Spiral

by Kōji Suzuki

  Ando let the pen come to rest. "Hold on a second. We're not talking about a living thing here."

  Miyashita didn't miss a beat. It was as if he'd prepared his response ahead of time.

  "If someone asked you to define life, what's your answer?"

  Life, in Ando's view, basically boiled down to two things: the ability of an entity to reproduce itself, and its possession of a physical form. Taking a single cell as an example, it had DNA to oversee its self-reproduction, while it had protein to give it external shape. But a videotape? To be sure, it had a physical form-its plastic shell, usually black and rectangular. But it couldn't be said to have the ability to reproduce itself.

  "A video doesn't have the ability to reproduce on its own."

  "So?" Miyashita sounded impatient now.

  "So you're saying it's just like a virus…"

  Ando felt like groaning. Viruses are a strange form of life: they lack the power to reproduce on their own. On that score, they actually fall somewhere between the animate and the inanimate. What a virus can do is burrow into the cells of another living creature and use them to help it reproduce. Just as the videotape in question had held its watchers in thrall by means of its threat to destroy them unless they copied it. The tape had used people in its reproductive process.

  "But…" Ando felt compelled to object at this point. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to deny. He just felt that if he didn't, something catastrophic would happen.

  "But all copies of the video have been neutralized."

  There shouldn't be any more danger, in other words. Even if the videotape had been alive in the limited way a virus is, it was extinct now. All four specimens that had been introduced into the world had now been removed from it.

  "You're right. The videotape is extinct. But that's the old strain." The beads of sweat on Miyashita's face grew larger with every swallow of beer he took.

  "What do you mean, old?" asked Ando.

  "The video mutated. Through copying, it evolved until a new strain emerged. It's still lurking out there somewhere. And it's taken a completely different form. That's what I think, anyway."

  Ando could only stare open-mouthed. His mug was empty, but he wanted something stronger than beer now. He tried to order some shochu gin on the rocks, but his voice faltered and he couldn't make himself heard to the bartender. Miyashita took over, holding up two fingers and calling out, "Shochu!" Two glasses of the liquor were set on the bar before them, and Ando immediately reached out and drank about a third of his in one gulp. Miyashita watched him out of the corner of his eyes, and then said: "If the videotape did mutate and evolve into a new form during the process of multiple copying, then it wouldn't matter at all to the new species if the old one died out. Think about it. Ryuji went to all the trouble of manipulating a DNA sequence so he could talk to us from the world of the dead. I can't think of any other explanation for why he'd send us the word 'mutation'. Can you?"

  Of course Ando couldn't. How could he? He brought the liquor to his lips time and again, but intoxication seemed still a long way off. His head was distressingly clear.

  It might be true. Ando found himself gradually leaning toward Miyashita's viewpoint. Ryuji probably meant the word "mutation" as a warning. Ando could almost see Ryuji's face as he sneered, You think you're safe. You think it's extinct. But you won't get off that easy. It's mutated, and a new version is rearing its head.

  Ando was reminded of the AIDS virus. It was thought that several hundred years ago some preexisting virus mutated and became what is now known as the AIDS virus. The previous virus didn't infect humans, and may well have been harmless. But through mutation, it took on the power to wreak havoc with the human immune system. What if the same thing happened with this videotape? Ando could only pray that the opposite happened, that a harmful thing was now innocuous. But the facts suggested otherwise. Far from becoming harmless, the mutated videotape had turned into something that killed anybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they made a copy of it. If that was any indication, the thing was getting even nastier. And with Ando unable to form any conclusions yet about Mai's disappearance, that left Asakawa as the only anomaly.

  "Why is Asakawa still alive?" Ando asked Miyashita the same thing he'd asked him the day before.

  "That's the question, isn't it? He's the only clue as to what that videotape has turned into."

  "Well, actually… there is one other person."

  Ando gave Miyashita a brief rundown on Mai: how the video had made its way through Ryuji to her, how there was evidence that she'd watched it, and how she'd been missing for nearly three weeks now.

  "Which means there are two people who saw the tape and are still alive."

  "Asakawa's still alive, although just barely. I'm not sure about Mai."

  "I hope she's alive."

  "Why?"

  "Well, why not? We're better off with two clues than with one."

  He had a point. If Mai was still alive, they might be able to figure out what she and Asakawa had in common. It might give them an answer. But for his part, Ando just hoped she was safe.

  PART FOUR - EVOLVING

  1

  Monday afternoon, November 26th Ando had finished an autopsy on a boy who'd drowned in a river, and now he was filling out a report while listening to the boy's father explain the circumstances.

  Ando was trying to ascertain the boy's date of birth and his movements on the day of the accident, but the man's answers were vague and confused, making Ando's job difficult. Sometimes the father would gaze out the window when the conversation flagged, and sometimes Ando caught him stifling a yawn. He looked sapped of strength, drowsy. Ando wanted to finish up as quickly as he could and release the man.

  Then the M.E.'s office rang with a sudden commotion. They'd just been notified by the police that another body was coming in, that of an unidentified female. At the moment, they were simultaneously preparing to treat the body and to dissect it. Dr Nakayama, an older colleague of Ando's, would be in charge of the autopsy. The police had said she'd been discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of an office building. This meant the team would have to do two autopsies back to back, so assistants and policemen were running in and out now getting ready.

  "The body has arrived, Doctor."

  The autopsy assistant's voice rang out. Ando jumped involuntarily and looked toward the sound. Ikeda, the assistant, was standing by the half-open door, facing Nakayama. For some reason, though, Ando felt as though he were the one being summoned.

  "Alright," said Nakayama, getting slowly to his feet. "Get it ready, would you?" Nakayama had joined the M.E.'s office two years before Ando; he belonged to the Forensic Medicine Department of Joji University Medical School.

  The assistant disappeared, and in his place a policeman came in and approached Nakayama. After a couple of words of greeting, the cop pulled up a chair and sat down next to Nakayama.

  Ando looked back down at his own work. But he could overhear the policeman's conversation with Nakayama behind him, and it interested him. He could only catch fragments, words here and there. The officer seemed to be explaining the circumstances in which the body had been found.

  Ando stopped writing and listened. The words "unidentified" and "young female" cropped up again and again.

  Nakayama asked, "But why was she on the roof?"

  "We don't know why she went up there. Maybe she was thinking of jumping."

  "Was there a note of any kind?"

  "We haven't found one yet."

  "I imagine, from inside an exhaust shaft nobody would have heard her cries for help."

  "It's not a residential area."

  "Where is it?"

  "East Oi, in Shinagawa Ward. It's an old fourteen-story building along the Shore Road."

  Ando looked up in shock. He recalled the view from the Keihin Express tracks. Beyond the residential district, one could see the Shore Road where it passed through a district lined with warehouses and offic
e buildings. It was just a stone's throw from Mai's apartment. An unidentified young female on the roof of a building on the Shore Road…

  "I think that'll do. If I have any more questions I'll give you a call." Ando thanked the boy's father and wrapped up what he was doing. He was too interested in the conversation behind him to be able to put together a report right now. There were still some things he knew he needed to find out, but he decided he'd take care of them later.

  Ando slipped his papers into a folder and got to his feet. Nakayama and the policeman stood up at the same time. Ando went over and clapped a hand on Nakayama's shoulder. Bowing slightly to the officer, whom he recognized, Ando said, "The female you're doing next-she hasn't been identified?"

  The three of them left the office and headed down the hall toward the autopsy room.

  It was the policeman who answered Ando. "That's right. She didn't have anything on her to help us peg her."

  "How old is she?"

  "She's young, twenty or thereabouts. She'd be quite a looker, if she weren't dead."

  Twenty or thereabouts. Mai was twenty-two, but she could easily pass for a woman in her teens. Ando could feel himself starting to choke.

  "Any distinguishing features?"

  He'd know immediately if he saw the body. But he needed to prepare himself first. Of course he'd much rather hear something that proved it wasn't her. Then he could leave without having to check.

  "What's the matter, Dr Ando?" Nakayama grinned. "Are you more interested now that you know she's a knockout?"

  "No, it's not that," said Ando, refusing to play along. "There's just something that bothers me about it." Seeing his expression, Nakayama quickly wiped the leer off his face.

  "Now that you mention it, there was something strange about her. Dr Nakayama should hear this, too."

  "What's that?"

  "She wasn't wearing any underwear."

  "Really? Top or bottom?"

  "She was wearing a bra, but no panties."

  "Were her clothes in disarray when she was found?"

  Ando and Nakayama were both thinking the same thing: maybe she'd been raped on the rooftop, and then thrown down the exhaust shaft.

  "No disturbance of her clothes, and at least on visual inspection, no evidence of rape."

  "What was she wearing?"

  "A skirt, knee socks, blouse, sweatshirt. A normal outfit. You might even say conservative."

  But she hadn't been wearing panties. November, and she was wearing a skirt and no panties. Was that normal for her?

  "Excuse me, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say she was found in an exhaust shaft on a roof," Ando said. He was having trouble imagining the scene.

  "We're talking a shaft about ten feet deep and about three feet wide, next to the machine rooms on the roof. It's usually covered with wire mesh, but it'd been partially removed."

  "Enough for her to fall through."

  "Probably."

  "Is it the kind of place you just trip and fall into?"

  "No. It's not easy even to get close to. First of all, the door from the elevator hall to the roof is locked."

  "So how did she get there?"

  "There's a ladder up to the roof from the top of the fire escape. It's built into the outside wall. We think she went up that. It's the only way she could have gotten up there."

  Ando didn't see what she could have been doing up there.

  "About the underwear. Do you think she could have taken it off herself, intentionally, inside the exhaust shaft?" The shaft was three yards deep. If she'd fallen, she would have hurt herself. Maybe she'd taken off her panties to use as a bandage. Or maybe she thought she could somehow use them to help her escape.

  "We looked for them. In the shaft, and all over the roof. And then, just to be sure, we checked around the perimeter of the building, too."

  "Why the perimeter?" Nakayama interjected.

  "We thought maybe she'd wrapped them around a piece of metal or something and tossed them. Inside the shaft, there was no chance anybody'd be able to hear her cries for help. The only way to let the outside world know where she was would have been to throw something down that might catch people's attention. But that turned out to be impossible, too."

  "And why's that?"

  "From the bottom of that shaft, there was no way she could've thrown anything past the fence on the roof."

  Assuming it had something to do with the angle, Ando didn't press the point further.

  "So, it's most natural to assume that she wasn't wearing any panties when she left."

  "At the moment, that's the only explanation we can think of."

  They stopped in front of the autopsy room.

  "Would you like to join me, Dr Ando?" asked Nakayama.

  "Maybe just for a little while." It was an honest enough answer. If it wasn't Mai, he'd sigh with relief and leave. And if it was her… he'd probably leave anyway, entrusting the autopsy to Nakayama. In any event, the thing to do now was check to see if it was her.

  Beyond the door, he could hear water gushing from the faucet, as usual. As he listened for other sounds, Ando was suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. His stomach churned, and his extremities quivered. He prayed it wasn't her. It was all he could do.

  Before Ando was really prepared, Nakayama opened the door and led the way into the autopsy room. The officer was next to enter. Ando didn't go in, but only peered through the open doorway at the naked, pale corpse on the operating table.

  2

  He'd had a sneaking suspicion that the day would come, but seeing the young woman's body up close sent a deathly chill through his body nonetheless. Ando finally approached the table in Nakayama and the officer's wake. He looked at the face from every angle, still unwilling to recognize it. There was mud, dried and hardened, in the hair on the back of her head. Her ankle was twisted unnaturally; the skin over it showed the only discoloration on her body. He figured the ankle was broken, or at least badly sprained. No signs that she'd been strangled. In fact, there were no external wounds at all. The body was well past the rigor mortis stage. Over ninety hours had elapsed since death.

  Ando knew the healthy glow her flesh had displayed in life. How many times had he fantasized about holding her and feeling that skin against his? Now he'd never have the opportunity. Now she was a wasted, waxen corpse. The woman he'd been about to fall in love with now lay cruelly exposed on the table, changed into this. Ando couldn't bear the reality, and anger welled up in him.

  "Goddamnit," he sighed. Nakayama and the officer turned simultaneously to look at him.

  The policeman couldn't hide his astonishment. "Do you know her?" Ando gave a barely perceptible nod.

  "I'm sorry," Nakayama mumbled, not being able to tell exactly how close Ando had been to the woman.

  The policeman spoke next, slowly and deliberately. "Would you know who we should contact?" Behind the polite tone, Ando could hear a hint of expectation. If he knew who she was, it would save the officer from the drudgery of having to identify her.

  Wordlessly, Ando took out his planner and paged through it. He was sure he'd written her parents' phone number in it. He found the number, wrote it on another piece of paper, and handed it over. The officer read it back to Ando.

  "You're sure about this, then?" The man's tone was almost obsequious.

  "I'm sure. It's Mai Takano, alright."

  The policeman rushed out of the room to call Mai's parents and notify them of her death. Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead… Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn't collapse, she wouldn't break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.

  He couldn't stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai's body, the air would be filled with an odor much w
orse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn't want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.

  He whispered in Nakayama's ear, "I'm going to leave now."

  Nakayama gave him a suspicious look. "You don't want to participate, after all?"

  "I still have some work I need to finish up in the lab. But I want to hear the details later."

  "Understood."

  Ando put his hand on Nakayama's shoulder and whispered to him again. "Pay attention to the coronary artery. Make sure you get a tissue sample from it."

  Nakayama was puzzled that Ando had a hypothesis regarding the cause of death. "Did she have angina?"

  Ando didn't answer. Instead, he squeezed Nakayama's shoulder and, with a look that warned against asking why, said, "Just do it, alright?"

  Nakayama nodded twice.

  3

  Back at the office, Ando pulled out the chair from the desk next to Nakayama's and sat down in it backwards, hugging the backrest. He waited like that for Nakayama to finish his paperwork.

  "You seem rather concerned," Nakayama said, looking up from the report he was writing.

  "Sort of."

  "Want to see the autopsy report?" Nakayama indicated a sheaf of documents in front of Ando.

  "No. All I need is a summary."

  Nakayama turned to face Ando.

  "Let me get right to the point, then. The cause of death was not a heart attack due to blockage of the coronary artery."

  So the hypothesis Ando had shared with Nakayama before the autopsy had been wrong. Ando fell silent for a time, wondering how to interpret this. So Mai didn 't watch the video after all? Perhaps the tumor didn 't get big enough to block the flow of blood.