Arcadia Chapter 1.5

“Why are you clinging to me like this.”

Frowning, he let the still-cold stream of water run down his thigh. The creature hadn’t taken its eyes off him for a single moment since opening them. It was unpleasant. Is this what they’re like when they’re first born? Having never given birth to a child, he had no way of gauging whether this was normal or abnormal.

“What are you looking at.”

He flicked water droplets at the child, which was preventing him from even moving his feet. The child, seemingly startled by the sudden splash on its face, squeezed its eyes shut and then opened them, squealing with laughter. Then it began slapping the water that was starting to collect in the bathtub with its palms. Splash, splash. It looked just like a young child.

“Are you happy…”

Just then, he readjusted his grip on the shower head, which was now spraying warm water, and bent his waist. After lifting the tiny head up and sitting it upright, he slid down into the tub, and his underwear became soaked.

Van set down the shower head with its weak water pressure and sat the child on his thigh. He cupped water in his folded hands and began to wash the sticky face, a soft texture meeting his hand. The delicate flesh, like a human baby’s, felt both eerie and unfamiliar. Whether it knew what peculiar emotions Van was feeling or not, the child giggled every time the large palm wiped its face.

“Why do you keep laughing.”

After he meticulously peeled off the membrane stuck in its fine hair, the child twitched its chubby cheeks and moved its mouth agape. A high-toned, beautiful voice popped out.

“Ah!”

Following that, babbling sounds like ‘eu’ and ‘ae’ flowed from between its lips. It had been quiet without even a whimper until then, but now, as if its throat had opened up, it started speaking in words that were hard to understand, accompanied by peals of laughter. Van, who was finishing washing its hair, mumbled sourly.

“Still, it’s a relief you didn’t suddenly start talking.”

If it had spoken in proper language without giving him time to prepare his heart, he might have been so startled he’d have thrown it. Lost in pointless fantasies, Van focused on washing the short, small body. After dousing it with water several times, its short hair gradually revealed its true color.

Even when he parted the roots, a clean blonde color, free of any black, was plastered down, wet with water. He roughly swept the hair up and slicked it back neatly, then cupped its cheeks to lift its face. The child’s pupils contracted in the bathroom light, making its irises stand out clearly. The vivid green eyes blinked once.

Van, who at some point was cupping the child’s cheeks with both hands and studying its face intently, suddenly furrowed his brow.

“The name is…”

ArcaDia. The name of this bizarre operation, written on the letter Michel had left behind. He wondered if he’d named it too thoughtlessly, but no other name came to mind.

“ArcaDia.”

When he faced it and called its name, the baby smiled brightly. It was a reaction as if it understood its own name. Rolling the name around in his mouth a few times, Van tilted his head. Not only did he not know the meaning, but it was also long enough to be a nuisance to say.

“Arca, Ar… CaDia. Hmm…”

He tried cutting the long word here and there, finally finding an easy nickname.

“Let’s just call you Dia. Figure it out on your own.”

He gave the child’s small face, cupped in his palm, a little shake, and it let out a happy laugh. Dia, whose name had been drastically shortened thanks to Van’s laziness, opened its mouth. Its lips, which popped out from being pressed by his palm, moved as if chewing. In that moment, Van spotted something inside the small mouth and pulled his leg closer to Dia.

“Wait a second.”

He tried to insert his thumb into its mouth to check, but instead of meekly opening its small mouth, Dia pursed its lips and began sucking on his finger.

“That’s gross… Hey. Spit it out.”

Grabbing Van’s hand with both of its own, Dia began sucking not just his thumb, but his index finger as well. The dampness he felt on his fingertips was unpleasant, and the anxiety that he might be swallowed whole washed over him. Van hurriedly stuck his middle finger into Dia’s mouth and spread his fingers to the sides.

Peering into Dia’s mouth, which was now forced open as if saying “cheese,” Van realized he hadn’t been mistaken. Two bottom teeth had popped up through the pink gums. As he idly fiddled with the bottom teeth with his thumb, two top teeth slowly grew in on the empty gums. They were no bigger than specks of dust, but Van’s expression stiffened.

“…Do teeth normally grow this fast?”

He turned Dia’s face this way and that, looking into its mouth, but Van, whose only point of contact with a baby had been waving a hand at one in passing, didn’t know the proper timing for teeth to grow in. It was all just a series of questions. Dia, who had been watching Van intently as he scratched his forehead and once again rummaged around in its mouth, burst into bubbly laughter.

As soon as he stepped out of the bathroom where warm steam was billowing up, his limbs began to tremble. His plan had been to take a shower as well since he’d already taken his clothes off, but the child would stubbornly crawl over and cling to him no matter where he put it, so washing off the sticky fluid was all he could manage. Wearing only black underwear, Van, holding Dia wrapped in a towel, quickly grabbed a sweater from the second floor and went down to the basement.

“Ugh, it’s cold…”

He promptly put the child inside the glass enclosure and then pulled on a large sweater. His exposed legs felt chilly, but it was warm enough otherwise.

Dia, tightly wrapped in the towel, immediately realized it couldn’t move its arms and legs and started rolling on the floor to get closer to the glass. The child, whose awareness of the situation was far from ordinary, stared intently at Van standing outside the glass.

Judging by the movement of its lips, it seemed to be chattering on again, but unfortunately, he couldn’t hear a thing. Van, making a smug face, roughly wiped the water droplets falling from the ends of his hair and turned around.

He headed to the location the mechanical voice had told him about to carry out the second mission, ‘Feeding.’ Standing in front of a bookshelf, Van pulled out a black box from the bottom shelf. The quite heavy box contained a sealed container that looked similar to a protein powder tub, a coffee pot, and a thick book.

Sitting down, Van took out the book first and, upon checking the cover, let out a hollow laugh in disbelief. <The Encyclopedia of Child Rearing>. What a grand title. He pressed a hand to his throbbing forehead and glared through the glass.

“Right now… you’re telling me to raise that thing…”

It seemed Michel had already considered the possibility of it waking up. Van threw the brick-like book on the floor and took out the powder container. When he opened the unlabeled container, it was full of fine-grained powder. The mechanical voice had only told him the box’s location, so if he were to guess with his non-functioning brain, it seemed he was supposed to feed it this…

Van picked up the book he had thrown. As he quickly scanned through the thick book, he found that, unexpectedly, it had many illustrations. Just then, he noticed a bookmark tucked into a page describing how to prepare formula. Pressing down firmly on the center of the book to keep the page open, Van let out a deep sigh.

As he was lost in thought, debating whether he should do this or not, he heard a faint thump, thump sound. Turning his head toward the glass wall, Van creased his brow. He had wrapped the baby in a towel to keep it still, but Dia had already gotten right up to the glass and was bumping its forehead against the hard surface. Thump, thump. Noticing his gaze, Dia scrunched up its tiny face and wriggled. At this point, that single-minded gaze was becoming frightening.

“What is wrong with it…”

Thanks to Dia acting so distractingly, Van ended his unanswerable deliberation and began to clumsily prepare the formula. He replaced a baby bottle with a concave bowl he found after rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, willfully ignored the part that said it needed to be sterilized, and poured in water he had boiled beforehand. He dumped a heap of powder into the steaming hot water and stirred it haphazardly with a teaspoon. Holding the bowl with undissolved clumps of powder floating in it, he entered the glass enclosure.

“Uwah…!”

“Can’t you stay still?”

The moment he stepped inside the glass wall, Dia rolled over and came right up to Van’s feet. When he set the bowl on the floor and untied the tightly bound towel, the child, whose arms and legs popped out, wriggled and promptly flipped itself over.

“Eat.”

Tossing out the single word, Van turned away and began to clean up the floor, which was a mess of the shed skin Dia had emerged from and the sticky liquid. Dia, which started crawling as if it had been waiting, looked at the formula placed before it for a long while, then went around the bowl and grabbed Van’s knee. Van, who was shuddering as he picked up the tattered skin and put it in a bag, frowned. He grabbed its chubby waist and turned it toward the bowl, but the child showed no interest. He had gone to the trouble of preparing it, yet its attitude was utterly insolent.

“Hey, you’re being picky.”

I ate pizza the moment I was born. If you act this weak, we can’t be together. It didn’t take long for Van, who was maintaining a firm attitude with the crawling baby, to go out to get a dropper.

Van sucked up the formula little by little with the dropper and held Dia by the scruff of its neck to keep it still. The child flailed its legs as if the position was uncomfortable.

“Wow. How did I end up…”

Since he had never held a child in his entire life, he held the baby in his arms as he had seen somewhere, and Van’s shoulders shot up towards the sky. Laments, laments, and more laments followed endlessly.

“What am I even doing, seriously.”

The dropper, a substitute for a baby bottle, went between Dia’s lips. When he squeezed the bulb at the end of the dropper to deliver the formula, its cheeks began to puff up. However, it wasn’t long before Van had to scowl. Dia started letting the formula that filled its small mouth dribble out.

“Why. Why are you doing that. Swallow it, quickly.”

The formula he had given it with the dropper trickled out from its slack mouth. Even when he tilted its head back or held its cheeks and shook them, it showed no intention of swallowing. Staring intently at Van, who was struggling to feed it, Dia let the formula stream out until it finally spat it out.

“…Did you just spit that out?”

Seeing the look of utter disbelief on Van’s face, Dia turned its head back and forth and squealed with laughter. The battle between Van trying to feed it and the child spitting everything out continued for a considerably long time. Finally succeeding in getting it to eat even a little bit of formula, Van was so drained that he lay flat on the floor.

“Wow… I don’t think I can do this.”

All he had done was wash it, feed it, and clean up, yet he was so exhausted he could barely lift a finger. He had thought it was a security mission, which he had always done, but he’d never dreamed he’d be hired as a babysitter for a monster. Beating people up was easy; raising something was something Van had never done, nor ever wanted to do, and in just one day, he felt the full agony of child-rearing.

He was staring blankly at the blinking red light of the camera, completely drained of energy, when Dia slowly crawled up onto Van’s stomach. A feather-like weight was transmitted from the hand that rested on his chest, and then a small face popped into his field of vision. The eyes, with their distinct green hue, insistently met his gaze.

“What are you looking at.”

Dia, having no part that could be called a neck, slowly lowered its head as if it were heavy. As it rested its round forehead on the bridge of Van’s nose, their eyelashes brushed against each other every time they blinked. Unable to bear the tickling sensation, Van reached out his arms and swiftly lifted the child. Dia, suspended in the air, let its body go limp.

“I think you’ve gotten bigger again.”

It was heavier than when he had first torn the membrane and pulled it out. He slowly moved his arms up and down, examining its body here and there. He began the observation he had briefly postponed due to the breathtakingly busy situation. As he carefully scrutinized the child, he noted a couple of other strange things besides its astonishingly fast growth.

Instead of wailing its head off, it was grinning foolishly, and it wouldn’t leave his side for a second. In that moment, Van reached a chilling conclusion and his expression hardened.

“…I’m not your dad.”

He had warned it firmly, but Dia only tilted its head and gave a smile of incomprehension.

Van lay stretched out, leaving Dia to crawl down to his head, pull on his hair, and rub its lips against his forehead. He rubbed his tired eyes.

What did I do today? He had made such a fuss about everything that he couldn’t even remember what he had been doing before he started resting like this. He was so confused he couldn’t tell if meeting Jack at the supermarket had been yesterday or today. Above all, he was tired. As drowsiness washed over him, his eyes began to close, even under the bright lights.

Unfortunately, just as he was becoming drowsy, a vibration transmitted through the floor. Annoyed, he reached out and fumbled along the floor. His phone, which he had tossed aside before leaving, was vibrating furiously.

“Can’t I even get a break? Let me rest a bit.”

A grumble, which had barely managed to form into a complaint, escaped Van’s lips as soon as he answered the phone. He furrowed his brow slightly because of the faint breath Dia exhaled as it came down to his eyebrows. The mechanical voice, which already felt quite familiar even though it hadn’t been long since they’d last spoken, suddenly spoke.

— Lift your leg.

“My leg?”

Van slightly lifted the leg he had stretched out. He looked down, wondering if something was on it, but there was nothing particularly noticeable. His bare feet, exposed after taking off his slippers before entering the glass enclosure, dangled under the blue light. He switched and checked the other leg as well, but it was clean.

— Why aren’t you wearing pants?

“…What?”

Van looked down at the tight black boxer briefs under his exposed skin and slowly lowered his leg. In that instant, a thick sense of displeasure hit the back of his head. This guy, right now, is this bastard right now…

— Looks good. Keep dressing like that.

“You want to die? You crazy bastard.”

He held up his middle finger toward the camera. When one hand wasn’t enough, he flipped it off with both hands, and a low laugh trickled out from the phone he had placed near his ear.

— Would you mind standing up?

“No.”

— I can give you a bonus…

At the mention of a bonus, he shot up into a sitting position. Because of that, Dia, who had been leaning on his forehead, tumbled backward. The child whimpered, seemingly startled, and he gently stroked its head as he looked up at the camera.