She was named Yoko because it was, quite simply, the most Japanese name her mother could think of. And it was all down hill from there.
Born in 1992, Yoko was the result of a heavily one-sided relationship—if it could even be called that—between Reina Hernandez, eighteen year old second-generation Puerto Rican born in the heart of El Barrior, and Endo Yamanaka, successful international finance consultant born and raised in Japan. Endo kept an apartment in Manhattan for his frequent business trips, and any apartment scarcely lived in needed to be cleaned at least once a week. Reina had a reference who knew a reference who had worked for Endo’s co-worker; she was in. Maybe she wasn’t so smart, though she wasn’t dumb, but she was pretty, and the sharp cut of Endo’s suit, the way his hair was always perfectly slicked back. She was hooked. She made the first move, really, so it could never have been workplace harassment. She thought he would take her out of El Barrio; she thought she would come live with him in his Upper East Side apartment, wear expensive clothes and learn to move through the world of high society. When Reina got pregnant, she thought she was in. Except, when she told Endo, he fired her, pushing her out the door with a handful of twenty dollar bills and the express instruction to never, ever come back.
Growing up a mixed-race and low-income illegitimate child, and a girl child at that, was not very easy. Though Yoko spent the first eight or so years of her life in general childhood ignorant bliss, not counting the school and backyard violence and crime in El Barrio, she was not cherished. To Reina, she was a sign of failed love; to the rest of the Hernandez family, she was a walking symbol of sin, of mistakes and miscegenation. Throughout her childhood, she was instructed to write and decorate cards to her mysterious father. Reina thought that a child’s plea might bring Endo back. She still thought there was a future for them. For Yoko, it was the art that fascinated her, and from an early age she was an expert with x-acto knives and papercrafts, cutting out foxes and wolves for the monthly or weekly card. After ten years, they got a letter back. But not from Endo.
As is usually the case with businessmen of loose morals, Endo had had a family in Japan the entire time. Some kind of secretarial mixup had resulted in his wife getting one of Yoko’s cards; she wrote to the Hernandez’s demanding an explanation, one which Reina gladly provided. The magic was over. She had always been the other woman, and Yoko saw the mother, as she knew her, disintegrate. Endo, under threat of divorce, was forced to make contact. He set up an account to look after Yoko’s education and general lifestyle, frowned a lot and got away as fast as he could. Years later, what Yoko remembers of her father is his face, looming, inconvenienced and uncaring.
With no hope for a happily ever after, Reina lost interest in her daughter. No longer a token to lure Endo back, Yoko became a burden to milk money from, and in her adolescence Yoko spent much of her time holed up in her room, sometimes even her closet, doing homework or reading or making art to escape the clutches of her money-hungry mother. She cultivated a talent for faking sick, and frequently wished her mother would become bed-ridden so that she could feel some kind of pity for her. And, when Yoko was halfway through her fourteenth year, it seemed that her scathing thoughts and ill wishes did start to have an effect on her mother. Always relatively healthy, Reina began to take to her bed more and more often under a barrage of colds and so-called food poisonings. Though Yoko always got sick as well, she would recover in hours while her mother languished for a week.
Yoko’s grandmother was staunchly Catholic and had been mentioning, offhand, that such a child of sin as Yoko should attend a Catholic school. As Reina became sicker more and more often, Yoko’s grandmother was the one to suspect that perhaps her crabby granddaughter was the cause––if not spiritually with her corrupting presence, maybe through more physical, mundane means. She began to shadow Yoko’s every move in the house, insisting on being present whenever daughter and mother interacted and refusing point-blank to allow Yoko to help with preparing meals. Yoko was always complaining of the smell in the house when anyone was sick, and her grandmother began to see this as an unconscious admission of guilt. Of course, Yoko saw all this as further proof that religious people were insane, or at least that her grandmother thought she was soulless simply because she wasn’t enthused about church.
But the idea that her grandmother thought she might have some kind of spiritual power, or even just the strength of will and malice to undermine her own mother’s health, thrilled Yoko in a quiet way. She figured it was all some kind of disease-feedback system and she happened to have a stronger immune system. After Yoko turned fifteen, Yoko’s grandmother was decided; Yoko was sent to a private Catholic middle school and high school, to get her away from Reina and to hopefully make her at least a little religious. Of course, Yoko’s grandmother also probably suspected that with Endo now pressganged into taking care of some of his daughter’s expenses that Yoko would receive a much better education far from Spanish Harlem, but Yoko was not one to see good intentions in such people. And certainly not at fifteen.
Had her grandmother sent her away because she thought Yoko was making Reina sick, she soon had her suspicions confirmed: Reina recovered almost immediately. And, hearing the news through phone calls, Yoko herself began to suspect there was more to the story than a bad immune system. She began to experiment with something she could not even name. She had rarely tried to speak about anything of significance with her family, and her few friendships prior to private school had been tenuous. She asked, in a roundabout way, how other girls knew when they started getting sick; how, exactly, it felt. And she found discrepancies. No one else smelled the “corruption” or experience the “pressure like swallowing.” No one else recovered quite so quickly from the common cold.
As she had become more withdrawn and more critical of others, Yoko had taken their heightened impression of “dirtiness” as an extension of her own feelings; she did not like someone so they seemed uglier. But when she thought about it, she found holes in her logic. People seemed “dirtier” and then did not. People she liked were affected only a little less than those she didn’t––before her experiments, anyway. Familiar primarily with influenza and its hundred faces, she began brushing against girls she especially disliked, even going so far as to grab one by the wrist and then slip away without explanation. In the days when she was testing her power, Yoko operated mainly on an intellectual level. She imagined the scientific names of strains, how it felt to have one them, and then tried to expel it. In general, she was successful. Girls she touched while focusing became sick. She was powerful; she had been given something, an ability to cause suffering, and she could use it however she wanted.
Private school was a paradise for Yoko. Although she hated the strict Catholicism immediately, the resent it built in her felt... good. It felt righteous, was the word, though hating religion and feeling righteous was a funny thing. Separated from her family, she was in a restrictive atmosphere that nonetheless had paid chaperones, not parents, and who couldn’t be bothered to monitor the girls every second of the day. Plus, there was the internet. So Yoko educated herself, reading feminist zines in the bathroom and sneaking into other girl’s rooms, soaking up articles on social injustice and systematic oppression.
Although Catholic school was a time of discovery and growth for Yoko, that didn’t mean she had friends. She had few. She bloomed away from home, but what exactly bloomed about her was her hate, her resent, her bitterness to her mother, her family, her father, and the world in general. Intelligent, she soon learned to belittle the ignorance of others; mildly pretty and unconcerned with her appearance, she made constant jabs at those she thought were too self-absorbed, too smug to deserve their beauty. In secret she admired those who had talent. In public she tried to crush their spirits, enraged that someone should have anything she did not.
A chance friendship with an older girl soon erupted into an obsession, infatuation; what Yoko felt wasn’t love, but it was furious. Sophia was the definition of the dumb blond, a lacrosse and soccer star, popular and friendly and everything that Yoko railed against. She was the gargoyle of the school, not in looks but in personality, a bitter, twisted thing who saw only the worst in everyone around her. Her friends were few, but somehow she found herself making exceptions for Sophia. Anything for Sophia. The relationship wasn’t unrequited, though Sophia was hard-pressed to feel anything for such a caustic suitor. Yoko was tolerated, in some ways accepted because Sophia was too good-hearted to reject her outright. But when Sophia was caught mooning with a townie boy, Yoko’s wrath exploded.
Sophia’s affair was uncovered in February 2008, shortly after the Seattle Incident. Yoko’s ideas of being some great chosen punisher were not entirely crushed by the reveal of Vols to the public, but they were weakened. She was no longer the lone special vigilante, just a girl with powers among any number of girls with powers. But as the Seattle Incident undermined her bloated sense of self-worth, it strengthened her belief in her own capabilities. Rational as she was in, at least in terms of science and the realm of the realm, she had not been able to fully believe that she could cause sickness. It could all be some kind of magical thinking writ large. After the Seattle Incident, she began studying diseases in a casual way, soaking up news stories of outbreaks and poring over thick biology textbooks. She knew how to give people colds, but that was not enough.
When she infected Sophia’s boyfriend, she did not know exactly what she was giving him. The sickness she infected him with was known to her only as something slimy and nauseating, a chill in the bones and a looseness in her veins which she remembered feeling when she went to the zoo, once, and was allowed to handle a fruit bat. But what he contracted she would later turn into something of a trademark: Ebola virus.
The strain was weak, almost improbably so, and he didn’t die, only suffered for two weeks before recovering. Yoko suffered too, not only in heart but in body; for three days she showed the most preliminary signs. Her head was constantly pounding. She threw up. She coughed. Sophia’s boyfriend bled from his eyes and nose, and so he was tested for more serious illness. Yoko’s symptoms were general enough to be seen as an accident. But Yoko’s experiments with infection had taught her better. No matter how mildly, she always became sick as soon as she infected someone. She thought of it as recoil, the damage taken a fraction of the damage dealt, just like her favorite Pokemon moves.
She was sorry, in the end, for getting Sophia’s boyfriend sick. She had become emotional, and she viewed it as an unfortunate accident. Soon, she would know what to do. Once she realized her power, she inflicted a milder Ebola on Sophia, and on two other girls–– their sickness didn’t extend beyond fatigue, but it was enough, she thought, to cover her tracks, and if Vol involvement was suspected, she never heard of it.
Until one person sought her out. Nathaniel Dorsey, the brother of the boy she infected, slipped her a note through various channels. They met in town over ice cream, an ironically infantile start to what would become one of the most intense relationships of Yoko’s life. Nathan informed her that he was a Vol, that he thought she was one, and that he thought they should be friends. Yoko was unconvinced, but the depth of Nathan’s sincerity touched her; so, too, was she curious to see the sort of people she would now be associated with. Despite their shared state, their friendship was more or less normal. Nathan introduced her to film and the began to plan complicated storylines for films. Together they designed costumes, sets, dream-cast their movies, took drugs and discussed philosophy. More from curiosity than attraction, Yoko initiated a physical relationship with him. One of the many perks of bering her friend, Nathan said, was that he never seemed to get sick.
Yoko had always nursed a sense of superiority; her friendship with Nathan, who was similarly intense, only heightened it. She felt that her power was a gift, a gift to be used. She applied to film school as a documentary major, alongside Nathan who came in for directing, and she knew that she would be the best of them. She would become a renowned documentary maker, traveling to the sites of poverty and oppression; she would lampoon all those people who wronged others, and in the process she would quietly sow health where it was deserved, and sickness where it was called for. Yoko could not guarantee that the good would live and the ignorant would die. But she could try.
After graduating, Yoko dedicated herself to politics. She argued on a daily basis with her family, who were all rather conservative, and she began to test her powers at political rallies of those she disagreed with. In July, she attended a rally where several conservative senators were scheduled to appear. What Yoko meant to do was warn them, in a sense; they were so deluded, so religious, she thought that perhaps she could send a message by striking them down in a public place. She did not exactly intend to kill them, but as she sat through their speeches and the call-and-returns of the crowd, she became lost in disgust. The plan was simple: shake hands with as many as she should, and make them sick. She did not show up intending to infect them with Ebola, but with a much milder norovirus that was common enough for her to know intimately. In her anger, she slipped, concentrating on the nausea, the feeling of vomit trickling out of her throat, and when she smiled and shook their hands it was with every ounce of venom within her. Four of the six senators contracted strains of Ebola, with symptoms that advanced so rapidly they were hospitalized within the day.
And Yoko was on their heels.
When she was tested and found to be carrying every strain which had struck the senators, and then recovered a day later, there were suspicions. When government officials ran a background check and discovered the case of Ebola connected to her school, those suspicions turned to all but certainty. She was detained on suspicion of being an unregistered Vol, subjected to a power detector, and forced to cure those she had infected. After a month in which she was monitored to be sure the senators recovered, and her own recovery taking two weeks, Yoko was released. She came home just in time to receive her rejection letter from film school. Though officially she had not been held responsible for the events of the rally, she had been deemed “too unstable” to attend.
As a known Vol with potentially dangerous powers, Yoko knew she could not simply vent her wrath by going across the country and inflicting people with the plague, much as she wanted to. Instead, she moved to Boston, to be near Nathan. He had been accepted; though he had to stay on-campus for the first year, he spent most of his time in her tiny apartment. Deprived of her proper film school education, Yoko instead picked it up piece-meal. Within the year she became known for all the typical things: talent, vision, leadership, and the ability to make anyone who worked with her wish they had never been born.
Still, even if people thought she was an asshole, no one thought she deserved to be barred from the college. Several of her friends and fellows filed complaints with the college’s administration, and she received a personal email acknowledging the school’s wrongs and inviting Yoko to re-apply. Of course, then the IVI was built, and as a known shit-stirrer Yoko was informed she was obligated to attend, and she became angry all over again. Not that she ever stopped hating everyone––she just went on break to do films. Now that her life has once more been hijacked to suit some authority which (probably rightly) suspects that she will murder important people if left to her own devices, Yoko probably despises the government even more. On the bright side, she wants to associate with other Vols. And she might tattle on Nathan just to have a fucking friendly face in what is sure to be a sea of idiocy.
|
