Shit! SHIT! It wasn’t going to work! I couldn’t stand it. I was going to cry. And it was going to be one honking flood of tears. Why not? I was really sad. I wanted to cry. Embarrassing or not, it didn’t really matter anymore. I could feel the sobs and the sniffles and the snot working their way up my throat, marching up like they were about to attack. My hands were numb from being balled up so tight.
And then, just as I was thinking, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, this is it…just as I was about to lose it, Yoji stood up as if he was about to walk away.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured. Was that lucky timing, or what? Or what? In one blast, I breathed…out everything I had been holding inside, then took a few gulping gasps and—then I lost it.
“Hiii…ku, fu, eeeee, ggu, fuu…” I couldn’t believe how pathetic I sounded—couldn’t believe this was coming from my own mouth.
And getting louder every second. It was out of control. I wanted to cry, and that’s what I was doing. What was wrong with that? I wanted somebody to tell me that it was okay for anybody as sad as I was to cry her eyes out for as long as she wanted. But then just as all my blubbering and yelping was about to jack up to some new and more disgusting level, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that Yoji was standing a little ways off…talking to someone? “What do you think you’re doing?” he was saying.
You idiot! Yoji! You asshole! I’m bawling my eyes out here and you don’t even notice. Asshole! Drop dead! Do you hear me, Yoji? DROP DEAD!
“You can’t do that here,” he was saying, his voice getting really stern. “Don’t you know where you are? I’m calling the police.” This made me look up. I didn’t even care if he saw me like this. And anyway, if I didn’t look up he’d never realize I was crying.
But did I get a shock—enough to stop me mid-sob, like I was sucking back the tears, which had mostly been for show anyway.
Because now I saw why Yoji sounded so mad: he was standing in front of a couple who were on a bench next to the swings, no more than a few yards away. The man’s pants were down around his ankles and the woman’s skirt was tucked up to her waist, and they were going at it, right there. No doubt about it, they were doing it. They were bumping uglies, and they didn’t seem to care who saw, much less that Yoji was pissed off. There they were, in broad daylight, on a park bench, almost fully clothed, fucking their brains out. But one look told you this wasn’t some pervert thing they were doing—because the whole time they were going at it, the whole time he kept putting it in and taking it out and putting it in and grinding it all around, they were both crying their eyes out. And the tears had nothing to do with the ones I had just been shedding. They weren’t working themselves up and making themselves cry to make a point about something, the way I had been. You could tell that these tears had come pouring out all by themselves. I could see the difference right away. Because my tears had been fake, and theirs were totally real. Maybe it was because I had just been crying fake tears that I knew the real thing when I saw them.
But shit! If they were doing it in broad daylight on a park bench, why were they crying, real tears or not? It did look kind of cool, kind of out there, to be doing it right in the open like that; but somehow I could tell there was nothing fake or showy about either the tears or the sex. They weren’t exhibitionists—somehow I knew that right off the bat. They were crying because they couldn’t stop from crying, and they were fucking because they couldn’t keep from fucking. Of course they were. If they weren’t, why did they go on doing it—crying and fucking—even when Yoji went right up and told them to stop?
I gave a little rub to my cheeks—but the fake tears had dried in no time.
“I said cut it out!” Yoji said, whipping out his cell phone. “I’m really going to call the cops.” I hauled myself up off the pink bear and went over to him.
By this time, the guy had started moaning, but the woman looked up and murmured, “Go ahead, call them. Do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter.” We could see everything now, the skin and pubs rubbing together between the rolled-up skirt and the pulled-down pants, and hear the sound—gucha gucha, chappo chappo. There was something so sad about it that I started feeling miserable again, but in a whole different way.
“I’m not kidding,” Yoji said, starting to punch buttons on his phone. “I’m really calling them.” So I reached around from behind and grabbed it out of his hand.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Give it back, Katsura. This is disgusting. What if some kids were to walk by?” But I didn’t give it back. Instead, I just stood there, looking at their crying faces and their plastered-together parts. “Give it back,” he repeated.
I knew who they were: Takaaki and Sayaka Yoshiba. They’d had three sons, triplets named Shin’ichi, Koji, and Yuzo, and all three boys had been killed by someone who called himself the Round-and-Round Devil. The bodies had been completely dismembered—arms, legs, and heads cut off—and the pieces had been left along the banks of the Tama River. The Round-and-Round Devil was still at large.
So even if this didn’t exactly give them the right to sit on a park bench bawling—and balling—it seemed only fair, to me anyway, that we should let them go at
