Authors: Berit Ellingsen
“Let’s leave early tonight,” he whispered. Michael nodded, eyes dilated and dark in the faint illumination in the hallway, and took his hand.
Michael opened the door and yelled, “Beanie! Five minutes, or we’re coming in to fetch you!”
“Seven!” Beanie shouted from the bedroom.
“So how were the mountains?” Michael said with a neutral facial expression.
“A bit strange,” he replied. “The neighbors have started growing wheat, it’s gotten warm up there too.”
“How do you stand it?” Michael said.
“The neighbors?” he said. “They’re all right.”
“No, being alone in that cabin, away from everywhere else, anyone else.”
He laughed. “It’s fine. The cabin’s got everything a person needs, and it’s quiet, peaceful.”
“It’s quiet and peaceful here as well,” Michael said, looking at the apartment. “And the view is phenomenal.”
“There’s no traffic in the mountains,” he said. “I can hear the wind at night and smell the heather in the morning.”
“You look terrible,” Michael said.
“I do?” he said. “I thought I looked fine.”
“You’ve lost weight, and there are dark rings under your eyes.”
“I’m training a lot,” he said.
“How’s that working out?” Michael asked.
“They called me in for a third test,” he said, ignoring Michael’s sarcasm. “Down south. Seems they wish to meet us in person, and do some medical exams.”
“If you are being selected, how long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a long training program, taking place with all the major space organizations, all over the world.”
“You want to become an astronaut but you don’t know how long it takes to go to Mars?”
“A year and a half,” he said. “At best.”
“One way or round trip?”
“Round trip.”
Michael’s eyes grew more and more dark. Then he blinked quickly and glanced down at his watch. “Five minutes, we’re coming in, Beanie!” Michael strode over to the bedroom door and opened it.
Beanie shrieked and tried to keep them out. She was dressed in a twinkling sequin blouse and a short, wide skirt that reminded him of ballet dancers, only it was black. She was even in high-heeled shoes, but kept fiddling with a pair of large crystal earrings that reached almost to her shoulders.
“You’re coming with us now,” Michael said, picked her up, and put her over his shoulder. Working out or running on the nights his job as a financial risk analyst in the city allowed for, Michael had no problem lifting his petite sister.
“My earrings! I’m not finished yet!” Beanie yelled and flailed, but Michael continued into the hallway.
“Take her coat,” Michael said, “we’re late.”
As soon as Katsuhiro saw them he started the car, having been their get-away driver many times before.
He got into the back seat and opened the other door from inside. Michael deposited Beanie, tucked her flaring skirt inside the vehicle, and closed the door, then took the passenger seat in the front.
“Everybody inside, including Beanie’s skirt?” Katsuhiro said.
“Just about,” Michael said and pulled on the seatbelt.
“You bastards!” Beanie yelled. “I lost my earrings! They were so expensive!”
“Don’t forget that you and I have the same parents,” Michael said.
“You’re still a bastard,” Beanie said.
Katsuhiro brought the car into a wide curve on the nearly empty parking lot and started down the road toward the motorway.
It was nearly dark. The honeycomb towers shrank behind them, but even from a distance he could see that more than half the balconies were unlit, several windows seeming to lack curtains. Katsuhiro had moved out early in the spring because of the high cost of living in the building. He wondered how many others had done the same.
They drove westward to one of the oldest residential areas in the city, where tall corkscrew hazel and hawthorn hedges hid long, low houses with flat roofs, expansive windows, and large
wooden decks. Katsuhiro eased the car slowly into the driveway, then slipped it neatly around the corner behind the dense hedge which blocked even the view of the garage from the quiet street outside.
When he exited the car and started on the short path to the house, he saw that the low boxwood plant which stood in a wedge-shaped, glazed pot outside the front door had been cut into a tight sphere, garlanded with tiny string lights, and strewn with fake snow for an extra festive appearance. He nearly laughed when he saw it, and imagined Michael’s father kneeling in front of the pot as if in worship, laboring to trim the bush into the perfect holiday ball. But it was an honest effort, as were the lit torches that flanked the rain-glistening shale paving toward the front door.
They were among the last to arrive, the hallway and the living room and kitchen full of Michael and Beanie’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and their partners and children. Since his parents had no relatives in the city, they spent the holiday with Michael and Beanie’s family. Fortunately, there were enough people for him to quietly fade into the background, and only have to muster small talk with a few people.
At the dinner table, beneath the sparkling chandelier and the Christmas garlands, relatives dressed in silk and sequins, velvet and fine wool, took turns clinking their cutlery against their glasses, standing up, and relating to the rest of the family what the past year had brought to themselves, their spouses, children, and pets. He refused to pay attention to the boring stories about who the family members had proposed to or married or given birth to, what they had bought or won or otherwise accomplished, and allowed his mind to relax while keeping his eyes open and his lips curved amicably upward. He was deep in his own thoughts when Katsuhiro tinkled a glass, rose, and started recounting their father’s achievements and those of their mother and of Katsuhiro himself from the year that was almost
through, things he hadn’t heard before. But then Katsuhiro said, “And lastly, but not least, my beloved brother applied for the space organization’s new astronaut training program and has already passed the two initial rounds. If this continues he may be the first of our family to go into space!”
Michael and Beanie’s relatives oohed and aahed and toasted him and said, “We didn’t know you had applied, how exciting, when’s the launch?” He didn’t even have to answer them, all he needed to do was to keep smiling through the surprise and irritation that had risen in him, and mumble something or other, and soon enough, another relative banged on their glass with their knife, and stood to recount their branch of the family’s highlights of the year.
After dessert, but before the cognac, coffee, and cake, he snuck out to the hallway and pretended to be waiting for the bathroom while checking his phone for messages to get a break from the chatter and the hot air. His father appeared in the living room doorway and congratulated him on his success with the testing, and his mother beamed at him, hugged him, and said, “We are immeasurably proud of you and we love you!”
He wanted to invite Michael to the apartment to talk, but at the end of the evening Michael and Beanie stayed behind at their parents’ house, and Katsuhiro drove him back to the towers alone.
“Did you really have to tell everyone about the astronaut program?” he said when they were almost there.
“Why not?” Katsuhiro said, pouting a little in the same way he did when they were small and he wasn’t allowed to follow his older brother. “If I hadn’t, you never would have told them.”
“Of course not, that’s my damned point!” he said.
“You are much too modest of your achievements,” Katsuhiro said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
He turned and glared at the night-dark streets that rolled past them.
“Why does everything with you have to be so secret?” Katsuhiro asked. “If people disapprove of what you do, will that make you refrain from doing it?”
“No, only from telling you about it,” he said and went back to watching the city.
THEY SLIPPED INSIDE THE SHADOW FROM THE heat and humidity outside, where it seemed as if the August warmth had caused the air to thicken and vibrate with the frequency of the cicadas’ song. The gloom enveloped them in a fragrance of lotus incense and worn wood, with a musty undertone he couldn’t quite place.
“Stand still,” Katsuhiro whispered in the language of their birthplace, not the tongue of the country they were visiting, that of their father and his family. “Our eyes will adjust to the darkness in a few seconds.”
“Don’t worry,” he growled, annoyed at being instructed by his brother, who was two years younger and a full head shorter than himself. “I won’t trip over anything.”
Katsuhiro nevertheless took hold of his sleeve.
His shirt, although thin, stuck to his back with perspiration, and his heart beat slowly and heavily, as if his blood had thickened from the heat. Carefully, so as not to make a sound, he unscrewed the cap on the bottle of water he had bought in a corner store on the way to the shrine. But as he tilted the nearly empty plastic container back, it sloshed noisily.
“What the hell!” Katsuhiro hissed and tried to slap his hand. “Are you drinking inside a shrine?”
He knew Katsuhiro would do that, so he turned away and switched the bottle to his left instead. “At least I’m not swearing in one,” he said, and downed the last of the water.
Katsuhiro hit his shoulder instead. In the glare from the open door, they could see a robe-draped silhouette lift its head and turn toward them, but the monk didn’t say anything or approach them.
“Let’s have a look, then,” he whispered and sauntered further inside while pretending he didn’t see the sweaty footprints his socks left on the wooden floor. Both he and Katsuhiro had removed their shoes and placed them on the rack outside before they entered the shrine, and they never wore shoes indoors, neither at home nor at their grandparents’. There was just enough light to spot the display which housed the relic and the sturdy pillars that flanked it in the back of the shrine. Even here, away from the sun, it was so hot and humid it was hard to breathe, and he deeply regretted that he had agreed to go to a country where the air grew warmer than the inside of his own body.
At the relic a crowd of candles flickered in the faint breeze from the door, their smoke rising and mixing with the fragrance from multiple bowls of incense. The reliquary itself was a box-like structure, approximately one meter in each dimension, fronted by a pane of uneven glass. In its scuffed and dim surface, the candle flames quivered and gleamed. He gazed at the small space for a while before realizing that it contained a human skeleton sitting cross-legged and draped in the silk robes and tall head-piece of a monk.
Before he could feel surprise that the shrine housed a mummy instead of a more common sacred object, and wonder why it had been sanctified, the scent of tea leaves and tree resin filled his nose and mouth, making him nauseous and dizzy. He staggered
backward, cold sweat blooming on his forehead and back, and the urge to throw up, shrine or no shrine, to rush back to the hotel, and spend the rest of the day in the bathroom, overtook him. His pulse roared in his ears and he balled his hands into fists to regain some control of his body. On the other side of the glass, the skeleton’s eye sockets were deep and lightless and the bone ridges above them were as black and smooth as the edge of a lacquered bowl.
He had started by eating only certain local nuts and seeds for a thousand days. Since he had been a vegetarian for most of his life, and the nuts and seeds were often used in the monks’ dishes at the temple, the change was mild.
In the mornings he would participate in the daily tasks at the temple, as he had done since initiation: cleaning the floors, laundering robes, preparing the meals, sweeping the grounds. In the afternoons he ran for hours on the paths that wound through the forest, and in the evenings his meditations were extended. In the beginning it reminded him of his novice years, when the work had felt heavy, the food monotonous, the sitting raw, but then, as now, the structuring of the days, the slow rhythm of the seasons, and the yearly observances approaching and receding in turn, transformed the labor into something joyful and satisfying.
The minimized diet and the increased activity made him lighter, leaner, and not just in mass or weight, but in thoughts and concerns as well. They simplified everything further than taking the robes already had. He could easily see why the process was done and why it was given such reverence. It also built the endurance — and discipline necessary for the next part of his journey.
After a thousand days he was allowed to restrict his diet further, to only the bark and roots of pines that grew in the mountains above the temple complex. Every morning he ran to those
heights to harvest the thick bark and bulbous roots with a small sickle and spade, in sun as in rain, never taking more than he would need for the coming day and be able to prepare on his own. On that thin, but fragrant diet, the soft parts of his body slowly shrank and vanished. Since his bones remained the size they had always been, they jutted the fabric of his robes to new and unexpected shapes, like the gorges that remain after a river has carved its way through.
When his flesh had finally become lean enough, he was permitted by the senior monks to go to the grove of droopy-leaved lacquer-sap trees to the north. He walked there with a broad knife and a deep bowl, cut a diagonal groove in the bark of a young tree, caught the drops of yellow-gray liquid that seeped forth in the bowl, and carried it back. In his room he heated water from the temple’s sacred source in a bronze kettle patterned with long-stemmed poppies suspended from the claws of a small bronze dragon. He poured a little of the hot water into the resin he had collected, along with some tea leaves. The resulting infusion was bitter and thin, but he drank it while chanting scripture in his mind.
The effect from the sap tea did not delay, and voided his body in long, slow shudders that lasted through the night. When dawn finally arrived he was emptied and exhausted and drenched in his own sweat. The thought that he would have to return to the grove and do it all over again in just a few hours brought such despair that for the first time since he started the journey he considered leaving it, despite the shame that would entail.