This is a story from an early episode of "Tales of the Unusual." My memory is a bit vague, so I apologize if I get some details wrong.
The story begins with an elderly man, A, around 70 or 80 years old, moving into a nursing home. A uses a wheelchair, but his mind is still sharp, and he carries himself with a dignified air.
A is assigned a dedicated caregiver named B, a shabby and servile middle-aged man around 50 or 60. When asked, B explains that he has a disability in either his eye or his ear, which was caused by corporal punishment from a teacher when he was a child. "I was a slow learner, you see, so I was beaten all the time," B recounts.
In reality, A used to be a schoolteacher during the war, a hardcore, strict disciplinarian who strictly followed the educational policies of that era. Whenever a student did poorly, A would call them out to the mountain behind the school, hurl abuses like "You unpatriotic traitor!" or "Is that how a Japanese man acts?", and beat them with a bamboo sword or his fists.
A doesn't remember the faces of the students he assaulted, but he begins to suspect: could B be one of those students? Is B using his position as a caregiver to take revenge?
Sure enough, starting that very day, accidents keep happening. His wheelchair isn't locked properly, almost causing him to slide out, and foreign objects keep turning up in his meals. Because A feels a sense of guilt, and because B apologizes pathetically every time something happens, A just lets it slide.
Then, one day, while out on a walk with B, B ignores A and pushes the wheelchair aggressively up a mountain path.
"It was autumn like this back then, too. You called me out because I couldn't do a backward hip circle on the horizontal bar. No matter how much I cried and begged for forgiveness, even while I was bleeding, you kept beating me."
Now the roles are reversed: A is screaming and begging for forgiveness, while B grins maliciously to stoke his fear.
Finally, the wheelchair stops deep in the mountains, and A panics, convinced he is going to be killed right here. Summoning a burst of adrenaline, A picks up a large rock nearby and beats B down, shouting, "You unpatriotic traitor!!"
B collapses. Right before losing consciousness, he murmurs just one sentence: "I just wanted you to apologize to me..."
After that, B is forced to resign, and a new caregiver arrives. But the next man, C, is also around B's age and similarly has a disability.
"Because of corporal punishment from a teacher when I was a child, my arm still only goes up this high," he says, wearing that same servile smile that reminds A of B.
The lingering, unsettling part is that A likely has many more victims out there, and while A lived a happy life and could afford to enter a luxury nursing home, the student victims were left with disabled bodies, unable to find proper employment or get married. At the same time, it's hard to say A is entirely in the wrong, leaving you with a lingering sense of unease.
Comments (-)