THE GRADUATES
by
Alan Harnum
Utena and its characters belongs to Be-PaPas, Chiho Saito,
Shogakukan, Shokaku Iinkai and TV Tokyo.
E-mail : harnums@thekeep.org
Transpacific Fanfiction: http://www.thekeep.org/~mike/transp.html
Utena Fanfiction Repository: http://www.thekeep.org/~harnums/UFR/
Post-series story. Full knowledge of the TV series necessary to
understand, and some spoilers.
* * *
They met in the first tutorial for The Western Canon in
Translation: he was in his final year of Honours Mathematics,
taking it as an elective out of personal interest, and she was a
freshman with no real idea of what she wanted to do with her
life.
He'd noted her in class, she'd noted him as well--both noted
one another with the casual, meaningless recognition of someone
as a momentary intruder into some sphere of the self's world, one
that will pass away soon enough into nothingness once again.
They only ended up meeting in the way that means anything because
they chanced to be seated beside each other (perhaps, given what
happened later, "chanced" was the wrong word, perhaps they could
no more have avoided truly meeting then they could have broken
the law of gravity, but chance it seemed at the time, and chance
they called it) at the first tutorial, and she'd forgotten her
copy of _The Iliad_.
"Mind if I look over your shoulder when we discuss specific
passages?" she asked quietly.
"You're free to, if you wish," he answered. He had a
reputation for coldness (some compared him, behind his back, to
a computer), but it was really that no one had ever tried to
teach him how to be warm.
After the tutorial was over, she asked him if he was free to
join her for coffee, and even though he technically had a class
to go to, where the professor would teach him concepts he already
understood and show him how to solve equations he could have
solved as a freshman, he said he was. At a chipped plastic table
in the corner of a cafe a short walk from the small campus, they
drank cappuccinos and talked of Homer, while the ceiling fan
blurred overhead.
"Kind of silly when you think about it," she said. "All of
these brave and noble warriors, and all they're really fighting
over in the end is a woman. A terrible waste."
"They were noble and admirable men who fought for a petty
and ignoble cause. It is part of their tragedy." And he sipped
his cappuccino.
She touched the middle knuckle of her right index finger to
her mouth in thought. "It's the fault of the gods, really.
Though Paris being so stupid didn't help much. I mean, what kind
of choice is that to make? The world's most beautiful woman,
over being the wisest man in the world, or the most powerful man
in the world?"
He smiled a little. "With power, he could easily have made
Helen his. With wisdom, he would have known how to make her fall
in love with him. Yes? That is what you are thinking?"
She nodded.
"I've thought of that myself a few times since I began
reading," he began. "And, yes, on one level, Paris was a fool to
make the choice he did. But, on another level... perhaps he did
not choose a woman, but what she represented; he chose, rather,
Beauty. For beauty is a sublime mystery, and if he had chosen
Wisdom and thereby come to know all things, there would be no
beauty left in the world for him. And if he had chosen Power...
what kind of man is he who would love Power more than Beauty or
Wisdom?
She thought briefly on that, then said, "I think you're
giving Paris a little too much credit. He was just thinking with
his dick instead of his head."
He stared at her for a moment, shocked, then burst out
laughing, the laughter of a man unused to it, who has only just
discovered how pleasurable it is.
Coffee again the next night, dinner on the weekend. Repeat,
with variations, for three weeks. Then she accepted his
invitation to go back to his apartment for a drink after the
movie (the first such invitation he'd made), and they ended up in
bed together by a kind of mutually unspoken agreement that it was
time.
Neither of them was a virgin, but neither of them was very
experienced, either. There was little of the awkwardness that
often came of the first sex between two people--they learned the
ways of one another's bodies by a scientific method of hypothesis
and experiment, which seemed to work out quite well. After it
was done, they lay in each other's arms amidst the sweaty tangle
of the bedsheets, with a cold autumn wind fluttering the pale
curtains and blowing over their skin.
"Tell me something about yourself," she murmured, head
pillowed upon his strong, slender chest, fingers resting against
the hollow of his throat. "Something no one else knows."
"I don't know what to tell you," he said, his hand gently
caressing loose strands of pale-rose hair. "My life has not been
particularly interesting."
"Anything," she prompted, "so long as no one else knows it."
"Hmm." He thought for a moment. "When I was seven, I spent
the entire summer killing ants. I waged a kind of one-boy war
against them, with cheerful childish sadism. Water, fire, a
magnifying glass, a hammer... I had many different methods." His
hand stopped moving upon her hair. "In hindsight, it disturbs me
to recall how much pleasure I took at that young age in bringing
death to so many creatures who had done nothing at all to offend
me."
"And no one else knows that?"
"No one," he replied. He shifted a little, and brought an
arm down to embrace her around the midsection, right below her
breasts. "No one."
"Want to ask me something?"
He smiled. "Tell me something about yourself," he said.
"Something no one else knows."
She was silent for a long time.
"I lost my virginity at age fourteen," she said finally.
"To a much older man. I've always regretted that."
"Oh." He lightly touched her cheek. "Am I..."
"Yes," she replied, before he finished, "you are."
"Oh."
"Do you ever get the impression," she said after a moment,
"that every memory we have is merely a delusion, that the past
has no existence, that we live merely in one eternal moment?"
He thought on it briefly. "Yes," he agreed. "All the
time."
* * *
Winter came, and passed away, and in the spring, shortly after
he got his degree, she moved out of her dorm and into his
apartment.
"You don't think this is too early?" she asked, unpacking
her things from a cardboard box, as he looked over his shelves to
see which of his books he could discard to make room for hers.
"I don't think it's too early," he replied, selecting a few
of his old textbooks that he no longer needed. "Do you think
it's too early?"
"No, I don't think it's too early."
He'd been thinking of taking a year off before he began his
graduate work anyway, and she only made the decision easier. He
got a job at a software company where he'd worked in the summer,
as a programmer and debugger, and spent eight hours a day, five
days a week, staring at lines of code that were complex and
beautiful to him as a jewel of many facets. He'd occasionally
come close to holding the conviction, common to mathematicians
and physicists, that reality really was based upon numbers and
equations, and coding was like being able to construct his own
tiny reality.
She called him her sugar daddy once, only half-jokingly, and
they had an argument over his insistence that she didn't need to
work. She went to class, joined the fencing team, and chose
Literature as her major. "At least you have a useful degree,"
she said, again only half-jokingly. She was a good cook, but he
made an effort to make dinner a few nights a week even though he
wasn't. They had frequent minor arguments over the housekeeping,
as he was punctiliously tidy, and she wasn't.
During her break, he took a week off work, and they went
camping in the mountains. They made love in a tent beneath the
circling stars, huddled together tightly for warmth in one large
sleeping bag all through the night afterwards, and spent their
days hiking beneath the boughs of tall pines.
On the night before they returned home, she had a terrible
nightmare, and woke him with her tears upon his skin. He held
her close and told her to tell him about it.
"I dreamt that you were my enemy," she explained. Tear-
tracks shone in the moonlight upon her cheeks. "And that I
pierced you with a million swords, until your body became mist
and disappeared altogether."
He said nothing, but touched her face in the pitch-darkness
of the tent, like a blind sculptor seeking memory the eyes cannot
give.
"You wore a black rose at your breast," she continued,
eyelids closing to the stroke of his fingers. "It had seven
stems, and there was bright blood upon its thorns."
Something stirred deep inside him, like a wave building far
from a village on the shore, but it receded as he kissed her
closed eyes and cupped one slender, perfect, naked breast in his
hand.
Near the end of the next summer, after her sophomore year
was finished, the dark woman came, and everything changed.
* * *
It was the hottest night of the year, and they sweltered in the
apartment with their two electric fans running full blast, she in
a tank-top and shorts, he in loose slacks and nothing else.
Outside, cars crept through the muggy close-to-midnight air.
"Let's go for a walk," she suggested as she poured them both
another glass of lemonade. "It can't be any worse out there than
it is in here."
He shrugged, pulled on a shirt over his bare chest, buttoned
it loosely up to his breastbone, and slipped on his shoes.
Outside, it wasn't any worse, though not for lack of trying. More
than the usual number of people walked the streets that night,
most of them with the same idea in mind as they'd had. They met
some of her friends from the university that he hadn't been
introduced to, and had a few beers with them at a quiet table in
the local bar. He felt, as was usual for him when spending time
with her friends, much older than her than he actually was.
It was nearly two in the morning when they parted from the
others, and he was grateful he didn't have work that day. She,
having a low tolerance for alcohol and having drunk more than he
had, swayed a little upon his arm as they walked through the
thick summer night-haze.
A block from their apartment building, they passed a dark-
skinned woman in a flowing red gown whose liquid eyes seemed too
bright with the reflected moonlight. They walked slowly, and she
walked slowly by them.
After she had passed, her whisper reached back like an echo
from somewhere out of their time. "If the chick does not break
its shell," it said, old and tired and faded as a funereal rose,
"it will die without being born..."
A twinge like a harp's plucked string sounded within his
heart, and he whirled back to look after the dark woman. But she
had already turned the corner, and was gone.
She looked up from her grip upon his arm. "What'd she say?"
she murmured blearily.
"I don't know," he replied.
Later, in bed, he kissed the nape of her neck delicately,
and slid his hands down the smooth expanse of her belly towards
her hips, but she said that she was tired. He rolled over with
his back to her and stared out the window at the lights of
passing cars.
After he finally fell asleep, he dreamt of the dark woman.
She made love to both of them, and her breasts were as a field
of fragrant jasmine flowers, and her neck was as a tall tower
of black onyx, and her hair was as a hanging garden, and her lips
were as a ripe red fruit, and her sweet thighs were the gates of
paradise.
Months later, at dinner after the first day of her third
year at the university, she said, casually, "Remember that woman
we passed on the street that night we went walking near the end
of summer? Dark skin, red dress?"
"Yes," he said, and nearly shuddered with the memory of his
dream.
"She's in two of my classes. Sits beside me in Twentieth-
Century Japanese Lit. Talked to her today a few minutes before
class started. She's really nice."
"Oh? Where's she from?"
She looked a little askance at him. "Why's that matter?"
He shrugged. "Just wondering. She's obviously not from
around here."
"India, I think," she answered after a moment. "She told me
her name was Parvati. That's an Indian name, right?"
"I think so," he replied, not really knowing.
"Want to meet her?" she asked, as though she could
unconsciously read his thoughts. "I'm going out for coffee with
her tomorrow. You're off work by five, right?"
"I will be," he answered.
Parvati was exotic and beautiful and intelligent and
intriguing, and neither of them could take their eyes off her the
entire time. They asked her back to the apartment for a drink
afterwards.
Near midnight, Parvati paused in mid-sentence, looked at the
clock, and said, "I really should go now. I didn't mean to keep
the two of you up so late."
"Do you truly have to go?" he heard himself ask softly, as
though he listened to his own words from a distant place.
Dark Parvati rose from her chair without a word, and her red
dress slipped to the floor. Beneath, she wore nothing at all,
and her skin seemed to glow in the moonlight. She spread her
hands wide at her sides, in a gesture of all-encompassing
beckoning.
They came to her both as wayward lambs to their long-lost
mother, and her body was as a field of young green grass beneath
their mouths, and her breasts were as soft heather upon dark
mountain slopes, and her eyes were as two moonlit pools deep
within an ancient forest, and her voice was as a master-player's
harp, and her sweet thighs were the gates of paradise.
Later, they rested, heads upon her breasts, her arms holding
them both to her. In time, they fell asleep. When he awoke, he
was alone in the bed, and the one who had called herself Parvati
sat nude upon the floor, legs folded beneath her, watching him
with unblinking eyes.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
"If the chick does not break its shell," she said, in
strong, clear, ringing tones, like a brazen bell, "it will die
without being born."
He felt something clutch his heart tightly, like the thorny
vines of a black rose.
"But even after the chick is born," she continued, voice
rising and resounding and echoing, until the walls of the small
bedroom shook and plaster cracked, until the glass of water on
the nightstand shattered and splashed upon the floor, "it is weak
and helpless. It cannot fly. It must be cared for by its
mother. It must be taught to fly, even after it has broken its
shell. If the chick never flies, it would have been better for
it never to have been born at all."
"Who are you?" he whispered again.
She rose, legs unfolding smoothly as the unfolding petals of
a lily. Her hair hung down to her ankles, and she shone like a
new-born star. "I am Parvati," she began, "I am Durga and Kali.
I am Diana and Hecate and Circe. I am Tiamat. I am the salt
waters. I am the great sow that births and devours her young."
He wept then, in terror and awe. She brushed his tears
away, smiling. "For too long," she said tenderly, "I had
forgotten. For too long, everything has been twisted. It is not
I who is supposed to suffer; it is not I who is meant to die and
be reborn. I am eternal."
She pushed him back down upon the bed and straddled him,
rode atop him as though he were only another steed, for that was,
he realized, all that he was and all that he would ever be. Her
hair was as thorny vines, and her teeth were as a white fence of
bones, and her her tongue was as a bright sharp sword, and her
breasts were as two fierce lions, and her dark thighs were the
gates of hell. At the end, he spasmed, and loosed himself within
her, and she sank down atop him with a smile, stretching her body
across his like the sea submerging an island.
"Will you fly, young chick?" she murmured, touching his
lips, his eyes, his nose, his ears, his tongue. "Can you fly,
still? Dust and ashes--dust and ashes is all you are." She
paused. "But, then, are any of you not, in the end?"
For a second, she wore the face of a young and beautiful
boy, and thorns of grief pierced his heart.
"Where is she?" he asked her. "What have you done with
her?"
"She is in the kitchen," was the answer. "I have taught her
to fly."
"Will you... will you teach me?" he asked.
"You must learn to fly in a different way," she murmured,
and moved off the bed, stood staring out the window with her back
to him. "The time will come, soon or late, that I must face him.
It cannot be any other way. He has grown strong, and I have
grown weak. As I shall have my servants, so too shall he have
his. Things are not as they were."
Suddenly, she spun back towards him. "But they shall be,"
she hissed through her white teeth. "As it was in the beginning,
so shall it be again in the end, and my brother shall learn once
and for all time what his role must be."
"Teach me," he insisted. "Teach me to fly. Teach me to fly
all the way to the ends of eternity." He scrambled from the bed
and placated himself at her feet. "Teach me, oh, great goddess,
oh, my great love, Parvati, Durga, Kali, Diana, Hecate, Circe..."
The names went on, dredged from the deepest sediments of his
unconscious mind, from out of abyssal salt-seas where black roses
grew amidst the coral.
She laughed, terrible as an army arrayed for battle, and
kicked him over onto his back as one might a tortoise. The ball
of her bare foot pressed down upon his chest, right over his
heart.
"If you would fly," she said, without kindness or pity or
cruelty or scorn, "then you must be reborn. I require both a
priestess and a consort, and I shall love you both in ways you
cannot imagine."
The sound of footsteps.
"Come, my priestess," the goddess whispered, and there was
love in it, so fierce and strong that it would consume everything
that stood before it like an inferno. "Come, and crack your
shell, as you cracked mine, and we shall fly towards eternity
together."
He cried out, gently.
"To spread your wings, you must be reborn, consort," she
murmured. "And to be born again, first you have to die."
He saw then that his love stood framed in the bedroom
doorway, and that she held a silver knife in her slim, pale
hands.
END
Notes:
I had the idea for a post-series Mikage/Utena story some weeks
ago, but didn't actually have a plot to go with it that
sufficiently interested me enough to write it.
In an e-mail exchange with Paul Corrigan, the possibility was
raised of Anthy and Akio as a product of the twisting of the
traditional relationship of a tripartite lunar goddess to her
ever-dying, ever-reborn consort/brother/lover (often all three at
once), as found in many of the more primal mythologies of
numerous cultures.
These two separate concepts became fused in my mind, and this
story resulted.
Reading over what I've written, I detect a certain influence from
Elizabeth Hand's excellent novel "Waking the Moon", which I
recommend highly, both as a fuller treatment of the tripartite
lunar goddess mythology and as a truly fine piece of speculative
fiction.