by Kōji Suzuki
This last point piqued Reiko’s interest, and, still leaning against the glass, she turned to face Kaoru.
“What kind of relationship?”
“I’m not entirely sure yet, but the statistics show certain peculiarities that can’t be ignored.”
Kaoru warmed up to his explanation, as he could see that Reiko had pricked up her ears.
“It was not just coincidence that led me that night into associating gravitational anomalies with longevity. I had a flash of intuition. Most scientific discoveries are the result of intuition. Inspiration comes first, then reason. It might not be far off to think that I was responding to some kind of suggestion that night.
“When my father’s cancer spread to his liver, I started researching longevity zones worldwide. It wasn’t just my imagination. It’s been confirmed: there are spots on the globe where people live longer. I analyzed all kinds of data. If they had something in common, I was going to find it.
“I finally narrowed it down to four particularly well-known longevity zones: Abkhazia, an area of the Caucasus on the shores of the Black Sea; Vilcabamba, a sacred valley on the border between Peru and Ecuador; Hunza, a mountainous region surrounded by the Karakoram Mountains and the Hindukush and cut off from the surrounding area; and Sanaru Island, in the Samejima archipelago of Japan. I wasn’t able to visit these places myself to investigate, so I read everything I could get my hands on that related to them, and compiled my own statistics. When I did that, one thing stood out. It’s a bit too early for me to make a definitive judgment, but it would seem that these places have not seen a single death from cancer. Doctors and biologists from around the world have investigated longevity zones, and they’ve left countless reports. None of them record deaths from cancer.
“The reports all agree in pointing to diet as a possible cause for this low cancer rate. But this is nothing more than a guess, seeing as how we haven’t yet fully explained the mechanism that produces cancer. There’s no denying that people in these areas live on a simple diet consisting mainly of vegetables and grains, but data suggests that their consumption of tobacco and alcohol may even be higher than other areas. At the very least, we aren’t able to say that their exposure to carcinogens is lower than normal.
“All of this makes me wonder. Why is it that these longevity zones have so few people suffering from cancer? And then … Listen to this. Cancer cells have the ability to make normal cells immortal. Is that somehow related? And how are we to account for the fact that these longevity zones match up perfectly with areas of unusually low gravity?
“There’s got to be a satisfying explanation, but I haven’t been able to come up with it yet.”
Kaoru paused for breath. His excitement had risen to a peculiar pitch as he talked.
Reiko was silent for a time, looking at Kaoru. Then she licked her lips and spoke.
“This MHC virus that’s suddenly everywhere—where did it come from?”
Her question struck Kaoru as beside the point.
“Why ask me?”
Reiko’s eyes were open wide and her expression was serious: she evidently really wanted an answer. At that moment Kaoru found her unbearably adorable. He forgot all about the fact that she was ten years older than he; he wanted to place his hands gently on her cheeks and draw her to him.
“Don’t laugh. It’s just that I wondered, for a second, if the MHC virus might just possibly have come from one of these longevity zones of yours.”
Kaoru could guess at her train of thought. He’d read a novel once about someone whose entire body had been overrun by cancer; only, instead of dying, the cancer had made him immortal.
Maybe people in those areas have learned to coexist with cancer, and that’s why they live so long. Most likely Reiko’s imagination had moved along those lines. Maybe it’s not that those areas are free of cancer. Maybe they’re full of it, in fact. Maybe it’s just that nobody dies from it. Maybe the cancer virus started there …
“Maybe a virus somehow picked up these people’s cancer chromosome and the result escaped into the world as the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s all much too difficult for me to understand, I’m sure. It was just a thought. Forget about it.”
Reiko turned her gaze to the world below. Over the last few minutes the sky had changed color dramatically, and that change was reflected even more vividly in Reiko’s expression. Deep shadows pooled in the hollows of her eye sockets. The darker it got outside, the more the window began to function as a mirror. Against the backdrop of skyscrapers Kaoru saw Reiko’s face reflected in the glass as if it was floating disembodied in the darkness.
“Metastatic cancer victims are especially numerous in Japan and America.”
It was true: the geographical distribution of the victims showed marked variation. Japan and America each had roughly a million patients with the disease, and the advanced nations of Europe had several hundred thousand, while remote areas of the type where the longevity zones were located had hardly reported any cases at all. Kaoru was trying to imply that her hypothesis had holes.
“What about the desert area you mentioned, in North America? It has abnormally low gravity, so it wouldn’t be surprising if people there lived longer, would it?”
“It’s just a guess.”
“So you have no proof.”
“I suppose you could say all this has just been a game for me.”
The word seemed to come as a shock to Reiko: she became visibly discouraged. “Oh.” Now her discouragement turned into a frown; she made as if to turn away from Kaoru.
“What’s wrong?”
Kaoru was a bit taken aback by this sudden change in her.
“I was hoping for a miracle. It’s all we have left,” she said, still looking away.
A miracle, Kaoru thought in disgust. Reiko was about to fall into the same trap as his mother.
“I think you’d better stop hoping for a miracle.”
“I won’t stop.”
“You have other things you need to be doing.”
He wanted Reiko to keep her wits about her. But she wasn’t listening to him now.
“I was just thinking, maybe all the inhabitants of those longevity zones get viral cancer at some point. But before the cancer cells incapacitate their internal organs, some factor turns their cells immortal, and the cancer becomes benign. Its bad side disappears, and the cancer is able to coexist with human beings. Their cells are able to undergo mitosis more times, with the result that they live longer. How’s that for a theory?”
He’d never seen Reiko go on like this before. She wasn’t making reason the arbiter of truth and falsehood anymore: she was judging subjectively, based on how much hope the result would allow her. You could find two or three pieces of evidence to support any hypothesis if you allowed your judgment to be swayed by your desire for a particular result, Kaoru knew. This wasn’t going to help her son. He understood the desire to cling to a god. But how was he to deal with her clinging to what she knew was nothing more than idle speculation? It might make for good fiction, but Kaoru didn’t have time to take such fancies seriously if he wanted to make it as a doctor.
For her part, Reiko was prepared to believe in her imagined world with all her might. Kaoru knew he’d sown the seeds for this. He wished he’d never mentioned any of it.
“Please, just forget everything I told you.”
“No way. I can’t. That place you were trying to get to has something, some factor that can eliminate cancer’s negative properties, that can change it from something malignant to something benign.”
Kaoru held up his hands as if to calm her down, but to no avail. She was more enthused than he’d ever seen her.
“I think you need to go there after all—you need to get your hands on whatever it is that can turn death into life.”
“Now hold on a minute.”
Her face was close to his now, and she’d grabbed hold of his hand.
“Please!” The soft touch of her hand reinforced the message.
“I’m tired of living like this. Ryoji’s going to start his fourth round of chemotherapy soon.”
“I’m sure that’s tough on you.”
“I’d go with you if I could.”
In that moment, what had started out as a family trip suddenly turned into something different. Imagining a journey to the North American desert alone with Reiko made Kaoru feel hot inside. That low-gravity point at the Four Corners area—it felt like a deep crevice, a vortex, sucking everything in. He was being pulled in by low gravity … No, at this moment Kaoru was being pulled in by this pair of eyes right in front of him.
She wore no makeup except for a very little lipstick, and she gave off a perfume that seemed to be the natural scent of her skin. Kaoru and Reiko were enveloped in the shadows where the fluorescent lights of the hallway were blocked by a large pillar. The window was now a perfect mirror, reflecting the occasional passerby in the corridor.
Before he knew what was happening, Kaoru was returning her grip on his hands. Hand toyed with hand, fingers intertwined with fingers, and eyes checked each other’s intentions.
The last sound of footsteps disappeared from the hallway, and as if they’d been gauging the moment when silence would grace them, they drew each other close in an embrace. They seized the moment when the seventeenth-floor corridor was empty.
Arms encircled backs in embrace, body communicated to body the pulsating of blood vessels. The individual rhythms of their blood synchronized, cells were stimulated through thin cloth layers. Kaoru became erect, his swelling pressing against Reiko’s midriff.
Kaoru needed her lips, so he pulled his head back and tried to turn her face up towards his; Reiko didn’t respond, but only dug her fingers deeper into his back. She pressed her forehead into his jaw and forced his head sideways—she seemed to be actively rejecting his kiss. After several tries and several rebuffs, Kaoru finally understood.
She’s infected too.
The MHC virus was known to have been transmitted via saliva. Reiko must be rejecting him out of fear for his safety. He began to understand her unexplained course of action that evening. Earlier, when Ryoji had said, “I never wanted to be born in the first place,” she’d left the room without a word. Maybe Ryoji had been infected while still in his mother’s womb. He’d finally let these recriminating words escape, and she’d found she couldn’t bear to remain.
However, the fear of infection did nothing to cool Kaoru’s ardor. He gently parted his body from hers, cradled her cheeks in his hands, pleaded to her with his eyes that he’d understood the situation, and then placed his lips on hers in a way that brooked no refusal.
This time, Reiko didn’t even try to reject him.
He placed one hand on the back of her neck, the other on her bottom, and pulled her toward him. Such was the force of their coming together that their teeth collided softly, with a lascivious sound composed equally of the softness of lips, the hardness of teeth, and saliva.
They pressed their mouths together until they’d sucked out all their breath and could no longer sustain the intensity. Then their lips parted and they touched cheek to cheek, listening to each other’s tortuous gasps. Reiko stretched up to her full height so she could bring her lips close to Kaoru’s ear.
“Please,” she said, between ragged breaths.
He couldn’t tell if the vibrations at his ear were gasps or sobs.
Reiko wanted to save not only her son, but herself.
“Please … help.”
“I’m not God.”
It was all Kaoru could do to say that much. The only thing he understood clearly at this moment, with his organ engorged with blood and his mind not behaving rationally, was that he had taken his own first steps into Death’s territory. He felt no confusion, no regret over having obeyed his body’s commands and held Reiko and kissed her. He felt that no matter how many chances he had to live this moment over, he would always make the same choices. Reiko’s body emanated a power that could not be opposed.
“Please. I know you’ll go there.”
Now even Reiko was spurring him on to visit the low-gravity zone. The fiction whose seed he himself had planted, to which Reiko had given form, was now taking root within Kaoru.
8
As Kaoru entered his father’s hospital room, he found Professor Saiki just getting up from the chair by his father’s bed.
“Hey,” Saiki said on seeing Kaoru. He raised a hand and made as if to leave the room.
“That’s alright, stay a while.” If he was leaving because he felt bad about disrupting Kaoru’s visit with his father, then Kaoru felt a duty to press him to stay.
“I can’t. As you know, I’m quite busy.” And it didn’t seem like mere politeness: Saiki was twitching as if he did indeed have pressing business.
“Oh. Well, then.”
“That’s right. I just popped in by special request,” Saiki said, glancing at Hideyuki. Then he raised his hand again, said, “Later, then,” and left. Kaoru watched him walk away, then went to his father’s side.
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
Kaoru gazed down at his father for a moment, studying his color and the set of his jaw, before taking Saiki’s place in the chair.
“Annoyed,” Hideyuki said in a monotone, eyes raised to the ceiling.
“What happened?”
“Saiki. He brings nothing but bad news.”
Saiki was an old classmate from med school, but as he’d elected to go into research rather than clinical medicine, he wasn’t directly involved in Hideyuki’s case. Which made Kaoru wonder all the more what sort of bad news he could have been bringing.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know Masato Nakamura?”
Hideyuki’s voice was hoarse.
“One of your friends, right?”
Kaoru recognized the name Nakamura. He’d been a coworker of Hideyuki’s on the Loop project; Kaoru believed he was currently a professor in the engineering department of a provincial university.
“He’s dead,” said Hideyuki, curtly.
“Really?”
“He had the same illness as me.”
Kaoru had heard people say that when someone your own age dies it invariably comes as a shock, making you feel it might be your turn next.
“You’re still alright, Dad.”
Kaoru couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound commonplace. Hideyuki slowly shook his head where he lay, as if to say that meaningless words of encouragement wouldn’t do him any good.
“Do you know Komatsuzaki?”
“No.” Kaoru had never heard this name.
“He joined the Loop project after me.”
“Oh?”
“He’s dead, too.”
Kaoru swallowed hard. Death’s shadow was creeping ever closer to his father.
Hideyuki proceeded to list three more names, summing up with a simple “They’re all dead.”
“Doesn’t it make you wonder what’s going on?” he continued. “All those names I mentioned belonged to people I worked with on the artificial life project, or who were at least connected with it in some way.”
“And all of them died from MHC?”
“How many people in Japan have been infected with this virus?”
“About a million, maybe?” That included people like Reiko and Kaoru’s mother who had been infected but hadn’t yet gotten sick.
“That’s a whole lot, but it’s still no more than one percent of the population. Whereas, me, I don’t know anybody who’s not infected.”
Hideyuki cast a sharp glance at Kaoru; at first he seemed to be searching Kaoru’s soul, but then his expression relaxed into one of prayer.
“You’re okay, right?”
Hideyuki brought a hand out from under his sheet and touched Kaoru’s knee through his jeans. No doubt he wanted to hold his son’s hand, but was afraid of skin-on-skin cont
act. With his wife already infected, all it would take to rob Hideyuki of the will to fight the cancer would be knowing that Kaoru had contracted the virus too.
Kaoru averted his eyes from his father’s weakening gaze.
“Were there any problems with the test results?”
Kaoru felt like his father could look right through him, but he forced himself to speak through his fear. “I told you there’s nothing to worry about.” True, two months ago his test results had been negative, but there was no telling what next month’s test would reveal.
Kaoru turned away, pretending to be reacting to the sound of footsteps in the corridor. He flashed back to the scene in Ryoji’s room yesterday afternoon; the mental images brought with them stirrings of the blood and of the flesh, resurrecting the sensory fluctuations that had rocked his body.
The evening before last, he’d been forced to limit his contact with Reiko to kissing. They’d been in a hallway, and they’d only been vouchsafed a few minutes. Considering they were in a hospital, it was about as much as they had any right to hope for.
The next afternoon—yesterday—he’d gone back to Ryoji’s sickroom to retrieve the pathology textbook he’d left there, and he arrived just after Ryoji had been taken off to Radiology for some tests. Kaoru hadn’t known it was time for his tests; Reiko hadn’t told him. But to all appearances it looked as if he’d timed his visit to coincide with the boy’s absence.
He knocked softly, and immediately Reiko opened the door, but just a crack. Her face was wet and she was holding a towel—she must have been washing her face when he knocked. There was a sink next to the door, and the ten-watt fluorescent bulb above it was lit. She’d been taking off her makeup there, rather than in the bathroom.
Patting her face with the towel, she spoke in a quiet, controlled voice.
“You forgot something yesterday.”
“Sorry, I should have called first.” Kaoru lowered his voice in response. There was no sign of Ryoji.
“Come in.”
She took his hand and guided him into the room, then shut the door. They stood in front of the sink, in front of the mirror, facing each other. She finished wiping her face. She was letting Kaoru see her features unadorned by cosmetics. There were crows’ feet around her eyes, appropriate to her age, but they only made her look more attractive to him.