Dead Life

(sensitive content: the story contains the theme of death)

Yuta would have had complete happiness, had it not been for the fact that he was alive. And afraid of drying. That’s what pushed him to do the deal with a dark-valley creature all those years ago, after all.

Yuta used to be everything, twenty years ago, before the deal tied him to the factory. He was a rising artist, a riveting poet. A man of beauty so unique people feared coming close, as if he was a personification of danger, although of such charisma and magnetism that danger never stopped anyone from being pulled into Yuta’s blazing eyes and quicksand words. He attracted everyone, but his favorite were the men - of his age, or slightly younger - that he could grant not the power of his words that everyone should access, but an opportunity to find out if his lips tasted like gloss.

Now Yuta was something. He did not know the word for what he’d become. For the past twenty years, he’d been pushing the lever. That’s what the creature asked of him in exchange for the guarantee of life. No, it must have been more than twenty years. He had time to resent the creature for putting him in such a situation, and to later on forge the external resentment into the internal disappointment.

His memories were fresh, but only because he relived them in his mind from the moment he realized he’d ever make any new. He thought the most about Akari - the last man he kissed, the same night he was granted a forever. When Yuta met Akari, he thought he’d fall in love for the first time. Yuta marveled everything beautiful - love, life, joy, pace. Akari was the most beautiful of them all. Falling in love was going to make him feel more alive than he’d ever be. Yuta would have fallen in love soon.

But what if he’d lost Akari? During the days they kissed and held each other, Yuta experienced the fear of losing Akari as often as he thought of the man’s smile. Yuta couldn’t handle the fear of losing the person he was to fall in love with. Afraid of something going wrong, losing his life and leaving his beloved all alone in the world. What to love for if the possibility of loss is as great, or ever greater than the love itself?

When Yuta was promised a forever, he thought he was doing it for love. For Akari. Their happiness.

The bell rang, and Yuta pushed the lever away from himself, then pulled it back. He didn’t need any strength for the task. He didn’t need food, nor sleep. He’d been sitting on the wooden stool, in a gray room lacking windows. He had not seen the creature since the transaction was concluded, since the creature sliced the top of his hand until four drops of blood spilled onto the creature’s own skin. The rules were simple - push the lever. Days later only had Yuta learned this was not the only rule. Push the lever, don’t leave the room, don’t leave the factory, don’t stand up. Going against the rules meant dying. He had panicked when he learned it, but never did Yuta go against the rules.

The memories used to be sufficient. When Yuta didn’t think about Akari, he reminisced about the sweaty summers in Tokyo, watermelon juice dribbling down his chin and the exotic faces of the travelers. Yuta’s favorite time to write poetry was summer. He thrived in heat and humidity, like the lavender flowers of hyssop. His poetry used to be like his summer, like himself - smoldering and sweet, slow and beautiful.

Yuta hadn’t written a poem in decades. He used to make them in his head, trying to memorize them, so that he could get them on paper once he’d be out of the factory. That was when he believed there was a way out. Only one poem stayed with him through the years, coming alive at some point, keeping him company as he pushed the lever.

Sold to the wheel of life

For a life dead before it began

He did not write it. It came to him by itself one day. Or night. Yuta didn’t know what was happening outside of the factory. He wasn’t sure if the factory existed. There was his room, and his lever - his, because after all this time he liked to think he wasn’t in a place entirely foreign. Maybe there was no summer anymore. No travelers and no watermelons. No poetry.

Maybe he was not in the future, but in the past. Or maybe he wasn’t in time at all. He did not know anything, and trying to come up with answers always gave him a headache. Yuta was an artist, not a scientist. He’d never been a fan of the serious part of the world, the mathematical formulas, research papers and white lab gowns. He was the lover of intuition, music, taste, and the emotions they evoke in him.

Yuta didn’t like to think all that much, but he made an exception for Akari, the summer and the lonely poem. 

The bell rang. Yuta pushed and pulled the lever. He had asked the lever what it was for. Because there were no answers, and a creature that put him in this place was a mysterious kind, he thought asking the lever was sensible. Yuta never learned the purpose of pushing the lever. At the beginning, he often wondered if he had been causing tremendous harm. Or blessing the world. He wondered which world he was affecting - the one he knew or the one the creature came from. Then he wondered if the lever had any purpose at all. It might have been a meaningless piece of metal. Yuta didn’t understand the logistics of his deal. 

But at least he was alive. He would always be alive.

Was Akari still alive? It couldn’t have been twenty years. Yuta made the deal when his face glowed with youth, and his arms could hold him above a man for hours as he moved his hips just as freely. Now his hands were wrinkly. His stiff spine ached. If the time in the factory worked as the time should, Yuta would have been at least eighty years old. Akari was a couple years younger, but Yuta could still taste the cigarettes in their kisses that lingered on his lips. The man smoked multiple packs a day and, to the horror of young Yuta, always said he was not around for a long time, anyway.

Akari, who gelled his long, black hair, and drew eyeliner wings along his eyelids. Akari, who didn’t speak much, because he laughed a lot more than he talked. 

Akari might have been alive, but Yuta had been dead for years. When he bought immortality for a few drops of his blood, Yuta died. His body still worked, and it would work for as long as he pushed the lever, but that was no life. He made no deal, for he’d also have been dead if he’d continued his life in fear of loss. Had Yuta always been what he was afraid of the most?

The bell rang. Yuta looked ahead, at the door. He wanted the sweaty clothes clinging to his skin. He wanted to hear the voice of someone else than himself. He wanted to see Akari again, hold his hand and say the words he never got to say. The bell kept ringing. Yuta looked at the lever. Had he been pushing it for someone? Had he given his life for someone else? 

If he stayed to push the lever, if he kept living for whoever he had been doing it for, he’d be alive. Technically. Because he could no longer see the point of what he’d bought himself all those years ago. Immortality was no freedom. No happiness. No life. 

He didn’t know what was outside the door and what would happen to him if he left. But there was a chance. The possibilities were endless outside this door, not here. Not in the room with the lever. The room that was supposed to be a safe haven became hell Yuta had only one way out. A way uncertain and foreign.

He longed for life. When the bell rang louder, he slowly stood up and walked past the lever. Years ago, when he made the deal to live forever, he died. Now, crossing the room, walking towards the end of his life, Yuta was becoming alive. More alive he’d ever been.

In the last moments of his life, Yuta thought about Akari, watermelon juice, wrinkled pages of his notebooks and sweat, hoping whatever he focused on, the door would lead him to it.