*
The following day was hot, and the day after that. And as the sun moved, so did Saito, following the moving shadow of the bridge above as best she could and eking out her available water till she felt the first effects of disease, in her case bleeding from the nose and gums.
That same night, while she still had the strength, she scrambled down to the base of the gully, badly scratching her hands to slow herself, and filled her bottle from the weak trickle of water still flowing through it. The Arroyo Seco was well named: hardly a drop. There was always the risk of infection from a tepid source like this, but that didn’t matter now: the flu would get her first.
She lost her footing several times on the way back up the incline to her belongings, her boots slipping on loose stones and pebbles she couldn’t see in the dark. When she finally made it, she sat down heavily on her mat and rested for a moment before preparing her last moves. They would be aesthetically pleasing, her body making an eloquent statement even in death.
She pulled a white kimono from her bag and replaced it with the skirt and top she took off, removing her letter from it before zipping up. So Hawking was alarmed about the end result of human aggression on the planet. Well, he had a point. But Saito did too when she enquired of the learnéd professor whether he really wanted to visit humanity’s virulent malevolence on planets as yet uncontaminated by it. Surely we had done enough damage to Planet Earth as it was. Who in his right mind would want to visit such a fate on other destinations as well?
She would lie face upwards, her face to the world she hoped to change. She slipped the letter into her kimono, a corner sticking out to ensure it would be noticed by whoever found her, as found she would be, the white of her funeral garment standing out from her surroundings even in the bright light of day.
Saito had no fear of death, but she had no wish to die with a dry mouth either and kept her water bottle by her side. She knew that death, being unpredictable, might toy with her, making her wait for several hours or days. Even so, in her final fever, when she heard the tinkle of an incoming message, she wove it into a waking dream where, along with birdsong, it became the sound of the healing wind chime hanging from a hook at her parents’ home.
The Ears of a Cat Page 29