UNFINISHED CHAPEL

Antoinette

The key to the archives was held by a gallery manager. Unhelpfully, the manager was visiting his parents outside of Osaka and would not be back for another two weeks. This information was relayed by a thin, timid man with a lanyard around his neck. Ana could have screamed. She considered grabbing the nametag and dragging the man out of his complacent pose and demanding he bring her an axe. Or dynamite. Something to access the damn door. It wasn’t necessary, though. The displeasure on her features was evident enough. Administrators who answered to the manager scrambled to find alternative solutions. His wife might know where the key was. They could get in touch with Tokyo. They would let her know as soon as possible, and would she please accept their apologies for the inconvenience, and would she like a voucher to access the gallery for free—except of course she didn’t need that because she had full access to everywhere—as the President’s daughter. Access to everywhere, that was, other than the archives. 

They would know more that afternoon. 

Wouldn’t she like to take time to see the sculptures?

There was nothing to be done. While Kyou was catching up with family—her mother had an appointment—Ana was loitering outside the entrance of the near-vacant hotel overlooking the sea. It felt odd being alone in a place that had once felt so hostile. Now the island just seemed ambivalent to her presence. She considered the white linen of her dress, followed the line of wooden buttons down its front, and observed the spectral billowing of the skirt’s hemline. She was haunting this place. There were so few villagers. The ferryman—an unusually intense character—had given her a map for the public art trail that followed the coast. There was an uncharted area, he said, but she knew about that, didn’t she? And he winked in a way that Ana chose to ignore.

She threw her leg over a hotel-issued bicycle and pushed off onto the empty road, sucking in lungfuls of salty air as she coasted down the incline. It alleviated some of her frustration. Her legs found an easy rhythm. She passed beaches with clear shallows that housed darting fish and strange blooms of seaweed. She found the first of the artworks, located on a grassy outcrop. It was a large blue cup, intended, apparently, for the gods. Before it was a small, empty bench. Ganymede, the cupbearer. Ana levered down the kickstand and dismounted.

Beside the bench were black pines, fragrant and lush. Heat warmed the sap on branches, its scent infusing the shimmering air. Ahead were the upturned shells of boats. Some were seaworthy; some were gashed and splintered. All were castrated of their engines—the good kind: Yamaha. The ridge that preceded the path down to the beach had been landscaped to appear like the edge of a suicidal drop. Ana approached to check. Not so. There was a respectable set of grass-covered stairs upon which picnickers might enjoy taking in the view of the Inland Sea.

Her feet found the water to be instantly warm, only barely cool at the upper rings around her ankles. A forearm-sized fish leapt from the sea within a buoyed-off area. There was the sweet smell of summer grass. Amongst all of this, her mind turned again to Kyou. 

Ana’s fear, which had been growing, was not that Kyou would dismiss musings such as these as indulgent artistic nonsense, but that she wouldn’t. That she might understand—keenly, even—the immediacy of everything. The beauty and horror. And if she could do that, and look Ana in the eye—well. Well then. Anything that followed could hardly be said to have been a choice.

She needed to keep moving and stop thinking. The ride to the next site was steeper. It took her further inland and around an off-road track that wound up towards a shrine. The surrounding garden had been designed by a French landscaper who believed in the magic of mathematics and of gardens seen through the eyes of children.

Ana sat a moment on another faded bench to get a moment’s respite from the crunch of her footfalls. A black-winged butterfly as large as a sparrow accompanied her. Cyclists sailed by, joking in Mandarin. In front of the shrine, twin lion-dog statues, there to ward off evil, were cursed to hold their grins until time destroyed them. Her eyes had had too much sun and not enough levity. 

The tasselled rope before the shrine was as fat as a strong man’s arm. It gripped two cement pillars. There was a locked gate that barred the most sacred space for genuine worshippers. Insects kept up a steady eeep. Flies came and went. The ants, the mosquitos, a large stick insect all passed her by. She wondered if their feet tasted the sense of foreignness she had developed, and whether they cared.

Had she been here in the past? Had she been alone? Drunk? Distracted? Had she scattered stones with her bicycle wheels and laughing boyfriend in tow? Had she taken a photo of the severe dragon dogs? Had Summer itched at her neck and sent its battalions of insects to attack her exposed skin? Had they tasted with their feet?

From the shrine, the trail was an easy cruise down to the docks. In spaces reserved for fishermen, there were mismatched indoor chairs and under-fed cats. Piles of rusted chain links large enough to hold a mythical beast (or haul a mid-sized vessel) sat hulking in corners. They must have belonged to someone, or perhaps to the dock. All of these elements had shared the same story for years and leagues. There was the constant creak of rope tensing and easing between anchors and cleats. They were caught in a long-standing argument. Asked and answered. Asked and answered.

Moving along, Ana noticed a man who seemed to be anxiously questioning a girl by the racks of fishing poles. She would not be soothed by his murmurings, or apple tea from the vending machine, or the kind breeze that fluttered her collar. 

Barnacles had chewed through tires. Everything was salt-rusted: the boats, the stains of the pier, the old school chairs, the faces of men. The boats’ prows were a welcome relief. They were carved with floral designs and symbols of strength and painted in gold. When Ana stopped and watched, her shadow stretched away over the water, abandoning her. 

Ana finally walked her bike to the racks at ferry terminal. Approaching the pier was a strangely lovely sight: a woman with a parasol and white gloves, travelling alone, moving in a time all of her own.

Upon returning to the hotel, she received a note. It was accompanied by a map and a set of silver keys. Tonight, the closest she could get to her mother’s death certificate was the basement level, which held the locked door to the archives.

She declined the offer of a guide. She didn’t care that the place didn’t receive many visitors. She accepted that the site of a half-finished installation the size of a performance hall might present hazards. She really, sincerely wanted to go alone. Or so she thought. Looking from her hotel window at the thickening night and the mere scattering of street lights, shameful fear sunk its claws into her. ‘You’ll get lost again,’ it hissed in her ear. ‘This island wants to eat you alive.’ To be lost or eaten was bad. To do nothing was worse. The smallness of the room was intolerable in comparison to the vastness of the blue-cloaked beyond.

She sent a text message.

Kyou arrived as promised. Her open shirt fluttered to ghostly effect as she ambled across the parking lot. It was all so empty: the expanse of gravel, the quiet hills, the silver sea and ink sky. Ana thought back to the time she had first approached Kyou on this same clifftop. The struggle between fear and curiosity. How desperately she had wanted to scramble back to the safety of the gallery. How keenly she had felt something missing might be found. Watching the thin figure advance, that feeling resurfaced: I shouldn’t be here. Never here. Not with you.

Kyou was sparing with details about her afternoon. The appointment had been pointless. Her mother hated it. Probably made things worse. She didn’t want to talk about it. Ana had nothing to offer but melancholic musing on her unusual surroundings, which didn’t feel appropriate to relay either. It was a good twenty-minute walk to the bunker, and they took it in near silence. The route led down the road from the gallery, then, before reaching the lights of the wooden village below, veered right and up another incline. Without the moon, they would have been lost. The shadows seemed to thicken every few metres. But Ana was on a mission. Finally, they made out the top of a structure. It was a cement box, no larger than a shed. Behind it, the earth fell away. There appeared to be something like a black pool below, but it was hard to see.

Yellow light grinned from a propped-open fire exit. The door opened easily. The hotel staff couldn’t help themselves. Ana moved ahead of Kyou and descended four flights of poorly-lit metal stairs that led to the storage room. It was an access point for workers, not visitors. A slip could be fatal. 

The next door appeared, and it, too, opened smoothly. Antoinette stopped at the threshold. Her eyes had adjusted in the stairwell and the scene before her appeared to glow. A massive, circular skylight—the thing that she had mistaken for a pool outside—let in the white light of the moon. The entire space, which was large enough to host an Olympic event, was covered in sheets. Dust covers. The objects, appeared to be furniture laid out as if for a church service: innumerable rows of pews separated by a centre aisle. In the aisle was something else, like a long boat, but it was hard to make out through the veil-like curtains hung every ten metres or so.

Kyou bowed her head close to Ana’s ear and whispered, “Shall we take a look?” Then moved on ahead and, without direction, began removing cloths from the furniture and dropping them on the floor. She may as well have been harvesting crops. 

Ana hung back. Was the art concealed, or was the art in the concealment? What a space to be abandoned; it was like a treasure room: the lair of an ancient, greedy dragon. 

Kyou’s figure kept moving, stripping and casting material aside. The detail of her body became more obscured as new sets of curtains fell between them. Ana felt suddenly compelled to paint her. Her silhouette could have belonged to a man or woman. Or neither. Flattened like an ink stroke, the shadow moved with beauty. Always in motion, too hard to capture honestly in a painting.

Kyou stopped. There was a cracking sound, a flare of light. Ana took a breath, raised her arm, pushed aside a veil, and stepped one room closer. It appeared a candle had been lit. Then another. Another. The scent of construction, of once-warm plaster and concrete, was rising into the air from the sheets covering forgotten woodwork. Hand-carved pews and altars had been revealed row by row. They still looked alive, waiting. How sad to think that this had been kept from all the world. The object in the centre of the room was revealed to be a long table, generous enough to host the Last Supper. It was set with a candelabra that stretched the table’s full length and was studded with white candles and stems of incense. Kyou had adopted a ceremonious pace and was lighting each wick one by one. She alternated between a using a candle and her lighter. When she reached the other end of the table, she looked up to see what Ana saw: an anguished blossom of light, one of heads of flame bobbing in perfect agreement with each other. 

The overhead window was positioned so that only the sky was visible; no tree, no horizon, no skyscraper. But the stars.

“A beat-down secret.” Kyou’s voice travelled through curtains from across the table. “This was the part of the art tour that could never happen. ‘The Unfinished Chapel.’ It developed a mythical status. The museum was very protective of its assets. They never let the guides or local staff anywhere near here.”

“Why unfinished? What happened?”

“I can only speculate.”

“Tell me.”

“One rumour is that the artist found out about the history of Bijushima, about—well, all the things that had been redacted courtesy of Kanto Electric’s non-disclosure agreements, and he abandoned the work in protest. He also threatened legal action should there be an attempt to complete the work without his oversight. So the piece has remained in limbo. All this time.”

“‘The Unfinished Chapel,’” Ana repeated. “So here we are.”

Kyou’s form advanced, becoming clearer as each curtain that separated them was pushed aside. She stopped only once she was directly in front of Ana, expression unreadable. 

“And you came,” Ana said.

“You asked.”

“So simple?” 

The air was heavy with incense. Firelight kissed the skin of Kyou’s face and neck, Her collarbones and hands. 

“So what’s through there? Your forbidden gate?” Kyou gestured behind her. On the wall opposite the entrance was a door bearing the words ‘Authorised Personnel Only.’ It seemed smaller in the grandeur of the hall. The door had no handle, only a steel plate to push against, and, on the frame where a light switch might have been, a sensor for the key card. Its dim red eye watched the two of them from the panel.

The forbidden gate.

“Behind that door,” Ana began haltingly, “is a filing cabinet. In it is a folder marked ‘Privileged and Confidential: Spring 1997.’ And in that are the unredacted—or un-doctored—documents concerning the death of a young woman who had the misfortune of marrying my father.”

“Your mother.”

“My mother.”

Kyou shifted from foot to foot. “And what will you do with this information?”

“Well,” Ana vacillated, “with this information, I will come to my decision.”

“Your decision—”

“En face de la mort, on comprend mieux la vie.”

Kyou cleared her throat. “Je ne parle pas français, Antoinette.”

“‘In the face of death, we understand life better.’ I need to decide if now is the time. To face it. Perhaps, after all, it’s been enough.” Ana couldn’t bear to see either realisation—or the lack of it–on Kyou’s features, so she looked instead to the wide window above and the forgiving night sky. “And if it is enough, how I will do it.”

“I see,” said Kyou quietly. “And you wanted a witness.”

“You don’t need to stay.”

“Seems a big ask, given you don’t intend to.” An edge was coming into her voice.

“I’m not being frivolous. I promise.”

“Tell me.”

Was that what she had wanted? Someone to ask? Kyou didn’t seem as though she would leave without an explanation. What was the point in hiding anymore? There was really so little to lose.

“It has been twenty years, you see?” Ana swallowed. “Twenty years of feeling pulled between a parent who is alive and a parent who is dead. Between their countries and failings and hopes. I—” Ana felt the acid threat of tears. She gripped her own hands, flexed her fingers, and went on. “Twenty years of death’s hand on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, tugging on my wrist. Promising peace.” When she turned to look at Kyou, it was suddenly too much. Too real. “I am so tired, Kyou.” Her voice broke. “I know it is ungrateful, but if that’s the way she went, then why shouldn’t I—”

“I see,” Kyou interrupted. Repeated, almost soothingly, “I see.”

“You do?”

“I mean, I’m surprised.” Kyou shrugged, turning away to look back at the candles, at the twisting lines of incense smoke. It gave Ana the moment she needed to swallow down her desperation. Kyou went on. “Doesn’t seem like you want to let your story be written out in official documents.”

“My story? You mean the truth?”

“Truth has many faces.” Kyou didn’t look back.

Ana coughed out a laugh then. To have thought that her innermost pain could be consoled by this arrogant, contrary… wolf of a woman. She was kidding herself. “How very like you to say so.”

“Hm.”

“You used to write me stories,” Ana said, stepping in and pushing on Kyou’s turned back. “Then what? Ran out of postcards? Lost interest?”

Kyou spun, eyes blazing. “If you do this, I will write to you every fucking day after you die. Every day that I am still living. And I will post every letter into a—a ghost-proof box!”

“What?”

“If you die, you will never, never know your story.”

Ana glared back at her adversary of ten years, stalled somewhere between weeping and screaming at the cruelty of it all, and said, in a steely voice, “You threaten to punish me even in death.”

Kyou responded in a tone to match. “It’s a promise. If you want to continue our argument, you’ll have to remain alive. I won’t engage with spirits.”

Ana took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and refixed her attention on the door. That was why she was here. For documents. For answers.

“And in lieu of a key, I suppose we’ll try a password?” Kyou said flatly.

“Perhaps a sacrifice,” Ana sighed. “A broken vow. The blood of a virgin.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Well, that may depend on the definition.” Ana looked over her shoulder. “Have you ever been with a man?”

Kyou rounded on her again and leant forward. “Have you ever been with a woman?” Her pupils were dilated, head cocked to the right. The light of candles danced on her skin. She looked like the photograph that Ana never managed to capture that night in the tunnel, eyes burning with both a masculine vulnerability and feminine fury. 

See me. 

Dare you. 

See you. 

Dare me.

Ana  shuddered. She whispered, “Is it less of a sin in a half-finished church?”

Kyou said, “I thought you were above judgement.”

Ana said, “Not yours.” She lifted her left arm, touched her fingertips to the point in the centre of her collar bone, and curled her fingers. She closed her thumb and index finger on the top button of her dress, twisted it, and let collar fall open. Kyou did not move. Ana lowered her hand and repeated the motion. And again. Again. Again.

Kyou stepped in then and pulled the linen from Ana’s shoulders to let it slide to her waist. There was a hand at Ana’s back, and then they were sinking, collapsing into a pile of white cloth. Ana glimpsed the impassive stars through the window and closed her eyes. The dress slid up her thighs. She opened her mouth to let the spectre of a sigh escape and allow starlight into her throat.

It was impossible to sleep afterwards. Impossible to articulate what happened next. It should have been unthinkable for Ana to have lost focus so completely. But she had. And now she didn’t know what to do at all. But they needed to leave, Kyou said. Someone would come if they stayed too long. They would be discovered. 

The beach would be empty, so that was where they walked.

“I can only think of the sea,” Kyou said, gesturing for Ana to follow her along the line of rope and posts through the dunes. “We’re made of more water than rock or air. The sea is the only thing that feels big enough to encompass all of it. Rage. Sorrow. ...Love, I suppose.”

“You suppose.”

 “Are we speaking of vulgar things?” Kyou said lightly.

“Keep going.” Ana murmured, taking off her shoes, testing her feet against the shifting ground.

“It’s where we’re from,” Kyou said. “I can’t help but think that some way or another, it’s where we will return.”

“Like the ruins of civilization.”

“Like lost treasure.”

At three A.M. on the empty beach, looking only at the lunar sand and their feet dropping into it, toes scattering white granules, they might have been on another world. Over the water were blinking lights from the silent port. Or perhaps they were the last people on Earth. Perhaps the rocks, wormed through with holes, were the hemispheres of skulls. Perhaps the skins of their fellow men had been salted and dried to leather, their nutritious meats and jellies consumed by creatures of the sea. 

Ana considered these things without sadness or worry. Kyou’s knuckles brushed against hers. It seemed like an invitation. She took it, lacing their hands together, stroking her thumb over the skin that was still magically strange. 

Don’t swear by the moon, for she changes constantly.

“I used to think—for a long time—that the perfect time for me to die would have been when you took me to the temple and the snow came. Do you remember? When we saw all of those little statues, all of the offerings for the dead children? I thought how beautiful it might have been, in that broken car of yours, in your arms, to have fallen asleep and let the cold take me. It felt fair. Like the end of a curse, you know? To be laid out with them. But there is only one of me. My death would never be enough to repay my father’s debts.”

“You are cursed to live, then.” Kyou picked up her hand and kissed it. As though it were a precious thing. As though she were.

“But think about it. If we went back, you would never have been picked up by that awful club. And I wouldn’t have married.”

“Has it really been all that bad? Your life?”

The sea shushed like a tired mother, ever-hopeful but never able to send all of her children to sleep.

“No.” Ana stopped walking and pushed her head into Kyou’s neck. “But I have been thinking of time lost. I have been reading your old cards and reimagining histories for us.”

“Because we have no future?”

“Don’t speak of vulgar things.”

Kyou chuckled, which Ana felt as a rumble. She lifted her head, raised Kyou’s hand to her lips, then kissed and took two fingers into her mouth and sucked slowly. Then pulled back. “Swim with me,” she said, and walked into the water.

The sea was warm as blood around her calves, rocking softly. After ten metres, Ana lost the feeling of sand beneath her feet. She laughed and kicked her legs in their net of billowing fabric. The moon’s reflection shimmered, always out of reach. She turned to float on her back and listened to the sea’s rush and pulse. She didn’t dare look back to the land. She could imagine Kyou’s confused face. Her sceptical look. Her thoughts of madness and—

—And there were hands beneath her back. The sound of a second pair of legs wading. Of a body. Of Kyou, looking strange and wet and—happy. Beautiful in her happiness. So beautiful that it was only right to kiss her, delicious and salty. To part the confusion of fabric and seawater and strip back and grab at the truth of the flesh underneath. To feel the nearness and vastness all at once. 

“You’re not afraid to drown,” Kyou stated more than asked, pausing a moment before dipping to kiss Ana’s neck. 

Ana hummed and didn’t answer: I drowned long ago. I am still drowning.