Excerpt: Trollslayer

TROLLSLAYER
BY JACOB MARTIN

CHAPTER ONE

At times like this, when you realise you’ve just shot your imaginary girlfriend with a Nerf gun, and you’re sobbing into your sleeve even though you know it was either her or you, you tend to think “Gee Wiz! My life is fucked up! James Rolfe couldn’t describe how fucked up it truly is!”. And it was fucked up. For starters, both of my great grandfathers were war criminals, German and Japanese, both sides of the Axis Powers. You don’t come across many mixed-race couplings like that. H.P. Lovecraft may have known a few things about atavistic guilt, but what he failed to realise is that ‘miscegenation’ isn’t a real problem, and isn’t the bones of it. The bones of it are the realities of both my great-grandfathers being war criminals, not that my parents are a mixed race couple at all. People get confused about that in this country.

In any case, what happened between me and Miyako Yamada, my imaginary ex, was strange and peculiar all at once. Example, I only was able to see her because of a side effect of an anti-depressant I was prescribed. The drug was recalled recently for causing hallucinatory side effects. Using the last of my supply of my meds, I went on one hell of a bad trip just to say goodbye. Miyako deserved that, even though she wasn’t real. That’s why I had to kill her now.

Miyako Yamada was a cute meganekko girl right out of a Japanese dating sim, only she looked 3D instead of 2D. She bobbed her head sideways to look at me, and she often repeated herself, not realising she had said the same thing five minutes ago.
“Ichi, I have always loved you” – she had said this for the eleventh time now, like a broken record, and just as distorted. My field of vision was warped and she had ripples in the air when she moved, like in water how everything is stretched as you look below the surface of a lake from above. I broke into a sweat, and breathed heavily. My panic attacks were supposed to be suppressed by this medication, but since I had taken too much it wasn’t working. The sound vibrated through my head, my computer was playing the soundtrack to Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, making its way through the chorus of Billy, Don’t Be A Hero. The bass throbbed in my head. I held my head in my hands as I screamed.

“Ichi, I have always loved you….” – Miyako repeated this again, and I smirked at her, reaching for something under my bed that might destroy her. My hand fumbled over old magazines, my pet rock from primary school, a-ha, a Nerf gun! My Nerf Maverick pistol which I had ordered online since these non-pump action Nerf guns were hard to find in Australia. Surely an imaginary weapon was perfect for destroying an imaginary girl.

I pulled it out and smirked. I was terrified, but I managed to spout out courage in a dumb-headed Hollywood badass quoting way, the only badass I could think of under the circumstances was Han Solo from Star Wars. So I quoted him, after Miyako repeated herself again:

“Ichi, I have always loved you” – I sat on the bed, reclining backwards on some pillows, faking my calm through the whole thing. “Yes, I bet you have” I said, imitating my situational cinema hero who gave me courage at the moment. Then I shot all six foam darts into her and she vanished into a green vapour which dissipated into nothingness. I fell asleep for a while after that, which was probably dangerous since I had overdosed on some heavy duty prescription drugs. Would I survive?

When I awoke, I heard the opening bars of Gloria Gaynor. Clearly I had not slept for long, as the Priscilla: Queen of the Desert soundtrack was still playing. She was now my situational hero. She was what I needed now. I Will Survive. I WILL SURVIVE!
I laughed to myself, crying at the same time. What had become of me? Was I so lonely and jaded that I would never find love that I clung to a delusion of a woman? Had I become a hikikomori? According to the endnotes of my guidebook on the subject, my Tokyopop translation of Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto, if you were a hikikomori, the Japanese Government defined you as being isolated from social contact for at least six months. I had passed six months only barely, and I regularly talked to my parents because it was so lonely living like this. I had failed at failing. An epic fail, that was what my life was now.

If I had failed at failing, maybe I was somewhat of a success? But what kind of a success? I had broken up with Miyako, my manic-pixie-dream-girl. I was probably better off for it. Gloria Gaynor was right. I needed her to go, walk out the door. She was most likely some kind of coping mechanism that wasn’t helping me at all. But where the hell was I supposed to meet a rebound girl at this hour? It was two thirty in the morning on a Saturday night. It wasn’t like the bars would be closed, but I had never been to a bar this late so I was uncertain if going outside at all would be advisable. Since it was two thirty in the morning. Yet I couldn’t sleep either.

I resolved to watch Rage on my room’s TV set until sleep took me. People I talk to online in America think that there is only really MTV and stuff for watching music videos, or Youtube, but Australians have Rage. The Rage Top 50 has been a late night TV tradition in this country as long as I can remember. To imagine Australia being without it would be like SBS not showing Friday Night Smut on their channel every Friday night. In this country there were just things you grew to expect if you lived here. It was as Australian as booze and footy, even though I liked neither of those two things in regular intake. They were just things I knew other people who at some point in my life socialised with me did.

Maybe if I just stayed up a bit longer, I would be able to find out what were the latest music hits of June 2012. They said the world would end this year, the Mayans did. Somehow I doubted it, since there were no more ominous signs apart from the dust storm that painted Sydney in a blood red haze. I had seen the photograph of the ANZAC soldier statues on Anzac Bridge in that haze of crimson, and it terrified me to see it first hand when I caught the glimpse of what the seven o clock news called the apocalypse. Now it was three years later and the apocalypse hasn’t come yet. I decided that perhaps the band Emo By Accident was going to hit it big this year, with their ironic take on a now dying subculture. Their music video for their new album Emonomicon was either going to make or break them. In reality, not even music pundits know if a band will be successful.

Drifting off to sleep, I thought of how wonderful it would be to embrace the world when it had embraced only nothingness and consumerism. The joke was on me, I had embraced just that at least once in my life. I was a hypocrite, a consumerist whore. In a way there were hundreds of people like me in the city, if you removed my poor mental health and bloodline linking me to Nazi and Japanese war criminals. In that way I was unique, but this country made sure to perpetuate the notion that all Asians looked the same. That notion was so successful even I can’t tell most Asian people apart from each other. People only know I’m Japanese because I tell them, and they’re surprised when they find out I’m German too. They tell me I must be very confused, to which I reply, no, you are.

When I woke up again I felt groggy. My father always told me to seize the day, but when I was as groggy and overslept as this I couldn’t even look it in the face. At this moment you hit rock bottom, and you realise just how messy your room really is because you can smell a five month old half-eaten Whopper burger decaying and rotten in your rubbish basket. You smell it like it is the death rattle of a cow weeping that it has died in vain, uneaten. If I continued to live like this, that cow would be me, and I would become wasted meat with no real achievements.

The floor-drobe of the clothes littered like leaves at the bottom of a rainforest canopy stank with sweat, the blinds unopened and no natural light had seen this room in months. My anime posters and PVC figures were choked in dust, the ghastly fetid air made me cough. Anime figures and posters don’t have real lungs to scream out in agony. That is why the lonely otaku who post on 2Channel and 4Chan keep them, no matter how bad they’re treated, they never leave you. The crunch of a cockroach’s small insect body squishes and squelches uncomfortably under my foot. Books and comics, both manga and Western, are piled up on every available surface that doesn’t have anime figures taking up space. Maybe this idea scares you, and it scares me too, but perhaps, I thought to myself at that moment, it was a sign I had no option to clean up my room, and repair the ruins of my wretched life.

I picked up the clothes, tossed them in the basket, and sighed. I had been reduced to laundry duty. My parents would be proud that I was cleaning this place up, but at the same time they would blame me for what I had done with my life. I picked up my Nerf Maverick pistol and decided to go outside, even though I was in my pajamas. For all I know it could be like leaving the Vault in Fallout. As far as I know it could be a nuclear wasteland outside. The news could be lying to me. The blogs might be involved in a conspiracy. All these things I thought about before actually opening the door, my hand trembling at the knob. Could I actually defy hikikomori and venture into a land where I was uncertain of my safety?

When I actually turned the knob slowly, breathing heavily as fresh air gushed into my dust-ridden lungs… there was no nuclear wasteland. Just a park outside where children were playing. And the sun made my eyes bleary and the glare stunned me.

Damn you sun! I knew you were my enemy always!

I pointed my Nerf pistol at it, futile. It was millions of years old… I couldn’t stand a chance against it. But it wasn’t really my enemy at all – the sun was merely a light-giver, and I had been shrouded in darkness all this time. Now, I realised I needed to get out more if I was having paranoid delusions about the sun. In reality, the sun only gives you skin cancer if you don’t wear sunscreen.

I didn’t care that I was in my pajamas. A man on his bicycle mocked me in a drive-by shooting down of my pride. But I was there, outside the house, pajamas or not. The last of the sunrise crept above my head and its light justified the singing of the birds. Life began again on Planet Earth on this new day. But why did I feel so miserable? Did I really have anything to worry about? To be honest I was pretty lonely. It wasn’t like I could say to a woman “Hey you! Be my girlfriend!”. Real relationships were more complex than that. Defeated, I moved back inside, but not before the Newspaper Delivery Man hit me in the back of the head with a Sydney Morning Herald wrapped in transparent plastic. That plastic is like a condom for the news to stop it from shooting its cum all over you when you first open it: the shock of the daily disasters in the world doesn’t hit you quite so fast.

I read the front page, and it said:

PRIME MINISTER CAUGHT BROWSING CHILD PORN WITH INTERNET BLACKLIST

NATIONAL ADVANCEMENT PARTY SHAMED WITH NEW EVIDENCE AGAINST GORDON RUBBLE

You know your country’s future is fucked when it’s run by lolicons. Youth is fleeting, it doesn’t stay forever, and the politicians get older and older. People my age just wait for them to die. They take up space in the ecosystem they refuse to take action about. I smirked as I saw the Prime Minister photographed covering his face as they took him away. We haven’t had a dismissal of a PM since Whitlam, and this guy actually deserves it.

I laugh and a kookaburra on the telegraph pole laughs with me, a warbling laugh you’d get if you crossed The Joker from Batman with Australian native wildlife. Close enough, Heath Ledger was Australian after all. I take the paper inside and slam it down on the table. My father with his round face and John Lennon glasses simply looks at it and shakes his head.

“My grandfather, he would have done a much better job at making a dictatorship out of this country” he said, coldly, without any hint of emotion. “Fascism doesn’t come naturally to these impostors. They just don’t know how to get away with it. Not that I’d want this country to be fascist” – he smirked, and sipped from his coffee mug.

He rolled his eyes at the photograph of the Prime Minister, but slapped me on the back. “Come on, have you been looking at that German dictionary I gave you?” he said with a glimmer of hope.
No, I said. His hopes surely turned to ash, you could see it in the way his muttering of “My son knows nothing of his heritage” marked his disappointment. “He knows only what he knows from Hogan’s Heroes and anime shows”
I laughed. “I’ll learn German one day Dad, when I have the time” – Dad shook his head. “It’s what you always say…” he retorted. “But you never do it. That’s not very German at all.”

My mother came in and snapped her fingers at me.
“Who the hell cleaned your room? I didn’t even get the chance to yell at you yet.” – she said. “I mean really, gimme a chance will ya?”
My mother is Osakan by birth. As a result she’s very frank.
“But Mum, aren’t you happy I cleaned it?” – I protested.
“Only because you’d die from the mould in there if you didn’t.” she added. “You need to apply for University again, Ichi. There are people wondering if you’re dead or something. Eugene called giving me fucking flowers because he thought you passed on. Poor fucker’s autistic, you know how people like that worry about these things unless you talk to them and convince them it isn’t so!”

Eugene. Eugene was the man who always worried about something, after that shelf crushed him to death in Books Kinokuniya, he’d been wary of anything that could hurt him even though he was in a state where nothing could hurt him, ever again. At least not physically. I didn’t like having to hang out with him too much for too reasons, he was autistic like my Mum said, and you felt bad for him even though he was married, because he found it so hard to make and keep friends, and that he was Polish, which made me feel bad because my great grandfather probably invaded his country and killed his great grandfather in a concentration camp. Eugene always assured me that no such concentration camp sentence ever occurred to his great grandfather, because he was not Jewish. At which point he offered to show me his uncircumcised penis as proof, which I told him wouldn’t be necessary. Eugene wasn’t full retard because he never mentioned his penis in front of me again. He wasn’t that bad, he just had this really horrible aura of melancholy about him that creeped me the fuck out. That and he was fucking deceased.