Cosmonaut
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Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion belongs to Studio Gainax and Hideaki Anno
Special thanks to my beta-reader anime-freaksg for his keen eye and commitment to making this average piece of fiction better.
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PART TWO - DOWNWIND
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Ayanami Rei thinks about the Russians when she can't sleep.
A long time back, after the Trials were over and she had been acquitted, all the pilots fell into the business of being media personalities. After all, they were the poster boys and girls of NERV, the children who had no choice but to step up and save the world. Their voices suddenly mattered when NERV ceased to exist.
Sometime during that period, she had given her first and only interview to a Russian news network. She never knew why she chose them. They had just asked at the right time.
Shinji and Toji had accompanied her for the session, both already accustomed to handling attention. They acted like the press minders NERV had, breaking the ice and helping her relax with the journalist. They stood just out of the camera's view, far enough to be insignificant, but close enough to prompt and reassure her with their presence.
She hardly understood the language. Still, she spoke to the journalist and camera as a translator spoke to in the general direction of her left ear. The questions were harmless and open-ended - unlike those she was asked at the trial that seemed to be deliberately trying to lead her to an answer the investigators desired.
"What was your earliest memory?"
"What did you do during your free time at NERV?"
"How did you feel when you first stepped out in Unit-00? When you faced your first Angel?"
"As a teenage girl, was there anyone particularly special to you at NERV?"
She thought it was refreshing: not being asked her about what happened during Third Impact, or what she could remember of it. Later, halfway into the interview, she understood the questions were deliberate. The journalist and her channel were detaching her from the single event that turned humanity upside down. She remembered feeling grateful that she was being asked mundane and normal things – things outside the sphere of Eva. So she answered them simply, the tone of the interview turning chatty.
Then, she received a photograph and the journalist asked her:
"What are your thoughts on this?"
She had seen it before: the giant face and ruin in her likeness, face-up, beheaded diagonally, dominating the horizon like a mountain. It had long rotted away and dissolved into LCL. But confronted with the image, she did not know what to make of it. Was it really her, like prosecutors at the Trials claimed? Just a clone? Or a monster who had borrowed her face?
The question lay before her, like a body, unanswered, unresolved. Her hand had gone to her forehead by reflex. The silence filled her throat, the room and the world. Shinji gestured at the Russians to cut the interview.
But the journalist took her hands in hers, and spoke to her in broken Japanese, "You don't need to say anything. Don't worry, you are more than that."
They never used any footage from that interview. Instead, the Russians gave her several pages in a lifestyle magazine. It featured a full-page shot of her sitting in the plush, polar white armchair at the interview, her chin planted on her upright arm. She thought it all looked unnecessarily artistic. Her side-profile also graced the front page, side-by-side with a famous Russian cosmonaut the same journalist had interviewed.
When she made it clear she wasn't interested in speaking to any other media, that interview became the reference material for future news and journalists.
So now when she can't sleep she walks over to her desk and seeks out the laminated copy. She thinks it unnerving: having so much connection to an inanimate object, similar to her previous attachment with the Commander's spectacles.
But no this is different, she think, this is part of her history, a halfway point in trying to understand herself. She looks at the Russian cosmonaut's mirror-image profile with its sharp long features. She reads the title in Cyrillic script ("Not all who wander are lost"). And she remembers the words the journalist spoke to her years back.
You are more than that.
The following week, she sees Shinji, Asuka and Toji in the papers.
The announcement that some government agency will be taking over research related to Project E occupies the front and centre pages of the daily broadsheet. But she doesn't bother with the story. Instead she scans the text to see where her former pilots are mentioned. Shinji's name and title – press secretary to the Japanese Defence Science agency – shows up whenever the text descends into technical details. On a facing page, a related news story declares that Toji has joined a Russian institute as a test pilot. Finally, a flattering photograph of Asuka, now chairperson of a scientific consulting firm, adorns a column dedicated to those who oppose further research.
There's a brief mention of a "fourth, original pilot", but she doesn't see her name anywhere. So once she's done reading, she tucks the newspapers away. She prepares the next meal, and goes to fetch the Commander.
Facing the window, the Commander sits slanted, his legs criss-crossed. She undoes and massages them, at the same time smoothening his creased pants.
"Are we comfortable today?" she asks.
"How can I be comfortable bored to death here?"
She halts, and looks at the Commander. He stares back, his gaze strong and hard. Under his wrinkled face, his eyes narrow and brows dip. It's the same impression she saw many years ago at NERV.
"Commander?"
"Stop calling me Commander. Those days are over."
"Do you know who I am?" she asks.
He looks at her as if she had just told him she was his father. "You're Rei. Who else would you be?"
She retreats to the kitchenette and pours herself a glass of water. By the time she's emptied the cup, she takes in the living room and the Commander sitting there patiently staring around the room, his head turning slowly, taking it all in.
"Can you get me something to read?" he asks, almost as if he's giving a command.
She calls Shinji first, then the caregiver. When Shinji's phone automatically goes to voicemail, she tries to tell it as clearly as possible.
"Sorry, but there's something –" she pauses, wishes he could would just pick up. "The Commander – your father is lucid today. He remembered me."
"Asuka is," he says, mirroring her stance by the railings as the river ebbs away behind, "well, the same as ever."
"Are you and her –?"
"No," he says. "No."
Once, probably four months back, Asuka had accompanied Shinji on one of his Friday visits. Rei remembers returning from the library to see an extra pair of shoes at the door. When she entered, she found her former compatriot doing exactly what she would've done: waiting in the kitchenette, flipping through yesterday's newspapers and drinking leftover tea.
"Hello, Wondergirl," Asuka said.
The presence of an additional person made the kitchenette seem awfully small. So she greeted Asuka with a nod, and worked around her. She picked up the used cups, dumped the tea, started dinner. She would've finished preparing dinner had Asuka not seized her wrist and pulled her outside into the common corridor.
"In the mood to talk to me like an adult?" Asuka said.
She remembers facing down Asuka outside her home and thinking: still the same. Asuka was a person defined by sharp angles: lock-jawed grin, back straight and still, just edging to the right. And the colour red, from the hair pulled sharply away from her face to the intense slash of her lips.
"Yes."
"Still the same, yes? A woman of a few words."
"You said you wanted to talk. Talk then."
"So what Shinji told me is true?" Asuka said. "You're happy with this full-time job of taking care of Ikari senior until he kicks the bucket?"
"You can see for yourself."
"Seriously you're spending your life living and cleaning up after an old war criminal with dementia?"
"He's Shinji's father." Then Rei decided to add: "He was once your commander."
Either Asuka did not catch her hint, or was completely immune to blind stabs at her conscience.
"Rei, why are you wasting your life?"
"That's a subjective statement." It was the best retort she could think of at that time.
"Subjective, my eye," Asuka pointed to her scarred eye for effect. "Look, I know age and time passes differently for you. But you've got to move forward. Everyone, the world, all the people involved in Project E have moved on. If I were you –"
"You're not."
" – I would do something that didn't involve the Commander or anything to do with stuff that happened before Third Impact. Like create a new identity. Get a new life. Settle down with someone."
"You know that isn't possible for me."
Asuka sighed, blew a stray lock of hair from her forehead. Her stance and face tightened in a clear attempt to be patient. At that moment, Rei had seen a hint of curved ridges and lines in her face, the creases at the very edge of her mascara-ed eyes. It brought to mind the streaks of silver in Shinji's hair. At once, she felt the conversation with Asuka take on a different meaning.
"Fine. Be that way. All I can say is, I hope you aren't stuck in this apartment the whole day."
"I go to the library," Rei replied.
"Hah. What a happening social life you have. Come here," Asuka patted the empty wall space beside her. Rei went over. "You know what? Add some makeup to your eyes. They'll look better. And wear your hoodie like this. Shinji likes it with your hair sticking out."
She let Asuka touch up her hair and adjust her hoodie. As Asuka's fingers brushed and messed her hair, Rei felt the gesture seemed almost – for a lack of a better word – motherly – or at least, she thought, what she thought an older sister would do.
"Better," Asuka declared.
Then her tone turned solemn. "Rei, speaking as someone who once faced a lot of shit with you: if you want to do something, don't wait. Wait for things too long and they're going to slip you by."
"I think," she said, trying to sound neutral. "I think I'm not the only one waiting for something."
Asuka had turned and stared, as if she'd been given some sagely advice. From then on until Shinji finished with his father, she didn't talk anymore. Instead, they waited by the door, side-by-side, in silence. After a while, Rei remembers how Asuka had put her elbow on her shoulder, leaning for support while absently playing with the strings of her hoodie. Rei let her.
She sees the corpse again. In a collection of testimonies from NERV's Moscow branch, one of the high-resolution photographs shows the corpse from the Russian coast. Instead of the sun, there's a face in its place. Its sunken grin melts away into a bloody archipelago of LCL, half-decomposed.
These photographs surface now and then in the course of her research, like signposts en route to some final truth. She stares at the giant in these images, tries to ignore the face and its contours, its leering half-smile that almost appears to taunt her: you are the cause of everything, you are a monster like me –
She can't concentrate today, so she puts the images aside and goes for a walk around the library. She tries to shut out the mental image of that creature, focusing instead on immediate things: the crackling of newspapers being turned, the hiss of books being shelved, whispered voices.
At the first window she comes across, she sees a world flooded with LCL and a giant disembodied chunk of white nose floating amidst the buildings.
She bites her lips until the coppery taste of blood seeps to the back of her throat. But when her eyes open, the corpse is still there.
you are the cause of everything, you are a monster like me –
She wanders. At the fiction section she pulls out thin volumes at random, flipping open pages to what she thinks her current age should be and circling the page numbers with a pencil. 30 – 44 – 45 – 32. In the maze of bookshelves, she runs her fingers along the edges of hardcover books. There's another window up ahead, but she's afraid that if steps into the milky afternoon light she'll see –
"Miss, you okay?"
He's wearing fake red ray-bans, which he tucks back with a gloved hand. His face peers out from the rectangular shelves, glowering, like a piece of food about to explode in a microwave.
"You're scaring the other guests with your walking up and down and staring out the windows ah." His voice drops to a lower tone, concerned. "Anyone here bothering you?"
Behind him the window glows, sunshine pouring in like liquid, pooling on the ceramic floor. She glances outside, past the librarian and sees buildings, the courtyard and clouds like rags. No faces, no corpses. No red-wine sea of LCL.
"I'm ok," she says.
She sways, allows him to escort her back to the table where her notes and books lie like the shredded wings of dying birds. The librarian sweeps up all the stray books and tucks them into the crook of his arm. As he lays them aside, he arranges her notes into the files.
Rei realises it's been years since someone has tidied up for her.
"You need to rest. I'll bring you into my break room."
So this is how it feels nice to be doted on – taken care of, she thinks. Before she can answer he lays the warm meat of his palm on her shoulder.
The sensation of touch spreads out from her shoulder like a fire, licking her bare skin. She responds to it on instinct, raising her own hand to the individual press of fingers. But when she turns to the librarian, she sees everything: his past, present and future –
A young boy in a jockey cap, a smartly-dressed librarian with a Mohawk, an old man with white hair spilling from his head – past, present, future, all sprawled out like channel changing on a television –
And beyond him, the walls of the library breaking down into ruin and regenerating back into form again – a thousand points on a history she can't pinpoint –
"No, I can't," she chokes out.
She pries his hand off her shoulder leaves without gathering her files, feeling nauseated. She squeezes her eyes shut so she won't have to see the librarian or the hurt look on his face. When she has the courage to finally open them, she sees the librarian staring down at her files as if the meaning of her departure is written somewhere at the bottom.
A strong wind stirs goosebumps on her exposed skin all the way back home.
Rei senses that something isn't right long before reaching the apartment. After the incident at the library, she almost expects something else to disrupt the routine – cook dinner, bathe the Commander, see him off to sleep – she's set in place.
Then, she sees Asuka outside her house.
Asuka's pacing the small square of space before the door. When Rei approaches her, she pauses and spins around. The look that breaks on her face is something Rei hasn't seen before: counterfeit patience giving way to relief.
"They've been at it for the last twenty minutes," Asuka tells her.
Asuka leans against the corridor wall, causing the angular slant of her body to be visible within her clothes. Rei doesn't get anything else out of her, her ex-colleague's silence a warning, as if the apartment had turned into a crime scene she would not discuss.
The first thing she hears when she enters her house is the echo of appliances running - the washing machine's low-pitched whirl and the kettle on the boil. A quick glance into the living room, and she sees the shadowy hunched figure of the Commander on the extra chair, his wheelchair parked by the shelf. She hears his ragged, throaty breathing seeping into the kitchenette.
In the kitchenette, Shinji's watching the white ghosts of tea towels fly in circles in the washing machine. He grips a cup of hot tea. She stands over him for close to a full minute before he realises she's there.
"Hello Ayanami."
She knows something's wrong when Shinji reverts back to formal speech.
"He's got some of his memory back, like you said," Shinji says. "And he -"
"Rei? Is that you?" a hoarse voice calls out from the other room, a voice so strong it reminds her of her days at NERV fighting Angels. "Where have you been?"
"We fought," Shinji says simply. "But I didn't want to leave before you came back."
"Rei?" the Commander's voice again.
"I'm here, Commander."
"You talking - to that worthless son of mine?"
She doesn't need any other explanation to act. So she puts dinner on the stove and ushers Shinji out. But the Commander's voice falls upon them like a bucket of bricks:
"He thinks I can - forget? He thinks I'm just going - to die in this chair?"
And: "Helping him run away from me again?"
They're out the door when Shinji lets out a sigh, as if he's been holding a deep breath underwater. Rei watches as he almost falls into Asuka, their bodies meeting, fingers crossing like clusters of entangled hooks.
"Let him run - let him run to that plaything of his - never dares face me like a man!" the Commander voice booms, before dissolving into a hacking series of coughs.
Asuka moves for the door. Rei blocks her.
"Let me handle this," she tells Asuka. "You take Shinji back."
"Thanks for looking after him," Shinji says, the colour from his face slowly returning.
Rei sees them off. At the elevator landing, Asuka looks solidly ahead, not meeting anyone's eyes. Shinji gratefully smiles back at her. Rei tries to maintain her composure.
But when they're in the elevator, Asuka's eyes rise to meet hers. Her voice reminds Rei of water lapping at the edges of the river near the apartment.
She says: "Take care, Wondergirl."
When she returns home, she pours two cups of tea from the pot Shinji made. She sets them down beside the Commander, cleans the encrusted spit from his lower lip and straightens is posture.
"Has that brat left?" he asks.
She winces at the term. But still responds. "Yes."
Then, conversation ceases. The Commander stares slack-jawed at her – past her – to something only he can see. She politely gazes at his hands instead. She's tempted to ask the Commander a question now that he's regained some of his memory, but she doesn't. Instead she finishes her tea in complete silence, offers some to the Commander and, when he refuses, prepares dinner.
They eat silently. Several moments in, the Commander's grip falters and his spoon falls to the table. He hunches forward as if trying to seize it, but his entire arm twitches. His lips part, his mouth opening into a call for help that never comes. Rei watches as a rivulet of dribbled soup makes his way down the Commander's flaccid chin, before staining his shirt she just washed.
"Rei?" he croaks.
"Commander?"
His sunken eyes sparkle in the light as his body squirms in his chair.
"Rei?"
"What happened during Third Impact?"
The question spills from her mouth before she can help it. The Commander's frown deepens, reducing his eyes to near blinds. She doesn't know if he's trying to process the question or just stunned from the abruptness of it. When he doesn't respond to her, she urges herself on. She can't let this window of clarity escape her.
"What happened to me during Third Impact, Commander?"
"Why don't I age?"
"Why do I see things?"
"What am I?"
He responds: "Rei."
This time his tone is different, and the sound of her name from his tongue silences her. One of his hands reaches for and grips the table's edge. He straightens himself and makes eye contact. In just a moment, the roles are reversed, and Rei knows that this small, shrunken man is still her Commander.
So she goes around and picks up the spoon. She fits herself between his body and the table, almost straddling his child-like legs to feed him like she's done for hundreds of nights before. When she's finished, she wipes his mouth clean.
When her back's turned at the sink, he speaks: "You were an experiment."
She stops everything.
"You were a vessel for something greater," he says.
His voice is nothing more than a struggling whisper, like a slow stream of water from the kitchen tap. But Rei soaks up every syllable, every inflection, every word that oozes truth from the man himself. She imagines the years of things said between Asuka and Shinji, the things that the Major and Doctor won't tell her, the multiple images of that iceberg-like head floating in the ocean that looked exactly like hers. And she knows that she needs to get the Commander to tell her everything.
"And?" she asks, pressing.
The Commander's mouth curls into a slight smile – or a sneer – she can't really tell.
"And?"
"You're just a copy," he says. "A flawed copy –"
She knows the words even before they exit his twitching lips.
"A monster."
Rei chases down her dinner with a last cup of tea from the pot Shinji made. Silt rides through her teeth and down her throat along with lukewarm English Breakfast. She sets her cup down, steadies her hands. She closes her eyes. She wants to tell herself that what she's doing is just. When she opens them, she's unconvinced.
She does it anyway.
When the Commander dozes off in his wheelchair, she takes the handles. She pauses at way to his bedroom, but in a moment's decision she eases the wheelchair out the main door instead. She guides him down the corridor, past other units where people live like stationery in drawers, and into the glow of a horizontal slash of fluorescent light by the elevator landing. The beep of the elevator causes the commander to stir. His mouth moves, but his eyes remain closed.
At the top floor she navigates the Commander in his wheelchair up the raised parapet below the roof. The Commander stirs again, and his eyes come open, mutely staring at her. She throws a blanket over his face.
Access to the roof means going up a ladder with its bars punched into the wall like staplers. So instead she moves the Commander out into the open, along the edge of the parapet, by the rusting bars lining the edge. They're so high up the buildings have lost definition in the dark, and the river squirms away like a twisted finger in the distance. Here, the wind is so strong she can feel it threatening to cut her head off. It causes her blanket over the Commander's face to billow like a flag.
She moves him to the edge of the parapet. Thirty floors below, a car gives a gassy moan and pulls out of the carpark.
She thinks: she could finish it. She could right the injustices of the Commander's lenient punishment. She holds the handles of the wheelchair like she's holding onto the controls of Unit-00. She imagines she's fighting an angel, where pulling the reins on the console would make the world a safer place.
She could remove the one thing that loomed over all of their lives like a shadow, the last remnant of NERV's twisted generation. She could set the Commander free of his pathetic earthly shell, unite him with his beloved. And she would be free too.
She thinks it amazing how one single action could do and undo so many things.
But free - to what?
"Rei," the Commander says.
Grey cumulus clouds dominate the night sky, rising like thrones above the harsh lights of faraway buildings. She holds the handles, imagines waiting for an Angel to strike, visualises pulling the trigger on her gun, feeling the sharp rush of adrenaline that comes when she does something important or unexpected -
She lets go.
Lying on her bed that night, she can feel the absence of another living thing from the house. The stillness accumulates in dark corners, pools in the floor at the edge of her bed. It reminds her of her old hovel when she was still working for NERV.
She shuts her eyes but can't seem to sleep, so she sits up on her bed. Her head feels heavy from all the days' events. She doesn't want to think of tomorrow morning, of what she'll do. All she thinks about is the present.
A neighbour's TV blathers on somewhere behind the walls. Once in a while, she hears the shush of water racing through pipes. Her notes and papers stand out starched white in the piss-coloured light from the window.
Monster, the Commander said.
On nights like this, she can imagine herself taking the four steps in the dark to her desk to find the Russian magazine to affirm her humanity, to see herself side-by-side with the cosmonaut. But tonight she takes one finger and traces her skin from the centre of her palm across unblemished skin to the curve of her triceps. She traverses skin that hasn't aged, bled or wrinkled, as pristine as new soap.
Monster, the commander said.
She follows her arm up to shoulder, to the pale cross of her collarbone, until her hands are almost wringing her own neck.
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End
Edited 03.11.2013 (first), 22.11.2013 (second)
End Notes: I know this ended a bit ambiguously, but there will be one more chapter - an epilogue. It's already written. It will be up latest by Monday. It's time to finish this story and tie the loose ends.
A short disclaimer: I don't work in the medical care/ eldercare line, but I understand that caregivers are under a lot of stress to handle their patients, deal with family members and help out in their facilities. So if this story did speak to you as a stressed out medical care worker, please find someone to talk to or share your problems with.
Thanks to all who've given comments and feedback. All I can say is I hope this chapter & the epilogue will meet your expectations.
Questions: (a) Asuka's included in this chapter. Is her presence a distraction from the focus on Rei's life? And, (b) the part explaining Rei's link with the term cosmonaut was meant to be a standalone chapter. I wanted a clear link in the context of the story. Anyone finds the explanation a bit lame?
Once again, thanks for reading!