Cult X

  Two police cars followed the ambulance. Tachibana leapt up suddenly and pressed the barrel of her gun to the temple of one of her medic guards.

  “Speed up. Lose the cops.”

  The medic was too startled to speak. This wasn’t a hostage; it was a terrorist. There was a terrorist pointing a gun at his head.

  The driver slammed on the brakes. “If you stop this car, I’ll shoot,” Tachibana screamed. “I’ve already killed many people, so I won’t think anything of it. If you want to die, stop this car right now. But do what I say and we all walk away from this.”

  Sirens on, they blew through the stop lights. There was nothing strange about the speeding ambulance. The police took no notice.

  The ambulance, Tachibana thought, had been a clever idea. No vehicle could be better for escaping the cops.

  “Stop next to that department store.”

  The ambulance stopped. Tachibana got out of the ambulance as two police cars pulled in behind it. She ran into the store, stripping off her white robe as she wove between product displays. She had put on an ordinary blouse and skirt underneath before leaving. The police didn’t know what Tachibana’s face looked like; without her cult robe she was just another shopper. As Tachibana exited from the other side of the department store, the police were shouting her fake name at the crowds of confused shoppers.

  Tachibana got into a taxi parked nearby. As calmly as a regular shopper would, she told the driver where to go, and he set off. There was no way the police could catch her; they didn’t even know who they were looking for. She was safe.

  Tachibana turned on Mineno’s phone. Takahara might not answer if he thought Mineno was calling, so Tachibana blocked the number before she dialed.

  The phone the fifty-something man was holding in his hand was ringing. A blocked number. When he answered, a woman spoke.

  26

  Narazaki stood in front of the door.

  There were no guards, and the door was standing open. On the other side there seemed to be only deeper layers of dense darkness. Narazaki suddenly remembered the first time he’d stood in front of the gate at Matsuo’s mansion. But this time it was Sawatari he had to face.

  When he entered the room, the door closed quietly behind him. Sawatari was looking at him. His legs were crossed and his head was hanging slightly. He started to speak, but then stopped as if he were too much trouble. Finally, as though merely exhaling, he said, “Sit there.”

  Across from Sawatari was an empty chair. Narazaki felt like a figure being fixed into a tableau.

  “Why did you call me?”

  “Mm.” Narazaki thought he saw a slight change in Sawatari’s expression. “ . . . You really do look like him.”

  Narazaki raised his lowered head.

  “You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.”

  The fleeting expression had vanished from his face.

  Sawatari’s Past

  Long ago I tried to believe in the god of Christianity—not out of faith, but rather because it seemed necessary. The world was bleak and dreary, and I was the sort of person who thought that it would be hard to bear that if there was no god. My faith was born of arrogance. I tried to learn the secrets of god. I studied medicine, but I also researched the history of traditional religions. In each religious text you can see the influence of its precursors. What claims to be the word of god actually reveals the evolution of local folktales. This is easy information to find if you look. The more I considered religion as history, the more I researched it, the more distant god grew. I couldn’t help but see the traces of ancient peoples’ different environments. There was no god. That made the world even bleaker. And if there was no god, that meant there was no reason for me to rein in my lust.

  When I began working as a doctor, I was taken over by a particular lust. It always happened when I pierced a woman’s white flesh with my silver scalpel. With that woman anesthetized in front of me, my throat would always grow dry, and my mind would go blank, as if I were intoxicated by that experience . . . What would I do to this woman in front of me? By moving the scalpel just an inch more, I could cut an artery, and her blood, her life, would pour out. I’d open her body and watch the hidden parts inside her working with my own eyes. My will controlled her life, her fate—by letting her live, I controlled everything that would become of her after this. When I felt all that, the tip of my scalpel would always tremble slightly . . . And I would get hard. What a gloomy sight. A sickly pale youth with a scalpel and a hard-on. But I always gave myself over to that lust, even when my coworkers occasionally looked at my eyes peeking out over my surgical mask with concern. When I finished surgery, I would feel relieved for having embraced that lust, and to quiet my excitement I would go to a brothel. The women in brothels were beautiful, but they were nothing more than a way to control my desires. During those days I searched for god, and the more I searched, the more distant he grew.

  I was curious about this feeling of pleasure that visited my body when I did good. But I was also interested in the feeling of pleasure that visited my body when I did evil. My mind was wild. I was curious about how far a human could go. When I was a child I often heartlessly killed bugs. I wanted to know how I would feel when I killed them . . . I felt sorry for them, but at the same time, I felt there was something funny about seeing those bugs crushed so pitifully. There are examples in literature, like Goethe’s Faust and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, of those who thirst for both good and evil. The Greek word for cross is stavros. You can see from just his name that for the character Stavrogin, Christianity was always in the background . . . I read those books and was comforted, but I also felt that there was a big difference between those characters and me. The nucleus of my feelings was sexual. My desire to hurt others was sexual, and I was far removed from those who suffered for the sake of religion and intellectualism. My mind was closer to sex than theirs. It was more concrete, and darker. Their delicate suffering, born of their ideas of essential good and evil, was quite foreign to me. In the end, I was too different from them.

  My search for god went in a strange direction. Like Matsuo, I became a disciple of a teacher named Suzuki. I was very interested in watching this man who I thought was quite close to god grow old and senile. I managed to ruin him quite easily. That, too, excited me sexually. But at the same time, I desired to do good. I traveled to the islands of the South Pacific. I traveled through poor villages, distributed medicines and performed basic surgeries. When I saved someone, I felt myself enveloped by this warm sensation, a pleasure that resembled success seeping through my body.

  In southern Malaysia, I met a fifteen-year-old girl named Nayirah. She was beautiful and tanned. She had tuberculosis. She was forced to live isolated from her poor village, and the only medical care she received was chants and prayers. I gave her streptomycin, which anyone could get in Japan at the time, and she recovered. I was happy that she recovered, yet I felt the opposite emotion stir within me as well. My happiness gradually faded.

  When Nayirah recovered from tuberculosis, her beauty was cut in half. The lust I felt when I looked at her at the nadir of her suffering, so thin, death right before her eyes, faded. When she thanked me in her high young voice, warm feelings did rise up inside me, but at the same time, I wished for her to get sick again.

  That soon happened. Her immune system was weak, and she suffered from many ailments. Her most pressing chronic ailment was heart disease. But she also got a case of peritonitis so bad that it put her life in jeopardy.

  I laid her on one of the village’s simple beds, anesthetized and undressed her. My scalpel in hand, I felt my mind draw into itself. My throat grew dry. This girl’s life was in my control. I stared hard at her to savor the moment the scalpel split her beautiful skin. If I moved the scalpel in a slightly different direction, she would bleed out and die. There were so many possibilities in that scalpel as it entered her body. Her
vital organs seemed to twitch with desire at those possibilities. I was breathless. That scalpel parting her flesh—that silver scalpel was the eye of a hurricane. The rest of the world spun around that eye, loose and wide. I imagined my scalpel slicing open one of her vital organs, and that hurricane spinning wild while Nayirah writhed in pain. I felt so bad for her, I grieved, and I continued moving my scalpel. Though there was no physical stimulation, I felt as though my scalpel were an extension of my penis, and my life force poured out through it. The delusion was complete.

  If something had gone wrong during that surgery—some medical accident—no one would have noticed. On the contrary, I had earned the villagers’ trust with the streptomycin. But I finished the surgery without any complications.

  When she woke up on top of that bed, she began to cry and thanked me. I felt something warm spread through my body. I had given this innocent girl a future. Not just anyone knows what it feels like to save a life. However, at the same moment those warm feelings appeared inside me, I became unable to escape from this single thought. This curiosity. What if I, the kind man who saved her life, suddenly changed into someone cold and cruel . . . ?

  Compared with my curiosity, any conflict between good and evil grew so small and faded so completely that I couldn’t feel it. But my heart beat furiously, furtively.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  Did she think this was part of the medical treatment? She undressed. Embarrassed, she hid her breasts, which were just beginning to develop. I got close to her.

  “Take off everything and spread your legs. You cannot resist. If you do, I won’t help you anymore.”

  I savored every sound, every sentence as I spoke. For some reason, I was filled with the same warmth as when I did something good. I was belittling this fifteen-year-old girl, holding her life hostage. That hideousness raised the level of my desire. But then something strange happened. The girl, who I thought would hesitate, calmly revealed her breasts.

  She took off her underwear, faced me, and spread her legs. When I saw her body trembling, I climbed on top of her. Even though we were in the tropics, the room was cold. Her face twisted in pain from her stitches. I felt sympathy for her, and while I tried to be careful of her wounds, I made them hurt more. I sympathized with her pain, and the harder I worked my imagination, the closer I came to that pain. I managed to feel close to her suffering. My ability to sense others’ pain was highly refined. And the more she suffered, the greater my lust. As I moved on top of her, my shadow spread over the cracking gray walls. I felt bad for her, being raped by someone like me, but that feeling of pity drove me on. While I gently wiped away her tears, I made her cry more. I was wrapped up in this powerful pleasure. When I came inside her, I felt a dull remorse. For the first time, I had realized only one part of my desire. After ejaculating, these sorts of languid thoughts rise up in men. However, she smiled at me with tears in her eyes. I didn’t understand why. Nayirah looked at me and said, Save me again. Save me again. Then you can do this again, she said.

  “Do you hate your life?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why?”

  She just cried, and didn’t answer my question. I gave her sleeping pills and left. I felt as though I had touched something mysterious, and was now running away.

  Her peritonitis healed, but then she developed a fever. It was just a cold, but I was worried it would develop into pneumonia. Watching her suffer, I felt that violent lust again. I administered cold medicine, but I diluted it. I wanted her to suffer forever. As long as she suffered, she would always be close to perfection. The act of secretly giving her diluted medicine increased my lust. She grew slightly healthier, and regained the power of speech. I made her denigrate her body again. Though she was suffering from a fever, she moaned. Though she was emaciated, she held me tight with her thin arms.

  “Why are you enjoying this?” I asked from on top of her. “I’m only using you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why?”

  “You can do whatever you want to me,” she said. Her face was flushed. Her vagina clenched like an adult woman’s. It was dripping wet. “My life is in your hands . . . That makes me happy. I am entirely yours. I don’t need a will of my own. I can leave everything up to you. You make me suffer, but you give me life and pleasure. I am a dog. I will follow you no matter what. Please, keep toying with me. Keep fucking me. I, I . . .”

  She leaned back blissfully, her body quaking.

  “You are my god.”

  I came violently inside her. But I wasn’t done. I kept moving, and came again, and then started again, and came again.

  “Treat me badly. Kill me. Kill me, bring me back to life, and kill me again. Do whatever you want to me. I love you.”

  Was she mad from her fever? I wondered. Even her voice sounded strange. But she stared at me with knowing eyes. I had to tell her about my doubts.

  “How can you love someone like me? What would others think if they saw this?”

  “What are you saying?” she asked. “If you hadn’t come, I’d already be dead from tuberculosis. To me, the people who don’t do anything for us might as well not exist. I don’t need to listen to their morals.”

  While watching Nayirah moan in pain and suffering and hopelessness, my vision grew cloudy. I ran my tongue over her body, and I thought about Buddhism. In stories, the Buddha takes the shape of ordinary people, like beggars, or poor young boys. Gods occasionally descend to this world and take the form of humans to test us. What if Nayirah was the Buddha? Wondering about that made me laugh. If that was the case, I’d raped the Buddha. But what if I was being tested? For what? Should I abandon my ideas about good and evil and love Nayirah? What was the point of acting out that sort of idiotic Buddhist fable? What if I fell into terrible regret at Nayirah’s death, and then I was reborn as a good person? I raped Nayirah every day, and was overcome by a strange sensation. As I held her, I felt the same clarity I had when I’d killed bugs as a child. I could observe my emotions in great detail, without letting anything escape. And then I understood one thing clearly. I felt more lust when Nayirah screamed in pain than when she moaned in joy.

  Nayirah noticed, too. She demanded that I treat her more roughly. She knew that her pleasure would not make me happy, and that only her suffering could bring me joy. She had me change positions, take her in the most humiliating ways possible. She reveled in the pain. I raped her more often when she was weak from illness. I was repelled by the sex; I could only feel pleasure in others’ pain. I was far removed from the beautiful sex that came with mutual love. If sex was the richest form of communication between individuals, I was an aberration, for I could only be satisfied by my partner’s rejection and misery. Was god trying to show that to me? To shove the truth about me in my face?

  But I wasn’t the type to shrink away. I wasn’t constrained by Christian morality, like Faust or Stavrogin. To me, Christianity was just history; it had nothing to do with flesh and blood. I was free from its rules. And since I was free, I was boundless. Nayirah told me that there were moments when she was no longer herself. Something else was using her body, but she could feel its emotions and sensations. This is not Buddhism, I thought. Fundamentally, Buddhism preaches nothingness. It teaches that everything will vanish eventually. This, though . . . This was something else.

  I remembered how I had pretended to train under Suzuki. We would meditate on the grass. As you imagined the grass and trees around you on the inside, the border between yourself and that grass and those trees would gradually grow indistinct. Just once, while doing that, I experienced something strange. I felt the earth’s sexual appetite. I felt the grass and trees, the earth and stones feeling lust. Everything wanted to connect to everything else, and even if those things around them rejected them, they tried to connect; when they did connect, they trembled with pleasure. My mental image stretched to encompass the tow
n. In that moment, I felt as though I could see with my own eyes all the lust of the men and women in that town. Men and women howled and moaned and the world trembled. Atoms, I thought. Atoms are filled with the possibility of bringing humans to life, and at the same time, they are filled with the possibility of bringing about carnal desire. They flow and change places and stretch out like a hurricane, and through their constant generation, they also generate lust. That image surged through my inner vision. The particles trembled, flew in all directions, tasted the pleasures of lust, then came to want more and more. The particles that made up Nayirah’s brain were connected to the particles that made up her body, and constantly longed for pleasure and pain and ecstasy. The earth’s lust, the world’s lust, my lust—none of those things were either good or evil. They were nothing more than one violent vibration, like a grinding of teeth, that brought this world into being. And I, I was just caught up in all of that. I continued to spend my days with Nayirah, traveling to surrounding villages practicing medicine. Because of my skills, I could feel the pleasure of saving many lives. I could smile at a child running about innocently, and then, when she paused to look down over a low cliff, sneak up behind her and gently push her over. I felt I had to. That fallen child’s face twisted in pain—it was horrible. I liked the feeling of thinking things were horrible. My right hand still tingled with the warmth of having pushed her small back. I ran over to where she had fallen, asking if she was all right, and treated her minor wounds. That child thanked me, completely oblivious to what I had done. I felt something funny about that innocent child. Her mother visited my medical office to thank me. When I pulled her body toward mine, she looked at me with a rapt expression, as though she were worshipping me. I fucked that woman, and as I mocked her, she just took it. When I saw her so happy to be used, I felt lust. I felt no regret or conflict. My pleasure spiraled out of control. It would never end. It wasn’t a spiral that led to the foot of god. It was a spiral that led endlessly away from god.