Mito Itomi kept an immaculate apartment. She had what some people described as a severe allergy to dust by many, but what was actually a dislike bordering on phobia of dirt. She hated dirt. It was unclean, stifling, and corrupting. Dirt was a sign of low, base minds and unspeakable acts. Itomi was a religious atheist—she believed in no god but in all the qualities of godhood. She slept in the morning, cleaned in the afternoon, and drank herself into stupors at night.
Everything about Itomi’s world was cleanly. The floors were washed twice a day, the walls once, and not a dish could stand used in the sink for more than ten minutes under daylight. The sun peered into her tidy home through glittering glass panes. The kitchen was the despair of grime spirits everywhere. The bathroom might have been layered in marble and plexiglass. The beddings and linens were quickly worn through with washing, no matter how often they were replaced. Laundry was done twice a day when she could, at least once a day where she could stand it.
Still, the house was never clean enough, never. There was always something missing, some bit of rubbish or muck that she had gone by, that mocked her from dark corners or from under heavy furniture. Itomi could never clean quickly enough, or simply enough.
It was enough to drive a woman insane, so she took refuge the only way she knew how. She drank the gifts her husband had left her.
Sleep. Clean. Drink. Sleep. Clean. Drink. Itomi rarely left the house. She was a mistress of the home. The house was her domain. How the groceries were bought, how the household stocks were replenished every other day, she never questioned it. In her atheistic religion, it was a quiet sort of magic that did these things, the same kind of quiet magic that was her son.
Itomi didn’t see him much, her son. Some corner of her mind was aware of the fact that she had a son, but mostly she slept, cleaned, and drank. She could remember no baby at her breast, no little boy clinging to her hand. What she remembered was a tall, black-haired figure that bellowed and blustered and drank and struck, a figure that had been gone a long time, and the never-ending quest for sanitary perfection.
There was a name, but Itomi didn’t think of that very much either. The house was never clean. The food was there, and invisible, magical hands always prepared them and restocked them, and invisible, magical hands made an attempt, every now and then, to take the bottle from her, but they were easily resisted. All she need do was cry a bit. The magic had pity. It let her be.
Itomi had her good nights and her bad nights. On good nights, she might only sip at the gifts of her husband, might watch a bit of television and drowse, that sense of impending failure in matters of hygiene slowly fading under the pleasure of nothing. She would sleep then, good sleep, the kind in which she dreamt only good dreams when she dreamt at all.
And then, on most nights, she would drink until the world spun and nothing smelled, tasted, looked, or felt the same. Then she would laugh and laugh until she would sick up, and then the invisible, magical hands were usually there to hold her hair back, to help her, and a sad, calm voice to speak nonsense into her ear until she fell asleep or passed out.
Some days, on the good days, she wondered about her son. He was never there during the day, and increasingly absent at nights. But these wonderings always lasted only minutes. So much cleaning to do, so little time, and here she was daydreaming.
Itomi was a woman as immaculate as her house. Her skin was pale and white and dry from always being scrubbed. Her eyes were wide and strained, usually red rimmed. Her hands were the hands of working women, of women who had scoured floors for years, callused and rough. Her drab, perpetually faded clothes were plain and blindingly clean. She was a round, flat-faced, doughy woman with little left but a breath of alcohol and a blank stare of faint disapproval.
She knew this. Itomi was not blind. There were mirrors in the house. But the cleaning, the cleaning took so long, it didn’t leave it her time for anything else, to think anything else…
Infrequently, only every now and then, a moment of lucidity would strike. That was when Itomi woke enough to reassure herself that her son was still alive, that her dim, shadowed figure of the past was still gone. Itomi shunned these seconds of clarity with a vengeance usually reserved for only the most vicious of stains.
Once, only once, had she ever heard anyone speak to her.
It had been a bad night. She was so sick. She’d vomited until there was nothing left and then retched dryly some more. A frightened, exasperated voice was yelling.
“Goddamnit, Mother, look at you, you’re a drunk! You’re a goddamn wino! A ghost of a drunk, that’s what you are! Why don’t you fucking wake up? Why can’t you fucking wake up?”
“It’s so quiet in here,” she rasped through a throat scraped with bile.
“Oh, God, Mother,” said the voice, so tired, so hopeless. “Look at me, Mother, it’s Youhei, Mother. Sit up, Mother, here, I’ll help you…”
Youhei. Yes. That was the name.
Itomi was always tired, but she never let that beat her. Never. The dirt was always there. No matter how tired she was, she would clean, as long as the noonday sunlight lasted. Night was the time for forgetting, for losing everything over again to a pleasant nothing.
Night was when she could sleep. She could forget.
Itomi always wanted to forget.
There was that one night. It was a peculiar night. She had only begun drinking. The house was not clean enough again. She half expected someone to come bellowing at her, so she was sitting in the shadow with a bottle in one hand in a half cringe, when the people-noises began.
There were voices, but not loud. They weren’t speaking to her. She was alive enough to know that. It didn’t take much of her courage to creep up to the door, breath full of whisky, to listen. Courage never meant much to Itomi, who had nothing to be scared of but dirt.
She thought it might be Youhei. She wasn’t sure who Youhei was, but the name came to her most easily, much more easily than Ojiro.
There were two people. One, she recognized as the sad, calm voice that came with the invisible, magical hands, the one that spoke to her, the only one that spoke to her. The other was strange, but stranger still by how it felt to her—all broken and whimpering, terror coursing through it like the sluggish blood in her veins. It was a pathetic noise that rose and fell almost in cadence.
Itomi peeked through the door. A partially upright shape was pulling a second, sprawling figure through the front doorway. The latter was a mass of a body, bigger than her boy’s, but looking dead. Her mouth twisted in disgust as she registered that neither had taken off their shoes. Filth. Filth.
“Shhh, shhh, Hanamichi,” her boy’s voice said carefully. It was soothing, reassuring, but under it she could scent a slithering hint of fear, but mostly…something unfamiliar…the hard odor of…rage?
That was strange. Her boy was never so angry.
Itomi drank from the bottle a bit. The world hadn’t begun to swim yet. It would be a good night. When next she looked out the door, Youhei wasn’t there.
But she could still hear the whimpers. They were coming from down the hall, from Youhei’s room, her boy’s room. It broke through the alcohol and the vague indifference like a knife.
Itomi was a good woman, always had been. It shocked her to hear those people-noises. She had never heard those kinds of noises before, but had an excellent idea as to what it was. A long-forgotten mother had drilled those stern impeccabilities in her at the dawn of everything, and she recognized it as surely from the core as she could if someone had painted a sign.
Filth! Filth, in her house! A rage of her own ripped through her shell of nothing. Filth! Filth! Disgusting smut! Immorality! A god that wasn’t hers bid her up in righteous anger.
Itomi staggered, but the hallway wasn’t so long as it looked. She stopped a moment, at Youhei’s door, with the bottle elapsed in her hand, to put an ear to the door. There were the noises, quieter now, but no less there.
She crashed open the door with all the force of a mother at war.
It was night in there, as it was in the hall, and no one had turned on a light. Everything was so clean, as it always should be, except for the bed.
In the bed, under the covers, was the person. The covers were heaped in a pile, and, as she blinked fuzzily and squinted around the drink that fogged her eyes, seemed to writhe as if two bodies grappled beneath the surface.
“Filth!” she shouted. “Filth, here in my home! Wanton filth!” Itomi moved like an assailing snake, thumped her upraised fist down in a blow that left her arm ringing. It met the thump of flesh. “Filth! Filth! A whore in my son’s bed! Filth! Filth!”
“Mother!”
Her blows wavered, stopped. She turned her head, winced at the light blaring around the shape that stood in the doorway. Something like the horrified face of her boy glared at her, a wet cloth in one hand and something that looked like…a kettle?...in the other, a towel in the same grip.
“Get out!” Youhei’s face was that of a murderous god’s. “Out, Mother! Out!”
What happened next confused her. Abruptly, she was in the harsh light of the hallway, and the door was slammed in her face. She could still hear the noises from the other side, but now they were accompanied by the low, warm croon, “Shhh, Hanamichi, it’s okay, just relax. You’re safe now, it’s okay, it’s okay…”
Her eyes cast to the floor, saw the marks on her beautiful floors. They were an ugly, rusty red, new-dried, and trailed all from the house threshold to Youhei’s closed door. Revulsion distorted her features. Itomi did not know her skin was so blood-flushed, or that her eyes were so red they seemed to be bleeding. Stains, stains were everywhere, and now, when it was her time to forget!
“Filth!” she roared. “Filth in my house, filth in my son’s bed! You bring a whore into this house, this house of purity; you consort with a priestess of the flesh!”
“Shut up, Mother!” He was so angry.
“A priestess of the flesh!” Itomi reeled toward her own door. “Like father, like son, alike as everything in their filth—”
“Shut up, Mother!” There was a little, despairing cry, not her boy’s. “Hanamichi!”
“Filth in all its parts,” she muttered, and fell into her room. “Filth in all its parts, filth in all its parts…”
She crawled into her corner, returned to that little bottle in her hand, turned her back to the hallway lights. The drinking was cool, safe. The clean could wait.
All those stains. She would have to work hard to erase those stains of her son’s sins. Those blood stains, blood of her son’s sins, blood of her son’s father’s sins. She knew those sins. Itomi could see those sins. And it was easy to drink until she couldn’t see them.
“A priestess of the flesh,” she growled, and vomited close to the wall, the whimpering and the crooning a pillow about her head.