“We should leave tomorrow,” Sugimura said. “We shouldn’t stay here any longer.” The five of us had carried the body back to the campsite. We placed it beneath a sheet beside Sugimura’s tent. “Besides, we’re running out of food and water. We keep going for another day, the search will turn futile.”
Everybody looked at Nobuo. He was taking deep breaths, his chest rising and falling as he did so. He shook his head. “The situation’s not that bad,” he said. “We can still afford to keep going.”
He waited for a response. Nobody said anything against him. I turned to Sugimura.
“When will the officials collect the body?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. He looked pale. “I gave them our coordinates… They’re setting off at eight, so they should be here by ten.”
“I see,” I said. I was still shaking, somewhat. I tried to hold it together. Sugimura and I were supposed to be a pair tomorrow. “They’re going to ask us a lot of questions. Do you want to swap with Ahab and stay here at the camp? Liaise with the officials and everything?”
Sugimura shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “We’ll proceed as planned. Ahab will do fine with them.”
Back in our tent I changed out of my clothes. Ahab came inside. He lay his knife down, and started to change as well.
“The guy slit his own throat open with a razor blade,” he said. “He did it before we could catch up to him. He saw us coming and panicked, I think.”
I didn’t say anything to that. He then asked me what had happened earlier. One moment I was there, and then in the next I wasn’t. It was as though I had just disappeared in the middle of the forest.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was trembling. Burned into my eyes was that image of the light, moving, moving, moving. “I came back out,” I said.
“You what?”
“I came back out,” I said again. “I went in and then I came back out.”
Nobuo and Akiko were assigned the twenty-third cardinal point, while Sugimura and I were assigned the twenty-fourth. Sugimura didn’t look too happy. What he had said was true: we had no food, no water. Instead we had a body.
Ahab sat by the fire and began sharpening his knife. “I’ll let you guys know, yeah? When the officials are here,” he said.
I thanked him. We set off.
“See you later,” Nobuo said to us. Akiko waved. She was in red again, with her boots and her raincoat on. I waved back.
“I don’t know why she insists on wearing them,” I said to Sugimura. “It must be uncomfortable.”
He scratched an ear. “It’s very noticeable, isn’t it…”
“What?”
“I mean, you can’t help but take note of her. Especially in a forest like this.”
“Because of all the green.”
Sugimura nodded. “Exactly,” he said.
We kept on walking. There was a bird somewhere, here in this sea of trees; it made a call like a whistle. For some reason the forest felt sparser here.
“Akiko and I chanced upon a cave yesterday,” I said.
“You did?”
“Yeah.” I then described it to him: how big it was, how wide. I gave him the coordinates Akiko had on her GPS that day.
“That’s interesting… I’ll take note of it,” Sugimura said. “I’ve never heard of a cave in that location before.”
According to him, there were a great number of caves throughout the forest, formed by lava and steam, some as large as the one I had described. Others were smaller. All this had happened during the Jogan period, after an eruption of Mount Fuji laid waste to the surrounding area. Ash had risen into the sky and fell back down in faraway places.
“The lava flowed across the middle of a large lake and split it in two,” Sugimura said. “Over time it cooled down, and the forest grew atop it.”
The forest, spanning more than 3,000 hectares, was built on a thin layer of soil only dozens of centimetres thick. “That’s why all the roots are exposed,” he said. “The ground’s too hard and shallow… And yet the trees manage to grow, somehow.”
“They hold on to what they can,” I said. Sugimura smiled.
“This whole forest has been here for more than 1,200 years… That’s hardly a life, if you think about it.”
A minute passed. Sugimura went on.
“I remember going into this cave once, about a month after my divorce was finalised. I was asked to lead a group of undergraduates there as a tour guide of sorts. The cave was a tourist destination, famous for all the ice it had, even during the summer… In order to go in you had to climb down these narrow stairs and then climb back up.”
“Was it fun?”
He shook his head.
“I was still bitter from the divorce,” he said. “I had all these feelings weighing me down, things I didn’t want anymore… They were a great burden to me. As we walked down to the very bottom of the cave, there was a large fence across a dark enclosure, and a sign on it that said, ‘Hell Hole’.”
“Hell Hole?” I said. Jigoku Ana. He nodded.
“I remember staring at the sign, transfixed… I’d seen it before, of course, but this time I kept staring at it, even though there were a bunch of students behind me, waiting for me to say something. But I said nothing. I stood absolutely still… There was a message on the sign saying that if you ever slipped into this hole you’d never go back home again. And then I thought about it: I thought about going over the fence and jumping straight in.”
He paused.
“It’s true, what the sign said.” He looked at me. “There’s no coming back from something like that.”
They found her that afternoon. Nobuo and Akiko. They found Haruhito Kawako in the end. They had walked by the other side of the cave, the large one that Akiko and I had chanced upon the day before, and found her clothes, neatly folded in a pile at the edge of its lower lip. Her bag and other belongings lay in a separate heap.
“We found her,” Akiko said. Her voice was static, white sound over the radio. In the background was an ugly, retching noise. “It got her first.”
7
SORA NO NIKKI
MAY-JULY 2013
I
ZHIWEI
A row of palm trees stood between the outer wall and the main road. The trees were brown around the base, and then green from the mid-section up. There were eight of these trees, each one a perfect distance from the other, so that their leaves formed a canopy of sorts, a shield from the outer eye. The outer wall was of a white stone, smooth all around. It stretched from one corner of the eye to the next, forming a low perimeter around the estate. The sky above was a rare, cloudless blue.
I’d started going in the pool again. It’d been a week since the incident, after the authorities had cleared the body away and assured the residents that the water had been fully replaced. It didn’t take long at all for me to settle back into my old habit. It was a thing I did, whenever I had nothing better to do: I’d step into the pool and float on its surface, my body half in and out of the water for hours at a time. Sometimes I would do a couple of laps, just enough to get the blood pumping. I’d been doing this ever since I was a teenager.
The pool had never been very popular to begin with. It was a centrally located facility, about twenty metres long and eight metres wide, and only two metres deep. Sectioned at one end was the Jacuzzi, just big enough for five or six people to sit inside. There were deck chairs on one side of the pool, with a view of the palm trees; each chair had its own parasol, striped in white and blue. But flanked on three sides were five blocks of flats, each block more than twenty storeys high, with a balcony attached to every apartment. This meant that any resident could look down at the pool whenever they felt like it, and nobody ever seemed to appreciate that kind of scrutiny. Sometimes I’d find myself accompanied by a mom or a dad, splashing about with their kids, teaching them how to swim. Sometimes I’d find the elderly man from Block B, who would have forgotten to do his usual laps that mo
rning. He was a quiet man, with a flat chest and even flatter stomach, and he moved with a silent, slow-moving grace. Other than those people, though, it’d just be me, swimming about in the pool, my few belongings placed along the edge of the water—my keys, my phone, and my towel. Those were all the things I needed.
Over time, I found that a pool wasn’t a place for worries. A pool was a place where things came to rest. All of one’s anxieties and fears didn’t matter once you were in the water, with a stomach full of air and your body swaying and bobbing on the surface. The water would lap continually into my ears: there’d be a sucking, gurgling noise, followed by the swirling sound of underwater currents, powerful routes of movement unseen to the naked eye. All other sound would be cut away from my ears.
The only thing the water ever demanded was your ability to stay afloat. All it ever needed was for you to remain completely at peace. And all it wanted was for you to relax and remain calm on its ever-rocking, ever-changing surface. It would be all you’d ever amount to, just a thing to be one with, to be in equilibrium with. I learnt this over time as the surrounding blocks towered over my being, over and over again, like a memory I needed reminding of. With my ears in the water, it was all I could do, really, to hear me take my own breaths: to hear nothing but what was going on, to hear the reason why my heart could still beat.
Ever since the North East Line began operations ten years ago, the area surrounding the condominium had become prime real estate: from the guardhouse, you could walk to the nearest station in under five minutes, and to the nearby St Andrew’s schools in ten. There was a kopitiam in the vicinity as well, where I could get nasi lemak for under three dollars. At various stages across the past decade, all the surrounding houses and condominiums had been torn down and built again, which meant that my idea of a neighbourhood had always incorporated the sound of the chainsaw, its high shrill cutting away at something, as well as the repeated sound of metal striking rhythmically against metal, keeping tempo to the daily music. Only the condominium where I stayed remained untouched as newer, fancier buildings rose around it, as though the estate—with its swimming pool, its white outer wall, and its tall row of palm trees—had remained oddly trapped in time.
Before the incident, I’d find myself in the pool about three times a week, sometimes four. My core modules had started to kick my ass that April, and the pool was my only way of unwinding from all that stress. After the incident had passed, my parents had advised against ever returning to the pool: they said something about bad luck, about how that kind of thing wouldn’t go away, no matter how many times the water got drained and replaced. But I told them I didn’t mind. That sort of thing didn’t bother me, I said, and I didn’t care if I would be the only one in that pool. But I was wrong.
He was slim and pale, with hardly any muscle on him. He looked to be about the same age as I was. The first time I caught sight of him, he was wearing a pair of yellow boxers, and reclining on the centremost deck chair. He had his long hair tied back with a hair band. It was the start of May, and the temperature that afternoon had been around thirty-four degrees, with only a couple of drifting clouds in the sky: it was perfect weather for swimming, and for sunbathing as well, except the guy seemed perfectly content reading the newspaper, beneath the wide shade of his parasol. He read it front to back, before calmly putting it aside. He then reached into the tote bag he’d brought with him, and took out a worn-looking paperback. Shortsighted as I was, I couldn’t make out the author’s name from my spot in the water.
Two hours we spent there, side by side but never speaking. Not once did either of us make eye contact: he was reading his book, whenever I stole a glance at him, and whenever he looked at me, my mind was probably somewhere else, my gaze kept focused on the sky above. I’d always been aware of the word azure—how it was supposed to describe crystal blue skies—and I believe I had only grown to understand what that word had meant that day. Those were the kind of thoughts that had run through my mind. The guy and I were so wrapped up in our own separate things, it hardly seemed to matter that only a few metres or so had stood between the two of us. We were like two boats docked at the same harbour, within reach of each other and yet never more than that. You could even say that I had come to appreciate his company: he was as much a part of the pool as the deck chairs, or the Jacuzzi, or even myself were. We valued the time we’d spent there, just as much as the other would. It was as good as being alone.
After that day, I grew to think that more people would come flocking back to the pool—that it was okay, really, and perfectly enjoyable. But I was mistaken. Even the elderly man from Block B, with his precise and careful strokes, had stopped his morning swims altogether. Over the course of May, it was only ever that guy and I, minding our own separate business. He’d be on the same centremost chair, reading through his paperback, while I’d float on the water, eyes closed, after a couple routine laps. Every time I took the lift down to the first floor, I’d find him there, settled beneath his parasol. This happened without fail, neither one of us saying hi to the other. Eventually I grew to rely on it: the same old pattern, the seeming order to my life. To our lives.
When May gave way to June, I found myself down at the pool nearly every day, seeing how my school holidays had officially begun. My friends and I were the types to hang out at night, for dinner or for movies or for drinks, which meant that my afternoons were kept largely free. The guy on his deck chair had moved on to his third paperback by then, although who he’d been reading all this time, I still couldn’t tell. My things had always been placed at a corner, far away from his.
There was one day, a Wednesday, when the guy had not shown up. It was the fifth of June. I placed my belongings on a deck chair, wondering where he was. I felt almost sad. I could always count on him to be there, whenever I used the pool. Now the water appeared cold, and empty. A passing breeze nipped lightly on my thighs.
I began my usual routine. I started from one end of the pool and swam, freestyle, to the other end and back. Each time I surfaced above the water I’d cast a look towards the deck chair, the centremost one, and found it just as empty and vacant as the minute before. It was strange; I wondered what the guy could be up to, spending his afternoon somewhere else. I then returned to my laps with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. I’d decided to put him out of my mind for the time being, and after I was done with my laps, my blood pumping and body brimming from all the effort, I walked over to the centre of the pool, took off my goggles, and kicked my body off from the tiled floor. I floated on the water, eyes closed, against the bright rays of the sun. I stayed there for as long as I could, first tensing my muscles and then relaxing them, one portion of my body at a time. Finally, after a while, I settled into what I felt was my freest.
Time passed; time slowed. Time didn’t matter anymore. Time, in some sense, ceased to exist.
I opened my eyes. Nothing about my day seemed to have changed: the sky was still exactly the same, and my surroundings were left just as how I had remembered them. I lowered my body back down, and dunked my head into the water. I then came back up for air, grateful for the relief of cold water on my face. When I opened my eyes again, however, I noticed that one thing had changed about my surroundings: a person, seated on the centremost chair, just metres away from where I stood.
It wasn’t the usual guy, though. It was a woman this time, and she seemed to be in her mid-thirties. I had never seen her before, not around the condo. But she had the most beautiful skin: it shone, golden almost, from all the sunscreen she had applied. And she seemed to have the roundest, deepest set of eyes. She raised a hand.
“Hey you,” she said to me. “Great day, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I had never spoken to anybody by the pool before.
“Hi,” I said. “The day’s great.”
The woman didn’t smile, not particularly, but her manner seemed inviting. She let her hand down. “It’s the perfect weather for sunglasses, don’t you think?�
��
“Yeah,” I said. I squinted my eyes as I looked towards the sky.
“I can’t really wear them, though,” came the woman’s voice. When I turned back to her, she was pointing at her nose. “I’ve got this really problematic bridge. It barely slopes at all, so things like spectacles and shades can’t really stay on my face,” she explained. “It’s kind of like a disability.”
“Do you wear glasses?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I do,” I said.
“Oh? Are your goggles prescriptive?” the woman asked.
“My eyesight’s pretty bad,” I said.
The woman leant forward on her chair.
“Can you see me at all, from that far away?”
I shook my head. I strained my eyes.
“Your face is kind of a blur to me.”
“Come closer, then,” the woman said. She beckoned me forward with her hand. “Just come to the edge of the water. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“Are you talking about your nose?”
“That’s right,” she said. “Come on.”
I walked in the water. I walked until I could rest my arms on the edge of the pool, over the white plastic grates that covered the drain. I could see her better from there.
“Ah,” I said. “No offense, but, your nose is exactly what you say it is.”
“Isn’t it?” the woman exclaimed. She moved her head from right to left. “Are you seeing this? Look at this. My profile makes me look like a dinosaur.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Come on. Have you seen The Hours?” The woman leant back against her chair. “My nose is kinda like Nicole’s, I think. But people often talk about how she had to look ugly for the part. I don’t really like that movie.”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve never even heard of it before.”
The woman let out a laugh.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good kid.” She then closed her eyes before peeling one back open. “You’ve got a great tan, by the way.”
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