by Kōji Suzuki
Kaoru sank deeper into the bathtub. Now the water was up to his earlobes. Do I have that kind of strength?
The more he thought about it the stranger it seemed. All these events connected with the MHC virus springing from somewhere close to him, closing in on his body as if he’d been assigned to save the world.
You’re overestimating yourself.
Unable to stand the heat any longer, he got out of the tub.
Saving the world actually had a nice ring to it. He wouldn’t mind looking like a hero, playing at savior. But he had a personal matter he had to attend to first. Nothing world-class—something far more local in scale. This evening, for the first time in a week, he had a rendezvous planned with Reiko.
He wiped himself clean of perspiration and then put on a brand-new T-shirt and jeans.
He hadn’t seen Reiko since Ryoji’s funeral. Since then, she’d refused even to meet him. Finally, she’d offered to speak with him for an hour this evening. This would be his only chance. Kaoru would have only tonight to find out why Reiko had closed her heart to him.
16
Reiko’s condo was on the edge of a wooded hilltop. The building was an ostentatious one, three stories, red brick exterior.
Kaoru went around to the entrance, pressed the buttons for her room number, and waited for a response. The speaker came to life and he heard Reiko’s voice softly say, “Come in.” A moment later, the door slid open.
He’d already assumed that Reiko was financially comfortable due to the fact that she’d been able to put Ryoji in a private room at the hospital. As he walked down the carpeted hallway to the elevator, he saw his assumption borne out.
Of course, he’d never tried to find out where the money came from. He never asked, and she never volunteered the information. However, she’d hinted that her husband had been socially successful. He’d been older than her; he’d died of cancer a few years ago.
Hers was a corner apartment on the third floor. Before he could even ring the bell, the door opened. She must have been watching through the peephole, estimating his time of arrival.
It had been a week since he’d seen her. She opened the door a crack and stuck her head out. They were face to face. Her hair was combed back and held in place with an elastic band. He noticed a few strands of white.
“Come in.” Her voice seemed to recede within itself.
“Long time no see.”
She showed him into her living room, where he sat on a couch. For a while neither spoke. Kaoru felt uncomfortable. He didn’t know why she was acting so cold toward him, and not knowing that, he didn’t know what he should say or how to start.
Reiko wordlessly placed a glass of iced barley tea before him, and then sat down facing him.
“I’ve been wanting to see you.” He reached out for her, but she avoided his touch. She sank back into the sofa, maximizing the distance between them.
The same thing had happened at the funeral. Flattering himself that he was the only one who could heal the pain of losing her only son, Kaoru had tried to put his arm around Reiko’s black-clad shoulders, but she’d rejected the gesture, twisting away from him. Inexperienced with women he may have been, but even Kaoru could get the message if it was repeated enough times. But he couldn’t fathom the reason behind her persistent refusals. One day they’d been in intimate physical contact, and the next she recoiled from his touch.
Reiko hugged herself tightly, rubbing her arms with her hands as if chilly. But the air conditioning was at a reasonable level, and the room was far from cold. In fact, it was still too hot for Kaoru.
He observed her exterior, hoping to understand the pain in her heart, hoping that if she’d closed herself off to him out of anguish at losing her son, he might yet find a way to comfort her.
He wanted to say something that would give her courage, ease her heart, but the only words that came to him sounded so weak and forced, even to himself, that he was embarrassed to speak them. “Cheer up”—he couldn’t bring himself to say that if his life depended on it. And so there was no way to start a conversation.
“How long do you intend to sit there without saying anything?” She said this coolly, looking at the floor. This bothered Kaoru—she’d made it so he couldn’t say anything, and now she was reproaching him for his silence.
“Knock it off already,” he finally managed to say.
“You …”
She held her head in her hands and shuddered violently. She was crying: every now and then he could hear a sob.
“I want to relieve your sadness somehow, but I don’t know how to do that.”
Reiko groaned and looked up at him, biting her lower lip. Her eyes were red from weeping, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
“I wish I’d never met you.”
Kaoru was shocked.
“So you hate me now?”
That just can’t be, he wanted to shout. If she really hated him she wouldn’t have consented to meet him. She could have spared herself this awkward scene simply by continuing to ignore his phone calls. And yet she hadn’t: she’d set up this tête-à-tête, albeit on the condition that it last only an hour. There had to be something she wanted to talk to him about, some legitimate reason for meeting him.
“He knew.” Her voice was suddenly, unexpectedly calm.
“What?”
“About you and me.”
“That we’re in love?”
“In love? So that’s what being in love looks like?” A self-mocking smile appeared on her face.
Kaoru sat bolt upright, startled. What being in love looks like?
“What did he know?”
“What you and I were doing in that room.”
She couldn’t go on. Kaoru swallowed and said, “He couldn’t have known.”
“He was a sharp boy. He picked up on it. We were so stupid. How could we … how could we do something like that?” Her heart was starting to crumble.
“But …”
“He wrote it in his note.”
“Huh?”
“What do you think he wrote?”
Kaoru swallowed again, bracing himself.
Reiko imitated her son’s voice. “‘I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out.’”
Oh, no.
Kaoru thought of Ryoji in his swim cap, smiling, standing by the side of the pool in his baggy trunks, repeating the words over and over. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out.
They’d taken every precaution. They’d only been together when Ryoji was gone for two-hour tests. Even then, the act itself had been over in less than ten minutes. After it had been accomplished, they’d spent the rest of the time on the edge of tears, eyeing each other with lethargy or regret. Kaoru would sometimes kiss away Reiko’s tears and whisper, “I love you.”
Reiko rocked back and forth as if having a seizure, as if reading Ryoji’s suicide note had stolen her reason.
Kaoru let her weep for a while. There was nothing else he could do. She’d calm down eventually, once she’d cried herself out.
He tried to imagine things from Ryoji’s perspective. His mother had seized on the occasions of his tests, moments when he’d been in the worst pain, to abandon herself to pleasure. To Ryoji it must have amounted to betrayal. His mother was supposed to be fighting this illness side by side with him, but instead, she’d sent him off to fight it alone while she got her kicks. No wonder he felt disillusioned. No wonder he’d lost the will to fight. Kaoru had assumed that Ryoji’s suicide had been a form of surrender to the illness, but the reality turned out to be something else again.
Up to now, Kaoru had grieved relatively little over Ryoji’s death, knowing that the poor kid was destined to die soon anyway. His time would come soon enough, so if he wanted to shorten its remaining length himself, maybe it was better that way. Kaoru had almost felt relief.
But if Ryoji’s mother’s actions had
triggered his suicide … Ryoji’s thinking suddenly seemed a little more complicated than Kaoru had imagined.
No doubt Reiko felt the same. She’d paid extra for a private room, she’d hired a tutor on the assumption that her son would return to school someday, and she’d generally tried to show an enthusiasm for life. When you know somebody’s going to die, love is letting that person see that you’re willing to fight right by his side. She’d wanted to show Ryoji that she would stick by him until the very last moment, but instead she’d simply sped him on his way.
No wonder Ryoji had despaired. And now Reiko was wracked with remorse for having driven her son to that despair, to his death. She’d turned the brunt of her rage on Kaoru, her partner in crime. Kaoru finally understood why she’d fled when he’d tried to put his arm around her at the funeral. Standing in front of Ryoji’s memorial tablet, she didn’t want to be seen touching him even for an instant.
What Kaoru needed was time to think. He was still young—he didn’t know how to deal with something like this. It would’ve been easier if he’d wanted to end their relationship. But he had no intention of doing that. He desperately wanted to find some way to fix things, to overcome this seemingly hopeless situation.
“Can you give me some time?” He decided to be honest with his feelings. He wanted to wait a while, then consider rationally what they should do.
“No.” She shook her head violently.
“But I don’t know what to do.”
“Neither do I. That’s why …”
Therein lay his salvation. She hadn’t called him here today to put an end to their relationship once and for all. She was admitting that she herself was lost, that she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t make this decision alone.
He’d promised only to stay for an hour, but outside the window the autumn sunset was already upon them. It had been the rainy season, early summer, when he’d come to know Reiko. They’d only been together for three months. It felt longer to Kaoru.
The majority of their time together that evening was spent in silence. Sometimes the gaps when they couldn’t think of what to say lasted ten minutes or more. But still, Reiko never told him to go home. Kaoru thought he sensed something unnatural in her attitude. Several times she’d be on the verge of saying something, only to bite the words back.
“Reiko, you’re hiding something from me, aren’t you?”
This made up her mind for her, and she looked up at him. Her expression challenged him.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
It took him a few seconds to process what she was saying.
“You’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
Their eyes met, and he knew she was telling the truth.
The shock ran up and down his backbone. He simply couldn’t grasp this. Death and birth had been almost literally bumping elbows in that little hospital room. The world’s cruel irony rankled him. He felt the presence of an ill will invisible to the eye.
“I see.”
He heaved a deep sigh.
“What do you think I should do?” Reiko asked.
“I want you to have it.”
Saying this, Kaoru leaned forward. He hadn’t just been playing when he started this relationship. If there was a child on the way, then he was prepared to raise it—he wanted them to live together.
“What are you saying?!”
Reiko took a newspaper from the magazine rack by the couch and threw it at him. It was this morning’s edition.
He knew what she was trying to tell him without even looking at it. He’d read the article this morning.
The article accompanied a photograph of a stand of desert trees in Arizona, in America. The trees had been discovered by chance along US Highway 180 between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. According to the article, most of the plants, short trees and shrubs growing low to the brown earth were covered from their trunks to the tips of their leaves with strangely-shaped swellings. Of course there are relatively common plant viruses that cause unnatural growth or withering, but these specimens suggested a viral infection on a scale never before seen. The very shapes of the trunks, branches, and leaves had been altered. All signs pointed to the work of a virus. In fact, some were theorizing that the culprit was a mutated version of the MHC virus. Not content to ravage the globe’s human population, it seemed that the virus had extended its reach to encompass not only animals but even plants. The sight of these grotesque trees seemed to signal the end of the world. A gloomy article, ending on a doomsday note.
Reiko was a carrier; she just hadn’t gotten sick yet. The probability was high that the child within her would be born infected with the cancer virus, too. And if that child were to be born into a world in which the cancer threatened every living thing …
It was all too easy for Kaoru to say that he wanted her to have the baby. She lashed out at him.
“You tell me, where in this world is there any room for hope?”
In the Loop, the ring virus had come in the end to have sway over every life-form pattern, hounding them all to extinction. Kaoru was beginning to know how that felt.
It’s starting. Reality is coming to take after the Loop.
“Just give me some time, okay?”
He was forced to beg. He couldn’t come to any conclusions right now.
“Will a way open for us if we put off deciding? I’m sick and tired of this. Disgusted. I don’t want to have an abortion. Can’t you see that? It’s like this child has come to take the place of the one I lost. Of course I want to have it, to raise and protect it. But I just can’t, not when I think that this child might meet the same fate. To be born into the world only to suffer, to die so young … Help me, please. I don’t know what to do anymore!”
He wanted to sit next to her, to let her whisper her pleas into his ear; he wanted to hold her and deliver her from her confusion. But he was afraid it was too soon for that. He fought down the urge.
“So you’re not considering an abortion?” He pressed the point, and she slowly shook her head.
“I don’t have the strength for that, even.”
So she didn’t mean to abort the child; still, that didn’t necessarily mean she was determined to have it.
Kaoru searched as much of her soul as he could perceive from her eyes, and he thought he caught a glimpse of a decision. She wouldn’t abort it, but neither would she give birth to it. Which must mean … was she on the verge of choosing suicide?
Kaoru had one wish now. He wanted Reiko to go on living. In order to ensure that, he had to somehow prove to her that the world was worth living in, both for her and her unborn child. And not just for them, either: he had to learn the value of life for himself. How could he convince anybody else that life was worth living if he himself was willing to abandon the world to cancerization, to loss of genetic diversity, to doom?
I’ve got to prove it to her so that she can’t possibly deny it.
There was only one way: he had to change the course of the world.
How much time would it take? Two, three months? If he hadn’t settled things by the time Reiko’s belly started to swell, there was every chance she’d choose death. Three months was about all the time he had, then: her nerves wouldn’t let her hold out any longer.
“Give me three months. Please. I’m asking you to trust me.”
“Three months?!” She gave a feeble scream. “I can’t. Something’s going to happen to my body, I know it.”
“Two months, then.”
She stared at him resentfully.
“I can’t promise anything,” she said at last.
“You have to promise me. For the next two months you can’t kill yourself, no matter what happens.”
Kaoru placed both hands on the table and leaned toward her. Overwhelmed by his sudden intensity, she recoiled at first, but then a look of relief, of eerie lucidity, came over her. Her indecision seemed about to give way, in one direction or the other. If she could just settle on a
direction for now, her suffering would be lessened, at least a bit.
He felt it best to distance himself from her for now, if only to redeem himself from the dishonor of being physically denied. Two months would be about right.
“Two months,” she murmured.
“That’s right. Let’s meet again two months from now. Until then, you have to keep living, no matter what.”
“Just stay alive?”
“As long as your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep breathing, and you think of me once in a while, that’s enough for me.”
She showed him a faint smile.
“I don’t know about that last part.”
It was the first flash of brightness she’d shown that day. It reassured him.
He needed her to trust him unquestioningly. If she started to inquire—if she asked him, for example, whether or not he was confident in what he was about to do, he wouldn’t have satisfactory answers to give her. He felt he had several clues in hand. The unexplained fact that the number of bases in each gene of the virus came out to equal 2n x 3. The fact—only a hunch, actually—that the virus had emerged someplace in the vicinity of Kaoru himself. If he could discover the secrets of its creation, maybe that would lead him to the means of its destruction. He had two months. He’d have to face this situation burdened with the knowledge that Reiko’s fate, and his, depended on it.
17
In the elevator, on the way up to the twenty-ninth floor, Kaoru’s ears began to ring. The elevator was designed to be unaffected by the change in air pressure, but today he felt a pressure on his inner ear that he’d never felt before. Simultaneously, an afterimage flickered before him.
The sound of Ryoji’s bones cracking as his body hit the concrete still lingered in Kaoru’s ears. He hadn’t actually seen the boy falling; his impression was that he’d heard the body’s impact as he himself was running to the window. It was nothing more than that, just an impression, but still the memory of the sound refused to fade away. Now, as the elevator climbed, something had triggered that memory, reviving images Kaoru had never actually seen.