Parasite Eve (22 page)

    Mariko heard no splash from
his dive.

    And in fact, all of the
sounds around her had disappeared. Her own voice, her friends, the screaming of
the crowd...all was hushed, as if frozen in time. It was like suddenly being in
a silent film.

    Aoyama surfaced. He turned
his head to the side, took a breath, and plunged his left hand thumb first into
the water to propel himself forward.

    Mariko then saw that the feet
of her team anchor were in line with Aoyama’s outstretched fingertips. Aoyama
was gaining.

    Her throat was sore from
shouting so much, but she cheered on. She kept hollering even though she could
not hear herself.

    She had no idea who she was
rooting for. She wanted to support her class, but her eyes were locked on
Aoyama. As they approached the goal, Aoyama and Mariko’s teammate were head to
head. Aoyama turned his face to breathe.

    Mariko felt their eyes meet.

    She gasped. Her kidney ached.
She fell silent and just gazed at Aoyama.

    The first place anchor
touched the wall, followed soon after by second and third. The pool darkened
for a moment as clouds covered the sun overhead.

    Aoyama had won by a fraction
of a second.

    Suddenly, the roar of the crowd
returned. The noise crashed into her ears like an avalanche. Everyone threw up
their arms and yelled as loud as they could. Her friend hopped over to her.

    “We still made third place,
Mariko!”

    She rejoined the cheering
with a smile upon her face.

    Aoyama was president of his
class. He was a little on the light side, but excelled at sports. He was pretty
articulate and was always quick to make people laugh. Mariko had never been in
the same class with him, but had been interested in him ever since fifth grade.

    She never spoke to him, since
he was usually found to be chatting animatedly with the throng of girls that
seemed to follow him everywhere.

    She felt they wouldn’t get
along anyway.

    Being the sporty type that he
was, Aoyama probably liked cheerful, athletic girls, Mariko had always assumed.
She’d been in bad shape from dialysis, and now, she’d just had transplant
surgery. And while she’d probably be able to do gym again someday, she couldn’t
be termed healthy at a stretch. She was short, and she had that scar on her
side. She had to take drugs every day, like some sick person. It was hopeless.

    Even so, she asked Doctor
Yoshizumi if she was okay now.

    She wanted him to tell her
she was cured for life, but his answer was quite the opposite. If she forgot to
take her medicines at all, her new organ would be rejected. Under no
circumstances could she treat her situation casually.

    Mariko simply nodded at the
doctor’s words. She knew he was telling the truth.

    Why did she have to get
kidney failure in the first place? She never hated her body so much as now.

    She wondered how things might
have been if she hadn’t gotten sick. She’d have been able to play sports...

    Still, she was happy enough
to chance upon him in the hallway. After class, she would go out of her way to
walk past his homeroom and peek inside to get a look at him, even though it was
in the opposite direction from where her locker was. After she passed by his
classroom, she would turn around and go down the hall, taking the roundabout
way, walking an entire lap through the school building. Whenever Aoyama was not
there, she would act cool and continue walking. But if he was there, she could
barely contain her happiness, and her steps would lag.

   
That
was her mistake.

    With summer vacation over and
two weeks into September, everyone was just coming out of their hot weather
daze.

    Classes were done for the
day, and Mariko went over to look at Aoyama as usual. She craned her neck and
scanned the classroom’s interior.

    He was not there today.

    She was about to continue on
in disappointment when she heard a voice address her.

    “What’cha doing there,
Mariko?”

    She stopped dead in her
tracks.

    When she looked in again, she
saw two boys sitting on desks. They had huge grins on their faces. There were
hardly any other students in the room.

    “Why’ja always take a peek?”

    She had shared a class with
these two the year before. They were known for sticking their noses where they
did not belong and being pushy towards girls. Mariko and her friends disliked
them.

    “So what if I did?” she shot
back in a callous tone in an attempt to hide her embarrassment.

    But this only encouraged the
pair. One of them cut to the point.

    “Oooh, I get it. You like
Aoyama. That’s why you’re always hangin’ around here after class.”

    They’d figured her out.

    Mariko felt her face turn
completely red. She wanted to say something, but just stood there stuttering.

    “Too bad, you just missed
him. You know, he told us puffy-faced chicks aren’t his type anyway.”

    The two started laughing.

    Mariko turned back on her
heel, wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible, but just as she was
about to run away, she heard those dreadful words.

    “Hey, I heard you got a
kidney from your dad?”

    Her legs froze.

    “Awww, it went breaky, so you
had to get help from your daddy? How cuuute.”

    Why were they saying these
things to her? It had nothing to do with Aoyama. If only she could cover her ears
and block their words. Her body had frozen and she couldn’t move a finger. She
wanted nothing more than to disappear at that moment.

    But the boys went on.

    “She’s just like that
Frankenstein monster, don’t you think?” one of them said to the other.

    “She wants to live, even if
it means taking someone else’s kidney. Aww, what a greedy little girl.”

    “What a freak. I bet her body’s
all patched up.”

    “Wonder if she can even take
a piss.”

    Their guffaws rang in her
head like horrid bells. She wanted so much to tell them to stop, to say that
she wasn’t a monster, that she wasn’t put together from dead people like that
creation of Dr. Frankenstein. But nothing came out.

    “Stop it you guys!”

    A voice cried out and, the
moment she heard it, Mariko fell forward as the tension in her body snapped.
Her head made an awful sound against the hallway tile. As she tried clearing
her blurred vision, she saw a group of girls quarreling with the boys, but
could not make out who they were.

    She ran away. A voice called
out from behind her, “Mariko, wait!” but she ignored it. The distance to her
locker had never felt so long. She changed her shoes hastily and ran home with
all her might, not stopping once on the way. By the time she got to her house,
she was short of breath. Her side was in terrible pain, her surroundings
distorted through tears.

    When she walked in the door,
she immediately removed all of her immuno-suppressants from their pouch, tore
open the packages, and threw the multicolored capsules and pills into the
toilet. She pushed down on the handle and watched as they swirled around and
flowed down the pipe out of sight, leaving only a gurgling sound in their wake.

    I’m not a monster.

    Mariko crouched in front of
the toilet bowl, buried her face between her knees and cried there in the
bathroom, her body convulsing in unison with her sobs.

    It was not long before
rejection set in.

    Mariko was taken to the ICU
right away. She clearly remembered Doctor Yoshizumi’s expression of disbelief
that day.

    “Why didn’t you take your
medicines?” he asked, but the question fell on deaf ears.

    “I did take them.”

    Yoshizumi was unconvinced.

    “If you had, then you wouldn’t
be here right now.”

    “I took them just like you said.”

    “You shouldn’t he, Mariko.
You’re not well. Why did you do this? Didn’t I tell you to take your meds every
day? Didn’t I warn you?”

    Yoshizumi’s voice was tinged
with despair. He’d probably tried his best not to sound that way, but Mariko
didn’t miss the tone.

    “We’re going to have to take
it out now.”

    After all they’d gone
through, it had come to this.

    Yoshizumi, Mariko, and her
father discussed a plan of action, though Yoshizumi did most of the talking. He
sat in front of Mariko’s bed, looking at her pitifully, more, it seemed to her,
for his own sake than hers. Her father reacted to each of the doctor’s words
with utter disbelief.

    I ruined my father’s kidney,
Mariko thought. She was afraid to imagine what he must have been thinking, but
she couldn’t keep terrible guesses from running rampant in her brain.

    Her father was naturally
upset. His own child had rejected a most selfless sacrifice. She had been on
her way to a normal life again, but had thrown away her only chance to get
there, through her own negligence. Mariko was sure her father thought she was
beyond saving.

    Yoshizumi must have shared
the sentiment. After all the hardships they faced, and despite having gone
through all the necessary steps, she had repaid their diligent work with
intolerable foolishness. Mariko was sure the doctor thought she was hopeless.

    She was sure.

    Mariko closed her eyes. The
faint humming sound had faded into silence.

    Hot air from outside
permeated the hospital room, making it difficult for her to fall asleep. The
bed creaked faintly as she turned onto her side.

    She thought of school.

    She had no desire to return
there. The laughter of those two boys was still trapped in her ears. If she did
go back, it was only a matter of time before she became an object of ridicule
again. It was an unbearable thought. If this was how people were going to treat
her, then living a life of dialysis was, to her, the more favorable option.

    The next morning, a nurse
came in carrying a white bag filled with packages of immuno-suppressants.

    Mariko wondered what would
happen if she didn’t take them. She would only need to pretend to swallow them
and hide them in the back of her mouth. Then, when the nurse was not looking,
she could spit them out and stuff diem under her pillow. No one would suspect a
thing.

    Then again, the doctor was
sure to notice something eventually.

    In the heat, her thoughts
soon grew vague and disjointed. As she drifted between wakefulness and sleep,
she imagined scenes from the near future when this transplant would end in
failure.

    Just then, she heard an
indistinct noise.

    Her ears perked up in alarm.
She stopped breathing and listened for nearly a minute, but heard nothing.

    Just a figment of her
imagination.

    She breathed a sigh of relief
and looked at the window. A street light threw jet black lines on her face
mimicking the blind that was lowered between them.

    She always had the same dream
here of some unknown entity walking slowly with determined footsteps, her room
as its goal. She wouldn’t be able to run away. Her body was always paralyzed,
her heart pounding close to bursting. And then her kidney would announce itself
by moving around, enthralled by the strange presence approaching her door.

    The footsteps always stopped
just outside the hospital room. Before long, the doorknob would begin to turn.

    She always woke up just as
the door was about to open.

    But Mariko knew who the
footsteps belonged to.

    The donor.

    The corpse from whom she had
stolen a vital organ had come to reclaim it.

    She was reminded of a strange
little comic book she once read long before her kidney problems even began. A
friend had bought it for her. Mariko didn’t remember the author’s name or the
title and could only vaguely recall the story, but she still remembered clearly
the shock of reading it. It had made her afraid to even go to the bathroom
alone.

    The story centered around a
young girl who was paralyzed after falling down a flight of stairs. All the
doctors judged her dead from the fall. Even though she was fully conscious and
aware of her surroundings, her total lack of bodily control hindered her from
telling them that she was still alive.

    The girl was brought into the
operating room and designated as a heart donor. She tried desperately to make
everyone notice she was alive, to no avail, and had to watch as her heart was
cut out.