by Kōbō Abe
She stood in front of the toilet with her back to me. Without the least hesitation, I put my arms around her shoulders and pressed up close against her, leaning my full weight on her. Her hair smelled like toasted seaweed. If not for my laughable predicament, this dramatic event might well have turned my whole life around. There was still hope, I thought. That foot might pop right out without causing any relative change in our positions. Bending my elbows, I hauled myself up vertically. The only thing to change was her position. Her shoulders tilted, she slumped forward, and my knee curved forward too, defying its construction. The pain stopped just short of unbearable. I had achieved nothing. Only the sensation of physical contact with her saved me from blind panic.
“It’s no use,” I said. “The inside of the pipe is a vacuum.”
“How long does it take to get from here to the Broom Brigade headquarters and back?” she asked.
“No more than ten minutes one way.”
“Then if they finished quickly they could be on their way back now.”
“It won’t be that easy,” I said. “They’re talking about a human corpse, after all. Man, I sure would like to be out of here before they get back.”
“They might at least call us on the radio. If they stop off somewhere for a drink, they’ll be forever. Glued to their chairs.”
“With a body stashed in the jeep?”
“That’s true; I suppose it would be too risky… .”
She went back to the stairs and seated herself on the second step from the bottom. That short move put her totally beyond my reach. So this was the cozy time alone with her that I had waited for so eagerly. I felt sick.
“When the cork in a wine bottle gets stuck, there’s the devil of a time getting it out, you know,” I said.
“Let me know if you want anything.”
“I’m okay for now.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It itches as much as it hurts. The blood must be congesting.”
After a pause, she looked up. “The inside of the pipe is a vacuum, right? Isn’t there a valve somewhere below? If you open the valve, the pressure ought to go back to normal.”
“Maybe. I’ve never actually checked it out, but I imagine it’s built to take advantage of the different levels of underground water. So the actual valve creating this suction is the water itself, and beyond that, somewhere, there must be something geared to a lever that cuts off the flow of water. Something on the order of a hydraulic turbine.”
“I’ll go take a look,” she volunteered, bounding up like a spring. Anybody can move that way when they’re light of weight. “Tell me the way.”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. As far as I can tell, there is no way to get there.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Somebody must have gone in to do the installation work. There’s got to be a way in.”
“I used to think so too, but I’ve gone over the area pretty thoroughly.”
“Maybe it’s blocked off.”
“There’s no sign of it. This is a guess, but I have an idea some other outfit tunneled underneath without permission. The competition was fierce, and the various explorations were like spiders’ webs. One cave-in after another. You want to take a look at the maps? When I lost my balance I knocked down a scrap album along with those photos—over there. Mind getting it and bringing it here?”
Reluctantly she came down the stairs. “It is funny,” she said. “It doesn’t figure. After all, the plumbing was installed below so that it could be used up here. Don’t tell me it just happened to connect up.”
Gingerly she handed me the scrapbook, as if determined to come only so close and no closer, then she hurriedly withdrew her hand. I must have been a sorry sight. She was right; a stupid bungle like this deserved not sympathy but scorn.
“Look,” I said, “here’s a map of the work hold.”
“Don’t bother. I’m not a map person. You don’t look very good. Shall I get you some medicine?”
“I guess a couple of aspirin wouldn’t hurt. You don’t mind? Remember that medicine box before—under the chaise longue? The aspirin are in a green holder.”
While she was off getting the aspirin, I flipped through the scrapbook, scanning the areas that had not yet been closely surveyed. Mine shafts lacking either ladders or lifts, and waterways very far underground, were still virtually unexplored. There was danger in exploring them, and anyway they lay on the other side of the line that would be formed when my dynamite blasts cut us off from the rest of the world. But if I ever made up my mind to go back and investigate, it was just possible that I might come on a passage leading in under the toilet. My powers of concentration were dimming. My knee began to buzz, and suddenly a spectrum of pain exploded through me, branching all the way to my armpit.
“Is one enough?” she asked.
“Make it three. People usually fix the dosage by age, but it ought to be by weight.”
“Want me to take your picture?”
“What for?”
“You look just like a human potted plant. It’s so unusual—and then you’d have something to remember it all by. If the slate really does get wiped clean, and I get a chance to start over, I’m going to give up being a woman for a living, and take up photography.”
“By then it’ll be too late. This is the age of advertising—you can make a go of it as a photographer as long as you have a knack for business; that’s all the talent you really need.”
“Don’t be mean. Say, how long do you think you can last that way?”
“Damn it, my knee is killing me. And the calf feels like it’s about to pull right off. If lack of circulation brings on gangrene, it’ll have to be amputated—same as frostbite. Even supposing I could tide along with sedatives and antibiotics, I suppose I’m good for only four or five days at the most.”
“You’ve got to be able to relieve yourself… .”
“A worse problem is sleep. I don’t know how long I can stay sane.”
“It must be torture.”
“Even though I have nothing to confess. It’s not fair.”
“Freedom to walk around really is important, isn’t it?” she reflected.
“Of course it is. People aren’t plants.”
“And yet you’re happy taking trips on paper.”
“That’s different. You talk about walking around, but you can’t fly, can you? Well, on my aerial-photograph trips, I can. So could you.”
“Looking at you is depressing,” she sighed. “With survival like this, you might as well be dead.”
“Oh, no. There’s a world of difference between being able to take a few steps and not being able to walk at all. Not being able to go to the bathroom on your own might be sad, but who cares if he can’t make it to the South Pole?”
“You can’t even take one step.”
“I’ll be okay. Nothing this idiotic can go on forever.”
“Maybe you’re right. Even a balloon starts to shrink in time… .”
“Freedom is something you have to discover for yourself. There’s freedom even here.”
“Are you a college graduate?”
“No. High school dropout.”
“Sometimes you talk like somebody with a real education. And you’ve got all those books… .”
“I like to read. I take them out of the public library. But I’m really better at working with my hands. I can fix a handbag clasp in no time.”
“If there’s anything you want to read, I could go get it for you,” she said, a half-smile playing at the corners of her mouth as if blown there by a passing breeze. She was teasing me.
“Even cancer patients who know they’re dying go on trying to live, right up to the end. All of life is just that, in fact—carrying on until you die.”
“Pardon me for saying this,” she said, “but you don’t really seem all that happy. This ark seems seaworthy enough, but even so …”
“Staying alive comes first, doesn’t it?”
“Have you ever heard about mass suicide among whales?”
“A little. Not much.”
“Well, as you may know, whales are very intelligent creatures. But all of a sudden they’ll go berserk, swim straight for the nearest shore, and beach themselves. The entire herd. They won’t go back in the water no matter how you coax them. They drown in the air.”
“Could something be after them?”
“The only thing that could scare a whale is a killer whale or a shark. But this phenomenon occurs even in waters where there are no sharks—and the killer whales commit mass suicide too. So the scientists racked their brains and came up with a very interesting theory: they say the whales try to get out of the water for fear of drowning.”
“How could that be? They’re aquatic animals.”
“But they’re not fish. They evolved from land mammals breathing air with lungs.”
“Then they’re throwbacks?”
“That’s funny—my foot’s starting to prickle. Feels like ants are nesting in it. Anyway, it’s true that if whales are unable to surface, they’ll suffocate. There could be some sort of communicable disease that would drive them to suicide by making them fear the water, like hydrophobia.”
“That may be scary for whales… .” She spoke in a low voice, rubbing the back of her neck. “If you want to know the truth, I’m more afraid of cancer. That’s a lot scarier to me than some bomb you don’t know when to expect either.”
“You’re coming down with whale disease,” I retorted—but I felt as insecure as an earthworm burrowing in the dirt. Without her support, I doubted my ability to cheer when the ark set sail.
“I have to see the sky,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve got a magic spell I say. One time, I forget when it was, as I was looking up at the sky, the air looked like some great living thing. Tree branches look just like veins and arteries, don’t they? Not only their shape; the way they change carbon dioxide into oxygen and absorb nitrogen. Always changing, metabolizing… . Changes in wind and air pressure are the flexing of the air’s muscles, and grass and tree roots are its arms and legs and fingers and toes. Animals living in them are the corpuscles and viruses and intestinal bacteria… .”
“What does that make people?”
“Parasitic worms, maybe.”
“Or maybe cancer.”
“Yes, that could be. Lately the air just hasn’t seemed itself… .”
“So what’s your magic spell?”
“ ‘Hello, air—you’re alive, aren’t you?’ ”
“Sorry, but when the bomb falls, the air will be done for too. The earth is going to be put on ice for months and months on end, wrapped in a heavy layer of dust and debris.”
“But I have to see the sky.”
I had to stop her from going. Somehow, anyhow, I had to free myself. As long as you could take even one step, life here really wasn’t so bad, I thought. The humiliation and anger of that time years ago when Inototsu had chained me to this very spot came bursting out from my tear glands like air out of a punctured tire. I ached to be free by the time the insect dealer and the shill returned. There was no need to invite them to take seats in the gallery for a hilarious sideshow.
“I wonder if you could do it,” I said. “I mean break the concrete around the pipe.”
“How?”
“With a drill. There’s one in with the hammer in my toolbox under the table. There are five or six inches from the pipe mouth to the floor, and my foot is stuck about twelve inches in. The difference is six or seven inches. So if you dug down eight inches in the floor and opened a hole in the pipe, you could let air in without risk of hurting my leg. The same principle as opening the valve below.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, the toilet would then be useless.”
“There’s some waterproof putty in the toolkit.”
“Putty’s no good. It couldn’t stand up to the pressure. We’ve got to dispose of a dead body down here, you know.”
“Well, we can’t, unless my leg comes out first.”
“If it came to a choice between your leg and the toilet, it would be better to amputate your leg.”
“Are you mad? I’m the captain here. This toilet belongs to me.”
She stretched her lips out in a line, and balanced a smile on them like a dot. She’d meant it as a joke.
“But while we sit around waiting for your leg to come out naturally, the body will start to smell. I won’t be able to bear it. I have a very sensitive nose.”
“Well, as soon as they get back, there will be all sorts of alternatives. Like setting up a scaffold for a pulley, and pulling me out with a winch.”
“How do you know the leg won’t just tear apart at the knee?”
Would the insect dealer and the shill also object to opening a hole in the pipe? I wondered. If putty was out, there was always welding. No, that wouldn’t work, either, on second thought. Once the plug of my leg was removed and the water in the pipe fell, it would refill all the way to the top, on the principle of the siphon. Water would pour out from the hole nonstop. There was a special technique for welding underwater, but I didn’t have the equipment. There had to be some other, more practical idea.
My water-bloated nerves seemed to burst through the skin and touch the pipe directly, with a savage pain like that caused by biting on an ice cube with a decayed tooth. My entire body was riddled with holes, releasing fumes of pain.
“It’s no good. My foot feels awful. I can’t stand it anymore… . I’ve got to yell.”
“Is it asleep?”
“No. Would you mind holding my hand? I have a chill. Just let me touch you somewhere, anywhere. Your tits, your ass … I don’t care.”
She sat motionless on the bottom step, her look frozen. Screams squeezed up through my body like toothpaste through a tube, and came pouring out my throat. I beat my thighs with both hands like a bird beating its wings, and went on screeching like a monkey. She covered her ears. While I howled, a thought crossed my mind: Of all the stupid things—I still haven’t found out her name!
20
THE BODY WAS WRAPPED
IN A BLUE PLASTIC SHEET
“Be quiet!” the girl screamed, stomping on the floor. It being stone, this effort was wasted, but I was tired of howling anyway, and ready to call it quits.
“Listen,” she commanded. “Isn’t that a car horn? Maybe it’s them.”
I had to admit she could be right. “Go check it out, will you?” I said. My throat burned. The reverberations of my howls lingered deep in my ears, so that my ordinary speaking voice sounded no louder than a murmur.
Crossbow in hand, the girl circled around the toilet, keeping her distance, and headed for the hatch. The vertical ladder was impossible to negotiate holding the crossbow. She stood the weapon upright at the foot of the ladder and started climbing insecurely. With every step her red artificial leather skirt peeled higher, exposing bare flesh. Her every movement injected high-pressure gas into my veins. That I could still react this way, even though my trapped foot felt now as if it weighed more than all the rest of me, seemed nothing short of incredible. Fresh anger flooded me at my clumsiness in failing to capitalize on our time alone.
She unbarred the steel door and opened it. The sound of the horn was now unmistakable. The dogs were barking for all they were worth. Their sensitive ears had probably picked up my howls through the wall, which would make them all the more excited. Signaling reassurance, she disappeared into the tunnel. Only a few minutes now and the two men would be here to rescue me. Some loss of dignity was inevitable. But now there was a good chance I could be freed at last, by whatever means. Perhaps because I had relaxed, my leg became several dozen times itchier than before. The itch was more maddening than the pain.
She came back an
d poked her head in the doorway. “What shall I do? They want you to get rid of the dogs for them.”
“I can’t. I can’t get out of here.”
“But they’re going crazy, those dogs… .”
“Hmm. Well … maybe I could try using a hand mike.” As she came down the ladder, I grew impatient at her excessive caution even as I savored the sight of her skirt rolling up.
“Look over on the side of the table by the bookcase,” I said. “You’ll find one in with the electrical parts, the soldering iron, and so on. Red, shaped like a trumpet… The microphone and speaker are detachable.”
I got her to hand me the mike and carry the speaker down to the far end of the tunnel. When she gave me the mike, I deliberately saw to it that our fingertips touched; she did not seem to mind. Was it because the shill was back—or was it all my imagination?
“What do I do?” she asked. “Just turn it on?”
“Pull the antenna all the way out and turn the volume all the way up.” I turned on the mike and pulled out its antenna. “Testing, testing, one, two, three …”
I whispered the words, but they came booming back at me in a voice as loud and bold as a foghorn. I quieted my breathing, positioned the back of my tongue up against my soft palate, and took a deep breath. There was a noise in the toilet like the sound of wet noodles hitting the floor. I felt myself slide in a fraction of an inch deeper. Or had I imagined it?