Consciousness comes and goes like the tides. In fact, it’s like drowning. Drowning in darkness, drowning in blood, drowning in music. Take your pick.
Sometimes it’s easier to drift, to let go and let the darkness suck me down. Fighting is painful. But there’s not much peace in letting go. Down below the darkness hell lurks, waiting to take me back, and soon I’m thrashing my way back to the surface again, as frightened as when I first bolted out of Mikaboshi’s lab like a startled rabbit.
Of course, there at the brink, between darkness and light, between consciousness and the nightmares, is pain. I’m caught between hell below and agony above. Maybe between two hells, pulling on my soul like children fighting over a toy. It comes to me only gradually that there is a wall of pain keeping me from awareness because someone is torturing me.
The fact that I realize this denotes a degree of awareness. I retreat from the pain into the darkness, then push forward again. The results are the same, I am being tortured. It’s a different feeling than the torments of the Wicked City. There the whole hell was designed to inflict excruciation. The acid rain, burning the skin, the stomach cramping food, processed from weaker souls, the flickering fluorescents that seared the retinas, and the implants, deep inside, orchestrating the agony.
This new torture is different, not ubiquitous, but deliberate. We’re talking movie torture. Hot needles, jumper cables, scalpels. I bounce back and forth between the torture and my hell. I fear it’s driving me mad. But how does one objectively determine if one has lost his mind? There are no tests I can perform to gauge my sanity. Is the music real?
Yes. I determine that it is. I am hearing music every time I rise towards awareness and the torment in my way. This indicates a higher degree of consciousness than I previously possessed. I am in a room, perhaps ten paces square. The walls are dark stone or concrete, as is the floor. I can feel my arms wrenched above my head, though I can’t tell how I am tied because my wrists are numb and throbbing. There is a drain directly below my feet.
I am naked.
There’s a long table against one of the walls covered in the instruments with which I have been tortured, the ones that are polished reflecting the dim light coming from fixtures on the walls. Very few of the instruments are polished, most are dark with rust or blood. The music is playing lightly in the background. The atmosphere is somewhere between a medieval dungeon and a romantic diner.
My hostess embodies the contradiction. She’s a petite Japanese woman with porcelain white skin and a round face. However, her hair is bone-white, despite her apparent youth. If that were her only oddity she might have turned a few heads and nothing more, however, her black leather outfit exposed countless body modifications. Everything was pierced. Long needles were thrust through her skin in shiny rows, spiked studs were mounted on her hands, and her back had been slit open along her spine, then laced closed with black silk. She was terrifying and she was beautiful.
I retreat into darkness.
There’s no sense of time when you are drifting in and out of awareness, your mind not even fully your own. The passage of time is a backdrop against which I can measure progress and change and without it I am drifting. Moments are centuries, time slowing down or speeding up in relation to my perceptions.
I think I am aware again. I can hear the music and feel the pain. I hear a voice and I realize that I am speaking to the woman who tortures me. I expected it to be hoarse and cracked from disuse. My throat is a little raw from screaming, but otherwise smooth. I take a moment, the music fading as my awareness focuses inwards, contemplating what this means.
I have been speaking for some time. Often enough not to have lost my voice, yet I have been unconscious. I hypothesize that another awareness has been speaking from my mouth, but I need evidence to support this conjecture. My gut feeling is not enough. As I try to focus on the waking world again, I hear the woman asking me about the music playing in the small room and I hear my own voice answering it. I claim to recognize the music, a piece that played at my wedding, though I do not remember the name.
This isn’t true and the woman seems to know it. My hypothesis is supported, though I wonder at this awareness using my body and voice. The woman punishes me for my lies and the agony flares brightly. In the midst of the pain I understand.
I am me. I am the consciousness struggling against the darkness and the pain, and I am the voice which lies. That cruel speaker is the self that escaped from hell, the soul which forgot happiness and life. Somehow, when I escaped from the Wicked City, I found that part of me which remembered. But these two parts of me are not fully reunited. I am not one soul, but two.
My dark half is strong, toughened by the torments of hell and made bold by the victory of its escape. My light half is weak and confused, and perhaps would have been lost. I examine the few waking memories I have after hell and I conclude that something lured my higher soul out of the darkness. The music.
Every night it is the same, music and pain. My dark soul rages and it lies with every breath, but my consciousness clings to the music. I fight against my own soul and finally my body is my own, I am afloat on the darkness. I can feel the depths below, and the waves threatening to submerge me again, but for now, the fresh air gives me strength.
That is when my teaching begins. My new sensei is called Sweet Swallow’s Song, a strange, but beautiful name. I listen to the music and I understand. She gives me a choice as well, to endure pain and torment, until I am cast back into hell, or to rise above it and become a person once again. Music or torture. The choice seems simple enough, and it would be to anyone who’s soul was whole, whose internal darkness did not have a voice with which to scream lies and strength with which to wrest their very body from their control.
I learn what it is to be gaki, and I learn that Swallow’s Song is gaki as well. We both began in hell, and we both walk the Road Back. The difference is that Swallow’s Song is far along that road. My own feet drag with the weight of my inner demon, and if I stumble on this narrow and treacherous part of the path, hell is waiting to swallow me up again. That we are both the same is called the Way of Origin, the first of the Great Principles. It is this respect for all who walk the Road Back that prevents Swallow’s Song from destroying me outright.
Some nights I hear the music clearly enough to claim my body, and on those nights I learn. On some nights my darkness is too strong to be denied and on those nights I suffer.
On a night that my demon-self is strong and the music is loud there is a visitor. The door opens and I raise my head – I have not yet been outside that door, I have not earned that right. My wind soul rises to the surface and I feel shame. There is no reason to be ashamed of my nudity, but I feel shamed for this new person to see me as I am now, not yet in control over my own demon-soul.
It is ZhiZhu, a member of the Thousand Li Scouts. Swallow’s Song has told me that if I master my own soul, then I will join this blood family. I want to have an Uji. I crave that fellowship like I crave chi. But with that thought I am reminded that I must steal chi from the flesh of the dead, and my shame is renewed.
ZhiZhu watches me, gauging me. By her name I conclude that she is Chinese, rather than Japanese, supported by the slant of her eyes and the curve of her cheek. I wonder what brought this woman to Nippon, and what made her one of the Thousand Li Scouts. It gives me hope to see another cloven soul who has taken the first steps along the Road Back.
The conversation is mostly between my sensei and the guest. I do not wish to shame myself further by speaking and revealing my appalling lack of enlightenment. When she leaves I raise my head again.
I tell Swallow’s Song that she can remove the chains that hold me. They are no longer necessary. I am ready to learn.
My sensei smiles. The chains shatter without my ever having seen her move. She turns up the music.
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