There were only temporary reprieves, all coming from the outside world. People in distant villages who heard rumors of me came to beg for medical treatment. Nayirah realized that if I stayed in her village that would mean there would be other lives I wouldn’t be able to save. Nayirah already had a fiancé. He was a drunk widower over fifty, and it had been decided that when she turned eighteen she’d become his wife and take care of his house like a maid. Even if the world were to somehow become just, there would still be places like this, holes in the net where justice would never reach. Nayirah asked me to kill her and leave the village. Without you here, I’ll die of some illness anyway, she said. She couldn’t run away with me; her family would be ostracized.
I didn’t agree to do it. I still longed for her body. But Nayirah’s heart was failing, and she had to have surgery or she wouldn’t live. She begged me to kill her, but she also begged me to save her. Even though she wanted to die, she didn’t want to be separated from me for a minute. She was so young. I made my preparations, and a few days later I anesthetized her, laid her on the operating table, and undressed her. I cut her open with my scalpel.
When I opened her body and saw her defenseless heart, my pulse began to race. I took deep breaths to help me concentrate, but my own heartbeat wouldn’t settle. Though she should have been subdued by the anesthetic, her heart was racing as well, as if it were responding to my heart. I was overcome by lust. I wanted to do irreparable damage to this vital part of her, her heart. For some reason I forgot that I couldn’t let her die. Her fate was in my hands. My hand, holding that silver scalpel, began to tremble.
I’ll just try, I thought. I’ll just cut her heart a little. I’ll just stop myself before I actually damage it. I don’t have to do it for real. But I’ll see what it feels like to almost do it. First, I sighed deeply while my assistant watched. This is horrible. This is no good, I said. The assistant who helped me in the village didn’t have any deep knowledge of medicine; I would not be blamed even if something went wrong. I have to cut here, I whispered, pointing with my scalpel to an entirely different part of her heart than the one I had to operate on. As I spoke, my heart began to race again. Nayirah’s heart, as if nervous in the face of my intentions, or maybe inviting me to proceed, also began to race. I brought my scalpel closer to her heart. If I moved it just a bit more, her life would end. I was straddling the line between life and death. My breathing grew labored. I felt drunk, and as I grew aroused, my body went limp. Nayirah’s heart wouldn’t slow down. It was still going. Even though I stopped my hand, the choice remained. Should I try? I felt my body growing wet with sweat. This is what I’d always wanted. To take a life and in doing so destroy all the possibilities it had. I brought my scalpel up against her heart again. I was a bit surprised to realize that my fingers had stopped shaking. I was so close. Could I stop myself, so close? Happiness spread through my body. The light above the operating table pulsed, and for a moment I looked directly into it. I realized the room had lost all color. Under my hand, Nayirah’s insides were black and white. At some point, I had stopped seeing colors—perhaps my brain had removed all color to ease my sense of cruelty. But now Nayirah’s red insides were spread out before me. Her bright red heart shone in my eyes. I’ll get past this, I thought. I plunged my scalpel into that bright red heart. I expected it to open right up, but for some reason its elasticity resisted. That thin membrane was the border separating me from another world. My heart beat so fast it hurt. My heart seized, as if it were being closed in on by the scalpel. The scalpel entered, and then cut. At that moment a sharp sensation pierced my heart. Blood began to spurt. Human bodies are beautifully built. They are also beautiful when they crumble. All those organs struggle and resist death violently. But my scalpel wouldn’t stop. I cut through that life, all its resistance. No matter how much it resisted, I cut through it, enraptured. My life force poured out. It was a pleasure that made all existence tremble.
Her blood pressure fell, and her pulse suddenly began to quicken. The electrocardiogram continued to beep. Before I’d anesthetized her, she had been staring at me. Did she know she would never wake up? I thought she looked at me with a certain determination, an innocent expression on her face. But even if she did know, what did that mean? The EKG began to beep faster. My assistant panicked, but since I had whispered to him that the surgery would fail when I first opened her body, he just started crying and didn’t interfere further.
After my lust had been satisfied, I waited to feel something else. Maybe a sense of regret would come over me. I looked at her innocent face, thinking it would cause me emotional pain. She looked like she was sleeping. Five seconds passed, then thirty. I thought I would collapse in tears, but nothing happened. The EKG alarm went off, and the beeping grew irregular. I felt surprised at my own calm. All I felt was a quiet satisfaction. The beeping grew even more erratic. It should have already stopped. It’s still going? I thought. It’s still going? It went on longer than I’d expected. I thought maybe I should try to cry even though I didn’t feel sad on the inside. Perhaps that thought only crossed my mind because I had time for it. To try and make myself cry, I thought about her beauty, and how pathetic she was. Eventually I grew sad and tears began to fall. Then I thought about how I had used her beautiful body however I wanted, and in the end, I’d even done what I wanted with her life. I thought about penetrating that final border. The sides of my mouth rose into a smile. Good and evil intermingled, and my feelings trembled. My consciousness became something I could control without any resistance. The sound of the EKG grew distant and then finally stopped. Repelled. That word floated up in the corner of my mind. Stavrogin, who constantly worried about god, had suffered from a guilty conscience. Faust, in the end, embraced the good. I was being repelled from guilt over good and evil. Soon after she died, I raped Nayirah one last time. I felt thrilled doing it, and I also felt the pleasure of being able to come. Later, in front of her parents, I felt truly sad and cried. When I left the village, I felt cheerful. I caught myself naturally making small talk about the heat to the driver taking me to the next distant city.
In the next city, and the city after that, I did the same thing. I didn’t meet any girls as young as Nayirah, but I saved lives only to play with them, and my feelings transformed rapidly. I never lost my color vision again. The emptiness of my days vanished as my lust grew. Or to put it in the opposite way, what sort of life lacks emptiness? Life eventually ends. Good and evil are ultimately nothing more than crutches for people who will eventually cease to exist, and even if a great tragedy like the Second World War occurs, days will march on, and nothing is special about any of it. I thought it funny that anyone who knew about the world’s tragedies but did nothing about them would criticize my morals. Humans want to think themselves good, but the world is made of heartless evil. My ancestors had protected our useless bloodline just for a monster like me to be born.
But these are just the things that I would whisper listlessly to others. On the inside, I truly didn’t think them. I felt satisfied at saving the lives of those suffering from poverty, and I also felt satisfied in humiliating women in horrible ways. The nothingness that Stavrogin fretted over so much was the major premise of life to me, not something to fear. On that point, I may just have a complicated connection to Buddhism.
My interest was in whether or not there was a god. If there was, my way of living might be rejected. From time to time I watched happily as people prayed. For example, athletes praying before sports competitions. There is no way a god who continues to ignore starving children cares about the success of some athlete. A god who leaves sinless children to die in natural disasters and of sickness has no right to censure us. If nothing else, within the limits of human reason, no one can say that god is as good a being as I am. Maybe god will punish me after I die, but even then, that would depend on god having more power than we do, and thus there’d be nothing we could do about it. We would look on this god who only
controlled us by force with contempt. It’s convenient for us to say we can never understand the will of god. For if we can never understand the will of god, that means there is always a possibility we will be accepted by him.
I built a new hospital in Indonesia. One day I had hooked an IV up to a girl on the verge of death from malnutrition, and had received heartfelt thanks from her parents. As they stood thanking me, I tried to drink some clear water from a clear glass. But there was an uncanny feeling in my fingers, and I put the glass down.
I stared at that glass. It looked slightly cloudy now for some reason. I grabbed the glass again. But the feeling of closing my fingers around it seemed different from before. I realized that the mother who had just been there a moment ago was gone. I looked around the hospital room. The operating table, the medical instruments, the chairs, even the walls—everything was slightly different. I drank from the glass, filled with that sense of uncanniness. I felt the warmth of the water, tasted the slightly rusty flavor. I returned the glass to my desk. I heard clearly the hard sound of the glass touching the desk. But none of it was natural.
The world had somehow lost its naturalness. When I touched something, I felt the sensation of touching it, and when I moved something, that object moved. But all of it felt awkward. It was as if I were trying to forcibly change the way things existed in the world. Then I remembered that word again. Repelled. I got the feeling that I didn’t fit in this world.
I went outside. The tropical trees were shaking, and the warm wind hit my cheeks. Dust rose up. But all of that felt distant, and it seemed as though it only appeared in front of me because I was watching it. I noticed my body temperature drop suddenly.
From that day on, the feeling would come to me haphazardly, randomly. But I didn’t feel lonely when I experienced these occasional changes. Loneliness was natural to me, and not something I worried about anymore. Viewing the world as someone repelled from it—that was something I could bear. I had not been born this way. When I felt my temperature drop and the things around me grow distant, I often thought this. When Nayirah’s heart was in front of me, I overcame my mind, my mind that made me see in black and white. I created a world of vivid color, and I surpassed myself. I had become this way of my own will, I thought.
I returned to Japan, sought out women who were doing sex work and created a harem. I left the hospitals my father used to run in the hands of other doctors, and sat back and lived off the profits. I thought that by playing the role of a fake god I might actually come to be called god. Would god leave someone like me alone? For me, god had to exist. My arrogance wouldn’t allow me to do something as stupid as live in a world without god. I continued to act like a god, half in jest. But no real god appeared, and my believers increased. It seemed that the empty space inside me attracted people. I, who had been repelled from everything, attracted others. I felt as if I were peeling away part of the world and pulling it toward me. Though I was repelled by everything, I could go on living, feeling no sadness or emptiness, only pleasure.
But this led to one problem. To do either good or evil requires energy. And the energy within me was fading.
I thought that my desires would only grow fainter, and that I would gradually shrivel and die. I thought that I had reached the limit of human achievement, that I was headed toward oblivion. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.
I went abroad once more, this time, to India.
I took a few believers with me, and we did medical work in poor areas. The disparity between the wealthy and the poor in that country was very interesting to me. Right beside someone who might as well have been a billionaire was a child with only one arm, begging. His parents had cut off one of his arms in a bid for sympathy. I was curious what I would feel saving the lives of weak children now that I was losing energy myself. But the satisfaction was quite weak. My temperature continued to decline despite the strong sunlight shining down on me. Huts made of scraps of cloth, the clouds of dust cars kicked up—it all seemed somehow unnatural.
I walked along a road a little outside of the center of town. I suddenly felt sexual desire. I wasn’t sure why. There was nothing there to arouse me. I noticed a dirty ball rolling right in front of me. That ball stood out strangely from its surroundings—it seemed to overflow with its own presence. I looked past that ball and saw a girl and her mother. The girl was balancing awkwardly on top of a tall wall while her young mother was talking to someone on one of the pay phones that had just started appearing in the area. She wasn’t watching her daughter. Judging from their appearance, they were well-off. The ball rolled toward the girl. She finally noticed. My throat grew dry and my heart began to race.
She’ll fall, I thought. She’ll be distracted because of the ball I kicked, and she’ll fall. I wasn’t sure why, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t survive the fall. The road wasn’t paved, but the ball rolled straight along it. It was as if that ball were drawing a beautiful line, a straight line that would cause the girl to fall. I hadn’t planned it. My leg had kicked that ball reflexively, its motion never passing through my consciousness. I noticed the rest after. The slowness of consciousness, and the motion of the mind . . . It was as though my mind had moved my body so as to invite me to action, because I was losing strength and doing nothing. She’ll fall, I thought. The ball drew closer. Not yet? Will it take a little longer? No one could stop that ball rolling any longer. The ball arrived right below the girl. The girl jumped toward the ball as if she were trying to get the attention of her mother. I was breathless. The moment her small body hit the stony ground below she appeared an adult in my eyes. I thought about that body jarred by that impact, and I lusted intensely for it.
Her mother screamed and ran to her. But they no longer looked like people to me. There was one collection of particles that because of a violent impact had begun to lose its life, and another collection of particles running toward it, and a collection of particles that was me. Human identity had been lost. My lust quickly subsided, and it seemed that all that was in front of me was the movement of those particles. That straight line the ball had followed, the line that had caused such a stir in the particles, was perfectly clear. I approached them without any feelings of good or evil or lust. It was as though there were two collections of particles in front of me that both did a good job imitating humans. But actually, humans really are just collections of particles, so they weren’t imitating anything. I stopped my consciousness. I could do it. I heard my own voice.
“You have a beautiful face.”
And then I strangled that mother. Can I do this? I wondered the whole time. I wondered if I was going to kill her because the girl who had lost her life so violently a moment ago looked like her mother. No one was around. In this area where there was so much crime, what would anyone think of a woman’s brief screaming? The wall in front of me and the two abandoned cars would shield me from view. Though I was surrounded by humans, I was in a space visually separated from them entirely. The mother’s eyes were full of confusion—why was she being strangled? That was only natural. I didn’t know why either. My body grew cold, and everything became awkward. I tore at her clothes, pushed her down, and licked her body. As I strangled her, I began moving my hips, imagining I was raping the girl who had just died. I felt that if that girl had lived, this would have been her. I felt as if I could see time. The past, the future that should have come, and the future that would actually arrive were all mixed together. But I wasn’t aroused—I did what I did as though it were my duty. I had felt that sense of duty several times before. That sense of duty separated me from physical sensations. I was moving away from reality, leaving a shell of particles behind me. I was in a dangerous place of knowledge. The world was changing. I had peeked inside the world—I had seen past its surface particles. I was crushing that woman for the me behind the real me, the me who was still human, still looking at the surface of that world, feeling carnal pleasure—for those particle
s that made up the me behind me. I wasn’t sure if she was dead yet, but I humped her. Pleasure formed behind me. The straight line that had led me here had finished its job; it began to waver, to loosen, and eventually eddied out of existence. That line had probably marked the moment a human lost his humanity. The scene I saw when I raped that woman was different from everything before. There was no warmth, no meaning, no sensation. The thing I had previously recognized as a woman grew blurry. It was as if the laws of perspective had vanished. It seemed everything was cloudy, but also clear. The pleasure of humiliating this woman continued to build within my body. But I had slipped beneath the surface of this world. There was no happiness, or loneliness, or pleasure. Just particles joining together and drifting around. Everything was there, and nothing. Particles were born and then vanished, vanished and then were born again. And the organ I was could do nothing more than stare as though that had some sort of meaning. For a moment, I felt terribly scared. A cold shiver spread inside me. I was terrified because I had always existed in this sort of system. The cold I felt inside myself and the cold of the scene may have actually been one and the same. But that fear was momentary. I became accustomed to it, and became part of the scene. I came inside the woman. I didn’t feel anything, but unbelievable pleasure exploded around me. After coming, the scene around me restabilized. I returned to myself, and my energy began to deplete rapidly again. I thought I had learned the secrets of god, the secret of this system that allows him to fool humans. From then on I’d occasionally see the world that way, and then return from that world to the human one, and be able to experience pleasure as I used to. I didn’t fear it anymore.
. . . My final curiosity was to see what would happen to someone like me in the end. If there was a god, what sort of end would he give me? It would be fitting if I were destroyed. But nothing bad happened to my body. After decades, an abnormality appeared. Cancer. When I learned of it, I was slightly surprised at its ordinariness. I had lived so long and now had cancer. I, who tortured women, and sometimes even killed them, would die of cancer in the end. I wanted to ask god, is this enough of a punishment? Wouldn’t something much more extreme have been appropriate? Won’t this destroy the order of this world? I had drugs that would kill me before I felt any pain from that cancer. And since I had no attachment to this life, even that didn’t make me unhappy. My cancer progressed normally, and I faced death normally. But because of my arrogance, I wanted my life to end with me facing off against god. I didn’t care whether he existed or not. I couldn’t be moved by anything that wasn’t greater than me. If god didn’t exist, I just needed to create him. If I did that, I could realize my own destruction. In other words—