Loop

by Kōji Suzuki

  The whole time his father was drinking the mineral water, Kaoru couldn't tear his gaze from it.

  "What're you looking at? Jealous?"

  "Unh-uh."

  Kaoru's reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru's eyes.

  "Look, kiddo, it's your ancestors," he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.

  "Eww," said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.

  He didn't know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.

  Sometimes Kaoru didn't know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother's sufferings.

  So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his "ancestors".

  The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd-he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.

  These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother's eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn't follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body's basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life-it wasn't too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.

  All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father's sperm was something he'd never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.

  Was I really born from something this tiny?

  He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn't existed anywhere until they'd been made within his father's body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.

  So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn't notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.

  "What are you doing, kiddo?" He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

  "Observing your… things," said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

  "What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you."

  Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

  He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

  So his parents' secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father's attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

  Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

  "What am I going to do with him?" she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pyjama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.

  4

  Kaoru's mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.

  "Sorry to get you out of bed," Hideyuki said to Machiko.

  "That's okay. I'll bet you're hungry, aren't you?"

  "A little."

  "Why don't I make something?"

  Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.

  "Have a drink first."

  Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn't like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn't mean she wasn't a drinker, though- she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.

  When he'd seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie.

  As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of him in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn't bother Hideyuki in the least.

  Kaoru's mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn't asked him, he recounted the day's events with brio, mentioning co-workers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.

  Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. "By the way, Kaoru, why don't you show your father what you showed me?"

  "Huh? What?" He'd been taken by surprise.

  "You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies."

  "Oh, those." Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he'd put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.

  "You'll be amazed at what he's discovered," his mother said, but Kaoru didn't feel it was that great a discovery.

  "What's this?" said Hideyuki, holding the print-outs up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.

  "I get it, this is a map of the earth's gravitational anomalies."

  He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn't have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn't figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.

  "Alright, you got me. What is this?"

  "The earth's longevity zones."

  "Longevity zones?" No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.

  "Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies."

  Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father's mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. "That's right!" he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.

  "I wonder why that is," Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.

  "Is this, like, common knowledge?" It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who'd been ignorant of it.

  "Well, I for one wasn't aware of it."

  "Really?"

  "So, what? Does this mean that perhaps there's some sort of relationship between people's life-spans and gravity? The data's so clear and specific, it's hard to think it's just a coincidence. By the way, kiddo, how do you define a 'longevity zone'?"

  It was only natural for Hideyuki to stick at that point. Kaoru felt the same way. How exactly should he define a longevity zone? Was it an area with lots of long-lived people in it? Perhaps an area where the average life
span was longer than in other areas? If that was what he meant, there was nothing to prevent him from seeing all of Japan as one big longevity zone.

  He had to use a more limiting definition. It would be more exact, at least, to stipulate that a longevity zone was an area clearly delineated from the surrounding territory, a high percentage of the inhabitants of which were a hundred or more years in age.

  But in reality, no such mathematical definition existed. The villages that he'd seen talked about on TV were simply places that had been found, statistically and experientially, to have lots of long-lived people in them, and they were known for it.

  "I'm not sure there is a mathematical definition."

  He found it more and more curious that the villages mentioned on TV, defined as impressionistically and sentimentally as they were, should match up so nicely with gravitational anomalies, so clearly visible as numerical values. Kaoru and Hideyuki both were impressed by this.

  "Too vague. Still, I wonder why it came out like this?" Hideyuki said this under his breath, as if bothered.

  "Have you heard anything about the relationship between gravity and life, Dad?"

  "Well, they did an experiment where they had a chicken lay eggs in a zero gravity environment, and they turned out to be unfertilized eggs."

  "I've heard about that. That was ages ago."

  Somewhere in the corner of his mind he recalled the sight of his father's sperm three months ago. He remembered reading an article about the chickens, which had laid unfertilized eggs in spite of the fact that they had copulated. He'd forgotten exactly what the experiment had been trying to prove. He'd read about it in a mass-market weekly, which had seized on the results of what was actually an old experiment in order to make some point about modern sexuality.

  His imagination started to run away with him. Suppose an egg started to undergo cellular division without fertilization, growing through birth to maturity-what kind of human being would result? Kaoru got a mental image of a woman with a smooth, egg-shaped face. He shivered. He tried to banish the image, but the woman's slippery face wouldn't leave him.

  "Well, nobody's made a logical connection yet, I don't think. But anyway, why did you think to compare gravitational anomalies and longevity?"

  "Huh?" Sometimes the images taking shape in his brain undermined Kaoru's ability to think, and he couldn't hear what was being said to him.

  "Stop making me repeat myself." Few things annoyed the impatient Hideyuki more.

  "Sorry."

  "What gave you the idea, in other words?"

  Kaoru explained how a TV special on longevity villages had been playing in the background while on the computer he'd been looking at a map of gravitational anomalies, and how he'd had a flash of intuition.

  "I think it was just a coincidence."

  "Meaningless coincidences produce nothing. Take jinxes, for instance."

  "Jinxes?"

  Kaoru actually had something of an idea why his father would bring up something unscientific like that now. He was trying to give Machiko an entry into the conversation.

  Having pretty much finished fixing snacks to go with the beer, Machiko had joined them at the dining room table, where she sat listening to the conversation without offering up a word. Not that she'd looked particularly bored, but she did lean forward just a bit when her husband mentioned jinxes.

  Her reaction didn't escape Hideyuki's notice.

  "Hey, Machi. Know of any interesting jinxes?"

  "Why ask me?"

  "You like that kind of thing, don't you? Fortune-telling, charms, stuff like that. Don't think I haven't noticed you reading the horoscopes every week. Plus, you know a lot about folk-tales from around the world."

  "Okay, jinxes. How about the one that says if you give a handkerchief to your lover as a present you'll break up?"

  "Everybody knows that one. Don't you know anything, you know, weirder?"

  Kaoru thought he could guess what kind of thing his father was looking for. He was probably trying to find an example of a belief that connected, seemingly at random, two disparate phenomena.

  "Something weirder? Okay, how about this? If you see a black cat swimming in a river, someone close to you will die."

  Kaoru immediately pursed his lips. "Really?"

  "That's what they say. You've heard it, haven't you, dear?" She looked at Hideyuki for support. But he just laughed and cocked his head.

  "Don't you have any that are just way out there?"

  "How about the one that says, when you leave the house, if a chair has its back to the window, you'll drop your wallet?"

  Hideyuki clapped his hands.

  "Okay, we'll go with that one. Now, it may be true or it may be false, but let's just take it as a given that such a superstition exists."

  "It does!" Machiko frowned.

  "Alright, alright!" Hideyuki said, putting his palms together. "Now, we have two phenomena brought together. A chair having its back to the window when you leave the house, and dropping your wallet. Scientifically, these two phenomena have no relation to each other. There are lots of superstitions in the world, and no doubt different kinds come about for different reasons. But what I find fascinating is when you have the exact same superstition existing in two distant places, isolated from each other. If this crazy superstition that Machi just told us about happened to exist in different places on the globe, it'd make you wonder, wouldn't it? Of course it would."

  "So, are there superstitions like that? That exist in different places in the world?" Kaoru looked back and forth between Machiko and Hideyuki.

  Hideyuki prompted his wife. "How about it, Machi?"

  "Of course there are. The jinx I just told you about is one. It exists in Europe and in the Americas, too."

  Kaoru and Hideyuki exchanged sceptical looks.

  "By the way, Machi, have you ever thought about why superstitions arise?"

  "No," she said, curtly.

  "What about you, kiddo?"

  "I guess it has something to do with human psychology. I'm not real sure, though."

  By this point there were five empty beer bottles sitting in front of Hideyuki. His conversational engine was finally getting warmed up.

  "Ask yourself: what is a superstition? It's an oral tradition that if you see something or experience something, a certain thing will happen. With a jinx it's something bad, but of course a superstition can involve something good, or even something that can't necessarily be categorized as good or bad. To cut to the chase, a superstition is something that connects one phenomenon with another phenomenon. Sometimes science can explain the connection. For example, the superstition that when clouds move from east to west it means it'll rain can be explained very easily by modern meteorology. There are others that you can understand intuitively, like the one that says being photographed takes years off your life. Or ones about breaking chopsticks or sandal thongs, or seeing black cats or snakes, those aren't too hard to understand. Those things are just eerie somehow. There's something about black cats and snakes that makes people the world over uneasy.

  "The problem is superstitions that aren't reasonable. The ones that strike you as totally arbitrary, like, 'Why in the world do people believe that?' The jinx Machi told us about is a good example. What could having a chair back toward the window when you leave the house possibly have to do with dropping your wallet?"

  Hideyuki stopped and looked Kaoru in the eye.

  "Maybe it's based on experience."

  "No doubt it is. Maybe people found out through experience that the chances of dropping your wallet are greater if a chair's back is to the window when you leave your house."

  "But there's no statistical necessity that it has to be that way."

  "We're not talking strict accuracy here. Let's say when you drop your wallet, it just so happens that the chair's back is to the window. And let's say that the next time you drop your wallet, the chair's back is toward the window again. So you tell someone about it, suggesting
that the two phenomena are related somehow. Now the important thing is whether or not the person you tell about it has had a similar experience-whether or not they can nod and say, 'yeah, you're right'. If the idea is dismissed by a third party, then chances are it won't be handed down. But once it becomes established as a jinx, then by the mere fact of people's being aware of it, it can influence their actions, and so it stands a good chance of surviving. Once the relationship is established between the two things, the fact that people are aware of the relationship strengthens the bond even more, see. Reality and imagination begin to correspond to one another."

  "So you're saying that the phenomenon of a chair having its back to the window when you leave the room and the phenomenon of dropping your wallet exert some kind of invisible influence on each other?"

  "You can't rule out the possibility that they're connected on some level, deep down."

  What was his father trying to say, using the superstition as an example? Kaoru had the feeling that he could substitute "life" for "superstition" and the argument would still stand up.

  "Life," Kaoru muttered. As if that word were a cue, the three exchanged glances.

  "It reminds me of the Loop."

  It was Machiko who brought up the subject. It seemed she felt it was a natural progression from the word "life".

  Hideyuki had started his college career in pre-med. He'd switched fields, to logic, in graduate school, studying the concepts of meta-mathematics, but one thing led to another and he found his old abandoned interest in the world of living things rekindled. He decided it would be interesting to see if the language of mathematics could explain life. His original interest in biology was reanimated as it found expression in numbers.

  Thus it was that when he'd finished his doctorate and received an offer to join a joint Japanese-American research project on artificial life, he'd accepted without a second thought. To create life within a computer? Hideyuki couldn't think of anything he wanted to do more.