James Kane’s Past (1)
James’s connection to magic began back when he was still going to school in Texas. He had the American name James Kane, but before that, he had also lived under a Korean name: Choi Ji-min.
“……”
He did not know his biological parents. He had been left at an orphanage. Raised in a Korean orphanage until he was seven by Korean age, Ji-min was adopted to the United States, where he first became aware of what it meant to have parents, and from that point on, his life in America began.
“Uh, h-hello... I’m Choi Ji-min……”
He tried to greet them the way the orphanage had taught him, but it did not seem likely they understood a word of it.
“Your name is Ji-min?”
“Jimmy? I think James is better.”
“……”
He did not even know English yet, so Ji-min received a new name, James, and learned the language under his adoptive parents. Within a year, he had begun school, awkwardly and haltingly. But for an Asian boy who could barely speak English, school was one trial after another.
“Yellow monkey? Ooh-ooh-ooh?”
“They probably don’t understand even half of what we’re saying.”
“……”
He did not take the contempt and mockery that came with being Asian too seriously. But the boys kept tormenting him, and that bullying continued even after he entered high school.
They always called him a yellow monkey, even though he had a name: James.
Thwack.
James’s head, struck cleanly, bobbed downward.
“Yellow.”
Smack.
“Monkey.”
Thwack.
“Look, it’s that yellow monkey again.”
He had already known he attended the same school as the others.
“……”
If only there were more schools to choose from.
The boy who had been pestering him and tapping him on the head smiled as he asked, “Heh. Why don’t you stop turning our school into a zoo and just kill yourself?”
“……”
James did not answer, but he was nodding. Ever since he realized they went to the same school, there had been something he had wanted to say to them.
“Oh? You’ve got the guts to kill yourself?”
“Of course... I’m planning to do it soon.”
“Hahaha.”
“……”
Ji-min looked calmly at the boys surrounding him and said, “I’m thinking about who to take with me, but... for now, you should consider yourself guaranteed.”
“……”
“……”
“……”
American schools had no shortage of gun accidents, so this was not a joke anyone could brush off.
“I want to take as many as I can. You understand, right?”
“……”
They could not dismiss Ji-min’s words as empty bluster.
“Have your fun while you’re alive. It’ll be harder once you get to hell.”
“I, I……”
From that day on, he became a complete outsider. No one at school paid him any attention, and no one bullied him anymore. Yet for him, it was a blissful time. It was also a very short-lived happiness.
If I hadn’t said that to him back then...
At the time, after long deliberation, he had managed to leave behind a terrifying warning that conjured the image of a gun incident, but the result was tragic.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“James, you’re home?”
“Yeah. Mom.”
“Whoa.”
Mom’s scent. I love it...
James was enveloped in the arms of his mother, who had come to greet him, and he reveled in the happiness of it before hurrying upstairs to his room.
“Going to read again?”
“Yep!”
“Don’t be late for dinner.”
“Got it!”
Thud.
James was already in his room.
“This time, I’m definitely going to figure it out.”
The book he took out in his room was one he had found years ago in an antique shop.
“You were never meant to be decoration. My instincts are usually pretty good.”
Confident in his own intuition, James remembered the day he had first walked into that store.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“Wow...”
The antique store was packed with old things anyone could see were old, and the book that caught James’s eye was wedged among all those other relics.
“Oh. This looks like it has something going on.”
When James held the book out, the antiques dealer tilted his head in confusion.
“Huh... when did I get this?”
There was no record of purchasing a book like it, and he had no memory of it, either.
“It probably got mixed in with the others. Did the book crawl in here on its own?”
“Hmm...”
The man opened it to check, then frowned and handed it back to James.
“It’s just an old scribble pad.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s not writing I can read.”
Ji-min quickly opened the book as well. He had chosen it based on the cover alone.
“Aw...”
Once he saw the contents, he understood immediately that this was the problem: he had not checked what was inside. The characters on the pages were clearly written by hand, but they did not look like writing at all. As the shop owner had said, “old scribble pad” was an apt description.
“Still, it’d do for displaying on a living room bookshelf.”
The owner was politely saying he had no intention of giving it away for free.
Tap.
“Then display it in your own house, sir.”
That meant James had no intention of buying it. He had imagined there might be some hidden secret behind the cover, but he knew perfectly well that imagination often stayed imagination.
“Hm... You know how to bargain too. Fine. I’ll take five dollars.”
“……”
I don’t actually want to buy it...
But James’s silence was provoking the man in the wrong way.
“Three dollars! I can’t go lower than...”
“Hmm...”
For three dollars, maybe it would be fine to take it home and put it on a shelf, but it also seemed like it would only make his room messier for no reason.
“...No thanks.”
“Hah. You win. One dollar!”
At one dollar, it was cheap enough not to care about wasting.
“...Fine. I suppose adding one more piece of trash to my messy room won’t matter.”
“Hahaha.”
James took the dirty old book home for a single dollar, and from that moment on, his struggle with it began. Though “struggle” was putting it grandly; it was really nothing more than a desperate attempt to decipher the bizarre pictographic script he could make no sense of at all.
The battle with the book that began then... and then...
Unbeknownst to the young James, the seed of the problem was growing as well. It was a seed he himself had planted.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
It was a few days after James had adjusted well to school and started earning good grades.
“I contacted your parents to discuss your future.”
“...Yes. I know.”
James had always been near the top in academics, but recently, with the bullying gone, his grades had risen to the very top of the class. The day before, his parents had heard the news and praised him proudly, then informed him that they would meet with his teacher at school today.
“They’ll be here soon. Before that, James, did you have any...”
Just as the teacher was about to ask whether he had any dream he wanted to pursue, a sudden noise cut the sentence short.
Bang!
“!!”
It was a sound that should never be heard in a school.
Bang! Bang!
“D-duck!”
James understood exactly what those sounds meant, so he immediately crawled under the desk at the teacher’s order.
...A gun. Someone brought a gun to school and started shooting!
A gun incident, the kind he had only seen on the news, was happening at his own school. The teacher quickly grabbed her phone and dialed 911 to report it.
“There’s been a shooting! Please send help immediately!”
“……”
James was relieved, in a way, that this had happened while he was not in the classroom, but he also worried about the friends who had remained there.
I hope Tony and the others are okay...
Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he climbed out from under the desk and rushed toward the window.
“Dad! Mom!”
His parents were supposed to be visiting the school that day.
“James! Don’t go!”
Even with the teacher’s warning, James hurriedly looked out the window and spotted a familiar brown station wagon on the road in front of the school.
“No, no!”
“James!!”
James ran out into the hallway, where the gunfire was still ringing out.
“……”
There he could see several students who had been shot and fallen, and two people lying at the end of the hall. They were adults, and did not seem to be teachers. In James’s eyes, only those two figures loomed large and sharp.
“No...”
James walked forward, praying it was not true, but the closer he got, the more familiar their faces became.
“No... no... no, that can’t be!”
Thud.
James dropped to his knees in front of his parents.
“Dad, get up... Mom, Mom...”
Dark red blood was spreading beneath the bodies lying face down on the floor.
“Mom!! Mom! Daaaad!!!”
Apparently hearing James’s huge cry, someone with a gun came out into the hallway.
Click.
“Heh. There you are. Any idea how long I looked for you?”
The bastard who had started the shooting at the school was Andrew, the same one who had been tormenting James relentlessly all this time.
Clack.
Hearing his voice, James stood and turned to face him.
“...Go ahead and shoot.”
He had never had the courage to kill himself in the first place. But now that the parents he loved so much were gone, he had no reason left to keep living. Death was no longer frightening.
“Heh. Hah-hahaha.”
The bastard was drooling as if high on drugs, and he pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Bang bang! Ratta-tatta-tat.
Ting ting.
The bullets kicked up dust around the hallway where James stood, and only a few of them hit their target.
Thud.
That few was enough. Two bullets struck James in the torso.
“Guh...”
The bullets burrowed into his body, and James pitched forward.
Thump.
“Hahaha.”
In the dimming edges of his consciousness, James reached toward his fallen parents.
Let’s go together...
James had no doubt that when he opened his eyes again, he would be in heaven with the parents he loved.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
James awakened beneath the white ceiling of a hospital room.
“……”
In truth, he had come to hours earlier. But he had not wanted to open his eyes, so he had kept them closed.
...Did I survive alone?
He did not want to live in a world without his parents. That was too horrific to accept.
I don’t want this...
So he did not want to open his eyes, but he could not keep them closed forever.
“The patient is awake!”
A nurse making rounds in the ward noticed that he had opened his eyes and went out, and after that, James learned many things. The teacher had come to the hospital and told him everything.
“The boy refused to surrender that day until the end, and...”
“……”
James had no interest at all in Andrew’s circumstances.
“What about my dad...? And my mom...?”
“I’m sorry, but your parents...”
“!”
His worst fears had always come true.
Just before the incident, his parents had already entered the school, and that bastard Andrew had shot them first. After that, because the standoff between him and the police dragged on, his parents had been pronounced dead before the doctors could do anything. James himself had been hit by two bullets, yet survived after a long surgery.
“……”
“Haah. I don’t even know what to say to comfort you...”
“Sob...”
The tears he had been holding back since waking in the hospital finally burst free.
“Waaah!”
“……”
The shooting at the school was splashed across the news and newspapers and sent shockwaves through society, but only for a brief time. The companies that produced guns still sold their products to drug addicts and gun enthusiasts, and students were still left exposed to the dangers of drugs and firearms.
“……”
And James, who had still not found a reason to live, remained in the world as well.
“...James. Have you lost interest in studying?”
“……”
He had returned to school, but he was not the James he had been before the incident.
Studying? Why would I care?
He still could not find a reason to live, so he felt even less need for study.
“In time...”
“If you’re finished speaking, I’ll be going.”
Creak.
James knew that no one’s comfort would help him now.
“……”
Even the teacher found it hard to come up with the right words for a boy who had lost both parents in an instant.
“...All right. Take care.”
Click.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“……”
James came home weakly, and he hated the barren house that greeted him with no one in it.
This is my reality...
But he had to acknowledge it. He was alone again now, just as he had been in some far-off past, hidden in hazy memories.
I’m alone now...
A crushing loneliness, impossible to endure, came over him again and again. He had been alone even as a child who knew nothing, but the loneliness he felt now that he was grown was entirely different from then. He had already known the deepest kind of love. Where the mountain is high, the valley must be deep.
“Ugh.”
James wrapped his arms around himself and dropped to his knees on the floor.
Shudder, shudder, shudder.
Cold sweat streamed down his forehead, and his body shook against his will, beyond his control. The vast sense of loss brought by his parents’ absence was affecting not just his mind but his body as well. The floor in his vision seemed to rise, and the walls, suddenly immense, looked ready to topple toward him.
“Ghk... ngh.”
I’m scared... I’m scared!
Then, from the depths of memory, a small voice reached him. It was something his parents had once told him.
James, when something is hard, turning away from it doesn’t solve anything.
Then what?
You have to look at it. That way, fear can’t grow any larger. The problem that hurts you, and the fear that comes with it, stops there. Fear ends as fear. It can’t hurt you.
And after that?
James, that’s how the world always is. And after that...
James faced the memory he had been unable to bear, refusing to look away, and recalled his father’s next words.
The moment you face your fear!
The moment...?
You cross the point where tragedy and comedy meet. That’s when comedy gets its turn.
“He said comedy comes after tragedy...”
What James needed now was to accept the reality of his parents’ absence.
“Dad. Mom... I’m alone now. Sob... I miss you!”
The cruel reality crashed down on him just as fiercely as before he tried to avoid it.
But perhaps because he had not turned away from the pain, as his father had said, the tears slowly began to dry. He could not change the tragic reality, but there was no reason for the suffering he felt to grow larger.
How much bigger could it get from here?
Sniff.
For the moment, he had escaped the depths of his emotional ruin, but he felt as if fear might come back at any time. James realized he needed to do something, anything, to keep reality at bay for even a little while.
“I’m not avoiding it. But if I just sit here and do nothing, I’ll start thinking about it again.”
What came to mind then was the old book he had bought for one dollar from the antique shop.
Wobble.
If he could think about something else, maybe he could endure the reality of losing his parents and being alone. No matter how much he suffered, he could not keep clutching at something that would not be solved by pain alone.
“...What’s wrong with this thing?”
But when he staggered upstairs to his room and opened the book, it greeted him in a way that seemed different from before. And yet the book was certainly no different than it had been. Its contents had not changed; what had changed was the person looking at them.
Having returned from the threshold of death, and now running once more toward death under the burden of unbearable loneliness, James’s gaze could finally see the book from the narrow space between life and death. It was a vision belonging neither to the living nor to the dead, but to the boundary between them.
“!”
When James opened the book, he could suddenly understand the meaning of the pictographic script that had made no sense at all before.
“As the court mage and great sage of the Tessar Kingdom, I...”
Not only could he now grasp the meaning of the book, he could read it.
“...having found no successor, I leave my knowledge here. Anyone who walks between life and death will be able to read this book...”
After that, James sank into the contents of the once-impenetrable old tome. He did not want to look outside at the world anymore, because everything in it felt like suffering. Only the old book became James’s comedy.