Madoka didn’t care for what poetry she had read of her ancestor’s—it was all very sentimental—but she enjoyed imagining the scenario of a woman trying to run from her home, and getting stuck in melting pavement. Screaming, and so forth, before her own lungs melted.
Madoka has thought, often, that the vividness and complexity of her fantasies, and the fact that they are voyeuristic, not personal, means she has the soul of an artist.
She continues down the hallway, not touching anything, challenging herself to walk normally and not shuffle. She has never spent a lot of time in this house. Her company is based in Nagoya, but her work requires her to travel for most of the year. Madoka is Global Chief Sales Operative for a company that manufactures robotic caregivers. The robots are excellent at their job. They keep track of medicines, monitor vital statistics, communicate with doctors, suggest exercises when they sense their charges have been stationary for too long, assist in manual tasks. They read out loud, ask questions, play music. They chat. They do not love, but they are capable of receiving it.
Yoshi’s parents had bought the house for them when they were newly married. Madoka and Yoshi had put into the house all the things that people put into a house, except for themselves, and children.
Her husband will never say to her: I want to have children. He needs her to take the responsibility of wanting it.
It’s not that she is afraid of the responsibility. She just doesn’t want being a mother to be her great thing. She doesn’t want the epiphany of motherhood. She isn’t interested in learning that it’s “not all about her.” She is quite well aware of that already.
She might be able—just—to face being a mother, if she knew for sure that she was a real person. But not before.
The Prime Space Simulation would last for seventeen months. Yoshi would be gone for much longer, because of the training, but for seventeen months she would know absolutely that he was gone. It would be almost like he was in prison.
Yoshi had been largely gone for most of their marriage, either training in Tsukuba or Cologne, or Houston. Once in low Earth orbit. During his time on the space station they had conversed much more than they did when he was on Earth. It was important, psychologically, for astronauts in space to communicate with their friends and family. The idea that she was contributing to Yoshi’s psychological health was very funny. Sometimes she felt that they were on the edge of laughing about this together. But if they did that, that would mean that he saw her for who she was, and then they would probably have to get divorced.
When Yoshi had gone to the space station she had been the target of the usual envy: “Your husband is a hero!” and the even more usual envy disguised as pity: “It’s wonderful what he’s doing, but it must be so hard on you!” The Prime Space simulation was different. It was childish, playing at going to Mars, and there would be opportunities for very silly jokes in the media: that Yoshi would rather be stuck in a metal can in a desert in Utah with a Russian man and an elderly American lesbian than her, and so on.
She is at the stairs now. Five steps, then a turn, and then thirteen steps. If she practiced, she might be able to work up to doing this without holding on to the wall. The staircase has no banister; if she fell on the thirteen steps, she would fall through open air onto the table below, or on the cabinet to the left of the table, which had candles and picture frames and three glass bowls on it. What a big mess it would make! The blood would run down her legs and there would be bruises, maybe broken bones. She could hit her head at a bad angle and die. It would look very odd to whoever found her because she would still be wearing her sleep mask and also, she was not wearing any clothes.
People would see her naked body and the sleep mask and think there was something sexual involved, that she had been engaged in some kind of perverse tryst with a lover, who had abandoned the crime scene. The medical examiners and the police would take photographs.
It would all be very dramatic. But that kind of drama wasn’t as interesting as this moment right now, standing on the stairs, naked, blind, just thinking about falling.
She was an artist, she knew it. This proved it, this thinking. She was maybe the only real artist, because she did not want to display her art. People who showed their art, and sold it, were just people who sold things. They might as well be making donuts or futons or socks. They got to call it art for some reason that was totally unclear to her, that was, in fact, made up. What gave them the right to say that what they made was art? Because they had feelings about it? People who made socks had feelings too. She had lots of feelings about her socks.
What she was talking about, what she had discovered in this moment, was the real thing. Creation without object or purpose or audience.
She was possibly not the first person to realize this. She was probably, right now, connected to a great tradition of true artists who nobody knew about because they had never made anything but true art, which no one had ever seen or heard. Her body feels so warm, thinking this. She is lit up, on fire. She stands still and lets the feeling grow up around her.