by Otaro Maijo
In the two terrifying seconds before my life ended, I knew with complete certainty that Maki and her shattered nose would follow me into the next life and spend eternity devising the proper punishment for my crime.
But what was the appropriate punishment for destroying an absolutely perfect nose—a nose a model would kill to have?
Would I get to pick it myself?
4
A lot of other stuff happened, and when it was all over, and night had come and I was in bed, curled up there in the dark, I suddenly realized that someone was standing at the foot of my bed—Sano! But not exactly. A pale, white Sano face was floating silently above me, bending low, reaching out for my bare feet. He took hold of my left ankle with an iron grip, but his hand was icy cold, and I realized he must be dead. I wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t. What was he doing? But almost as soon as this question occurred to me, I realized he was pulling a single white thread from the arch of my left foot, a thick piece of cotton thread that somehow seemed to be coming from my body. It seemed to come from somewhere inside my chest, through my body, to my left foot. And Sano seemed to be pulling it out of me, monyomonyomonyosui! It felt as though the thread were wound around my guts, and as he pulled, my insides dissolved into mush. First my stomach. My belly seemed to be getting hot and slowly melting. As my lungs unraveled and shrank, my breathing grew shallow. My organs seemed to be dissolving one after the other, and my body shriveled wherever one disappeared. Then I realized my heart was melting, and I panicked. Sano’s blank face made me feel sick with fear. I wanted to tell him to stop, to get out of my room, but my body had gone limp. Then the thread began to empty out my neck, and I couldn’t even turn to look at him. I lay on my back, staring up at the dark ceiling. I would die. Sano would empty me and I would die. My body would unravel into a single strand, and I would die. A single, long, white thread.
What would become of me? I had no idea.
I had no idea, but I was suddenly really sad and I began to cry. I wanted to be able to cry for just a moment before I became a thread. My tears would wet the thread. They would be absorbed by the thick cotton, and that would at least feel good.
The unraveling continued, climbing from my neck to my brain, which was slowly turning to thread. Soon I wouldn’t be able to think—so what should be my last thought?
Of course! A memory. Of someone I loved.
Yoji Kaneda.
I thought about Yoji’s face. When my brain was nothing but a white thread, it would probably fall to the earth in a shape that matched Yoji’s profile.
But, hold on a minute…
Wait!
What?
What did he look like?
No! It couldn’t be!
I really couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Shit no! I couldn’t remember at all.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Nope. I was going to become nothing but thread, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember.
Had every bit of Yoji, every memory, turned to thread?
No, really?
I wanted to see his face one more time.
Yoji!
Pitch black, and I’m still having this nightmare—nothing but the sound of the thread unraveling in my head, and the feeling that it’s being reeled in through the sole of my foot. But when I open my eyes it’s already morning…or later…The light coming in through the crack in the curtains looks suspiciously bright.
Definitely one of the worst five nightmares of all time.
The top of the list, though, the worst one of all time, I was at this funeral with all these people sitting around me, and I realized it was my brother’s funeral. But just as that was sinking in, the guy who had killed him showed up and started attacking all the mourners. I ran off at top speed, but he ran after me. He was catching up with me when I suddenly noticed Miyuki, the little girl who lives next door—she really does, in real life—so I shoved her toward him. When I turned around again, she was all bloody and screaming hysterically, but I kept on running…
That was one creepy nightmare. And even though it was only a dream, I still feel guilty whenever I see Miyuki walking by on her way to school. In the dream I knew exactly what I was doing: I was sacrificing Miyuki to that monster to save my own skin.
I guess I’m just a cruel bitch. Scratch away the surface and you get someone who’d throw her own sister or the little girl next door under the train to save herself.
I lay on my bed and twisted my left foot around so I could see the arch. No thread. Duh. But I was still relieved. There was something too creepy about the idea of becoming just a long piece of string. Spine-tingling, as they say.
I felt exhausted and decided to stay in bed for a while. So as I lay there, I tried to remember Yoji’s face. Bingo! I could see him there in front of the nurse’s office after he’d rescued me from the bathroom, worrying about my bloody knee. I remembered!
But why was that?
How could I remember something when I was awake that I couldn’t recall when I was asleep?
It was all the same brain, but it seemed like a completely different organ when I was sleeping. Maybe it was. Could your brain be one way when you’re awake and then become totally another when you’re sleeping?
Or maybe there were two brains.
One for when you were awake, and another for when you were asleep?
No, that’s too weird.
Your brain—my brain—is probably just a little fuzzy when you’re asleep, so it can do some really weird things but forget how to do the simple, obvious tasks. It can imagine you being stretched out into a really long string, but it can’t remember the face of the boy you like. Love. Which really sucks.
Maybe what I need to do is carve Yoji’s face deeper into my brain so that a little thing like falling asleep won’t make me forget him again. What if sometime something really terrible happens and I’m just about to lose consciousness, or even dying or something, and what if, just as I’m blacking out, I can’t remember how he looks?
I need to be able to remember Yoji easily and quickly.
But how?
Well, you might start by seeing him again, Aiko.
You’ve got a point, Kerstin.
So I grabbed my phone from the table by the bed and checked the time. Ten minutes after noon. Lunchtime. Flat on my stomach, cheek on my pillow, I jot off a text.
Good morning! Just woke up. Eating lunch? Want to skip class and go somewhere? Go where? He’d want to know. “To find out about Sano or something.” Then he’d probably ask how we’d do that. “I’m not sure how, but there must be something we can do. Anyway, we should meet.”
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t refuse. He was a good guy. Sano was an asshole, but Yoji was always nice, even to him. So if there was any way he could manage it, he would try to help. He almost never skipped class, but he would probably even do that if I asked him. Come to think of it, he must have been skipping yesterday when he rescued me. I remember once, in the middle of some class, he stuck his hand up and said he felt dizzy. He ran out of the room and never came back. He’s a serious guy, but he knows how to handle himself when he’s got more important things to do.
I added to the text: I have an idea about what happened to Sano.
And it was true, I did have an idea—sort of. I wondered how much this would interest Yoji.
Akihiko Sano had stayed another half hour after I left the hotel. Then he’d gone downstairs, stopped at the front desk to pay the bill, and had vanished. Nobody knew where he’d gone after that, but he never got home—that much was certain. Though we did know what had happened to his toe. At some point during the night, a package had been left at his house. His mother discovered it early the next morning, and when
she opened it, she found the little toe from his right foot covered in plastic wrap and sealed in a baggie. And a note demanding ten million yen in ransom if they ever wanted to see their son alive again.
That’s what I learned from the detective who came by to ask me about going to the love hotel with Sano that night.
Then I realized there was something familiar about all this, about sending a toe to a victim’s house. I’d seen it before. But where? A movie. One with that gross guy in it, and with that other even grosser guy. And something about bowling, and a man in some kind of purple outfit dancing around in slow motion after he gets a strike. What was it?—directed by the something-or-other brothers. A rich old guy’s wife gets kidnapped and they send her toe to the husband. And then the bowling, and then somehow bowling and kidnapping get all mixed up. What was it called?
Oh! And Buscemi was in it too! Steve Buscemi! I’ve been a huge Buscemi fan ever since Con Air—something about that long, lanky frame and those big round eyes, that loose mouth, he just gets to me. Buscemi, Buscemi.
The Coen Brothers.
That’s it! The Hudsucker Proxy!
No, that wasn’t it. I checked the old movie programs on my bookshelf, and it turned out that Tim Robbins was in The Hudsucker Proxy, not Steve Buscemi. The movie about bowling and kidnapping was The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges played Buscemi’s gross friend, and John Goodman was the really gross fat guy, and the weird guy who danced after getting the strike was John Turturro. How could I have been so far off?
John Goodman was so gross in The Big Lebowski that I didn’t even buy the program—shit! It would have come in handy about now. But I remember, I’m sure of it. This lady gets kidnapped, and they cut off her toe and send it to her stinking-rich husband. But I don’t remember how it all turned out.
I seem to remember that John gave this crazy speech about something.
…And?…that the kidnapping was all a fake.
But I don’t really remember the ending.
I’ll have to rent the DVD. Maybe I can watch it with Yoji. That would be fun.
Like a date.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now. A guy I did it with—even if it was just once!—has been kidnapped. I have to be more serious.
But just then a text came from Yoji. Skipping class. Looking for Sano with Kita, Shiba & Satoru. Where are you? Got things we want to ask you.
What? What was he doing with those boys? My phone started ringing, and Yoji’s name came on the display. I tossed it on the bed. What good was he if he came with Kita, Shiba & Satoru? We had to be one-on-one—anything else was claustrophobic.
The ringtone—from Life is Beautiful—played all the way through, twice. It stopped for a minute, and then, just as I went to put away The Hudsucker Proxy program, it started playing again—dadadadadada. It played a couple more times, then stopped.
Now that it was quiet again, I picked up the phone, erased the incoming messages, and put it away in my bag. Then I put on a bra, T-shirt, and jeans, pulled up my hair and fastened it with a clip, put on my glasses, combed my bangs, put on some lip gloss, picked up my bag, and left. I was going to get The Big Lebowski, even if I had to watch it alone. Maybe the movie would offer some kind of clue to Sano’s disappearance.
But even after I got back and watched the DVD, my opinion hadn’t changed: John Goodman is really gross. He’s fat and he doesn’t listen to anybody, and he says all this dumb stuff, all of which is wrong and screws everything up—and still he’s clueless. So I really can’t stand him. But I was right: Steve Buscemi as Donny is really cute. He gets killed somehow or other at the end, but he has this excellent, Buscemiesque way of dying.
Any—way! The point is the kidnapping. Kidnapping. In the end, the kidnapping in the movie is a fake. They haven’t really kidnapped the wife at all. They just cut off the toe of a woman in the kidnappers’ gang and sent it to the rich husband. And it turns out he’s tired of his wife anyway and realizes he could use the kidnapping to get rid of her. But he has to seem like he’s worried about her, so he hires Lewbowski—aka Jeff Bridges—the biggest slacker in LA, to make the payoff to the kidnappers. He’s pretty sure Lewbowski will fuck things up and get her killed. That’s when John Goodman gets involved and things get really screwed up, and everybody gets totally disgusted, the kidnappers, the rich guy—and me too.
When the movie was over, I thought for a while. Was Sano’s kidnapping based on The Big Lebowski?
What if we assumed the kidnapping was a fake?
That left you with two possibilities right off the bat. One was what John Goodman’s idiot character was thinking: the victim had staged it herself—or himself. In other words, Sano had faked his own kidnapping. But then you had the problem of the toe. John Goodman kept saying the wife had cut off her own toe and sent it to her husband, but that’s a dumbass theory at best. Even an idiot like Sano wouldn’t go around cutting off his own toe. So he must have found someone else’s toe to send. But whose?
But supposing he did find somebody, it still would have made the toe donor pretty mad, so you can assume there was a big fight over the donation. But maybe it didn’t stop there. Maybe Sano killed the owner of the toe and cut it off? Then he was guilty of murder in addition to faking a kidnapping…But hold on, that seemed all backwards. Who’d commit a murder in order to fake a kidnapping? Maybe he murdered the guy first and then came up with the idea of staging the kidnapping—that made more sense. That’s probably it: he committed murder and then faked the kidnapping to cover it up.
Of course! That way he’d have the ransom money to start a new life on the run. If he didn’t reappear after the ransom was paid, everybody would assume the kidnappers had killed him and gotten rid of the body—and after a while everybody would give up looking for him, and he could live happily ever after, someplace faraway where nobody knew him. And if he got tired of happily ever after, he could always go home and say it had taken him all that time to escape from the kidnappers. It was foolproof!—for a really good liar anyway. So this was a much cooler plot: kill somebody and fake a kidnapping to cover it up! The whole movie scenario was writing itself in my head…
But hold on a minute, Aiko. Calm down. That’s the first hypothesis. What about number two? Which was just like what happened in The Big Lebowski. Sano suddenly disappears, and somebody else decides to make it look like a kidnapping in order to collect the ransom. But who was that somebody?
Who knew?
I didn’t know much about Sano’s friends, but it had to be somebody who knew him well enough to hear right away that he hadn’t come home that night.
Sano’s friends? He had lots, boys and girls, so there were plenty of suspects. It made my brain hurt to think about it.
And the toe was still a problem. I decided to think about that again for a while. If someone else was involved, where’d he get a toe?
It was the same deal: no one was going to smile sweetly while you cut off his toe, so there was still a major battle with whoever wanted to fake the kidnapping. And maybe he got killed and it turned into murder again. But it still didn’t make sense to commit murder just to fake a kidnapping, so you had to turn it around again and figure someone else besides Sano had committed murder and then staged the kidnapping to get ransom money in order to disappear. Could be. Or maybe not.
Or there was still another possibility: one of Sano’s friends had killed somebody and then Sano had agreed to help that kid by faking the kidnapping. You couldn’t put it past Sano to come up with the idea of trying to get ransom money out of his own parents.
No, maybe not. That seemed like a stretch.
Okay, then suppose Sano did it all himself, and once he had the money he gave it to his friend to run away with. That way he could later show up at home spouting crap about how the kidnappers had let him go. That was possible too, wasn’t it?
But now I had a bunch o
f maybes and no way to figure out which theory made the most sense. Maybe it was better that way—allow for all the possibilities to be true at once. Or something like that. Anyway, I was pretty sure it was a case of Lebowski—the kidnapping was a fake. But then didn’t it also make sense that the murder had come first?…
Probably.
All of that assumes, though, that it’s impossible to cut off your own toe. But is it? If you were getting ten million yen, couldn’t you part with one little toe?
Maybe. I bet I could, under the right circumstances. Ten million yen for one toe. Pretty decent trade. All you had to do, aside from cutting it off, was write a scary note, send it with the toe, collect the ransom—and go home. Mission accomplished.
Even better: if your mom and dad put the toe in the freezer and you got home real quick, you might even be able to get to the hospital and have it sewn back on.
In that case, for that one second of pain, you’d have the ransom money and your toe.
Nice! Who couldn’t stand a little pain for that? You’d be singing all the way to the bank. Given the chance, anybody would do it. Shit, I could do it right now!
Ten million yen. You could buy a whole lot of stuff with that.
For the next half hour I flipped through Olive and Spring and some of the other magazines I had on my shelf, thinking about what I could buy with that kind of money.
That’s when Yoji showed up.
5
“Not much going on, I see!” he said. And then, “What did you think you were doing, messing up Maki like that? How could you screw up the prettiest face in the class?” Then he laughed. I suppose it did bother him a little that I’d hurt Maki, but I doubted he was really blaming me. He had figured out right away in the bathroom that they intended to crucify me. So he had rescued me, then went back to help Maki, and now was able to laugh about it and make the whole thing into a joke—mostly to make me feel better. Pretty sweet. And shy too. When he’d left me at the nurse’s office, pretending to be worried about Maki, it wasn’t really her he was thinking of. He knew what hell my school life would be if everybody found out that I had taken on a popular girl like Maki, even to avoid crucifixion. He felt sorry for me, but he was too embarrassed to tell me straight out, and so he’d run off to help her and now was laughing about it to hide how he really felt…Or at least that’s how I saw it. Anyway, asking me why I’d “messed her up” was soooo much cooler than just telling me to cheer up or something—the kind of thing other people would have said. And it had been waaaay better just to leave me at the nurse’s office like that. Waaay.