Piercing

by Ryu Murakami

  Had someone seen them? In any case, he certainly couldn’t call the S&M club now. He hadn’t even disposed of the weapons yet. The girl lay in the entryway, moaning.

  ‘Owww! It hurrrts!’

  Minutes earlier, awaking from the briefest of naps, Chiaki had found herself back in touch with all five senses, and the pain had been excruciating. Her thigh was clumsily wrapped with a makeshift bandage, and when she stood up a rivulet of blood ran down her leg to the top of her foot. She was scared. She’d have to go to the hospital again. The man who always took her there had been at her side just a moment ago — she could still feel the warmth of his arms around her. Her teeth were coated with a sticky substance, and her tongue discovered something like a bit of rubber band stuck to her upper gum. She fished this out and looked at it. It had a pattern of little grooves, and when she realised it was a piece of human skin, she remembered having bitten the man’s finger. She could still hear the way he’d whispered in her ear: It’s all right, don’t be angry, there’s nothing to be afraid of. To think that even as he was whispering things like that in her ear, she was tearing his flesh with her teeth. . She limped to the bathroom, groaning with each step, but the man wasn’t in there either. She picked up the navy-blue suit he’d been wearing and shook it out, waving it in the air and shouting, ‘Where are you?’ Spotting his overnight bag next to the desk, she snatched it up and threw it against the wall, then hobbled to the door. Only after she’d stepped out into the corridor did she realise she wasn’t wearing any clothes. The door slowly swung closed behind her, and it had just dawned on her that she couldn’t get back inside when she saw the man running towards her from way down the corridor. But wait. This couldn’t be the same man — he was wearing different clothes. Terrified at this realisation, she’d scrambled to get away, but the man had caught her and dragged her back into the room. Once inside, she noticed the wound on his hand and thought: It’s him after all.

  ‘Listen to me!’ Kawashima said, gasping for breath. ‘Can you, understand, what I’m saying?’

  Chiaki nodded, staring at his face and trying to fix it in her memory. Of course I understand what you’re saying, she thought. You want to take me to the hospital, right?

  ‘First of all, would you, please, put your clothes on?’

  He had to get out of this hotel as soon as possible. Someone may have seen them just now, and he still had the knife and ice pick in his possession. He should probably take her to a hospital. Escort her to an emergency room, get her some treatment, and the S&M club could have no cause for complaint. He was the one who was being inconvenienced here, after all. Surely they’d be satisfied if he explained things properly and paid for six hours of her time.

  ‘Please? Please get dressed.’

  He’d throw everything into his bag and check out immediately. The fact that he was with a woman would make an impression on the clerk, but he couldn’t worry about that at this point. I haven’t actually done anything anyway, he told himself. Get in a taxi, take her to the nearest hospital, and wash my hands of the whole thing.

  ‘We’re going to the hospital. You can’t very well go naked, right?’

  Chiaki was ecstatic. So it really was him. The one who’d grabbed her from behind and whispered in her ear and made her realise how angry and scared she was, was the same one who always saw to it that she got to a hospital. It’s really him, she thought. I’ve finally met the mystery man.

  ‘OK,’ she said, peering at his face and nodding. ‘But let me call my office first, OK?’

  She limped to the telephone on the table, and Kawashima went into the bathroom to gather her things. The Swiss Army knife was on the floor. He used a tissue to pick it up, wiped the blood from the scissors, folded them back into the handle, and dropped the knife into her purse. He’d left the door open so he could hear her talking on the phone.

  ‘That’s right, I’m not feeling well so I’m going to finish up now, but it’s all right if I don’t come by the office, isn’t it? It’s, let’s see, just after ten, so. . four hours, right? Don’t worry, I’ll go to the hospital if it keeps getting worse.’

  Kawashima heard her hang up and turned on the shower to wash the remaining blood from the bathtub and floor. Even the blood that had already dried cleaned up nicely with a wet towel. I’m not feeling well and might have to go to the hospital — couldn’t have invented a better story myself, he thought with some relief. He carried the girl’s purse and undergarments and dress into the bedroom. She was sitting on the sofa, still naked except for that silvery ring in her nipple.

  ‘Can you help me with my panties?’ She lifted her legs so that her toes pointed at him. ‘I’m afraid I’ll hurt my leg.’

  He knelt before her with the rolled-up panties in both hands, slipped them over her feet and pushed them up her shins to her knees, then let go and told her to stand. She put a hand on his shoulder and rose unsteadily to her feet, her thin pubic hair nearly brushing against his face. Stretching the elastic as far as it would go, he managed to pull the panties up without disturbing the bandage, then unrolled the purple, translucent material to snugly encase her crotch and buttocks.

  ‘I don’t need to put on my stockings, right? They’ll just make me take them off again, right?’

  Kawashima grunted agreement and stood up. It was then that he noticed his overnight bag lying on its side against the opposite wall, and his open notebook beside it. His blood turned to ice. She must have read the notes, he thought, and a shiver emanating from his bitten finger rippled through every cell in his body. He experienced a surge of nausea and looked over at the girl, who had turned her back to him and was climbing into her slip. I have no choice now, he thought, and the chill and the nausea merged with a peculiar, bubbling excitement. I have no choice but to kill her. If she read the notes and lived, there couldn’t be a next time. She’d be sure to tell someone: I had a client like that once.

  It was a good thing he hadn’t disposed of the ice pick and combat knife after all.

  He had to walk slowly to keep from outpacing the girl, who was limping along beside him, holding his arm. Wind whistled through the canyon of skyscrapers, and on the empty street the cold seemed to seep into every pore. For a moment he even forgot about the pain in his finger.

  ‘It’s freezing,’ the girl said, turning up the collar of her coat, hunching her back and clinging even more tightly to his arm.

  What a strange woman, he thought — why’s she so thrilled about going to the hospital? Well, at least she hadn’t caused any problems when he was checking out. She’d clung to his arm like this in the elevator too, but when they reached the lobby she let go and headed straight for the exit without so much as a backward glance, as if they had nothing to do with each other. Probably second nature for a girl in her profession, but he was glad not to have been seen leaving the hotel with her.

  Chiaki hadn’t wanted to let go of the man’s arm in the lobby, but she guessed he wouldn’t care to be seen cuddling with her in front of a lot of people. Nobody likes to be seen with me in public, she thought. Even Mama, after I told her what You-know-who was doing, started walking a few steps ahead when we went out together. That’s me: a woman other people are ashamed to be seen with.

  Waiting for his receipt at the checkout counter, Kawashima had peered over the rim of his fake glasses to watch her crossing the lobby. She slumped along with bent head and rounded shoulders, dangling her sizeable bag of toys from one hand and her purse from the other.

  ‘Emergency room of the nearest hospital, please,’ Kawashima said, and the driver asked if Sogo Hospital in Yoyogi would be all right. Kawashima didn’t care which hospital it was, and neither did the girl. It was warm inside the taxi, but she snuggled up to him anyway, twisting her upper body to bury her face in his chest. There had been girls like this in the Home, Kawashima remembered. He knew she wasn’t doing this because she liked him, that any moment her attitude could change completely. You never knew what someone like this might do
. She might laugh hysterically out of sheer terror, only to end up sobbing and attacking you with her fists. She might be all over you one minute and act as if you didn’t exist the next.

  In other words, her clinging to him like this was by no means an indication that she hadn’t read the notes. He’d have to spend more time with her before he’d know for sure.

  ‘Emergency room, eh?’ the driver said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. ‘Anything wrong?’

  The girl laughed in a weird voice — a voice remarkably like the beeping of an ATM — and said, ‘I’m having a baby.’

  Kawashima shook his head. What an imbecilic thing to say. The driver had seen her standing at the kerb, and would surely have noticed how slender she was. You could have encircled her waist with two hands.

  ‘Aren’t I?’ she said, looking up at Kawashima.

  He didn’t bother to reply. He glanced at her moist eyes for a moment, but the expression on his face gave her nothing.

  ‘You look good with those glasses on,’ she said.

  He stared straight ahead, thinking: Hurry up and get us to the hospital.

  ‘Your eyes are really pretty through the lenses.’

  Chiaki had begun to sense that this man, her mystery man, was in fact very wealthy. He was so calm and dignified, and really kind of handsome up close. And somehow she knew she could trust him completely. Normally, whenever she said something she really believed, something straight from the heart, or made a clever joke, all she’d get from people were phony reactions. But this man wasn’t saying anything or reacting at all, so she knew he wasn’t a phony, or a liar. He’d been wearing that cheap suit at first, and the things he had on now — the coat, the sweatshirt and jeans, the shoes, even the glasses — were chintzy too, but maybe he was in disguise. Maybe he’d disguised himself because he was embarrassed about the whole idea of S&M. He’d reserved her for six hours but never even touched her in a sexual way. And he’d paid her for six even though she said she’d only charge him for four. He was nothing like all her other clients — Hurry up and take it off, hurry up and show it to me, hurry up and lick it, hurry up and suck it — he was different, in every way. And even though her leg had been hurting really bad, she’d got wet when he put her panties on for her. He must’ve gone to that hotel incognito for one night of fun, she thought, just to try something new. I bet he’s from Kyoto or Kobe, someplace like that. And I bet he’s even got another room at a different hotel, probably some unbelievable luxury suite.

  ‘Hey,’ she said softly, smiling up at him. ‘What hotel are you staying at really?’

  Kawashima’s body stiffened.

  I knew it, Chiaki said to herself — he’s a secret rich man.

  Sure enough, thought Kawashima — she read the notes.

  Most of the hospital’s windows were dark. The driver dropped them off at the side entrance and watched them move slowly, arm in arm, up the walkway to the door.

  ‘Listen, I’ll be waiting right here,’ Kawashima told the girl. ‘I don’t want to go in, but I won’t move from this spot. I don’t like hospitals, never did. I mean, the truth is, I’m afraid of them. Hospitals scare me.’

  His breath made little clouds as he spoke. They were standing in front of a lighted sign that said EMERGENCY OUTPATIENT RECEPTION. The reception room would be brightly lit, and he couldn’t afford to be seen with the girl in a place like that, especially by any doctors or nurses.

  ‘OK,’ said Chiaki, thinking: So that’s why he’s never around when I wake up — he doesn’t like hospitals. ‘But shouldn’t you have them look at your hand?’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Kawashima said. He took three 10,000-yen notes from his pocket and held them out to her. ‘Use this to pay.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said the girl, shaking her head. ‘You already paid me extra and everything.’ She stepped towards the door beneath the sign, then stopped and looked back at him. ‘You’ll be right here, right?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And you’ll stay with me tonight, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I won’t leave you.’

  I’ve got to snuff her as soon as possible and get this over with, Kawashima thought as he watched her enter the building. The longer I put it off, the greater the risk that someone will get a good look at us together.

  Chiaki shook her head when the nurse asked if she had her insurance card, and she had to present her driver’s licence and write her name and address on some forms. When she got in to see the doctor she told him she’d fallen off a bicycle. He inspected the wounds on her thigh and said that one of them was fairly deep and would require stitches. He didn’t question her story or ask about the shirt-cloth bandage, and though he must have seen the scars from all the previous incidents he didn’t say anything about them either. He injected her with a local anaesthetic in three different spots, disinfected the scraped knee and the wounds and sewed up the deep one, and covered them all with lots of gauze. He seemed to be in a hurry to finish.

  There had been about ten other people in the waiting room. A man with a shaved head sitting in a wheelchair, his eyes half-closed and his mouth hanging open, wearing just a thin cotton robe; a middle-aged woman with thick make-up whose big toe and ankle were swollen grotesquely, and who was supported by two thin young men sitting on either side of her; a group of four men dressed for construction work who smelled of sweat and sat with their heads bent together, discussing something in low voices; an old man with bulging purple veins on his hands reading a newspaper; a man cradling a baby, next to a woman holding a stuffed toy chipmunk and pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

  The anaesthetic had taken effect in just a few minutes, but Chiaki still felt a little pain when the suturing needle pierced her flesh, and beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip and the bridge of her nose. Each time the doctor’s arm brushed against her translucent purple panties she thought of the man with the glasses on, the way his eyes looked behind those lenses.

  ‘Is it OK to have sex?’ she asked as she was leaving the examination room. Without even glancing up from the chart he was scribbling on, the doctor muttered, ‘Just be careful the bandage doesn’t come off.’

  Kawashima had taken refuge across the street from the entrance, at a bus stop with partitions to protect him from the freezing wind. He’d decided that loitering outside an emergency room entrance at eleven o’clock on a cold night like this, holding two large bags, just wouldn’t look right. If a cop on patrol were to come along and question him and then ask to look in the bags, he’d find the girl’s S&M toys in one and an ice pick and combat knife in the other. At a bus stop, on the other hand, there was nothing suspicious about carrying luggage of any size. He had a clear view of the hospital doors from here, and if a bus were to come he had only to act as if he were waiting for a different one.

  His clothes — T-shirt, sweatshirt, and jeans under a cheap coat of thin material — were no match for this weather, though. He’d finally stopped bleeding, but his fingers were frozen, and he reopened the wound by putting his leather gloves back on. He wondered if he couldn’t separate himself from the cold and the pain, using the technique he’d developed as a boy. There were a lot of things he had to think through right now, while the girl was receiving treatment, but conditions like this robbed you of the power to process information. The technique. .

  It had been a cold night in winter, just like this, when he first discovered it. He’d run out of the house and slammed the sliding glass door behind him. Come to think of it, the palm of his left hand was hurting that night, too. Mother had coated it with industrial ammonia — the kind you dilute ten parts to one to use as insecticide. In a little while it had begun to make this awful smell, and he felt the skin of his palm burning. When he tried to wash the stuff off she pulled him away from the sink, and he ran outside. Don’t bother coming back! she shouted through the glass and locked the door, turning the latch slowly, deliberately. Clack. Her silhouette on the frosted glass was terrifying,
blurry at the edges and bigger than life, and he was freezing and in so much pain that he thought he was going to lose his mind. I must’ve made use of that, he thought, that feeling that I was going insane. Something came flooding into me, I remember, and something went flooding out, and suddenly I’d managed to separate myself from the pain and the cold and the fear.

  The one who’s here right now isn’t me. This pain isn’t mine. That was the general idea, but of course he hadn’t put it into words at the time. The words had all been erased, along with the feelings. He’d used the technique later on in life, too, when he lived with the stripper. He seemed to remember subtly shifting the focus of his eyes, like with one of those 3-D illustrations, but there was no way he could maintain that sort of concentration right now. And it was no use trying to analyse how he’d done it. The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words — the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

  About two hundred metres from the bus stop was a phone booth. If only he were inside it. He’d be completely protected from the wind, and he could even call Yoko and hear her voice if he wanted to. He was summoning up the sound of that soothing voice of hers when, absurdly, he began to imagine actually asking her advice.