by Kōbō Abe
“If you want it that bad, why not just smash down the lookout post?”
“Listen here … you took that girl away from me, but I haven’t taken anything away from you, don’t forget.”
“It’s all the same thing. The hospital did.”
“But for all we know, your wife may have applied.”
“Applied for what?”
“To be in the pre-festival orgasm contest. Yes, that would explain everything. They were advertising for contestants pretty widely, and she must have had it all worked out with the pill thief beforehand. Still, it took some thinking to use an ambulance like that. Some hospital insider must have helped her out.”
“Sorry, but both of us are in the pink of health. There’s no way she could have had any contact with the hospital.”
“The boundary between the hospital and the outside world isn’t as firm as you think it is. Hmm, if your wife did apply voluntarily, then even if we do track down her hiding place, it’s not going to be easy after that.”
“What about the girl from room eight? If she ran away from that room of her own free will, then even if you find out her hiding place, it won’t be easy after that.”
“Listen here: I don’t know where your wife is.”
“You listen here: I don’t have any idea where that girl is, either.”
The horse and I were both deeply hurt. He had been standing all this time, while I sat in a chair; we glared at each other, making no attempt to hide our quickened breathing. I was first to turn my eyes away. I did so only because my contact lens was about to slip out of place; it had no other meaning.
“What are you just standing there like that for? You cut off the view.”
The horse loosened his belt, unzipped his fly, and let his trousers fall down around his knees; then he rolled up his shirt. A black synthetic-rubber corset about five millimeters thick totally encased his middle, from just under his rib cage to midway down his thighs. Its surface was crisscrossed with variegated electrical wires, with a gold-plated electrode at every point where they crossed. At his crotch was an opening like a vertical letter slot, where his penis hung down limply like moldy Chinese food, framed by pubic hair like a metal scrub brush.
“See? I haven’t got much choice.”
“All right, you’ve made your point, so pull up your pants, please.”
When he wound a microcomputer belt under the corset and fastened on his auxiliary lower half, complete with miniature life-sustaining equipment (portable), a transfer of nerve sensations took place. Since he was unable to take the corset off unassisted, however, he had to spend all his time either standing up or lying down, except for once every three days or so, when he had the thing cleaned at the artificial organs department. If I ever felt generous enough to forgive him, which didn’t seem likely, I thought it would be nice to design a chair for him so that he could relax while standing up.
Pulling up his trousers, he said, “Okay, if you’re that positive, then how about taking a lie detector test like you promised?”
“Fine with me.”
In point of fact, I was worried about the girl from room eight, and wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I had left her alone almost five hours, waiting for me in that underground passage. I had made sure she had plenty of drinking water and food, but she was probably bored and feeling lost and alone above all. Besides, with this rain I was afraid that water might start to seep in.
I knew, though, that there were bound to be several of the secretary’s shaven-headed henchmen lurking in shadows around the building, waiting for me to leave. I wasn’t too sure of the geography around there, and had no confidence that I would be able to shake them off my tail. Fortunately, the horse’s wife, who was the lie detector specialist, lived in quarters by the Psycholinguistics Center. Since the machine was in the center, of course the test would be held there. The center was in a square white building that lay east of the main grounds, across the street from the hospital cemetery. In order to shut out all noise and light from the outside, it had no windows, and was designed to be entered and left from below ground. From there I would be able to make use of the cemetery layout to shake off any tail they cared to put on me.
Of course, I wasn’t really serious about taking the test. I intended to think of some appropriate excuse to get rid of the horse, and then win over his wife and persuade her to cancel or postpone it.
My image of the assistant director’s wife had been quite mistaken. After all, I had thought, she was intelligent enough to have risen straight from plain patient-typist to full-fledged researcher on the strength of a single article, entitled “The Logic of Lying: Adapting Toward Structure Through Ritualization.” And knowing that she had been self-centered enough to leave her husband on grounds of impotence, I couldn’t help picturing someone like a mechanical drawing in drag.
When I actually met her, I was taken completely by surprise. Except for a certain shrewd and determined quality in her nose and upper lip, her subcutaneous fat was distributed across her body in perfect proportion. Her eyes were sad and heavy as ripe grapes; her voice was soft and breathy, and the collar of her uniform was crisp even in midafternoon.
I changed my mind and decided to take the test after all. I think now I must have been gasping for a sensation of normalcy, like someone gulping for air underwater. It wasn’t only a reaction to the horse’s abnormality, and to all the strange happenings around there; my confidence in the reliability of my own internal mirror had begun to waver.
When she came to the dangerous questions, all I had to do was refuse to answer.
She received me as cordially as I had hoped. She even told me frankly all about her reasons for separating from her husband. The day they were married they had made a bizarre agreement to confirm all their conversations with each other using the lie detector. Their decision had not been based on jealousy or suspicion; it had been a free choice, meant actually as a positive, naive confirmation of their love. Not to blame but to forgive, they had sought to eliminate the artifice of lies.
Results had undermined all their expectations, producing just the opposite effect from that intended. Day after day the vital tension between them had weakened until in the end nothing was left but an empty space like unexposed film.
“It wasn’t that anything had changed especially. It was just like a light bulb with no electric current. I guess lie detectors have a freezing effect. And if truth is the front, then lies are the back; you end up thinking of everything in terms of front and back.’’
“Sounds pretty dismal.”
“Even computers think of everything in binary terms. Yes or no. That might work if there were never any contradiction between feelings and reason. But take away that contradiction from people and what do you think would be left? If there were nothing but facts, no lies or truth .. .”
“Things would certainly be logical.”
“That was what I hated more than anything else about myself.”
After they had ceased to have dialogue, the magnetism between them had gone, too. Nothing had been left to hold them together, and nothing to push them apart; there had been only their dried-out hearts, like empty insect shells. The assistant director had become chronically impotent, and the head of the Psycholinguistics Center had prescribed a trial separation for their own good.
“So your article on ‘The Logic of Lying’ was based on your own experiences?”
“Have you read it?”
“I’m sure it’s way over my head.. ..”
“Well, for example, there are social lies, such as calling the announcement that two people are about to begin sexual relations a ‘wedding,’ or calling the period of temporary seclusion when they devote themselves to sex a ‘honeymoon.’ That does away with the sense of indecency, doesn’t it? When the sex act is made a ritual, then the body’s personal relations center can relax and issue its own permit.”
“That’s the second time today I’ve heard that term ‘p
ersonal relations center.’ ”
“Three times is bad for the heart.” She laughed and finished adjusting the machine. “May I begin?”
“Go right ahead.”
She began a long succession of flat, colorless questions. Do you like dogs? … Is it morning now? … Is it raining? … Have you ever eaten a tomato? … Do you brush your teeth before you wash your face? … Did you dream in color last night? .. .
Then all at once she hit me with a totally unexpected question.
“Do you want to sleep with me?” When I was unable to answer, she looked at the graph lines on the roll of paper and smiled, biting her lower lip with white teeth. “There, you told a lie.”
“But I didn’t say anything yet.”
“Whatever you say will be a lie.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Adultery is the personal relations center’s number one enemy.”
“All right, ask me again.”
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny. ..
“It came out true, right?”
“Your personal relations center must not be working… . I’ll bet the lie detector test is serving the purpose of realization.”
“How about getting on with the last question?”
But instead she turned off the machine and started to remove the electrodes from my body.
“You never meant to answer anyway, did you?”
Her throat tightened as if she were talking to someone else in the distance. If she hadn’t cut off the questioning for my sake, but as a kind of declaration aimed at the assistant director, then perhaps she was trying to tell him that now that he had become a horse and recovered from his impotence, he should come back to her. When I tried to picture the horse having intercourse with his extra penis, it seemed more obscene, somehow, to imagine him doing it with her than with anyone else. But in my mind the word “obscene” seemed to have acquired positive connotations, such as “mellow” or “ripe.”
“Do you still want to sleep with me?”
For some reason I was unable to answer. Perhaps without the electrodes, the ritual had ended. She said shyly that she would like to take my picture, and snapped four or five Polaroid shots of me wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, from several different angles. It made me slightly sad to imagine her staring at the photographs alone at night. It seemed so unfair that such a rich body should be so lonely. And yet in a way it seemed to suit her so well.
Regretfully I saw her back to her apartment, and then went out to the street by the cemetery. In the dim light of the few streetlights, the wet, straight paved road was as black as water in a stagnant canal. Nothing could have been blacker; even a black kitten crossing the road would have stood out against it. I crossed leisurely over to the cemetery side, cleared a shoulder-high cement-block wall, and checked back through the dense cherry tree branches. Just as I had expected, about three seconds later five human figures crossed the road behind me. Were they the same ones who did in my predecessor, or was the secretary just partial to groups of five?
For a while I walked along attracting my pursuers’ attention by kicking stones and rattling branches. Then suddenly I started to run. Not along the road, though; using obstacle-course racing technique, I vaulted over gravestones, running in a beeline, ignoring the road. Luckily, in that weather there was no danger of colliding with couples engaged in secret rendezvous. The rain had stopped and the half moon, racing through rifts in the clouds, lit up the wet gravestone heads for me. The gravestones were a good height for jump shoes, but with ordinary sporting shoes you would have to climb laboriously up on each one and then jump down again. That alone would produce a time gap. Besides, even though the stones were laid out in a strict checkerboard pattern, each one faced in a slightly different direction; the road followed the gravestones, so it wound as intricately as an arabesque design. Whoever had designed the place must have been strongly opposed to any communication among the dead. Even for the living, it was difficult to decide after clearing one stone which grave lay in a straight line from there. As the distance between me and my pursuers gradually increased, they would begin to lose their sense of direction, and scatter; chasing after one another, they would eventually lose sight of me.
I regulated my breathing, put bounce in my knees, and ran on quickly and smoothly. Before long the five sets of footsteps behind me were bound to falter, mix in confusion, and then recede in the distance. But as it turned out, equally smooth footwork followed me closely wherever I went, like a second shadow. I thought I must be imagining things, and tried speeding up. The footsteps behind me did likewise. I tried changing direction. Like a school of killifish, in an instant they shifted direction with me. Somehow they must have got hold of jump shoes of their own. Maybe one of the guys from the company had campaigned here successfully. I couldn’t let anyone get away with stealing a march on me like that. Or had these fellows just gone and ordered them themselves? I wished they had done it through me, since I was in sales. I had a right to a fixed commission on every sale, and it affected my sales record, too.
Little by little I started running out of breath. They seemed to have figured me out; the five of them were spread out in a grid, like dogs hunting down a rabbit. Every time I changed direction, a new pursuer would take over. But since I was the only one being chased, there was a definite limit as to how long it could go on. They did not seem bent on trying to catch me, though; their strategy seemed to be to continue this game of hide-and-seek until my patience gave out and I ran back to the hideout. What if I never went back; what would the girl from room eight do? In despair at my betrayal, and in terror of rats, she might burst into tears and scream for help with all her might. That would play into their hands, too, I was cornered.
Hold on, though—wasn’t I the chief of security, with three black stripes to prove it? That made me their direct superior whether they liked it or not. I had no idea what the assistant director’s secretary might have told them, but it could do no harm to try a test of my own authority. If it failed I would at least be no worse off.
I jumped up on a gravestone (there was a noise like a tiny bell rolling), spun around, and yelled out a command at the top of my lungs.
“Everyone stop! Don’t move!”
There was no need to repeat it. My timing and tone must have been exactly right. My pursuers became unmoving shadows in the darkness, then disappeared. Insects began to sing. It was a new experience for me, and I suspect for them, too. If my predecessor had only known how to give commands he might not have been murdered so helplessly.
I ran through the darkness alongside the infirmary’ until I came to the old, weed-covered hospital site. I listened awhile to the voices of the insects, making sure I hadn’t been followed, then crawled through a half-flooded sewer pipe, emerging through a toilet hole. I groped my way down a hall that was half buried in rubble from crumbling walls, feeling my way ahead; finally I came to the steel pipe I had been watching for (it stuck out from the ceiling, and for some reason, when I put my ear up to it I could hear noises of railway construction), and switched on my flashlight.
Slipping through narrow spaces in the rubble, after a time I emerged into a fairly secure concrete hallway. Beyond the wooden door at the end of the hall was our hideout. I thought I heard a moan of pain, and abandoning caution, I began to sprint. When the sound of my footsteps did not evoke the reaction I had expected, I became even more concerned. I burst through the door just as the girl was having an orgasm. Pretending not to notice, I bent down and gave her a strong hug, ignoring the wrist busily at work between her thighs. I could not be sure, but it seemed that the resiliency of her body had subtly changed. Had the liquefaction of her bones progressed even further? Her wrist stopped moving, and she threw her arms around me with all her strength. She began to sob, then to tremble with uncontrollable violence.
I am just back from another survey of the anniversary-eve party s
ite, from the top of the hill on the old hospital grounds. A few more people had gathered than before, but the place was still quiet. I could tell that something was about to happen, though, from the way the owners of concession stands by the park were bustling around lighting portable burners and preparing to open for business.
I made a simple meal out of a curry roll and some apple juice. To keep the girl from shrinking any more, I lowered the back of her wheelchair until it was horizontal, and began to massage her spine; I stopped in three minutes when she started to show signs of arousal. Thanks to an outside antenna I attached to the ventilator, radio reception is much better now. Listening through earphones, she is beginning to nod sleepily.
I may as well go on writing awhile longer.
I cannot explain to my own satisfaction, let alone defend, the inherent contradiction in my hiding out here like this with the girl from room eight while ostensibly searching for my wife. Doubtless I am not the only one who finds it difficult to accept. Any normal human being would sneer at such deceit.
But it was only last night that I learned about the possibility of contact between my wife and the pill thief. It seems to me that no allowance can be made for the horse’s breach of faith in pretending to know nothing until then. The only way I can get back at him for that is by not returning the girl. Early this morning I telephoned security headquarters and ordered them to gather data on the pill thief on a top-priority basis. Yes, “ordered”; last night’s experience taught me the effectiveness of an order. Since then I have been going outside every two hours to listen to the reports. Unfortunately, as of this moment not a single one has given me any cause for hope.