Mr. Beast #1

I went to a city where apples were being sold beneath colorful, striped awnings that flittered and snapped in the wind like carnivores. The shops came every 20 meters with the same signs, the same product, the same table with slices of each type of apple for customers to try. Incentive. Mr. Beast couldn’t get enough of them; standing in his hunched way, bound as if by defiant muscles into a rigid shape. He finished all of the green apple, snatching up one slice after another, then moved on to others once it disappeared. Watching him, it seemed to be he were always hauling some invisible weight behind him. When he moved forward, with his hands in his pockets, he moved as a refrigerator moves, awkward, as if not meant to. Sometimes his hands weren’t in his pockets. Then it was because they holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice below his chin, or holding an apple and a knife, quickly stashing things between his lips where they’d disappear. Mr. Beast loved to drive. When the bus from Tokyo dropped me off in Nagano prefecture, he was prompt and waiting, stopped in his car near the bus stop.

We had met once before.

We had stayed in the same little cabin on the base of Mt. Fuji one weekend. I had finished stowing away my luggage near my futon when I first met and began to fear Mr. Beast. He was sitting silently in a chair in the living room, gripping the ends of the armrests with his long, brutish fingers as though he were prepared to be tortured or put to death. His eyes seemed to reflect nothing, the way a dead person’s eyes do nothing. I sat down, across the low table opposite from him to look at a book I had brought from home, Dave Eggers. Mr. Beast made no reaction to the new company I made for him, he only continued to look (if you could call it looking) diagonally downwards into the ancient wooden table top between us. I couldn't read a single sentence. I had hallucinations of him lunging at me with a knife. I expected he hated me, resented me, would risk anything to destroy my life. Later, in bed, there were more hallucinations. He would be waiting downstairs for everyone to fall asleep and then climb up, one step at a time, each thump heard only to me, and then he would step over the two men sleeping near me, and, careful not to wake them up, he would choke me to death with his huge hands and there would be nothing more to hear than the hush sound of a sleeping bag being dragged across the floor and into the forest. Though I was prepared and waited for him, he never came up the stairs to kill me. The next day everyone went to the tennis courts down the road. A wonderfully kind old couple gave me a small tennis lesson wherein after they tossed a ball at me I would count ‘ONE, TWO, YAMA!’ and hit the ball over their heads, toward Mt. Fuji. But for most of the time I sat on the sideline, on a bench watching them play together. Watching Mr. Beast play. He was magnificent! His arms could hardly bend past a 90-degree angle yet his power and precision with a tennis racket was supernatural. His body moved as if thawing and yet he was a fabulous player. That night, I imagined Mr. Beast climbing the stairs again; this time carrying a tennis racket to bludgeon me and to then stomp my skull like a carton, and then, to mash the rest of me up with his stony fists. To my pleasure, the next morning, I was alive and it was a beautiful day.