Today is your date with Misa, and as you slip your shoes on in the hall in preparation to leave Ryuzaki announces, "I have another rule, if you're interested, Light-kun."
"Yeah?" you glance over at him. "What is it?"
"Well, it might be difficult to remember," he says. "But how about… when we go anywhere, you'll wait for me to sit down before you do, and then you'll sit on my right."
"I already sit on your right."
"Then maybe it won't be so hard to remember," Ryuzaki says. He smiles at you mischievously.
"Whatever," you say. "I'll do your 'very challenging task'… though I don't know, maybe you should go easy on me. I mean, at this rate I just might pass out from overwork."
"Well, we wouldn't want that," Ryuzaki agrees. "But I'll remember how challenging it is for you, if you slip up…"
"I won't slip up."
"We'll see," Ryuzaki says.
When you get up to Misa's floor she's in an excited mood, assuring you, "you'll totally love this, it's like real art and stuff. It's good."
You go into the theater, and stand beside her until Ryuzaki sits down, only then taking your seat to his right. Hah! you think. I knew this would be ridiculously easy.
The title of the movie is Pulse. It starts with a boat on the open ocean; a middle-aged, weathered man watches a woman who's back is to the audience. She speaks in voiceover narration, facing the sea, as her short dark hair whips wildly in the wind. "It all began one day… without warning… like this…" The sound of the wind is harsh and overpowering; the sky is grey, the colors dull and faded. For something that claims to be "art and stuff" you don't find the framing to be particularly artistic, and the low-budget impression follows you into a cluttered room filled with desktop computers and other paraphernalia, half-glimpsed through a plastic curtain. It glitches in and out of the frame, as the sound of a phone ringing cuts across the dark and lonely space. Michi, an employee at a plant shop, goes to see if her friend Taguchi has finished a tape the shop needs finished. But when she gets to his apartment he's acting distant and strange; and while she's searching for the correct tape he hangs himself in another room. Of course the question that comes to her and her coworkers' minds is "why?"
"I don't even know what he was so depressed about," Junko says, as she, Michi, and Yabe sit together in a cafeteria. "He never said anything, so what could we have done?"
"Maybe…" Yabe replies dully, "he suddenly just wanted to die. I get that way sometimes. It's so easy to hang yourself."
The use of music is sparse; instead favoring diegetic sound—background noise; background chatter; things being picked up, set down, footsteps, a soft blanket of silence.
Meanwhile, Ryosuke, a student who doesn't know a whole lot about computers, connects to the Internet and soon finds his computer dialing up on its own and showing eerie loops of people in their apartments, sitting there or wandering, in endless repetition. In the school, where Ryosuke asks Harue for help on his computer issue, there's a program playing, a grouping of dots on a black background. Harue explains, "if two dots get too close, they die. But if they get too far apart, they're drawn closer."
"What's it for?" Ryosuke asks.
"A miniature model of our world…" Harue answers.
The movie is slow, and at first, you have to admit you find it somewhat boring, and certainly not scary—even when weird things start happening, people disappear, or turn into stains on the wall. But you begin to realize that the movie isn't trying to be terrifying as far as images and scenarios that can't get out of your head; instead, it is quietly disturbing on a conceptual level; a desolateness that slowly spreads without the viewer even realizing it. If souls go to an afterlife with finite space, perhaps eventually it will fill up. Perhaps eventually they will come back as ghosts. And it won't be through revenge or through terror, but through their sheer presence, a black-hole loneliness that seeps into anyone who encounters them, that they cause the vanishings.
"What have ghosts got to do with us?" Ryosuke asks. "Besides, we're alive." Harue runs over to the computers in her own house, turns each monitor on to show the eerily moving figures, each in their own isolation.
"Then who are they?" she asks, frantic and quietly sad. "Are they alive? How are they different from ghosts?"
There is something utterly real about these characters. From the numbing lives they lead to the way they dress; the disconnection, the way their conversations linger, as though in a counterpoint to the increasingly absurd happenings around them.
Messages in a bottle.
Lists of missing people, playing on television.
A ride on a deserted train at night. The world gets emptier and emptier but so easily and subliminally that you don't even notice until it's over.
When the movie finishes, the world is unrecognizably bereft, and yet even with the metaphors of a twist ending, you can understand that the horror, here, is not about ghosts at all. Not really.
"Well, Misa," you say, "After this I don't think you can complain about a movie being slow."
"Whaat?" she says. "It wasn't slow. It was terrifying! You didn't find it scary?"
"I mean… not really," you admit. "It was kind of unsettling, I guess." Unsettling. The best word for it. Like when you looked away, something had happened that could never be un-done, something had drifted to pieces beneath your hands that no amount of red colored tape could fix.
"I thought it was very artistic, Misa-san," Ryuzaki says.
"Really? I told you it was!"
"Yes, it was quite profound."
You glance over at him. Seriously? Profound? You wouldn't go that far. It reminds you uneasily of your days in high school, going from school to home, dragging the shades shut to try to find a privacy you increasingly craved, even while you started to wonder what the point of life was, or if this meaningless, heavy existence was all there was ever going to be. From home to cram school, where you smiled and pretended, joking with your friends and keeping up your appearance as the genius of the group, the one everyone knew would succeed. Throwing yourself into your studies to distract yourself from your thoughts. Repeating, every night like a mantra when you went to sleep, just don't think about it. Just don't think about it.
Just don't think about it.
Tomorrow would be the same as yesterday; a boredom undifferentiated. A universe where you would continue to play the same part, just as you always had. Tomorrow would be the same as yesterday; never being able to talk to anyone about your thoughts, and being surrounded only by meaningless chatter by people who seemed to think the most insignificant things noteworthy.
Tomorrow would be the same as yesterday; people would continue to get away with crimes—rape, murder, crooked politics. Wars would be fought. Places would be ravaged and destroyed. Ordinary people would sit around watching the TV and joking with their friends, using the Internet, drinking away their troubles, lazy and unmotivated, while their very ecosystems rotted at the hands of the powerful. Tomorrow would be the same as yesterday, and you wanted to change something, anything, anything at all, even if that was just to get away from—
Don't think about it.
It's been a long time since those days, and you're glad of it.
Misa calls Watari to ask for some lunch and then you all sit down on the couches in your usual spot.
"Do you find sitting down to be a challenging task?" Ryuzaki asks Misa. She gives him a weird look.
"Um, what kind of a question is that? No. Obviously."
You look over at him, catching his eye; he's still standing.
Fuck.
"I just wondered," Ryuzaki says, hopping down onto the couch and pulling his feet up to rest on the cushion.
"It seems like you do though," she says. "Is that why you always sit so weird?"
"No," he says. "I only sit like this because sitting like other people decreases my reasoning abilities by forty percent."
"You can't do anything like other people, can you?" Misa says. "'Cause if you did, you wouldn't be able to show off."
"I'd suggest you try it too, but I'm not sure if it would be effective in your case," Ryuzaki adds with heavy sympathy.
Misa glares at him.
At that moment, Watari rolls his tray in, so the beginning of what looks like a real fight is narrowly averted as everyone eats; Misa, for her part, steadily avoids speaking to Ryuzaki and instead plies you with questions about how you're doing.
"I'm doing well," you say at last, when you can finally get a word in edgewise.
"Really?" she asks. "Even when you have to drag the pervert around everywhere? You're so strong, Light! I don't know how you even stand it."
"Er, yeah." You give her a polite smile.
"Ooh, I'm 'the pervert' again," Ryuzaki says.
Misa gives him a side-eye. "You're not supposed to take it as a compliment," she says tartly.
"I'm not supposed to, and yet I do anyway," Ryuzaki says.
Misa sighs. She studies her nails, and then frowns. "Ugh, I can't believe it," she says. "My nail polish is chipped. Light, would you mind if I went and fixed that real quick?"
"You could just bring it here," Ryuzaki says. "There's no need to stand on ceremony. Anyway, who knows what I'd get up to if you left me alone with poor, innocent Light-kun for too long?" he asks.
"Cut it out, Ryuzaki," you say as Misa stands up with a huff.
"What?"
"You know what. You're behaving like a complete bastard," you say, as Misa starts off to her private rooms.
"Good luck with that, Light," she calls back over her shoulder. "He's incorrigible."
For a second, the two of you are alone. You give him a disappointed look, and Ryuzaki says, "I'm not saying anything that doesn't already go through her head. Your Misa-san is very imaginative."
"And you play into it like a pro."
"Well, one makes one's amusement where one can."
Misa walks back into the room carrying an entire bag filled with nail polish, and sits it on the table in front of her as she rummages through it, taking out a couple of colors and sitting them on the table before finding a bottle that matches what she has on. As she brushes a small amount over the chipped section, Ryuzaki plops on the floor next to the table and starts rearranging the bottles. After a moment, he holds up one of them, a pale eggshell blue, and announces, "I like this color."
"Good for you," Misa says, screwing the cap on the color she was working with shut and putting the bottle back in its bag.
"Misa-san, do you think you could do my nails?" Ryuzaki says.
"You aren't serious," you say.
"I'm pretty sure he's serious," Misa says.
"It's the perfect color," Ryuzaki insists. "If you won't do it, I will," he adds, and starts unscrewing the cap.
"Okay, okay," Misa says quickly, grabbing the bottle before it tips and spills everywhere. "Just stick your hands on the table, all right?" she directs, and plops down on the floor beside him as Ryuzaki obediently sticks his hands palm-down on the table.
"Come on, this is going a bit far for a joke," you say.
Misa puts a dash of color onto one nail, quickly getting an even coat. "Light, Ryuzaki just doesn't have any masculinity to speak of," she says.
"Misa-san is right, Light-kun," Ryuzaki says.
You cross your arms. "Actually, that's fake, and I know it."
"Oh, you know it?" Ryuzaki says teasingly. "How did you find out?"
Misa cackles.
Seriously, how did it go from Ryuzaki and her at each other's throats to them behaving like girls at a sleepover?
"Really?" you groan. "Fine. Do whatever you want, Ryuzaki. It doesn't matter to me."
Pretty soon, she's covered every single one of his nails in blue, and Ryuzaki holds them out in front of himself admiringly. The terrible thing is you're pretty sure he's legitimately happy. How is this your life.
"Now, you have to keep them still until they dry," Misa directs him. "That means no—no…" she grabs his hand before it wanders up toward his lip. "No touching anything until they're dry, okay? Light, give me a hand here?"
"Why do I have to do it?" you complain.
"Um, because I did all the work, and you're a good boyfriend," Misa says, with an attempt at an enticing smile.
Okay, a successfully enticing smile, probably. It just doesn't do anything for you.
You slouch off the couch, feeling put-upon, and hold both of his hands firmly against the table.
Ryuzaki looks sadly at his pinned hands, and says, "I'm bored."
"Well, you should've thought of that before putting on nail polish," you say.
Misa grins. "Actually, this is the perfect time for telling you something…" she says. "It's very important to me, so don't make fun, okay?"
"He's totally going to make fun," you say. "Why are you even telling him anything?"
"Shh," Misa says, putting a finger to her lip. "You've probably felt like this too, at least once or twice, Light. You know how, when you're a kid, walking home alone at night is super scary? Everything gets really quiet. And there are shadows where you don't expect them, and the alleyways seem deeper. Even when there's people all around, sometimes you feel like you're floating in a sea where they're all nothing but driftwood… well, that's how I felt, and sometimes, there were people standing on street-corners in the lees of a building that creeped me out when I walked by…"
"Most of them didn't mean you any harm, I'm sure," Ryuzaki says.
"Oh, of course. But there was one night when I had an encounter that scarred me for the rest of my life…" she says seriously.
"Was this your stalker?" you ask.
"No," Misa says, leaning forward. "Worse than that."
"Surely this can't be the man who killed your parents," Ryuzaki says.
She shakes her head. "No. This happened before that. It was night, like I said. I'd just gone to the store, and while I was there I decided to buy myself some caramel candies. I started eating one and stuck the other two in my pocket, and I was walking along the road when I saw this woman wearing a kimono, waiting just outside the light of a streetlamp. Now, even from down the street I had the feeling she was watching me with some kind of creepy look in her eye, but I didn't look too closely at her, because that would be just asking for trouble. Well, I got closer and closer, almost about to walk by, when all of a sudden she grabs me by the arm," Misa says, and mimes a grabbing motion. For something that scarred her for the rest of her life, she's sure getting into the telling. "And I'm about to scream, or kick her, or something, but before I can do anything she's asking me a question. And I'm so startled, right, that I actually stop right then and there and listen to her… she says, 'am I beautiful?' Well, how was I supposed to know that? She's standing in the shadows, and to top it off she's got a mask over her nose and mouth. I mean sure her eyes aren't bad, and she's good with makeup—plus, like, she's a total creep and is still clutching onto me, so I give it to her. 'Yeah, you look beautiful,' I say. Which is a good idea because I've just noticed this huge, nasty pair of shears hanging from her belt."
Ryuzaki is rapt, leaning slightly forward with his eyes wide, so he doesn't notice the way you stifle a smile. You know this story; though you have to admit, Misa's doing a good job with it.
"Then her other hand reaches up to her face," Misa continues with relish. "She grabs the edge of her mask and pulls it down till it dangles from one ear. 'Even now?' she asks. And I'm so scared, let me tell you, I can't even move! No wonder she was wearing that mask! 'Cause, underneath it, instead of an ordinary smile… her mouth is cut wide on either side. Ear to ear," Misa adds, and makes a dramatic shudder. "Well, what the hell am I supposed to say to that? If I tell her no, she'll probably cut my throat with those very shears! But if I say yes… who knows what she'll do. What if she gets it in her head to give me a little makeover too? Well, I've got these candies with me, right? So I'm like… 'Well, I guess now I'd say you look kind of…' and I grab the rest of the candies and throw them at her! 'Average!' I say, as she grabs for one of them (I guess even creepy psycho women like caramels) and man, I hightail it out of there! But as I'm running, I can't resist looking back one more time… and somehow, even though there's no other way out of the alley… she's vanished. And that," Misa finishes, "is how I met the ghost Kuchisake-onna."
"I see," Ryuzaki says. "It sounds terribly frightening for a child. Although, I'm not sure she was really a ghost," he adds. "Perhaps there was a fire escape in the alley you hadn't noticed? Maybe she climbed up."
"No, I'm pretty sure she was a ghost," you say. Ryuzaki gives you a questioning look, and you smile in Misa's direction. She giggles.
"Hm," Ryuzaki says. "Well, come to think of it, that encounter reminds me of a crime I ran into early in my career, and one in which, I'm sorry to say, I was never able to solve. I heard about it all from the frightened parents the day after, but it was from the young girl herself that I finally managed to piece together the sequence of events. There had been an escaped killer on the loose in the neighbourhood, and in defiance of all common sense her parents had decided to stay out late at a party. Now, naturally, the child was terrified. It was her first night alone, and it was an old house, the kind where the floors are always creaking and the wind shrieks around the corners like an infant's screams. But being quite bright and logical, she locked each and every door and window on the first floor, and even on the second. Now, I say she was alone, but her parents didn't leave her entirely without protection. In fact, she had a huge german shepherd who would certainly protect her if worst came to worst. So she snuggled up in bed and tried very hard to go to sleep. But the trees kept tapping on her windowpane and looking awfully like fingers, and the wind kept shrieking, and her heart kept hammering… finally, she fell asleep, at least for a little while, though her sleep was pretty bad. A few hours later she woke up to find the wind had stopped, but from the bathroom connected to her room she heard this very distinct sound… drip. Drip. Drip. She hadn't taken a shower that night, or a bath, but maybe she'd left the faucet on the sink running a little?
Either way, she was too terrified to go and check. The thought of that killer out on the loose made even the walk into her bathroom seem too dangerous… but she remembered that, in any case, she had protection, and she reached out of the covers, remembering that her dog was there beside her to make sure everything was okay. And, just as she had expected, her german shepherd gave her a soft lick across her palm. Suddenly not so frightened after all, she fell back asleep, and slept the rest of the night deeply.
In the morning, her parents were home, and her dog had left the bedroom, probably to pester them for food. She went into her bathroom to freshen up for the morning and screamed… because right there, hanging from the showerhead, was the german shepherd, or rather the corpse of the german shepherd, its blood dripping steadily into the bathtub. Drip. Drip. Drip. And behind it, written on the wall in the same blood, was the words, 'humans can lick too.' So," Ryuzaki finishes casually, "I did a sweep of the house and found out that, as I'd suspected, she'd forgot to lock the window in the basement."
"...That's an urban legend, right?" Misa says, a little uneasy.
"I assure you," Ryuzaki says, "it's quite true."
"Yeah. Sure it is," you say.
"Well…" Ryuzaki allows. "Maybe not this exact incident, but one of my acquaintances could definitely give that killer a run for his money. He really did love to hide under beds when you were least expecting it…"
"At least he didn't kill any dogs," you say.
"If he did, we never could verify it," Ryuzaki adds. "But they did tend to disappear when he was around. It happened twice."
"Either you're talking complete bullshit," Misa says, "or your friend group could use an upgrade."
Ryuzaki grins.
.
.
.