Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  This is at least better than it was then. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get that bad.

  Burnt, half-naked people had been squeezed tightly together in the gymnasium that the elementary school had used on rainy days, their skin peeling, redolent of blood and pus. There had been weak, crying voices—and screaming voices—of still-living babies with half the skin peeled from their bodies. Young women with pubic hair singed brown from where their clothes had caught fire, and countless shards of glass stuck in bosoms that had looked like the Buddhist Hell of the Mountains of Needles. The new medicine called “cryptocyanin,” which had had not been all that effective …

  What’s happened here?! In the bottom of his heart, the doctor suddenly groaned weakly as he stood in the doorway of the hospital office. My life is surely going to end amid blood and pus and the moans of my patients.

  Exhaustion like a great black bat suddenly unfolded its wings inside his skull, and in an instant his consciousness was receding into the distance. In that instant, all of the innumerable horrors he had encountered over the past thirty years came welling up in his mind. The one that his mind latched onto was that terrible train wreck at Tsurumi. Dr. Tsuchiya had been at a bar near his home in Shinagawa. He had heard about it from a television news update, immediately run to get the medical bag he always took with him on house calls, and rushed over to the site. Nobody had called them, but many doctors had come running from all quarters as soon as they had heard, to work in silence, free of charge. Before the police’s request for assistance had even gone out, nurses had arrived with their families in tow, and the city’s general practitioners had begun treating the injured and seeing to their accommodations. Dr. Tsuchiya thought suddenly of disease and death and of those who battled against it. Because it was true—this really was a battle, after all. An endless, boundless battle. Not just at K Hospital, but right now, at each and every hospital throughout all of Japan, other doctors were fighting the same battle. Just like Dr. Tsuchiya, they were fighting on without sleep or rest, with no time to spare for eating meals, growing so exhausted that they could barely keep standing. And not only in Japan, but all over the world.

  Dr. Tsuchiya shut his eyes and between ragged breaths tried to visualize the force strength of his comrades. Presently, the number of general practitioners in Japan numbered around one hundred twenty thousand. A scant hundred twenty thousand! One hundred twenty thousand, for a population of one hundred million. Even adding in the hospital doctors, interns, and nurses, the number still probably wouldn’t break three hundred thousand. As for hospital beds, there were around a million of them—which meant there was one bed for every thirty patients. And not every patient was an influenza case either; there were countless people with other illnesses and injuries as well.

  There are too few of us, thought Dr. Tsuchiya. But how many doctors would be enough? A hundred million people aren’t all going to grow up to be doctors. Normally, there’re so many of us that some are hardly busy enough to support themselves. But once an epidemic reaches these proportions, there aren’t nearly enough. Maybe it’s time to rethink how we deliver medical care in this country …

  Exhaustion suddenly clutched at his heart with icy hands. Dr. Tsuchiya bore it with his brow tightly knitted.

  “Won’t you come in and have something to drink?” said Tanabe from Respiratory Medicine at the door.

  “Thanks,” the doctor answered at last. “I think I will …”

  The doctor’s lounge was being used to examine patients, and even the basement cafeteria was being used for temporary hospital rooms, so there was no choice but to use a corner of the cramped hospital office for taking breaks. In a metal mesh basket was a small mountain of cheap teacups, piled upside-down. A large aluminum kettle and several half-finished cups of tea had been left scattered around on a table that was covered with scratches. There were two large plates of rice balls as well, one of which was now mostly empty.

  “Looks like a typhoon blew through here, eh?” Tanabe said with a slight smile as he helped himself to a rice ball. “The Ladies’ Association and the volunteer housewives have been bringing in emergency provisions. Not just for us either; they’re cooking rice for people in the neighborhood too. They’ve been a huge help to families that have been hit by this thing.”

  “Emergency provisions, eh?” Dr. Tsuchiya said, smiling just a little. “Japan never changes, does it? My mother told me that in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, she’d often make three thousand rice balls in a single night. To hear her tell it, the palms of her hands would swell up and bleed.”

  “But these days they all have electric rice cookers. I hear they’re using the kitchen facilities at elementary schools and kindergartens now. When there are wars or fires or floods, you can always count on them.” Tanabe picked up another rice ball and held it out. “Have one?”

  “No thanks. Just coffee for me.”

  He poured coffee from the red pot into a cheap teacup and drank. A film of dark grime clung to its surface. It was lukewarm and weak—like drinking muddy water. Even so, to his parched, cracked lips it was a merciful rain from heaven.

  “Did you catch the midday news?” Tanabe asked, licking off the grains of rice stuck to his fingers.

  “No. What’s happened?”

  “The number of deaths has finally hit ten million.”

  “That many?” Tsuchiya’s hand froze, holding the teacup.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” muttered Tanabe in a low voice of utter exhaustion. “The mortality rate is thirty percent. You think Japan might end up losing more people from this than it lost in the war?”

  “More,” Dr. Tsuchiya said with a nod. “Pretty soon … twice that number.”

  “It hasn’t even been two months since this started,” Tanabe said in a strained voice. “Tsuchiya—this is really bad. Do you think this is really even influenza we’re up against here?”

  Tsuchiya stared dazedly into the dirty-looking brown liquid in the bottom of his teacup for a moment, then, as if deciding his course of action, filled it to the brim once more. “Tanabe, how’s your wife?” he asked unexpectedly.

  “Haven’t seen her in nearly a month,” Tanabe said with a frown and drooping shoulders. “The hospitals over there in Kanagawa are full to bursting too.”

  “It’s been a month, has it?” Tsuchiya said vacantly. “I guess it has. After all, look at how dark that shirt collar of yours has gotten.”

  “Doctor, yours is even worse,” Tanabe said. “How’s your boy?”

  “Sent him off to Yamagata with my wife,” said Dr. Tsuchiya, holding on firmly to his teacup, gripping it tightly with both hands. His body was rocking back and forth just slightly. “I wonder if it’s been a month apart for us too? It’s strange, really. I mean, back when all of this was just starting, I just had this uneasy feeling, so I, ah, ordered a strategic dispersal, you know? Send them away, and it’s less likely to get us all.”

  He fell silent then, but after a long pause began to speak again in a murmur, as if talking to himself. “Is it because I’m getting old? My only son … he’s so precious to me. And I’d kept putting my wife off because I didn’t want to be a father. And if this thing gets him too, it would’ve been better if we’d never had him.”

  “We first met during the war,” Tanabe said. “A lot of young people died then. Children too.”

  “Yeah.” The doctor raised the teacup to his lips. He drank noisily, but his Adam’s apple didn’t move. Coffee ran down his chin and into his collar. He didn’t seem to notice. “Where were you deployed before we met?”

  “The Soviet-Manchurian border.” Tanabe rubbed at his eyes. “After that, Siberia. For three, no, four years.”

  Dr. Tsuchiya started slowly rocking back and forward again. When Tanabe looked at him, he was shocked to see that the doctor seemed to have aged ten or fifteen years all at once. Sitting there with his exhausted back hunched forward and rounded, holding on to the teacup firmly, he looke
d almost like a monkey. His skin was pale, dry, and covered with grime, his cheeks were hollow, and his eyes sunken. His jaw hung loose, covered with the whiskers that had started to appear since he’d stopped shaving. He looked like a dead man. The lid above one of his filmy eyes twitched with a nervous tic.

  “Why don’t you lie down for just a bit,” said Tanabe.

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “What about a shot of glucose?”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  Tanabe took a long pull on his cigarette. When he exhaled, he felt a great wave of drowsiness overcome him. It felt as if it were about to drag him down into slumber right then and there.

  “I hear the research center at J School of Medicine has a problem too. They’re finding golden staph in patients’ bronchial tubes and in the lobes of their lungs again.”

  “It was like that with the Asian flu too,” Dr. Tsuchiya mumbled inside his mouth. “If you got pneumonia because of a double infection of those two, you were pretty much out of luck. After all, antibiotics don’t do a thing against staph.”

  “Well, the really weird thing is that the staph this time isn’t reproducing well enough to cause inflammation, and it seems to just disappear almost immediately. Come to think of it, don’t you think the number of deaths from complications of pneumonia is rather low this time?”

  Dr. Tsuchiya gave a faint nod. “That’s true. This flu really is a strange one. There are even double infections with that parainfluenza I was talking about earlier. There are things about it that don’t make sense if it’s a regular influenza.”

  “You think so too, Doctor?” said Tanabe around a harsh cough as he crushed out his cigarette. “Leaving aside the issue of just how bizarre it is that the vaccine has such a weak effect, surely you must find it strange that this thing is wrecking people’s hearts and making them keel over, one after another, without even getting very sick. Do you think that some other, unknown illness may be going around camouflaged by this flu?”

  “That’s a … an excellent thought,” Tsuchiya said, speaking very slowly with a yawn that looked as though it might make his jaw creak. “But if it’s viral … it’s probably not something we’ve encountered before.”

  “Certainly, people both at home and abroad have suspected such a thing since early on. Even in Japan, I hear they’re using a 2.35 Angstrom electron microscope—the best in the world—to hunt for a contagion.”

  “Japan has the best electron microscopes in the world,” said Dr. Tsuchiya in a voice that sounded half asleep. His eyelids were already flickering closed.

  “I just wonder if maybe this contagion is conducting a coordinated assault with the influenza virus group. Hiding among viruses we already know about.”

  Dr. Tsuchiya was silent for a long moment but at last said, “Interesting,” with a slender thread of saliva hanging from his lower lip. “Very interesting, but that’s a theoretician’s …”

  “I’m against the idea of planning countermeasures on the assumption that this epidemic is influenza,” said Tanabe in a fervent voice. “We’ve got to find the other contagion. The real contagion.”

  “But either way … it’s already too late now.”

  “Dr. Tsuchiya—” Tanabe looked out the window, suddenly besieged by a sensation of intense unease. Gray clouds were beginning to appear in what had been a clear blue sky. “—how long is this going to go on?”

  There was no answer. When Tanabe suddenly looked back at Dr. Tsuchiya, he was still supporting with both hands a teacup full of coffee that had by now lost every trace of its former warmth. He was breathing slow, regular breaths that made it clear he had fallen asleep. His thin nostrils laboriously expanded and contracted like the gills of a dying fish. Tanabe cautiously rose without making a sound, went over to the window, and took a deep breath. After that, he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands for a moment and then opened them again.

  “There’s an end … to everything that happens,” Dr. Tsuchiya said in a voice that was unmistakably him talking in his sleep. “Except the problem is … what kind of ending you get …”

  Tanabe turned back and watched the doctor, observing his state for a moment. Then taking care to soften his footsteps, he slid past him sideways, exiting the office and heading back out into the pandemonium that waited in the corridor.

  The problem is what kind of ending you get.

  That was true. At some point an end would come, both to the fierce battle they were waging and to this elusive disaster they were fighting. But how would it all end? The numbers of both the infected and the dead were still rising. There was no telling how far it would spread or what course it might take. This limp gray curtain of misfortune—was it to envelop all of Japan? All of the world? If this loathsome Tibetan flu were to infect all of the hundred million people in Japan at a mortality rate of thirty percent, it would mean that thirty million people would …

  His mouth started to feel dry and he hissed unconsciously when he sucked in the air. Tanabe was shocked at the thought.

  Thirty million. That’s . . .

  But then he realized that right alongside this fear, another bottomless pit had opened its maw before him. For an instant, he felt everything going dark right before his eyes. The death rate had hit thirty percent in the space of two months. Which meant that there was no guarantee that the mortality rate had reached its peak.

  The shock hit him, and as was his habit when trying to get a grip on himself, he reflexively reached into the pocket of his dirty lab coat to rummage for his cigarettes. That’s when he realized he had left his pack in the office. He turned around and hurried back to the office through the hallway filled with milling patients. He picked up his cigarettes from the top of the desk where he had left them, and realized then that Dr. Tsuchiya was still sitting with the same posture as when he had left him, both hands tightly gripping the teacup even as he slept. Just as he was tiptoeing back out of the office, Tanabe had the sudden feeling that there was something wrong about that posture. It was then that he remembered: in that position, he looked just like …

  During Tanabe’s long, harsh internment in Siberia, he and the other prisoners had endured poor food, horrible winters, frostbite, itching, harsh work schedules, beatings, prisoners ratting one another out, overwork, malnutrition, and heartbreaking yearnings for home … When they had talked about anything, they had spoken only of the foods of their homeland. When the late spring had come to Ragel for the second time, he had seen one of his comrades-in-arms sitting in the same position that Dr. Tsuchiya was in right now, holding on firmly with both hands to a bowl of thin rice gruel. While rocking his body back and forth just slightly, he had lifted up the empty eyes of his starved face and muttered: “I wonder when I can go back to Japan …” As he had been speaking, his body had suddenly stopped rocking, and that man died still holding on to that bowl of food, as though doing so had been part of his final meditations before facing the afterlife.

  “Dr. Tsuchiya?” Tanabe called out without thinking, feeling bad for waking him. “How about putting some of these chairs together so you can lie down? Doctor?”

  It was only when he lightly put a hand on Tsuchiya’s shoulder that Tanabe realized the man sitting in the chair was no longer breathing.

  No sooner had June arrived than the rains began. It was from that point that the bodies began to appear on Ginza Avenue.

  Small bodies had already begun to appear in the alleyways of the Ginza district starting around the beginning of May—these were the corpses of plump gray rats. Rats lay dead in roadside gutter openings and on the concrete plates that covered the gutters, swollen and rounded at one end and pointed at the other—tear-shaped balls of short gray fur.

  Among the back streets of Ginza, where hundreds if not thousands of bars and restaurants jostled against one another, rats were not an especially unusual sight. Considering the leftover fish and scraps that were constantly being thrown out, the suitable temperatures, and the compl
ex network of gutters, these nasty-looking, sweet little gourmands had discovered for themselves a veritable Garden of Eden, and there they gave birth, multiplied, and filled the shadowed places. They swam through the lamplight of that district praised as Japan’s most historic and stylish, darting across the paths of proud ladies who wore their lipstick and powder too thick, occasionally being so rude as to wind themselves around ankles, eliciting screams, coquettish squeals, and opportunities for would-be Casanovas to make their moves. Someone would gravely intone that the rats were preparing to rise up in conquest of humanity, and there the matter would rest.

  But now the corpses of these felonious little imps had at last begun to appear on the streets. This began in the dim spaces between buildings and in the corners of alleyways—the cleaning workers who came round to clear away the detritus of late-night and early-morning entertainments would say to one another, “Look at all of these things!” as they left them where they lay with little concern, and the hostesses and bar madams would wonder aloud to one another who it might be that was using rat poison in this manner.

  At last, however, on a clear day before noon, a single rat was seen running out into a tree-lined thoroughfare along which there were yet only a few people out walking. Just as it was attempting to cross the street in great haste, it fell over and died. By evening of that day, dozens of newly dead rats lay along the route of the train tracks. At that time, however, the traffic was still heavy, and under the hard, cruel tires of countless wheels, the bodies of the rats were immediately crushed, flattened, dried, and made one with the asphalt.

  The next day, however, the number of dead rats was in the hundreds, if not the thousands. Before the eyes of people waiting at crosswalks, numerous rats came crawling drunkenly out of the shadows, only to keel right over, twitch their slender whiskers, and then lie still.