Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

  Now he said the first thing that came to him. “A kind of self-sacrifice, I guess.”

  “So you think your death is going to help the world?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “OK, why die then?”

  “My instincts are telling me to. Just like your instincts tell you to kill people and then to save them.”

  “I get the feeling we’ve got something in common, you and me. We can’t explain our impulses.”

  “Why don’t you want to kill yourself? You can save someone else by dying yourself, you know.”

  “No, being alive allows me to save you. But in any case, the world doesn’t give a damn whether I live or die, it doesn’t suffer either way. Even if nothing much happens in the world on any given day, a lot of people still die. And we’re both going to join the anonymous dead sooner or later. The world at large doesn’t have anything to do with each and every person who dies, now, does it? We’re part of the world, but once we go the gap’s soon filled. My, what a cold hard world it is, how easily it forgets! How many of the dead do we each personally remember, hey? Family, close friends, important people we’ve respected, famous artists – probably no more than ten or so, right? But just think of the millions who die during our lifetime.”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  “The world will abandon you.”

  “So?”

  “So haven’t you felt that before you die you’d like to do something that would lodge you in people’s memory somehow?”

  “Not really, no. I don’t give a damn whether I’m forgotten or not.”

  “Do you believe in the next world?”

  “There’s no such thing. What was it Shinobu said? The next world is just the worst place, or something.”

  “Even so you want to die?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You have no regrets? Nothing to tie you to life?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You have some grudge against the world perhaps?”

  “When I die, my world will disappear. I can’t destroy the world. No matter how many people you kill, the world will still keep going. Mao Tse-tung, Stalin, Hitler – they all massacred vast numbers, but the world kept going. So you see, you should give up murder and kill yourself instead. That way you can at least get rid of the world you personally live in.”

  “You say this, Kita, but surely you’ve struggled with the world? You’re actually a hero in disguise. The fight begins now.”

  “You have a strong will to live. That’s why you kill others instead of yourself. You must be motivated deep down by hatred and malice, even if you can’t really comprehend yourself, I think. This will of yours to live’ll get the better of you one day, and you’ll die. Just like your father died from over-eating.”

  Kita yawned and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” cried the doctor, leaping hastily to his feet.

  Kita smiled at him. “My father died a bland, kindly man. He was used by others all his life, he had no friends, he was abandoned by the world, and he died quietly alone. No one remembers him now. My mother’s lost her marbles, his son’s about to die. All that will be left is his grave. But most people in the world live like him, and die like him. Mao Tse-tung and Stalin and Hitler killed anonymous millions just like him. They killed some famous folk too, of course, but they were in the minority. So at least where dying’s concerned, I’m one up on my Dad. I managed to get a bit of my own back on the world, and I met the woman of my dreams.”

  Kita put on his coat, shouldered his backpack, and disappeared into the crowded streets of Susukino. The doctor in turn picked up his heavy bag and set off after him, maintaining a steady distance.

  All that remained by now in Kita’s wallet was two thousand five hundred ninety yen. Whatever he did now, his range of choices would be pretty limited – a nap in some sauna, for instance, or a couple of cheap drinks in a bar. Perhaps he should set himself up to sleep the night in a park or doss down between a couple of high-rises. No doubt he could dip into the doctor’s pocket for expenses, of course, but it felt somehow right to spend his last night on earth sleeping out in the open. It was time to gaze up into the sky in this northern city, ask the doctor to keep his mouth shut, and make some final decisions about how to carry out his imminent execution.

  He walked slowly north from Susukino along Minami Shijo, heading for Odori Koen. The benches around the fountain were all occupied by couples, but along the street under the trees was emptier. He chose a spot between two trees, and the two of them spread out some newspaper salvaged from a garbage bin, and settled down for the night. Kita closed his eyes and concentrated on the question of how to kill himself, dimly aware of the distant cacophony from passersby in the park and its surrounding streets. Then it suddenly struck him that he wanted to try ski jumping just once before he died. Well how about throwing himself off the Okurayama ski jump where Sasatani had performed his feats back in the Sapporo Olympics? With luck, he’d smash himself up badly enough to die. As luck would have it, though, he might manage a successful jump. Either way, it was worth a try. How about tossing back the remaining bottle of vodka from the Russian sailors and then speeding down the ski slope on a bicycle? Even his internal organs would squirm with excitement, for sure.

  As Kita lay there grinning to himself, the doctor suddenly sat up. “Sorry, but there’s something I forgot,” he said. “As I understand it, Shinobu’s in love with you.”

  What was the use of hearing this now? Kita had lost his love four hours before he flew to Sapporo. “I’m grateful to her. She’s managed to make my suicide into a kind of art.”

  The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose. “An art, eh?” he said softly. “I finally get it, Kita. You, my father, even me – we’re all death artists.”

  The Death Artist

  Kita lay there breathing in the fragrance of the damp stone in the night air. He took a swig from his last bottle of vodka, then got to his feet. “Well then,” he said to the doctor. “Shall we be off?”

  “Where to?” asked the doctor, but Kita didn’t reply. He simply walked off through the park, as if carried on the wind. This park felt too comfortable. He wasn’t inclined to fall for the temptation of settling in to live here on the streets. Why not leave his backpack here for someone else to use? He only had a few more hours of life left, after all. He needed to get on with finding his execution ground and setting things up.

  He tried vaguely to picture the place he was after. Somewhere completely undistinguished, he decided. Somewhere wild and natural. There’d be birds flying about in the clouds overhead, and no sign of anyone about; his scream would vanish in the wind, his corpse would be hidden in the deep grass. He’d set off in search of just such a place, and when he got there, he’d find a flat rock just the right size to lay himself down on. It would serve very nicely as an operating table.

  The doctor followed him wordlessly, but his left shoe rubbed, and the limp slowed his pace. The fifteen-pound bag dragging on his shoulder felt more like thirty pounds. He wished he could have a good long soak in a bath and settle his exhausted body between some freshly starched sheets. Why oh why should it be so tiring to save someone’s life, while the guy he was saving could follow his every whim? It was one thing to save someone lying meekly on the operating table, but there wasn’t much he could do with this particular patient when he kept moving restlessly about, stubbornly intent on dying. He was only a surgeon, not a professional counsellor who could talk Kita out of suicide; the only thing left for him to do under the circumstances was to watch him kill himself, perform a swift operation to remove his organs, and deliver them to the organ market. Good grief, he thought, let me have a quick rest before we get on with it.

  What kind of organ thief was he right now, anyhow? He had no desire to get himself caught, but exhaustion compounded his fear, and made him desperate. He was also a murderer, and there’s nothing scarier than a desperate killer. Yet Kita was using him as his
manager, for Heaven’s sake.

  Kita was headed for Sapporo station. As he walked, he eyed the cars parked along the road. Having scrutinized the makes, number plates, and interiors of each car he passed, he came to a halt in front of a BMW with a Tokyo license plate, and put his hand on the door. Needless to say, it wouldn’t open. He walked another ten yards, and tried a Nissan Skyline with a local Sapporo plate. No luck.

  “You’re trying to steal a car?” the doctor asked irritably.

  “They’re all locked,” muttered Kita. Well of course. Yet he doggedly went on trying one after another. He was sick of walking.

  The doctor got ahead of him and paused at a Chevy Camaro with an Osaka plate. He beckoned Kita. “This one has ‘Please make free use of this vehicle’ written all over it. Let’s take it.” He took from his bag what looked like a metal ruler, inserted it between the doorframe and the window, and began to pump it gently up and down. Immediately there was the shriek of an alarm piercing enough to tear the flesh from one’s temples. The doctor frowned, but didn’t pause in his work. The lock broken, he slid into the car, opened the hood, briefly fiddled with the electronics, and the alarm stopped. He started the engine.

  Kita had been standing there with his hands to his ears. The doctor motioned him into the driver’s seat, settled down beside him, put on his seat belt, and tutted in vexation.

  “Come on, what’re you hanging around for? Get this car moving.”

  Kita took a short breath. Then he wheeled the white Camaro around and set off in search of his execution ground.

  The doctor didn’t ask where they were going. He settled back and closed his eyes, letting things take their course. He woke from his nap with the nasty feeling that Kita was clumsily up to something again.

  The roads decided where the white Camaro went. It raced straight along whatever road it happened to be on until it had to turn, and then alternated right and left at each new junction. There’d be no going back from this journey.

  Kita was pretty impressed with the doctor’s car thieving skills. It wasn’t just organs that the guy could steal, it seemed. In this man’s hands, his corpse would be quickly dispatched. Kita looked at the sleeping doctor with renewed awe and fear.

  It was a fabulous car for speeding. It seemed almost made to be crashed. “Thanks for such a great gift,” whispered Kita, but the doctor pretended he hadn’t heard.

  Now and then the road was momentarily illuminated by the stark light of a gas station or convenience store or drinks machine. It seemed so insubstantial it might disappear at the merest puff of breath. And sliding along it the white Camaro seemed it might melt into thin air if he closed his eyes for a moment, Kita thought. The steering wheel and accelerator were amazingly light to the touch, and his own body too could have been made of styrene foam it felt so weightless. Bearing down on this feather-light accelerator, he felt a thrill run right from his temples down his back. He pushed the speed up a bit further, past seventy-five miles per hour, and the thrill ran down over his knees. If he really put his foot down, the thrill would reach his heart and penetrate his pores and blood vessels, and he’d crash to instant death, laughing till he drooled. The white Camaro would be his coffin. And if a spark ignited the gas in the tank, that would deal with the cremation at the same time.

  The speedometer now registered over ninety, and the street lights sped by like fighter planes. There were only a few inches separating him from death. Within his narrow field of vision, a stark white high-rise sprang up like a gravestone. Narrowing his eyes, he made out the word “Hospital.” He slammed on the brakes, and in the same instant his pulse started throbbing violently and the weight returned to his body.

  Held firmly by his seat belt, the doctor gave a low groan. The tires squealed around a gentle curve in the road. The thrill that had been rushing through Kita’s body now subsided, replaced now by a stirring and hardening between his legs.

  “You were going to take me with you there, weren’t you?” the doctor muttered hoarsely.

  “I wouldn’t have minded just crashing the car back there, but then I saw that hospital.” Kita glanced sideways at the doctor, who was wiping the sweat from his hands, hollow-eyed.

  “Goddamn hospitals everywhere you go,” the doctor spat.

  “You don’t like hospitals?”

  “They make my heart ache.”

  Kita gave a laugh like a cough. Fancy that, this man who could dispose of people and bring them back to life as casually as he’d move chess pieces around a board actually had a heart. “You look done in,” he said sympathetically. “Don’t worry, you can rest easy. I don’t plan on killing you too.”

  The doctor raised his hands, spread his fingers and yawned, trying to get his circulation going again. It was all very well to be told he could rest, but how could he possibly doze in this hearse with someone bent on dying at the wheel? Besides, the law stipulated there should be only one corpse per hearse.

  Perhaps it was having just passed a hospital that had given the doctor his nightmare. He had been in a high-ceilinged hall, full of dazzling light. Around fifty people sat in the audience holding their breath, their eyes fixed on him. He was in the midst of a performance of heart massage. He climbed on top of the patient on the operating table and sat there, both hands to the inert heart, leaning his weight into the task of pumping it at varied rhythms and tempos. He was a percussionist, and the audience was appreciating his concert.

  He went on massaging, working up a great sweat as he pumped. The muscles in his arms were jelly, and pain and exhaustion gripped his back. He wiped the drops of sweat from his brow with his white sleeve, and glanced at the audience. Some were dozing. Others were rising to leave. Still the doctor couldn’t end his performance. There would be no rest for him until the heart began to beat of its own accord again. But even that rest would be only brief, before he had to begin work on the next patient. More and more patients in cardiac arrest were being brought into the hall.

  Even if he failed to resuscitate someone, the doctor thought, he wasn’t directly responsible for his death. It was now around two hours since the heart had stopped. The situation was hopeless. Continuing the heart massage was a mere formality.

  He was tired. He longed to stop. There was no way the patient would revive. Yet the audience was poised to applaud the very moment the patient was resuscitated. If he got down from the table now, they’d not only boo him, they’d lynch him. A thought came to him: what if he fainted right now?

  The next instant, the prone patient opened his eyes, and gave him a leer that seemed to see through to his very soul. The doctor felt his own heart squeeze tight, and at that moment the dream bumped him back into reality.

  “Could you please go someplace where there isn’t a hospital?” he asked Kita confidingly.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve been dreaming of all the patients you killed getting their own back on you, have you?”

  The doctor sighed in response, and said, “Heart massage is a nightmare. I’ve had it up to here.”

  “It really does make your heart ache, eh?”

  The doctor could remember heart massages that had gone on for four hours straight. If there’s no response within thirty minutes, you can generally assume brain death, but the patient’s family still hadn’t shown up so he had to keep going. You have to show the relatives that you’re massaging the heart. The doctor will go on trying until he’s too exhausted to pump any more, so that the relatives will acknowledge that he’s done all he could. The family will use the doctor’s sweat as surety for the fact of their relative’s death. That’s the custom in hospitals.

  “So what does it feel like to massage a corpse?” Kita suddenly asked.

  “You have to like corpses. If you think it’s pointless, you can’t get your arms and back working strongly enough. You have to tell yourself it’s for humanity and the world as you press.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “You get on the corpse, shake your head arou
nd wildly, yell ‘Don’t die, you crazy fool!’ and go like this.” The doctor placed his hands against the dashboard and leaned into it, breathing heavily. The car swayed slightly.

  “I guess it would feel pretty good to the guy being massaged.”

  The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose, and irritably tutted again. The next time he makes a bad joke, he thought, I’ll give him a shot to put him to sleep.

  He closed his eyes again, but he didn’t want to return to the dream, so he imagined music. The prelude to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He used to listen to this opera a lot in his student days, so he thought he could remember most of the melody, but it began to repeat itself half way through and he couldn’t move it on. Oh well. To cheer himself up, he taunted Kita, “By the way, maybe it’s natural to get an erection when you’re close to death.” He’d apparently noted the shape of Kita’s pants of the corner of his eye. “I think it’s a normal reaction,” he went on, red-faced.

  “It felt like having sex with a car back there. Literally car sex.”

  “A car accident is sex with a car, you know. You don’t need a man and a woman for that. All you need to do is step on the accelerator. You reach climax in no time.”

  It was four in the morning. Kita had no idea where he was going. There wasn’t a building to be seen along the roadsides. No hospitals, no graveyards. The road simply stretched ahead to carry them along. Kita pressed harder on the accelerator again. His forehead grew hot, and a thrill ran down to his thighs.

  The doctor chuckled reminiscently, and murmured, “You know, after a car accident you sometimes find people with a blissful expression on their face. Just like they’ve come through wild sex.”

  That young hot-rodder had been like that. He’d been playing tag with a motorcycle cop, failed to take a corner, and piled into a noodle shop. That was the first time the doctor had seen that ecstatic look. The accident happened right near the hospital where he worked, and the patrol car had taken him to the site. Three broken ribs appeared to have pierced his stomach. The helmet was smashed, but his head was unhurt, and he was conscious. When he was carried into the operating room, he was drooling and grinning, his eyes glazed. When they removed the bloody clothes and set about dealing with his injuries, they found his pants were wet with semen. He’d apparently ejaculated at the moment of impact. His penis was still engorged.