Osaka, metal pins, glass shards… appendix 6

The police located her in the hospital a week or so afterwards, her fractured arms and wrists in plaster, her fingers were reattached, her fractured right leg in a support and her ribs strapped. They asked her what had happened. The police commands were refused. She told them the truth, asking the doctors and nurses to remain to protect her. She told them she wouldn’t speak unless there were doctors and nurses there, except even then she never told them that the woman was the killer. She was just 15, it took a year for her to recover. Her family came to see her after a few weeks, the police had contacted them. She never answered to her name again, the hospital staff called her Osaka. Her small brother had died, later she realized that her parents had selected her brother to live and her to die. Though she eventually returned home they never really spoke again. She loved her hand therapist, her physiotherapist, her doctors, nurses and surgeons but mostly her hand therapist. She refused to leave the hospital in Osaka when her parents wanted to move her to Tokyo. She insisted on staying until she could walk out of the hospital. She said her name was now Osaka, eventually having osaka tattooed in english on her right forearm, and in smaller kanji characters on her left arm. She never realized how much she’d changed, her parents were guilt ridden and never recovered from the child selection that went wrong. When she returned to school a year later, she always had a rounders bat in her backpack which she wore as a sidepack with the handle facing forward. The school tried to order her around and failed. When her schoolmistresses instructed her on a rule of grammar or arithmetic or behavior, she was not informing, any more than she was informing herself when she questioned her students. She did not instruct so much as give orders or commands. She never remembered being the model student she had once been. Osaka found it difficult, nearly impossible to trust anyone. The girls called her yakuza because of her missing small finger on her left hand. A few girls tried to bully her and stopped after she started hitting them with the rounders bat. In the disciplinary office she merely said — they shouldn’t have tried to push me around, if they do it again I’ll hurt them. They thought she hadn’t recovered from the kidnapping […] Osaka thought she might. The school counselor saw her every week for two years indirectly helping her to pretend she was normal. Her grades never recovered, she had became indifferent. She couldn’t learn to fight with her hands and her weakened leg so she took up kendo, the instructor was always slightly worried by the intensity and situational viciousness that was always just below the surface. She would always be disabled she thought. Even then she already wanted to see the woman again… Just once she said, just once to say thank-you. […] Time and years passed, on leaving school she went to an american university on the coast. She developed a deep love for Shklovsky and Brecht. When her parents died in her third year she didn’t go to their funeral. By this time she had acknowledged that her mother hated her for surviving. Eight years had passed. A man tried to mug her on the east-side, she fractured his skull with her rounders bat and went for his partner who sensibly ran. In the police station She cried for a 15 year old self and flew back to japan to accept the inheritance and to see if she could find the woman. Whenever she walked through the airport scanners the metal pins in her leg set the alarms off. She took to wearing inconvenient short skirts so she could easily show her scared bare leg to the security guards and changed into jeans on the plane. It took half a year to find a trace, which happened almost accidentally when she identified the tattoo. five months after her arrival back in Japan Osaka walked into the bar of the hotel the gang owned, booked a room and asked to see a female gang member with a single dragon tattoo. Twenty four hours later they pointed her towards a man and two women, one of the women was western, the others were Japanese. They asked who she was and what she wanted. I am looking for the woman who saved my life eight years ago in Osaka. She was about my age, perhaps older now with a dragon tattoo. She rescued me, saved me. I would like to see her. He remembered, they looked at her, so your the girl, I wondered about you. The japanese woman introduced herself as Seo and gave her a business card, that’s me. I’ll see you here tomorrow morning and tell you what we can do. Osaka walked off limping slightly as her leg was aching. They watched her limp off. The next morning she was told that the woman she was looking for lived in London, told her, told her, told her her name and an office address. Told her to be careful. Osaka recognized that the woman’s utterances were order words. She smiled in memory of reading plateau 4. Her leg was not hurting, so she ignored the orders. Osaka still carried her rounders bat. It took a few weeks, a month for Osaka to leave for london, she found the address, stayed in a hotel for a week before renting a studio flat for three months. She got a job as a barista in the cafe next to the building. She worked and observed the building for a month and had seen her enter the building a few times. Seeing her she didn’t know what she wanted to do. Approach and speak? bow and speak ? Beg forgiveness ? Proclaim love ? Osaka watched the office from the cafe, the counter was accidentally placed so that she could watch the building entrance whilst she made coffees and teas. Sometimes she watched the woman go into the building and leave, she knew it was her because her face was imprinted on her mind, twice she had seen her leave the building with a man, they walked off together holding hands. After a month she still couldn’t decide to speak, to present herself. […]

One Tuesday the problem resolved itself. on an exceptionally hot day, the air temperature well over 30 degrees, she was wearing a white short sleeved tee shirt, black jeans with a support around her knee, because her leg was hurting just a little, her left hand was twinging, her missing finger hurting and she had a slight stress headache. ((What happened to your leg the manager asked ? She told him her well rehearsed fiction/story, when I was 15 I was hurt in a car crash, they put metal support pins in my leg. Sometimes, like today it hurts a little. It happened in Osaka, she tapped her tattoos with her fingers and smiled at him. She thought he was quite nice and probably harmless)) […] She had been there a month when a woman and one of her assistants came in to collect a set of coffees for a meeting. The woman looked at the youngish Japanese woman, a little muscular, white short sleeved teeshirt, who spoke english with a slight american/tokyo accent. Tattoos on her forearms, osaka on the right arm, written in kanji on her left. Her server badge had her name “Osaka Park” printed on it. “Ïs that your name?” she asked her. “Yes, everyone calls me Osaka, do you work for Kwarbarti ?” “Yes. You have an unusual name.” “ Ï changed it when I was in hospital 8 or nine years ago.” she paused. “ Here you are.” placing the last of the coffees in the cardboard trays. Osaka watched them leave. Quickly cleaning the surfaces of the machine before starting the next order.

[…The director was sitting on the sofa next to her desk when they arrived with the trays. The assistant was saying “I wonder what her story is?” to Nancy. “Whose story?” Park asked them. “The barista, Osaka…” She remembered the teenage girl she should have killed, the trouble her misunderstanding had caused, (was it misunderstanding or had she simply not wanted to kill the tortured girl, even when she had told him about it she hadn’t known.) She stood up. “Ï need to check something” Park walked into the cafe and recognized her immediately. Osaka stepped out from behind the counter and to the astonishment of the manager, and to the embarrassment of Park stepped forward and two metres away bowed. “It’s you. Thankyou.” The cafe stopped. Time froze. A Schrodinger cat moment. A wave, particle, or both. People looking at the two women. Park pulled her over to a corner table and looking at her face said “I never expected to see you again.” She stroked her arm, “your called Osaka.“ “I kept the name you gave me that day. Was I named after the city or the Brecht poem?” “I don’t know most probably the poem.“ [They sat and talked, the manager brought them tea and bottles of lemonade and watched them between serving customers. She explained about her leg, the pins in her leg, how they hurt sometimes. Her hands only on cold days. Eventually Park began to tell about her life in exile. Though this may have been later … ]]Hours later in the early evening, in Park’s house, whilst the man Park lived with was cooking in impromptu meal, badly, in the kitchen, with a background of an unknown jazz piano music, she told park more about her body, the titanium in her leg, the piece of titanium in her finger, her fractures and ribs, the alarms she always set off, her parents betrayal, her dead brother, the inheritance, the indecisiveness, everything, everything. Then she told her that she just wanted to say thank you. Just once before she continued her life. Park told her whilst he was in the kitchen that that she could say anything, She gestures at the kitchen. Sam knows everything, can know anything, its all been so accidental, an ongoing experiment, life is an experimental activity… Trust blossomed.

Extra irrelevant passages for the reader to understand the psychosis of the repressive state apparatus, they do not have to be read.

Nancy reported about Osaka’s appearance to her excellency, ‘She said she is probably family, part of Sam and Parks. I asked what her relationship actually is, my daughter or sister. Her excellency groaned my life as police has become so problematic, as if I don’t have enough problems with Sam and Park. (Chaos that mighty agent of war machines, is not confined to cathedrals, it infects the police that supports them. In truth it fills the air, seas, the universe and the everyday, affecting us all.) Nancy asked whether she had ever thought of making him leave the police ? Her Excellency explained it was easier to keep her under surveillance if we made him stay. And i misunderstood/underestimated how much he would change. Nancy said thoughtfully that she found it difficult to believe that Park is/was a psychopathic murderer. There is nothing in any of the files mentioning anyone who could be this young woman Osaka. I think park must have had all the records referring to her removed. Possibly Park has been protecting her, probably for a decade.

Park hugged him in the doorway, whispering something into his shoulder. Osaka wondered what she said. Park looked at her as they drove off. I thanked him for being so understanding, and other more private things. She drove her south to the studio apartment. Plus one. The war machine extended…