He glanced over at his colleague Takagi, who was leaning against the wall to his right.
They’d been working in the same office right up until closing time, so his facial features, naturally, were clearly defined. He had a gentle sort of face, although a painful-looking cold sore was sticking out on his lip. Since it was easy to have those implanted at the doctor’s office, there were oddballs out there who wore them as alternatives to piercings, but in Takagi’s case, the reason was different: he liked to indulge in the sense of liberation that comes when an illness has departed or a wound has healed.
Hisauchi and Takagi reached the first floor, and the doors slid open. They walked out into the entryway. Takagi’s footsteps were awkward due to the repeated compound fractures his femurs had endured.
“Want to go out for a drink?” Takagi asked.
“I’ve got plans already,” said Hisauchi.
Even if he had been free, he probably would have turned him down. Every time he drank with Takagi, it always felt like he was reliving the same evening. That was how little their topics of conversation varied whenever they got drunk.
Hisauchi parted company with Takagi as they left the building, then started off down a cobblestone road, walking parallel to the streetcar tracks. After passing the trading company’s three buildings, he turned into a narrow alley on the left and continued walking, turning corners at random.
A great number of crosses rose up into view; they glowed faintly from the spaces between tiles in the walls of the buildings and from bars in their windows. Sick of this ubiquitous holiness that was turning up everywhere, Hisauchi turned another corner, only to find his way blocked by an iron gate painted with yellow and black stripes. This was the border of the next parish over.
He backtracked and turned right. Someone came walking toward him from across the way. There was nothing unnatural about the man’s face, except that the harder Hisauchi tried to recognize some physical characteristic, the grainier and more blurred his visage became. This was what was commonly known as
Taking the initiative, Yasukawa said, “Hey, Hisauchi, is that you?”
“Hey there, long time no see. What brings you all the way out here?”
Yasukawa’s home office was in Parish 153—the same one they were standing in—but located on the exact opposite side of it.
“I was just feeling antsy,” he said. “I get this feeling sometimes, like if I’m not out here walking around like this, the places I don’t know all that well are just going to up and vanish.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Hisauchi said with a nod. He felt something similar and couldn’t refrain from obsessive-compulsive wandering either.
“Well then, I’ll see you later,” Yasukawa said. He dragged his feet as he started walking again and passed Hisauchi on the side.
Viewed from behind, he was a pitiful sight.
Hisauchi gave up on his aimless roaming and returned to the main road.
He went into a little bakery in front of the streetcar stop. The inside was crowded with
He left the shop holding the sack against his chest, then saw a streetcar stopped right in front of him—no, not stopped; it was just starting to move.
In a sudden rush, he hurried after it, grabbed the handrail by the door, and pulled himself up into the car. With a sigh of relief, he took hold of a leather strap.
The man in the seat by the entrance was humming some sort of tune to himself. “Stop that,” scolded the woman on his right. “I know you don’t mean to, but that song is expensive; there’s no telling how much they’ll deduct.”
Beyond the glass window, the stone city rolled past, painted orange in the light of early evening. Off in the distance, a church’s steeple peeked into view. The passengers’ reflections were overlaid on the scenery, including Hisauchi holding on to the leather strap. Every bag and every article of clothing subtly displayed the name of its maker, retailer, and raw materials used in uniformly translucent text. This was a lingering memory of Kosmetics, which had once adorned the world in kaleidoscopic splendor back in the days before it degenerated into the scrapworld that existed today. The streetcar itself was almost like a show window, lined with faceless mannequins.
Hisauchi got off three stops later and started walking along a dimly lit alleyway that cut through a residential district.
The paper sack he held in his right arm was warm and a little damp from the steam. On the other side of the familiar stucco walls that stretched along both sides of the road were long rows of everyday, single-family homes. The trees in their yards threw out large canopies of branches and leaves.
None of the homes had any feeling of being lived in though; practically all of them appeared to be vacant.
Dry leaves danced to the ground with their customary motions.
A rumbling began emanating from somewhere, drowning out the faint echo of Hisauchi’s footfalls.
Hisauchi tensed up, stopped walking, and held his breath.
Just a few paces ahead, something suddenly leapt out of the seam where the road met the stucco wall. It had the energy of some predatory beast.
With a gross, sticky sound, it stuck to the street.
It was a chain of tumors the color of raw meat, tangled up like a set of puzzle rings. In the light of a lonely streetlamp, the tumors glistened. They bubbled up one after another from the edge of the street, twisting and turning like beads in a rosary as the mass as a whole swelled larger. Many clawed fingers protruded from the gaps in the tumors, twitching as if tapping on keyboards. Hisauchi’s back broke out in gooseflesh. As the fingers played their silent strains, they started swelling up, as if each were competing to be the largest, and varied organs resembling skinned rats and cow tongues grew bountifully from their tips. Just as suddenly, bulges began appearing in other places, and all manner of internal organs began spilling out one after another. Splorching and splurching against each other, writhing furiously as they buried one another, they grew into luxuriant thickets that rose even higher than the stucco walls.
Throat tightening, Hisauchi loosened his tie and shifted the paper bag to his left arm. The aroma of freshly baked bread caressed his nostrils. He moved over to the other side of the street and, scraping his suit jacket along the stucco wall, managed to slip past what was probably fifty people’s worth of viscera.
Once he was through, he took a deep breath and started walking again. Even so, he found himself unable to shake the sight he’d just seen from his mind.
“You must be a thief,” he could clearly hear a nasal voice say. His heartbeat quickened.
“Not that we mind or anything,” added a relaxed, easygoing voice.
“If you think so, then I don’t really—”
His stomach squeezed tight.
“We know.” A woman’s voice this time, filled with scorn.
In trying to get his mind off the proliferating organs, he had just run up against a layer of memories he could have gladly done without. A series of linked moments from his past, without exception painful ones, came blossoming back into life.
This sort of recollection seizure was a disease endemic to the
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The street and the rows of houses around him began to fade suddenly, and the scenery around him dissolved into the chaotically jostling dustwroughts of a discardation stratum. His legs and back grew heavy with exhaustion: he had been wandering the discardation strata aimlessly for days—this was one example of the nightmares he had come to have occasionally over the past fifty years.
He pulled an aluminum case from his coat’s inner pocket, shook out a pill, and tossed it into his mouth. As he ground it between his molars, his surroundings started to go back to normal, and the pangs of remorse and self-reproach melted gently away. While his past did not recede from him (it was shared by a large number of unspecified individuals), he was able to distract himself from it in this manner.
Hisauchi started walking faster, and presently he arrived at his home.
He opened the wrought-iron gate, stepped through, and entered the garden. The davidia tree’s branches were studded with scattered white bracts, and fresh leaves spread out from the many species of plantain lily. The oak front door that came up in front of him was out of style; he didn’t like it. With Kosmetics, I could’ve replaced it in a heartbeat, he thought unhappily.
The instant he gripped the brass knob, his authentication went through and the lock came open. Moss-green pumps were set out neatly in the entryway.
Hisauchi changed into his regular clothes and went into the kitchen-cum-dining room. Hamuro, wearing her apron, turned toward him, but her face was indistinct, like that of some stranger set to
“Relational appearances are still on the blink, I see.”
“Yeah. I hear it’s just our parish though. Somebody from the computation company was just here explaining it.”
“The computation company?”
“Said he was here to check on something. I thought you might be nearby, but when I opened the map, there were ‘He is here’ markers all over the place.”
“Again? I wonder if it’s the same kind of malfunction the intimacy settings are having.”
“Who knows? Anyway, I made sure to put in a gripe about your usage volume. He apologized profusely, of course, but—”
“Ah, so that was what he wanted to check on? Thank you. They had me at four zeroes too many. No way that could be right …”
While Hisauchi was speaking, he handed her the paper sack. Hamuro unfolded the top, and said, “Ooh, these smell great!” as steam came wafting up from inside. She put the rye bread and walnut bread in a basket on the dining table. “I’m sure glad bread doesn’t cool off. The meat sauce just finally finished simmering.”
“Oh, let me help you.”
Hisauchi filled a large pot with water and put it on the fire. Beside him, Hamuro heated a frying pan and tossed in some butter. The butter shrank as it melted, sliding around in the pan as though skating. Then she added soft wheat flour, poured in the milk, and beat the mixture with a wooden spatula. Hisauchi looked on, transfixed by Hamuro’s skill and efficiency, and presently the water came to a boil.
He poured a small amount of olive oil into the hot water, added a pinch of salt, and then in went the lasagna, which he stirred with long chopsticks to keep the pasta from clumping.
Hamuro looked at Hisauchi, and a hint of a smile appeared on her face. Her features were steadily coming into sharper focus.
The lasagna finished boiling and was allowed to cool in the water-filled pot. Hamuro drained off the water and started laying the pasta out on a baking sheet, piling the noodles one on top of the other. Moving to Hisauchi’s left side, Hamuro spread the meat sauce around in a square lasagna dish. Hisauchi poured white sauce over it. “Someone forgot to shake the water out of the noodles,” Hamuro said while spreading out the lasagna. Together, they repeated the operation, piling on layer after layer. The steady progress of their mutual efforts, uncoordinated and utterly commonplace, felt somehow wondrous to him. At last they put the cheese on top, sprinkled it with bread crumbs, and placed it in the oven.
The lasagna cooked up to a splendid color, and they took it to the table. Even through the potholder, the heat of the dish made it hard to hold. Hamuro set out the plates and the wineglasses without missing a beat and piled their dishes high with salad and salami. Hisauchi twisted a corkscrew into the cork of the wine bottle. While this would sometimes split the cork, today it came right out.
Hamuro’s intimacy level was soaring by the time they sat down facing one another. The fresh gloss of her lips, the faint rosiness in her cheeks, the scattered freckling of her skin—it was all coming into sharp focus now. Still, this was just her veriself, a unique form made to order by a bodyshop stylist; Hisauchi had never seen her gene-derived baseform.
He tilted the bottle of wine over Hamuro’s glass. Amber-tinged ruby filled it. He poured for himself as well and with one finger wiped off a drop that had trickled down the neck of the bottle. The color of the grapes seeped in between the lines of his fingerprint. He somehow felt the spaces between the ridges were too wide. Both lifted their glasses lightly and sipped the wine. The fragrance of berries … a faint vanilla flavor. Without a word, the couple nodded at one another.
Hisauchi put his spoon into the deep dish in front of him. With a strange feeling that something was a little off, he stirred up the cream-colored stew, scooped out a chunk of potato, and popped it into his mouth. The spoon made a return trip between the dish and his mouth. All expression gradually faded from Hisauchi’s face, and he stopped moving.
“What’s the matter?” Hamuro said.
“This is what we started out to make, isn’t it?”
“’This?’” Hamuro scooped up a piece of broccoli with her spoon and showed it to him. “Why do you ask? We just made this stew together, didn’t we?”
“I’m sorry, I just have this feeling like we made something completely different.”
“Different? Different how?”
“Um … let’s see, it was more like, cooked on the surface … and the inside too was firm like this … and the blackened part was really good.”
“That would be gratin, wouldn’t it?”
“No, it was more like, lots of layers … That’s right! We used this big, square, heat-resistant dish.” He traced a finger across his wineglass and brought up a list of his personal possessions on its surface. But there was nothing under Dinnerware that jumped out at him as the dish he was thinking of.
“I can’t remember.” He wiped away the list and began to display a succession of oven-baked foods, their pictures taken from a cooking catalog. “Were there always so few varieties?” He slid his fingers across the curved surface of the glass as he wracked his brain impatiently. What he was looking for didn’t appear. “But still … it was something completely different.”
“That’s a nice problem to have, not being able to remember. Everyone else is struggling with memories they can’t erase.” Hamuro soaked some bread in her stew. “I’ve never once passed a screening to gain the right of obliviation. What you’ve got is a simple case of imaginative amnesia.”
“It isn’t that; no matter how I think about it …”
Even when he checked the oven history, all he found displayed were ingredients for making stew.
“Now it really is looking like imaginative amnesia.”
Hisauchi gave Hamuro a forced smile, feeling his eyes grow hot with an ineffable sense of loss, and he topped off his glass with plenty of wine.
Chapter 2:
Bonebells
1
A glaze of Chaos lay upon the greater portion of the world, and on the surface of its ever-growing, ever-transforming Vastsea, thousands of caravans could be found at any given time, making their way across in long processions.
One of these caravans—a column made up of several dozen downy white momonji—was
advancing across a dustwreck plain, with dustwroughts of all shapes and sizes grinding and jostling against one another. Each momonji had its three transparent eyes fixed on the backside of the momonji in front of it, and their giant bodies—reminiscent of coupée pão bread rolls with their slight, gentle swells toward the front—swayed left and right as they crawled over unstable ground that was rolling with eidos waves. Ten pairs of claw-legs were arrayed in the middle of their undersides, which they used to pull themselves along guidelines that were laid out over the ground. These guidelines, made from twined fibers of momonji entrails, were indispensable for travel over the ever-changing Vastsea.
The momonji began pushing their way through a dustwreck jungle that blocked the way forward, slipping between wrecktrees that melted and flowed like mercury. Every fifth momonji was guided by a handler who accompanied it.
The field of view opened up and a calmdust belt, dented with countless indentations like the receptacle of a lotus, spread out all around them. Up ahead was Tochino Recuperation Block, standing like a fortress in the midst of an ivory-white plain. It was an artificial island floating on the Vastsea, covering an area of eighty thousand square meters. Eight connected flotation modules formed its rectangular shape. High castle walls of potsherd brown enclosed it completely, keeping the nanodust outside.
The caravan’s vanguard reached the midpoint of the eastern blockwall, and the East Gate opened up. One after another, the momonji passed through, headed for the earth-covered area called Caravan Square.
When they came to the middle of Caravan Square, the handlers all shouted out in loud voices, placed hands on the backs of the chest-high momonji, then jammed fingertips into gaps in the backshell ossiforms that were under their skins. The four-meter-long creatures began turning their huge bodies around to face northward. The recuperation block’s interior was divided into three large sections: a temporary holding pen to the north, Caravan Square in the center, and living quarters to the south.
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