Scoring Points
I thought that people in situations like these couldn’t get any sleep. But after a hot shower, a change of clothes, and lying down in bed, my eyelids quickly got heavy, and I slept like the dead for six hours.
I sat up to check my phone and found no messages. The girl still didn’t need me, I guess. I lied down again and stared at the ceiling.
Why did I feel so good despite having run someone over last night? A total turnaround from yesterday’s heavy regrets, my mind was clearer than ever.
However, the accident last night dropped me straight to the bottom. Upon falling as low as I could go, there was a kind of extreme comfort in that darkness.
There was nothing more I could lose. I had no hopes to betray, so I could have no despair.
By the time I’d reduced about a centimeter of the cigarette to ash, I heard a woman’s voice from the neighboring veranda.
She was the girl who lived next door, an art student in college. I didn’t remember her name. But not because I didn’t care about her or anything. I’m just bad at remembering names, just as it always is with introverts of my sort.
“Good evening, miss shut-in,” I replied. “You’re up early today.”
“This?”, I asked, pointing at the cigarette.
She had a small stepladder laid on top of the left and right edges serving as a flower stand, and a red garden chair was situated in the center. The plants were very carefully tended to and looked vibrant and lively, unlike their owner.
“So you went out yesterday,” she observed, taking smoke into her lungs. “Not what I’ve come to expect from you.”
“Yeah, but I only ever read the front page. What about it?”
“Hm. Okay then, come over,” the art student told me. “I was about to call for you too, for tonight’s walk.”
I went out into the hall and into her room. This made the second time she’d let me inside. The first time had been a request for some company to drink her sorrows away with, and I tell you, I’d never seen someone living in such a messy place in my life.
Her living room served as her atelier, so there were huge shelves along the walls with art collections and photo albums galore, as well as a huge collection of records that tightly filled all available space.
One of the two tables had a massive computer on top, with worn-out pens and pencils scattered in front. The other table was clean and neat, with only a record player in a wooden cabinet.
Sitting in the veranda chair, I looked over every line of the morning paper in the light of the setting sun. As expected, there was nothing about the accident I caused.
“Don’t mention it. Find the article you were looking for?”
“Huh, that’s too bad.”
“You don’t even have a TV at your place?”, the art student asked, astonished. “I guess I hardly watch mine, so it’s honestly not something I need, but…”
She went fishing under her bed, pulled out the remote, and turned it on.
“Pretty soon, I think. Weird to hear a shut-in interested in the news. Getting curious about the outside world?”
“I ran a girl over last night. I was going fast enough to kill her, for sure.”
“It isn’t,” I nodded. Since she was the same kind of person as me, I felt at ease telling her anything. “And when I ran her over, I was totally drunk on whiskey. I don’t have even a shred of an excuse.”
She looked at the newspaper in her hand. “If that’s the truth, then it is weird that it didn’t make the news. You think they haven’t found the corpse yet?”
“Yeah, I don’t get it.” She crossed her arms. “Do you have the time to be talking to me? Shouldn’t you be erasing evidence, running away somewhere, that kind of thing?”
“Yes, any way you slice it.”
At once, the art student’s expression brightened. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me, her face beaming more than simply “joyous” could describe.
“Schadenfreude?”, I asked through a bitter smile.
A reaction like this was more comfortable to me than awkward sympathy and worry. And at any rate, she was getting positive feelings thanks to me.
“So you’ve graduated from shut-in to killer.”
“It’s a step up in my book. …Hey, let’s go walking tonight. We’ll waste that meager postponement of yours. Sound good? It’s so comforting having you around.”
“I’ll hold off on drinking. I want to be able to drive right away when that call comes.”
“Sorry, can I have a glass of that after all?”
“Cheers.”
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Be sure to savor it.”
My shut-in art student neighbor and I got acquainted some time after I became a shut-in myself.
One day, I was lying down in bed and listening to music. Playing it at a loud volume without regard for anyone else, there was soon a loud knock on the door.
The bespectacled intruder had a somehow familiar face. I supposed she was my neighbor, come to complain about the noise.
I pressed play without checking what she’d put in and was met with guitar pop as sweet as orange juice, which was a little disappointing. I’d be hoping she might have recommended me something really good, but alas.
There was nothing obstructing the view between us, so when I saw her, I bowed my head without too much familiarity. I’d greet her, and with a watchful eye on me, she’d return the greeting.
Then, one day toward the end of summer, she was out watering her plants, and I leaned on the left railing and spoke to her.
“Not really,” she mumbled in a barely audible voice. “It’s not hard.”
Still observing the plants, she replied, “Sure, but I might not answer.”
“I don’t mean to dig too deep, but have you not left your room at all in the past week?”
“Dunno. I guess I’d just be happy.”
“Because neither have I.”
I picked up a cigarette butt from the ground, lit it, and took a puff. The art student opened her eyes and turned to me.
“Right. It’s scary outside. Must be the summer.”
“Walking around under the sun makes me feel so miserable that it takes two, three days to recover. No, maybe guilty, or pitiful…”
“Hmm,” the art student replied, pushing up the bridge of her glasses. “I haven’t seen your friend lately. What happened to him? The one who looks like a drug addict. He was coming by almost every day.”
“He’s dead?”
“…Huh. I’m sorry I brought it up,” she apologized in a hollow voice.
“…I see. I guess there might be people like that,” she meekly supposed. “So then, you can’t leave home out of sorrow for your friend’s death?”
“Have I gotten that skinny?”
Looking at my legs, I noticed that thanks to my lack of walking anywhere, they were as thin as a bedridden patient’s. And having not spoken to anyone in so long, I didn’t realize all my drinking had made my voice so hoarse; it didn’t sound like my voice at all.
“You’re really pale, too. Like a vampire who hasn’t sucked any blood in a month.”
“You might not see anyone in it.”
“That was the idea,” she smiled, grateful for me playing along with her joke.
“So anyway, what about you? Why won’t you leave your room?”
“I’ll save that for later. For now, I just thought of something really good,” she told me with a friendly smile.
I wore a jacket and one-wash denim jeans. The art student wore a navy cocoon one piece with a necklace and mule shoes, also switching her glasses for contacts and neatly doing up her hair. Clearly inappropriate attire for wandering around at night.
Prior to this, there’d been occasions where I was forced to go out, such as for shopping or going to the bank. And every time I was dragged out like this, my dread for the outside worsened.
“Who’d you rip that quote from?”
The art student grabbed the sleeve of her one-piece and adjusted it. “We feel tense, don’t we? That’s pretty much the only reason, but I think it’s something very important for us right now.”
We walked aimlessly around town dressed like we were headed for a party.
Stepping around the bug corpses, the art student stood under a light. A huge moth flew about her head.
She tilted her head and asked me a question. “Am I pretty?”
“You are,” I answered. I honestly did think she was pretty. Faced with a picturesque sight like this, I could really understand that feeling of “beauty.” So I told her she was pretty.
A half-dead brown cicada beat its wings against the asphalt.
Our destination that night was an empty train station in the area. The station, hidden amongst residences, connected out to all places like a spider web.
Gradually, we recovered to the point where we could go out alone as long as the sun was down. Her idea, strange as it had seemed, was surprisingly effective.
I hurried to collect my thoughts. I remembered as far as drinking with the art student, having our usual walk, going home and taking a shower. Maybe I fell asleep immediately after.
It was 11 PM. I picked up my phone and listened. The call was from a public phone, but I had no doubt that it was the girl I’d run over.
There was silence for many seconds, the girl’s way of showing her pride. She didn’t want it to seem like she was depending on me.
“You called this number because you want me to do something, right?”, I asked.
“Roger that,” I affirmed. “I’ll head there right away. Anything else?”
There were about ten lights on the way, but they all turned green for me right as I approached. I arrived at the destination much sooner than anticipated.
At the same bus stop where my first day’s duty had concluded, I found the girl in her uniform alone, burying her face in a dark-red scarf and sipping on a can of milk tea as she watched the stars.
I got out of the car and went around to the other side to open the passenger door. But the girl ignored me, instead sitting in the back seat, throwing her school bag off, and exasperatedly closing the door.
“Where should we go?”, I asked.
“Sure, that’s fine. But can I ask why?”
“Did you have a fight?”
There were many black bruises on her thin arm. Even if they were just burns, I supposed they must have been at least a year old.
This couldn’t have been the same arm I saw then. So she must have still been postponing these burns at the time. And in the time between then and now, something had happened to call it off.
“These are marks my father made by pushing a cigarette into my arm,” she explained. “They’re on my back, too. Want to see?”
“Yes. I tied up his arms and legs with bands and hit him about fifty times with a hammer.”
“I have it here.”
The girl took a double-ended sledgehammer out of her bag. It was a small one, like you’d use to pound nails in elementary school arts and crafts. It seemed old; the head was rusted, and the handle was blackened.
I guess she’d dropped one of the numerous bags burdening her.
“Revenge is a great thing. It’s so relieving. I wonder who should be next? Because I don’t have anything to lose anymore. …Oh, yes. Naturally, you’ll be helping me too, mister murderer.”
I slowed down and drove carefully so that I didn’t wake her up.
She probably purposefully let the burns “happen” to justify her retribution, I realized.
She must have lived a truly harsh life, I thought.
Back at the apartment, I opened the door, then returned to the car to carry the girl to my room.
Afterward, I heard about two or three bouts of sniffling. She was crying.
This girl’s really busy between smiling and crying all the time, I thought.
Maybe she didn’t even know the reason for her tears. There were likely a lot of emotions going on in her; feeling lonely when she should be happy, feeling happy when she should be sad.
I laid down on the sofa and absentmindedly stared at the ceiling, waiting for morning. What should I say to the girl when she wakes up? What should I do? I thought it over at length.
And so began the days of revenge.