User:Zadimortis/The Lobster Rises/3

When I was ten years old, I found a lobster on the side of the road.

I still remember all the pieces of that moment. The bright-gray sky slowly cracking open to reveal the yellow-orange of late afternoon. The flat buzzing of matte cars flying down the astropaved road overshadowed in juxtaposition by a green mountain to the west. The way the glow of the sun over the mountains made its back look bloodied, casting a scarlet shadow over my nametag, “HOMURA HARUKA”, making my name read like a curse. I remember seeing some other kids sitting on a steel bench along the sidewalk, and the nameless smell of some nameless food they were eating.

I was not surprised the children hadn’t noticed the lobster, this ocean native hiding in the grassy easement between the worn-smooth stone sidewalk and glistening black mirror-road. Ours was a world of violent anomalies. A crustacean on the street was perhaps no stranger than a metal serpent in the sky. And the scarlet scales of its back slid in together, out together, much like those alien emissaries of the heavens.

I leaned down to pick it up. At first I went for the tail with one hand, then drew back. I remembered watching a server grab a lobster out of a tank the same way, its legs and banded claws flailing weakly while the two escaped hastily behind a screen. My father never told me what they did to the lobster, but I saw enough footage in school of the old fights-turned-massacres against the Rorqual to know exactly what that server did behind that screen.

I went for another approach. I slid my hand underneath its belly, my other hand bracing the tail, and lifting it up like a folded bedsheet, its claws and tail draped over the sides of my hands. I felt its legs press up against my hands, but it didn’t seem to resist - it felt more like an affirmation of my existence as its new ground. Its tiny eyestalks peered around, then with an interlocking of sliding scales, its head arced to the side and it looked at me.

I decided to name him Kiyoshi.

~

Nobody was around when I got back home. My adoptive father flew out to Tokyo for the week to visit his wife in the Estonian embassy, and my brother Aoi wouldn’t be home from cram school for another half hour, when the verdant peaks to the west would just begin to flirt with the setting sun.

I put Kiyoshi down and let him explore my room. It was a simple affair, my bag slumped over a neatly made bed in one corner next to a window, an unfinished Cola-flavored Ramune Fizz on the tiny wooden dresser next to it. The floor was divided by the natural seams of tan carpet into long rectangles, tinged orange by the sun streaming in. One of the walls had propped against it a hand-painted screen depicting lavender and cherry blossoms, a gift from my adoptive mother that felt less truly given and more sloughed onto me. Poking out from behind it was a poster depicting the Mitsubishi ATD-X “Shinshin”, one of the fighter jets used by pilots during the period of Rorqual resistance. A gift from my brother, though he seemed to enjoy it quite a bit more than I did. The wall opposite me rippled with color, depicting a beach scene in mid-day. The clouds looked atomically perfect, the barely-dressed beachgoers all with spraypainted bodies lounging, talking, laughing. Every so often, a flock of seagulls danced by, painting white streaks across this impossible sky. Kiyoshi had turned around and fixated on this magical, paradoxical scene, this portal to another world (a concept that he was starting to get used to).

“You like that?” I asked. “Watch this.” I held my hand up, fingers pointed into a wedge, and flicked the hiragana へ in the air. As I peeled away from the final stroke, the image blurred, and the wall assumed a red glow as it looked over Mount Fuji, in silhouette, backed by a sunset so vivid it stretched the boundary of the real, but didn’t quite breach it. The lobster watched, mystified. I watched, too.

After some minutes, the lobster crawled towards the wall-screen, then stomped his feet against the ground a few times, as if confused by the ground beneath his feet. I realized that soft things are probably not something ocean-dwellers regularly deal with. I leaned over and rubbed the carpet with my hand, Kiyoshi watching this strange human ritual in earnest. He stomped a couple more times, slowly, kneading this woolen alien landscape with his hard alien legs.

I wondered if Rorqual understood softness.

~

I kept Kiyoshi in a box under my bed when I was at school, and let him roam my room when I was home. I did not really think until the second or third day how a lobster could survive so long in the open air without water; I just figured it was one of those ‘exceptions to the rules’ that adults like to lean on when explaining things to kids, like why they could drink certain drinks we weren’t allowed to, or why Aoi wasn’t allowed to start his driving or piloting courses like all his friends, or why we had new parents and no one else did. But that was okay, for me. Aoi was always asking questions. If he saw Kiyoshi, I’m sure he would ask where I got him or why I was keeping a lobster hidden in my room. Maybe he would say this was a “girl thing”, as he had accused me of doing many times before. For all I know, it might be. Maybe every girl, at some point in their life, finds something so weird and precious that all they know how to do is pick it up and cherish it as their own. Was that what my adoptive parents were doing with the two of us? My adoptive mother was always so kind when she came home on the weekends, and the four of us always went out to nice restaurants.

Maybe Aoi and I are lobsters that she found on the side of the road.

I watched Kiyoshi as he scuttled over to my pile of dirty clothes, and pinched a sock. That I should stop him only came as an afterthought, not as an immediate reaction but as an independent, latent thought that occurred to me for the sake of the sock. But Kiyoshi had already since put it down, apparently uninterested, and moved on to some other item of clothing.

A sharp crease was visible along the length he had grabbed.

~

Aoi did not think it was a girl thing.

At first he was scared, and I was too, mostly for Kiyoshi - men and boys tend to react violently when scared, and I didn’t want my brother the fighter pilot to divebomb into my own personal alien for fear of his life. But ultimately his fear gave way to boyish fascination, and he agreed with me to keep Kiyoshi’s presence a secret from our new parents. Just like with the Rorqual, we had come to a tense truce; often times I would find him in my room prodding Kiyoshi or feeding him some snacks he swiped from our adoptive father’s pantry downstairs. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, it’s just that - is usually as far as I would go before my mind would distract me with something else so I didn’t have to resolve that formless enigma. I wanted to trust my brother, I have always trusted him, but some things are beyond trust and distrust, perhaps some parts of us simply aren’t meant to be put in the hands of others.

Was Kiyoshi a part of me now? Whenever Aoi played with him it was fine, because I was there to make sure some unknown violation of trust never took place, I wouldn’t let it. But I knew he would be around when I wasn’t, and the crumbs of the snacks he brought tucked neatly along the edges of his box were proof that he abused that privilege.

~

Kiyoshi was gone. Not just him, but the box, and the packet of Vita-Snacks I had propped against it, in the hopes it would serve as a silent sentry to the lobster within. It didn’t.

I found myself suddenly outside - I assumed the “running outside” part happened, and there were probably corners turned, and I dropped my bag off at some point, but to me, I was inside, then I was outside, like a nightmare - and saw Aoi with two of his friends, all staring at the lobster that had been unceremoniously deposited on our front lawn. One was poking him with a stick, and Kiyoshi didn’t seem to appreciate it very much.

“Brother! What are you doing!?” The question seemed to shock all three to their feet, like they heard some desperation in my voice that I didn’t intend, an unanswered demand, a silent scream.

“I’m showing off our lobster. What do you think?”

“MY lobster!” I pushed past him to grab Kiyoshi, clumsily pulling him up into my hands, not caring about how his Rorqual-like sheathing frame twisted and bent in my grasp. It’s okay if he was in pain, we were fine, the missing part of me had been reattached, it was my-

I dropped Kiyoshi. His legs flailed around in panic for a bit before he pushed off his tail to lift up and restabilize himself.

Where I was holding his thorax, his claw had dug into my thumb and forefinger. Several ribbons of blood danced along my hand, plopping onto the grass.

The afternoon sun lit up my hand like a flame, the streams of blood reflecting brilliant glints of white into my eyes. I felt strangely cold.

I looked down at Kiyoshi. One of Aoi’s friends, the one holding the stick, was laughing at the blood dripping from my hand, and said something that probably would have hurt my feelings if I was anywhere near him, in the same yard, on the same planet. A small trickle of blood splashed onto Kiyoshi’s back, the red blending with the red.

And in that moment, I saw how magnificent he was. How could I have been so blind? I watched him, and wondered how he saw the world. How he saw me. How foolish I must have been for thinking we were one in the same. In truth, we were so different - but for a moment, there was a connection over the gap, then there was nothing.

Never more had I wanted to be a bridge.

~

Kiyoshi vanished that afternoon. Aoi’s friends said that they looked away for just a second, then he was gone. They spent hours and hours searching for it, Aoi was nearly in tears when he told me late that night. But I didn’t mind. We met, we reached out across that nameless distance, and then we went our separate ways. Kiyoshi had taught me to appreciate the measure of my reach.

I sat up in my bed, the moon’s empty gaze cast upon my cloth-covered legs from the window. The Hitachi Prismavision wall display across from me showed a field of twinkling stars floating amidst gas clouds and massive nebulae. For the first time, I felt truly stunned by the immensity of the image, the incredible, impossible distance between each of those stars. And somehow, paradoxically, that made me feel even closer to them than before. I traced a hiragana よ in the air, and seeping in from the sides, caricatures of needle-nose human spaceships flew around spiraling Rorqual. What respect those aliens must have had for us, and that distance between us.

I decided, then and there, that I wanted someday to become a bridge between us and the Rorqual.

~

The only revelation that had come to David Lobster Wallace in the past several days was how much he hated stale rice and Vita-Snacks, along with a firmly established loathing of shoeboxes. Falling between the pages again, he was glad to have finally escaped, to be rid of those pestering children. For the first time in his life, against all his superior sensibilities as a lobster, he felt as though he actually missed Paris, and the doting strains of Blaise Pascal’s scholastic drone.

He wasn’t sure where he was going to fall next, but if not Paris, then at least somewhere nice, his lobster voice in his lobster head pleaded to whatever lobster gods were listening. Somewhere without children and without spaceships and without magic, and just maybe somewhere with water?

Somehow, his supra-lobster self knew that wasn’t going to be likely.