“Where’s my newspaper?” the woman demanded.
Didi looked up at her with a puzzled expression. Her cheeks were now numb and her whole body shivering as she’d been standing on the doorstep quietly for nearly 1 hour before she was noticed. During all this time, the house had remained quiet and not a sound could be heard, but for the occasional gust of wind that blew drifting snow into her face.
After some time waiting in silence, her teeth had started chattering.
The sound of the chattering had evidently set the proceeding chain of events into motion: The first thing she heard was the sound of a man and a woman talking. The woman had a particularly loud and exasperated tone of voice. This was followed by a loud metal clank and a correspondingly loud howl of pain. “Be careful,” the man said in response, “You’ll stub your toe. My father died of-“
“’For God’s sake, Raju! I know!” the woman screeched in response, “How many times are you going to go on about your poor old Papa and how he died of a stubbed toe?!!” Didi could, then, hear the sound of a piece of furniture—a stool, perhaps—being dragged across the floor.
“Yuri! What are you-?
“This time I’m going to catch the little bastard before he gets away!” The voices continued indistinguishably for moments, before Didi finally heard the sound of footsteps walking down a staircase. There was a loud crash and she could hear the woman scream, “Dammit! Bun-bun!”
Didi turned back and looked at the mountains, momentarily considering the possibility of trying to track down her horse, but before she had the chance to ponder the merits and downsides of doing so, the door swung open before her. A woman, who was much smaller and less imposing in actuality than her voice had sounded, now stood there, looking down at her sternly. “Well?” she said breathing heavily through her nose, “Explain yourself!”
“W-w-well I-“ Didi started to say, teeth still chattering.
“Where’s my newspaper?” the woman demanded.
“Y-your n-n-news-“
“Stop wasting my time, Girl, and spit it out! You stand outside my house like that making a terrible racket. Why if I were your mother-“
“But-“
“Don’t interrupt me! Don’t you know that’s rude?” the woman’s eyes widened.
Silence.
“Well?!!” the woman eyes peered down at her, “Speak up then! I asked you a question!”
“Well, the thing is-“
“What?” she thrust her head forward like a chicken in a cockfight.
“Well, if you let me-“
“Huh?”
“Could you please-“ Didi pleaded.
“You’re wasting my time!” She slammed the door shut, causing some snow from the roof to fall on Didi.
She knocked on the door.
The woman opened the door again. “Yes? What is—HEY! YOU’RE STILL HERE?“ It seemed as though the woman had momentarily forgotten about Didi, upon opening the door the second time. However it only took a split second for her to be reminded of why she’d slammed it in the first place. Now, her eyes stared intimidatingly into Didi’s. “Well…are you going to give it to me then?”
“Give what?”
“My newspaper.”
“I don’t have your-“
The woman put a hand to her head. “You really are too much!” She said quietly, her voice losing its potency, as though she were overwhelmingly stressed out by the situation. “What is it then? Huh? Want more money?”
“You don’t-“
“You tell Masafumi that I was supposed to start getting deliveries 2 months ago and-“
“Masafu-“
“Let me finish, you worthless child! Well…I-buh-I-uh-muh-tuh th-the manners on this girl!“ The woman was so outraged that she was now interrupting herself, sputtering unintelligibly in response to what she construed as a horrific trespass upon her refined sensibilities. “You tell Muh-muh-muh-Masafumi that if I don’t-“
“Will you please…LET ME TALK?” Didi roared, her eyes closed, fists clenched, body shaking. The ground, too, suddenly started shaking as the voice echoed through the valley. A fresh clump of snow fell from the roof to the ground, some of it landing on Didi’s head.
“Hmmm… Must be an earthquake,” the woman uttered calmly, seemingly unfazed as she watched the snow dropping from the roof. “Damn that continental drift!” She looked over Didi’s head at the mountains.
“Now then!” Didi said emphatically with her teeth clenched. She was at wit’s end. “Are-we-ready-to-listen???”
“You’re a rather little creature, aren’t you?” The woman remarked matter-of-factly, punctuating her insensibility to Didi’s words with a scrutinizing purse of the lips. Didi began to hyperventilate. She could hear the sound of someone coming down the stairs inside the house. The woman continued, “My, my! Those eyebrows are ghastly! I never thought they could grow so long. I’ll bet you can braid those suckers, can’t you? And that protruding forehead! Oh, dear…you really must do something about that. Not to mention that terrible odor you’re giving off! Well…sweets, I’m afraid you shan’t soon be the belle of the ball. What are you anyway? Some kind of troll? Level with me, lass!”
“I AM NOT-“ Didi said as the ground started shaking again.
“What’s going on here?” a voice interrupted. The shaking stopped. A man came from behind the woman. He was slightly taller, but more stocky and round. He had a huge tummy and wiry gray hair.
“Raju!” the woman squealed hysterically, “Masafumi sent this impudent little troll as his goon to try to squeeze us for more money!!!”
“Who’s Masafumi?” he responded.
“Is your name Raju?” Didi stepped forward.
Seemingly preoccupied by another matter, however, the man turned to his wife and said, “I could have sworn I felt the house shake.”
“CONTINENTAL DRIFT!” the woman screeched back at him, her eyes nearly popping out of her skull.
“Excuse me…” Didi said in a diminished, imploring tone to the man.
“Wow…” he continued as he scratched his head, “I can’t even remember what it used to look like without those mountains there. Remember when we first moved here, honey? Nowadays, it’s as though, every time you so much as look in that direction, the mountains suddenly seem to be towering over you. Didn’t Bunnu used to play around that area where that rock formation is now? Things really do change, don’t they? Have to admit, though, you really can’t beat that view. Talk about value added. I wonder what that’ll do to our property va-”
“Raju…” the woman said in a tired voice.
“Do you think that-“
“Raju…now really!” she said tilting her head as though to indicate that he should know better. “You really are being rude.”
“Huh?”
“I believe the smelly troll had a question for you?”
“Oh…sorry,” his eyes peered down, “You were saying?”
“Are you-“
“You know,” the man said, “you look quite familiar. Are you from around here?”
“No, Vasalla,” Didi responded politely, “I’ve just arrived in town.”
“Dear me!” the woman’s voice suddenly jumped 2 octaves in delight. “A visitor from Vasalla? W-well…don’t stand out there in the cold like that! Come in!” She was suddenly very cordial, as she put an arm around Didi’s shoulder, lassoing her into the house. She rubbed Didi’s arms in a vain attempt to warm them before pulling up a chair from the kitchen table and pushing her down into it. The woman was now looking down with a sheepish grin, as her right hand pulled her hair down past her shoulders, while the left reached across and brushed it nervously. “I-I…well…I wasn’t…I certainly wasn’t expecting a visitor from Vasalla. This is quite a surprise. I’m sorry about the state of the house. We’re doing some renovations, right now. My name’s Yuri, by the way. And you are?”
“Didi.” She responded as she looked
down at some of the wooden planks stacked by a gaping hole in the wall through which she could still feel a slight draft. Looking around, Didi was quite unaware of it, but the house had, in fact, changed profoundly in the past couple of years. Times were financially prosperous for the family and Yuri wanted to make sure that their good fortune was apparent to all who visited by refurbishing the interiors and replacing the furnishings with some of the finest materials money could buy. She replaced the straw matted floors with a solid polished hardwood. The back porch, which had been virtually non-existent, soon became the site of their greenhouse, as well as their indoor Koi pond and garden. As for the upstairs, Yuri had put a lot of time and work into picking out the right color scheme and patterns for an addition that she decided to build as a nursery for O. as well as a guest room for anyone who happened to pop in from out of town. She spent months harassing the local fabrics shop owner day and night—at his shop and at his home, sometimes buttering him up until he put in another order, while, at other times, belittling him for dealing in such low quality merchandise—all in an attempt to obtain the finest grade Wormdrool Silk possible for the cushions in her meditation room. For her own room, she had coerced the young, but handy, O-bousan-144 to build a little powder blue make-up dresser with a mirror and tiny chair. As for the kitchen, she made sure that everything she used for the purposes of cooking was state-of-the-art. She even bought platinum-plated propane tanks in case she happened to replace the tank in front of any guests. And on the wall of the living room, she hung between the big framed portraits of her children an even larger portrait of Charismatic K, for whom she had a great affection.
“I’ll make some hot ocha,” Yuri now said. She rushed to get the kettle. “Want some?” she asked the man.
“Please,” he said as he sat down next to Didi at the table.
One of the reasons for the family’s recent financial success was that Yuri’s husband had changed careers from a sharecropper of Magenta to a permanent landowner and farmer of replacement organs. As the mountains were now approaching the town and tearing up the landscape, the best that could be hoped for in the long run was to get out of sharecropping and jump headfirst into this new and growing market, which literally involved the replication of organs to be used in medical transplants on humans.
The replication process had changed vastly from what it had once been during the pre-industrial era, which was to a large degree, the reason for its newfound prevalence. Originally, through a process of organic retro-coding, the nucleotide sequence required to replicate the necessary genes was duplicated by a relatively unpleasant looking creature of the subphylum B-987—known to the layman as the Heisenpig-8. The original replication process, too, was rather unpleasant as it required the Heisenpig-8 to actually swallow the organ whole and subsequently defecate the original along with its clone so that they could both be harvested by the farmer. However, in order for it to defecate after the process of replication had been carried out, the Heisenpig-8 required an excessive amount of stimulation, often sexual. This job was often left either to the farmer…or one of his hands, so to speak.
And it was, duly, no mistake that most organ farmers of the pre-industrial era had to live an existence plagued with the unfortunate stigma of being known to their neighbors, and notably amongst the children of the neighborhood as ‘filthy pig fuckers.’ These days, however, the stigma carried in the past by men of this profession had now been relegated to a humorous afterthought—an anecdote told about the primitive bumpkins who, regardless of their deviant sexual appetites, now had the luxury of basking in the reverence of the organ farming community as pioneers in the field, despite not having quite overcome the burdens inflicted upon them by the haunting moans of that Heisenpig-8, which plagued them relentlessly in recurring nightmares that lasted well into their retirement.
Their personal torments notwithstanding, it was due to the advances made by such men that the process was much less hair-raising, now, as all kinds of equipment had been designed for the very purpose of making the organ harvesting process simpler, less invasive, and greater in yield. And so, organ harvesting became the hottest new industry for people from many disciplines to break into: medical professionals, research scientists, businessmen and farmers alike saw a great deal of potential in it, with the foreseeable result that, due to an oversaturation of replacement organs on the market from suppliers both domestic and foreign, the government was faced with little recourse but to favor the domestic suppliers through the payment of grants and subsidies.
This, effectively, allowed them to undercut the prices of imports and, in many cases, pay some farmers for not harvesting organs during a given season. And in order to ensure compliance, the Medical Harvest and Agriculture Ministry sent packages filled with documents weekly to be filled out in triplicate by the farmers receiving money from them. These documents, while truly serving no other functional purpose, except as a kind of receipt for payment to the Ministry, were often so time-consuming to fill out that they ended up keeping the farmer too busy to get any other work done around the farm.
Regardless, few, if any, complained.
The man now moved a loose stack of Ministry documentation from the kitchen table to a nearby chair, clearing a space in front of him and Didi. “So…” he said, “Just arrived in town, have you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well…it’s a long trip from Vasalla alone for a girl your age. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.” Didi blushed. The color was returning to her face now that she was indoors.
“Sixteen? Well…you certainly are…” the man paused, struggling to avoid saying something that might make the situation awkward, “…young…uh…for your age.” He giggled nervously.
“Well, I take after my half-father, I guess. He was a dwarf.”
“Who’s that?”
“Guni.”
“Guni?” the man leaned forward. “You’re Guni’s daughter?”
“Half-daughter.” She corrected.
“Hmmm…good ol’ Guni. What’s he up to these days?”
“He died four months ago.”
“Oh no!” the man said with a hint of sadness. “That’s terrible! I really can’t imagine Guni dying. He was a tough old guy. Was like a father to me! How’d he go?”
“Runny nose.”
“Yep,” the man sighed, “those’ll sneak up on you.” He nodded contemplatively for a moment before asking, “So, then…who’s your mom?”
“Josefina.”
“J-j-j-josefina?” the man stammered uncontrollably as beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. “I-is she…S-she isn’t here in Bahlia, is she?”
“Who’s Josefina?” Yuri asked as she poured ocha into the cups.
“Nobody, sweetheart!” the man called back. “Just a regular who used to come to Guni’s bar...uh, b-before we met.” He turned back to see a curious expression on Didi’s face. “I mean…” he back-pedaled a bit, “well…of course, she’s a lot more than simply that. She was…your mother!” He said nervously, laughing at his own foolishness. “So…uh…is she…uh… here in town?”
“No. She passed away a few years ago. Due to the after-effects of childbirth. You see, she was pregnant with me for about 32 years.”
“32 years?” Yuri exclaimed.
“Yeah!” Didi responded, “Can you imagine having to carry a full-grown child in your belly for that long? Certainly does a fair bit of damage to the body. I probably could have come out after 9 months, but from what I hear, I was frightfully scared to leave the womb. But I probably wouldn’t have been so scared if my mother hadn’t whispered into her belly every night about how dangerous and cold and sad the world really could be and how I was better off staying where I was. How much warmer and comfortable it was in my protective cocoon. Now, looking back at the whole situation, I’m not sure she really believed that. I just don’t think she wanted to deal with me. I think she wanted to live
her own life. You know…without me in the picture.”
“Yeah…I’ll bet,” Yuri remarked from the kitchen, seemingly preoccupied by something else. Her back was to them, but she seemed to be tallying something invisibly in the air with her index finger. She was calculating something. “32 and 16…oh, so really you’d be 58 now, if you’d have been born on time. But you weren’t, so you’re 16.” She paused, “Well, you certainly are young for your age, aren’t you? 58 years ago…where were we? Well, we weren’t married yet. So, I do believe we were still in Vasalla at the time! Isn’t that right, Raju?”
“T-that’s right.” The man took a deep breath. He didn’t bother trying to correct Yuri’s mathematical error.
“58 years ago!” Yuri went on as she set the cups on a tray. “Those were the days. Remember that beard you used to have, Raju?”
“He had a beard?” Didi said wide-eyed. “I can’t imagine.”
“Don’t bother trying to imagine it either, dear,” Yuri responded. “It really wasn’t becoming. I tried for years to get him to shave it. It got to a point where it hung halfway down his chest. And it was really sticky and disgusting, especially in the summertime.”
“Eeech!” Didi responded.
“I forget, though. I couldn’t get you to shave it. But why did you decide to shave it in the end?” Yuri asked.
“I wanted to cry.” The man said nervously.
“Cry?” Didi asked.
“Men with beards just shouldn’t cry. It’s an unspoken rule. Have you ever seen a bearded man cry?”
“I can’t remember.” Didi said.
“Well…it’s probably because you haven’t seen it. It’s the saddest, loneliest thing you could imagine. So…at one particular moment, when I felt the urge to cry, I rushed to get my shaving kit and shaved my beard off as I bawled my eyes out.”
“Honestly Raju! Sometimes I wonder where you get these idiotic notions from!” Yuri said skeptically. “Anyway, dear, what brings you to Bahila?”
“Well…I was told that my other half-father lives in Bahlia.”
“Oh?” Yuri responded as she brought over a tray with the three cups of ocha. “Maybe we can help you find him. What’s his name?”
“Raju.”
The tray dropped to the floor.
V.
A silence loomed in the air.
And in the stillness, Raju couldn’t help but give weight to his momentary suspicion that after many years of having pushed his eardrums to their limits of tolerance with respect to the volume of his wife’s screams and rants, he had finally transcended the physical form to achieve a state of release that brought both equilibrium to the chaos of his personality and a pang of welcomed relief to his already well-worn patience—which is to say, that he’d entered a kind of Nirvana impenetrable to sound. But his fanciful musings were quickly dashed by the sound of the clock on the wall chiming the hour. It was the first sound to break through the deep freeze that had enveloped the room almost instantly when Yuri had finally stopped screaming, only to fold her arms with an expression on her face that was so sour and contorted as to cause all sounds uttered, in hopes of appealing to her sense of reason, to freeze in mid-air and fall to the floor with a resounding thud.
Didi listened to the chimes, as well, as she sat quietly at the table, still nursing her cold ocha. It was now three hours later and she couldn’t have imagined being in a more uncomfortable situation. She had sat there watching the threatening hand gestures and listening to this woman’s shrieks, too scared to talk, too afraid to get up from her seat, even though she’d wanted to use the toilet for the past hour and a half. And then when everything went silent, she didn’t want to so much as move from the chair because the last thing she wanted to do was attract attention to herself. And so, deciding that the best way not to inflame the situation any further was to remain as inconspicuous as possible, she stayed seated and proceeded to wet herself. The decision to wet herself was a difficult one to make, but in the end, she knew that it had to be done for the good of all. And in so doing, it was, perhaps, more a selfless act than anything else. She only hoped that it would be viewed by the others that way. The urine dripped down to a puddle by the leg of the chair as Didi, deciding it best to say something, for no other reason than to take advantage of this opportunity created by the chimes of the clock to steer this situation in a positive direction, asked, “Is that clock from Vasalla?”
Yuri remained silent as Raju looked over at her, as though having completely forgotten that she’d been sitting there all this time. “Why, yes. Yes it is. Recognize the wood?”
“Not Grainless Oak! From Neha?”
“Indeed it is!” Raju said, now breaking a smile, seemingly forgetting about Yuri’s sulking.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Well, it pays to know the right people. We got the clock from the nice man who used to manage Mama Yuri’s brothel. You might know him, actually. He used to be a regular at Guni’s.”
“Oh yeah? What’s his name?’
“I was afraid you’d ask that. I’m really bad with names.” He paused for a moment, concentrating. He hit his forehead with his hand repeatedly. “Come on! I know it’s in here somewh- Eihachiro! That’s it! His name is Eihachiro.”
“Eihachiro? Why yes! In fact, he’s the person who gave me the map to this house. And the horse! He sends his best.” She looked at Yuri, who was still standing in the kitchen, looking away with her arms folded. “To both of you.”
“Good old guy! And to think that, at one point, he had it in for Anup and me. Honey, remember that time he threatened to slice Anup’s balls off for roughing up one of his women?” Raju giggled as he said this to Yuri, who continued to ignore the two of them. “Anup did have a bit of a temper, though. Maybe more than just a bit. Some might even say he had issues with repressed rage. Ha! But ‘you certainly can’t take the jungle out of the cat,’ as that one guy once said. You know, the one who people quote all the time! Anyway, I guess it couldn’t be helped.” He shrugged his shoulders with a warm smile. He looked at Didi and the smile disappeared from his lips. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you just say…Anup?” Didi said slowly.
VI.