Quicksand (26 page)

But how on earth could we have had anything to do with each other by this time? Even if we'd been left entirely to ourselves, neither of us had the slightest wish to lay a hand on the other; we were as passionless a couple as you could find. And yet Mitsuko said: “If you sleep in the same room, you have to take the medicine.”

As the sleeping powder gradually became less effective, she would change the dosage and the prescription, so that we were still drowsy from that powerful medicine even after we woke up. Lying in bed with my eyes open, I felt awful: the back of my head was numb, my arms and legs refused to move, I felt nauseous and hadn't the energy to get up. My husband had the same sickly pallor I did. Sighing, with his speech as thick as if he still tasted the medicine, he would say: “If we keep on like this we
will
be poisoned one of these days.”

When I saw how he looked I felt relieved, thinking he must actually have swallowed the medicine, but then I began to suspect that I had been tricked again.

“Really, why do we have to take that medicine every night?”

My husband seemed suspicious too. Peering into my eyes, he said: “Yes, why should we?”

“Obviously there's nothing to worry about, is there, even if we
were
in bed together. She must have some other purpose.”

“Do you know what that would be?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I suppose you do, though.”

“No, I don't. You must be the one who knows.”

“If we go on doubting each other like this, there'll be no end to it. Still, I can't help feeling I'm the only one being put to sleep.”

“And I feel the same way!”

“But then, you know very well what happened at Hamadera!”

“That's why I feel it's my turn to be deceived.”

“Haven't you ever been awake till Mitsu went home? Please tell me the truth.”

“Never. And you?”

“After medicine as strong as that I couldn't stay awake if I wanted to!”

“Oh? Then you
did
swallow it?”

“Of course I did! See how pale I am!”

“I'm as pale as you are!”

We were still going on like that at eight in the morning, when the telephone rang, as usual.

“Time to get up!” Mitsuko said.

Rubbing his sleepy eyes, my husband got out of bed. Sometimes he had to go in to his office, but even if he was altogether too drowsy to leave the house, he knew Mitsuko had told him he mustn't stay in the bedroom after eight o'clock, so he would go downstairs, perhaps to sit in the wicker chair on the veranda, and fall asleep there. That way, I could stay in bed as long as I liked, but my husband was so drained of energy that when he did go to the office he couldn't put his mind to his work. He simply wanted to rest. Yet if he took too many days off, Mitsuko would tell him he seemed to want to spend all his time with me, so almost every morning, whether he had business or not, he would leave the house. “I'll be back after I've had a nap,” he would say.

That was when I began telling him: “Mitsu doesn't bother about me; she just keeps saying what
you
should or shouldn't do—it proves that you're the one she loves.”

But according to my husband, she wouldn't have been so abusive to anyone she loved. “Isn't she trying to wear
me
out,” he said, “to paralyze me so that I'll lose all desire and the two of you can do whatever you like?”

Strangely enough, at dinnertime, even though our stomachs were suffering from the sleeping medicine and we had no appetite, we both ate as much as we could, counting each other's bowls of rice and doing our best to cram down food. We knew it was the only way to weaken the effect of the medicine.

“You mustn't have more than a second bowl,” Mitsuko would say. “If you eat too much, the medicine won't work!” Finally she sat beside us at dinner and kept a sharp eye on how much we ate.

When I think back on our physical state in those days, it seems amazing that we managed to survive. Every day our weakened stomachs were subjected to large doses of sleeping powder; perhaps because we couldn't assimilate it, our minds were always cloudy, even during the day, as if we hardly knew whether we were alive or dead. We grew steadily paler and thinner, and worse yet, our senses dulled. Mitsuko, though, in spite of tormenting us and even putting a limit on our food, indulged herself in whatever delicacies she liked, and her complexion was as radiant as ever. For us, Mitsuko seemed to shine like the sun: no matter how exhausted we felt, the sight of her face brought us back to life; it was our sole remaining pleasure.

Mitsuko herself remarked: “You seem to feel as if your nerves are numb, but you do brighten up a little when you see me, don't you? Maybe the trouble is you're just not passionate enough.” She could tell by the degree of excitement which of us had stronger feelings for her, she said, and that was all the more reason to keep on giving us sleeping medicine. Really, you might say she wasn't interested in being offered an everyday love; nothing would satisfy her unless she felt it was a passion that flamed up even though desire had been blunted by the power of the medicine. . . .

In the end, both my husband and I were like empty husks—she wanted us to seek no other happiness, to live only for the light of our sun, Mitsuko, with no further desires or interests in the world. If we objected to the medicine, she would burst into angry tears. Well, of course Mitsuko had long ago shown how much she liked to test the devotion of her admirers, but she must have had some other reason to carry it to such hysterical lengths. I wonder if it might not have been Watanuki's influence. Had that first experience left her dissatisfied with an ordinary, wholesome relationship, so that she wanted to turn anyone who was in her clutches into another Watanuki? Otherwise why did she need to paralyze our senses so cruelly? In the old tales you often heard of spirit possession, by the dead or the living, but the way Mitsuko behaved, wilder and wilder every day, made you think she herself was under the spell of Watanuki's deep-seated bitterness. It was enough to make your hair stand on end.

And not only that. It wasn't just Mitsuko; even my normal, healthy husband, a man without the slightest trace of irrationality, had changed character. By the time I noticed it, he had already become spiteful and jealous; humoring Mitsuko, with a weird grin on his pallid face, he seemed womanish, crafty, mean-spirited. If you watched closely, everything about him—his tone of voice, the whole way he talked, his facial expression, the look in his eyes—seemed to be the very image of Watanuki. I know a person's face is supposed to reflect what he feels in his heart—but still, do you suppose there really is such a thing as a vengeful spirit's curse? Is that just a foolish superstition? Anyway, Watanuki was so dreadfully spiteful that it was easy to imagine him putting a curse on us and casting some kind of spell to take possession of my husband.

“You're getting to be more and more like Watanuki,” I told him one day.

“I think so myself,” he replied. “Mitsu wants to turn me into a second Watanuki.”

By that time he had meekly bowed to his fate, whatever it might bring. Far from trying to resist becoming another Watanuki, he seemed happy about it; as for the sleeping medicine, eventually he was asking Mitsuko to give him more. And Mitsuko, now that the three of us had arrived at this stage . . . how could there be a satisfactory conclusion for her? She must have felt desperate, ready to do anything, maybe even to weaken us with that medicine until she had killed us off—didn't she have a scheme like that buried deep in her heart? . . . I wasn't the only one who thought so. My husband was resigned to it. She might just be waiting for the day we both dwindled down to wraiths and died, a day not far off, when she would skillfully have freed herself from us and become completely respectable, ready for a good match.

“Mitsu seems to be thriving, but look how sickly you and I are,” he said. “I'm sure she has something like that in mind.”

By then both of us were so debilitated that we no longer felt the least pleasure; we lived only with the thought that today or tomorrow might be our last.

Ah . . . how happy I would have been if we had died together then, as we expected. What changed everything was that newspaper article. It was around the twentieth of September, I think. Anyway, one morning my husband demanded I get up, to see what somebody had sent us. He spread out the gossip page of a newspaper I'd never seen before, and the first thing that struck my eye was a big photograph of that agreement Watanuki had had me sign, along with the heading (circled twice in read ink) of a long article! And I noticed an announcement that the reporter had accumulated a great deal of material; this was only the beginning of a series of articles exposing the sordid vices of the leisure class.

“Look at that!” I said. “Watanuki tricked us after all!” Yet I felt curiously calm, not in the least bitter or angry. I thought that at last the end had come.

“Yes, but he's a fool!” My husband smiled coldly, the blood draining from his cheeks. “What good does it do him to make all that public?”

“Never mind,” I said. “We can just ignore it.”

I felt confident that people would find it hard to believe, since that so-called newspaper was really nothing but a scandal sheet; still, I called Mitsuko right away to warn her of what had happened.

“Somebody sent us this paper—did you get one too, Mitsu?”

She hurried out to look, and when she came back she said: “Yes, it's here! Luckily nobody else has seen it!”

Hiding the paper under her kimono, she came straight over to our house.