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She remembers, once, when she was a child, she heard someone say that God was just what humans invented to reassure themselves in the face of their own powerlessness and ignorance. They recited it like a line out of a book, with the self-sufficed conviction of one that does not speak with their own voice.
It made her angry then. Now, she smiles at the memory.
They were right to think humans are terrified, always have been.
How strange, that they should not realize that they have been graced with this fear, a gift out of many, leading them into the benevolent arms of God.
☼
Everyone has a God. Even the people who think otherwise. They might deny it, be unaware, cover it up with a chuckle, a swatting gesture, a sheepish smile; but Angie knows.
She knows that God is there, in metal, in fire, in flesh. In the enamoured whispers of lovers, hands clenched tight around a phone, a raised head to look at the stars, in the gleaming surface of a mirror or the grip of a knife.
They create their own Gods, turn around, and tell Angie hers is made up, that she is the strange one. Child of the temple, daughter of a priest, with her chants and her searching stares. She doesn't mind so much. Any noise is better than no noise at all; any noise is better than having to pretend there is no noise at all.
There is one too many voices in her head.
She does not think her father’s God is speaking to her. Nor does she believe a yokai has taken hold of her body in her sleep. She is long past such fantasies.
All that she knows is that it is bigger than her.
She seeks out those whose souls are alight with belief, hoping for an answer. They confide in her. They tell her that praying helps them feel less alone, that they have found solace. She listens and imagines them sending out confessions like bottles swallowed by a stormy sea, relieved as they watch it sink. She thinks of red gates, steady like arms, of the never-toppling arches of churches and the old glued prism of stained glass, the warmth of candelabra light and of the ground against the palm of the hand as one keeps their back to the morning sun. How nice that must be. That’s what she said then: How nice!
Her voice was floating and not quite her own.
In the end, she was not able to understand them any more than they could understand her.
Believers and non-believers who believe, they are all the same. Pure sound.
Past their curious displeasure, they check up on her in thrown-away glances and questions, and gently drift away. Placid smiles, nods, indulgent hums.
Her father is the only one who seems bothered still.
☼
In the sunset, the city curls and falls over like a dying match. Cars drone by like approaching magnets as she makes her way to the train station, school bag slung over her shoulders, following the shrill line of skyscrapers with her eyes, gaze jumping every now and then to the letters and wide smiles that scream out brightly from the sides of buildings.
She bats her heavily-mascaraed eyes. The posters peel away like cheap paint. The glass panes fall over, suspended in the air, on the brink of shattering. Construction sites collapse like firewood tumbling from a giant’s hand. The clouds hang low in the air, amassed smoke with too many a flame, hovering above her head. Houses explode from the inside out.
She sighs and holds her bag with her hands, swinging it like a pendulum as she walks, and mutters under her breath: “My head hurts. I want ice cream.”
She soon regrets buying ice cream. She barely tastes it. Ice burns against her teeth. She has been punished for her whim.
“It’s alright, let go,” she murmurs, and drops it, after a moment of petrified hesitance, into the nearest garbage bin. Such a waste.
Distracted by the incident, Angie bumps into a group of chattering high school boys. Crowning over a computer, they are too busy cheering for their pixelated God to mind. They flicker out of her vision soon enough, but their firecracker laughter crepitates under her feet.
She turns around to face a frozen street, rows of polished little buildings, stainless pavement, deep calm. For a second, she believes in it. Then her gaze is drawn to the adoring silhouette of a boy with a black cap, contemplating the screen panels with flushed cheeks, and she whirls around again, head throbbing.
She makes it home while only looking at her feet. The pavement itself wobbled like charred skin.
☼
Her father told her that there was a tree outside the temple she liked to climb back when she was a small child. She would stay hours in the sun, away from it all, and come back with her skin browner each time. He said that’s how her hair became so pale. She doesn’t remember anything, not even the tree, only the faint feeling of burning. She has wondered once or twice if he had imagined the whole thing. Wishful thinking. Maybe all she did was burst out of the dark corridors and sit right where she was, fall asleep there, in a puddle of light, and he just never found her.
She is thankful for the anecdote nonetheless. She dreams of the tree, at times.
The inside of the temple is blankness. She airs the room like they all do, cleans the floors, dusts the shrine, replaces the incense, the yellow and white flowers in their bronze lotus-shaped vases. She kneels on the tatami mats, she reads, repeats, reiterates until the candles by the altar connect with the luminous orange silk of the pillars, until their diaphanous wafting loses the likeness of torn-off sails.
The porcelain bowls. The columns. The polished ornaments. Disjointed elements that hold no essence, yet impose themselves through their uncanny resemblance to a distant before, like the scattered remains of a shipwreck. She closes her eyes.
Nevermind if her murmurs melt into a mindless humdrum: she isn’t listening to the sound of her own voice.
Let go of earthly temptations. Let go of pain. Let go of desire. She feels her father’s voice slither out from under the golden curtains, resonate inside its case of weathered wood. Around her the paper thin walls tear and threaten to close. Let go, Angie. Let go. Only then will you be appeased.
Her hands clench together. She doesn’t think she is the one who needs to let go.
Angie’s aunt has been insufferable. Her suffocated, gilded wails spin the family history into a tailored tale. She was to her brother what Shôtoku was to Dôkyô, Nihôkin to Wake no Kiyimaro, Ômikami no Morime to Emperor Shômu. She cries enough to cry sincerely, and Angie guesses she must like her brother much more than she ever did, then. In the end, though, the recipient of her tears is not the grave nor the shrine but the square, broad-shouldered, stone Buddha statue in the garden.
Angie watches. Her aunt’s still, rigid shoulders; the Buddha’s warm, affected smile.
Her family says God has lost sight of her when she lost sight of Him. Why would God abandon her, the one who sees, and hears, and knows better than anyone in what ways this world has become sullied? No. They are the one who chose to turn away, as they turn away from the tainted. Yet what could there be more natural? Not even spirits are spotless. They bear the marks of their attachments. Or they did, at least. Now they say defilement has finally been contained, that humanity has expelled most of its reiterated blemish, and the need for purification rituals is little. Now the world is smeared with indifference, and beneath the veneer of conceited concern that is all she hears.
But she has made progress. She has identified the source.
Artists give a voice to the wound, and through their eyes, blood is giving. To the earth, to each other, to tradition. Blood is respect, debt fulfilled, a confession of vulnerability, equanimity, blood is fatality, blood is acceptance, blood is fault, blood is a reminder.
Team Danganronpa are artists: they make the whole world bleed without bleeding. A splendid scarlet, slashes like smiles. Their mouth is full of it for a shadow of a taste.
Angie is not scared. There is nothing to run from. She is annoyed, rather, by their determination to deny blood its right to be blood, before it becomes paint.
If humans invented God because they are scared, what they are scared of might have been this: the certainty of pain, a continuous ebb and flow, spilling out all over. Drenching it in a quiet red.
God is the art, and then the artist.
☼
She has looked for God in many places. She comes closest to Him in the shiny art galleries and museums that she has learned to hunt down like a shark.
She could stare at a painting she likes for hours. More than once, her immobility and fixed stare worried the visitors, and when those visitors turned out to be potential buyers, she was asked to leave.
Something always breaks the illusion anyway. If not their demands, the vacuous laugh of the artist at the back of the room, a whispered price behind a counter, an enthusiastic art connoisseur, rowdy elementary students with their squeaky shoes and rows of notes. Three weeks might have been the longest one painting had lasted her; or was it a month? Mere hours in front of it, stolen glimpses of silence.
Chaos is soothing when enclosed by a solid line, she thinks, in a trance.
And startles, struck by a self-imposed revelation.
She has been doing the same thing as them. She cannot. She must not.
Trapped inside its frame, the world that they call peaceful is slowly unscrewing, about to fall out of its hinges. Still as it might appear to others, Angie can hear it creaking. She keeps her feet firmly planted on the ground, for she will not be crushed. The God she has not yet found bestowed a favor upon her. She can make them see.
But how?
Angie does not have the hands of an artist. Her hands are for praying, praying to a God whose voice she cannot make out over the cacophony of mock renunciation.
She clenches her teeth, even though the pounding of her head will not subside.
Once she finds Him, it will all become clear.
☼
She waits for an epiphany that will not come. Eyes and ears open. A human sponge, soaking up red.
She tries her best to filter and hold in her ears the gurgles of the heart, to capture inside commiserating cries the echo of compassion. She collects the spatters of pain that the fog fails to shield from view and sticks them to her skin. An effigy of loss that does not speak to anyone, as it is neither static nor perforated plastic.
Even if they won’t--
Can’t He see?
Can’t He hear?
☼
Her teacher spits out his well-prepared speech over the listless sigh of the classroom. Angie chews on her pen. Her head is churning out white, noises of foam, a frothing of whispers that build upon whispers. Her mind is eating at itself like a greedy snake.
Sometimes she closes her eyes and lets it unfurl like a scroll. But no matter how much she wishes for the voices to merge into One, it’s no good. She is subjugated by vapid cracklings. If only she could make herself burn high and bright, but she cannot, not unless she becomes a pyre, not unless--
Suddenly she thinks: God does not have to be One. God can be multitudes, united in a single stroke. In a moment of searing reverence she reaches out, plunges into the sun.
I’m here, she thinks. I’m here.
There is a spiraling, suspended stirring of the sea, ready to draw back into shuddery sleep while she slips into the deep end. She tries again:
What do you want? Please, tell me. What can I do? I’ll do anything.
For the first time, Angie feels it listening. She reaches out again to meet blinding reflection.
She positions her pen on top of her finger and it stills horizontally on her fingertip. She hums, content, and releases it.
Something like hunger rises in the depths of her belly. Her mouth waters.
☼
They-- she cannot profess to all that They are God, not yet, but she has faith in Their inexhaustible presence, in the fear she will soon come to know-- They want, and that is why she hurts. Angie should have known. She is sorry, but They forgive. Simply by being, They forgive. Angie is thankful that she is not alone. She was drowning, and they were not the ocean, they were the helping hand, the guiding beam. Angie should have known.
It so happens that they fall into accord.
They want to bring into the light Their truth, in the colors of hope and endless struggle against despairing odds, elemental fury. Like her, They wish the fresco of the world to reclaim a vivid red.
Though she may be but a messenger, she has confidence that she can set everyone on the right path again.
She is there to make them all see.
☼
In careful penmanship, she traces the outline of the life They desire. She will be holy, the bearer of Their will, in the middle of women like her, chosen. Almighty priestesses on an island, much like Okinawa; or what it could have been, had it not been corrupted. She needs a fresh start, a clean canvas. There will only be one God, Their numerous fingers imprinted in the molding touch of her well-loved hand. They will wear any faces Their disciples might need so that no one should be godless. Wants will be sated and the sky wide open.
As she heads into the building where her audition takes place, she does not think of the notes she will submit. She thinks of her father and what he would say. Life to him was a dotted line, a circle. Saṃsāra.
In between there will be rest; next time there might be silence. Yes, that would be nice. But her God has already provided her with another existence.
With her assistance, They will break this new world’s shell from the inside out, and the rotten product will run down the hands of the people who had been incubating it.
“Welcome! Please decline your name and your reasons for wanting to participate in the 53rd season of Danganronpa!”
Angie opens her mouth.
☼
The city bends like a reed inside a single whisper, one that comes out of her parted lips, pours out of speakers, engulfs all.
Blissfully she sways with them in the embrace of God.