Loop (9 page)

Kaoru wordlessly set up the extra bed. It wasn't so much that he was caving in to Ryoji's challenge as that he was eager to yield to whatever he felt on touching Reiko. If his feelings were going to deepen, let them. As yet he didn't understand the effect physical contact with her would have on his psychological state.

Kaoru placed his arms behind Reiko's neck and under her knees, and in one motion lifted her up and placed her on the bed.

As he laid her down, her lips brushed against his neck, just for a moment. She opened her eyes slightly and flexed her arms so as to hug him closer, then loosened her grip with a contented look on her face, and fell back to sleep.

Kaoru stayed silent and motionless for a little while, afraid she'd wake up if he moved. For several seconds, his body covered hers. With his face between her chest and belly, he could feel the resilience of the flesh of her abdomen; his eyes were trained on her face. He was looking up at her face from below, essentially. He could see the fine lines of her jaw, and above it the two black holes of her nostrils. He'd never seen her face from this angle before.

At length he stood up again. As he separated himself from her body, he asked himself, repeatedly:
Am I falling in love with her?

The touch of her lips was still vivid on the skin of his neck.

"Well, then, I'll see you next week."

Kaoru put his hand hesitantly on the doorknob, so as not to reveal the pounding of his heart.

Ryoji still sat cross-legged on his bed, rocking back and forth, cracking his knuckles. Unlike a few moments ago, his face held no look of provocation or mockery now-he'd stifled all expression.

"Good night."

Kaoru slipped out of the room. He could feel Ryoji's unnatural smile fixed on the door as he shut it behind him.

Kaoru had a flash of intuition. This meeting was not mere coincidence. His future would be intimately tied with Reiko and Ryoji.

Among Kaoru's pleasures in life were his visits to the office of Assistant Professor Saiki in the Pathology Department. Saiki had been a classmate of his father's in this very university, and now, with his father in this unfortunate condition, Saiki was always ready to lend an ear or some advice. Officially, he wasn't Kaoru's advisor, but he was an old friend of the family, someone Kaoru had known since childhood.

These days there was a specific purpose to Kaoru's regular visits. Cells from the cancer torturing his father were being cultured in Saiki's lab, and Kaoru liked to come by to look at them under the microscope. To adequately fend off this enemy's attacks, he felt he needed to know its true visage.

Kaoru left the hospital proper and entered the building containing the Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and Microbiology laboratories. The university hospital was a motley collection of new and old buildings; this was one of the older ones. The Forensic Medicine classrooms were on the second floor, while the third housed Pathology, where he was headed.

He climbed the stairs and turned left into a hallway lined with small labs on either side. Kaoru stopped in front of Professor Saiki's door and knocked.

"Come in," Saiki called out. The door was open a crack; Kaoru stuck his head in. "Oh, it's you." This was Saiki's standard response on seeing Kaoru.

"Is this a bad time?"

"I'm busy, as you can see, but you're welcome to do what you like."

Saiki was involved in examining cells taken this afternoon from some diseased tissue; he barely looked up. That was fine with Kaoru; he'd rather be left alone to make his observations in freedom.

"Don't mind if I do, then."

Kaoru opened the door of the large refrigerator-like carbon dioxide incubator and searched for his father's cells. The incubator was kept at a constant temperature and a nearly constant level of carbon dioxide. It wouldn't do for him to keep the door open long.

But the plastic Petri dish in which his father's cells were being cultured was in its usual place, and he had no trouble finding it.

So this is what immortality looks like,
he thought. It mystified him, as it always did.

His father's liver had been removed-having changed from its normal reddish-pink to a mottled hue covered with what looked like white powder-and was now sealed in a glass jar, preserved in formaldehyde, in another cabinet, where it had been stored for three years now. Sometimes it seemed to squirm or writhe, but maybe that was a trick of the light.

The liver was dead, of course, pickled in formaldehyde. Whereas the cancer cells in the Petri dish were alive.

The dish contained cells grown from Kaoru's father's cancer cells, cultured in a medium with a blood serum concentration of less than one percent.

With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won't multiply beyond a single layer no matter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.

Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a flat, orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional, disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.

Immortality.

Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immortality, the object of man's deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men.

As if to demonstrate their three-dimensional nature, his father's cancer cells had bubbled up into a spheroid. Every time Kaoru looked they had taken on a different shape. Originally, these had their source in normal cells in his father's liver, but now it might be more appropriate to see them as an independent life form. Even as their erstwhile host faced his crisis, these cells greedily enjoyed eternal life.

Kaoru set this dish full of concentrated contradiction into the phase contrast microscope. Its magnification only went up to x200, but it allowed easy colour imaging. He could only use the scanning electron microscope when he had time to spare.

The cancer cells, these life forms which had gone beyond any moderating influence, presented a peculiar sight. Perhaps there was something actually, objectively grotesque about their appearance, or perhaps they only looked grotesque to him because of his preconceptions about them as usurpers of human life.

Kaoru struggled to abandon this bias, his hatred of the agent of his father's suffering, as he observed the sample.

Raising the magnification, he could see that the cells were clumping together. The long, spindly, translucent cells grew as a thicket, stained a thin green. This wasn't their natural colour; the microscope had a green filter attached.

Normal cells would have been evenly distributed in a flat, orderly fashion, with no one part sticking out, but these cancer cells revealed, here and there, a thicker green shadow.

He could see them clearly: a multitude of points, bubbling up roundly, shining. These were cells in the process of dividing.

Kaoru changed the dish under the microscope several times, comparing the cancer cells to normal cells. The surface difference was readily apparent: the cancer cells displayed a chaotic filthiness.

But the surface of the cells was all he could examine: an optical microscope wasn't powerful enough to show him their nuclei or DNA.

Still, Kaoru gazed on untiring. His heart was heavy with the knowledge that he was wasting his time: just what was he going to learn looking at them from the outside? Still, even as he cursed himself for doing so, he examined the external part of each and every one of them.

The cells all looked alike on the surface. Thousands of identical faces, all in a row.

Identical faces.

Kaoru raised his face from the microscope.

Totally out of the blue, he had compared the cells to human faces. But that was what they looked like: the same face thousands of times over, gathering and sticking together in a clump until they formed a mottled mass.

Kaoru had to look away for a while.

That image came to me intuitively. Was it for a reason?

That was the first question to consider. His father had taught him to pay attention to his intuition.

It often happened that Kaoru would be reading a book or walking down the street and suddenly a completely unrelated scene would present itself to his mind's eye. Usually he didn't inquire into the reason. Say he was walking down the street and saw a movie star on a poster: he might suddenly remember an acquaintance who resembled the movie star. If he didn't register having seen the poster, which was entirely possible, it would seem as if the image of his acquaintance had come to him out of nowhere.

If it was a kind of synchronicity, then Kaoru wanted to analyze it to find out what had synched up with what. He'd been looking at cancer cells under x200 magnification, and something had been triggered so that the cells looked to him like human faces. Now: did that mean something?

Pondering it brought no answer, so Kaoru returned his gaze to the microscope. There had to be something which had elicited the comparison in his imagination. He saw narrow cells piled up in three dimensions. Little glowing globes. Kaoru muttered the same thing as before.

No doubt about it, they all have the same face.

Not only that, but it was clearly not a man's face, not to his imagination. If he had to choose he'd say it was somehow feminine. An egg-shaped, regular face, with smooth, even slippery, skin.

This was weird. In all the times he'd looked at cells through the phase contrast microscope, he'd never thought they looked like human faces.

Kaoru was in a hospital room face-to-face with Ryoji, but his mind was on the sounds coming from the bathroom. Reiko had been in there for some time, with the water running. She wasn't showering; maybe she was washing underwear. While tutoring Ryoji he'd seen Reiko hurriedly gathering up underwear that had been hung up to dry in the room.

Distractedly, Kaoru set about answering Ryoji's questions about his father's condition.

He gave him a brief rundown, but Ryoji's body language said he wanted to hear more. Maybe he wanted to sketch in the future of his own illness based on what he could learn of Kaoru's father's.

Kaoru stopped the conversation before Ryoji could start to guess that the cancer had spread to his father's lungs. Partly he hesitated because he thought the knowledge might have a negative influence on Ryoji, but partly he simply didn't want to say it out loud.

When the cancer had become heavy on his lungs, Hideyuki's face had started to betray weakness; he'd started to talk about what would happen after he was gone-to talk about entrusting Kaoru with his mother's care.

Look after Machi, okay?

At the sight of this weakness, Kaoru was seized with a desire to deliver the full force of his anger upon his father.
And just how am I supposed to comfort Mom after you die,
he wanted to say.
Quit laying these impossible tasks on me!

Now as he sat talking about his father's condition with Ryoji, also lying flat in a hospital bed, his father's image came to him, and he had a hard time speaking. Not noticing that Kaoru had fallen silent, and insensitive to the reason why, Ryoji produced a forced-sounding laugh.

"Now that I think about it, Kaoru, I talked to your father once."

They'd both been in and out of the hospital with the same illness. No matter how big the hospital, it wasn't unlikely that they'd come into contact.

"Really?"

"He's the tall guy in 7B, right?"

"That's him."

"He's pretty strong. He's always frisky, slapping the nurses' butts and stuff like that."

That was Hideyuki alright. He'd achieved a certain notoriety among the patients for the cheerful way in which he battled his illness, never seeming to lose heart. They said that seeing him act so cheerful, so unafraid of death, made it possible for them to hang on to the hope necessary to gamble on long odds. He'd lost his stomach, his large intestine, and his liver, and now it looked like the cancer had spread to his lungs: his time, it appeared, had come. But regardless, in front of other people he put on a display of high spirits he couldn't possibly feel. The only exception was when he was alone with Kaoru: then he allowed his weak side to show…

"What about your Mom, Kaoru? How's she doing?" Ryoji asked, without much evident concern.

Reiko came out of the bathroom, spread the laundry out on the extra bed, and then disappeared back into the bathroom.

Kaoru followed her with his eyes, but the expected sound of running water never came. It seemed that Reiko just didn't want to be there. Maybe because the topic of Kaoru's mother had come up.

The Metastatic Human Cancer Virus can also be spread through contact with lymphocytes,
the attending physician had said. Kaoru's first fears had been for his mother. He imagined they'd ceased sexual relations as soon as they'd been made aware of the risk, but there was a good chance she'd already contracted it by that point. Recently, Kaoru had finally been able to prevail on his mother to have her blood tested.

The results were positive. She had yet to manifest any symptoms, but it was a fact that the MHC virus had already attached itself to her DNA. In other words, the retrovirus's base sequence had been incorporated into the chromosomes in her cells.

At the moment, the process was paused at that step, but at any time her cells might begin to turn cancerous. In fact, there was every chance that it had already begun, and it just wasn't yet apparent on the surface.

The mechanism that determined when and how the provirus attached to the chromosomes would turn the cell cancerous was not yet understood, so the disease's progress from this point could not be predicted with any accuracy. But if it moved on to the next step, then his mother's cells would start producing new copies of the MHC virus.