After Dark (9 page)

“All that’s left are tuna fish.”

“That’s okay. I love tuna fish. You don’t?”

“No, I do, but mercury builds up in your body if you eat tuna fish.”

“Yeah?”

“If you’ve got mercury in your body, you can start having heart attacks in your forties. And you can start losing your hair.”

Takahashi frowns. “So you can’t have chicken, and you can’t have tuna?”

Mari nods.

“And both just happen to be some of my favorite foods.”

“Sorry.”

“I like potato salad a lot, too. Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with potato salad…?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mari says. “Except, if you eat too much it’ll make you fat.”

“That’s okay,” Takahashi says. “I’m too skinny as it is.”

Takahashi picks up a tuna sandwich and eats it with obvious pleasure.

“So anyhow, are you planning to stay a student until you pass the bar exam?” Mari asks.

“Yeah, I guess so. I’ll just be scraping by for a while, I suppose, doing odd jobs.”

Mari is thinking about something.

Takahashi asks her, “Have you ever seen
Love Story
? It’s an old movie.”

Mari shakes her head.

“They had it on TV the other day. It’s pretty good. Ryan O’Neal is the only son of an old-money family, but in college he marries a girl from a poor Italian family and gets disowned. They even stop paying his tuition. The two manage to scrape by and keep up their studies until he graduates from Harvard Law School with honors and joins a big law firm.”

Takahashi pauses to take a breath. Then he goes on:

“The way Ryan O’Neal does it, living in poverty can be kind of elegant—wearing a thick white sweater, throwing snowballs with Ali MacGraw, Francis Lai’s sentimental music playing in the background. But something tells me I wouldn’t fit the part. For me, poverty would be just plain poverty. I probably couldn’t even get the snow to pile up for me like that.”

Mari is still thinking about something.

Takahashi continues: “So after Ryan O’Neal has slaved away to become a lawyer, they never give the audience any idea what kind of work he does. All we know is he joins this top law firm and pulls in a salary that would make anybody envious. He lives in a fancy Manhattan high-rise with a doorman out front, joins a WASP sports club, and plays squash with his yuppie friends. That’s all we know.”

Takahashi drinks his water.

“So what happens after that?” Mari asks.

Takahashi looks upward, recalling the plot. “Happy ending. The two live happily ever after. Love conquers all. It’s like: we used to be miserable, but now everything’s great. They drive a shiny new Jaguar, he plays squash, and sometimes in winter they throw snowballs. Meanwhile, the father who disowned Ryan O’Neal comes down with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and Ménière’s disease and dies a lonely, miserable death.”

“I don’t get it. What’s so good about a story like that?”

Takahashi cocks his head. “Hmm, what did I like about it? I can’t remember. I had stuff to do, so I didn’t watch the last part very closely…Hey, how about a walk? A little change of atmosphere? There’s a tiny park down the street where the cats like to gather. We can feed them your leftover tuna-mercury sandwiches. I’ve got a fish cake, too. You like cats?”

Mari nods, puts her book in her bag, and stands up.

T
akahashi and Mari walk down the street. They are not talking now. Takahashi is whistling. A black Honda motorcycle passes close to them, dropping its speed. It is the bike driven by the Chinese man who picked up the woman at Alphaville—the man with the ponytail. His full- face helmet is off now, and he scans his surroundings with great care. Between him and them, there is no point of contact. The deep rumble of the engine draws close to them and passes by.

Mari asks Takahashi, “How did you and Kaoru get to know each other?”

“I’ve been doing odd jobs at that hotel for the past six months or so. Alphaville. Dirty work—washing floors and stuff. Some computer stuff, too—installing software, fixing glitches. I even put in their security camera. Only women work there, so they’re happy to get a man’s help once in a while.”

“How did you happen to start working there specifically?”

Takahashi has a moment of confusion. “Specifically?”

“I mean,
something
must have led you to start working there,” Mari says. “I think Kaoru was being purposely vague about it…”

“That’s kind of a tough one…”

Mari keeps silent.

“Oh, well,” Takahashi says, as if resigning himself to the inevitable. “The truth is, I once took a girl there. As a customer, I mean. Afterwards, when it was time to go, I realized I didn’t have enough money. The girl didn’t, either. We had been drinking and really hadn’t thought much about that part. All I could do was leave my student ID with them.”

Mari offers no comment.

“The whole thing’s kind of embarrassing,” Takahashi says. “So I went the next day to pay the rest. Kaoru invited me to stay for a cup of tea, and we talked about this and that, at the end of which she told me to start part-time work there the next day. She practically forced me into it. The pay’s not much good, but they feed me once in a while. And my band’s practice space was something Kaoru found for us. She
looks
like a tough guy, but she’s actually a very caring person. I still stop in for a visit now and then. And they still call me if a computer goes out of whack or something.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“The one who went to the hotel with me?”

Mari nods.

“That was it for us,” Takahashi says. “I haven’t seen her since then. I’m sure she was disgusted with me. I really blew it. But anyhow, it’s no big deal. I wasn’t that crazy about her. We would have broken up sooner or later.”

“Do you do that a lot—go to hotels with girls you’re not particularly crazy about?”

“Hell no. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing. That was the first time I ever went to a love hotel.”

The two continue walking.

As if offering an excuse, Takahashi says, “And besides, it wasn’t my idea. She was the one who suggested we go to a place like that. Really.”

Mari says nothing.

“Well, anyhow, that would be another long story if I got started,” says Takahashi. “All kinds of stuff led up to what happened…”

“You seem to have a lot of long stories…”

“Maybe I do,” he says. “I wonder why that is.”

Mari says, “Before, you told me you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“Right. I’m an only child.”

“If you went to the same high school as Eri, your family must be here in Tokyo. Why aren’t you living with them? It’d be a lot cheaper that way.”

“That would be another long story,” he says.

“You don’t have a short version?”

“I do. A
really
short version. Wanna hear it?”

“Uh-huh,” Mari says.

“My mother’s not my biological mother.”

“So you don’t get along with her?”

“No, it’s not that we don’t get along. I’m just not the kind of guy who likes to stand up and rock the boat. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend every day making chitchat and putting on a smiley face at the dinner table. Being alone has never been hard for me. Besides, I haven’t got such a great relationship with my father.”

“You don’t like each other?”

“Well, let’s just say our personalities are different. And our values.”

“What does he do?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Takahashi says. “But I’m almost one hundred percent sure that it’s nothing to be proud of. And besides—this is not something I go around telling people—he spent a few years in prison when I was a kid. He was an antisocial type—a criminal. That’s another reason I don’t want to live with my family. I start having doubts about my genes.”

“And
that’s
your really short version?” Mari asks in mock horror, smiling.

Takahashi looks at her and says, “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”

10

E
ri Asai is still sleeping.

The Man with No Face, however, who was sitting beside her and watching her so intently, is gone. So is his chair. Without them, the room is starker, more deserted than before. The bed stands in the center of the room, and on it lies Eri. She looks like a person in a lifeboat floating in a calm sea, alone. We are observing the scene from our side—from Eri’s actual room—through the TV screen. There seems to be a TV camera in the room on the other side capturing Eri’s sleeping form and sending it here. The position and angle of the camera change at regular intervals, drawing slightly nearer or drawing slightly farther back each time.

Time goes by, but nothing happens. She doesn’t move. She makes no sound. She floats face-up on an ocean of pure thought devoid of waves or current. And yet, we can’t tear ourselves away from the image being sent. Why should that be? We don’t know the reason. We sense, however, through a certain kind of intuition, that
something
is there. Something alive. It lurks beneath the surface of the water, expunging any sense of its presence. We keep our eyes trained on the motionless image, hoping to ascertain the position of this thing we cannot see.

J
ust now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai’s mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can’t be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.

As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri’s mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.

G
radually we begin to tire of passively observing the TV screen from this side. We want to check out the interior of that other room directly, with our own eyes. We want to see more closely the beginning of faint movement, the possible quickening of consciousness, that Eri is beginning to exhibit. We want to speculate upon its meaning based on something more concrete. And so we decide to transport ourselves to the other side of the screen.

It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind, and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss. Which is exactly what we do. We let ourselves become a pure single point and pass through the TV screen separating the two worlds, moving from this side to the other. When we pass through the wall and leap the abyss, the world undergoes a great deformation, splits and crumbles, and is momentarily gone. Everything turns into fine, pure dust that scatters in all directions. And then the world is reconstructed. A new substance surrounds us. And all of this takes but the blink of an eye.

Now we are on the other side, in the room we saw on the screen. We survey our surroundings. It smells like a room that has not been cleaned for a long time. The window is shut tight, and the air doesn’t move. It’s chilly and smells faintly of mold. The silence is so deep it hurts our ears. No one is here, nor do we sense the presence of something lurking in here. If there was such a thing here before, it has long since departed. We are the only ones here now—we and Eri Asai.

Eri goes on sleeping in the single bed in the center of the room. We recognize the bed and bedclothes. We approach her and study her face as she sleeps, taking time to observe the details with great care. As mentioned before, all that we, as pure point of view, can accomplish is to observe—observe, gather data, and, if possible, judge. We are not allowed to touch her. Neither can we speak to her. Nor can we indicate our presence to her indirectly.

Before long there is movement in Eri’s face again—a reflexive twitching of the flesh of one cheek, as if to chase away a tiny fly that has just alighted there. Then her right eyelid flutters minutely. Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to each other, their spreading ripples intermingling. The process takes place before our eyes. A unit of thought begins to form this way. Then it links with another unit that has been made in another region, and the fundamental system of self-awareness takes shape. In other words, she is moving, step by step, toward wakefulness.

The pace of her awakening may be maddeningly slow, but it never moves backward. The system exhibits occasional disorientation, but it moves steadily forward, step by step. The intervals of time needed between one movement and the next gradually contract. Muscle movements at first are limited to the area of the face, but in time they spread to the rest of the body. At one point a shoulder rises gently, and a small white hand appears from beneath the quilt. The left hand. It awakens one step ahead of the right. In their new temporality, the fingers thaw and relax and begin to move awkwardly in search of something. Eventually they move atop the bedcover as small, independent creatures, coming to rest against the slender throat, as if Eri is groping uncertainly for the meaning of her own flesh.

Soon her eyelids open. But, stabbed by the light of the fluorescent lamps ranged on the ceiling, the eyes snap shut again. Her consciousness seems to resist awakening. What it wants to do is exclude the encroaching world of reality and go on sleeping without end in a soft, enigmatic darkness. By contrast, her bodily functions seek positive awakening. They long for fresh natural light. These two opposing forces clash within her, but the final victory belongs to the power source that indicates awakening. Again the eyelids open, slowly, hesitantly. But again the fluorescent glare is too much. She raises both hands and covers her eyes. She turns aside and rests a cheek against the pillow.

Time passes. For three minutes, four, Eri Asai lies in bed in that same position, eyes closed. Could she have gone to sleep again? No, she is giving her consciousness time to accustom itself to the waking world. Time plays an important role, as when a person has been moved into a room with vastly different atmospheric pressure and must allow the bodily functions to adjust. Her consciousness recognizes that unavoidable changes have begun, and it struggles to accept them. She feels slightly nauseated. Her stomach contracts, giving her the sensation that something is about to rise from it. She overcomes the feeling with several long breaths. And when, at last, the nausea has departed, several other unpleasant sensations come to take its place: numbness of the arms and legs, faint ringing of the ears, muscle pain. She has been sleeping in one position too long.

Again time passes.

Finally she raises herself in bed and, with unsteady gaze, examines her surroundings. The room is huge. No one else is there.
What is this place? What am I doing here?
Again and again she tries to trace her memory back, but it gives out each time like a short thread. All she can tell is that she has been sleeping in this place: she is in bed, wearing pajamas.
This is my bed, these are my pajamas. That much is certain. But this is
not
my place. My body is numb all over. If I was asleep here, it was for a very long time, and very deeply. But I have no idea how long it could have been.
Her temples begin to throb with the determined effort of thinking.

She wills herself out from under the covers, lowering her bare feet cautiously to the floor. She is wearing plain blue pajamas of glossy material. The air here is chilly. She strips the thin quilt from the bed and dons it as a cape. She tries to walk but is unable to move straight ahead. Her muscles cannot remember how to do it. But she pushes onward, one step at a time. The blank linoleum floor questions her with cold efficiency: Who are you? What are you doing here? But of course she is unable to answer.

She approaches a window and, resting her hands on the sill, strains to see outside. Beyond the glass, however, there is no scenery, only an uncolored space like a pure abstract idea. She rubs her eyes, takes a deep breath, and tries to look out again. Still there is nothing to see but empty space. She tries to open the window but it will not move. She tries all of the windows in order, but they refuse to move, as if they have been nailed shut. It occurs to her that this might be a ship. She seems to feel a gentle rocking.
I might be riding on a large ship, and the windows are sealed to keep the water from splashing in.
She listens for the sound of an engine or a hull cutting through the waves. But all that reaches her is the unbroken sound of silence.

She makes a complete circuit of the large room, taking time to feel the walls and turn switches on and off. None of the switches has any effect on the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps—or on anything else: they do nothing. The room has two doors—utterly ordinary paneled doors. She tries turning the knob of one. It simply spins without engaging. She tries pushing and pulling, but the door will not budge. The other door is the same. Each of the doors and windows sends signals of rejection to her as if each is an independent creature.

She makes two fists and pounds on the door as hard as she can, hoping that someone will hear and open the door from the outside, but she is shocked at how little sound she is able to produce. She herself can hardly hear it. No one (assuming there is anyone out there) can possibly hear her knocking. All she does is hurt her hands. Inside her head, she feels something resembling dizziness. The rocking sensation in her body has increased.

We notice that the room resembles the office where Shirakawa was working late at night. It could well be the same room. Only, now it is perfectly vacant, stripped of all furniture, office equipment, and decoration. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling are all that is left. After every item was taken out, the last person locked the door behind him, and the room, its existence forgotten by the world, was plunged to the bottom of the sea. The silence and the moldy smell absorbed by the four surrounding walls indicate to her—and to us—the passage of that time.

She squats down, her back against the wall, eyes closed, as she waits for the dizziness and rocking to subside. Eventually she opens her eyes and picks something up that has fallen on the floor nearby. A pencil. With an eraser. Stamped with the name veritech, it is the same kind of silver pencil that Shirakawa was using. The point is blunt. She picks up the pencil and stares at it for a long time. She has no memory of the name veritech. Could it be the name of a company, or of some kind of product? She can’t be sure. She shakes her head slightly. Aside from the pencil, she sees nothing that promises to give her any information about this room.

She can’t comprehend how she came to be in a place like this all alone. She has never seen it before, and nothing about the place jogs her memory.
Who could have carried me here, and for what purpose? Is it possible I have died? Is this the afterlife?
She sits down on the edge of the bed and examines the possibility that this is what has happened to her. But she cannot believe that she is dead. Nor should the afterlife be like this. If dying meant being shut up alone inside a vacant room in an isolated office building, it was too utterly lacking any hope of salvation.
Could this be a dream then? No, it is too consistent to be a dream, the details too concrete and vivid. I can actually touch the things that are here.
She jabs the back of her hand with the pencil tip to verify the pain. She licks the eraser to verify the taste of rubber.

This is reality,
she concludes.
For some reason, a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit. Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? No, that is not likely, either. After all, who gets to bring her own bed along when she enters the hospital? And besides, this simply doesn’t
look
like a hospital room. Neither does it look like a prison cell. It’s just a big, empty room.

She returns to the bed and strokes the quilt. She gives the pillow a few light pats. They are just an ordinary quilt and an ordinary pillow. Not symbols, not concepts; one is a real quilt, and the other a real pillow. Neither gives her anything to go by. Eri runs her fingers over her face, touching every bit of skin. Through her pajama top, she lays her hands on her breasts. She verifies that she is her usual self: a beautiful face and well-shaped breasts.
I’m a lump of flesh, a commercial asset,
her rambling thoughts tell her. Suddenly she is far less sure that she is herself.

Her dizziness has faded, but the rocking sensation continues. She feels as if her footing has been swept out from under her. Her body’s interior has lost all necessary weight and is becoming a cavern. Some kind of hand is deftly stripping away everything that has constituted her as Eri until now: the organs, the senses, the muscles, the memories. She knows she will end up as a mere convenient conduit used for the passage of external things. Her flesh creeps with the overwhelming sense of isolation this gives her.
I hate this!
she screams.
I don’t want to be changed this way!
But her intended scream never emerges. All that leaves her throat in reality is a fading whimper.