Some guy’s coming after me, fast! He’s going to catch me…got to…hurry!
Made it! The roof.
Over this fence!
No!
Uhhhhhh!
«Where do you think you’re going? Give us back the girl!»
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t know any girl!”
«Don’t lie to me!»
“I’m telling the truth!”
I really don’t! I have no idea what’s going on!
I’ll poke your fucking eyes out!
«Huh?»
“You asshole!”
Shitbread di dum di dum. The last time. For all the world’s a shitbread, and we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…
Heh!
Chofu’s a great big beautiful place!
Look at all those people down there. Try not to land on any of them.
Shit! I didn’t think I would die before the old lady.
So, you’re still here.
Would have liked to leave this world just a little better than I found it.
Wish I’d had time to finish my Asura Man, the little Buddha I was going to make out of those kids. That would have been a statue like the world has never seen!
Oh well. The Round-and-Round will now perform his patented quadruple somersault in the laid-out position…
1
What am I? How did the monster inside me get plugged right into the Round-and-Round Devil? What’s the link between the Round-and-Round and me?
The Round-and-Round is a different person, but somehow, metaphorically speaking, he’s also another me. I’m a woman and he’s a man, but that’s the difference of just one sex chromosome. It doesn’t amount to much. These days you’ve got men who like men and women who like women, people who feel like women living in men’s bodies, and vice versa. You’ve got fairies and dykes and gays and homos and lesbians—and on top of that you’ve got half the people faking it. When it’s all that confused, no one’s going to care that the Round-and-Round’s a man and I’m a woman. Come to think of it, it’s not a bad analogy—you can’t tell the difference between men and women anymore, just like the Round-and-Round and I can’t tell who’s who between the two of us, can’t figure out where I leave off and he starts. It’s almost like we’re the same person—which may be more common than you think these days, now that we’re all reading each other’s thoughts online all the time. Kind of screws with the idea of the individual—one big group consciousness, like all those people on V of H following everything we do.
I guess you get all those creeps together inside one head and you actually make a monster.
And then there’s the monster made out of pieces of all those kids in that dark forest inside me. Totally scary, stealing sounds and voices and doing all that evil shit. That was made by chopping up me and the Round-and-Round and a whole bunch of other kids and sticking us all together. I suppose it’s still in there, chopping up more people and slapping them on to make itself even bigger. When you get so much bad karma together, something pretty monstrous happens. Like Armageddon.
So I guess that monster makes sense in a way, metaphorically speaking.
And even the Round-and-Round—he might be something that was already inside me.
I’m one single person, but I’ve got all of these different personalities and voices inside me. And that monster that took them and turned them all into those terrible songs…that was just me too. Which means—I’m just guessing here—that the way it looked, that awful crammed-together body, was somehow an image of something deep inside me, some fundamental core. Like my “ego” or something? Who knows? Or maybe it’s more like…I’m somewhere deep inside myself in that dark forest and I’m sucking up all those people, all the ones inside of me, and cutting them up and incorporating them into myself, making them part of me and making myself bigger and bigger. Maybe that’s it: I’m the monster. But I bet it’s probably the same for everybody—we’ve all got a monster inside, in our own dark forest, grubbing up parts from a whole lot of other people.
That’s probably it—we need to feed on others to make our inner monster grow. In the forest inside us, it’s all-powerful, but what it wants is to be totally scary on the outside. And maybe the boundaries between those forests aren’t always as clear as you think. Maybe some people have special powers that let them come and go from one to another whenever they want.
Tansetsu Sakurazuki. That pale, chubby, shaggy geek. Maybe he couldn’t exactly come right into my forest, but once I was there, he managed to reach in and grab me. And all the weird stuff that happened to me on the way to the forest—all that must have been inside me as well. I mean, how likely is it that you’d escape from a hammer-swinging classmate and run into a bunch of TV celebrities, then get on the wrong train and end up being chased by the Mafia? All that must have been my imagination. But Tansetsu Sakurazuki came right in and collared me there by the cliff. Pretty cool. And if he can do it, then there must be other people who can too. And if people can get in and out of these inner-self places, that means there must be paths of some sort leading back and forth—even if not everybody has the power to use them. Paths between me and Tansetsu, between the Round-and-Round and me, between me and everybody else, between all of us.
Not that that makes me feel any better. The point here is that totally scary monster. I think it was probably just something inside me, but it might also be totally possible that it really exists somewhere. That out there in some real dark forest—not inside me or anybody else—a monster is really catching little kids, cutting them up in pieces, and sticking them onto its own body. If so, then maybe, while I was wandering around in limbo like that, I got called to that real dark forest,
