Asleep in Nara (Short Story Series, Pt. 9)

Note: This entry, set in Nara, Japan, continues the story of Sebastian’s Faustian deal with Persephone. Remember when I said the story would be five to eight parts long, and I was wrong? Then I said ten parts long? Yeah, well, it turns out I’m a lying liar face. I’m sorry my estimation skills are so poor. Please, never put me on any projection committee; I’ll just take your project over budget.

I can say with certainty that we’re in the final stretch. I’m going to stop promising a final chapter count, but we’re coming to a close.

Are you enjoying Sebastian’s tale? What elements are you still curious about? Are you rooting for him? For Persephone? For both? Against both? Is there any distinction? Comment and let me know your thoughts. I’m always eager to read your comments and questions.

As always, you can find the previous chapters here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.

To Persephone’s surprise, Sebastian outperformed expectations. On the one hand, she felt vindicated in her initial assessment of his ability; on the other hand, she was a little disappointed he kept surviving. It seemed like a terrible cosmic joke that Ken should be dead and that Sebastian should fill his old role and even excel in it.

Furthermore, she had simply grown tired of putting up with Sebastian. She found his chain-smoking particularly annoying. It felt like he was emulating some sort of Japanese caricature. More practically, she feared every demon would smell him coming from a kilometer away. None did, fortunately, but the smell was nauseating. At least the job was getting done.

Over the next few weeks, Persephone tracked three demons, and with Sebastian’s help, they all met violent ends. Persephone began to wonder how organized the demons in and around Nara were. After a lot of research, and some light torture, she determined none of them were working in concert. That was a relief.

Research and tracking were difficult for Persephone; she was a soldier, not a scholar. Most demons were hard to find. Unless they were literally insane, they didn’t normally go around announcing their presence. Despite the difficulty, Persephone had picked up enough tricks from fellow demon hunters to help her identify the ones who didn’t want to be found. They tended to hide right out in plain sight, but they often had a tell. It was amazing what something like pouring a line of salt in a suspected demon’s path would reveal.

For each kill Persephone forced Sebastian to make, she was at least 80% certain the victim had been a demon. She didn’t bother sharing any confidence intervals with Sebastian, of course. He just assumed she could recognize her own. More importantly, he assumed Persephone would bring him to a quick end if he didn’t do her bidding. She did nothing to alleviate his anxiety on the matter.

While Persephone’s research was going okay, Sebastian’s was going terribly. He had lost interest in Supernatural, figuring he had gotten as much out of it as he could. So, rather than watching more TV or crappy YouTube videos, he turned to a couple of long-forgotten research tools: reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Like any good research project, and despite the researcher’s best intentions, Sebastian’s project began in fits and starts. He made the mistake of turning first to an online fan forum for Supernatural. Reading fans’ interpretations of the show, near as he could tell, the story was about two sexy brothers circling the “Will they/Won’t they?” dynamic of their forbidden love. Sebastian was fairly certain that wasn’t the show he had been watching and wondered if there was another show of the same name. Then again, maybe being in Nara so long had destroyed his understanding of the subtleties of American culture. And he wasn’t going to pretend to be some sort of expert in queer culture.

Great, he thought. Now I don’t get Japanese culture or American culture. He felt like a man without a country.

Fortunately, shotgunning Supernatural hadn’t been a total loss. The show set him onto a couple of useful trails. For starters, now he knew what a crossroads demon was, and he learned about the devil’s trap--a kind of occult-looking binding circle that demons could enter but couldn’t exit. The show took some dramatic liberties, but it provided just enough information to point him in the right direction.

Sebastian determined that Persephone must be some kind of crossroads demon. So that explained why she had dragged him under a torii to save him. From there, she could strike a deal with him, and despite some variations on the terms of the deal, there were always two consistent features: the human received some sort of gift, and the demon laid claim to the human’s soul.

Normally, such a deal worked out much differently than Sebastian’s. He also learned he probably could have gotten far better terms than just Persephone saving his life. He could have asked to be a rockstar or a billionaire or anything, really. Missed opportunity there.

The ten years of service didn’t make much sense to him either. These deals usually ended when the crossroads demon either a) collected the human’s soul for Hell or b) reneged on the deal and killed the human anyway. Often, the deal was for a ten-year term, but he couldn’t find anything about helping the demon with her dirty work.

Ultimately, despite various sources’ wild disagreement on the details, as best Sebastian could surmise, there was one abiding certainty to his situation: he was now what professionals in the business would call “proper fucked.”

He turned off his computer and lay down for at least a few hours of sleep. In the morning, he would go to class. He had managed to squeeze attendance back into his routine, but he was almost always mentally checked out. His mind ran constant calculations on how he could slip out of this arrangement with Persephone. He hoped he was getting close.

Life went on this way for a while longer. Sebastian’s anxiety mounted.

Two weeks--and a couple dead demons--later, Sebastian had a breakthrough in his research. It started with a few old blues songs and one committed fan’s connecting the dots Sebastian needed.

Sebastian wasn’t following the argument at first, so he decided he had better listen to the songs in question. He found a YouTube video of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues,” but didn’t care for the song much. It was too musically simple for his twenty-first-century taste. The cover by the rock band Cream was much more to his liking.

Besides recognizing the use of more instruments in the latter version, Sebastian wasn’t musically sophisticated enough to realize why the Cream’s version appealed to him. He couldn’t consciously perceive the ways in which Eric Clapton had simplified the structure of the song, standardizing bar lengths, implementing an eighth-note rhythm throughout, and explicitly following chord progressions that were only implied in the original recording. While Clapton’s version was a more palatable listening experience for a mainstream American audience, it lost that sense of disquietude Johnson so painstakingly evoked.

Sebastian only made it through a couple of cursory listens before switching over to “Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas. Supernatural had gotten the song stuck in his head, and it wouldn’t dislodge.

A pebble hit his window, disturbing his jam session. Persephone was summoning him. Further research would have to wait. He put on pants and went outside to meet her.

“Took you long enough,” Persephone said.

Sebastian grunted and lit a cigarette. Persephone sucked in a deep breath and tried not to release it in an irritated huff.

She was wearing another long skirt, a forest green with pleated vertical folds. The texture and dark color concealed the katar underneath. No one would would even suspect she had a weapon until it was too late. Sebastian, of course, was familiar by now. He searched her figure, trying to determine which leg she had the blade cinched to this evening. He couldn’t tell, and that uncertainty unnerved him. Persephone, of course, had picked up on his reaction and routinely switched which side the blade was on, just to torment him.

That night, at least, she should have refrained from making Sebastian nervous, but she couldn’t help herself. His anxiety brought her some small joy. She couldn’t bring herself to admit it, but Persephone absolutely was going to need Sebastian’s help that night. But her view of him was exceedingly narrow. To her, he wasn’t a person; he was nothing more than his role as Charon. She couldn’t get past viewing him as a mere tool, a grip for the real weapon.

As they left campus, Sebastian wondered how Persephone spent her free time. The thought had never occurred to him before. He imagined she slinked in the shadows, appearing when a demon needed killing.

The reality, however, was that, mostly, she drank. Physiologically, alcohol didn’t affect her as intensely as it would a human, but it had some effect. Unlike Sebastian, she didn’t have to sleep, and that left a lot of hours to mentally replay her failures over and over again.

She had been careless, too arrogant, with Ken. After nearly a decade of working together, she foolishly believed they were unstoppable, that their success was inevitable. The delusion came to a bitter end when they faced the Yakuza demon.

Wracked with guilt, Persephone couldn’t recognize she was not the only one to blame for Ken’s death. He had waved her off , and at the time, she was happy to fight the dozen or so humans at once while Ken faced the greater demon. Once she had dispatched her opponents, Persephone had considered jumping in to help, but Ken had refused again.

Even as the fight turned in the demon’s favor, Ken still refused her help, and she had stupidly complied, assuming he would come out victorious like he always had. She now fully understood her own arrogance, but at the time, nor even weeks later, could she recognize Ken’s hubris. She should have intervened, she told herself over and over.

But there was some other strange intent hidden behind Ken’s bravado. Persephone couldn’t accept this fact either; her mind refused to entertain the thought, but deep down, she knew it to be true: Ken had wanted to die that night.

That suspicion again crept into her thoughts as she walked in silence with Sebastian, doing her best to stay upwind of his cigarette smoke. The wind changed direction, and she groaned.

Growing increasingly frustrated and realizing her own impotence and limitations, Persephone resorted to the only thought that had given her any comfort recently: she had avenged Ken’s death. It was a pale shade of contentment, but it was the best she had.

In bigger cities, like nearby Osaka, the bodies of the unidentified dead are disposed of by the municipality in which they are found. Sometimes there is a small funeral, then the body is cremated. Typically, a large temple will combine the ashes in some sort of communal grave. At Isshin-ji Temple, for example, the deceased’s ashes are added into one of several full-size Buddha statues.

But unlike Osaka, Nara is a small town; there wasn’t necessarily a temple willing to accept the ashes of the unknown dead. But that didn’t mean Ken’s ashes would be treated without the respect due to the dead.

Persephone had learned that a wealthy man living on the outskirts of town saw to the proper burial of these unknown dead in Nara. On his property, he kept a communal grave dedicated to their remembrance. That man had collected and deposited Ken’s ashes.

Persephone felt she had already said her goodbyes and never intended to visit Ken’s grave, but circumstances suddenly dictated otherwise. The man who had deposited Ken’s ashes, it turned out, was a demon.

Persephone shared almost none of this information with Sebastian. She told him only the bare essentials: they were on their way to kill a demon outside of town. Sebastian nodded apathetically as they walked, a long cylinder of ash curling from the end of his cigarette.

***[The photo is my own, taken along the entryway to Wakamiya Shrine in Nara Park]