『Obedience』
I stuffed a piece of bread into my mouth, crammed so full of custard cream that it felt like someone had packed it with a feather duvet. I could hardly breathe. My stomach was making noises like an empty bucket.
Never, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb until that very day, had I imagined that a mass of rock would come falling from the sky before I even made it to university. Well, my mother had already said goodbye to this world when she gave birth to me, so I had never even seen her face.
And so, my father raised me. He had spent every day going back and forth between work and home as though he were riding a conveyor belt. But even he said goodbye to this world four years ago, just like my mother, when he was hit by a car driven by a man who behaved like a wild beast. Apparently, that man had been pouring alcohol into his stomach—which was apparently nothing more than a garbage bag—until he was practically swimming in it. When he turned my father into minced meat with a construction company's truck, he climbed out onto the road and rampaged like an actual beast. According to the thin, flickering testimony of an unfortunate witness who happened to encounter that bizarre moment, the man had apparently hurled filthy abuse at my father's mangled remains.
And so, before I had even properly sunk into the muddy swamp called society, I was taken in by my paternal aunt and her husband. They treated me like air, but at least they gave me food. They squeezed money for my third-rate university tuition out of themselves as though wringing water from a rag, and I attended.
Perhaps "attended" is the correct word.
Then that meteor came falling from the sky, a lump of rock smeared as though with ketchup, and my damp little world collapsed. The university I had attended was destroyed, just as a meteor might smash through the cage of students who dragged themselves through their classes with the dull hopes of prisoners. I had been scheduled to enter that cage in the afternoon, so I escaped being covered in ketchup.
One day, I secretly smeared paint onto the back of one of my classmates from the engineering department. He had a denim jacket that was more precious to him than gold, bought with wages he had earned from his part-time job helping with office work at a construction company. When I stained it with fluorescent pink paint, he went berserk in the lecture hall, not knowing that I was the culprit, expressing his fury with every filthy word he knew.
The impact of the meteor, reminiscent of that anger, tore apart the house of my aunt and uncle as well, the very place where I had felt as though a cork had been stuffed down my throat, making it difficult to breathe.
I had no hobby that involved going out beneath the morning sunlight, but neither did I have the hobby of kneading boredom inside my room tucked away in my pocket. So I walked through the city wearing the suit that, to hardworking people who busied themselves like worker bees, was practically a suit of armor, passing office workers—the gears moving back and forth through society—as I wandered almost as though carried by the wind along a tree-lined avenue that appeared over and over in the sort of magazines devoured by women who wanted to gorge themselves on the city's fashionable pleasures.
Shopping. Playing. Expanding one's horizons.
Such lofty purposes, fit to be placed upon an altar, had been thrown into the river that flowed from east to west through the city. Inside my probably half-melted brain, there wasn't even the faintest glowing stone called purpose.
The adult video I had watched the previous night.
A woman in her late thirties, called a "mature woman" despite still being in her thirties, had been on top of a dark-skinned, pot-bellied middle-aged man, producing a high-pitched voice like a musical instrument, even if it was supposedly part of her job. Perhaps because I had masturbated while watching it, the red capillaries crawling across my eyes made it impossible for me to notice the fashionable scenery of the city.
Instead, one particular sight appeared beneath a spotlight: a filthy clod of earth lying on the sidewalk.
Right in the middle of the city.
The sidewalk, beautiful enough to serve as a photo spot, was like the forehead of a woman wearing an exquisite dress, makeup, and perfectly styled hair—with a single mole upon it. I had no idea whether someone had dropped the clod there or deliberately placed it there out of malice, but I instinctively lowered the leg that had been drifting along with the wind back onto the ground.
And then, as if God had placed my life upon the palm of His hand, a meteor came sliding down from the sky.
It spread its flaming arms as wide as it could, its tail of black clouds trembling behind it, descending toward a building that glittered obnoxiously beneath the sunlight.
The ground shook like a body seized by a chill.
The vibration traveled through my leg, which had just touched the earth, as though electricity were flowing through it, and my not-particularly-bad backside hit the ground.
Office workers wearing suits—their armor—and working like bees.
Women dressed beautifully as they shopped through the city, admiring it as though it were a field of lotus blossoms while their husbands were buried like gears in the mud called society.
And groups of students who had escaped the prison of learning called school and wrapped themselves in the blanket of pleasure.
Each of them must have been confronted with the reality of a meteor falling from the sky as though a piece of shit had been hurled directly at them, something they had probably never considered in their lives, something that had never even dripped into their minds like saliva.
Even when the muscles in their legs transmitted pain to their brains through their nerves, they devoted themselves to the act of fleeing, running away from the meteor—the gift from the heavens—as though they could wash away the reality that had become filthy by distancing themselves from it.
As for me, the clod of mud that had been sitting before my eyes had somehow disappeared.
Strangely, I felt something grow cold deep inside my chest when it was gone.
Was that loneliness?
Or was I merely intoxicated by the strange fact that I had developed an affinity for something that was nothing more than dirt?
My half-melted brain could not tell.
While I was thinking such utterly meaningless thoughts, no more important than horse piss, something black and reeking of age slammed into my strange body—muscle, bone, and skin, a body I had never trained before—as though someone had driven a pen through pure white, untouched paper.
I briefly thought that perhaps tripping people who were trying to escape the reality that had been smeared with shit might be amusing.
But the black, stale-smelling mass had fallen on its own through the laws of nature.
When I looked at it with eyes reddened by last night's adult video and masturbation, I saw a pot-bellied man lying on the ground. He had white hair, wore a navy-blue suit, and had dirty, wrinkled leather shoes. His beard was unevenly shaved.
He had bought an entire plastic bag full of bread.
Through the bloodshot eyes that had watched a naked woman the night before, I now watched this yellowed, middle-aged man. The bread spilled from the bag and rolled across the dirt-covered ground like little stones.
The man desperately gathered the bread like a beggar and tried to run.
Of course he did.
Sweet bread was appropriate for a reality smeared with shit.
It was perfect for escaping from reality.
At that moment, I believed I was wearing the clothes of calmness.
Though perhaps I was actually wearing the trousers of malice.
I picked up a piece of concrete that had flown from one of the buildings that had collapsed and continued to crumble around me.
And then I did something I had not even done when my father was turned into minced meat.
I struck a person.
I'm sure I looked pathetic.
A man without any muscles, striking another human being for the first time, not because anger or malice had spilled over the rim of his cup, but simply because some emotionless, intangible thing like cotton candy had told him to do so.
I struck the man's white-haired head with a piece of concrete.
Of course, the man's gray suit became soaked in ketchup-red blood, and he collapsed onto the ground, now scattered with fragments of rubble like beads that had been spilled from a broken necklace.
I found it strangely interesting that a human body, once all its strength had drained away, became as limp as rubber.
I had no idea whether that moment lasted several minutes or merely a few seconds. Only the god of time could have known.
And I didn't care.
Yet I instinctively snatched up five pieces of bread that had fallen nearby and fled the scene as though I had stolen jewels.
Even that surprised me, like the shock of having water poured over your head and discovering that it was much colder than expected.
Gasping for breath, I ran.
There was no reason for me to run. I was not some carriage horse, nor was marathon running my hobby.
Unlike the other people whose realities had been smeared with shit, I was already aware that my reality lacked the wall onto which the shit could even be smeared in the first place.
I had no need to escape.
And yet human beings, those breathing vertebrates, are strange creatures.
When reality suddenly presents them with an even harsher reality, they run.
Perhaps they run as though rejecting reality itself.
In this case, they fled the place where the meteor had fallen, desperately trying to return to the clean reality they had known before.
I had never exercised, so I had never imagined that running could make me feel this unpleasant.
Before I knew it, I was standing in the middle of a symbolic bridge spanning the river that had not yet been affected by the inequality called the meteor. It was one of those bridges in the city where tourists gathered for no particular reason, simply because everyone had somehow decided it was a landmark.
There was an astonishing lack of people.
It looked as though the world had selected the people it wanted and removed everyone else.
I was hungry.
Far hungrier than I had imagined.
I felt as though I could stuff anything into myself now, like one of those professional competitive eaters.
I didn't know whether it was because I hadn't eaten anything since morning, or whether there was actually a wall inside me that hated having reality smeared with shit, and the meteor—the sharp tip of unreality—had fallen from the sky, making me hungry through stress.
But whatever the reason, I tore into the bread stuffed generously with individually wrapped custard, enough to raise my blood sugar to a pathological level, biting into it more savagely than an animal tearing flesh from its prey.
And so, here I was, shoving bread into my mouth.
Into a stomach as empty as a bucket, as though I were throwing dirt into it.
I wondered whether the man I had struck with the concrete was dead.
His suit had been stained with blood, as though someone had poured ketchup all over it.
Even if someone had seen me hit him, surely I wouldn't be caught.
I felt neither relief nor anxiety.
Even if I were arrested, I probably wouldn't feel anything.
My half-melted brain would not open the lid on its emotions merely because I had been arrested.
Besides, meteors were still falling from the sky, punching countless holes through the blue heavens, their smoky tails trailing behind them.
The police probably had no interest in some ordinary human being like me, someone who existed at the edge of the world.
I reached for another piece of bread.
This time, I stuffed bread filled with sausage and mayonnaise into my mouth as though I were packing tissues into it.
Come to think of it, what had I been thinking when I struck that man with the piece of concrete?
My morning was drawing to an end as I remembered the taste of the bread and the emotion—or perhaps the absence of emotion—I had felt when I struck him.
『Obedience』 — The End