The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (99 page)

Next I realized that I was stretched out on the fitting room sofa, wearing navy-blue pajamas that I had never seen before and covered with a blanket. The curtains were open, and bright morning sun streamed through the window. I guessed it must be around ten o’clock. There was fresh air here, and time that moved forward, but why such things existed I could not quite comprehend.

“Cinnamon brought you here,” said Nutmeg. “Your wounds are not that bad. The one on your shoulder is fairly deep, but it didn’t hit any major blood vessels, fortunately. The ones on your face are just scrapes. Cinnamon used a needle and thread to sew up the others so you won’t have scars. He’s good at that. You can take the stitches out yourself in a few days or have a doctor do it.”

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t make my voice work. All I could do was inhale and let the air out as a rasping sound.

“You’d better not try to move or talk yet,” said Nutmeg. She was sitting on a nearby chair with her legs crossed. “Cinnamon says you were in the well too long—it was a very close call. But don’t ask me what happened. I don’t know a thing. I got a call in the middle of the night, phoned for a taxi, and flew over here. The details of what went on before that I just don’t know. Your clothes were soaking wet and bloody. We threw them away.”

Nutmeg was dressed more simply than usual, as if she had indeed rushed out of the house. She wore a cream-colored cashmere sweater over a man’s striped shirt, and a wool skirt of olive green, no jewelry, and her hair was tied back. She looked a little tired but otherwise could have been a photo in a catalog. She put a cigarette between her lips and lit it with her gold lighter, making the usual clean, dry click, then inhaling with eyes narrowed. I
really
had not died, I reassured myself when I heard the sound of the lighter. Cinnamon must have pulled me out of the well in the nick of time.

“Cinnamon understands things in a special way,” said Nutmeg. “And unlike you or me, he is always thinking very deeply about the
potential
for things to happen. But not even
he
imagined that water would come back to the well so suddenly. It had simply not been among the many possibilities he had considered. And because of that, you almost lost your life. It was the first time I ever saw that boy panic.”

She managed a little smile when she said that.

“He must really like you,” she said.

I couldn’t hear what she said after that. I felt an ache deep behind my eyes, and my eyelids grew heavy. I let them close, and I sank down into darkness as if on an elevator ride.

•

It took two full days for my body to recover. Nutmeg stayed with me the whole time. I couldn’t get up by myself, I couldn’t speak, I could hardly eat. The most I could manage was a few sips of orange juice and a few slivers of canned peaches. Nutmeg would go home at night and come back in the morning. Which was fine, because I was out cold all night—and most of the day too. Sleep was obviously what I needed most for my recovery.

I never saw Cinnamon. He seemed to be consciously avoiding me. I would hear his car coming in through the gate whenever he would drop Nutmeg off or pick her up or deliver food or clothing—hear that special deep rumble that Porsche engines make, since he had stopped using the Mercedes—but he himself would not come inside. He would hand things to Nutmeg at the front door, then leave.

“We’ll be getting rid of this place soon,” Nutmeg said to me. “I’ll have to take care of the women again myself. Oh, well. I guess it’s my fate. I’ll just have to keep going until I’m all used up—empty. And you: you probably won’t be having anything to do with us anymore. When this is all over and you’re well again, you’d better forget about us as soon as you can. Because … Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. About your brother-in-law. Noboru Wataya.”

Nutmeg brought a newspaper from the next room and unfolded it on the table. “Cinnamon brought this a little while ago. Your brother-in-law collapsed last night in Nagasaki. They took him to a hospital there, but he’s been unconscious ever since. They don’t know if he’ll recover.”

Nagasaki? I could hardly comprehend what she was saying. I wanted to speak, but the words would not come out. Noboru Wataya should have collapsed in Akasaka, not Nagasaki. Why Nagasaki?

“He gave a speech in Nagasaki,” Nutmeg continued, “and he was having dinner with the organizers afterward, when he suddenly went limp. They took him to a nearby hospital. They think it was some kind of stroke—probably some congenital weakness in a blood vessel in his brain. The paper says he’ll be bedridden for some time, that even if he regains consciousness he probably won’t be able to speak, so that’s probably the end of his political career. What a shame: he was so young. I’ll leave the paper here. You can read it when you’re feeling better.”

It took me a while to absorb these facts as facts. The images from the TV news I had seen in the hotel lobby were still too vividly burned into my brain—Noboru Wataya’s office in Akasaka, the police all over the place, the front door of the hospital, the reporter grim, his voice tense. Little by little, though, I was able to convince myself that what I had seen was news that existed only in the
other world
. I had not, in actuality, in this world, beaten Noboru Wataya with a baseball bat. I would not, in actuality, be investigated by the police or arrested for the crime. He had collapsed in public, in full view, from a stroke. There was no crime involved, no possibility of a crime. This knowledge came to me as a great relief. After all, the assailant described on television had borne a startling resemblance to me, and I had had absolutely no alibi.

There had to be some connection between my having beaten someone to death in the other world and Noboru Wataya’s collapse. I clearly killed something inside him or something powerfully linked with him. He might have sensed that it was coming. What I had done, though, had failed to take Noboru Wataya’s life. He had managed to survive on the
brink of death. I should have pushed him over the brink. What would happen to Kumiko now? Would she be unable to break free while he was still alive? Would he continue to cast his spell over her from his unconscious darkness?

That was as far as my thoughts would take me. My own consciousness gradually slipped away, until I closed my eyes in sleep. I had a tense, fragmentary dream. Creta Kano was holding a baby to her breast. I could not see the baby’s face. Creta Kano’s hair was short, and she wore no makeup. She told me that the baby’s name was Corsica and that half the baby’s father was me, while the other half was Lieutenant Mamiya. She had not gone to Crete, she said, but had remained in Japan to bear and raise the child. She had only recently been able to find a new name for the baby, and now she was living a peaceful life growing vegetables in the hills of Hiroshima with Lieutenant Mamiya. None of this came as a surprise to me. In my dream, at least, I had foreseen it all.

“How has Malta Kano been since I last saw her?” I asked.

Creta Kano did not reply to this. Instead, she gave me a sad look, and then she disappeared.

•

On the morning of the third day, I was finally able to get out of bed by myself. Walking was still too hard for me, but I slowly regained the ability to speak. Nutmeg made me rice gruel. I ate that and a little fruit.

“How is the cat doing?” I asked her. This had been a matter of concern to me for some time.

“Don’t worry, Cinnamon is looking after him. He goes to your house every day to feed him and change his water. The only thing you have to worry about is yourself.”

“When are you going to get rid of this place?”

“As soon as we can. Probably sometime next month. I think you’ll be seeing a little money out of it too. We’ll probably have to let it go for something less than we paid for it, so you won’t get much, but your share should be a good percentage of what you paid on the mortgage. That should support you for a while. So you don’t have to worry too much about money. You deserve it, after all: you worked hard here.”

“Is this house going to be torn down?”

“Probably. And they’ll probably fill in the well again. Which seems like a waste now that it’s producing water again, but nobody wants a big, old-fashioned well like that these days. They usually just put in a pipe and an electric pump. That’s a lot more convenient, and it takes up less space.”

“I don’t suppose this place is jinxed anymore,” I said. “It’s probably just an ordinary piece of property again, not the ‘hanging house.’ ”

“You may be right,” said Nutmeg. She hesitated, then bit her lip. “But that has nothing to do with me or with you anymore. Right? In any case, the important thing is for you to rest now and not bother with things that don’t really matter. It will take a while until you’re fully recovered.”

Nutmeg showed me the article on Noboru Wataya in the morning paper she had brought with her. It was a small piece. Still unconscious, Noboru Wataya had been transported from Nagasaki to a large university hospital in Tokyo, where he was in intensive care, his condition unchanged. The report said nothing more than that. What crossed my mind at that point, of course, was Kumiko. Where could she be? I had to get back home. But I still lacked the strength to walk such a distance.

I made it as far as the bathroom sink late the next morning and saw myself in the mirror for the first time in three days. I looked terrible—less like a tired living being than a well-preserved corpse. As Nutmeg had said, the cut on my cheek had been sewn together with professional-looking stitches, the edges of the wound held in good alignment by white thread. It was at least an inch in length but not very deep. It pulled somewhat if I tried to make a face, but there was little pain. I brushed my teeth and used an electric shaver on my beard. I couldn’t trust myself to handle a razor yet. As the whiskers came off, I could hardly believe what I was seeing in the mirror. I set the shaver down and took a good look. The mark was gone. The man had cut my right cheek. Exactly where the mark had been. The cut was certainly there, but the mark was gone. It had disappeared from my cheek without a trace.

•

During the night of the fifth day, I heard the faint sound of sleigh bells again. It was a little after two in the morning. I got up from the sofa, slipped a cardigan over my pajamas, and left the fitting room. Passing through the kitchen, I went to Cinnamon’s small office and peeked inside. Cinnamon was calling to me again from inside the computer. I sat down at the desk and read the message on the screen.

You have now gained access to the program “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Choose a document (1–17)
.

I clicked on #17, and a document opened up before me.

There are many things I have to tell you. To tell them all would probably take a very long time—maybe years. I should have opened up to you long ago, confessed everything to you honestly, but unfortunately, I lacked the courage to do so. And I still harbored the groundless hope that things would not turn out so badly. The result has been this nightmare for us both. It’s all my fault. But it is also too late for explanations. We don’t have enough time for that. So what I want to do here is tell you the most important thing first.

And that is
, I have to kill my brother, Noboru Wataya
.

I am going to go now to the hospital room where he is sleeping, to pull the plug on his life-support system. As his sister, I will be allowed to stay the night with him in place of a nurse. It will take a while before anyone notices that he has been disconnected. I had the doctor show me yesterday how it works. I intend to wait until I am sure he is dead, and then I will give myself up to the police. I will tell them I did what I thought was right but offer no more explanation than that. I will probably be arrested on the spot and tried for murder. The media will leap in, and people will offer opinions on death with dignity and other such matters. But I will keep silent. I will offer no explanation or defense. There is only one truth in all this, and that is that I wanted to end the life of a
single human being, Noboru Wataya. They will probably lock me up, but the prospect doesn’t frighten me. I have already been through the worst.

•

If it hadn’t been for you, I would have lost my mind long ago. I would have handed myself over, vacant, to someone else and fallen to a point beyond hope of recovery. My brother, Noboru Wataya, did exactly that to my sister many years ago, and she ended up killing herself. He defiled us both. Strictly speaking, he did not defile our bodies. What he did was even worse than that.

The freedom to do anything at all was taken from me, and I shut myself up in a dark room, alone. No one chained me down or set a guard to watch over me, but I could not have escaped. My brother held me with yet stronger chains and guards—chains and guards that were myself. I was the chain that bit into my ankle, and I was the ruthless guard that never slept. Inside me, of course, there was a self that wanted to escape, but at the same time there was a cowardly, debauched self that had given up all hope of ever being able to flee from there, and the first self could never dominate the second because I had been so defiled in mind and body. I had lost the right to go back to you—not just because I had been defiled by my brother, Noboru Wataya, but because, even before that, I had defiled myself irreparably.