by Kōji Suzuki
Mai’s eyes opened wide as she asked, “How did you know it’s written that way?”
Ando couldn’t answer. Was this some sort of premonition? He felt he’d be coming into close contact with the man fairly soon.
5
For the first time in nearly a year and a half, Ando had allowed himself some saké with his dinner. This was the first time since the death of his son that he’d even wanted alcohol. He had liked to drink. It wasn’t that he’d given it up out of a sense of guilt for the boy’s death. Alcohol tended to amplify whatever mood he was in to begin with. If he was in a good mood, it made him jubilant; if he felt sad, it just made him sadder. For the last year and a half he’d been shrouded in grief, and so naturally he’d been unable to drink. He had the feeling that if he took one swallow he wouldn’t be able to stop until he was falling-down drunk. He was afraid he’d be unable to control an impulse to die should it arise. He didn’t have the courage to go there.
It was raining, rare for late October. It was a misty rain, wafting underneath his umbrella like smoke, wetting his neck. He didn’t feel cold. A faint glow from the saké warmed his body. As he walked back to his apartment, he kept sticking his hand out from beneath the umbrella to see if he could catch raindrops on his palm, but it didn’t work. The rain seemed to be coming not down from the sky, but up from below.
On his way down the road from the station, he wavered in front of a convenience store, thinking to buy a bottle of whiskey. Brightly lit skyscrapers towered over him. The cityscape was more beautiful than any natural landscape. The government edifices, all lit up, glowed cannily in the rain. He stared at the flashing red light at the very top of a building until it began to seem like a message in Morse code. It flashed on and off, slowly, like some thickheaded, barely articulate monster.
Ever since he’d separated from his wife he’d been living in a dilapidated four-story apartment building facing Yoyogi Park. It was definitely a step down from the South Aoyama condo he’d lived in before. There was no parking, so he’d had to give up his brand-new BMW. In his miserable little studio apartment he felt like he was a student again. There was nothing in the place to suggest that he cared about how he lived. The only furniture was a bookcase and an aluminum bed.
He went inside and walked over to the window to open it. The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
He recognized the speaker immediately. There was only one person who’d start a conversation with him like that, without bothering to identify himself: Miyashita, another classmate from his med school days. Miyashita was currently an Assistant Researcher in Pathology.
“Sorry not to call earlier.” Ando knew why Miyashita had called, so he apologized before he could be reproached.
“I was at your lab today.”
“I was at the M.E.’s office.”
“Must be nice having two paying jobs.”
“What are you talking about? Your job’s tenure track.”
“Never mind that. You haven’t RSVP’d about Funakoshi’s fare well party.”
Funakoshi, over at Internal Medicine, was leaving to take over his father’s clinic back home, the old man was retiring. Miyashita had taken it upon himself to organize a send-off for him. He’d already told Ando the time and place, and Ando was supposed to get back to him right away to tell him whether or not he’d be attending. He had gotten wrapped up in other things and forgotten. If his son hadn’t died, Ando would probably have been the one getting the big send-off. His stint in forensics was only supposed to be temporary, a stepping-stone. He’d planned to get the basics down pat, then switch to clinical work in preparation for taking over his wife’s father’s clinic … One moment of carelessness, and the whole blueprint had been ruined.
“When is it again?” Ando wedged the receiver in between his ear and his shoulder as he flipped through the pages of his planner.
“Next Friday.”
“Friday, huh?” He didn’t need to check his schedule. Only three hours ago, as he and Mai had parted, they’d made a dinner date for that evening. Six o‘clock next Friday. It was clear which commitment should take priority. For the first time in ten years, he’d asked a young woman out to dinner, and somehow, she hadn’t bolted. There was no way he was going to send things back to square one. Ando felt the date could be the moment of truth as to whether or not he was ever going to wake up from his long nightmare.
“So how about it?” Miyashita nagged.
“Sorry, but I can’t make it. Prior engagement.”
“Really? You sure this isn’t the same old thing?”
The same old thing? Ando didn’t know what that meant. He couldn’t remember if he used any excuse habitually to turn down his friend’s invitations.
“What same old thing?”
“Your not being able to drink. When I know for a fact you used to drink like a fish.”
“It’s not that.”
“Look, if you don’t want to drink, you don’t have to. Fake it with oolong tea or something. But you’ve got to be there.”
“I said it’s not that.”
“So you can drink?”
“Sort of.”
“Wait—is it some girl you’re after?”
Miyashita’s intuition was sharper than one would have guessed from his rotund physique. Ando always tried to play things as straight as he could with Miyashita, but he wasn’t sure he could say he was “after” a woman he’d only met twice. He didn’t know how to respond, so he said nothing.
“She must be something if she made you forget Funakoshi’s send-off.”
Ando still had nothing to say.
“Well, I’m happy for you. Don’t worry—hey, why don’t you bring her along? We’d welcome her, you know? With open arms.”
“We’re not at that stage yet.”
“You’re taking things slowly?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Hey, I won’t twist your arm.”
“Sorry.”
“Do you know how many times you’ve apologized during this conversation? I get the picture. I’ll put you down for a no-show. To make up for it, I’m going to spread the word that you’ve got a girl, so brace yourself.”
Miyashita laughed, and Ando knew he wouldn’t be able to get mad at the guy. The only comfort Ando had been afforded during the gut-wrenching days after his son died and his wife left him had come from a present Miyashita had given him. Miyashita hadn’t told him to “cheer up” or anything meaningless of that sort; instead he’d given Ando a novel, saying, “Read this.” It was the first Ando had heard of his friend’s interest in literature; he also discovered for the first time that books could genuinely give strength. The novel was sort of a Bildungsroman, the story of an emotionally and physically scarred youth who learns to overcome his past. The book still occupied an honored place on Ando’s bookshelf.
“By the way,” said Ando, changing the subject, “did you learn anything from Ryuji’s tissue sample?”
It was Miyashita’s Pathology Department that usually handled any diseased samples that needed to be analyzed.
“Oh, that.” Miyashita sighed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know quite what to tell you. I’m at my wits’ end with that. What do you think of Professor Seki?”
Seki was the doctor in charge of the pathology lab. He was famous for his research on the initial formation of cancer cells.
“What do I think of him? Why?”
“The old man says some funny things sometimes.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s not the arterial blockage that he’s focusing on. You remember the throat was ulcerated?”
“Of course.”
It wasn’t very noticeable, but he definitely remembered it. He’d overlooked it until his assistant had drawn his attention to it. After the autopsy, he’d cut the affected portion out complete.
“He took one look at it with his n
aked eye, and what do you think the old man said it looked like?”
“Knock it off and just tell me.”
“Alright, alright, I’ll tell you: he said it looked like what you see on smallpox victims.”
“Smallpox?” Ando yelped in spite of himself.
Smallpox had been stamped out through a concerted global vaccination effort. Since a case in Somalia in 1977, not a single patient had been reported worldwide. In 1979, the WHO had declared the disease eradicated. Smallpox only infects humans. No new victims meant that the virus itself had effectively ceased to exist. The last specimens were being kept frozen in liquid nitrogen in Moscow and in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia. If a new case had appeared, it could only have come from one of the two research facilities, but, given the tight security the virus was under, it was unthinkable.
“Surprised?”
“It has to be a mistake.”
“Probably is. Still, that’s what the old guy said. Respect his opinion.”
“When will you have the results?”
“In about a week. Listen, if we actually do turn up the smallpox virus, it’ll be huge for you.”
Miyashita sounded bemused; he didn’t believe it himself. He was sure it was an error of some sort. It was only natural, since medical professionals their age had never even had the chance to see a real smallpox patient. The only way for them to learn about the illness was through specialist works on viruses. Ando had seen a picture once, in a book, of a child covered with smallpox eruptions. A cute kid, mercilessly defiled by the pea-sized pustules, turning a hollow gaze on the camera. Those sores were the primary visible characteristic of smallpox. Ando seemed to remember reading that they reached their peak seven days after infection …
“First of all, Ryuji didn’t even have a rash on his skin.”
That much had been clear at a glance. His skin had glistened smoothly under the glare of the lights.
“Listen. This is so stupid I don’t even want to say it. Did you know there’s a strain of smallpox that produces obstructions in blood vessels, with a near one hundred percent mortality rate?”
Ando shook his head, ever so slightly. “No.”
“Well, there is.”
“Don’t tell me that’s what caused Ryuji’s arterial blockage.”
“Fine, then, I won’t. But listen, that sarcoma he had on the interior wall of his artery—what was that? You looked at it under magnification.”
Ando didn’t answer.
“What caused it?”
Ando couldn’t answer.
“I hope you’re inoculated,” Miyashita laughed. “It’d be pretty funny, though, wouldn’t it? If that’s what it turned out to be.”
“Jokes aside, I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“Forget smallpox, but suppose the sarcoma in his artery was actually caused by some sort of virus. There should be other people who’ve died with the same symptoms.”
Miyashita grunted. He was weighing the possibilities. “Maybe. Can’t rule it out.”
“If you have the time, could you ask people at the other university hospitals? You’ve got the connections. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Gotcha. I’ll see if any other bodies presented the same symptoms. If this turns out to be part of a larger syndrome, we could be in trouble.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll have a good laugh over this, I’ll bet.”
They said goodbye and hung up at the same time.
The damp night air had stolen in through the open window. Ando went to shut it, sticking his head out before he did. The rain seemed to have stopped. The street directly below was lit by street-lamps at regular intervals; tire tracks stretched into the distance, twin dry stripes. Headlights streamed past on the No. 4 Metropolitan Expressway. The seamless whole of the city’s din had become waterlogged, turning into a listless eddy. He shut the window, abruptly cutting off the sound.
Ando took a medical dictionary down from the bookshelf and leafed through it. He knew next to nothing about smallpox. It was the kind of thing there was no point in researching unless you had a scholarly interest in viruses. Smallpox was the common name for the viruses variola major and minor, genus orthopoxvirus, in the poxvirus family. Variola major had a fatality rate of thirty to fifty percent, while variola minor’s was under five percent. There were also pox viruses that affected monkeys, rabbits, cows, and rats, but there had been hardly any cases of these in Japan; even if they did break out, they involved no serious danger, causing only localized rashes.
Ando closed the dictionary. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Professor Seki had only glanced at the sore with his naked eye. And what he’d said was hardly a conclusive diagnosis. All he’d said was that the affected area looked like what happened with smallpox. Ando made denial after denial to himself. Why was he trying so hard to deny the possibility? Simple: if by some chance a virus was discovered in Ryuji’s body, then he’d have to worry about whether Mai Takano had been infected. She and Ryuji had been intimate. In the case of smallpox, eruptions would occur in the mucous membrane inside the mouth; when they ulcerated, the virus would spread. As a result, saliva was a major medium for the spread of the disease. Visions of Mai’s lips touching Ryuji’s danced in his head. He hurriedly shook them off.
He poured whiskey into a glass and drank it down straight. The alcohol, after a year and a half of temperance, had a powerful effect on him. As it burned his throat and seeped into his stomach, he was engulfed in lethargy. He sat on the floor, leaned back against the bed, and spread his limbs carelessly. Only a part of his brain remained alert. He stared at the stains on the ceiling.
The day before his boy had drowned, Ando had dreamed of the ocean. Looking back now, he knew the dream had come true. He’d known his son’s fate ahead of time, and he still hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Regret had made him a more cautious man since.
And now, he was having a definite premonition. A piece of newspaper had poked its way out of Ryuji’s belly after the autopsy, and he’d been able to take the numbers written on it and find the word “ring”. He couldn’t believe it was just a coincidence. Ryuji was trying to tell him something—in his own way, using a medium only he could manipulate. By now, most of Ryuji’s body had been reduced to ash, all but a small part which remained in the form of a tissue sample. Ando got the feeling that even in his dismembered, tissue-sampled state, Ryuji was speaking to him. Which was why he felt his friend was still alive. His body had been cremated, but Ryuji was not without words and some means to communicate them.
Ando kept fiddling with this notion as he loitered just this side of incoherence. A certain delusion—it could be a joke or it could be for real—was producing a new storyline.
Utterly ridiculous.
Objective reason reared its head. In that instant, Ando felt as if he were gazing with the eyes of a disembodied spirit at his own body, spread-eagled on the bed. His body posture looked familiar to him. He’d seen that pose somewhere recently. In the midst of an overpowering sleepiness, he recalled the Polaroids of Ryuji’s dead body. It was the same pose: head back on the bed, arms and legs flung wide. He fought off sleep and got to his feet so that he could crawl into bed and pull up the covers. He couldn’t stop trembling until he dropped off to sleep.
6
He finished his second autopsy at the M.E.’s office, then headed back to the university, leaving the clean-up to his colleagues. Miyashita had contacted him, hinting at a development in the pursuit of Ryuji’s cause of death, and Ando had been on tenterhooks ever since. He darted up the steps out of the subway.
He entered the university hospital by the main entrance and then crossed over to the old wing. The new wing, which housed the main entrance, was only two years old. It was a totally modern seventeen-story building connected by a complex of halls and stairways to the old wings, which crowded around like high-rise apartments. The whole place was like a maze. First-time visitors invariably got lost. New and o
ld intertwined, and the color, width, and smell of the hallways—even the squeak of his shoes on the floor—shifted as he pressed on. When he stopped at the iron door that marked the boundary and glanced back at the new wing’s wide corridor, he lost his sense of perspective momentarily. He was overcome by an illusion that he was gazing at the future.
The door to the Pathology Department was open a crack, and he could see Miyashita’s back where he sat on a stool. Rather than being ensconced in his lab equipment as Ando had expected, he was turned toward the central table, going through some literature. His face was down close to the book opened before him, and he was flipping its pages rapidly. Ando approached him from behind and tapped him on a burly shoulder.
Miyashita turned around and took off his glasses, then turned the book over and laid it on the table. The title on the spine read, A Beginner’s Guide to Astrology. Ando was taken aback.
Miyashita twirled on his stool until he was facing Ando and then asked, with a straight face, “So, what’s your date of birth?”
Ignoring him, Ando picked up the Beginner’s Guide and leafed through it.
“Horoscopes? What are you, a high-school girl?”
“You’d be surprised at how often this stuff hits the mark. Now tell me when you were born.”
“Never mind that. Listen.” Ando pulled another stool out from under the table and sat down. He moved carelessly, though, and knocked the Beginner’s Guide off the table. It fell to the floor with a thud.
“Calm down, will ya?” Miyashita bent over—it looked like it pained him—to retrieve the book. But Ando wasn’t interested in any book.
“So did you find a virus?” he demanded.
Miyashita shook his head. “My first step was to check with other universities’ forensic medicine departments to see if bodies had been brought in with the same symptoms as Ryuji. I’ve got the results of that inquiry.”
“So, were there any?”
“Yup. Six altogether, as far as I could determine.”