Parasite Eve (4 page)

    He poured some instant coffee
into a mug and sat down at his desk before opening his address book to scribble
in some additional plans. As he was doing so, the telephone rang. It wasn’t an
internal call. The low electronic tremolo indicated an outside caller.
Shinohara stood up and walked over to the phone, cup in hand. He then took a
sip of his coffee, picked up the receiver, and answered.

    “Hello, Surgery Department.”

    “This is Nagashima... from
the School of Pharmaceutical—”

    “What? Is that you,
Nagashima?”

    A smile came to Shinohara’s
face as he nodded to the voice on the other end. Shinohara’s relationship with
Toshiaki began when he took the same pharmaceuticals seminar to complete his
Ph.D. Simply passing the state exams didn’t mean a medical school graduate
could get a Ph.D. He had to remain at the dispensary for a standard period,
writing articles and passing tests. In those days, the 29- year-old Shinohara
placed the utmost priority in getting his Ph.D. Drowning under the extra work
requested of him by his seniors, he managed to continue cultivating cells.
Shinohara’s dissertation topic was cancer gene
[9]
production in liver cells. To study this, he collected
cells from extracted rat livers, carried out primary cultures, then took
healthy liver cells and added cancer-inducing drugs to observe the formation of
proteins. The focus was almost banal, but back then the particular protein
byproduct had yet to be researched extensively and was good for a doctoral
thesis. The associate professor of Toshiaki’s seminar had developed a detector
for the protein.

    Toshiaki himself was still a
graduate student then. Cancer cells had not been his area, but he carried out
daily primary cultures on rat liver cells, excelling greatly in the skills
involved. Shinohara learned these techniques well from him, staying on for two
years as a research student before returning to the medical department to
obtain his doctorate a year later. He continued his friendship with Toshiaki,
with whom he occasionally went out drinking. Despite being separated a little
by age, they enjoyed each other’s company as equals.

            As Shinohara pressed
the receiver to his ear, he downed a mouthful of coffee. Boy, not tonight, he
thought amusedly at first; yet right away he realized that something was not
quite right. A voice was groaning across the wires. Shinohara furrowed his
brow, wondering if some lines had come crossed, and tried pushing down on the
cradle a few times. Something was wrong. Toshiaki hadn’t spoken a word since
announcing himself. White steam rose from Shinohara’s coffee cup, engraving
helical spirals into the air. Unable to endure the silence any longer,
Shinohara opened his mouth to say something, when a low voice came from the
receiver’s depths.

    “Kiyomi is dead.”

    Shinohara shivered. He looked
unconsciously around the empty room. The fluorescent light flickered, then
regained radiance, casting its usual shadows on the floor, each particle of
light falling like rain.

    “What?”

    Shinohara surprised himself
with the volume of his voice. Two minute globules of his saliva traced arcs in
the air before descending out of sight.

    “But Kiyomi lives.”

    “Hey, back up...”

    “Extract Kiyomi’s liver cells
for me. I’m not a doctor, so I’d never be able to handle it. But I can count on
you, right?”

    “Kiyomi? What happened to
her?”

    “I’m coming there right now.
You’ll do this for me?”

    “What are you talking about?
Where are you right now?”

    “I’ll be there soon.”

    And with that the line went
dead.

    Shinohara stood in place for
a while, grasping the receiver tightly. Frozen in bewilderment, he was unable
to make heads or tails of this. The only thing he could say for sure was that
his old pal was not himself.

    He thought of Toshiaki’s last
statement,
I’ll he there soon
, and frantically looked about the room.
Did he mean to this office? He had called from an outside line. Where was
Toshiaki now?

    Just then, not even one
minute after the call, the door opened behind him. Startled, Shinohara looked
over his shoulder. Toshiaki was standing there, a faint smile upon his face.

    The cup slipped from
Shinohara’s hand and shattered into pieces.

6

    Mariko Anzai was in her room,
poring over the math homework spread out across her desk. She was singing along
to a tape of her favorite pop singer that a friend from school had made for
her. Her assignment was surprisingly difficult for a change, but since this was
her favorite subject, she was up to the challenge. Just when she had figured
out the problem she was working on, the phone rang.

    “Alright, alright...” she
muttered, receiving the interruption with mild irritation. She stood up and
went out into the hallway.

    The clock showed 8:20.
Outside her own room, the house felt all too cold and silent. Her father had
yet to return home from work, but these days it was not unusual for him to be
out until 11:00. Since becoming the head of his department, it was always like
that. He was quick to attribute his lateness to his busy schedule, but Mariko
knew the real reason.
You just don’t want to look at me more than you have
to.

    The phone’s ringing threaded
into the patter of her slippers on the hallway floor. These seemed to be the
only two sounds in the house. She picked up the receiver unceremoniously.
“Hello?”

    “Good evening. My name is
Odagiri. I am a transplant coordinator. I must apologize for the unexpected
call, but is Shigenori Anzai at home?”

    Mariko held her breath and
looked reflexively at her left wrist. The sleeve of her sweatshirt was rolled
up, exposing the IV hole to which her eyes were drawn. Further up along her arm
was another hole concealed beneath the sleeve, and both began to tingle.

    “Dad hasn’t come back from
work yet...” she replied unsteadily and with an uncomfortable smile.

    “Is this Mariko by any
chance?”

    “Um, yes... this is Mariko.”

    “Ah, good. Actually, I’m
calling because a donor for your kidney transplant has been found and I wanted
to pass along the good news.”

    Her heart skipped a beat.
A
kidney transplant...
The words ran along her spine and pocked her skin with
goose flesh.

    When Mariko’s first kidney
transplant failed, her father was insistent about registering her on a waiting
list for kidneys from nonliving donors. Only a year and a half had passed since
then. She was amazed that an organ had surfaced so soon. Mariko retraced her
memories of the past eighteen months...

    “Suitable nonliving donors
are rare, which means we’ll just have to be patient and wait.”

    This is what a doctor named
Yoshizumi had told her with a pat on her head. But to Mariko, still in
elementary school at the time, these words were meaningless. She never planned
on going through a second transplant. She’d only heeded her father’s request to
save his face.

    When her father heard Yoshizumi’s
words, he asked the doctor uneasily, “Wait? For how long?”

    “I can’t say for sure. At the
larger metropolitan area hospitals, over ten transplants from cadavers are
performed every year, but that’s because Tokyo itself produces a relatively ample
supply of donors. Hereabouts, we carry out only a procedure or two a year.
There are also those who are ‘brain dead’ but the idea of extracting organs
from them doesn’t sit well with most of society, at least here in Japan. So all
we can do is wait for a kidney from a heart failure patient. We need the
freshest organ possible, but the way things are now, many obstacles stand in
our way that significantly narrow down the number of available kidneys.
Compatibility is also a concern. There’s a waiting list, but it has an order
that must be strictly adhered to out of fairness to all potential recipients.
If a suitable kidney is found in another region, it’s possible to have it
shipped here. Even so, it’s not so uncommon for patients to wait five, even ten
years.”

    “Ten years...”

    Mariko could still remember
clearly her father’s hopeless expression at that moment.

    “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
we could do it right this time...”

    Yoshizumi said with a hint of
bitterness.

    Mariko simply looked downward,
biting her lip.

    She was sure they blamed her.
They thought the operation had failed because she wouldn’t listen. They all
acted nice towards her, but actually hated her so much they wanted to hit her.
What did they know, anyway?

    “Have you gotten sick at all
recently? A cold, maybe?” said the woman on the phone, yanking Mariko from her
unpleasant reverie. Mariko curtly replied that she had not come down with
anything. She pressed her left hand to her chest, trying as much as she could
to calm the heartbeat rising inside of her.
Am I really going to have
another transplant?
This time, it would not be her father’s kidney as
before, but one from a complete stranger’s lifeless body. The idea sank into
her guts like a stone into water.

    Images of the fish she
dissected in a science class experiment and of a cat run over in the street
came to her mind. The organ of a dead human being, a
corpse’s
kidney,
was going to be placed into her body. A dreadfully cold sensation ran through
her.

   
No way.

    I don’t want a transplant!

    Unaware of Mariko’s pained
thoughts, Odagiri continued in her fast-talking manner.

    “Do you know what time your
father will return from work?”

    “W-well...he’s always late,
so...”

    “When he gets home, please
tell him to call me as soon as possible, okay? If you can, call him right now.
Ask him whether or not you want to proceed with the operation. If we don’t hear
back from you soon enough, we’ll be forced to go down the waiting list. So
please. The sooner the better.”

          By the time Shigenori
Anzai returned home, it was past eleven. His section was preparing for the
release of next year’s word processor models. He had been incredibly busy these
past few weeks, unable even to enjoy his days off. Work had become exactly the
bad habit he always imagined it would.

    He opened the front door in a
weary daze and noticed the hall light was off. Thinking it curious, he flipped
it on and looked down. Mariko’s shoes were on the floor, so he knew she was
home. Ordinarily, she would have left the light on for him.

    After loosening his necktie,
Anzai went into the kitchen and grabbed some cold cut ham and a can of beer
from the refrigerator. Taking the ham between his teeth, he opened the door to
the living room, sat on the floor, and clicked on the television. An airplane
crash in South America was being discussed on the late night news.

    As he watched images of the
accident, he thought about how seldom he saw his daughter these days. She was
probably still awake, but then, he no longer did such things like go to her
room and say hi. They were both busy in the mornings, too, and hardly exchanged
a word. They ate their meals separately, something that had already become
normal for them. Things would probably stay this way until Mariko went off to
college. Anzai guzzled down his beer.

    The news ended about 20
minutes later. He needed to take a look at some files, so he switched off the
television and stretched.

    “Dad,” Mariko suddenly called
from behind him. Anzai turned around quickly to see her standing there in her
pajamas. Her eyes looked a bit swollen.

    “What is it? Something
wrong?”

    Mariko was silent for a long
while. Her cryptic attitude irritated him a little.

    “You had dinner, right?” he said.
“Still hungry? You shouldn’t keep eating so late, you know.”

    “...a while ago, there was a
call...”

    Picking up on her tenseness,
Anzai put his beer on the table and stood up.

    “A phone call...? From the
hospital you mean? Was it the doctor?”

    “No... it was the transplant
co-something.”

    Transplant. Anzai stiffened.

    “What did they want? Did you
listen to what they had to say? When did they call?”

    “Around 8:30...”

    “Why didn’t you tell me
sooner?!”

    Anzai clicked his tongue at
her, then ran to the phone. He got the number from her and dialed it. Had their
turn come? There was no other explanation. So why, he wondered, had Mariko been
so hesitant to tell him? Soon, a voice came from the other end.

    “Should we plan on proceeding
with the transplant?”

    “Of course, by all means!”
Anzai said excitedly. The coordinator began by briefly laying out the most
immediate concerns. She wanted Mariko to come to the hospital as soon as
possible. If the results of her examinations checked out, all they would have
to do was wait for the donor’s heart to stop.