She wills herself out from under the covers, lowering her bare feet cautiously to the floor. She is wearing plain blue pajamas of glossy material. The air here is chilly. She strips the thin quilt from the bed and dons it as a cape. She tries to walk but is unable to move straight ahead. Her muscles cannot remember how to do it. But she pushes onward, one step at a time. The blank linoleum floor questions her with cold efficiency: Who are you? What are you doing here? But of course she is unable to answer.
She approaches a window and, resting her hands on the sill, strains to see outside. Beyond the glass, however, there is no scenery, only an uncolored space like a pure abstract idea. She rubs her eyes, takes a deep breath, and tries to look out again. Still there is nothing to see but empty space. She tries to open the window but it will not move. She tries all of the windows in order, but they refuse to move, as if they have been nailed shut. It occurs to her that this might be a ship. She seems to feel a gentle rocking. I might be riding on a large ship, and the windows are sealed to keep the water from splashing in. She listens for the sound of an engine or a hull cutting through the waves. But all that reaches her is the unbroken sound of silence.
She makes a complete circuit of the large room, taking time to feel the walls and turn switches on and off. None of the switches has any effect on the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps—or on anything else: they do nothing. The room has two doors—utterly ordinary paneled doors. She tries turning the knob of one. It simply spins without engaging. She tries pushing and pulling, but the door will not budge. The other door is the same. Each of the doors and windows sends signals of rejection to her as if each is an independent creature.
She makes two fists and pounds on the door as hard as she can, hoping that someone will hear and open the door from the outside, but she is shocked at how little sound she is able to produce. She herself can hardly hear it. No one (assuming there is anyone out there) can possibly hear her knocking. All she does is hurt her hands. Inside her head, she feels something resembling dizziness. The rocking sensation in her body has increased.
We notice that the room resembles the office where Shirakawa was working late at night. It could well be the same room. Only, now it is perfectly vacant, stripped of all furniture, office equipment, and decoration. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling are all that is left. After every item was taken out, the last person locked the door behind him, and the room, its existence forgotten by the world, was plunged to the bottom of the sea. The silence and the moldy smell absorbed by the four surrounding walls indicate to her—and to us—the passage of that time.
She squats down, her back against the wall, eyes closed, as she waits for the dizziness and rocking to subside. Eventually she opens her eyes and picks something up that has fallen on the floor nearby. A pencil. With an eraser. Stamped with the name veritech, it is the same kind of silver pencil that Shirakawa was using. The point is blunt. She picks up the pencil and stares at it for a long time. She has no memory of the name veritech. Could it be the name of a company, or of some kind of product? She can’t be sure. She shakes her head slightly. Aside from the pencil, she sees nothing that promises to give her any information about this room.
She can’t comprehend how she came to be in a place like this all alone. She has never seen it before, and nothing about the place jogs her memory. Who could have carried me here, and for what purpose? Is it possible I have died? Is this the afterlife? She sits down on the edge of the bed and examines the possibility that this is what has happened to her. But she cannot believe that she is dead. Nor should the afterlife be like this. If dying meant being shut up alone inside a vacant room in an isolated office building, it was too utterly lacking any hope of salvation. Could this be a dream then? No, it is too consistent to be a dream, the details too concrete and vivid. I can actually touch the things that are here. She jabs the back of her hand with the pencil tip to verify the pain. She licks the eraser to verify the taste of rubber.
This is reality, she concludes. For some reason, a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit. Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? No, that is not likely, either. After all, who gets to bring her own bed along when she enters the hospital? And besides, this simply doesn’t look like a hospital room. Neither does it look like a prison cell. It’s just a big, empty room.
She returns to the bed and strokes the quilt. She gives the pillow a few light pats. They are just an ordinary quilt and an ordinary pillow. Not symbols, not concepts; one is a real quilt, and the other a real pillow. Neither gives her anything to go by. Eri runs her fingers over her face, touching every bit of skin. Through her pajama top, she lays her hands on her breasts. She verifies that she is her usual self: a beautiful face and well-shaped breasts. I’m a lump of flesh, a commercial asset, her rambling thoughts tell her. Suddenly she is far less sure that she is herself.
Her dizziness has faded, but the rocking sensation continues. She feels as if her footing has been swept out from under her. Her body’s interior has lost all necessary weight and is becoming a cavern. Some kind of hand is deftly stripping away everything that has constituted her as Eri until now: the organs, the senses, the muscles, the memories. She knows she will end up as a mere convenient conduit used for the passage of external things. Her flesh creeps with the overwhelming sense of isolation this gives her. I hate this! she screams. I don’t want to be changed this way! But her intended scream never emerges. All that leaves her throat in reality is a fading whimper.
Let me get to sleep again! she pleads. If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality! This is the one way Eri can now imagine escaping from the room. It’s probably worth a try. But she will not easily be granted such sleep. For one thing, she has only just awakened. And her sleep was too long and deep for that: so deep that she left her normal reality behind.
She lodges the silver pencil between her fingers and gives it a twirl, vaguely hoping this thing she found on the floor will evoke some kind of memory. But all her fingers feel is an endless longing of the heart. Half-consciously, she lets the pencil drop to the floor. She lies on the bed, wraps herself in the quilt, and closes her eyes.
She thinks: No one knows I’m here. I’m sure of it. No one knows that I am in this place.
We know. But we are not qualified to become involved with her. We look down at her from above as she lies in bed. Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away from her. The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image of Eri Asai, until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness. The movement is beyond our control.
The next thing we know, we are back in Eri Asai’s room. The bed is empty. We can see the TV screen. It shows nothing but a sandstorm of interference. Harsh static grates on our ears. We stare at the sandstorm for a while to no purpose.
The room grows darker by degrees until, in an instant, all light is lost. The sandstorm also fades. Total darkness arrives.
11
Mari and Takahashi are sitting next to each other on a park bench. The park is a small one on a narrow strip of land in the middle of the city. Set near an old public housing project, it has a playground in one corner with swings, seesaws, and a water fountain. Mercury lamps illuminate the area. Trees stretch their dark branches overhead, and below there are dense shrubberies. The trees have dropped a thick layer of dead leaves that hide much of the ground and crackle when stepped on. The park is deserted at this hour except for Mari and Takahashi. A late-autumn white moon hangs in the sky like a sharp blade. Mari has a white kitten on her knees. She is feeding it a sandwich she brought wra
pped in tissue paper. The kitten is eating with gusto. Mari gently strokes its back. Several other cats watch from a short distance away.
“Back when I worked in Alphaville, I used to come here on my breaks to feed and pet the cats,” says Takahashi. “There’s no way I can keep a cat now, living alone in an apartment. I miss the feel of them sometimes.”
“You had a cat when you were living at home?” Mari asks.
“Yeah, to make up for not having any brothers or sisters.”
“You don’t like dogs?”
“I like dogs. I had a bunch of them. But finally, cats are better. As a matter of personal preference.”
“I’ve never had a cat,” says Mari. “Or a dog. My sister was allergic to the fur. She couldn’t stop sneezing.”
“I see.”
“From the time she was a kid, she had a ton of allergies—cedar pollen, ragweed, mackerel, shrimp, fresh paint, all kinds of things.”
“Fresh paint?” Takahashi says with a scowl. “Never heard of that one.”
“Well, she had it. She had strong reactions, too.”
“Like…?”
“Like, she’d get a rash, and she had trouble breathing. She’d get these bumps in her windpipe, and my parents would have to take her to the hospital.”
“Every time she walked past fresh paint?”
“Well, not every time, but it happened a lot.”
“Even a lot would be tough.”
Mari goes on petting the cat in silence.
“And how about you?” Takahashi asks.
“You mean allergies?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have any to speak of,” Mari says. “I’ve never been sick. In our house, we had the delicate Snow White and the hardy shepherd girl.”
“One Snow White per family is plenty.”
Mari nods.
“And there’s nothing wrong with being a hardy shepherd girl. You don’t have to worry how dry the paint is every time.”
Mari looks him in the face. “It’s not that simple, you know.”
“I know,” Takahashi says. “It’s not that simple…Say, aren’t you cold out here?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Mari tears off another piece of tuna sandwich and feeds it to the kitten. The kitten hungrily gobbles it down.
Takahashi hesitates for a few moments, unsure if he should mention something, then he decides to go ahead. “You know, your sister and I once had a long, serious conversation, just the two of us.”
Mari looks at him. “When was that?”
“I don’t know, maybe April. I was going to Tower Records one evening to look for something when I bumped into her out front. I was alone, and so was she. We stood on the sidewalk making small talk, but after a while we realized we had too much to say, so we went to a café down the street. At first it was nothing much, just the usual stuff you talk about when you bump into an old classmate you haven’t seen for a while—like, whatever happened to so-and-so and stuff. But then she suggested we go some place we could have a drink, and the conversation turned pretty deep and personal. She had a lot she wanted to talk about.”
“Deep and personal?”
“Yeah.”
Mari looks at him questioningly. “Why would Eri talk to you about stuff like that? I never got the sense that you and she were particularly close.”
“No, obviously, we’re not. That time we all went to the hotel pool together was the first time I ever really talked to her. I’m not even sure she knew my full name.”
Mari goes on stroking the kitten in silence.
Takahashi continues, “But that day, she wanted somebody to talk with. Normally it would have been another girl, a good friend. But I don’t know, maybe your sister doesn’t have any girlfriends she can open up to like that. So she picked me instead. It just happened to be me. It could have been anybody.”
“Still, why you? As far as I know, she’s never had any trouble finding boyfriends.”
“No, I’m sure you’re right.”
“But she happens to bump into you on the street, somebody she doesn’t know all that well, and she gets involved in this deep, personal conversation. I wonder why?”
“I don’t know,” Takahashi says, giving it some thought. “Maybe I seemed harmless to her.”
“Harmless?”
“Yeah, like she could let herself open up to me this one time and not feel threatened.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, maybe it’s…” Takahashi seems to be having trouble getting the words out. “This is gonna sound kinda weird, but people often think I’m gay. Like, on the street, sometimes some guy—a total stranger—will hit on me.”
“But you’re not gay, right?”
“No, I don’t think so…It’s just that people always seem to pick me to tell their secrets to. Guys, girls, people I hardly know, people I’ve never even met before: they open up to me about their wildest innermost secrets. I wonder why that is? It’s not as if I want to hear this stuff.”
Mari mentally chews over what he has just said to her. Then she says, “So, anyway, Eri confessed all these secrets to you.”
“Right. Or maybe I should say she told me personal stuff.”
“Like, for example…?” Mari asks.
“Like, say, family stuff.”
“Family stuff?”
“Just for example,” Takahashi says.
“Including stuff about me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Takahashi takes a moment to think how best to say this. “For example, she said she wishes she could be closer to you.”
“Closer to me?”
“She felt that you had deliberately put a kind of distance between the two of you. Ever since you reached a certain age.”
Mari softly embraces the kitten between her palms. Her hands feel its tiny warmth.
“Yeah,” Mari says. “But it’s possible for people to draw closer to each other even while they keep a reasonable distance between them.”
“Of course it’s possible,” Takahashi says. “But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”
A big brown cat appears out of nowhere and rubs its head against Takahashi’s leg. Takahashi bends over and strokes the cat. He takes the fish cake from his pocket, tears the package open, and gives half to the cat, who gobbles it down.
“So that’s the personal problem that was bothering Eri?” Mari asks. “That she can’t get close enough to her little sister?”
“That was one of her personal problems. There were others.”
Mari stays silent.
Takahashi goes on, “While she was talking to me, Eri was popping every kind of pill you can imagine. Her Prada bag was stuffed with drugs, and while she was drinking her Bloody Mary she was munching ’em like nuts. I’m pretty sure they were legal drugs, but the amount was not normal.”
“She’s a total pill freak. Always has been. But she’s been getting worse.”
“Somebody should stop her.”
Mari shakes her head. “Pills and fortune-telling and dieting: nobody can stop her when it comes to any of those things.”
“I kind of hinted to her she maybe ought to see a specialist—a therapist or psychiatrist or something. But she had absolutely no intention of doing that as far as I could tell. I mean, she didn’t even seem to realize she had anything going on inside of her. I really started getting worried about her. I’m sitting there thinking, What could have happened to Eri Asai?”
Mari frowns. “All you had to do was give her a call afterwards and ask Eri directly—if you were really that worried about her.”
Takahashi gives a little sigh. “To get back to our first conversation tonight, supposing I was to call your house and Eri Asai answered, I wouldn’t have any idea what to say to her.”
“But the two of you had that long, tight conversation over drinks—that deep, personal talk.??
?
“True, but it wasn’t exactly a conversation. I hardly said a thing. She just kept talking and I chimed in now and then. And besides, realistically speaking, I don’t think there’s a lot that I can do for her—as long as I’m not involved with her on a deeper, more personal level, at least.”
“And you don’t want to get that involved…”
“I don’t think I can get that involved,” Takahashi says. He reaches out and scratches the cat behind the ears. “Maybe I’m not qualified.”
“Or to put it more simply, you can’t be all that interested in Eri?”
“Well, if you put it that way, Eri Asai is not all that interested in me. Like I said, she just needed somebody to talk to. From her point of view, I was nothing much more than a wall with human features that could respond to her now and then as necessary.”
“Okay, all that aside, are you deeply interested in Eri or not? Assuming you had to answer just yes or no.”
Takahashi rubs his hands together lightly, as if confused. It’s a delicate question. He finds it difficult to answer.
“Yes, I think I am interested in Eri Asai. Your sister has a completely natural radiance. It’s really special and it’s something she was born with. For example, when the two of us were drinking and having this intimate conversation, everybody in the bar was staring at us like, ‘What the hell is that gorgeous girl doing with such a nothing guy?’”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah, but?”
“Think about it,” Mari says. “I asked you if you were deeply interested in Eri, but you answered, ‘I think I am interested’ in her. You dropped the ‘deeply.’ It seems to me you’re leaving something out.”