"Hey, you gotta eat something at least."
She ignored me, sitting at her desk.
Come on, you can do it.
Liz, I tried calling her again.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
The fan hummed from behind her desk.
Even from here, I could see what she was reading.
Grade three physics, probably.
It was a cartoonish diagram of someone throwing an apple at a monkey.
She was frowning.
...
"Liz."
"I said I'm not hungry."
She was lying through her teeth—she had not eaten a thing since yesterday.
"Whatever."
I dug into my bowl of Mac and cheese while quietly shaking my head, my eyes still on her portion sitting in front of me on the other side of the table, which was the same as mine, but minus the cheese—like how she wanted them. It was just Mac.
What a waste of good food.
I pressed my lips together.
Keep going, don't back down now, I thought to myself. Just one more.
"Ooh! Smells great. Look at this!" I said to her. "Slurp. Hmm. So good. Too bad I'll have to eat all of it by myself."
I thought I saw her ear twitch a little.
It was only a matter of time until she'd give in. You could only go for so long without food.
"Slurp. Ooh!"
"Quit moaning!" she yelled, visibly breaking into sweat and trying hard not to look in my direction.
The temptation was too much.
Mac and cheese.
I knew I was going overboard with this. But from experience, oversell was often the best sell.
The spoon clicked against the ceramic.
One spoonful.
Two spoonfuls.
I was right.
She slammed the book shut and stomped to where I was sitting.
Then, picking up her bowl, she scraped the macaroni with the spoon and poured it into mine.
Maybe she really didn't feel like eating today.
Usually she'd be the one to do the cooking. On days like these I'd step in whenever something unexpected cropped up at work and she would come home late.
Liz sat down in front of me, rested her chin on her hand and watched me eat.
At least she didn't seem upset anymore.
Now might be a good time to ask her—It'd been on my mind for a while. I doubted she'd tell me anything since she lost her memory, but it was worth a shot.
Some questions were better left unanswered. But why should she get offended by it?
"Hey..."
"What?" she said flatly.
"How old are you?"
No answer. We both sat and listened to the whirring fan for a while.
"Just curious."
"How old am I… Hmmmm..." She put a finger on her lips, deep in thought. Then she beckoned me closer.
"What's with the secrecy?" I leaned forward over the table.
She clonked me on the head—though her knuckle only tapped lightly.
"—Ow!!"
"Rude..." she said, clearly offended. "That was rude ay ef..."
"Ayy—ef?" I sat back in my chair while rubbing a non-existent bump in my skull.
"You know..." She looked away, embarrassed.
"No idea what you're talking about." I lied with a smirk.
"Rude as freak..."
"Watch your profanity." My smirk widened.
"Shut yo b****-*** up you st****, br***, du***-looking a—" she said without any real intonation.
"Hey! Hey! Watch it!"
When did I become the straight man in this conversation?
"How old am I... Hmmmm..." Something was on her mind again. "You know, I've been thinking."
"What?"
"You're only as old as your memory."
"Yeah, that makes sense."
"If you could inject into your brain a memory of your great, great, great grandpa from 500 years ago, does that mean you are now 500 years old?"
No, I argued. "You only have the memory. You weren't there when it happened. He was."
She folded her arms. "But everything is a memory. What you're experiencing right now is a newly formed memory."
"... Okay?"
"I think there are actually two different components to a memory."
"Two?"
"The first one is the experience itself, like the senses, thoughts and feelings. The second component is the awareness that you were experiencing the event as it happened at that specific point in time. Even if you weren't there 500 years ago when the event happened, you have the memory. This means you should also 'remember' yourself being aware that you were the one experiencing the event, even though it never really happened to you, personally."
I'd no idea where she was going with this.
"So, then," she continued, "technically, you were there 500 years ago when the event took place, because you remember yourself experiencing it, even if the memory belonged to your grandpa. Does that mean you'd be 500 years old?"
"No, something doesn't add up," I said. "What about the 500 years in between? You didn't live through that. It'd be more like time travel." Or not. What were we even talking about?
She slowly nodded several times. "You're right... Then what if... you could inject all the memories of everyone in your family tree into your brain—"
"Yeah, let's not go there."
Every time I heard something from her, I felt like I just gained an IQ and then immediately lost it afterward.
"But there are so many people," she muttered. "Does that mean, technically, you'd be like ten thousand years old with the memories of every member in your family tree—of course, provided that the brain could store them all without breaking down."
"Sounds like a nightmare to me."
"You'd have the memories of both your parents, and all your siblings. Then... if the whole family gathered in a room and played a game of Monopoly back in the 1600s."
"Monopoly was invented in the 1900s," I corrected her. Was it 1901? Great game, although Margaret hated it. She said it was unrealistic because she'd never go to jail.
"The whole family gathered in a room and were throwing rocks at each other back in the 1600s."
"Times were different back then..." I shook my head, my face wistful with nostalgia. It was a family of apes, apparently.
"You had the memories of everyone in the room. You remembered throwing rocks at your wife, but you also remembered seeing your husband and three kids throwing rocks at you. You could remember doing five different things as five different people at the same time. Then, which one would be the real you?"
"... I don't even know what to say."
"If you remembered being the husband throwing rocks at your wife, and you also remembered being the wife, then shouldn't you be able to feel her pain from the point of view of the husband as well?"
"I take it back. Monopoly might have already been around in the 1600s."
"It'd be pretty lonely if you were every member in the family. Every time you said something, it'd be like talking to yourself... But then if you were the whole family, shouldn't you already know everything you were going to say? Why were you surprised when the husband told you that he'd been secretly raising a pet cow in your backyard? You were talking to yourself. Why were you surprised? You were surprised by something you already knew had been happening the entire time?"
"..."
"Back to the rock-throwing example—"
"No, change it to Monopoly!"
"If you remembered being the husband and five kids—"
"Three."
"—Three kids throwing the rocks and remembered having the same rocks thrown at you as the wife." She let out a little yawn despite her visible enthusiasm for the idea. "If you had the memories of all the members in the family on that day, then why had you, in the memory of the husband, still thought that you were not the wife the moment you threw the rocks at her? You remembered being the wife, but you also remembered being the husband thinking at that moment in time that the wife was not you. You remembered being all five people at the same time, but in each of your memories, you still thought that you were only just one person, and you thought that you were just one person and could only be one person while still being five different people at the same time."
"Interesting."
And then she just stopped talking, just like that. There was neither a punchline nor message. Just a stream of consciousness. She gave me an existential crisis then left me in the dust.
She'd get very excited whenever she talked about this kind of stuff—not the rock-throwing, but the other mental stuff. I wasn't crazy about it, but I tried to play along. It'd be awful if I'd just changed the topic and shut her down from the beginning—I hated whenever someone would do that to me.
Liz rested her chin on the table and watched me eat.
"Why do you chew like that?" she asked.
"What's wrong with it?"
"You chew like 80 times with every bite."
"It's good for digestion." It seemed she had also been counting. For some reason, it was weird when she pointed it out like that—as if I was being called out for something terrible that I did.
The metal spoon clicked against the bowl.
"You missed two."
"Stop counting how many times I chew!"
She watched me eat in silence.
"When did you get it?" I gestured at the small symbol on her neck. I'd never got the chance to ask her. "Did you have that on day one?"
I was asking whether she woke up in this body with the tattoo already on her neck.
"I got it myself."
"You just decided to get a tattoo..."
"So?"
"Why?"
"I don't know." She swayed uncomfortably from side to side. "Just wanted to see what it feels like to get one."
"But why?" This was turning into an interrogation, which was not what I had intended.
"I don't know, why do you ask me that?" she raised her voice, clearly backing off from my aggressive grilling. I was really bad at this.
"I'm guessing it probably hurt like hell," I said, trying to relate, "and it stayed there for good—"
"..."
"People do things for a reason. I just want to hear your story. What's that symbol, what does it represent, does it have a meaning, things like that."
She contemplated the texture on the table for a moment before letting out a pitiful sigh.
"Do you want to hear the cool version or the lame version?"
"Just tell me how you got the tattoo."
One night, she told me, she got lost while she was running some errands. It was raining and she decided to go into some random building to hide from the downpour.
When she entered, she tripped and fell into a black foldable chair made of PU leather?
She said she'd tried to get off but since she was soaking wet she kept slipping and falling back into the chair.
A shady-looking, her word, not mine, masked man came out from the back with a black electric pen in his hand.
So what do you want today, huh? He asked her.
Before she could even say anything, a small symbol was already carved into her neck.
The end.
And that was the cool version.
The fact that she had been telling me all of that with a straight face only made things harder for me. How should I even react to this?
"You're not gonna tell me how you got the tattoo."
"That's how it went down." She seemed genuinely surprised by my skepticism.
I would've believed her more if she'd said she was caught in a sex trafficking ring and they put a brand on her body to keep track of her, instead.
Apparently the "real" story was that she'd gotten it from her ex, one of her classmates, who wanted to open a tattoo parlor—and she was supposed to be his first customer.
"You could've just told me that from the beginning!"
"I saw something funny at work today." Her face stayed dead serious.
"Don't change the subject! What was the point of that dumb story?" And what about her ex? What was that about? She couldn't drop something like that on me and not say anything else about it.
Apparently, she knew what I was thinking.
"His house exploded."
"His house exploded??" I'd heard that somewhere before. "Did you have something to do with it??"
"We broke up, by the way."
"I know that! Did you have something to do with it??"
"Anyway, some kid decided to climb into a shopping cart. He was too big and got his head stuck under the metal tray that you flip on the side."
"That's not funny! What was the point of the tattoo story??"
This conversation was going nowhere.
It made me wonder whether she'd made up those stories she said she'd read in her school books as well—like the one with the daughter cannibalizing her family.
She sighed again. "The moral of the story is you shouldn't leave the house on rainy nights or you might just slip and fall into a tattoo bed and get a permanent tattoo by accident."
"That's great! I'm sure many people will learn a valuable life lesson from it, but what was even the point of telling me that??"
"So the kid was stuck inside the shopping cart for three hours until his parents came back to get him out."
"You know what, I suddenly want to hear the lame version for some reason."
"Already made your pick."
"Just tell me both."
If I do that, it will devalue the first story, she argued.
To be fair, I was betting on the chances that this lame story might somehow be her final saving grace. I was also just curious as to what she could come up with, so I kept pressing her.
She sighed again. "Here, I'll give you the discount lame version," she offered as a compromise.
"Discount??" I slammed my hand on the table.
This wasn't a third option. It was more like a cheap knockoff from one of the other two.
I was this close to asking for a full refund, if such a thing even existed in the first place.
"Okay so one night, while I was out running some errands—"
"It's gonna be the same story but minus the rain..."
She obviously didn't want to tell me how she'd really got the tattoo for some reason. I'd known that from the start, and there was no point in pushing her.
I also never got the real lame version from her either.
She sat there and continued to watch me eat for a while.
Then she suddenly said, "You know, on the day we first met, you said you were going to do a painting of me."
I choked on the Mac and Cheese and coughed hard.
"I did?"
"Yeah you did. A three-minute portrait."
I'd forgotten about it already.
She continued, "Do you think maybe you could do a portrait of me someday?"
"I only told you that so you would show up. I can't paint."
"You can't?" She eyed me suspiciously. "I mean your drawings of those buildings are pretty decent..."
"I can't paint." Or draw, in any medium, I clarified.
"Those houses..." she said while in what appeared to be a trance. She was smiling now. "I remember there was one with a cute balcony at the front."
"I told you, can't do it," I insisted.
"No one has ever done a sketch of me before."
"Well, you'd better look to someone else for that. Wouldn't want a drawing of you looking like a building."
"Huh." She seemed genuinely invested—impressed, even?—as if she wouldn't mind seeing something like that.
I tried to focus on the macaroni in front of me.
"That drawing of Margaret you did was beautiful," she said.
I turned up my head. "How did you—"
"I saw it in the trash," she said. "Sorry..."
I thought I'd tossed it in the bin a week ago.
"It was bad, I hated it," I said.
"I thought it was really nice..."
"I hated it."
She'd dug up the trash just to have a look at my drawing.
I dipped my head and brought my face close to the bowl.
The room slowly slipped into a long silence.
Was I responsible for the awkward tension in the room?
She brought it up on her own.
How should I have responded, then?
All right, if you insist on seeing a drawing of you looking like a house...
Like it was some kind of weird, niche astrology quiz article on the Internet from 2015.
What kind of building are you?
Nothing but parallel lines and no curves.
It was stupid.
...
I felt bad for some reason.
"Do you want to hear a ghost story?" Of course she'd ask me that.
"It's almost midnight!" I yelled. "What are you even on right now??"
"I haven't done it before—telling ghost stories..."
Had she lost her mind?
This was her idea of having fun.
"Whatever, just don't make it too scary. I've had enough problems, don't want to get any more traumatized."
"Aww, little Robert's gonna poop his pants and cry?"
She said it with a deadpan expression. Was this one of her jokes again or was she trying to provoke me for some reason?
"Listen here, you little—" I raised my spoon and pointed the tip at her.
She had no idea what she was doing.
A ghost story?
Now?
In the middle of the night in an isolated house in the countryside?
The girl let out a soft giggle, with a straight face.
That smile was in there somewhere.
"Fine," she conceded with a shrug. "I'll tone it down a little for you."
Yokatta, Wakatta, or something, as the Japanese often put it.
Maybe I should take up lessons when I'd get the chance.
I was a huge fan of Taniguchi Yoshio—that man was more than an architect; he was an artist. Too bad he was Japanese, and none of his interviews had subtitles. The auto-translate functionality on Youtube wasn't working properly, either.
I'd booked a flight ticket and gone to the D.T Suzuki Museum once. The atmosphere of the open space definitely made me feel things.
Maybe it wasn't a good enough reason to learn a new language. Some basic greetings and being able to ask for directions would be enough, or at least as a starting point. I just had to know his secrets. What did he say in those interviews? Why did he laugh so much? Was he mocking the world for its stupidity? Did he know that I would be watching and he was laughing directly in my face? I had to know.
"Here goes," she stretched her fingers as she was about to tell her ghost story. Wait a minute, why did I agree to this? A ghost story was a ghost story regardless of how much horror you cut out of it!
"A man was sleeping in his bed alone when he suddenly heard a knock on his window."
Who in their right mind would enjoy something like this?
She continued, "He opened his eyes to see a white palm pressed against the crystal-clear glass."
"Terrible planning. Nobody should be able to climb up from below."
"Be quiet... The man lay frozen in his bed, unable to move for even an inch."
"..."
"What do you think happens next?" she asked, like she was talking to a kindergartener, except she was carrying a deadpan expression on her face, and she hated children.
I wasn't scared. "He called the cops, obviously."
"No? He lay there, frozen. Then, slowly, the hand receded from the glass window."
"..."
"The man held his breath when he saw a tall figure looming at the bathroom entrance."
"How tall is it?" I asked.
She froze for a moment as if to measure the ghost in her mind. "Over two meters..."
"I mean it's not that tall. Can't be more than two hundred seventy. That's standard height for a ceiling."
After a long pause, she resumed her story, "The man couldn't move his hands, or any parts of his body, for that matter. He was petrified. The tall, dark figure began to slowly move toward the bed."
My eyes widened with realization.
Of course! Why hadn't I thought of it sooner?
They'd try anything as long as it would make you pay.
I'd heard these stories. To them, nothing was off-limit. It didn't matter if they had to work overtime, or whether it was illegal, because essentially, they were above the law.
She already knew I was going to say, so she raised a finger at me.
"Just saying. The IRS..."
"..."
She gave me a hard glare before she folded her arms on the table and buried her face in them.
The room fell into silence.
"... So, uh, what happens next?"
"He died." Her muffled words pressed through the sweater that had been dyed red covering her forearm.
"Oh, okay."
"The IRS killed him," she mocked me.
You ruined it, she said, even though deep down she knew she should be thanking me for it!
Then I remembered what I'd wanted to ask her.
"Hey, Liz."
"What?"
"You've been looking at that book a lot lately. Did you find anything?"
"Huh?" She raised her head to look at me. "Uh—no, not much."
She'd been looking at it non-stop. Sometimes she'd sit and stare at the blank pages for hours, shutting and opening the cover hundreds of times to see new text come up, even though I couldn't see any of it.
"I'm just wondering why you'd keep staring at the same thing again and again when nothing's ever gonna change."
"I don't know..." her voice softened. "I just want them to roll out faster. Eventually I might spot something we can use."
"Okay." I nodded in understanding. She'd write down new passages and upload pictures of them to the Internet. Maybe someday, someone would be able to figure something out. I'd already known how she'd answer my question. There wasn't anything else I wanted to ask her.
After some time, she said, "You know, I've been thinking."
"Uh‐huh."
"I know I'm not being reasonable. A part of me always wondered, what if it's all just gibberish, and there's no meaning or message behind it."
"..."
That was a possibility. But it was too early to throw this book out just yet. We were clutching at straws at this point.
"But then," she said, her soft voice going several pitches lower. "Another part of me was thinking about something else."
I nodded and kept quiet.
"What if..." she hesitated. "I know it's dumb... but what if, what's written in the book holds the secret of the Universe?"
"Just one?"
"The biggest, the most important secret. What if these passages hold the answer to life... What if they hold the key to happiness?"
"Happiness?" I supposed it was an interesting take. So I asked her, "What's your idea of happiness? How do you define it?"
"Me? Hmm—" she put a finger on her lips. "I guess... I don't know how to describe it. I think... happiness... is like the end."
"The end?"
"Like the end of a good story. Everything wraps up nicely and the meaning of the story reveals itself."
"Not all stories are so black-and-white, you know? Sometimes there are stories that have no meaning." She should know that.
Her expression changed ever so slightly. It wasn't a smile. She definitely wasn't smiling. But she looked happy.
"We don't know yet..." she said softly, her eyes fixed on her hands on the table.
Then she muttered something. Her voice so quiet it was barely audible.
"Maybe life is not as complicated as we think..."
The chances are very small, she mumbled. Very small. But even if there was the slightest possibility.
There's always a small chance that life is just another fairy tale.
I felt a knot in my stomach.
I sat and waited for a few seconds, before I picked up the empty bowls and went to the sink.
After a while, she quietly headed to her room.
My hands felt the water splashing against the bowl.
Maybe I shouldn't have talked over her when she was telling her ghost story. I could've got a decent ending out of it, whether it was tragic or not.
They live happily ever after, huh?
The flaw in her reasoning was clear as day. Unlike stories, life didn't have an end.
We might be blessed to live happily, but only for so long, until we could no longer.
But I was thinking that, maybe, to her, it was different.
It wasn't just a happy ending—it was the happy ending.
The happy end.
Or maybe it was something else, something more abstract.
The endless end.
The end that never was.
The end without an end.
The eternal beginning of the end—
I shook my head to myself.
What was I even thinking about?
But then again. Would it be right to support her ideals? It was her happiness, after all.
It was her choice—her world, seen through her own lens.
No one could ever impose their will on it.
Whatever she was looking for, I hoped she'd find it one day.