Loups-Garous

by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

  She really had a way with words.

  “They aren’t escorting anyone, eh? Not even important geniuses like you.”

  “They’re having a conference.”

  “Conference?”

  “When you talk to a group of people face-to-face. Adults like to meet in person and talk to each other. Such a waste of time.”

  Mio went on importantly about how meeting each other in person and talking face-to-face isn’t going to catch the killer, then sat up straight. Dried grass was stuck all over her backside and hair. She started clapping it off her shoulders, then shook her bob haircut furiously. The grass stuck to everything it touched and wouldn’t fall.

  “This is stupid.”

  “Everyone’s freaking out though.”

  “No one is freaking out. It’s always like this.”

  “They don’t usually clamp down like this though.”

  Mio stuck an index finger into her collar and wrung the neckline as if to open up a little space. “Sounds like you know what you’re talking about, Kono.”

  “I don’t.” Ayumi looked down.

  “You really like pestering people, don’t you, Tsuzuki.”

  “It’s fun.” Mio laughed.

  “What is?”

  “I can’t stop wondering.”

  She never knew how people would react…probably.

  Ayumi stared blankly at Mio’s feet and said without thinking,

  “You mean you don’t know what stupid people think?”

  Mio’s eyes widened.

  “If we think at all. I bet it’s hard figuring us out. Or is that what we’re learning in this communications group?”

  “You’re such a model participant,” Ayumi threw in.

  “Whaaat?” Mio’s voice went up several octaves.

  “That’s a pretty boring comeback.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m no comedian,” Ayumi said, looking back at Hazuki. “Am I?”

  Their gazes moved on as Hazuki lowered her head, unresponsive. The weeds snapped at her calves.

  “What I’m saying is…it’s not cool for you to be investigating us.” Investigating. Mio furrowed her face.

  “I’m doing no such thing.”

  “You were just staring at us, weren’t you?”

  “I can’t talk to you unless I see you.”

  “You can’t even look at me.”

  It was true. Ayumi had never actually looked at Mio.

  In fact.

  Ayumi had never faced anyone. Not even Hazuki.

  She suddenly came back at Mio and gawped.

  “What?”

  Mio shifted her sight line past Ayumi’s temple.

  “See. You can’t even maintain eye contact. You don’t want to be looked at either.” Mio made a bored expression.

  “Jerk.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s why I choose to be alone,” Ayumi said as she sat back down and looked at the stick building far away. The gesture was like a curtain call declaring an end to the conversation.

  It was true.

  Ayumi was vetoing.

  Mio raised both her eyebrows at Ayumi’s still back and let out a sigh.

  “Oh well.” She stood up.

  She’d apparently had the same thought as Hazuki.

  “That was fun, guys.”

  Was it? Ayumi glimpsed Hazuki, who continued to avoid eye contact. Mio shimmied over the railing and walked away. She was so different in person. Nothing like what the public data said, nothing like in the encounter group.

  Ayumi, without so much as looking after Mio, repeated to the faraway that she had been staring at,

  “I hate being watched.”

  “Tsuzuki said it herself just now. There’s no point in talking face-to-face.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  Maybe I’m bothering her too, Hazuki said to herself in a small voice.

  She certainly didn’t like being watched either. And yet, she couldn’t stop staring at Ayumi.

  Couldn’t stop.

  It was involuntary.

  “Am I a bother?”

  Her voice rose. She spoke doubtfully.

  “You’re not bothering me,” Ayumi answered. “You weren’t saying anything, Makino.”

  “Oh…really?”

  I wasn’t trying to be quiet. She’d said a few words here and there.

  Nothing useful, nothing important. Otherwise the two were just staring into the distance in the same direction. Except that…

  Ayumi was always in Hazuki’s line of vision because of the way they sat. Hazuki created the landscape Ayumi had to be a part of.

  So.

  So Ayumi had no idea Hazuki had been staring at her.

  Or did she? Impossible.

  They’d not yet made eye contact, despite their having sat there side by side. Ayumi couldn’t have seen Hazuki watching her. There was no way Ayumi would know what Hazuki’s eyes said.

  It was a comforting discomfiture.

  I guess it’s only normal.

  Hazuki reassured herself in an internal voice only she could hear, then stood up.

  “I’m going home.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Huh?” Ayumi was distracted.

  Now that she thought of it, Hazuki had never called back to Ayumi like that before. If she didn’t want to leave what was it to her? Think of all the times they’d parted ways without saying anything at all.

  “I mean, it being dangerous and all,” Hazuki explained, though why she felt she had to justify her comment, she did not know.

  “With the murderer…”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Ayumi spun around and looked Hazuki straight in the eye.

  Her eyes.

  “I’m fine. The field’s…” Ayumi said.

  “Dangerous, you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Without answering her question, Ayumi said she smelled water.

  “Huh?”

  “Look up.”

  Ayumi’s mind was preoccupied upward, then the instinct hit Hazuki. She looked skyward as one cold, piercing drop of water crashed into her temple.

  “Rain.”

  She hadn’t brought an umbrella, and it didn’t look like Ayumi was going to budge. Hazuki held back despite herself. Ayumi interrupted Hazuki as she prepared to tell her she should get out of the rain.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Hazuki didn’t understand what would be fine about it.

  She turned around and started to head up the incline when she felt something against her foot. She prodded it with her toe and discovered under the grass a half-buried hard drive.

  She picked it up and arched up to face Ayumi. It was definitely not hers.

  “Is this…?”

  Yours, Kono? Knowing full well it wasn’t.

  Hazuki returned to Ayumi with the disc.

  “I have no use for a drive with that much memory.”

  It was quite large. If the number on the drive were any indication, Hazuki could put all the data she’d ever collected in there and still have plenty of room for more. The thought of that much memory made the object between her fingers heavier. It was uncanny. The drive shouldn’t weigh any more because it could hold more information.

  Ayumi said, “Only someone like Tsuzuki would need that much disc space.”

  “So it’s Tsuzuki’s.”

  Could be. Mio had put down, no, dropped, her bag right around here.

  “What do we do with it?”

  “She’ll probably come back to get it, right?”

  “I doubt she knows it’s here though.”

  There was a lock on the drive, making it impossible for there not to be any content.

  “If it’s important, she’s going to come looking for it. Just leave it where you found it.”

  “But…”

  Hazuki looked skyward.

  The cold water droplets continued to pound her fore
head. A giant frameless monitor screened two layers of dark gray sky mapping out a texture without cadence.

  It was raining.

  But it certainly didn’t smell like water.

  CHAPTER 002

  SHE WAS STARING at the edge of her desk because looking at the leathery old face of the supervisor made her sick.

  She might not see him but could still hear him.

  In other words.

  Even from this vantage she could hear the huhs and hahs of his breath. When she thought of how they shared the air they breathed, how it filtered through his animal-like male body, through his filthy nasal cavity and viscous mouth hanging agape, it was enough to make her nauseated.

  I hate conferences.

  It was just a way to communicate the news, but they had to make it a pointless meeting.

  It was not constructive. Nothing that came of these meetings had anything to do with the deliberation items. Discussions in person didn’t augment or add any information, nor did they refine what was already known. It was just a collection of advertised opinions, everyone’s comportment, body odor, grating voice, extraneous data collected for intellectuals. Of no use. At this rate there would be no real discussion or deliberation.

  It was maddening.

  You know what you really need to effectively research communications is just your damned self, thought Shizue Fuwa.

  This was the only place she’d make eye contact.

  There were faces to look at all around her. And…

  Shizue hated the walls, the ceiling too. Actually, she hated the entire room.

  It was wide and had a high ceiling. It was supposed to evoke a sense of space but instead made her feel trapped somehow. In other words it was pretending to be spacious.

  Compared to this, the screen on her terminal was infinitely more spacious.

  And suddenly all the inorganic designs felt like a total lie. It was an outright lie. Unabashed gussying up, at the end of the day.

  The truth lay only in ideas.

  Yet people created the facsimile of a truth and pretended it was the real thing all the time. They told themselves that bumps were straight lines. If they were so able to convince themselves of the lie, why bother saying it was straight?

  Room 3, Section A, Area Community Center.

  She didn’t know how many centers there were across the country, but each region had a community center and each community center was built according to a uniform standard. The materials, the design, everything.

  A public platform had no need for embellishments—or so the thinking went. Austere, hygienic—that was the ethos of the design. But putting up the facade of austerity was costlier than putting up a cheap design. They talked about hygiene but weren’t really doing anything to disinfect the air—the spores were still there. What was more, you could see the dust. It was so bad you couldn’t really go anywhere without moistened wipes or a cloth.

  Shizue wasn’t saying there should be embellishments and decorations everywhere. She just wondered why no one else saw how trying that hard to be austere just made it all the more obnoxious. It wasn’t like you could walk into a space that really looked like a monitor.

  It was because they made rooms like this that organic humans did dirty deeds together.

  I hate it. They’d just had their monthly meeting…last week.

  Today’s was a unique summons.

  The Ministry of Culture, which brought together the National Welfare and Development System and the Committee on Adolescent Welfare and Development—comprised of center personnel from each locality— was meeting under the auspices of an emergency session of the 122nd Area Branch.

  Shizue had been brought in from central.

  They called her a counselor, but it wasn’t like she was an accredited therapist. She had a license but mostly advised minors in their plans for the future and assured they were in good mental health.

  She had no idea what it meant to deal with a serial killer, but they were saying at least one of the victims attended the 122nd.

  The conference seats were filled with police associates and local cops, as well as local governance that didn’t usually show up to these things. It wasn’t any ordinary conference.

  This was obviously a big deal.

  Being in the same room as these people for any amount of time de-pressed Shizue. On top of which, the facilitator of the emergency meeting —the very man she was judging—was the dumbest one of them all.

  Shizue’s melancholy was pitched at an all-time high. His whole introduction was pointless and over-long.

  “There’s been a rash of bizarre crimes,” he waxed impassioned.

  What’s bizarre mean anyway?

  It was an obsolete term.

  Bizarre. Derived from words signifying anger, wrath, and fascination with both.

  Bizarre, eh?

  Bizarre was a word that was popular a hundred years ago in detective novels, its time long since passed into history.

  Making such distinctions between normal and abnormal was in and of itself passé.

  Shizue thought the real crime was this attempt to apply the distinction to an unquantifiable territory and to the psychology of its inhabitants, its society.

  Unusual simply meant outside of the norm.

  It could also mean reality was less than ideal. Be it in excess or in its lack, significant idiosyncrasies were impossible.

  In other words, before one could begin to use a word like bizarre one would have to define normal, and that required envisioning an ideal. This conference was not doing any such thing.

  There was no such thing as a normal psychology or a normal society.

  Things changed. Things were complex and had aberrations. Things couldn’t be easily territorialized. Besides it being impossible to draw lines, how was one ever to measure deviations, if they’d deviated successfully?

  Ideals required ignoring the defects and deficiencies of a reality and replacing them with theoretically and carefully composed goals of superiority. Ideals were just ideologies. In which case, something was wrong with you if you tried to fix an ideal in this day and age.

  Also…

  It was stupid to be calling this a rash of incidents.

  Who knew why they deemed this a bizarre crime. It wasn’t like “bizarre crimes” had never taken place before.

  Even if in each era there were some vague trend of events noticed or unnoticed, the events were probably the result of several other events that occurred over the past several hundred years. Shizue was convinced that even if one tried to give numerical value to the events that led to the aberration and averaged a rate, there would be instances of too many or too few to come to a conclusion.

  People had been the victims of mass murder from a long time ago, every single day. Of course you wanted to stop it, or if not stop, control… This savage country used to slit the throats of murderers. It was also a country that under the guise of war rendered tens of thousands of lives useless. The only difference now was that children were being uniquely targeted, the method of killing was atrocious, and they couldn’t figure out how it happened. It was certainly disturbing but there was no right or wrong with a killer. In any murder case, a murderer was a murderer. Which stood to reason that there was no reason to get all up in arms now. You want normal?

  This is normal.

  This concept of the abnormal was no longer valid.

  And if you took the things that were abnormal or bizarre, you would eventually see they had no meaning.

  “The situation is imminent. We need a more concrete plan.”

  Shizue was through staring at the corner of her desk, so she looked to the right and saw the face of a fellow member of the welfare department. He looked obsequiously at the terminal, nodding stupidly along to everything the supervisor said.

  Did he feel anything? Or was it coded behavior, involuntary gesturing, meant for precisely this kind of situation.

  How insensitive.

  Rea
lly…

  He must not have felt anything. What did you expect from such insensitivity toward language?

  These people—a generation from the end of a millennium—were all obtuse when it came to language.

  You had to define your terms before starting any argument. Words were ambiguous; limiting the breadth of your words assured no confusion in argument. Terrible things happened when you didn’t respect this very basic premise, even when it came to something as simple as collecting data. It was impossible not to be prudent if you couldn’t see the face of the person you were talking to.

  It was hard dealing with people coming into a still-developing culture. They lacked skill and numbers, and because they had such low comprehension levels they were too eager to believe everything and too easily convinced to take sides. That was why they had to be personally confronted with information in order to get the information. Whatever it took…

  Whatever…

  Shizue’s larger generation, born in the twenty-first century, was raised to be personally offended by words whose use lacked consideration. Whatever. That was a pretty thickheaded thing to say. It riled her up despite herself.

  Still.

  Shizue held her breath. Then slowly let it out to calm the ire in her belly.

  The people who raised the insensitive generation that bruised Shizue now were probably even more insensitive. She tried to re-examine the bureaucrat’s face with a more historical appreciation of his stupidity.

  It made her feel better.

  He kept blathering.

  “—the body was discovered in this locality, and what’s more it’s a resident of the area, but besides the fact that the victim is a minor, and the possibility of this being one in a string of serial killings notwithstanding, we can’t treat this case as anything less than alarming.”

  That went without saying.

  Shizue looked at the clock on her monitor.

  They’d wasted 1,050 seconds just confirming the obvious.

  In other words.

  The murder discovered this morning wasn’t deemed part of the greater killing spree because this latest victim was male. The others had all been female.