Birthday

by Kōji Suzuki

  10

  Toyama left the subway station and headed down Hitotsugi Street toward his office. He felt cold sweat trickle down his back, rivulet after rivulet. The weather was balmy, considering it was almost December. Gazing at the cloudless sky should have given Toyama a corresponding sense of peace, but it didn't.

  Yesterday he'd contacted Kitajima for the first time in ages. The things they'd talked about—he couldn't get them out of his head now. They left a bad aftertaste, one that he couldn't quite define, and couldn't get rid of.

  According to Kitajima, Okubo and the other three had all died within the last few years, one after the other.

  And in each case the cause of death had been heart-related: angina pectoris, myocardial infarction, heart fail-ure. But there was another, even scarier, coincidence.

  When Okubo had played the tape of Sadako in bliss over the intercom into the big room, three interns had been present: Shinichiro Mori, Keiko Takahata, and Mayu Yumi. Those three plus Shigemori, who'd also happened to be there, made four. And it so happened that all four had died of heart-related illnesses. They'd died at different times—Shigemori the very next day, the other three only twenty-odd years later—but still, it was too much to be dismissed as mere coincidence.

  The first of the three to die was Okubo, the main culprit: he'd gone at age thirty-seven from a myocardial infarction. But in any case, all five of the people who had heard the tape were dead. It was disturbing, to say the least.

  Did I hear it?

  Toyama began to worry. He hadn't actually listened to the tape, but he'd heard what was on it—that is, he'd received Sadako's voice directly into his brain, where it had resonated as if to engrave itself there. Those words of hers that had once brought him unmatched ecstasy now began to take on a different meaning.

  He realized there was something he'd forgotten to tell Yoshino the other day. Which was that he was absolutely sure there was no way Sadako's voice could have been recorded on that tape.

  Even now, twenty-four years later, he could remember it clearly. In order to erase Okubo's impressions he had pressed the record button on the tape deck. Normally this would record over what was already on the tape, but in this case he wanted simply to make the tape blank, so he turned off the built-in microphone. This was important—he'd checked several times to make sure it was off. He had a visual memory of it: the VU

  meter that measured the recording level didn't budge from zero.

  Which meant—it was the logical conclusion—that Sadako's voice could not have been recorded on that tape.

  Suddenly he felt dizzy—he staggered down the sidewalk, then leaned up against a telephone pole. The dizziness and shortness of breath were particularly bad today.

  Usually if he rested for a few minutes his spells would pass, but now the dizziness got so bad he felt like throwing up. He didn't feel like this was going to go away any-time soon.

  He entered the building where he worked. His department was on the fifth floor, but he couldn't make it up there yet. He collapsed onto a couch in the ground-floor reception area and waited for the nausea and fatigue to recede. He felt a little better than he had back there on the sidewalk, but he wasn't up to returning to work quite yet.

  The reception area began to fade to white.

  "Mr. Toyama."

  He heard someone, somewhere, call his name. His vision grew hazy, like he was seeing everything through a film. He rubbed his eyes.

  "Mr. Toyama."

  The voice approached until it was right next to him.

  A hand patted him twice on the shoulder.

  "Mr. Toyama, what's wrong? I've been calling your name."

  He looked up toward the voice, alternately squint-ing and opening his eyes wide.

  Fujisaki, a production assistant, and Yasui, a mixer, were standing beside him. Both of them worked for him.

  Toyama gazed up at them as though at something painfully bright. Fujisaki frowned. "I'm worried."

  What's wrong?

  He wanted to ask what was worrying Fujisaki, but he couldn't speak all of a sudden.

  "Are you alright, Mr. Toyama?"

  "S-s-sorry. C-could you bring me some—water?"

  "Right away."

  Fujisaki went to the vending machine in the corner and bought a sports drink, which he handed to Toyama.

  Toyama drank it down. Only then did he begin to feel a little more human. He said what he had tried to say before.

  "What's wrong?"

  "You'll have to come hear for yourself. I can't believe it."

  Toyama stood up shakily and followed Fujisaki and Yasui to the elevator to the third floor, Studio 2. This was usually used for making classical recordings: it was perfect for strings, for chamber music and the like.

  Fujisaki and Yasui had just yesterday gotten back from a recording session in another town. They'd rented a hall in the mountains that was popular for recording and taken the musicians up there: the clean, dry air made for a great sound.

  They'd already reported to Toyama that the session had gone well. All that was left in terms of studio work was some editing. Then the album would be done, ready for release as a CD. It would hit the record stores soon.

  "Is there a problem?"

  Fujisaki held out a pair of headphones and said,

  "Just take a listen."

  Toyama put on the headphones and sat down at the mixing table. At a look from him, Fujisaki hit play and the tape reel started moving.

  He heard a pretty piano melody. Nothing wrong here. He flashed Fujisaki a puzzled look.

  "Right there." Fujisaki rewound the tape and played it again. The piano was descrescendoing from mezzo forte to mezzo piano, but there was something else there, besides the piano. It was faint, but Toyama's trained ears were able to pick it out. His eyes started darting about the room. He was visibly shaken. He started to tremble.

  "What do you think it is? It sounds like a baby crying to me."

  A baby crying, weakly. But that wasn't all there was.

  Fujisaki might not have heard it, but Toyama did: somewhere behind the cries, there were words, floating in and out of hearing. There it was. He felt a rush of nostalgia as he recognized the voice.

  Toyama, I love you.

  He doubted Fujisaki or Yasui could hear it. All they'd be able to hear was the baby. And their thinking was probably that there must have been a baby in a car behind the hall or something, and that their mikes had picked up its crying.

  But that's not it. That's not what happened.

  Toyama screamed the words, but only in his own mind.

  "This is a problem, wouldn't you say, Mr. Toyama?

  What do you want to do? This is the master tape, and what's more it's the only take we've got. I could swear this sound wasn't there when we were recording."

  Toyama rushed out of the studio, leaving Fujisaki shaking his head.

  "Mr. Toyama—where are you going?"

  At the door he turned around and gasped, "It's stuffy in here. I need to go get some air." It was all he could do just to get that much out.

  He left the studio and went down the hall. While he waited for the elevator to arrive, he pressed his face against the window at the end of the hall and stared down at the street below. Shadow and light swirled in the bright afternoon sun. The street began to turn misty white—as if his retinas were clouding over, although he knew they weren't—and finally everything began to turn black. The cold sweat made his forehead slippery against the glass, a nasty feeling; it was an oily sweat.

  Blacks and whites reversed, and all color drained from the world, except for a single point that hit Toyama's eye like an arrow. A woman, in a wrong-for-the-season lime-green dress.

  He was reminded of that time in the sound booth in the playhouse, long ago, when despite being lost in his lovemaking with Sadako, the red light on the cassette deck in the corner caught his eye. Shining in the black-ness like that, it only served to underscore the darkness.

  Th
is was like a strange transposition of that scene.

  That lime-green dress was the only spot of natural color left in the graying landscape, and it made for a violent disharmony. It disrupted the monochrome world with a fearsome, storm-like force. That tiny green speck asserted rulership over all.

  The elevator door opened. He went to the first floor and across the reception area. By the time he'd left the building, the world had regained its former color. But the pain that gripped Toyama's chest would not go away.

  11

  He was unbearably thirsty. He'd just drunk a whole can of sports drink, the one Fujisaki had given him, but the dryness in his throat was becoming unendurable.

  He bought a lemon soda at a vending machine right outside the building and drank it. As he did he could feel how much his body needed the fluid, but he didn't even register it as a pleasant taste: it seemed to be converted directly to cold sweat. He threw away the half-drunk soda and began to walk.

  Waiting for the elevator, looking out the window, he'd felt a dizziness, and a sense that the world was losing its color, and in the midst of it a single spot of bright green had caught his eye. Now as he walked aimlessly, his mind was still on that green glow.

  The scene in the sound booth twenty-four years ago came back to him like yesterday. Partly it was because of the voice he'd just heard in the studio, that whisper lurk-ing behind the baby's cries. The voice was Sadako's. It had to be.

  Sounds and smells, he reflected, could be like sparks igniting an explosion of old memories. In this case, the previous twenty-four years had somehow been removed from his memory circuits—somehow the present moment was being fused with the time he spent with Sadako in the sound booth.

  That smell.

  He'd begun to worry about that odd smell in the sound booth. At first he hadn't even noticed it. But every time he entered the room it impinged on his consciousness a little more, until he'd decided he had to try and nail down its source.

  He couldn't figure out how to describe the smell: it wasn't rotten or anything, but then again it wasn't exactly fragrant. It was pungent—not strong, exactly, but subtly stimulating to the olfactory membrane.

  Lemon.

  His mind hit on it at last. Maybe there was a lemon somewhere in the room. But if there was, it had to have been there for a while, in which case it would be rotten, and that wasn't the smell. It was something fresh, like something just peeled. Something not yellow, but still green with youth—something not yet ripe.

  He searched the room. He opened every cabinet, searched every shelf, but found nothing. The only thing he discovered was that the dried-up umbilical cord that had been placed before the little altar as an offering was gone. He couldn't think of who might have taken it or when. As far as he knew, Sadako was the only other person aware of its existence, but it was hardly worth accusing her of taking it—in fact, he was kind of relieved the grotesque thing was gone. He was reluctant to bring it up with her at all.

  So the umbilical cord was gone, and in its place was the faint scent of unripe lemon.

  The umbilical cord?

  Once, in a book, he'd seen a color photo of a twelve-week old fetus in the womb. It was curled up, arms and legs stuck out in front of it; its head was much bigger than its body. It was only five or six centimeters long, but it was recognizably human—it was even possible to tell what sex it was. You could see a tiny protrusion in the genital area.

  What stuck in Toyama's memory was the thread connecting the little fetus to its mother. The umbilical cord was thicker than the fetus's limbs and lined with red veins; it twisted and looped around, fixed firmly to the placenta. It was this very important conduit that brought oxygen and nutrients to the fetus.

  To the fetus, the womb was the entire world; the umbilical cord, then, was the sole connection between the fetus's world and the outside. In that sense it was an interface. Only when it left its mother's body would the fetus realize that there was another world outside the one it had been living in. Looking at the photo, Toyama had tried to imagine what a surprise that would be for the fetus. And it had struck him that, as long as you were inside, you could never know about the outside.

  Walking along the sidewalk he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of strangulation centered on a spot just above his navel—his stomach, probably. Chill sweat continued to stream from his pores. The joints in his arms ached, and when he tried to raise them they wouldn't move. He could barely keep walking.

  His heart beat violently.

  A single fact flashed across his mind.

  Everybody who heard Sadako's voice over the intercom from the sound booth twenty-four years ago died of heart disease. .. But I wasn't there. I didn't hear the tape.

  He was desperate in his denial, but then another voice seemed to speak.

  But you heard it directly from her, didn't you? And the words came to you not through your tympanic membranes, but directly into your brain.

  That had to have been his imagination. He wasn't telepathic, and anyway, there was no such thing as words forcing their way directly into a person's mind.

  Toyama, I love you.

  They came back to him now, those precious words from his beloved. But now they brought with them terror, as well.

  The seed of anxiety had been sown. Why were those same words present on the reel-to-reel tape in the studio? Why had Sadako whispered to him so insistently from behind the baby's crying? He had actually heard those words through the medium of tape: he felt terror, shock, anxiety, and nostalgia—it made no sense, but his love for Sadako flamed up again. Only the thinnest of lines separated terror and love for him now; his feelings of twenty-four years ago were back, the same as they ever were, but at the same time he could distinctly feel something wrong with his heart.

  He could tell without even having to turn around: the girl in the green dress was on the sidewalk across the street, behind him. Her pace was somewhat quicker than his. He kept walking. He didn't know where he was going, or why he had to keep walking. He just pressed on, without looking back.

  When the girl in the green dress was even with him, she crossed to his side of the street, threading her way between moving cars. He detected the fragrance of unripe lemon, the same as he'd smelled twenty-four years ago.

  Now she was right next to him. She was close enough to reach out and touch. He stumbled, and the back of his hand brushed her arm. She was alive, sure enough. The touch of his hand confirmed it.

  He glanced at the girl out of the corner of his eye.

  She was wearing a green one-piece dress with no sleeves—the season being what it was, he got chills just looking at her. It made her stand out among the passersby on the sidewalk. The way she asserted herself in a crowd hadn't changed at all.

  Her whole body seemed to be saying, Look! I'm here.

  Her hair fell to the middle of her back; her hands were so white as to be almost translucent. The nail on the first finger of one of her hands was split. He looked at her feet. She wore no stockings, just pumps on her bare feet; she had purple bruises on her ankles. She was tall, with a nicely balanced figure—that too was un-changed.

  The cramping in his stomach got worse and worse, and Toyama couldn't keep his feet moving. He collapsed on the sidewalk against the girl in the green dress. It seemed that the world was starting to close in on him.

  His back came into contact with the girl's bare legs, his greasy sweat dampening her soft skin.

  He stayed there like that for a while, cradled on her knees. Passersby looked down at him and said things, but he couldn't make out what.

  He thought he heard the word ambulance, faintly.

  He didn't like all these people staring at him. He wanted to chase them away, but his body was like a steel bar. He couldn't move. All he wanted was to be still, cradled there on the girl's knees.

  He tried to lift a hand and touch her cheek. No such luck. The desire raced in his mind like an engine in neutral. His mind and his body were separate now, an
d it frustrated him.

  Sadako's face was before him now. He'd missed her so much. Now he was staring up at her face, still young, untouched by the intervening quarter century, and he didn't find it strange at all. She was supposed to be dead...but that didn't matter now. Why hadn't she aged?

  That didn't matter either. He was just happy to be able to touch her, alive like long ago. His happiness pushed aside his fear of impending death; he found he could endure the rapid collapse of the world upon him. He only wished he could be free of this pain squeezing his stomach.

  Somewhere in the distance he could hear the approach of an ambulance. The air brought him the rever-berations of its siren. His arms were immobile from his shoulders to his elbows, but he thought he could still move his fingers. His hand crawled toward Sadako, and managed to catch hold of her.

  With her free hand, Sadako reached into her hand-bag and pulled out a small object wrapped in tissue paper; the tissue had turned brown in spots. She opened the tissue, took out what it enclosed, and laid it on Toyama's palm. He felt this had happened to him once before, somewhere: she'd plucked something up and laid it on his palm...

  In order to see it, he tucked in his chin and looked down toward his waist. The object lay naturally on his palm, weighing virtually nothing.

  He tried to pull his hand closer to get a better look at it. The trembling of his palm made the object vibrate as though it had a life of its own. He finally understood: it was an umbilical cord.

  This one wasn't dried and shriveled like the one he'd seen twenty-four years ago: this had fresh blood on it. It had probably been cut no more than a week ago. It was the conduit between a womb and a mother's body, an interface between the inner world and the outer.

  The umbilical cord looked strangely like it had been torn—the ends had clearly not been snipped by sharp scissors.

  His field of vision had shrunk even further: now all he could see was Sadako's face. He had no way of knowing what was causing the symptoms now fast progress-ing through his body, but he had a vague premonition of death. It looked, ironically enough, like he was to be granted his wish of dying in Sadako's arms.