Into the Light: Caesura

"Into the Light: Caesura"

On a cold, Tuesday night, behind an electronics shop, among piles of discarded garbage and goods, he found the fetus.  It was covered in ants, but their tiny mandibles somehow failed to tear little bits back to their insatiable broods. 

Reckless perhaps, without first apprehending why, he picked it up, and so abandoned his forage through the neighborhood.  With a hand gloved in an old sock, he brushed away the ants.  Its skin glowed white in the streetlight, like a pearl freed from the oyster’s flesh to bathe in moonlight.  He slipped it into his coat pocket and immediately felt both guilty and exhilarated for doing so. 

His mind absorbed in what he’d found, habit guided his steps through the maze of streets and alley-ways at the edge of Akihabara, Tokyo’s technological gullet.  Anyone risking a glance towards him would assume he was homeless: Dressed in layers of old clothes, unshaven, with long, unkempt black hair streaked with gray, he shuffled along pushing a shopping cart in front of him, mumbling, always mumbling, reviewing memories.  Apart from the shabbiness of his clothes and his lack of grooming, he shared a distinctive trait with supermarket shoppers the world over: He never ceased scanning for things useful that had been overlooked by others.  Yet he did have a small apartment nearby.  There he assembled gadgets from parts scavenged throughout the district which he then sold at the Saturday flea markets near the station. 

Why had it been there?  Why had it been cleaned and then put in the garbage?  Maybe it had been loved.  Maybe it had been cleaned before it had died, and the mother, lost in grief, had thrown it away—though lost to what he couldn’t name.  Or maybe death had come first and then the mother had cleaned away the blood and amniotic fluids, whispering words of love and apology, as if these could swath the infant in vestments soft and warm.  Maybe it hadn’t been a mother, though.  Maybe it had been a father who’d grieved and cleaned but, just as the mother, was unable to wipe away the regrets of memories to be.  Maybe it had been a father who’d cut himself from grief and left it out for others to dispose of.  But why?

Whoever they had been, they didn’t even put it in a bag, as if they hadn’t feared discovery.  Were they senseless and uncaring?  Were they criminals, pathologically alien to the law or considerations of the future?  Like a leech blindly probing the coruscating rot and rebirth of a swampy pool, a motive he’d be foolish to ignore swam through the mire of considerable possibilities: The fetus had been planted there to break him out of the blur of his day-to-day existence, to, in effect, involve him in a situation beyond himself.  Which was ridiculous.  They couldn’t have known he, specifically, would uncover it.  How could they have known?  Could they have been watching him since he’d been left alone, and then done this to break or mend a mind racing in the rut of a feedback loop? 

He opened the door to his apartment and wrestled the shopping cart inside.  The circular fluorescent bulb over the kitchen table blinked into life.  A TV was laid out on the table.  On top of the refrigerator a small radio began a classical tune, which was then driven into the background by two male voices enthusing about a recent exhibition of Michelangelo.  All of the room, except a small circle of open space around the kitchen table, was piled high with electronics, some complete, some incomplete, but in the whole mass of assembled circuitry these two states were impossible to discern.  There was just the one room and two doors, one of which lead to the toilet and one which led outside.  This was not a room through which people would come and go.  This was just a room, with human or without.

He moved the TV parts off the table and then laid the fetus in the cleared space.  He was amazed by how smooth its skin was and how it seemed to glow.  He couldn’t keep it here, he knew.  He had to call someone.  The police?  Had a crime been committed?  He wasn’t sure.  But he knew if he did call the police would ask questions to which he might not have answers.  They’d be annoyed with him, or worse.  Why had he picked it up?  He couldn’t say why, even now, free of their stare and accusations.  Why did he chase them?  Couldn’t he understand why he had to be suspected?  Why has he crying if not out of guilt?  He’d be taken to the station; interrogated, perhaps charged with a crime he couldn’t guess.  Could they, would they, believe he’d simply found a fetus in the garbage and picked it up?  Could they, would they, believe that he’d carried it home without understanding why?  Of course not.  That wasn’t rational.  Did such events manifest themselves often enough from the firmament of the roiling cosmos that the authorities would have procedures established to guide their steps?  Wouldn’t it be mad to hope so?

He could call the hospital.  The old couple next door had done that late one night.  The paramedics had taken the unmoving man away.  The woman had remained in the building for some time he couldn’t recall and then had been gone, too.  He knew ambulances took away the living and the dead, but did they take away things that’d never been alive?  Maybe this fetus had never been born; the idea of BEING.BORN.DEAD writhed around and out from under the finger of understanding.  If it had never been born, then it couldn’t have made any impressions in and of the world; no waves of change could’ve moved out from it, except in the mother’s body.  Only the mother could’ve said whether it had changed and been changed, whether it had lived.  But she was not here.  There was him, alone.  If he called the hospital what would or could they decide?  If they decided that it had never been alive, then he would have wasted their time and they, too, might become angry with him.  Maybe they, too, would be annoyed and leave and he, being afraid, would chase after again, pleading for them to tell him how to keep them here.  And no matter how much he’d plead or how fast he’d run, they’d hurry away until they wouldn’t have time to look before stepping into the street and the truck would smash into their softness, scattering their bodies and spilling their blood across the pavement.  No.  Better not risk calling out.  Only him here.  This thing on the table was outside of help.  But he had to do something, didn’t he?  He couldn’t leave it here.  He didn’t want to be alone with it any more. 

Just him here and this thing in front of him, and that situation wasn’t going to change by itself, was it?  He prodded the fetus in the hip with a screwdriver.  His mind went back to the police.  Just throwing it out wasn’t going to change his relationship to it.  But then, what the law would reproach him for was not any connection as such, but his own clumsiness in allowing himself to be put in a position where he had to prove there was, in fact, no connection, and thereby creating an impossible expectation. 

He pulled a can of beer from the fridge and took a long drink before sitting down again.

He had to get rid of it.  He toyed with the idea of setting it in the garbage to be taken care of by another.  He could even bag it—better than he had found it.  No.  That would be disrespectful.  If this thing was to be thrown away, it shouldn’t be done with honesty and in full consideration of the act being performed.  Anyway, to put another in the same situation he couldn’t resolve would be cowardice.

In a darkened room full of awkward shadows and a few reflective surfaces, in a small circle of lamplight the man sits, looking at a fetus glowing impossibly white, its tiny lips parted, an undiscovered ant wandering the darkness inside, in the caesura that death bears.