Death and the Flower

by Kōji Suzuki

  “If you don’t mind I’ll wait until he comes back,” I announced and stepped inside. I hid my shoes behind the golf bag in the entryway so I’d remain undetected. “When Masahiro gets home, please don’t tell him that I’m here, no matter what,” I cautioned his mother.

  Moved by such a display of responsibility from a private tutor, Mrs. Kawaguchi meekly thanked me, bobbed her head repeatedly, and withdrew.

  I waited for about an hour in the air-conditioned room. While I sat at the desk, it struck me how my efforts over the last four months seemed to have been a total waste. I’d come to believe in Masahiro once his grades had shown some improvement. Yet now the distinctive cruelty of youth spooked me. I had no desire for any further involvement with him no matter how much money they offered me.

  It wasn’t hard to understand why Masahiro had gotten zeroes on his exams. Who wants to admit to having inferior abilities? Choosing to run away before discovering one’s limits—of course that was tempting. The first escape was drawing a penis across the answer sheet. The drawing loudly exclaimed: “I’m too special to do stupid things like take tests.” But as he started to study in earnest, he began to see it himself. Strive as he might with a private tutor, he lacked the ability to turn his F’s into D’s, even. So he plotted another escape, this time by blowing off his tutor. How could he be saved? How could I teach Masahiro that we each need to muddle through whatever predicament we’re in with whatever abilities we’ve been blessed with? I was chagrinned, but what really pissed me off was that Masahiro’s avenue of escape had nearly cost me my life.

  The front door slammed shut and sprightly footsteps echoed up the staircase. Fed up with waiting, I swiveled the chair around to face the door. When Masahiro opened it and took one step inside, he froze in place.

  “Hey. Long time no see,” I said calmly and raised a hand in greeting.

  Masahiro, eyes blown wide, muttered, “Sensei …”

  He turned on his heel and tried to run away. I caught up with him at the top of the stairs and kicked him in the back. Masahiro lost his balance, tumbled down the stairs, and struck his head on the landing wall. He yelped a needlessly dramatic “Ou-u-ch!”

  Just as his alarmed mother set foot on the stairs, I grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him up. “It’s nothing,” I reassured Mrs. Kawaguchi, whose eyes looked ready to pop out of her head, and dragged Masahiro back up the stairs. Along the way, in a fit of rage, I slammed his face onto the edge of a stair. His bottom lip split open, caught between his teeth and the rubber edge on the wood, and blood dribbled from his mouth. Masahiro merely moaned rather than attempt another exaggerated reaction.

  Once back in the room, I threw him on the bed and closed the door. He was trembling from fear. Perhaps judging that no excuse would work, he kept his mouth shut.

  I put a pencil in his trembling hand and placed a notepad in front of him. “Write down the name and address of whoever was driving the Celica last night.”

  From the subdued way I’d spoken, Masahiro seemed to sense that I meant business. He obediently wrote “Fujishima” on the notepad in phonetic script and cast down his eyes. “I don’t know his address,” he mumbled. Ordinarily he would have said, How the hell should I know? Today he was minding his manners.

  “You don’t know where he lives?”

  Rather than reply, he started drawing a map. He was still terrible at drawing. He marked an X behind a Mitsubishi Motors located just before the gas-pipe bridge over the Tama River. I studied the map and mentally reconfirmed the local geography.

  “Shimo-Maruko is the nearest station, right?”

  Nodding, Masahiro licked at the blood on his lips and shed tears. Shoving his weeping face into the mattress and standing up, I made to leave the room.

  Masahiro’s sobs grew louder as though he was begging me not to leave. “Diapers …” he seemed to say.

  I stopped mid-step, turned around, and gave voice to a question that suddenly came into my mind. “Why did you do it?”

  “Sensei, those diapers …” he trailed off.

  Was it possible Masahiro and his buddies had messed with me without knowing who I was? It wasn’t impossible. Riding a race replica motorcycle with an economy-sized box of diapers strapped to the back would certainly have drawn attention. A biker gang running along Nakahara Street might have found it amusing to harass such a rider. Perhaps at first Masahiro had no idea that it was me. He did realize when Fujishima sideswiped me but didn’t dare rein in the guy, only leaning out the rear window to check if I was alive. Come to think of it, maybe I’d seen a somewhat worried look on his face in the dark last night.

  A favorable interpretation, while possible, didn’t kill my anger. After all I’d almost died.

  “See ya.”

  I closed the door just as Masahiro tried to say more.

  Before I ever found Fujishima’s house, I discovered the black Celica. It was parked, its left tires perilously close to a drainage ditch, on an empty road dividing a residential area from an industrial zone. With my back flush against a factory wall so as not to fall into the ditch, I went around to the passenger’s side. There was a two-inch long scratch on the back of the side mirror. It had to be from making contact with my bike’s right handle the night before. I thought it had been the door, but apparently not. The bike had lost balance when the handle caught on the back of the side mirror. As I stared, uncontrollable anger tore through me. It was completely unfair that while my bike was mangled beyond recognition, only a tiny scratch marked the car that had done it. Safe inside a metal box, not even showing his face, the guy had casually placed a total stranger in mortal danger.

  I grabbed the mirror with both hands, twisted it up hard, and wrenched it off the car. I tossed it into the ditch. Still not sated, I punched the center of the door. The wall at my back prevented me from really winding up but I managed to make a dent right under the window. That still wasn’t enough to ease my wrath. In fact, it was like pouring oil onto fire. I kicked at the dent with my knee and made it larger. I glanced over to the driver’s side and saw that the key was still in the ignition. If the driver hadn’t simply forgotten, it meant he was planning on coming right back. Wising up to the futility of mauling an inanimate foe, I slipped out of the narrow space and leaned against the wall to wait for the driver.

  The deserted street behind the factory led straight to the bank of the Tama River. Having found the car, I didn’t feel like looking for Fujishima’s house. Even if I did locate it, I couldn’t simply walk in. So just what was I trying to do now? Would I call out to Fujishima and scold him for his dangerous stunt? I closed my eyes. When I showed up uninvited at Masahiro’s place and asked him for the driver’s address, I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to do once I found the guy.

  I saw the image of my wife and daughter waiting at home for me to return. I was beginning to regret coming all the way out here lured by my anger. If I came face to face with Fujishima, there was no telling what I would do. Even if he were pure scum, I’d be forcing my family into dire straits. How was I supposed to relieve myself of this rage anyway?

  I made to walk away as though suddenly unbound. Just then I heard footsteps trotting along the black asphalt. A skinny male who looked to be around twenty was coming toward me out of the darkness. The guy seemed to have come out from the house just three doors down. He whistled as he trotted pigeon-toed and with a slight hunch, both hands in his pocket, toward the Celica. Convinced that he was Fujishima, I found myself working the stiffness out of both of my wrists. I relaxed my shoulders, held my elbows in place, and bent back my wrists, stretching them up and down.

  I pushed off the wall and started walking. Fujishima was reaching out for the door handle, but surprised to see me appear from the car’s shadow, he froze and stopped whistling.

  Right now I’m motivated not by logic, but instinct. So I’ll have my body decide. Will hatred for someone who almost robbed me of my life win, or will I let it pass to safeguard me and m
y own’s peace?

  The decision would be made the second I passed Fujishima. If he angled for a fight, I wouldn’t hold back anything. Since there was hardly any foot traffic past the banks of the Tama River, we wouldn’t draw any attention. We could brawl as long as we wanted. Not merely breaking a couple bones, I might kill him, if necessary, to end the scourge that was him. The same hands that washed a baby’s cloth diaper would take a man’s life. As soon as I had that thought, the scene in the alley framed by the gray wall stood out with clear contours. Pounding along to the certain rhythm of my pulse, a sense of being alive once again gushed up in me. My field of vision seemed to narrow as well, with Fujishima as its focus.

  The guy seemed the type to throw a fist before opening his mouth if he was given a dirty look. Yet, instead of planting his feet, he swallowed whatever he was about to say and drew back his shoulders. He stared at me speechless. Whether or not he’d sensed my murderous intent and panicked, his cheeks went slack and his eyes unsurely evaded mine.

  The servile smile that crept onto his face was hard to miss. It was a fawning, ugly smile. I felt a wash of disgust. He was nothing more than lowlife, hardly worth laying a finger on. The truth was that he was not capable of anything. As soon as his face went slack, the fighting instinct that had swelled to bursting within me vanished. I would gain nothing from taking him on.

  As he passed by, I brushed shoulders with him on purpose. Having tried to sway away, Fujishima lost balance and put one hand on the Celica’s roof. I glared at him with every ounce of scorn I could muster, then briskly walked off.

  By the time I turned the corner on the alley, I had regained a measure of calm. The blood that had pooled at my temples melted back into my body, and the scenery dissolved into typical blandness. In that easeful moment I casually considered fathering another child. Walking north along the Tama River’s bank, I mumbled to myself: Another girl’d be fine by me.

  Irregular Breathing

  Any outside air was completely shut out by the thick glass of the windows of the ICU. Even so, when I woke up in the middle of the night I sensed, though I couldn’t actually hear, rain falling.

  I rose from the guest cot and gently lifted up the curtain. Cupping my left hand to my brow to block out the light escaping from the nurse station, I wiped the moisture off a fogged-up window. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the U-shaped inner courtyard gradually came into focus. The branch of a cherry tree in the courtyard reached all the way to the intensive care unit on the third floor, close enough to touch were I to reach out. The leaves weren’t wet.

  Unconvinced that my intuition had been incorrect, I tried looking up at the sky. Thanks to the interference of the balcony upstairs, only a slender band was visible. It must have been cloudy since I didn’t see twinkling stars in the rectangle. When I shifted my focus downwards, I could see raindrops dripping off the leaves of the cherry tree. The three main branches drooping in different directions rustled in the rain, leaves and boughs swaying every which way, perhaps due to a breeze. I felt a strange satisfaction at predicting rain just as it started falling.

  As I stood gazing, the chill from the March night began to seep into my body. When I moved away from the window, the white lines of the hospital bed where my wife lay seemed to float outside, the reflection transposed over the image of the cherry tree.

  The ICU had two parallel beds. The other one had become vacant only early yesterday morning. In the gloom, the pure white of the freshly washed and starched sheets stood out symbolizing the “death” of the human being who’d passed away in the room.

  My wife and I were the only ones on this side of the glass partition with the nurse station. The sound of breathing filled the room. Not my wife’s, but the respirator’s. Some sort of piston was compressing and delivering air, and a mechanical sound that was neither a hiss nor a wheeze recurred at a consistent interval. This noise was why my sleep was shallow and I often woke in the middle of the night while keeping my wife company. There was nothing in the natural world that sounded similar. The closest comparison was Darth Vader’s respiration from Star Wars.

  I checked the level of the IV and the readings for the various monitoring devices stored in the column-type unit. There didn’t seem to be anything amiss. The machines were running smoothly, just as they’d been before I’d fallen asleep. The nurse had only asked me to keep a close eye on the level of the IV, but I couldn’t help eying all the readouts on the monitors. I didn’t have an accurate grasp of what the numbers signified. I just checked to see if they were still the same.

  I walked around to the foot of the bed and looked down at my wife’s face. The respirator’s tube stretched from her mouth down into her throat and was affixed to the entrance of her trachea with a balloon-shaped section. A feeding tube was inserted from her right shoulder, and the tube that drained away urine hung down under the bed. There were two systems of gentle, artificial currents flowing through my wife’s body. Aside from those that sent in nutrients and carried out excretions, there was another tube stuck in her bandaged head that flushed out the blood pooled inside her brain. The tip of this tube passed through a small hole in the temporal region of her skull and nearly reached her cerebral cortex.

  Peering closely, I could see pink fluid running through the thin, transparent tube. They were dissolving the blood that had built up between the pia mater and the arachnoid membrane in order to flush it out of the body. If the hematoma resulting from the bleeding was left untreated, she could become hydrocephalic, the attending physician had explained.

  Finding myself curious once again about the exterior, I opened the curtains and gazed into the courtyard. At some point it had started raining in earnest and the white hospital walls as well as the cherry blossoms and branches were getting a thorough soaking. The blossoms in particular looked as though they would fall off at any second, yet they held fast to the tips of the branches. Wet, the flowers’ hues looked more vibrant.

  My wife had suddenly taken ill the afternoon before last, but it felt like a great deal of time had passed since then. The night before, I’d sat in the hospital’s waiting room without even dozing off until the operation ended. A single day’s events felt like they spanned several days.

  After a checkup at the gynecologist, my wife had taken a bus ride home then collapsed. She’d crumpled onto the sidewalk while stepping off the ramp. It gave me the chills to wonder what might have happened had she collapsed just a little bit later. The bus stop was right in front of our apartment. If she’d lost consciousness at home, alone since her husband was away on a business trip, she’d have stayed that way overnight and been too far gone. Her operation had been urgent. By the time I’d rushed over to the hospital in a panic after receiving a call from my sister-in-law summoning me back, the surgery had already begun.

  Subarachnoid hemorrhage.

  Being told what she had didn’t make it any more sensible for me. My wife was only thirty years old. Thinking her too young to suffer a stroke, I only felt irrational anger brewing in me. In the waiting room my sister-in-law relayed the surgeon’s explanation to me. My wife’s vascular media was inherently weak and she’d had a cerebral aneurism. Walking around pregnant had made it rupture.

  Said some people are more prone to it than others. How awful. If it’s hereditary, will I get it too? my sister-in-law muttered, her brows furrowed, quite personally worried as she shared her summary.

  The nine-hour-long surgery was a success. They applied specialized clamps to the ruptured vessel and to the bases of two more aneurisms that were about to burst, then closed up her skull. There were no notable effects on the infant, and indications were good for the mother. Yet it was too early to relax. Developing cerebrovascular spasms a week or two after the onset of internal hemorrhaging was a possibility, and if that happened, she’d be beyond help. Apparently, there was no established treatment for cerebrovascular spasms.

  For two nights in a row now, I was only sleeping in fits and starts. I wa
s tired, but my nerves were too tense to allow me to fall into a deep slumber.

  I sat on the edge of the metal bed frame and gazed at my wife’s body for a while. I gently laid my hand on the swell of her belly, noticeable even under the blanket. I felt a kick. The seven-month-old fetus had struck the walls of its mother’s womb with its limbs. It was our first baby, conceived in our fourth year of marriage. We already knew the gender. About a month ago, we’d watched as the fetus appeared on the ultrasound monitor at the gynecologist’s. We simultaneously cried out “Ah!” at the sight of a protrusion between the legs.

  “A boy?” asked my wife.

  The doctor merely laughed and didn’t respond, but his smile said as much. Without a doubt, the baby was a boy.

  Placing my hand under the blanket to feel more of the unborn child’s presence, I froze. I sensed that something was out of joint. The atmosphere of the room was mainly dictated by the sounds of the respirator. I couldn’t help but think that its rhythm sounded slightly off. The pause between the loud inhalations and exhalations that engulfed the room seemed longer than usual. The lengthy break was making me fear that the breathing cycle had ceased altogether. As I listened intently, a few sudden breaths that sounded different from before broke the silence. Then it was all quiet again.

  Shocked, I stood up and checked the orange numerals floating on the monitor of the respirator, but there appeared to be no irregularity. The reading was still the same. I listened closely and waited for the rhythm to resume. Hnff, hnff. With what sounded like a pair of choked coughs, the respirator started to wheeze. As if it had just finished a burst of intense exercise or was suffering an asthma attack, the apparatus had completely abandoned the cyclicality that characterized machinery. It almost sounded like a ferocious beast was breathing through a megaphone.

  I thought maybe my wife’s and the respirator’s breathing rhythms had gone out of sync to cause this trouble. Perhaps the function that automatically adjusted the pace was glitching. Since the machine was my wife’s lifeline, the slightest anomaly set my nerves on edge. I put my ear close to her chest, checking for irregularities in her breathing. Her chest rose and fell slowly, almost without a sound. Her face showed no signs of suffering. Her plump cheeks occasionally creasing as if she were smiling, her expression was the picture of serenity.