Earthlings, page 18
“We’re in trouble. There’s been another landslide down by the bridge,” Yuu told us when he returned about an hour later. “There must be a few Earthlings left in the village, but this is the only house this side of the bridge that isn’t empty. We’re the only ones left behind.”
“Did these Earthlings cause the landslide deliberately?”
Yuu shook his head. “I don’t know. The first landslide at least was natural. They often happen around that spot. I think these Earthlings probably took advantage of there being not many other Earthlings around on the mountain to come and kill us. I don’t know whether it’s just coincidence that the mountain pass has been blocked by a landslide or whether they caused it to stop us from getting away. But they could only have caused it by using some kind of explosive, and that’s not something you can get hold of easily.”
We found some pieces of evidence in the Earthlings’ bags: a recording of the conversation with my sister in the karaoke room, an old, partially burned scythe, a pair of bloodstained socks. It must have been my sister who had given them these things. She had known everything all along. The evidence I’d hidden in the furnace had disappeared because she’d retrieved it and kept it all this time.
I didn’t know why my sister had decided to take revenge on me now. I suppose her “family” must have broken up, and emotionally it was rational to blame someone else.
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I killed their son, so I must be the one they came after.” I was being dragged back into the Earthlings’ world. It was as if I was being woken from a dream.
My husband frowned at my apology. “No, these Earthlings are out of order. Why should they come to kill you just because you killed their child? I could understand it more if they came to demand you provide them with a descendant to the human race. After all, the Factory exists as an organization for Earthlings to procreate. But even though they surely count you as an Earthling, they deliberately come here to further reduce their numbers by their own hand. It’s completely irrational.”
Yuu peered closely into my face. “Why did you kill the teacher?”
“Because I thought that I would be killed if I didn’t.”
Yuu gave a little smile. “Survive, whatever it takes, right?”
“What’s that?” my husband asked curiously.
“Our motto when we were kids,” Yuu said.
“That’s great. Apart from anything, it’s a really pure motto. And it’s absolutely correct too,” my husband said.
“Well then, how are we going to survive from now on? The road is blocked, and we’re trapped here alone. We always kept the lights off, so it’s very likely the villagers thought this house was unoccupied. But we have to do everything in our power to survive, whatever it takes.”
Yuu and I nodded emphatically.
Snow was beginning to fall. Countless irregular lumps of shredded ice fell around us, coloring the ground white.
We laid the corpses of the two Earthlings out in the entrance hall and went to sit in the living room.
“I guess all we can do is wait,” Yuu said.
My husband and I nodded.
“I wish we hadn’t cut the telephone line.”
“No, it was the most rational thing to do at the time. We have water, and there’s still some of the food we stole left. The Earthlings from the Factory are bound to come after us, so I think the landslide will be discovered relatively quickly.”
“We’d been thinking of how to shake off of our pursuers if they came, but now we’re waiting for them, are we?”
My husband sighed. “I want you two to survive, Yuu and Natsuki, but if it means being taken back to the Factory, then I’d rather stay here myself. Being taken back there I might as well be dead.”
“Tomoya, don’t say that. Earthlings have a habit of saving their own kind, so let’s use them to get out of here. Then we can escape somewhere else.”
I rubbed my husband’s back.
When Light Time and Dark Time had repeated some three times, we realized that we’d been overoptimistic.
Our stash of stolen food was practically gone. There were two other houses cut off by the landslide, and we had eaten all of their food.
“Shall we freeze the Earthling meat while it’s still fresh?” Yuu proposed suddenly.
“Are Earthlings edible?”
“They’re animals, aren’t they? They’re relatively clean animals, too, so I don’t suppose there’s much risk of disease. I think perhaps we should preserve them as emergency food while we still have the option, before they rot.”
“I guess so.” I nodded, but in the back of my mind was the thought that if we did this, we would lose any chance of ever being accepted into the Earthling fold again.
“I did once kill a chicken I was given by one of the local people here. I’ve never butchered large livestock, but I think it’s probably necessary to drain the blood from them. I don’t have anything better to do with my time, so I guess I could do that.”
Yuu made this proposal with the detachment of a true Popinpobopian. He was clearly easily influenced by his environment. He had been the best at fitting in and pretending to be an Earthling, and he was also the best at training to be a Popinpobopian.
“I’ll help, Yuu. It looks like it’ll be heavy work.” My husband stood up.
“Thanks,” Yuu said. “Let’s start with the small one.”
They went to get the body still lying by the front door where we’d left it.
I cowered alone in the room, unmoving. There was probably still some human left in me.
By the time I plucked up the courage to open the kitchen door, Light Time had returned, and the pair had just started work on the larger of the Earthlings.
“I’ll help too.”
Yuu turned to look at me. “Natsuki, don’t force yourself. It’s heavy work, after all.”
“It’s true, it takes quite a bit of strength. We’re probably not doing it right,” my husband said.
“It’s okay, I’ll help,” I told them. “I want to.” I held out a knife I’d found in the attic. “I think this will work better than a kitchen knife.”
“Thanks. To tell the truth, the first one didn’t go too well. Scraping the flesh off made it all pulpy like mincemeat.” Yuu smiled.
“Can I try?”
“Go ahead. We’re basically following the method for butchering pigs, but I’m not sure if it’ll work since the body’s constructed completely differently.”
“What should I do first?”
“Cut off the head and drain as much blood off as possible.”
I stuck the knife into the man’s throat.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” my husband said. “We used a saw.”
I switched tools and put all my strength into the task. The bones were really hard, but with some help from the others I finally managed to cut off the head. It landed on the floor with a thud.
“Right, let’s raise the body up and drain out as much blood as we can.”
Together we picked up the body and held it upside down over the sink. Now that they were on the second one, Yuu seemed to be getting used to things. He widened the opening so that the blood flowed into the sink.
“That looks tasty,” I murmured. Seeing the exposed red flesh, my stomach started rumbling.
“It does, doesn’t it? All the food’s gone, so should we have some of this tonight?”
“Yes, let’s!”
Once we started cutting up the Earthling, it was nothing more than a large piece of meat. Following Yuu’s instructions, we split open the torso, removed the innards, and washed the corpse. It smelled worse than I’d expected, and I grimaced. We washed the meat as well as we could, then carved it away from the large bones.
My husband and Yuu started getting the utensils ready so we could start cooking as soon as the preparations were finished.
“We have seasonings, so shall we boil it in miso? It stinks a bit, so would probably be best with a strong flavoring.”
“We’ve still got some daikon leaves. I bet it would taste good fried up with those.”
“Yeah, maybe. The freezer is already full of the woman, so the rational thing to do would be to eat whatever won’t fit in. Let’s try different ways of eating it.”
“We’ll have a feast tonight!” my husband cried happily.
We prepared three Man dishes: Miso Soup with Man, Daikon Leaf and Man Stir-Fry, and Man Simmered in Sweetened Soy Sauce.
“It’s been ages since we last sat down to a spread like this, hasn’t it?” my husband said in delight, and Yuu concurred happily.
I was hungry, too, and could hardly wait to tuck into the man. It was the first time I’d felt such a fierce appetite since my mouth had been broken.
“Bon appétit!”
I took a sip of the Miso Soup with Man and got quite a shock. “I can taste it!”
“What do you mean? Of course you can! It’s food, after all,” Yuu said, amused, but I felt a surge of excitement at sensing taste on my tongue after such a long time.
I’d thought my mouth would never recover as long as I lived, but now it was my own again. The meaty soup filled my entire mouth with the strong flavor mixed in with the smell and slowly saturated each part of my body. Ecstatically, I munched on the Earthling. I felt as though I was eating for the first time in twenty-three years.
The Earthling was really delicious. No doubt it tasted even better since I was hungry and also because I was so fond of the two creatures I was sharing it with.
“I wish there was still a bit of sake left,” my husband said.
We both agreed with him and raised our glasses of well water for a toast. Then we carried on eating the man.
For the first time in so long I felt satiated. Dark Time stretched and grew into an eternity as we felt the comforting presence of the creatures of the mountain all around us.
Our bellies full, we took some quilts to the kotatsu, wrapped ourselves in them, and dozed. Since today was a special day, Yuu brought a candle from the altar room and lit it for us. It was the first time in ages that we’d been enveloped in a glow of light during the Dark Time, and it felt somehow like a ceremony.
The three of us creatures wrapped in pure white quilts, dimly discernable in the candlelight, resembled cocoons. Maybe this is what the silkworm room had looked like, I mused sleepily.
According to Uncle Teruyoshi, after the silkworms had swelled up and taken over the whole house, the Earthlings would remove the tatami mats to expose the floorboards in the living room and the two large tatami rooms to let them become the domain of the silkworms. The Earthlings, meanwhile, slept in the corners, listening to the sound of silkworms munching noisily on mulberry leaves everywhere in the house.
I wondered what the Earthlings dreamed of whilst sleeping among countless pure white cocoons. As I dozed, I imagined what it must have looked like with the white insects wriggling around all over the room.
“I’ve got a request,” Yuu said abruptly as we lay in our quilts, our sighs of satisfaction beginning to blend into snores.
“What’s that?”
“If things carry on like this and the Earthlings don’t come for us, I want you to eat me.”
My husband and I jumped in surprise, our drowsiness immediately dispelled, and the plate of Earthling stir-fry by my husband’s hand spilled onto the floor.
“It’s far better than all three of us dying, and you already know how to butcher and cook me. Rather than us going extinct, it’s much more rational for you two to eat me and survive.”
“But in that case we could equally eat Tomoya or me, couldn’t we?”
“Yes, but I want to be the one who decides how to use my own body. I was never any good at handling freedom, but now for the first time I feel that if I am really free then that’s what I want to do.”
My husband frantically leaned forward and grabbed the edge of Yuu’s quilt. “Yuu, there’s got to be a more rational way. Like, how about we each cut off an arm or a leg and eat them all together? That way the three of us can survive.”
Yuu shook his head. “If we do that to these receptacles, we’ll probably die right away. It’d be okay if there was a surgeon among us, but none of us have the skill or the equipment. It’s safer to eat one of us at a time.”
I thought a moment, then said, “Well then, after Yuu, Tomoya should eat me. Of the three of us, I think he should be the one to survive. He’s the biggest and strongest and will last the longest once the food completely runs out.”
“Why are you both talking like this?” my husband shouted, shaking his head petulantly. “We made a pledge, didn’t we? We swore to live as completely separate entities from each other, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, that we would not love, cherish, or worship, nor stand by each other, and would live life for ourselves as long as we lived, right?”
Yuu and I looked at each other. Even Yuu seemed to understand that my husband was evidently not going to give way on this point.
He gently slid the spilled Earthling stir-fry back onto my husband’s plate and said, “You’re right, we did make the pledge. Well, how about this? How about we all taste a little bit of each other and then decide to eat each other in the order of how good we taste? If something is unpalatable, we probably wouldn’t be able to finish eating it. And there’s no need to cut off a finger or whatever in order to taste each other. We can just take a nibble.”
“Yes, that’s fair! I think that’s very rational,” I agreed.
My husband appeared satisfied with this suggestion. “Okay. Yes, that’s best. If I taste the best, be sure to eat me all up, okay?”
First of all, my husband and I took a bite each out of Yuu, me from his shoulder and my husband from his arm, testing the flavor on our tongues. He tasted slightly salty.
My husband apparently thought the same. After a few more bites, he said, “There’s a good hint of salt, so we could probably eat you without adding any seasonings. If we decide on eating you first, I promise to cherish you as food.”
“Me next,” I said.
Nervously my husband bit into me. “Ugh, bitter!” he said. “We might all be Popinpobopians, but we taste completely different.”
Yuu took a bite out of his own arm, then licked my knee wonderingly. “Mmm, there’s a slightly metallic taste. Maybe the taste of your blood is coming through.” He removed his tongue from my knee and bit my husband’s index finger.
“What do I taste like?” he asked.
“A bit sweet.”
“Really?”
We started eagerly taking bites out of each other, commenting on the flavor.
“I’m so hungry! Even though we’ve just eaten an Earthling.”
My husband sighed. “I can’t tell which of us tastes best.”
“At this rate, we’re going to eat each other all up.”
We each gnawed on bits of thigh and back and heel and jaw. I felt a raging hunger. Yuu and my husband were both delicious.
Eventually we were not satisfied by the surface alone and started in on each other’s innards with our teeth and tongues.
While having his eyelid chewed, my husband muttered, “Since coming here, I sometimes wonder whether there really are any true Earthlings at all. Maybe we’re all Popinpobopians. We were Popinpobopians from the start, and Earthling brainwashing worked for everyone except us three. Earthlings are just an illusion created by Popinpobopians to enable us to live on another planet.”
Crunching on my husband’s elbow, Yuu agreed. “You’re probably right,” he said quietly. “That means nobody will come to rescue us. They’ve probably all woken up from the dream, and now with the alien eye they’ll have realized that it wouldn’t be rational to come and rescue us.”
I was too busy eating the two of them to join in the conversation. They would be so delicious with some steamed white rice I thought. Now that I’d recovered my taste buds, I was savoring the various flavors: sweet, bitter, sour, salty.
“Oh, my ear!” I suddenly exclaimed.
“What about it? Is it tasty?”
I didn’t answer but sank my teeth into the thigh before my eyes.
My right ear had been broken all this time, but now there was a sound like wind exploding and the buzzing completely disappeared. Suddenly the sounds of the world began streaming in.
The first thing that entered my liberated ear was the sound of our meal. It made my eardrum shake and quiver. The sound rushed into me.
“Survive, whatever it takes,” I whispered in a small voice. That voice, too, fell inside my right ear and slowly made my eardrum vibrate.
That day, my body became completely my own.
Outside the window, it was beginning to snow. The shining white powder reflected the candlelight inside as it fluttered down from outer space. I thought of the scales that silkworms have. I imagined what it must have looked like when countless silk moths took to the air, shedding scales as they flew around the room.
The snow falling from the pitch-black sky was turning the ground white. The snow obliterated the presence of the creatures outside, and the only sound that remained was that of our uninterrupted meal in the flickering candlelight of the room.
A little while later, it was Light Time. The scent of Earthling reached me as I dozed, and I opened my eye a crack.
My head still sunk into the warm pillow woven from Earthling hair. I ran my eyes casually over the tatami and saw a finger lying there. I had been sucking on the bone, and it had rolled out of my mouth as I slept.
I reached out for it, still covered in saliva, and put it back in my mouth. It still tasted faintly of meat, and I sucked on it slowly, savoring the flavor.
The windows and doors should all have been closed tight against the cold of the fresh snowfall, but a breeze came in from somewhere and ruffled my hair. With it came a whiff of Earthling, sweet like wild boar meat soaked in milk but blended with an animal stench.
