II

The hatred that came through the screen. The bile that ran from the computer screen.
  What had happened?
  Upon opening her account, she found her red mail-box loaded with the 99+ limit sign. She feverishly clicked on it, desperate to become Auntie Suzi again, desperate to feel like someone, anyone other than Yuri. Poor, miserable Yuri.
  Someone had her account.
  Auntie Suzi had worked in overtime, spreading a vile display of hatred to the advice seekers and the vulnerable. Threats of death, rape, murder. It was so obviously out of character for Auntie Suzi, but the people still rallied against her.
  Yuri began to feel her chest sting as she scrolled through the hateful messages, people willing death on each other. Others making morbid jokes. Others simply stood on moral high-grounds. All from a hacker getting into her account.
  The last message made her blood run cold.
 
  ‘Hi Guys!

Letting you know I really am Yuri Kikuchi and I live in Apt. 35, Plaza Apartments in the Shibuya district!
 
Find me!

Love,

Yuri!’

  She screamed. Then, with a wild glance around the room, covered her mouth with her hand. Someone had told everyone where she lived. Her stalker had started a hate campaign against her. How did her stalker know? The only two people who knew where she lived were Yukio and Akiko. Unless, Akiko was her stalker all along.
  Yes.
  The letters.
  They were always dropped when Akiko had left.
  The phones calls seemed to happen when she was out, or nearby, always watching her. Always watching her.
  It had been Akiko. Their meeting had been no accident.
  But what had Yuri done to cause such a harmful reaction?
  Had, in fact, Yuri been the subject of Akiko’s cruel and emotionally disturbing experience? Yuri bet that Akira was not even dead. It must be Akira on the phone. She rocked back and forth, bile sloshing around her tightly knotted stomach.
  Buzz-buzz-buzz.
  She did not even want to look at her phone. But she knew that she had to do it. She had to confront Akira.
  She held it in her trembling hand once more, raising it to her ear.
  “Yuri, long time, no log in.”
  The voice almost sounded cheery.
  It sounded male now, her vision of Akira grinning down the phone as he calmly gloated.
  “Akira!” She screamed, “You set me up!”
  “Ah, but you are wrong.”
  “What? You aren’t dead! You and Akiko have done this to me! You’re trying to drive me to the edge!”
  The voice remained silent.
  “I’m not Akira. I promise you I’m not. Things will only get worse if you don’t do what I want.”
  The line went dead.
  Yuri wailed as she fell onto her bed, her eyes shimmering with tears, each drop catching the distinct warped glow of the monitor. It must be Akira.
  It must be Akira, surely?

She had stopped eating and drinking. Her paranoia on high.
  It was reaching the first week of spring, late April, early May. Time, space, dates, hours, and minutes, all lost in the settling fear that had drifted around Yuri and burrowed deep within her. Her nerves were shredded in terror. She did not order any new food.
  She thought if she did, someone might intercept it, pretend to be the delivery man, barge in. Or, worse, plant a bomb amongst a package, or poison the supply so she died a painful and horrid death alone in the apartment. Like Yukio upstairs. She felt like a king under threat of assassination. A queen about to become victim of an uprising.
  She had lost all control.
  There was no stability in life anymore. Everyone knew her, the real her. The longer she had thought about it, she thought about Akiko leaving her, her loyal subject. It was all part of the plan surely? Some grand scheme against her? Trembling, both in fear and anger, she had considered all the suspects.
  Akiko, jealous of her friend’s success and money, scared of being under the thumb of someone, had been scheming and toying with Yuri, in cahoots with Akira. Or, drugging her, putting something in the miso soup, so she would wildly hallucinate and imaging horrible events. Had her whole life been manipulated by drugs? Anything was possible now as the foundations of the world around her fell away. Her bed, framed by wood was now part of her padded cell. Had the world medicated her into this state of paranoia? Eiko Yoshinobu was a nurse, a psychiatric nurse with all the drugs. Working with Akiko to keep her sedated while the real world plotted against her.
  Yukio.
  He had been her cell mate.
  The pair were equally deranged and psychotic, only he expressed it.
  Akiko must have got to him, so did Akira. They drove him to suicide. They made him do it.
  Yuri felt the world looking in on her. The doors were locked, and no one stirred in the apartment. Maybe they were waiting for her to do something. Maybe the whole world was at her doorstep with pitch forks, torches, axes. She turned to her computer.
  In a moment of rage, she had smashed the monitor in with her chair, ripping out the cables from the main tower violently enough to fray some of them, or break off the connector elements in the jack still. She did not care. The devil machine was dead. She was pure, a God away from the machine, a God amongst mankind. She was simply trying to imbue her great works upon those around her, the people who did not understand life like she did.
  Agony.
  Not even Eiko could understand. No one ever would.
  Yuri crawled off the bed, raising herself to her knees. Kneeling before the bedroom door, she clasped a hand out to the door knob. Twisting it, her eyes wide as her body betrayed her mind. Flinging the door open, she was surprised to meet the dead darkness of the night time in her front room. How long had it been without leaving her bedroom? As she walked out, the pitch blackness seemed to envelope her in a warming veil. She felt safer in the darkness, like she was hidden from anyone. Or, something was hidden from her.
  Buzz-buzz-buzz.
  The phone went off again.
  With a sudden burst of violent energy, confidence growing in the darkness, she answered the phone.
  “What?” She demanded.
  “Yuri, it’s not going to get better.”
  “What do you want from me? My body, my soul? Do you want to come over and make me suffer? Are you just enjoying toying with me?”
  The voice was quiet.
  “You need to go to go to an overpass, near your street, a little way down the road in fact. I will instruct you as you go.”
  “Why? What for?”
  “You have to jump off it for me. You have to jump for me Yuri.” The voice was blunt, but almost sounded hurt.
  Yuri leant against the wall, tears streaming down her face, the dark swallowing her, becoming cold.
  “You want me to, jump off? To die?”
  “The overpass, five minutes. You know you want to.”
  Line dead.

Yuri had hesitated, but in the end found herself on the streets.
  The only way to stop this was to end it here. The world hated her. The police would condemn her as some crazy orphan child and lock her away. Akiko would spit in her face. The world was mad. All of it, gone mad. There was no method anymore. Why did this voice want her to die so badly? It no longer entered her mind that her stalker might be bluffing. The buildings around her were perfect vantage points. She wondered what the voice on the other end would do when she jumped. Maybe it would cheer, maybe it would cry, or maybe they would kill themselves too, destroying the body that carried its owner’s voice. Or, maybe they would touch their body, the beauty of Yuri premature death drawing upon some deep, sexual desires. Sex and death were always intertwined.
  Yuri remembered Eiko telling her about the way Eiko and her husband had made love the night before he disappeared on the sea forever. It was something that had stuck with her. The idea of the elderly woman, once young like her, interlocked with a young man. When she had thought about it, she thought about how her father had abandoned her. How harsh the man was leaving her at the train station. No tenderness, no love, no care. Not like Eiko and the pleasure brought by her lover.
  Yuri reached the foot of the underpass, the traffic streaming past, ignoring her. In her haste, she fell up the stairs, her body trembling as she reached the top of the stairs.
  For a moment, she wondered if she should be doing this at all.
  For one brief momentary lapse of insanity, she had a rational thought. Looking about her at the high rises of apartments, office buildings and shopping malls around her, she suddenly felt at home in the neon. And, for the first time, she noticed the blossom on the trees as it swirled around her. In that moment of clarity, she felt a beauty about her. She suddenly felt rather free, or freer than she had done in a long time. In a way, it tugged her back to an older self, someone ancient and buried in the psyche of Yuri pre-Auntie Suzi. That innocent little girl.
  Then came the bitterness, the sudden twisting of the world crawling after her. All her thoughts became a spiral, a loop of agonised will to die eating the tail of a way out. All the rings seemed to cycle back to death. The imbalance of her mind, in tandem with the imbalance of the nature around her suddenly took over. The neon lost its inviting brightness, and now simply hummed out a hollow and unforgiving light, impassive to whether she lived or died. It too, hid her assailant in the shadows. Looking out over the tops of buildings, the lights made the bodies of the buildings dark, while exposing her.
  She felt like a spy caught out, a criminal in the act of wrongdoing. On a primal level, she felt like a deer in headlights. Another side of her felt like an actor, standing upon the stage, choking. The faces hidden in the black offered no sympathy and comfort. They demanded to see a show.
  Yuri decided it was time to stop stalling.
  She took off her shoes, pointing them perfectly straight forward, facing the monolithic buildings in the distance. She tried to calm her breathing, feeling another wave of doubt overcoming her as she, with trembling hands and legs, lifted herself atop the railing of the overpass, looking out over the traffic that was to claim her.

“May the lily return to the earth.”
  The voice cooed down the phone. She felt a sudden weightlessness, then, she dragged herself back.
  An inch away from falling forward, her heart jumped.
  She balanced herself, then slipped off the rails, falling into a heap on the floor. A scream came down the phone.
  “Damn you!
  Tears fell from Yuri’s eyes as the voice chastised her.
  “You’re selfish! Only when things go wrong for you do you ever emote. When Akiko left you, you cried!” The voice trembled, and stopped, “When your mother died you did even cry! When your father left you couldn’t cry for him but only for your sad self at the station!”
  Yuri gripped the railing, hearing the tirade blaring out the speaker.
  She raised herself up off the ground, noticing she had put a hole in her tracksuit bottoms. She could feel something warm and sticky on her knees. Probably blood. Trembling, she suddenly felt like crying again. “What do you mean?”
  “And now! You cry again when confronted with your own selfishness! But for yourself! You are a worthless child.”
  The voice now was breaking down, becoming weaker. Age and sadness, an ancient agony, crept into it.
  It was drenched in familiarity, a voice she had not heard since she was small enough to begin making memories.
  A vision of an angry patriarch.
  She gripped the rail for support, feeling as if she was about to be dragged offstage by a hook. She looked out over the buildings, scanning them, a feeling that familiar eyes were watching her.
  “You are a selfish girl, Yuri.” The voice sobbed. “You couldn’t cry for your mother, could you?”
  Yuri paused.
  She no longer was crying.
  She simply stood still, the sound of the traffic falling away from her as she stared into the vast metropolis ahead of her.
  “Why couldn’t you cry for her?” He said.
  “Father?”
  Quietly. Down the phone. A whisper. The secret shattering.
  “Could you cry for me now?”
  Suddenly, rushing air ripped into her ear. She looked ahead.
  A black figure fell from between two buildings. There was no scream.
  Through the phone’s speaker came a thud.
  Then the line died.