CHAPTER THREE: HIMONYA-KOEN AND THE HANDS OF THE NORMAL GIRL
Ranma studied the soft object that he had just plucked out of his eye. It was a cherry blossom petal, one of countless many swept up in the cool early afternoon breeze whipping mischievously around them.
They were walking along a tree-lined path at Himonya Park. She was leading three or four steps ahead of him. Her stride was quick and animated with a confident sense of purpose. She had clearly been here before.
Her left hand was clutched onto the strap of a small white purse slung from right to left across her small shoulders. She had stuffed a handful of white cocktail napkins into her bag as they were leaving Sartre.
"What are ya — ?"
"Just wait. You'll understand," she had said cryptically with a small, secretive smile.
At some point, they veered left off of the central path onto the perimeter wrapping around the lake around which the park had been constructed. They eventually came up in the vicinity of a small boathouse in one of the more secluded areas of the park.
Here she stepped off of the path and wordlessly began studying some of the larger trees. She pushed up hard against the trunks and tugged on the low hanging branches of a few before finally finding one that she liked.
"Meet me up there," she said, pointing up.
Ranma turned and tracked his eyes in the direction she had indicated. Above them was a large branch at least eight meters above the ground. "Huh?" he asked incredulously.
"I said meet me up there," she repeated impatiently as she secured her purse behind her, leapt up for a nearby branch, and began to climb. As he saw her pressed up against the trunk of the large tree, he was struck by how petite and delicate she seemed.
"I can get us up there in a leap or two," he offered.
"No, thanks. I can make my own way up. Just meet me up there."
"Are ya – ?"
"I said just meet me up there! I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not f-#king made of glass!"
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"Sorry, " a chagrined Ranma muttered as he warily eyed the angry girl now sitting roughly four arm lengths away from him. She had her back up against the trunk and her knees drawn up to her chest. She appeared to look everywhere and at everything but him.
"No wonder my sister always wants to hit you," she muttered grouchily.
She had turned out to be a very good climber. There had been something unexpectedly graceful, even beautiful, about her movements. She was much faster, agile, and confident than he had thought she would be as she determinedly made her way up toward the branch that she had selected.
"Here," he said, offering the side of his face within arm's reach in weary resignation. Years of dealing with her sister and his unwanted fiancées had taught him the drill. This time though he felt he actually deserved it.
The icy stare that she flashed in reply was withering. She then wordlessly reached into her purse, pulled out a pen and one of the cocktail napkins, and started to write something. Her silence stung more than any actual physical slap or words of reproach.
In the chilled air between them now, he suddenly had the sense of an epiphany slipping away. For a moment, the notion of Icarus leaping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera had not seemed so far-fetched or crazy at all. For a moment, he had believed that the normal girl whose hands had made Icarus leap would have been willing to teach him a little bit about living.
He was suddenly filled with a terrible depth of sadness. Looking at her hurt. He had to turn away. He actually wished that she had hit him as her sister would have. It would have been familiar; he would have known how to deal with that.
As he looked away, he found himself studying the still water of the pond below. There he could see the clear blue sky above, the tree with the two of them in it, and people who would occasionally pass by on the path below. Among the people who passed were some runners; a mother pushing a stroller; an old couple holding hands as they passed by; some children playing; a man walking a dog. The whole tableau was illuminated by a brilliant mid-afternoon sun that mocked his mood. A couple in a boat eventually rowed by, dissolving the image away in the ripples stirred up in their wake.
He knew that she had dismissed him quite some time ago by now. Yet he could not bring himself to leave. A half hour quickly turned to an hour and more. He did not want to go back to Nerima and the old asinine script of repetitive, predictable, unending insanity. He did not want to go back to the abysmal vacuity of who he was. Seeing if he could steel himself for the inevitable, he closed his eyes and tried imagining that he could forget.
More time passed, but he could not forget. With a sigh of dread, he opened his eyes and glanced back down at the water. He was certain that he would find she had abandoned him by now.
To his surprise though, she was still up in the tree with him, still with her knees drawn up to her chest, and still concentrating on whatever she was writing on the napkin in her hand.
"You ever hear that old story about the group of prisoners locked away in the underground cave?" she suddenly asked. Her voice was surprisingly calm, even conversational. Still, however, she did not look up at him.
"No," he said warily. "How does it go?"
"There are these prisoners in an underground cave. They are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to look only at an empty wall in front of them. Other than the wall, they can't see anything, not each other or even themselves."
Ranma tried to imagine the strange set up that she described. "Okay. Sounds like sh#t."
She laughed. "Behind them, there's a fire, and between them and that fire is a wall on which other people walk across carrying puppets and objects. The people on the wall do this in a way so that only the puppets and objects and not their bodies cast shadows that land on the cave wall in front of the prisoners."
"So the shadows are the only things that the prisoners can see?"
"That's right," she affirmed. "The people on the wall also say things and make sounds to go along with the props that they're waving around. For the prisoners, though, those shadows are the ones that are talking and making the sounds, actual people and objects rather than representations. In other words, the prisoners see, hear, and know only what the people walking on the wall decide that they should."
He understood now. "An indoctrination."
"Yeah," she agreed, still without looking up at him. "Let's have some fun with this though. Let's say the people on the wall decide one day to let one of the prisoners out of her chains – just to see what happens.
"Okay…."
"Naturally, she would look around and see the fire, but then seeing actual light for the first time would hurt so much that she'd scream and have to turn away. Her captors, the people on the wall, would mock her by freely admitting that everything she sees now in the light of the fire is what has actually been real all along."
"Why 'freely'?"
"Because they know that she'd be unable to believe them. Of course, she'd choose to escape from the pain. Of course, she'd beg to be put back in the chains and want nothing more than to be turned back towards the wall for the rest of her life. It's safe and familiar."
"Of course, that's not what actually happens though, is it."
His words earned him a split-second grin of bemusement. Then she went back to her scribbling. "Of course not. There'd be no fun in that."
"So what do they do with the girl then? Or what does she do?"
"Well, naturally, they do the nastiest, most cruel thing they can think of to do with her."
"Naturally. That being?"
"Well, they drag her up out of the cave to the world above, tie her spread-eagle to the ground, violently pry her eyes open, and force her to look around in the sunlight. She is terrified; she thinks that she's going to die – but then her eyes finally adjust. She begins to make out new shadows, then the reflections of people in things in nearby water, and finally actual people and things themselves. Eventually, she's able to look up at the sky and see the sun itself, finally realising how beautiful the real world actually is."
"That's hardly actually nasty or cruel. Ya could even consider it a blessing in the end."
She answered with a laugh that somehow made him uneasy. "You're too easily impressed, and it's hardly the end. We're not even at the fun part yet."
"No?"
"Nope. Of course not."
"Okay…."
"I'll give you a hint. This will end up being a beautiful story."
"I'm not getting whatcha mean."
"Beauty does not come without pain, remember?"
"Oh."
"Yeah. The real fun part comes when her captors drag the girl back down into the cave, throw her back in chains, and face her back again towards the wall. She's euphoric and addicted to the memory of all the beautiful things that she's seen. She starts babbling to all the other prisoners, excited to share all of her new and wonderful experiences. No one believes her though. The other prisoners think she's crazy and either ignore her, pity her, or are scared of her. She finds herself alone to slowly rot and die in the frustrated, anguished hell of her beautiful memories."
"Oh," he said. A shudder went through him as the image of Icarus at Kiyomizu-Dera flashed again in his mind's eye. She was right; it was a beautifully cruel and nasty way to die.
"Here," she said. She reached out to him with her left hand, offering the napkin on which she had been scribbling.
Ranma was shaken to his very core by what he saw. On the napkin was a sketched image of himself sitting at the far end of the branch and staring down at the lake below. The lines were rough with many of the details still missing, but the weary eyes and the pained longing and sadness in them were chillingly vivid and unmistakable.
"Sorry that a lot of the texture and shadowing are missing. There's only so much that can be filled out in an hour or two."
"You're not mad at me," he suddenly realised, feeling very foolish.
She laughed. "Of course I was. You're really annoying sometimes, but staying mad at you would've been self-defeating."
"Ya coulda at least let me know."
"Ever heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?"
"No."
"It's a core tenet of modern quantum physics. You can't accurately know the position and velocity of an object at the same time."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that the awareness of being observed changes a subject's behavior."
"In other words, ya needed me to think ya were cold-shouldering me in order to get the pose for the sketch."
The familiar smirk of the Cheshire cat was again on her lips. "You asked me how I learned to see things as they were, not as I was told they were. I said that I'd show you. You really have to look at things in order to be able to deconstruct the essence of the world around you into actual lines."
He looked back down at the napkin in his hand and found himself tracing her lines with the tips of his fingers with genuine wonder and admiration. Raw and rough as the sketch was, it was still one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. She really did see people and things as they were, and she had been true to her word. However small her gesture was, it was the first time in a long time that anyone had kept their word to him.
"Thank you," he told her. He meant it. Talking with her made him feel happy for the first time in a long time.
"You're welcome."
"How long ya been sketching?"
"A long time."
"Since your mother…?" he ventured.
She nodded. "After that, there was just a lot of silence all around the house. Kasumi disappeared into the kitchen. Daddy spent time with the bottle. Akane found the dojo."
"Ya were lonely?"
She nodded. "That and I started reading, listening to, and dreaming about things that no one else around me cared about. I had to fill my own space up with something."
"So you're the prisoner who's been taken out of the chains and dragged up to the surface, huh?" he teased, trying to lighten the mood.
She smiled. "Yeah, that's me. I've been that girl for a long time."
"But you're finally leaving."
"Yeah. Soon."
"Do ya think I'm the same? Another prisoner being taken out of chains and dragged up to the surface?"
"Good!" she exclaimed with a clap of her hands. "You're finally asking the right question."
"So am I the same?"
"Uh uh," she chided, wagging her finger at him. "That won't help you. See things as they are, not what you're told they are, remember? You have to figure this one out for yourself."
"Because that's what ya did?"
"Because it's what a normal person would do if they truly wanted to live."
"Is that a challenge?"
"It's whatever you need it to be to motivate you to do what you need to do."
He looked down again at the napkin in his right hand. In between the ghostly, unfinished lines of his own face staring back at him, he was suddenly struck by a strange seed of inspiration. "Can I ask ya something else?"
"Sure."
"Can ya teach me how to sketch?"
"So that you can impress my sister?"
"So that I can finish what's on this napkin."
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