by Kōji Suzuki
“Did you know I was coming?”
Eliot reached out a huge hand to keep Kaoru from toppling over, and said, in a voice full of charity, “Yes. You were meant to come here.”
Kaoru felt hot. His fever must have come back.
“The only thing that wasn’t predicted was that record-breaking storm.”
Kaoru couldn’t even tell any longer if he was burning up or freezing. He felt feverish, but chills were running over the surface of his body. He couldn’t stay on his feet. Eliot’s words were indistinct in his ears.
He brushed Eliot’s hand away and tried to walk back to the bed under his own power. Halfway there he collapsed.
2
For the next three days Kaoru’s task was to recover his strength. This expenditure of time, Eliot finally gave him to understand, wouldn’t have been necessary had it not been for the rainstorm. Once his strength had been restored, Kaoru would be given the answers to all his questions. Until then, he was forced to recuperate in that little room, in ignorance of his real situation.
Eliot poked his head in once in a while, but mostly it was the nurse, Hana, who looked after Kaoru’s health and other needs.
Kaoru thought Hana was a cute name: in Japanese, hana means flower. He asked her if it was her real name, but her only response was laughter. “You can call me that, at any rate.” And it was easy to call her by it, once he got used to it.
Hana … It reminded him of delicate wild flowers blooming in a meadow—an image that fit the nurse to a “t”.
Once Eliot had left them alone, Kaoru would barrage her with questions. What kind of facility is this place? Who is Eliot? Is there a purpose to all this?
He delivered himself of every question that occurred to him, with an effect that must have been overwhelming, but Hana simply smiled and held her peace, shaking her head to show that no answers would be forthcoming from her.
In face and body, Hana looked like a child. She couldn’t have been more than four foot ten, and she had plump cheeks and big round eyes. If she’d worn her lustrous black hair down, sweeping back from her forehead to cover her whole back, she might have looked more grown up. As it was, she wore it tied tightly back, exposing her smooth, arcing forehead in a way that emphasized her youthfulness, obscuring her true age. The swelling of her breasts, too, was that of a half-grown girl, but he doubted she would get any bigger. Her small breasts, however, went well with her delicate Oriental features.
Kaoru was taken in by her childlike appearance, at first. He assumed that she wasn’t answering any of his questions because she herself hadn’t been let in on the truth. The innocence in her face seemed to indicate ignorance, so that even though she supplied none of the information he asked for, he felt no suspicion, no anger, tow ard her.
But Hana’s skills as a nurse turned out to be such as to belie her appearance. Kaoru could recognize a good nurse when he saw one, having virtually lived in hospitals for almost as long as he could remember. It was as though she knew how to scratch him exactly where he itched. She was perfectly efficient, with not a movement wasted.
She had him hooked up to I.V.s, taking antibiotics, and trying to get sufficient sleep.
She was fairly taciturn as she went about her work. He thought he detected in her gestures an unnecessary briskness. He wondered, although it was unfair to her, if she was trying to minimize contact with his body. She had manual dexterity in line with her competence as a nurse, but sometimes her hands seemed to hesitate when it came time to touch him. And occasionally he caught her stealing glances at him, observing him as if he were something unnatural, alien. He noticed it more as time went on.
It was two days after he first met Hana. He heard the sounds that meant she was about to enter the room, and he pretended to be asleep, leaving his eyes open just a slit. He watched her gaze at him with curiosity as she quickly changed the I.V. bottle. It was almost a morbid curiosity he saw in her eyes—she was afraid of him and intrigued by him at the same time. This in turn piqued Kaoru’s interest. What was she reacting to in him when she got that expression on her face?
She finished changing the bottle, and then bent over him, hips thrust back, observing him nervously. Surely she was convinced he was sleeping. But then why didn’t she let down her guard?
Kaoru snapped open his eyes and grabbed Hana’s arm. He hadn’t intended to startle her, but that was the effect. She tried to let out a little scream, but couldn’t find her voice. It died in the back of her throat, and all that escaped was a gasp.
“Why do you look at me like you’re seeing a ghost?” Kaoru spoke slowly and distinctly. He wanted to calm her down, first of all. Her hand, the one Kaoru wasn’t holding, was pressed to her cheek. She wasn’t putting up any resistance worth the name: she didn’t try to shake loose, didn’t turn her head away from him. She swallowed her scream and looked down at him vacantly. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, a look that was a fine complement to her childlike features.
“I want to know. Why do you look at me like that?”
She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry.” The words seemed to come from the bottom of her heart, but they didn’t answer his question. He could interpret them one of two ways. Either she was saying she was sorry for looking at him like he was a ghost, or she was apologizing for not being able to answer him. Or maybe it was both.
He let her go.
Her job was just to nurse him back to health. She’d been forbidden to open her mouth about anything else. Any explanation about the way she looked at him would necessarily involve explaining the whole situation he was in, and she couldn’t do that. As Kaoru came to understand this, he decided to quit pressing her.
She remained standing next to his bed even after he released her.
“Isn’t it difficult for you to talk?” Her sense of duty was showing through. Her first impulse was to check on her patient’s condition.
“It’s difficult for me not to talk. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Well, then, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Let’s see … How about everything, starting with your birth?”
“And what good would it do you if I told you?”
“At the very least, I probably wouldn’t look at you as if you were a ghost anymore.”
In other words, she knew nothing about him. If she knew more, maybe she’d be able to look on him as a fellow human.
“I want to know just one thing about you first,” Kaoru said.
Hana composed herself, without answering.
“If it’s not too forward of me, I’d like to know how old you are.”
Hana laughed. No doubt she’d been asked this any number of times.
“I’m thirty-one years old. I’m married and have two children. Both of them boys.”
Kaoru’s jaw dropped open in amazement. She looked no more than a girl, and yet she was telling him she was thirty-one. And a mother of two! An unexpected response, to say the least.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Everybody says that.”
“I was sure you were younger than me.” At twenty, though, he was eleven years her junior.
“How old are you?”
He told her. She furrowed her brow and in a low voice said, “Really?”
“I look older, don’t I? But I’m really twenty.”
Kaoru put a hand to his cheek. He hadn’t shaved since arriving in the desert, so he figured he might look even older than usual.
He couldn’t quite get over the shock that this woman was in fact older than him. It was bound to make him act differently with her.
Learning each other’s true ages seemed to change something between them. After that, whenever Hana looked in on him, Kaoru watched for the chance to tell her a little more about himself.
Hana was a good listener. She only came by the room a few times a day, and they only had a limited time to talk, maybe ten minutes at a time
. But she made good use of it, never getting off track, always eliciting more about Kaoru’s past life.
And Kaoru found he enjoyed talking to her, telling her things. It allowed him to make sure of himself as he was now. Of course, doubts did come to mind, but he shunted them aside and he spoke haltingly of himself.
He told her of his childhood, what he’d thought about, the kind of dreams he’d had. Bits and pieces of life with his father and mother. Their plans to go off to America together, to the desert …
There were things that were hard to talk about. Most of all, his father’s cancer: how it had dashed their travel plans, how their lives had revolved around hospitals ever since. How after several years his cancer had been identified as coming from the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, and how there was essentially no hope of him recovering. How Kaoru’s mother refused to give up, but had immersed herself in Native American legends until she found hints of a miracle cure, belief in which had allowed her to go on undaunted. How Kaoru, forced to balance his father’s illness and his mother’s headlong rush into spiritualism, had abandoned his early desire to study astrophysics for medical school.
As he spoke, Kaoru began to feel a nostalgia for it all. Over a period of four days he spoke to her for a total of two, maybe three hours. He certainly couldn’t tell her everything about his life in that amount of time; he had to cut out a lot of things. But he remembered a lot of things too. Sometimes he’d have to fight back tears, and then sometimes he’d burst out laughing as he told her about some crazy thing his father had done.
A life that could be told in a mere two or three hours—could it be real? As he talked, his more distant memories began to cloud over.
“Haven’t you ever been in love?”
Her question was perfectly timed. At that very moment Kaoru was wondering whether or not he should tell her about Reiko. He’d been leaning toward avoiding the subject, and if Hana hadn’t spoken, he very well might not have mentioned her.
Telling her about his affair with Reiko would naturally involve telling her about Ryoji. The experience still filled him with sadness, and more than that with pain. Regrets always came to mind first, shame for his ill-considered actions. He realized that the room where he and Reiko had taken their pleasure and the room he was in now were rather similar. Of course, Ryoji’s room had boasted a west-facing full-length window overlooking the green of the park and admitting the rays of the setting sun, while this room had no window at all. But that aside, in terms of size and the color of the walls, the rooms were very much alike.
No matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to communicate to Hana the carnal joy that Reiko had given him.
Kaoru confessed his feelings honestly. Now and then Hana looked at him disbelievingly, shaking her head and saying, “Oh, no,” in a commiserating tone. Then when Kaoru revealed that Reiko was carrying his child, Hana’s expression froze.
“And this child—it’s going to be born?”
A strange way to phrase the question, he thought, but he didn’t stop to worry about it.
“Of course, I want her to have it. That’s why I came here.”
Hana closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling and she seemed to be praying, although he couldn’t hear her words.
In this windowless room, the only way to gauge the passage of time was by his watch. If it was to be believed, this was the evening of the fourth day. After he finished telling her about his and Reiko’s child, Hana said, “That should do for today.” She seemed not to be permitted to do whatever she wanted with her time; she was always cutting their talks short when she found the right moment.
“I want to hear the rest tomorrow, though.” She spoke with kindness. This woman whom he’d once thought of as a child had now become a merciful mother-figure.
She placed a hand on his arm and contemplated him for a while, and then walked to the door. Once there, she stopped, glanced back at the bed, and then went out into the hallway.
The expression on her face as she looked back at him burned itself into Kaoru’s mind. He’d seen it somewhere before.
He thought about facial expressions, deciding that they usually fell into a finite set of categories. People generally made the same sort of face placed in the same sort of situation: hearing a piece of good news, for example, or jumping from a high place. He tried to figure out what category Hana’s expression belonged to.
Something came to mind immediately, something that had always stayed with him.
The situation had been almost exactly the same. A woman, dressed in white like Hana, walking out of a sickroom, turning around for a last look at the patient. A nurse.
Once, his father had been moved to a larger room, as a temporary measure. He’d just had surgery to remove the cancer from his rectum, and seemed to be making good progress. It had been a four-person room, and every bed held a cancer patient.
One of the nurses who frequented the room had been particularly popular with the patients. She was no great beauty, but she was attractive enough, and more than that she was the type of woman who just radiated goodness. She was always long-suffering toward her patients, listening to their demands with never a look of complaint. Kaoru’s father had liked her, too. He’d joke with her and touch her bottom, all for the pleasure of being admonished by her like a child.
A time came when she left the hospital, albeit temporarily. She was in her second year of marriage, and in fact was seven months pregnant. She’d put in for a year’s maternity leave.
On her last day at the hospital, she came by Kaoru’s father’s room to say goodbye. Kaoru was visiting his father at the time. She told the patients that she expected them all to be happy and smiling when she came back in a year, to which one of the patients joked, By the time you get back, honey, I’ll have checked out of this place.
Kaoru seemed to remember the other two patients, but not his father, saying similar things. It was impossible to tell how sincere the patients were being. In any case the nurse just nodded in agreement as she made the rounds of each bed to say her goodbyes.
Then, as she left the room, she turned back to glance at the patients in their beds, exactly as Hana had done just now. The look in the nurse’s eyes had not evaded Kaoru’s notice then: it had been one of certainty that there were those among the patients she would not see, could not see, when she returned in a year. And not because they’d have checked out. Her look was a wistful one of final—for this life, at least—farewell.
The patient in the bed next to Kaoru’s father had just learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. The next patient over had just lost his manhood to prostate cancer. Kaoru’s father was the only one with some vitality left. All the rest were proceeding steadily toward their dates with death.
Awareness of that had informed the nurse’s gaze. And now Kaoru had seen that same gaze directed at himself.
Why did Hana look at me like that?
It made him uneasy. He’d ask her directly if he could.
But as it turned out, Kaoru was never to see Hana again.
The next morning, at the usual time, there was a knock at the door. Kaoru opened it expecting to see Hana, but found Eliot instead, his huge feet sticking out in front of his wheelchair, his huge hands resting on the wheels.
Seeing that Kaoru was recovering smoothly, Eliot gave a satisfied nod. “How are you feeling?”
Kaoru’s endurance was at its limits: he had so many questions, and all of them had been put on hold for so long. Hana’s cuteness had helped him to bear it for a while, but facing Eliot he knew he couldn’t keep them back much longer.
How am I feeling? You’ve got to be kidding. Why am I always the one who’s got to answer questions? My physical strength is back, but at this rate I’m going to turn into a nervous wreck. How am I feeling, indeed!
He bit back his anger, but not all that effectively. His voice shook as he said, “Knock it off already.”
Eliot evidently noticed the tension in Kaoru’s v
oice. He held up his hands as if to tell Kaoru to hold on a minute, then paused. At last he spoke. “I get it. I think I understand your feelings. It’s about time we get underway with our plans.”
Plans? What plans? And what have they got to do with me?
With a hard look on his face, Kaoru began to press Eliot for answers. “First I want you to tell me where I am and what you’re up to.”
Eliot pressed his palms together.
“First I want to ask you something.”
Kaoru waited silently for him to continue.
Eliot’s voice was grave when next he spoke.
“Do you believe in God?”
3
Eliot showed him into a room with no windows. Why was this whole place sealed up like this? Kaoru disliked windowless rooms. This room was bigger than the last, though. There was a leather living-room set in the middle of it.
Eliot invited Kaoru to have a seat on the couch. Kaoru did as he was directed. Then Eliot got out of his wheelchair. He stood up, rear end thrust backward, and without using a cane hobbled over to seat himself opposite Kaoru.
Kaoru couldn’t help but stare. Since Eliot used a wheelchair, Kaoru had naturally assumed he couldn’t walk. But he could: somewhat awkwardly, but fairly steadily.
Noticing Kaoru’s surprise, Eliot flashed a triumphant grin. “You must learn to look at things without preconceptions. Trust nothing.”
But Kaoru was already quite accustomed to suspecting everything. One thing he’d learned crossing the desert was how to keep his balance as he walked the hazy line between reality and virtuality. It was the one thing he’d most wanted not to lose during that rainstorm on the ridge.
“When are you going to answer my questions?” Kaoru said sulkily, ignoring Eliot’s words. Eliot raised his hands in a gesture that seemed to say, Any time you want.
There were so many things Kaoru wanted to ask. He decided to lay aside his basic questions for the moment, and instead to start by exploring something Eliot had said earlier and which had been nagging at Kaoru ever since.