami. If I could have, I would have run away from Japan altogether.

When I first started running, I didnt know where the roads led to or even in which direction they traveled, so to be safe Id circle the apartment complex next to our house, and every day Id run a little further. By the end of my first week I made it to the end of our road, and a few days after that I crossed over to a road that ran over a hill, into a forest of bamboo and pine trees. The road twisted uninterrupted through the woods for a long time, like a stream flowing through the trees, but I kept going, and eventually I reached a place where the road split off in two directions. One way curved out of the forest, opening onto a cabbage farm and, beyond it, the sloping red- and blue-tiled roofs of town. The other way deteriorated into a dirt trail that wound further into the forest.

I took the trail that went into the woods, where under the gray-green bamboo shadows locusts buzzed and sawed, carrying on a strange conversation. As I ran I listened to the thud of my feet as they fell on the path, and the rise and fall of my breathing. Safe rhythms. They let me know my body was still the same, even though nothing else was familiar.

As I ran, a dragonfly big as my hand flitted back and forth around me, circling me but never leaving. It was bigger than any dragonfly Id ever seen in America. I could see all of its details, its metallic body and bulbous head, its knobby joints and how its wings sparkled in the shafts of falling sunlight. Its no wonder why people once believed they were fairies. But people will believe in almost anything, really. Sometimes you dont even have to try very hard to convince them.

I was so distracted by looking at anything other than where I was going that I didnt notice the trail I was running on had ended at some point. And when I did notice, I found myself in a cleared circle deep in the woods, where a tiny unpainted house, like the sort people back home put up on poles as bird mansions, stood pressed into the shade at the back of the clearing.

This house had little stairs leading up to a doll-sized door bolted with a rusty lock, and coins and braids of colored string lay scattered across its steps. As I walked closer to examine it, I started to think someone very small would unlock that door at any moment, swing it open, and step out. Maybe it was the dragonfly and all those thoughts of fairies that made me think that. Maybe it was my mood that day in general. Whatever the reason, no one opened that tiny door to ask what I was doing there. Instead, a rustling startled me, and when I looked up, I found a red dog stepping out of the trees behind the house.

It looked more like a fox than a dog maybe. Not like a real fox, though, all skinny and dirty. More like one that just stepped out of a storybook. It had a rich coat of red fur and a bib-shaped patch of white down on its throat. Lifting its nose to sniff the air, cocking its head to one side, it inspected me like Id inspected the house.

While it circled, I stood still like youre supposed to, careful not to provoke it. I mean, storybook or not, it was some kind of canine and I was obviously on its territory. It must have decided I was okay, because eventually it lowered its head, uninterested, and walked away. I let a breath out, but only a second later I realized my troubles werent over. The dog was leaving, but it was taking the path I needed to leave by.

I could have waited until the path was free of strange animals, but instead I decided to walk a little ways behind it. It was getting dark, and I couldnt help but wonder what other creatures might come out to meet me if I was still lost in that forest after the moon rose.

As I followed, the dog kept moving, only stopping to look over its shoulder occasionally, its black nose gently nudging the air in front of it. Whenever it did that, a little pang went off inside my chest and suddenly I wanted to pet it, to wrap my arms around its neck and hold it like I used to hold my girlfriend back in the States before we broke up because I was leaving. The fox felt that familiar.

And thats when the really weird thing happened. Thats when I got the idea that our meeting wasnt an accident. As we left the shade of the forest, I thought, Its leading me. Its taking me home again, isnt it?

But then it didnt lead me home after all. Well, not all the way, that is. When we reached the path to the intersection where I needed to cross over, it stopped, looked at me once more with its bright green eyes, then dashed back into the woods wed come out of. I stood there watching it slip through the poles of bamboo for a while, a flash of burnt orange amid the gray-green. And afterwards, when all I saw was green again, I ran the rest of the way home.

The name Ami officially has no meaning, but I think it has a secret one. In the Dictionary of Secret Meanings, the word Ami means the most boring town in the world. With its Catholic-school-uniformed boys and girls walking the sidewalks, with its 1950s-looking housewives wearing aprons as they zoomed down the street on mopeds, it was like living in some surreal