Live
AIDS is crazy in Africa. I won't pretend to know how things work there first hand, won't even pretend to know a lot about Africa or AIDS. I just feel strongly about this, and I wrote this. Most of the stories told in his story are true. I cannot possibly write something that can mirror what's happening there, but I hope it makes you think.
Why'd we come here? Seto asks himself this desperately as he looks down at the bloody corpse on the makeshift bed.
They'd thought that this trip would a vacation from Seto's troubles and Katsuya's classes. Seto would have liked to go to Europe, or even some South American country not locked in civil war. But Katsuya had wanted to visit Africa for some odd reason.
Why, Seto had asked. What's there of any interest to a young photographer? Jounouchi rolled his eyes, saying half-teasingly to Seto that if he had to ask, he wouldn't possibly understand.
Katsuya had made him feel inferior. And so Seto had wanted to know what Katsuya found so intriguing about Africa. All he saw were barbarians who still lived primitively. Didn't they play around with voodoo and sell their own kind into slavery? Not a whole lot to see there, in Seto's opinon.
Katsuya on the other hand found the people majestic and the scenery beautiful. He would buy those American magazines religiously, you know, the kind with all those Africans looking into the camera with the various piercing hanging off their faces and strange clothing hanging from their limbs. Katsuya found then 'haunting' and 'true.' Seto never really understood. Even now he didn't see it.
Those people were starving and poor. What was so majestic about not having enough to eat and living in poverty?
But Seto gave in to Katsuya—as he did far more than was good for either of them. Katsuya refused to go to Eygpt—which Seto had always wanted to visit—on the grounds that it was more Middle-Eastern culturally than African.
So they're in South Africa, and Seto didn't—doesn't—see the appeal, but Katsuya went out everyday with his camera. Seto warned him that he was going to end up getting robbed for that thing, but Katsuya didn't pay him any mind. He was convinced that he can take care of himself.
And he did, physically, at least. But Katsuya came home each day with more and more tragic stories about the horrors that were occurring like habits. Each had been told to Katsuya—who had spent the months before the trip studying the language—in halting voices by the natives themselves. Few are hopeful, and more often than not, Katsuya ended up in tears.
"They don't have any more hope!" He cried one time, the day he had seen three orphans living in a mere skeleton of a house. It had been the last thing their mother had done for them before she had succumbed to AIDS. Their relatives—who had been planning to sell the house and split the profits once she was out of the way—were furious that she had left the house to her children. And so they had left the already fatherless children to their own devices, as if they were to blame for anything.
And so they were, living on their own, scavenging for what little food they could manage to buy. They might still be there now. Either that, or they've died of starvation or disease.
"He told me himself, Seto. He has no dreams for the future because he's not stupid enough to thing he'll ever have a future beyond trying to survive."
Seto hadn't let him go out the few days. He'd vowed to never let Katsuya go around alone anymore. A person could go mad with all the death and denial.
He nearly went mad himself, following Katsuya around his daily trips.
How could he have been so oblivious? He would complain of hunger after a few hours, but these people were lucky to have food at all. In the weeks that followed Seto heard his own stories, of women abandoned by their families because of admitting to having AIDS, of children dying of painful diseases having only lived one excruciating year, of prostitutes selling themselves for 500 yen and risking fatal STDs to put food in front of their children, of ritual 'cleansings' where a widow must have sex with her late husband's brothers.
He called Mokuba all the time, to stop himself from being consumed completely by the death and disease and sex and superstition. And every time he would hang up knowing that it was only him. Only his perception of the world had changed, not the world itself. It had always been like this.
And no one cared. The world turned its back on these people, just as these people turn their backs on the truth. They're all dying.
Eventually, the two make friends with one of the many dying women in the small, simple village many miles off. They would visit her every few days, and stay in the village, since it could take a day to get there—especially since Katsuya would stop to take pictures.
She openly admitted to having AIDS, which was practically labeling herself as a leper. And what's more, she speaks to them without fear, perhaps so brave because of the knowledge that she has nothing to lose. These two can not possibly worsen the situation.
She never tells them her name, though, and never reveals anything about her past. She does not need to. They'd both been in the country long enough to know what happened to her. When she told her family she had AIDS, they threw her out. Seto and Katsuya had both seen it happen again and again, families torn apart by superstition and fear. And here was another painful reminder of how family loyalty could dissolve as easily as ice in midday sun.
Some days they would just sit and talk to her, about anything away from there, and pretend that they were somewhere else and that she was not dying. She was intelligent in ways that one only could after having a life like hers. She could have been anything, if only her skin had been milk and not coal, if only she had been born among tall metallic buildings instead of disease-bearing mosquitoes.
Other days they would walk with her to buy food, and she would tell them of all the people they would see. She was not blind, and the fact that the people in this village ignored her when they were not tormenting her only let her see more. She would show them her world through her eyes and they reveled in it.
And then there were days she was too weak to speak—too weak to move, and on those days they would care for her as best they knew how. She would die before their very eyes on those days.
And it was one of those days when she asked Katsuya to go and see if he could get her something to eat. She was running low and they'd spent the last two days with her—they would be returning the later that day. She might not be able to go herself to get food. So he went, reluctant leaving her with only Seto, but still proud that she trusted him so readily.
But there was a hidden desire beneath her request.
She asked Seto, in a voice filled with pain and eyes that only mirrored it, "Tomorrow, Seto, bring a knife from your place. Tomorrow, kill me. I refuse to starve to death, and I refuse to wither away slowly. I want to end it and I feel that the time has come." And Seto had not been prepared.
She had always had that spiritual calmness; that secret sort of knowledge of what was going to happen, and she went with the flow of fate without so much as a splash.
Who was Seto to argue with her, to convince her otherwise? In her own way she was stronger than Seto could ever hope to be, and he could not deny her this wish. She had asked and not Katsuya because she knew he would see what she saw. Katsuya would only try to change her mind, change her heart. He still felt there was a way of turning back. He still felt that good could come from this—that good had to come from this.
Seto knew that nothing good would ever come from this, that this cycle of death and misery would continue for a long time, if it would ever stop. There was no turning back, not now. The people had been digging their own graves for years and it was too late to try and pull them out.
So he brought it with him the next night, hidden in his bag. He wanted Katsuya take pictures on the way there, and wondered if this was the last time Katsuya would do this so lightheartedly. He'd grown too attached to the woman, they both had. Her death would be twin knives in their hearts. Seto was prepared for this, but he wasn't so sure about Katsuya.
Her last night was excruciating, and Seto and Katsuya could do next to nothing to ease her pain. The next morning she asked Katsuya to go and take pictures. He would have to send them to her so she could perhaps see the beauty of this land through his eyes instead of her own, which only saw things their a veil of death. He readily agreed, and once again Seto and the woman were alone.
She did not ask if he brought it, she did not say anything at all. She had accepted this as her fate, so had Seto. He said nothing as he pulled the knife out and pressed it gently against her throat. His hand shook as he held it there, his self-assurance waning.
She had closed her eyes and placed her hands across her stomach firmly. He closed his own eyes and pushed, with all his strength so that it would be swift. It wasn't neat, like he had though it would be. He felt the blood on his hand and threw up next to the corpse. He couldn't do anything but stare down at his hand because he could not look at what he had done.
He'd done it for her. He kept repeating this over and over, like some sort of mantra. He'd done it for her. He'd done it for her.
He knows that Katsuya will be returning soon. What will he say to him when he comes? How can he explain to him the reasoning behind his actions? Katsuya would only see the blood and the blood and the blood.
In fact, Seto himself can only see as much. There is nothing left in his stomach to throw up, so he crawls away from the woman's cadaver, his knees dragging across the vomit, but he doesn't care. Outside, he leans against the side of the house and holds his knees.
How did it get to be like this? Where is the God that everyone claims is a benevolent god? Where is the order that people claim is here? Seto sees no order, no god, no point. The men leave their wives at home to work at a mine that poisons them. A society that's sexually driven pushes them into the arms of infected prostitutes. The twisted belief of condoms being for weak men makes more condoms go unused, and the infection spreads and spreads and spreads and babies are born that die and the already living die all the faster.
Seto feels the tears, but he's not thinking about them. He's not even thinking about himself.
And he'll go home and make machines that push along the ignorance of the rest of the world. He'll make machines that push along the death of the earth. He'll watch his little brother grow up uninformed of the suffering happening all around, and he won't say anything. It is inevitable, now.
We've already begun walking upon the road, Seto thinks. And now that we've begun we can't look back. Humans will kill themselves and kill each other and kill their mother, the earth. And the earth will die all the faster, and will explode and eventually become something new where the cycle will begin again.
Live, she says to him. Live, Seto, because that is all any of us can do now.