by Kōbō Abe
“Don’t give up easy, do you? All right, then, I’ll tell you; it goes direct to the third floor. The doctors’ lounge is up there, and the nurses’ station and emergency operating rooms, stuff like that. Nobody goes up but emergency patients with admission cards, and nobody comes down but certified dead bodies… . Your wife couldn’t have been on this elevator, mister, because she wasn’t either one yet.”
“Then where is she?”
The guard turned and opened the stainless-steel door. It was smooth and heavy. An invisible stream of cold air poured out around their feet.
“This is the morgue, where they keep the bodies in cold storage. When it’s empty we use it to chill our beer. Comes in handy. Some of the guys go ahead and use it even when there’s a stiff in there, but not me. I only use it when the sign says ‘Vacant.’ ”
He brought out a bottle of beer, applied it to the edge of the door handle, and expertly pried off the cap. It barely foamed at all, no doubt because it was chilled. He stuck an arm in behind the reception window and took out a teacup, gave its rim a wipe with his finger, and poured in some of the contents of the bottle.
“I wish you wouldn’t dodge the question.”
The guard gulped down one cupful and poured out a second, mumbling in a flat, subdued voice, “You want me to take down your phone number? If I find anything out I’ll let you know right away.”
The man stared silently at the guard’s hands. He kept staring, not moving a muscle, until the bottle was completely empty.
At last the guard seemed to break down. He wiped away drops of sweat and gave a sigh, as though he were the loser in a game of endurance, beaten by the man’s surprising obstinacy, and there was nothing to do but concede defeat. Tracing bubbles in the bottom of the teacup with his eyes, in a secretive voice he finally began to open up and talk.
In order to prove for himself just how impossible it was to escape at night from the outpatient waiting room, where his wife had last been heard from, the man ought to go right over and make an on-the-spot investigation. Unfortunately, the day guard had already come on duty, and the cleaning women had started their operations; if he poked his head in now and gave them a chance to remember what he looked like, that would only cause trouble for any later strategy. The key to success lay in doing everything as discreetly as possible. Right now the best thing to do was trust him, the guard, and take his word for it that the rabbit had in fact been cornered in a silk hat with no way out.
Her disappearance was by no means a mere coincidence or accident of some kind, as the man assumed. There was positively no way to get out of that sealed room without the help of an accomplice. That would no doubt be a hard point for him to swallow, but there was nothing to do but face the facts bravely, head on.
Even assuming that there has been an accomplice, though, who could it have been? The first possibility that suggested itself —he hesitated to say this in front of the man—was none other than the young doctor on emergency-call duty that night. Of course, the ward doctors and other hospital employees were not above suspicion either, for that matter, but for the very reason that there were so many of them, it would have been difficult to escape the watchful eyes of nurses and others. Besides, before arriving at the outpatient building, anyone attempting such a thing would have had to go down long corridors and cross under the lights in the garden; even if such a person had been wearing a white uniform, assurance of safe conduct, any patrolman in the vicinity would surely have taken note of such suspicious behavior. On the other hand, the doctor on emergency duty could safely move around unaccompanied, and since he had a master key to the second-floor locker room, he could go unseen from the third-floor lounge down to the waiting room any time. Those were ideal conditions for leading her around. Besides, there was considerable gossip about what went on between that surgeon and the nurses; he was still single, even if his hair was horribly greasy. No matter how you looked at it, it had to have been a deliberate, prearranged rendezvous. Even so, it was going pretty far to call out an ambulance just to indulge in a little hanky-panky. He must have had the hots so bad it had gone to his head.
“Do you mean to say that with all those suspicions, you just stood by and let the whole thing happen right under your very nose?”
“Like it or not, the guy’s a doctor.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Nobody wants to have the wrong thing put down on their chart in the patient evaluation space, right?”
“That’s got nothing to do with me. I’ve never had more than a cold or the measles in my life.”
“You’ve got plenty of guts.”
“Tell me his number and I’ll call him up myself.”
“The phone’s no good. What kind of an idiot would confess to anything over the telephone? You’ve got to go straight to the scene of the crime and get hold of some hard proof. If you really mean business, I’ll give you a hand. I’ll show you the way to the doctors’ lounge if you follow me carefully. The doctor leaves there at nine. But let’s get one thing straight: I don’t want to get mixed up in this any more than I already am. It might surprise you to find this out, but as a matter of fact I’m a model patient. A kind of trusty. Now that I’ve got myself a good job, I don’t want anything to mess it up.”
It was an odd elevator, skipping the second floor and stopping only at the third. It moved at a crawl, but made an enormous racket. The odor of antiseptic solution stung their nostrils.
He learned from the guard how to behave inconspicuously inside the hospital. His ordinary street clothes were no problem, but since they meant he had to be either a sickbed visitor or a dealer of some kind, they put certain restrictions on his range of actions and on the time period in which he could afford to be seen. The safest course would be to wear a white coat. There were subtle distinctions in the types worn by doctors, technicians, office workers, and so on; ultimately they broke down into over a dozen different categories. Of course, that made them all the harder to get hold of; you needed a hospital identity card to buy one from the main store. Next best was to dress like a patient or a custodian. Patients had no fixed style of dress; they could wear a nightgown or pajamas or anything suitable for wearing in bed. (In that sense, his wife had been dressed in the most inconspicuous way possible. However, few patients were normally up and about during the hours from eight till ten in the morning.) A custodian naturally had to wear something immediately identifiable as work clothes.
All he could do for the time being was take off his suit coat, loosen his necktie, and try to look as comfortable as possible, hoping that he fell somewhere between a lab technician who had soiled his uniform and a custodian who had torn his work clothes. Then he remembered the sample pair of jump shoes in his briefcase, and suggested changing out of his leather shoes into them; except for their thicker soles, they were just like ordinary sneakers. The guard agreed. That gave him a much more casual look.
They got off the elevator to find themselves near one end of a corridor. On the end wall hung a conspicuous sign, white with orange lettering, that said night entrance, with an arrow pointing down. Turning around, they saw aluminum-framed windows at evenly spaced intervals on the right; even though sunlight did not shine in directly from outdoors, the entire corridor was a tube of light. On the left, black shadows were carved out by matching sets of swinging double doors, transom windows along the wainscot, and an indentation that seemed to be a stairwell. They came to some kind of laboratory room. Next was the nurses’ station, which despite the sight of people busily at work was as quiet as a silent movie. The man instinctively softened his footsteps. Fortunately, jump shoes make almost no noise. Moving past the nurses’ station, they came to the first stairway.
The stairway consisted of a mere four steps, apparently connecting to a newer wing which had been added on at a different level. Another corridor veered off at an angle. Poorly lit and narrow, it was blocked by a wood-framed vinyl screen, beyond which there seemed to be a te
mporary data storage room or something of the sort. A door on this side of the screen was marked authorized personnel only, the words circled in red for emphasis. The two men slipped through the door and came out into another corridor that was a sudden dazzling white, like the first.
A stairway and an elevator stood side by side. Somehow they had arrived on the second floor. Passing in front of an unmarked door, a doorless utility room, and a lavatory, finally they came to a small smoking lounge that was crowded with three wooden benches, a metal ashtray, and two vending machines, one for cigarettes and one for coffee. A wheelchair with a loose wheel stood to one side. The hall divided there, one side turning right and the other slanting left at an angle. There were two signboards: one, green with white lettering, said number three consultation and pointed to the right, while the other, in black on orange, said outpatient duty and pointed back the way they had come. The slanting left-hand corridor had no sign.
The unmarked corridor must also have been built at a different time, since there was a slight grade in its juncture with the main corridor. Everywhere else the ubiquitous white shone like plastic, but there it was the color of cheap paint. The floor, too, changed‘to wood planks; utter silence gave the hall a dismal cast, while sporadic windows made it resemble the gray-and-white underbelly of a snake.
The on-duty doctors’ lounge was inside that snake belly, he was told. Since the corridor came to a dead end, the doctor would have to pass by this smoking lounge in order to get wherever he was going. At last, having come this far, the guard seemed to become ill at ease. In parting, he said that he hated to repeat himself, but he didn’t want to get mixed up in this business any further, so why not call it quits right there. Then, scratching furiously behind one ear, he tore off down the hall with the green sign.
The time was 8:43. When the man sat down on a bench, his sweat-soaked trousers stuck to his thighs. He felt like urinating, but decided to hold off in fear of missing the doctor. He was only more likely to attract attention by sitting there doing nothing, though, so he put one hundred yen in the slot for a cup of coffee and sat down to sip it slowly, buying time. He was impressed by the intricacy of the way they had come, and strongly doubted his ability to make it back alone. A young nurse ran by from the green sign toward the orange one, scuffling her feet along the floor as she carried some sort of steaming widemouthed jar. A muttering mechanical noise beat ceaselessly against the floor; a tall, wheeled cage containing aluminum breakfast trays scraped against the ceiling as it went by. For a few seconds he thought he heard from somewhere a woman’s stifled sobbing.
When the paper cup was half empty, there came the sound of a door opening and closing down the unmarked corridor. Shuffling footsteps came closer over the wood-planked floor. It was a doctor, of such fine, strapping physique that his white coat seemed too short for him. He walked with chin high and chest thrust out, as smoothly as if he were gliding on rails. His black, wide-rimmed spectacles had thick lenses.
Since there seemed to be only one doctor on emergency call, this had to be the one. Had this guy really taken my wife and hidden her somewhere? Or rather, had she actually given in to his enticing and acted out that stagy abduction? I put every memory that came to mind through a compressor, squeezing as hard as I could to see if my wife’s behavior had ever contained anything to arouse the slightest suspicion. The liquid I extracted was clear and pure. Had ever a man been so brilliantly taken in? I was disgusted with myself. Suddenly the other man’s figure was garishly intensified, like a TV picture whose color control had gone wrong.
It wasn’t that I was afraid. Even granting that the doctor had an intimidating way about him, I have confidence in my own strength. I tend to look thinner in my clothes than I really am, so it’s hard to tell from the outside, but I’m in pretty good shape, if I do say so. A little difference in weight wouldn’t throw me. It wasn’t that I shrank back—I was purposely holding myself back. I didn’t want to give in to my emotions and ruin the opportunity. That may sound like bluffing, but don’t forget, I used to be a nude model. The first time I was asked, they said it was for a medical/sports magazine, so I let myself be talked into it. I quit as soon as I found out they were selling to fag magazines. That gave me the chance for the job I have now at the sporting goods store, so I can’t complain, but it’s nothing I like to brag about. Although according to that photographer, they’re pretty strict in their requirements for models for those fag magazines. They don’t want anyone who’s too tough, but if you look too namby-pamby, that’s even worse. Apparently the essential quality is an agile, quick aggressiveness.
I guess I’ve wandered pretty far off the track. Worse than that, I forgot and started writing in the first person. But bear in mind, I had all I could do at that moment to maintain my equilibrium. Right now I am listening to the sound of those footsteps again over the playback machine. The counter reads _874. The shoes he was wearing were low, slipper-style ones with thin leather soles, so the volume is not too loud, but even so, the sound seems extraordinarily distinct. It must be partly because I was sitting so still on the bench. That noise in the background like shallow waves breaking on a beach is the sound of my own breathing. The footsteps grow plainer and plainer, until they are so close that I can almost tell his exact mannerisms of gait, and even how far down the soles of his shoes had worn. Finally, just on the verge of colliding with the microphone, the footsteps recede and are lost again in the surrounding noise. There ends the first side of the first tape. I rewind it back to 874 on the dial, flick the switch to playback, and again the footsteps come closer. Time after time, again and again, they keep coming closer.
This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know about lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor s footsteps… the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me … the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody … the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger….
The doctor never glanced toward the man. Turning left at the smoking lounge, he headed in the direction of the green sign— the same way that the guard had gone. Staring into space from behind his thick glasses, eyes half closed, he passed by without altering his posture or his gait. The man tossed the rest of his coffee into the ashtray, paper cup and all, and stood up. He waited until a good fifteen meters lay between them before starting to follow.
At the first corner was an elevator. The doors opened as soon as the doctor pushed the button; evidently it had been waiting right there. The doctor went inside. It seemed impossible to make it there in time. Afraid he had lost him already, the man began to run. Thanks to the jump shoes, he bounded seven or eight centimeters into the air and lurched forward as he sprinted. Not surprisingly, he attracted the attention of the doctor, who pressed the “Doors Open” button and held the elevator for him. Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy. The man bowed his head without speaking, and the doctor followed suit, staring wordlessly at the man’s feet.
The doctor had pushed the fifth-floor button; pretending not to have seen, the man pushed the same one. The numbers went up to seven. Was the doctor on some errand of unfinished business in the hospital? Or was there somewhere on the fifth floor a private room that he used for his secret rendezvous?
They stepped out into a lobby that was plain but cheerful and clean, with a revolving door. The man could hardly believe his eyes, but there just beyond the door was the ground. Not the artificial ground made by piling dirt on terraces and roof gardens, either, but the real thing: you could have dug down clear to the center of the earth. Beyond the entranceway was a street, not too wide, but fitted with a sidewalk and planted with trees. Coming from the building’s front entrance this was the fifth floor, but evidently on this side it was ground level. The building must be
constructed on a fairly steep hill.
There was neither receptionist nor guard. Unchallenged by anyone, he followed the doctor outside. In the sudden heat his neck seemed to swell. The sky was blue only at the zenith, turning a murky gray toward the horizon. Looked like another bad day of smog. A microbus drove past and discharged a load of men and women in white onto the pavement. If they were running an intrahospital shuttle bus, this must be a hell of a big place.
The street, however, seemed fairly ordinary. A few buildings were obviously hospital annexes or laboratories, but side by side with those were camera stores and groceries of the kind you might see anywhere. Depending on your point of view, either the street area was working its way into the hospital or the hospital was spilling out into the streets. The first intersection had an overpass, and the wide, two-lane thoroughfare below was already bumper to bumper with cars heading both ways. That must have been the main highway before the hospital was enlarged across those two hills. He was unable to decide whether the tall, glass-plated building on one corner of the intersection belonged to the street or to the hospital, until finally he made out the quiet lettering in windows on the top floor: bedding for rent. Of course; catering to a big hospital like this, a bedding rental service would do a good business. So maybe this was part of the hospital grounds after all.
Next they came to a three-way intersection with a traffic light. One way led steeply downhill, with a small diner two doors from the corner. The doctor disappeared inside as if it were a familiar haunt. Instead of a sign, a big fork stuck out from under the eaves; spaghetti seemed to be the house specialty. For a clandestine meeting place it was certainly discreet enough. The man calmed his breathing and stretched the kinks out of his arm and leg muscles, preparing himself to rush in at a moment’s notice. It must have been still too early; besides the doctor, there was no sign of anyone, let alone the man’s wife. A sign announced that today’s special was cod roe rice balls with soup, 370 yen; a bargain, all right, but he’d hold off. The doctor was wiping his face with a cold towel, menu in one hand, so he was probably still unaware of the man’s presence. The man decided to go on past and keep watch from the corner, by the alley at the bottom of the hill. He was puzzled by this turn of events. This was strange behavior from someone who had gone to all the trouble of sending out an ambulance in order to abduct a woman. Or was she supposed to show up here later? Either way, he thought, he would be in a good position.