Loop (10 page)

Even if I get sick, I don't want to have surgery,
she'd proclaimed, as soon as she'd heard the results. Since there was no way to head off metastasis, surgery was doomed from the start. All it could do was slow the progress of the disease, not cure it. After watching her husband suffer, she had a strong aversion to seeing her own body carved away piece by piece.

But what bothered Kaoru most was seeing his mother stray into mysticism, thinking that if modern medicine couldn't cure her, she'd try to find her own miracle elsewhere. The person she really wanted to save was not herself, although she knew she'd someday come down with cancer, but her husband, in the last stages of his.

With a passion that wouldn't blink at selling her soul to the devil, she started reading old writings on North American Indians. Her desk was stacked high with primary sources sent from who knew where.

The mythical world holds the key to a cure for cancer,
she insisted, almost deliriously.

Again from the bathroom came the purposeful sound of running water. Ryoji reacted by glancing toward the bathroom.

"My mother's a carrier," said Kaoru in a low voice.

"Oh. So are you…?"

Ryoji asked his question with no emotion whatsoever, and Kaoru slowly shook his head. He'd had his blood tested two months ago, and the results had come back negative.

Hearing this, Ryoji actually laughed. Not necessarily out of relief that Kaoru was uninfected, though. Rather, it was a scornful, even pitying cackle. Kaoru glared at him.

"What's so funny about that?"

"I just feel sorry for you."

"For me?" Kaoru pointed at himself, and Ryoji nodded his head twice.

"Yeah. You're strong and healthy, so you're probably going to live a long time. Just thinking about it…"

Under his motorcycle-loving father's influence, Kaoru had taken up motocross, and under Hideyuki's tutelage he'd improved his showing with every race he'd entered. He'd grown up muscular and fit in a way that nobody could have predicted from a childhood spent on a computer from morning to night. Kaoru's muscles were visible even through his T-shirt, and yet this scrawny kid was pitying him. To Kaoru it sounded like he was laughing at something Kaoru had inherited from his father, and he fought back vigorously.

"Living's not as bad a thing as you seem to think it is."

Part of him could understand Ryoji's feelings, of course. Kaoru didn't know when or how he'd been infected, but here he was at age twelve- between surgery, chemotherapy, and repeated hospitalizations, his life had been nothing but an endless round of suffering. Kaoru could see why he'd want to generalize from his experience and believe that everybody must be feeling the same way.

"Yeah, but everybody dies." Ryoji turned his hollow gaze toward the ceiling. Kaoru no longer felt like arguing with him.

Death filled everything, everywhere. There in front of him was that bald little head. It was a solemn fact.

Nobody who hasn't experienced it can understand the misery of chemotherapy. Overcome with violent nausea, you lose your appetite, and anything you do manage to eat, you bring up again soon enough; you can't get any sleep. That was Ryoji's life, and that was how his life was going to end in the not-too-distant future. Kaoru knew it. What could he possibly say in the face of that?

Kaoru felt tired. Not physical fatigue. It was like his heart was blocked and screaming. He wanted to soar; he wanted to laugh, freely and from the heart. He wanted to spend time in close bodily contact with another human being.

"I never wanted to be born in the first place," Ryoji said, ignoring Kaoru's unresponsiveness. At that very moment, Reiko stepped out of the bathroom and into the reverberations of Ryoji's statement. Without the slightest change in her expression she crossed the room and went out into the hall.

Why did you have me?
Perhaps she left because she couldn't bear her son's accusations, or perhaps she simply had an errand to run. There was no way of telling.

But Kaoru had been paying attention to her movements. And now two questions raised their heads. First of all, was Reiko infected with the MHC virus? And, second, by what route did Ryoji become infected with it? These were questions Kaoru couldn't come right out and ask, as they touched on private family matters.

"Well, I think I'll be on my way now." He couldn't be by Ryoji's side any longer. Plus, he wanted to follow Reiko.

Kaoru left the boy's bed and opened the door to the hallway. He wanted to come into closer contact with Reiko, both bodily and with what was inside her. Maybe his interest in her amounted to a kind of love; he couldn't tell. He felt that she was urging him out of the cramped hospital room and into the world outside.

Compelled by this stimulus, Kaoru wandered the long corridors of the hospital, looking for Reiko.

He had an idea where she was, or at least he thought he did.

My only peace these days comes from going to the very highest point in the hospital and looking out over the city.

A few evenings before, Kaoru had seen her standing outside the restaurant on the top floor of the hospital, nose pressed against a window, and he'd asked her what she was doing. She'd explained her actions with those words.

The sun would be setting soon, silhouetting the skyscrapers in this subcenter of the city, bringing them into beautiful relief. Kaoru knew that this was her favourite time of day for gazing at the city.

He got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor, and when he stepped into the hallway and looked left he could see a woman standing there, leaning against a pillar. Kaoru approached her without speaking, until they were standing side by side.

The setting sun streaked Reiko's face with crimson. Her cheeks glowed seductively as they reflected the sky's shifting hues.

She knew as soon as he came up to her; she could see his reflection in the glass. She addressed his reflection with a faint smile.

"I'm sorry."

Kaoru couldn't figure out what she was apologizing for. Maybe she was recognizing his skill in tutoring her difficult-to-deal-with son, but in that case a thank-you would have been more appropriate. Kaoru was embarrassed for a response.

He decided not to ask why she'd apologized. "You really like high places, don't you?"

"I do. Maybe it's because I've lived my whole life hugging the ground."

Did she mean she'd always lived in one-story houses? If so, it was a stark contrast to Kaoru's own living environment. He still lived with his mother in their apartment tower overlooking Tokyo Bay.

Reiko changed the subject in an effort to dispel the oppressive atmosphere; in an enthusiastic voice she started talking about dreams. She started right in, like a shot, with what she wanted to do first when her son had recovered from his illness. The precondition itself-her son recovering-being utterly impossible, she was free to dream whatever unrealistic dreams she felt like. Among the more realistic ideas she mentioned was taking a trip overseas.

So when she changed tack and asked Kaoru, "What's your dream?" he was able without hesitation to come up with the family trip to the North American desert that they'd planned ten years ago.

Kaoru gave Reiko a brief account of what they'd talked about that late night ten years ago- the relationship between gravity and life, the mysteries of life itself, and how those led to the possible existence of longevity zones.

He then explained in simple terms how his father's promise to take him to the desert had fuelled further interest in global longevity patterns. Then came his father's cancer, which had prompted him to deeper research, and the belief that there had to be a relationship between longevity zones and the number of cancer victims.

This last point piqued Reiko's interest, and, still leaning against the glass, she turned to face Kaoru.

"What kind of relationship?"

"I'm not entirely sure yet, but the statistics show certain peculiarities that can't be ignored."

Kaoru warmed up to his explanation, as he could see that Reiko had pricked up her ears.

"It was not just coincidence that led me that night into associating gravitational anomalies with longevity. I had a flash of intuition. Most scientific discoveries are the result of intuition. Inspiration comes first, then reason. It might not be far off to think that I was responding to some kind of suggestion that night.

"When my father's cancer spread to his liver, I started researching longevity zones worldwide. It wasn't just my imagination. It's been confirmed: there are spots on the globe where people live longer. I analyzed all kinds of data. If they had something in common, I was going to find it.

"I finally narrowed it down to four particularly well-known longevity zones: Abkhazia, an area of the Caucasus on the shores of the Black Sea; Vilcabamba, a sacred valley on the border between Peru and Ecuador; Hunza, a mountainous region surrounded by the Karakoram Mountains and the Hindukush and cut off from the surrounding area; and Sanaru Island, in the Samejima archipelago of Japan. I wasn't able to visit these places myself to investigate, so I read everything I could get my hands on that related to them, and compiled my own statistics. When I did that, one thing stood out. It's a bit too early for me to make a definitive judgment, but it would seem that these places have not seen a single death from cancer. Doctors and biologists from around the world have investigated longevity zones, and they've left countless reports. None of them record deaths from cancer.

"The reports all agree in pointing to diet as a possible cause for this low cancer rate. But this is nothing more than a guess, seeing as how we haven't yet fully explained the mechanism that produces cancer. There's no denying that people in these areas live on a simple diet consisting mainly of vegetables and grains, but data suggests that their consumption of tobacco and alcohol may even be higher than other areas. At the very least, we aren't able to say that their exposure to carcinogens is lower than normal.

"All of this makes me wonder. Why is it that these longevity zones have so few people suffering from cancer? And then… Listen to this. Cancer cells have the ability to make normal cells immortal. Is that somehow related? And how are we to account for the fact that these longevity zones match up perfectly with areas of unusually low gravity?

"There's got to be a satisfying explanation, but I haven't been able to come up with it yet."

Kaoru paused for breath. His excitement had risen to a peculiar pitch as he talked.

Reiko was silent for a time, looking at Kaoru. Then she licked her lips and spoke.

"This MHC virus that's suddenly everywhere- where did it come from?"

Her question struck Kaoru as beside the point.

"Why ask me?"

Reiko's eyes were open wide and her expression was serious: she evidently really wanted an answer. At that moment Kaoru found her unbearably adorable. He forgot all about the fact that she was ten years older than he; he wanted to place his hands gently on her cheeks and draw her to him.

"Don't laugh. It's just that I wondered, for a second, if the MHC virus might just possibly have come from one of these longevity zones of yours."

Kaoru could guess at her train of thought. He'd read a novel once about someone whose entire body had been overrun by cancer; only, instead of dying, the cancer had made him immortal.

Maybe people in those areas have learned to coexist with cancer, and that's why they live so long.
Most likely Reiko's imagination had moved along those lines.
Maybe it's not that those areas are free of cancer. Maybe they're full of it, in fact. Maybe it's just that nobody dies from it. Maybe the cancer virus started there…

"Maybe a virus somehow picked up these people's cancer chromosome and the result escaped into the world as the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. Is that what you're saying?"

"It's all much too difficult for me to understand, I'm sure. It was just a thought. Forget about it."

Reiko turned her gaze to the world below. Over the last few minutes the sky had changed colour dramatically, and that change was reflected even more vividly in Reiko's expression. Deep shadows pooled in the hollows of her eye sockets. The darker it got outside, the more the window began to function as a mirror. Against the backdrop of skyscrapers Kaoru saw Reiko's face reflected in the glass as if it was floating disembodied in the darkness.

"Metastatic cancer victims are especially numerous in Japan and America."

It was true: the geographical distribution of the victims showed marked variation. Japan and America each had roughly a million patients with the disease, and the advanced nations of Europe had several hundred thousand, while remote areas of the type where the longevity zones were located had hardly reported any cases at all. Kaoru was trying to imply that her hypothesis had holes.

"What about the desert area you mentioned, in North America? It has abnormally low gravity, so it wouldn't be surprising if people there lived longer, would it?"

"It's just a guess."

"So you have no proof."

"I suppose you could say all this has just been a game for me."

The word seemed to come as a shock to Reiko: she became visibly discouraged. "Oh." Now her discouragement turned into a frown; she made as if to turn away from Kaoru.

"What's wrong?"

Kaoru was a bit taken aback by this sudden change in her.

"I was hoping for a miracle. It's all we have left," she said, still looking away.

A miracle, Kaoru thought in disgust. Reiko was about to fall into the same trap as his mother.

"I think you'd better stop hoping for a miracle."

"I won't stop."

"You have other things you need to be doing."

He wanted Reiko to keep her wits about her. But she wasn't listening to him now.

"I was just thinking, maybe all the inhabitants of those longevity zones get viral cancer at some point. But before the cancer cells incapacitate their internal organs, some factor turns their cells immortal, and the cancer becomes benign. It’s bad side disappears, and the cancer is able to coexist with human beings. Their cells are able to undergo mitosis more times, with the result that they live longer. How's that for a theory?"