Edge

by Kōji Suzuki

  Say, I could jump back 50,000 years to the point where language is about to emerge and insert a self-referential contradiction in the system. How do you like the idea of tampering with calculus to inject the tricks of zero and infinity? The more humans wield language and describe nature, the more contradictory it would all become. Each little step on the path of development would effectively tighten the noose around humanity’s neck. Eventually, the contradiction would grow so extensive it would reach the point of no return. What happens to the universe then? I bet the fireworks will be spectacular. Gets me hard just thinking about it.

  That’s why I’m just so hugely grateful to you for coming to me. Only one of us can wield power at any one time. So I’d like to have it. What would you do with it anyway? Just selfish stuff.

  Anyway, it’s getting late. I think I’ll be on my way now. You can look after everything. Stay here as a puny demon and be a good husband, live a quiet life, raise a happy family, and all that. It suits you.

  Kota’s monologue wound to a close. Saeko saw him stand up and brush down the back of his trousers. He turned his back to Saeko and now talked directly to the wall that separated him and her father.

  So this is goodbye. Just make sure to do as we arranged.

  Then he walked out of the light, disappearing into darkness.

  Saeko could hear a gentle sobbing pierce the silence from the other side of the wall. The pathetic sound bled through the partition.

  She pictured her father crying, hands over his mouth, defeated. Eventually, the sound died away. A silence enveloped the room as Saeko’s consciousness returned to the present.

  The room was as it had been before. The lights were on, and the muted TV set continued to broadcast the now familiar images from around the world. Seiji sat at the other end of the living room table and was staring at her.

  Saeko had heard her father talk about his greatest fear enough times. It was to have to continue living after experiencing the loss of his daughter. He had not had a choice, and traded his soul and 515 lives for her, made a pact with the Devil.

  That was the meaning of Seiji’s words: it had all begun with her. Faced with releasing evil into the world or losing his daughter, her father had chosen the former. It had all been to save her, and that was why she was here now, alive.

  She felt the weight of 515 lives on her shoulders.

  She often found herself wondering, without knowing why, whether she somehow had something to do with her father’s disappearance. She had always known that he loved her more than anyone else on earth.

  Her father had been living here all this time, up until a year ago. He had been living here as Kota Fujimura. Saeko struggled to hold back her tears as she looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time.

  She had searched for a long eighteen years yet had found nothing, no clues as to what had happened. And all that time, her father had been living here in Takato, just a couple of hundred kilometers from Tokyo. He had raised a family; he and Haruko had had a son and a daughter together. They’d been living a normal life. Saeko recalled the strange sense of familiarity, something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on when she’d first come to this house and just now again when she’d looked through the family albums. That was explicable if indeed this family had been raised by her father.

  She could guess why he had to replace Kota Fujimura. Their relationship was like that of matter and anti-matter, god and devil. Their encounter resembled their twin emergence.

  If you added energy to empty space, matter popped out, leaving behind a mirror image of itself, anti-matter. Saeko had a simple analogy.

  Considering the universe as an empty, two-dimensional space—a blank sheet of paper—this state represented the most basic form of symmetry, with no room for the development of matter. If you applied some energy to the space, say by taking a pair of scissors and cutting out the shape of a heart from the center, immediately the status quo of balance and symmetry shifted. In effect, the heart shape would exist outside of the originally prescribed number of dimensions. The spontaneous destruction of symmetry could be thought of as a phase transition.

  The excised heart would leave an empty space in the paper with exactly the same proportions as the heart itself. The heart represented matter while the empty space represented anti-matter. At the beginning of the universe, the same quantities of matter and anti-matter existed, but now only the former was observed. Did its opposite slip into a place that transcended the dimension of time? In that case, the two would rarely meet. But if they did by happenstance, and the heart-shaped cutout returned to its original position, outwardly it would resemble the disappearance of both. The mutual destruction would release the massive amount of energy initially used to cut the shape out.

  If the same logic applied, then after Kota’s disappearance, her father had to live here and cease to be Shinichiro Kuriyama.

  Yet, in the end, she could not meet her father. He had vanished along with his new family, just January that year, the day of the abnormal sunspot activity. Why did they have to disappear? Saeko couldn’t think of the reason. Only Seiji would know the answer.

  “Why? Why did the Fujimuras have to disappear?”

  Saeko studied Seiji’s facial movements for any hint of what might have happened. She noticed that his face had changed somehow. The poisonous look had all but vanished, and his eyes looked calmer. It was as though she was looking at a different person.

  “They knew of the coming catastrophe. By January, they predicted that the universe was not going to last the year. Luckily, they knew where to look for the opening of a wormhole. The plan was made; even if a phase transition was coming, they could travel back to a different past. The only problem was the arbitrary nature of the wormhole. Even if they managed to breach the opening and successfully travel back in time, they would have no way to control where or when it took them.

  “At the moment of transition, it’s as if the air around begins to boil. There’s no time to make choices then. Chance decides whether you’re cast into a starving populace or into the middle of a warzone. They had the knowledge to escape the phase transition but no guarantee that the route wouldn’t be a shortcut to the mouth of hell, so they decided to try and make the trip in advance. They were aware that sunspot activity and magnetic fluctuations could allow them to formulate a rough estimate as to where and when a wormhole would take them. They gathered together, countless times, debating whether it was better to wait for the phase transition.”

  That was it, then. That was why she’d had such a strange feeling about the family photo in the last page of that album, the morbidly commemorative nature of it. They had already made their decision to leave this world behind and were just biding their time for the right conditions. That day had come on January 22nd. Since their window was tight, they took what they could and rushed to where they expected the wormhole to open.

  The mechanism by which the Fujimura family had disappeared from this world was finally clear. They had disappeared of their own volition before the advent.

  Just then, something caught Saeko’s attention on the TV set in the corner of the room. She had been so deep in thought she had almost forgotten about the catastrophic phenomena tearing through the world. The screen showed California at early dawn. The tear in the ground seemed to be continuing to grow in length. The volume was still muted, but Saeko could more or less tell what the increasingly hysterical reporter on screen was saying. An invisible surgeon was taking a giant scalpel to the earth itself, slowly but surely lengthening the incision. If it reached San Fransisco, then it was just a matter of time until it extended into the Pacific. Would it continue to cut through and split the ocean in two? Or would the sea gush into the chasm and head inland? It was hard to guess how the rift would interact with water.

  The scene shifted suddenly to Calcutta, now dusk. The same five discs of light hung in the sky and seemed to be even brighter yet, appearing mystical, even divine.
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  The light from the TV set cast shadows across Seiji’s face. He was looking sideways, off towards the distance.

  But why is Seiji here?

  The question was so obvious she was surprised she hadn’t addressed it. Her father had made a pact with Kota. Where was Seiji in this? How did the vagabond who orbited the family like a plague have the capacity to get involved in all of this? Kota was the one with the third nipple, not Seiji, whose very existence seemed moot.

  “Who are you?”

  “No such man exists,” Seiji responded as though the statement concerned somebody else.

  “You … don’t exist?”

  During her preliminary research into the Fujimura family, Saeko had made sure to look up the family register. His name had been there, clear as mud. Seiji, the elder brother, born six years before Kota. At the time Saeko had noticed that the names were strange considering the order of birth; the “ji” in Seiji meant second, suggesting that he was the younger brother. But the register had shown it to be the other way around.

  “What do you mean, you never existed?” she asked again, more forcefully.

  “That punk had been a waster, always running from something. Never did anything of use. One time, thirty years ago, he ran away and never came back. The little punk’s been dead for over a quarter century. Died a dog’s death, alone and starving. Guess no one ever identified the body, probably sorted away as an unidentifiable, a John Doe.”

  From what she knew of Seiji the description seemed at least to fit. But he was right here, in front of her. How was she supposed to parse that? Was she talking to a ghost?

  “So tell me, what are you then?”

  Saeko didn’t notice that her voice was shaking. No longer distracted by the TV set broadcasting the end of the world, she stared directly at the thing in front of her, eyes steady and focused. Seiji held up a hand as if to forestall her line of thought.

  “Let’s see. So you think that the family made for a wormhole, that they made their escape, right? Well, that’s not exactly the case. One of them couldn’t go through the wormhole. Like a snake whose wings had been clipped, his power had been taken away. That’s right, the one who had made a pact with the Devil. That’s why he’d worked so hard at getting ready, so hard and for so long. He built a shitty little hut near the house here and made it look like that was where Seiji lived. He even piled up debts using the punk’s name. After he saw off the rest of the family, you see, he needed someone that he could become. Think about it: if he’d been the only one to stay behind, what do you think would have happened? The police would have dragged him through the dirt. The questions would hammer down like black rain. What did you do to your wife, your kids? He’d have no way to explain it. His only choice was to make it seem like the whole family vanished, him included. To do that, he had to assume the personality of another, a fiction that he’d fashioned. He lived as Seiji from that day forward.”

  Seiji stopped suddenly and broke eye contact, giving Saeko some time to absorb the information.

  Saeko’s mind was close to short-circuiting with a nasty zap. Sometimes the brain just went numb when faced with a fact that couldn’t be processed. She didn’t notice that she wasn’t breathing. A moment longer and her heart might have stopped as well.

  She replayed Seiji’s words in her mind, again and again. Each time, she came to the same conclusion. “Please, no. Not you … You can’t be Dad,” she squeezed out.

  Seiji’s eyes hung heavy, deflated in the middle of his wrinkled face. He blinked a couple of times, as though struggling to see out. His face, his body, the atmosphere around him, was the complete opposite of all her father was. Merely trying to overlap their faces in her mind threatened to shatter her precious memories of her father. Yet, everything was pointing to a single conclusion.

  Her father had once told her:

  Sae. When we look at something, we apply our own biases to the object observed. We influence the object itself. The moon is as the moon is because that is how we perceive the moon. Nothing exists in absolute isolation; nothing exists free from human perception.

  Saeko’s first impressions of Seiji had been almost abnormally bad; she hadn’t been able to think of a single good thing to say about him. Everything about him had grated at her nerves, like nails on a chalkboard: his grimy clothes, the dirt-covered gloves wrapped around his neck, the look of open perversion in his eyes, the way he drank in her body lines with his stare, those horrible noises he made. Even the sound of his voice grated like it was designed to offend. The coarse and lewd way he spoke to her—just coming within thirty feet of the man was enough to set her on edge. If he tried to touch her she would instinctively pull away.

  Her judgment had been clouded from the very beginning.

  Saeko tried to clear her mind of all prejudice, all the preconceived ideas she had of the man. She had to look at him with her heart. She worked to steady her racing pulse.

  There was an Escher drawing where a picture of a vase became one of two faces depending on the viewer’s focus. Saeko opened her eyes and experienced such a revelation.

  In that moment, everything she saw turned on its head. Seiji’s wrinkled face became full and healthy, and hair flowed back over his balding head. His once-dead eyes brightened with a new intensity, his arched back straightened. The characteristics that defined Seiji were replaced by the warm familiarity of those of her father. Before her sat the same man that had once taken her on a day out to the cycling theme park in Izu and used the bikes to analyze the characteristics of the products of human artifice; the same man that had sat with her on the living room sofa and taught her about the structure of matter, about the fundamental physical structures of the world; the same man that had taken her fishing on summer days and brought her on trips around the world, excursions he had branded “research trips.”

  Shinichiro’s eyes were brimming with merciful love. Slackening one side of his mouth as was his habit, he said, “Sae, it’s been a while. How have you been?”

  Saeko broke into tears, collapsed forward onto the table before her, and sobbed openly. Every happy moment she had ever spent with her father rushed before her eyes, finally allowing her emotions a release. She cried until the tears finally ran out. Then, praying that the image she had just seen of her father was back for good, she looked up.

  But the face that looked back was Seiji’s. No matter how she tried to focus, the image of her father did not return. Yet, a look of calm had descended over the face that Saeko had found so revolting.

  Her father hadn’t just endured separation with Saeko. In January, he forever parted with his wife and children, his family of eighteen years. Two times he had been torn away from those he loved.

  Saeko stood and walked slowly over to where Seiji sat. This was what was left of her father after he’d fallen all the way. He’d been punished for his decision to choose the future of one life over the future of all life. But now, Saeko could see clearly that no matter how he had changed, her father was still her father. There was no way she could abandon him when the world was about to end.

  Taking care not to knock the crutches from his lap, Saeko leant forward, putting her arms around him. She hardly registered the terrible smell, the roughness of his skin.

  “Dad, let’s go together,” Saeko whispered into his ear, ignoring the clumps of hair that sprouted out.

  “Go by yourself. The wormhole opens ten or so kilometers south of here. There’s no time.”

  Saeko already knew that there was a place just south of the Fujimura residence that exhibited strange physical conditions. Twelve kilometers south down the Akiha Road—Route 152—there was a mountain pass where the magnetic field was zero. It was well-known nationwide, and two of the cases of disappearances they had looked into for the program had occurred there.

  Sae, remember that numbers don’t form a straight line with no gaps. The number line has holes everywhere, it’s full of them. The holes are made of the irrational numbers—
the noisy, boisterous ones. The ones that continue in endless lines of random decimals. Then there’s zero. Zero is the abyss, an endless black hole.

  “Where the magnetic field drops to zero …”

  Seiji nodded slowly. The wormhole would open there. Seiji clicked his tongue and pressed his knee against Saeko’s waist.

  “Get the hell out of here. I’ve finished talking. Go and clear up the shit I’ve left behind.”

  Saeko translated the coarse words into her father’s message:

  Sae, you’ve got no time, you’ve got to go now. Apply your mind, you can get through this. Having lived in the place of 515 people, that’s your mission.

  Saeko put her arms under Seiji’s shoulders and tried to pull him up from the chair. Seiji clenched his face and groaned in pain, clutching at his legs.

  “Stop it! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m not going to leave you here. Come with me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Please, don’t leave me again.” Saeko gave up trying to lift him and started to pull on the chair itself.

  “Wake up for god’s sake, and get out of here. I’m not your damned father, I’m Seiji.”

  Saeko pulled on the chair, tipping it so she could drag it along the floor. The legs shrieked as they scraped along the wooden floorboards, but it was no use. He was too heavy and the chair collapsed backwards, sending him tumbling across the floor. His legs impacted on the hard boards, making him writhe on the floor, convulsing like an agonized caterpillar. His nails scratched at the floor and his features contorted from the killing pain.

  “I can’t go through. Even if I did, I’d only assume some half-ass fallen form. I’ve already tried a few times. I wouldn’t even be born as a human.

  “Take a good look at me. I’m not what I used to be. I sold my soul to the Devil, and this is all that’s left. If you take me through that wormhole, I might come out the other end as some disgusting wriggling insect. I’m not ready for that. That’s nothing but pain. That’s all that would be waiting for me, a never-ending cycle of degradation.