A STORY OF PAIN AND LONGING
TO KICK OFF THE WEEKEND.
© Makoto Shinkai Voices From a Distant Star
LETTERS FROM TWENTY YEARS
The dream goes on
and on; through an enormous house, a bigger, darker version of the California
Victorian I grew up in. There is a big
attic in the dream house, fifty feet high with beams halfway up: lurking in the
shadows is something decidedly evil, something humanish with dark bat-like
wings. Like a vampire story, except, for
all its distortion, this is my mother’s house, this is my dream, I’m in it, and
it’s scary. I dream in black and white
here because it’s night. If I pay
attention, when it is night in my dreams, I only dream in black and white:
there is no color at night.
Then I’m outside, twilight maybe or early
morning. I am certain my mother’s dead and that I can never go home again. Small mounds the size of ski-slope moguls are
covered in grass, greenish in the dim light and Civil War soldiers are peppering
at me with muskets and lead balls fly by my head. Suddenly a Mexican soldier grabs my arms from
the jungle behind me; another Mexican soldier grabs Ginette’s arms, because now
she’s there too – his partner shoots us in the chest. Ginette scrams. I scream.
I wake up screaming.
Breathing hard, I sit up. I reach out for Ginette, then remember she’s
in jail. Stupid girl: she told me she
was straight then got caught with a bit of coke. But she was on probation when she got caught,
so now she will be in prison for a year.
I miss her. Often I’m mad at
her. Often I don’t know what to
feel. When I need her, she’s not
here. And I remember that my mother is
indeed recently dead.
Shaky, I crawl out of bed, trundle into the
kitchen and turn on my espresso maker. I
always turn it on before I put the water in it: that way the heating element is
hot by the time I pour the water, it boils faster, and I get my coffee faster.
I imagine Ginette’s jailhouse dishwater
coffee: sock-juice, jeu de chaussette, as the French call it. Some oatmeal or corn flakes; thin orange
juice. Black sheriff’s deputies who hate
pretty white girls; stupid white trash girls who don’t know how to talk with a
smart girl like Ginette. Ginette being
abused, or just alone, like me.
I turn on the radio and listen to the NPR
morning news; I hear that light speed has been achieved. A small ship with a lone rider has made an
orbit of the entire solar system in something under four minutes. To the astronaut it felt like no time at
all. In a few years, maybe months, says
the news announcer, people will be going to new stars, new solar systems, new
planets.
After I drink my coffee, I lean back in my
chair, close my eyes and slip away: we’re telling stupid jokes and Ginette is
laughing so hard she has to keep getting up to go pee. “No, but listen,” I say, “This is true. Really.
It’s how they get hazelnuts out of the shell in factories…”
“Right,” she says. “So how do
they get them out. I always wondered
about that.”
“Right.
They actually have squirrels who bang them on rocks…”
“So why…”
“Why don’t they eat them? The have muzzles on.”
Ginette can’t stop laughing. We’re getting to the point where we’ll laugh
at anything: it’s the middle of the night and we’ve been at this for hours.
“It’s like how… how they shell
coconuts…” Ginette has to laugh for a
full minute before she can continue.
“They have these big Samoans… with big net bags full of coconuts and chum…
and sharks… sharks chase them…”
Neither of us can stop laughing. I laugh so hard it hurts. There’s a candle on the table and Ginette has
never looked more beautiful. She wears a
low cut spring dress, white with a blue and green flower pattern that seems to
perfectly set off the warm skin of her face and her long black hair that falls
in ringlets. One of her hands – her fingers impossibly thin and delicate, long,
the most beautiful hands I have ever held - rests on the stem of her wine glass that has
dripped a little, leaving a couple of purple rings on the light wooden
table. Two little foil gum wrappers lay
wadded up nearby. Ginette eats a lot of
gum, but I never notice her actually chewing it. When I can talk again I say, “I love
you.” She smiles and makes almost no
sound when she says, “I love you too.”
She
was arrested the next morning on her way to work.
Letters from Ginette come once or twice per
week. I send her some money so she can
buy decent food and warm clothes from the prison commissary: the prisoners are
given only a jump suit and bad food in the dining room. Ginette says they make it cold in the cells
to keep fights to a minimum, but long underwear and sweaters, even extra
blankets, must be purchased. The prison
is owned by Onoacom, a multi-national conglomerate whose primary industry is
military technology.
Six months go by and, like most days, I
listen to the NPR morning news. Onoacom
has built a large light speed ship to send prison inmates to new stars, to
“Create a New Australia,” a spokesperson for Onoacom says. “Of course,” she continues, “the program is
strictly voluntary.” I know however,
that in a prison system where, when a prisoner is beaten to death by guards and
is reported to the family as having fallen down the stairs, “voluntary” can
mean anything. In a system with its own
internal law and police, with little or no interference from outside, prisoners
do what they’re told. Or they go to
solitary confinement. Or they die.
A week later, I receive a letter from
Ginette: she is going to be on the ship.
Much of the letter has been “highlighted” with a black marker. Still, I see she loves me, will miss me; my
eyes are blurry and I have to put the letter down. I listen to the news that night and hear there
are to be five women for every male prisoner sent: breeder-mates they call
them. Whether from rage or sorrow, or
both I can’t tell, I am chocked with sobs.
I hear the ship is to blast off in fifteen minutes.
On the screen I see footage of the
“passengers” filing across the gangway from a tower into the ship. They are all still dressed in Orange
jumpsuits – a few have small bags, presumably with their precious sweaters and
blankets. The men leer at the women,
grabbing asses, stroking hair; the women flinch away, or try to, but it is crowded
on the gangway. I don’t see Ginette.
The ship takes off in enormous plumes from
chemical booster rockets. Twenty minutes
later, she is out of the solar system, headed to a star 20 light years away,
and there’s nothing I can do.
Ginette was younger than me already – in 20
years she will be 40 years younger than me.
She will not age. She will still
be 27. I am 47 now. I’ll be 67 when she
arrives at her new home.
And then her letters will take another 20
years to reach me. I hope she will write
to me every day.
THE END
