Pain, Pain, Go Away
The cirrus clouds that covered the sky were like the wings of a giant dove.
Only a few minutes after merging back into the main road, a small town came into sight. Familiar chain stores were aligned in a familiar order, as if placed there by a stamp.
We stopped the car in the parking lot of a tiny bakery and got out to take a big stretch. The autumn wind blew in and tickled my nose with a sharp smell.
It was a deep, straight wound, as if cut with a razor. She casually covered it with her hand to keep me from seeing it.
She didn’t offer any explanation, but I had little doubt it was inflicted by the man who would be her third victim.
I almost wondered if it was something about her that caused others to be so violent. Even between domestic violence and bullying, the sheer number of injuries seemed odd.
Like a certain shape of rock makes you want to kick it, like a certain shape of icicle makes you want to crack it off from its root, like certain kinds of petals make you want to pluck them off one by one… There exist things in the world that, regardless of how cruel it is, you just feel like destroying.
No matter what properties she had about her, it was no reason to hurt her.
We bought a fresh cheese croissant, an apple pie, a tomato sandwich, and coffee for us both, then ate in silence on the terrace.
“Want a coffee refill?”
“Why, that’s quite a ways, isn’t it? …Then you must be here to see the costume parade, I’ll bet? Oh, or are you taking part?”
“Ah, so you didn’t even know? Lucky you. It’s really a sight to see. A must-see, in fact! Hundreds of people dressed in costumes march down the shopping district.”
She glanced at me, begging for me to answer for her.
He stroked his mustache in thought. “A young lady and her attendant?”
Following the girl’s directions - “Turn right here,” “Go straight for a while,” “…That was a left turn” - we arrived at the third revenge victim’s apartment as the sun was setting.
The sound of awkward alto sax practice came from across the river. Probably a band member at a local middle or high school.
“I got this wound on my face in winter of my second year of middle school,” the girl told me, finally talking about the injury. “It was during skating lessons given once a year. One of the delinquent students any middle school is sure to have pretended to lose balance and purposefully hit my leg, knocking me over. What’s more, he then kicked me in the face with part of the skate. I’ll bet he only intended it as one of his usual minor harassments. But skates are easily capable of slicing off even a gloved finger. So the rink turned red with my blood.”
She stopped there. I waited for her to continue.
“At first, the boy insisted that I had tripped, fallen, and suffered the injury all my myself. But anyone could tell it wasn’t an injury you got from simply falling on ice. Within the day, he admitted to being the culprit, though it was concluded to be an accident. Even though he’d clearly kicked my face intentionally, and many students saw him do it. The boy’s parents came to apologize and paid me as consolation, but the boy who inflicted this lifelong wound wasn’t so much as kept from attending.”
“Wish I’d brought skates,” I idly commented. “Would be nice to subject him to two or three "accidents.”“
“Got it.”
Confirming that she had her dressmaking scissors hidden in the sleeve of her blouse, we left the car.
Within five seconds, we heard footsteps, the knob turned, and the door slowly opened.
I made eye contact with the man who came out.
He reminds me of someone, I thought, then moments later realized I was thinking of myself. And it wasn’t just his appearance, but his general lack of vigor.
“Yo, Akazuki,” he said to the girl.
“So if you’re here, Akazuki,” he began, “then I guess I’m the one you’re killing next?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna resist,” he continued. “But I have some things to talk about with you first. Come on up. I won’t keep you too long.”
The girl was concerned about the unprecedented situation, and nervously clutched the scissors in her sleeve.
“We shouldn’t lay a hand on him yet. We’ll hear what he has to say.” The girl paused. “It won’t be too late to kill him afterward.”
But half an hour later, the girl would come to realize how naive her judgement was. Hear what he has to say? Not too late to kill him after?
Getting revenge is simple, and if I feel like it, I can make someone die just like that - that’s how we’d come to think.
Along the wall of the roughly 100-square-foot room was an electronic piano, and the man sat backwards on the stool in front of it.
So he seemed to like music, though I doubted he worked in it. I had no proof, so to speak, but people who fed themselves by music seemed to has this particular air about them. This man didn’t have it.
“Sit down wherever,” he told us. I chose a desk chair, and the girl sat on a stool.
“In a sense, I’m relieved. Hey, Akazuki, I know you might not believe me, but - ever since the day I injured you, I’ve feared that, you know, someday you’d come to have your revenge. I never forgot that hateful, bloody face you looked up at me with from the rink. Yeah, this girl’s definitely gonna come back to get me someday, I thought.”
Taking a brief moment to look up at the girl’s expression, he brought his forehead back to the floor.
“Yeah, that’s it,” the man replied, still in his apologetic pose.
“Because my name came up on the news as a suspect?”, the girl immediately supposed.
So Aihachi was the name of the woman who worked at the restaurant.
“And isn’t that enough information?”, the girl asked. “Someone who was in that class could guess right away that I was the culprit upon seeing those two names. And you thought that if the killer was who you thought it was, she was very likely to come after you next. Isn’t that right?”
“Then this conversation is over. You aren’t going to resist, you said?”
But the girl didn’t try to put a stop to this. She showed interest in what he was saying.
“I have a request for how I want to be killed,” the man said, raising his index finger. “I’ll tell you all about it. But… let me pour some coffee first. …I never get any better at playing instruments, but I’ve gotten really good at pouring coffee. Weird, huh?”
At any rate, we had no obligation to hear it out. But if granting a minor request meant him not putting up any resistance, it might not be so bad, I thought.
I heard water running. Before long, a sweet aroma came wafting in.
“I’m not here to have idle conversation. Just get to the point,” the girl snapped, but the man paid her no mind.
“Well, whatever the relationship is, I’m happy somebody out there would accompany a killer. Makes me jealous. Yeah… When I was a kid, they told me again and again, "a real friend will stop you when you’re about to do something wrong.” But I don’t think so. What am I supposed to trust about somebody who abandons their friend to become an ally of the law or morals instead? I think a better friend is when I’m about to do something bad, and they just join me in being a bad person without a word.“
The man brought two cups of coffee and handed one to the girl, one to me. "Careful, they’re hot,” he warned.
The world had turned 90 degrees sideways.
I listened while I lied on the floor, but couldn’t get any meaningful information out of the sounds I was picking up. I had my eyes open, but I couldn’t piece together the images I saw.
The first thing I felt upon regaining consciousness wasn’t the pain of being punched, but the heat of the coffee spilled on my shin.
I was trying to stay on my guard, but let myself be distracted as he handed me the coffee. I cursed my own stupidity.
My sunglasses had come off, probably when I was punched. I gradually was able to focus my eyes and bring together the fuzzy images. Then, I at last understood what was happening at this moment.
The man was hunched over the girl. The scissors she should have stabbed into him had ended up on the floor some distance from them.
She refused to give up and struggled to the best of her ability. “Stop squirming!”, he shouted, punching the girl in the eyes. Twice. Three times. Four.
I’m going to kill him, I vowed.
But my legs didn’t agree with my will, and I collapsed back to the floor.
So that’s what he hit me with. Talk about well-prepared.
As the girl took the opportunity to try and grab the scissors, he brought the baton down on her knee. A dull sound. A short scream. After confirming the girl wasn’t moving, he came walking toward me.
The two letters “ow” filled my mind hundreds of times, and I couldn’t move until I’d proceed them all one at a time. Sweat ran down me, and I wailed like a dog.
“Don’t interfere. We’re just getting to the good part.”
My bones creaked with every blow, and my will to resist slowly left me.
Gradually, I came to be able to process my pain objectively. I wasn’t feeling pain, I was feeling “the pain my body’s feeling.” By putting that extra cushion, it became distanced from me.
The moment I realized what that meant, I sweat like a waterfall.
“Some real sharp scissors we have here,” the man admired.
People in situations like this don’t know hesitation. What’s more, this man was in a position where his acts of violence could be seen as self-defense. If need be, he could get away with that excuse.
“Is this what you were planning to stab me with?”, he asked with quickened breathing.
I imagined the pain that would come after the surface skin was cut. The image of my pinky falling off my hand like a caterpillar arose behind my eyelids.
You might just be right, I thought.
They was a horrific sound. Pain ran up to my brain, and my body felt like it was filling with tar.
I screamed. I desperately tried to get away, but the man’s foot stayed still as a vice. My vision dimmed, half-filled with blackness. My train of thought stopped.
Though the girl diligently sharpened the points, perhaps she hadn’t given the edges that kind of care.
He put power in the scissors once more, cutting into the second joint of my pinky. I felt the blades on my bone.
The man thought he had trapped my dominant hand. He didn’t know I was left-handed.
I thrust the key forcefully toward the leg that held my right hand down. It was force that even surprised me.
In falling, the man suffered a strong hit to the back of his head. He would be defenseless for at least three seconds. Now it was my turn.
I took a deep breath. For now, I had to shut out my imagination; it was key to abandon all hesitation.
The pain in my head and pinky fueled my anger. My fist was soaked with the man’s blood. I gradually lost feeling in the hand I used to punch him. But so what? I kept punching.
I got off the man and went to pick up the scissors beside him, but my left hand was numb from keeping it clenched so tightly. I slouched down and reluctantly grabbed it with my right, but my fingers were trembling too much to get a good grip.
The man kicked into my stomach. I lost my wind, saliva drooled out of me, and as I looked up in preparation for the baton strike that would be coming in seconds, time stopped.
He desperately crawled at me, either running from the girl or seeking my help. The girl tried to give chase, but stumbled and tripped from her wounded knee. But she looked up, undeterred, and crawled after the man regardless with her arms.
Gripping the scissors with both hands, she plunged them into the man’s back with all her might.
What a clamor there’d been in the drab-walled apartment room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the police show up.
Our pain and fatigue was no problem. We felt an primal sense of achievement for “winning the battle.” Wounds and exhaustion were just steps toward that achievement.
When was the last time I felt so satisfied? I went back through my memories, but looking in every nook and cranny, found that no experience had made me feel like this victory did.
I didn’t feel a shred of apathy. I felt like I was alive.
“Why didn’t you postpone it?”, I asked. “I thought for sure you’d postpone as soon as things took a bad turn.”
“Well, yeah. I did do that.”
“…Is your finger okay?”, she questioned, barely audible. She might have felt somewhat guilty about the wounds inflicted on my pinky with her scissors.
Though I claimed such, to be honest, I was still about to faint from the agony. Looking at the pinky the man had tried to cut off again nearly made me nauseous. All cut up with the scissors, it was more of a… pinky-like object.
Okay, I thought, whipping my aching body to stand up. We couldn’t just stay here forever. We had to get away.
It was gloomy outside, and rather cold. Compared to the bloody apartment room, the air smelled fresh like a snowy mountain.
Luckily, no one even passed us by on the way to the parking lot. Thinking about how when I got back, I’d take a shower, tend to my wounds, and sleep soundly, I took out the car key from my pocket and put it into the cylinder.
I tried to force it in, then tried putting it on the parking bumper and stepping on it to straighten out the distortion, but to no avail.
The girl and I had bloody clothes, and noticeable bruises and cuts on our faces. My finger was still bleeding, and the girl had runs in her black tights.
I couldn’t ask for our bruises and wounds to heal right away, but couldn’t we at least change our clothes? But two people bloody and covered in bruises going to buy clothes from a store… we’d obviously get arrested.
I remembered the words of the bakery shop’s owner.
She quickly guessed my intent. She tore up the sleeve of her blouse, and used the scissors to haphazardly cut away the hem on the shoulders and skirt. I too used the scissors to make cuts in my shirt collar and jeans.
What would be important now was our expressions.
“So if someone comes up to you, make a face that says, "well of course I look weird.”“ I faked a smile as an example.
My reaction came late, because for a brief moment, I felt the illusion that she was actually smiling at me. "Right, perfect,” I told her.
We proceeded down the alley leading to the main street. The music gradually became more audible. The noise piled on endlessly as we approached, eventually getting loud enough to feel in my stomach.
His cheeks were torn, his gums extending wide. The eyes lodged in black sockets glared at us from between the gaps of frizzy hair.
What a well-made costume. The wide-mouthed man seemed to think the same looking at us.
There were voices of admiration and praise here and there. So realistic, they said. Well, naturally. They were real wounds, real bruises, real blood. The girl dragged her pained leg along, but even that looked like an act to them.
The costume parade reached the road. The sidewalks were flooded with spectators; making it even a few meters was quite an undertaking, and they could only see just a part of the parade.
At this point, I took notice of a group of about twenty people wearing costumes related to horror movies.
Because of their makeup, I couldn’t tell their exact ages, but I’d say they were mostly in their twenties and thirties. While there were some costumes accurate enough to mistake for the real thing, others seemed to simply demean the source material.
Along the sides of the road stretched two endless lines of jack-o’-lanterns, lit out their eyes and mouths by candles inside. Nets like spider webs were hung from between trees, and a few giant spiders hung up there as well.
Turning around as my shoulder was slapped, I saw a man with his face wrapped in bandages.
The man unwrapped his bandages to show us his face. It was the owner of the bakery shop, who’d told us about the Halloween parade.
“Well now, that’s not very kind of you. You should’ve told me if you were going to participate,” he teased, giving me a light shove.
“Well,” he laughed with embarrassment. “You leaving the parade already?”
“Already had my time in the spotlight. I’m amazed at all these people. I got my foot stepped on five times already.”
“Were there this many spectators last year?’
“I always thought Halloween didn’t have much of a hold in Japan, but…” I took a look around. “Seeing this, I think that might not be the case at all.”
The girl bowed her head and pulled my sleeve.
“Yeah, somebody’s waiting for us,” I answered.
Blood seeped through the bandages. I endured and faked a smile. The girl casually shook hands with him as well.
The arcade was particularly crowded, and it took nearly ten minutes to reach the clothes shop about a dozen meters away.
I came up with some excuse to deny him and pulled out my wallet, then was told “Oh, it’s half-off for Halloween.” A discount for costumed customers, apparently.
We wanted to change right away, but first we had to clean up the blood all over us.
Tired of walking, I wondered if we should just buy a body sheet and slowly wipe ourselves clean with it. But as I looked up, between buildings, I saw a large clock tower on the roof of a middle school.
Hopping the fence, we intruded onto the campus. An elevated washing area behind the building, surrounded by dead trees and with no lighting, was perfect for secretly getting ourselves clean.
Dried blood wouldn’t come off easily, but I kept patiently scrubbing hard, and it soon reached a certain limit of cleanliness. Soap bubbles seeped into the cuts on my pinky.
Looking beside me, I saw the girl taking off her blouse with her back to me. Her thin shoulders with burn marks were left bare. I hurriedly turned my back to her as well and took off my T-shirt.
Just as I was thinking she couldn’t be thinking it, she cut short her beautiful long hair. It looked like she cut up to 20 centimeters off all at once. She tossed the hair fallen on her hands off into the wind, and it quickly vanished into the darkness.
By the time we were fully done changing, we were chilled to the core. The girl burying her face in the collar of a knit coat, and me shivering in a duck jacket zipped all the way up, we walked to the train station.
Disembarking 20 minutes later and buying tickets for seats at that station, we transferred to the bullet train. After sitting for about two hours, we got off and again took the regular train.
It was still a long way to our destination, and there was no point in forcing her awake. I’ll keep her from feeling awkward when she wakes up, I decided, closing my eyes and feigning sleep.
While hanging just a step away from dozing off, I started to hear familiar stations being announced.
How long had she been awake?
We arrived at the apartment after 10 PM. The girl took a shower first, put on the parka that served as her bedwear, swallowed a painkiller, and dove into the bed with the parka’s hood over her.
In the darkness, the girl was holding both her knees on top of the bed.
“You can’t sleep?”, I asked.
“Your knee still hurt?”
But I really wasn’t used to these kinds of situations. I had no experience whatsoever consoling people.
Time up. Some truly tactless words came out of my mouth.
The girl quietly looked up at me. “…That wouldn’t be so bad,” she answered, pulling away the hood.
I knew it was best to avoid mixing painkillers and alcoholic beverages, and that alcohol and injuries weren’t a good mix either.
As I went to the living room to hand the girl the mug, I recalled how that man had dropped my guard in this same way.
“It’s tasty,” she mumbled after a sip. “I don’t have very good memories of alcohol, but I like this.”
The only light was a headboard reading lamp, so I didn’t quite notice the girl’s face flushing from drunkenness.
Sitting together on the side of the bed, I was just staring at the bookshelves when the girl spoke with a lisp.
“Yeah, I think you’re probably right,” I agreed. It was the truth: I couldn’t tell what she was saying at all.
“You know, I was just thinking that,” I remarked. “But I really don’t know how to do it. As the one who killed you, nothing I say would be very convincing. In fact, you’d hear it as disgust or sarcasm.”
The girl stood up and put the mug on the table, lightly flicked it with her index finger, and returned to sit on the bed.
It was seeming like she actually did seek my comfort.
I decided to take kind of a big risk.
“Sure, do what you like.”
“I swear.”
“…Probably.”
I sat on my knees in front of the girl and took a close look at the painful bruise on her knee. What had at first been red and swollen ad now turned a violet-ish color.
It was now a situation where I could, with just a slight application of force, send significant pain through her knee. That choice admittedly had its own charm.
Though the girl feared, she kept her promise not to move. She kept her lips tight and watched things unfold.
When the tension reached its maximum, I said those words.
“Pain, pain, go away.”
I removed my hand from her knee and waved it toward the window.
The girl stared at me in disbelief. I thought I’d failed.
I laughed along with her. “You’re right, it is stupid.”
She fell back on the bed and covered her face with her hands, laughing.
Once her laughing fit concluded, she asked, “So where did you send my pain away to?”
“Well, that’s fortunate.”
She fumbled to sit back up. Her eyes were bleary from laughing so much.
“Of course. As many times as you want.”
She closed her eyes. I put my palm on her head, and again recited the silly soothing spell.
Once I finished with the cut under her eye, she looked so peaceful that I could imagine her pain really had been sent away somewhere. I feel like a wizard, I thought.
“Um, I need to apologize about something,” the girl mumbled. “I said "there was no one kind to me, helpful to me, no boys I like or used to like, no one.” Do you remember that?“
“That was a lie. There was once someone kind to me, helpful to me too. A boy I really loved.”
“In a sense, yes. And in fact, it’s my fault.”
As I discarded my desire to draw it out of her, she gently took my wrist, told me “I’ll do it for you, too,” and softly blew on my bandaged pinky.
Pain, pain, go away.