“YAAAAAAH!”
Chloe screamed herself awake from the bitter depths of reminiscence. Everybody in the classroom turned their attention to her in astonishment. She was in a sweat and couldn't remember what she was doing for a moment, but the professor's voice reminded her that she was actually in her psychology lecture.
“Are you all right, Chloe? You broke out in a sweat with a gasp. Did my boring lecture make you have a nightmare in your nap?”
“...Er...uh...I am sorry.” She blushed with shame and averted her eyes from the other students' stares to keep her thought from being discerned, and she casually cast a glance out the window at the dead tree. It was being cut by a maintenance man, and the loud noise of the chain saw began to interrupt the lecture. The professor said with a sigh and half in jest, “It may be vying with Chloe in noise....”
Everybody chuckled again, but Chloe ignored them and said to the professor, “Why is that tree being cut? It is not a dead tree. Well...it looks dead, but it is actually not. It is just the way to stay over the winter of sorrow! It will be enlivened by the coming of spring and will wake into life! So, don't let it be cut. Please....”
The professor frowned at her unexpected reaction to his joke and said, “Are you all right, Chloe? I don't see what you are talking about.” Everybody stared at Chloe who blurted out something strange.
“I am asking why you let it be cut down,” said Chloe with a serious face.
“Well, I don't have any authority over the maintenance guy. He is cutting it just because it is inconvenient to extend this building. Do you have any problem with cutting that tree?”
“Well...not particularly....” It was very odd that she asked such a thing because she didn't even know herself why she didn't want the tree to be cut. But she knew that she was feeling fretful and worried, so she crammed her textbook and notebook into the backpack and hurried out of the room without saying anything to the professor.
“I guess she has trouble napping when the tree is being cut with such a noise,” said the professor sarcastically, dumbfounded by Chloe's attitude.
As Chloe rushed out of the classroom, she didn't know what to do to erase her unknown worry. Something in the back of her mind was troubling her. She couldn't help feeling that something inauspicious was going to happen. She trudged aimlessly and speculated why she cared so much about the tree. Then, she thought the tree might use her voice as a medium to insist it was still alive just like spirits used human mediums to speak out for them. But she wondered why the tree was silent and didn't show any reaction to her attempt to commune with it using her special ability during the lecture.
'Was it in fact dead as people thought? Or was it just in sort of an unconscious state like some animals hibernate to survive a severe winter? If so, was it jolted out of sleep by pain while being cut?'
As she asked herself those questions, she was already in front of the tree before she noticed it. To her surprise, the tree was whole and uncut as it had been before. Was I hallucinating? Chloe promptly asked herself. She was totally stupefied with confusion and scared at the thought of whether her actual presence there was also hallucination. She slowly touched the tree with her hand trembling with fear to make sure of the reality. But she didn't feel the vitality of the tree through her hand. Is this tree dead or am I just in a hallucinatory state? she asked herself again, but she thought that at least the tactile feeling of her hand on the tree was real. So she simply convinced herself that she was not hallucinating.
Then she tried to trace back her memory to separate the reality from unreality. While in her lecture class, when she was remembering what had happened to Kip in the forest, she was in a fog of bitter reminiscence. She thought she must have still been in a dream-like state even after she yelled out in the class; otherwise she couldn't explain the contradiction about the tree.
While she was speculating, she remembered the man wrapped up in a black cloak. The reality of the man was very doubtful to her because Flora hadn't seemed to see him when she ran after Chloe at the hospital. If she had seen such a strange man, she would have asked Chloe about whom she was talking to or she would have scowled at him.
However, as Chloe thought more and more about her memory, she was puzzled and wanted to find a definite way to make sure of the truth. So, she was already in her car and driving before she decided to go back to the hospital without attending her next class.
As Chloe arrived at the hospital, she saw the man with a black cloak just entering it from the main entrance. She quickly parked her car and ran after him, but he had already disappeared. She carefully looked around, but she saw only Flora.
“Chloe? You're still here? Didn't you go to school?” said Flora in surprise.
“Did you see a man wrapped up in a black cloak coming in here?” Chloe panted without answering Flora.
“Whom did I see?” said Flora, wondering what was going on with Chloe.
“You saw a man wrapped up in a black cloak, black hat, and sunglasses coming in here, didn't you? Which way did he go?”
When Flora frowned at the question, Chloe rushed to Kip's ward without waiting for an answer. On the way to the ward, she carefully looked around, but nobody walking in the corridor looked like him. She was again struck with worry about her sense of reality.
“Humph, there is something wrong with me today,” she sighed out loud and put her hand on the knob of the door. At that moment, she was startled at a sound coming from inside the ward. Somebody is in there! she thought. She immediately strained her ears and tried to catch her breath.
There were two elevators for visitors in the hospital. One of them was out of order temporarily. The other had opened just when she reached it. She speculated that she must not have been far behind the man when she ran after him. So, the man might not have used the elevator. If he had used it, she would have waited for it coming down to the first floor. If he had used the stairs, he would not have reached the ward before she did because using the stairs was obviously alonger route.
If so, who is inside? Chloe realized that her heart had begun to pound in expectation. Did Kip come around? As soon as she thought about him, she pushed the door open, forgetting about the strange man.
However, Kip was still lying on the bed in an unconscious state, and nobody else was there. She was disappointed, but there was no time for her to regret it because she noticed the TV she had brought in the morning was on although it was not set up yet. She tried to figure out what had happened to the TV, carefully looking around it. She then noticed that the TV program on the air was one which Kip had always watched before.
“The daughter of Zeus and Demeter's: Kore. She is called Persephone in Hades. She is likened to a seed sown in earth. It grows with a mysterious agency of earth and bears fruit and crops with the favor of the sun and merciful rain. Although it once dies in a hiemal season, it is again vivified and gives favor to all that lives. She leads one third of her life in Hades and two-thirds above the earth....”
Chloe didn't understand such a mythological story, but she kept it on with the hope that Kip, even in his comatose condition, might enjoy it. Then she sat on a chair and stared into his face, wondering if he might have somehow turned on the TV. She held his hand and asked him about it in her mind, but there was no reply from him.
“Humans also bask in her favor....”
Somebody suddenly uttered those words. She was startled at the unexpected low voice from behind and turned her face in surprise. At the door was the man wrapped up in the black cloak, standing with a sinister air. He continued before she could say anything.
“However, figuratively speaking, all human beings are the same as Erysichthon. He was an arrogant feudal lord in Thessalia. One day he ordered lumbermen to cut trees in the forest where Demeter's shrine was located. As you saw on TV, Demeter is the mother of Kore and is the goddess of agriculture, fertility, and marriage. Although the forest was sacred to the deity of Demeter, he forced the reluctant lumbermen to cut the trees to build his own manor house. So, the goddess let Limos, the god of hunger, into his stomach in order to give him a severe punishment. After that his hunger increased until he was ravenous, but he never satisfied his appetite even with the enormous amount of food he could buy with all his fortune. The more the food he ate, the faster he died of hunger. He even sold his daughter to make money to buy more food. Nevertheless, he was never satisfied. The intolerable hunger finally made him gobble up his own flesh, and he died in misery. All humans are just like him. You all set foot in the realm of the providence and....”
“I don't think we should not have gone to the forest!” Chloe, who was immediately reminded, by his last remarks, of the forest where Kip had been shot, shouted emotionally and interrupted him. “What I think wrong is the hunters' conduct, not our setting foot in the forest! We didn't commit any sin at all!”
“What you think is no matter to me,” said the man, who then glanced at Kip. “Regardless of whether or not he is wrong, I will soon take him with me because calling for the dead is my job.”
“He is not dead yet!”
“I know. That's why I won't take him now.”
“Don't do that now or later! He is still alive and will come around! What right do you have to deprive him of his life? He is still alive, and I will... I will definitely make him come around!”
“But as you know, he has already been on the way to his last home. He is going there now of his own will.”
“How do you know that?” He would never desire death of his own will! He will never do anything that grieves his parents!”
“How do you know he won't?”
“I know! I just know!”
“No, you don't. You don't know anything. His parents actually will not grieve at all even though he dies because they believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis...but not resurrection in the mortal remains. They know he is already dead in a sense. You know ancient people in Egypt made mummies with the belief of resurrection, don't you? But none of them were resurrected at all. That't because the so-called immortal souls abandoned the mortal bodies. So, his parents already know that he, or you may say his soul, will not come back to his body which is now lying on the bed and which will perish soon because he will change his form of life and will lead a new life in the future. His parents rather will grieve if you let him live in such a miserable plight.”
“So, are you saying I should kill him somehow in order to appease his parents's sorrow? You're wrong! They won't be pleased if I do that! The Buddhist precept forbids wanton destruction of life as does Christianity. So even though they believe his soul will eventually change its mortal body, they will never actively kill him or let me do it! I am sure they would rather want him to come around!”
“But if he is wandering around somewhere and seeing you in a form of soul as you said,” said the man, whose implicit remark surprised Chloe. She wondered how he knew what she had said when she was talking to Flora in the ward before. “Figuratively speaking, he is in a movie theater alone to watch a movie objectively in a dark place and has no means to tell the world of the movie. He can neither talk to anybody in the movie nor communicate at all. Even though he is now groping for his own way in the dark as you said, there is definitely no way for him to go into the world of the movie because he is actually in a different world. I'm sure you can imagine how agonizing it is to struggle to find a way out of the darkness when it is known to be impossible. All he can do is to go to an exit to get out of the theater. That means he should abandon this world and go to another world. So you should let him die. That's what he wants to do. That's even what his parents want him to do, too.”
“No! What you said is merely a simple metaphor. There is actually no damage in his spine. The operation resulted in success. There is no brain damage found, either! So, he must come around. There is no difference between him and me -- he is completely normal. There is just some unknown problem with him. If I can figure out what it is, he will come around. He must be struggling now to come back to this world!”
“I can tell you what it is. He has lost the worth of life in this world. He knew all would happen according to his premonition and that his free will would not be completely respected. He knew he would be shot, and he knew he could not save the stag. That's why he was reluctant to go to the forest. He was struggling in a great quandary to go against his fate. But, after all, you took him there. So, he realized no one in this earthly world could evade their fate.”
“No! That's wrong!” shouted Chloe, melting into tears. “If I hadn't taken him to the forest, he would have been fine! If he knew what would happen there, he could have avoided such an incident. I... I was just too careless. When I noticed that he was afraid of something, I should have asked him what was wrong with him. But, in fact, I asked him to go there. That's why I feel the responsibility of my act and try to make him come around, even though all doctors already gave up.” Chloe sobbed her heart out in an unappeasable sorrow.
“You don't have to take any responsibility for that incident. As I said, everything happens according to the laws of nature. You are no exception. You took him to the forest as if you were controlled by the invisible daedal hands of predestination. Regardless of whether you tried to avoid it or not, it would inevitably happen. So let him rest in peace now. Sooner or later, I will take him with me. That is what he wants me to do. If merciful killing is performed with his will, it's not against a religious precept, is it?”
“Yes, it is! If he wants to die, it will be, in a sense, a suicide! It is the worst sin in Christianity! His mother will wail for him because he will never be emancipated from eternal torment in hell!”
“But you can perform passive euthanasia. It is just withholding the medical treatment. So regardless of whether or not he wants to die, he will close his life in a natural way. It is not a killing. It's not suicide, either, because he doesn't actually commit anything to kill himself.”
“I can't do that! Why do you always try to persuade me to let him go? I told you he was actually trying to come back! He must be struggling to come around!”
“How do you know that?” the man said in a cold, low voice.
“I just know! I cannot explain how I know it. How about you? How do you know he wants to die?”
“Well, as I said, I need to take the dead with me. That is my job. So I can know whoever is going to die or wants to die.”
“Who the heck are you? Why do you take the dead with you? Are you a mortician or something like that?”
“That's what you don't have to know....” Then, the man slowly turned his eyes toward the window.
“Thanatos! You've already come here?”
Chloe heard a sudden voice from behind and turned her face. There was a weird bogey-like creature coming out of the tunnel made on the window. The tunnel was very dark, but the sight outside the window was still visible through it, and the window seemed to have another dimensional world of its own.
Chloe was staring in fear and surprise at the creature which was struggling to bring its stumpy body down onto the floor. It looked like a bear, but its proboscis was similar to a trunk of elephant, its eyes to those of rhinoceros, its tail to that of cow, and its legs to those of tiger. Strangely, it was in Chinese red clothes. It was hard to see its body hair under its clothes, but she could see some black dapples on the white hair.
“Damn it! I wanted to take him before you came,” said the man indignantly to the creature.
“Ha-ha. Don't let so slight a thing annoy you. There is always a proper order in doing anything. You should have patience to wait for my job to be done.” The bogey-creature had an amicable countenance, but it was the same to Chloe as the man in the black cloak who might take Kip away from her.
Chloe exclaimed loudly in fear, without wondering why such a creature
could talk, “Who are you? Are you also going to take Kip away?”
“No, no. That's his job,” said the creature calmly glancing at the man.
“Thanatos, don't take him with you yet. He is still my good customer.”
“I know,” said the man reluctantly.
“By the way,” the creature turned its amicable eyes again on Chloe. “You asked me who I was. I am well known in Asia, but you've never even heard about me before, have you? People call me many different things, so I don't know which one is my real name. But a name is not important. I am what I am. If you think no name is inconvenient, you may call me anything you like, or you may call me 'Celestial Tapir' if you will.”
“Celestial Tapir?” Chloe was very confused at its name. Because the bogey-creature which wore Chinese red clothes appeared droll, she speculated it might be a Chinese hobgoblin. But the word 'celestial' could mean the divine being on one hand or 'Chinese' on the other hand. She gazed thoughtfully at the creature, but it had no air of sublimity at all. “Are you some kind of divine being or you are an apparitional creature or a goblin?” she asked half reverently and half fearfully.
“I am neither a god nor a goblin,” said the bogey-creature with a smile on its face.
“I told you that I was what I was,” said the creature flatly and then cast its glance on the floor, noticing some sound. “Well, he seems to be coming.”
Chloe heard something dropping onto the floor. She looked closely at the floor and found some scattered poppy seeds. They continuously dropped one at a time like a tap dripping drop by drop. She wondered where they came from and glanced up at the ceiling, but she couldn't figure it out.
“You are a little late, Hypnos,” said the bogey-creature.
Chloe turned her eyes again toward the creature. There was an ethereally beautiful, handsome young man wrapped up in a white cloth next to the bogey-creature.
But he had a pair of wings attached to his brow, and his eyes were glazed as if he were a somnambulist. His arm was unsteadily dangling, and poppy seeds were dropping one at a time from his hand.
“Where is Oneiros?” asked the man in the black cloak.
“He is levitating over Hypnos' head,” said the bogey-creature. “He can neither be incarnated nor manifested. He himself is very obscure, although he can give humans either blurry or very clear images, depending on who sees them.”
There was a phantasmal, hazy air brooding over Hypnos.
Chloe wondered if it was like ether that ancient people imagined, but she didn't think about why she wasn't frozen with terror by the appearance of such eerie beings. She was actually trying to quell her fear out of concern that Kip might be taken away from her. She drew courage from her feeling of responsibility to protect him, and she exclaimed, “Who are you? What do you want?”
But Hypnos remained silent.
“He cannot talk,” said the bogey-creature. “He is in an eternal sleep. I can explain to you why we came here in his stead.” Looking at Chloe, who was trying not to be frightened, the bogey-creature said, “Don't be scared. We are not ghosts. We've come here just to emancipate his doppelganger.”
“Kip's doppelganger!? What is it?”
“It is sometimes called 'wraith,' 'double-walker,' or 'astral body.' In other words, it is disembodied soul levitating at the moment of death. Life is merely an empty dream, but some people cannot tolerate such affliction. He is now merely lying on the bed, but he is in fact in the same state. That's why we are going to efface his distress in order to let him rest in peace before Thanatos takes him to the last home.”
Chloe was eagerly listening to the bogey-creature because what it said was very similar to what she thought, and it confirmed that Kip was actually wandering in the dark with his affliction. But like the man standing with a sinister air at the door of the ward, the bogey-creature said it would let Kip die. So she couldn't help exclaiming again, “Don't let him go! If you have mercy on him, let him come around! It is not time he should pass away. He is completely fine. He is just mentally tormented...isn't he?”
But Celestial Tapir didn't reply. Retaining its amicable countenance, it just said, “Look.”
When Chloe cast her eyes on Kip, the so-called astral body rose out of his physical body and levitated.
“Kip! No! Don't go!” Chloe tried to hold and push it back into his physical body, but she staggered because it was intangible.
The astral body started to walk into the scenery of the glade of the forest that loomed up in the ward. Everything going on was enigmatic to Chloe, and she just sobbed, almost becoming demented, with no means to save him.
In the virtual scene of the forest, she saw an image of herself plucking flowers at the bank of the river and the stag peacefully looking at her from the other side of the river. It seemed to be a very genial spring day. When Kip's astral body came to her in the scene, she asked him to pick the narcissuses blooming around the legs of the stag. Although it was getting close to evening, the narcissuses still bloomed vigorously.
He carefully crossed the river and tried to push the stag aside. It reluctantly stepped back, but when he tried to pick the narcissus, the stag tried to push him away from the flower with its nose.
“Kip? Did you get it yet? Please hurry. Probably we'd better go home now. Your father will be waiting for us with special dinner today.” Chloe rushed to Kip who was struggling to push the stag aside. In a hurry, he touched the narcissus to plunk it up. Then, the earth suddenly started to burst and rend with a tremendous roar. The stag's foot slipped into the chasm, the animal struggled to get out. Kip immediately tried to save the stag, but the rumbling of the earth grew in violence, and the earth quaked intensively.
“Kiiiip!” yelled Chloe in the scene, looking on helplessly. There was nothing she could do except support herself on the shaking ground.
Kip was trying to brace his legs on the ground firmly, holding the legs of the stag, but it was too heavy, and he was dragged with it into the chasm. When she saw him swallowed into the chasm of the earth, she screamed, sobbing, and tried to go into the chasm. Then, the virtual scene faded out.
“No!” Chloe, who saw the whole phantasmagoric scene, screamed and kneeled down. Tears streamed ceaselessly down her cheeks and dripped from her drooping face onto the floor like the scattered poppy seeds. She wept for a while, forgetting the presence of the weird beings, but those poppy seeds soon reminded her of them. She jumped up and turned her eyes on the bogey-creature.
“My goodness,” said Celestial Tapir. “I didn't think his affliction was so enormous that I couldn't swallow.”
“You couldn't swallow his affliction? What do you mean?” asked Chloe in a voice trembling with tears.
“Well, I feed myself on the fetters of humans' minds. Some people tend to have the gloomy belief that unhappiness is an inevitable part of life. All parts of yin in their mind such as fear, gloom, and distress grow and overwhelm them and make them have a virtual image of unhappiness. That's why they call for me. But the others are much worse. They lead a life of escape from reality. They tend to seek empty pleasure and escape deeper and deeper into the profound darkness for a virtual ray of hope without knowing what they are actually doing. He is now in the latter situation. So, there was nothing I could do for him now.”
“Why couldn't you do anything for him now? Because his soul has gone into the chasm of the earth? Is what I saw now really true? Has he really fallen into the chasm?”
“Well, I don't know the truth. All I can say is that he is now in the profound darkness. Thanatos already told you so, didn't he? That is what we think is true, and we think that he has gone somewhere he thinks he should be regardless of whether we agree. It is a very exclusive place. So I must go back where I think I should be now.”
“Where is the profound darkness? Why does he think he should be there?”
Chloe desperately asked Celestial Tapir, but it just walked back to the tunnel in the window where it came from, without answering her questions.
“Where are you going? Wait! Tell me where he has gone!”
Celestial Tapir awkwardly tried to climb up the window.
“Wait! Don't go, please! Tell me where it is! How can I go there? I want to go there to bring him back!”
Celestial Tapir then slowly turned back for a moment and said, “I cannot tell you where it is, but you can go there. If you think you can go, you can go. If you think you can't you can't. That is the way things work here.”
“What do you mean? You always talk obscurely! I don't understand you!”
“Ask Thanatos, the man behind you,” said Celestial Tapir, turning back and struggling to get into the tunnel.
She turned her face back to the door of the ward, but the man in the black cloak was no longer there. She promptly looked again toward the window, but the tunnel in the window was just fading out. And Hypnos and Oneiros were no longer there, either.
