THE STORY OF A CERTAIN CLEANER AND CORPSE ON A WINTER MORNING

The cleaner found the corpse on a winter morning when the town’s hazy air was frozen through. He was listening with one ear to the static-filled music coming from the portable radio on his belt, picking up the garbage along the town walls, and the first comment that popped into his head was the foolish thought that it was a very corpse-like corpse.

After squatting down and looking at it for a while, he took his stiff, cold hands from his cleaning implements and rummaged through the dead person’s things. In addition to a few small bills more than half-dyed a brownish red, which were stuck into the pocket of his work pants, the man carried only a few solitary cigarettes and a cheap lighter. It was an impersonal corpse with nothing but a few coldly impersonal things.

“Boy, he was hard up!” the cleaner grumbled, tucking the bills into his own pocket.

But then, completely disregarding his own actions of just a second ago, he murmured, “Poor guy…this is just cruel.” It wasn’t hypocrisy or an attempt at vindication; the words tumbled out of his mouth straight from the heart, and at the sound of them, even he was surprised to find that he had such a conscience.

Hugging his knees and curling up against the cold, he looked anew at the corpse lying at his feet.

The body was so miserably beat up all over that the cleaner could hardly tell what kind of injuries could have reduced him to such a sorry state, or even where exactly he was wounded. If this had been nighttime, he would surely have mistaken the man for garbage and set about cleaning him away.

His face was a horrible sight, too—half crushed with a wound that was sort of a bored hole, perhaps from a bullet. But the left side of it was still hanging on, if just barely, and peering at it, the cleaner thought the man seemed still young.

This foolish young punk had wasted the long life ahead of him on something stupid. He must’ve let someone tempt him into a shady line of work…Hmm, come to think of it, it was just about time for the early morning public broadcast. If this was part of a known incident, there might be a report on it.

When the cleaner turned the dial on the portable radio at his waist to check, he heard a hoarse voice so faint he almost mistook it for part of the static; but no, it had definitely made a claim on his hearing—

“Don’t…”

The cleaner’s hand froze.

Moving only his eyes, he nervously let his gaze slide from the radio to the corpse.

With his bloody right cheek still pressed to the ground, the corpse moved his thin lips slightly. No sound came out. After all, half his mouth was gone, and most likely his tongue and vocal cords weren’t in any shape to be used.

And yet for some reason the cleaner thought he had heard him speak.

“Don’t change it…”

His jaw dropping blankly, eyes still glued to the corpse, the cleaner half-unconsciously turned the dial back to the original channel with jerky, marionette-like movements.

The channel’s sound quality was so bad that if you didn’t know better, you’d only recognize it as noise. But if you listened closely, you could hear the comfortable, low-key sound of slightly distorted string instruments mingled in with the noise and the morning air.

This clandestine music program was broadcast daily from a guerrilla radio station located God only knew where. It was what they called “antiestablishment music,” the kind regulated by the Church, and naturally if he’d listened to it in broad daylight in the middle of town, he’d have been surrounded by Church Soldiers before he could blink. Getting to play it as his background music without having to worry about being observed was the lone, secret perk of this cold, low-paying, humdrum early-morning job that otherwise inspired absolutely no will to work at all.

“You like this?” he asked experimentally. The man’s single eye remained closed. His one good cheek assumed a sort of relieved expression, almost like that of a kid who’d fallen asleep listening to a “once-upon-a-time” story, and he fell still once more.

The cleaner was a little disappointed not to get an answer. Then, “Oh!” The startle reflex finally kicked in, and he sprang to his feet as if bitten. “W-Wait there! I’ll go get you some water!”

Whether the man could drink the water in his current state, and more fundamentally why he was even breathing in said state, not to mention the fact that the cleaner had what little money the man had owned in his pocket and would therefore actually be better off if the man stayed dead—at the moment, all those thoughts were the furthest things from his mind. Spurred on by some impulse, he took off running so hurriedly he almost fell. There was running water at the toolhouse a few blocks away. Was there anything he could put the water in…?

That was when he heard the sounds of many metallic footsteps behind him.

Thief’s instinct sent him diving reflexively into the shadow of a nearby building. When he gingerly stuck out his head to look, he saw five or six people in white clerical robes ooze out of the morning mist. The way they blended in almost perfectly with the milk-white town wall standing behind them made them seem hardly there at all, yet at the same time the group had an intimidating air.

Church Soldiers…

One of the men in clerical robes began to look as though he would turn his way, so the cleaner clung to the wall and stopped breathing. Noticing that sounds, however faint, were still coming from the radio at his waist, he switched off the power in a panic.

After waiting a while, he sneaked another look and saw that the group in clerical garb had surrounded the man curled up at the bottom of the wall and were all looking down at him so impassively that it was as if they wore identical masks. After some muttering in dull voices, one of them carelessly tossed the man over his shoulder like some not-very-important piece of luggage. From his white-robed shoulder, the back of the man’s head hung down like that of a floppy doll, but as proof that he was no doll, large drops of black-red blood dripped down his hair.

As if all that had happened was that they now had one more thing to carry, the group in clerical garb unconcernedly re-formed their ranks and disappeared, melting into the morning mist. The cleaner watched them from the shadow of the wall, breathing silently, until they were completely out of sight.

The whole scene was such a milk-white haze that he could barely make out the details, and the farther away they got, the less real it all seemed. The rust-colored blood staining the man’s hair was the one image that remained burned vividly into his vision to the last.

Looking back on it later, he was sure that must have been a procession of the dead heading for the other world.

Common sense said it was impossible for that corpse to have moved in the first place, and from then on the cleaner sincerely believed that he had accidentally witnessed the dead taking a new member of their ranks off into oblivion.