Loop

by Kōji Suzuki

  He stopped at a gas station not far from his destination. Not to fill up-he had plenty of gas- but to ask directions. Like seemingly all the gas stations on the state road, this one had a little convenience store attached, and so at the very least he'd find a clerk; if he passed it up, meanwhile, there was no telling when he'd meet another soul.

  Since he was here, he topped off the tank, then went into the store to pay. A bearded, middle-aged man glanced a hello at him.

  Kaoru hadn't even put in a full gallon, so it was a small amount of money that he gave the man. He then asked how to get to Wayne's Rock.

  The man pointed northward and said, "Three miles."

  "Got it. Thanks." Kaoru turned to leave, but the man stopped him.

  "Have you got business there?" The man's eyes were narrowed and he was frowning at Kaoru. His question was certainly a blunt one, but there didn't seem to be any ill will behind it.

  Kaoru didn't know quite how to answer, so he kept it short. "An old friend of mine lives there. I think."

  The man's lips twitched as he shrugged his shoulders and said, "There's nothing there."

  Kaoru nodded that he understood, and repeated the words. "There's nothing there."

  The man stared at Kaoru wordlessly. But what was he supposed to do, change his mind just because the guy told him there was nothing in Wayne's Rock? He had to go and see for himself.

  Kaoru forced a smile and said, "Thank you" as he walked out of the store.

  There was no one else around. Kaoru wondered, as he headed away north, just how many customers besides himself the gas station had seen today.

  He wanted to check the time as he rode, so he lifted his left hand, the one he wore his watch on, from the handlebars. But he found his leather glove was in the way: he couldn't see the watch. He tried to pull his glove off with his chin, and in the process took his eyes from the road for a split second. When he looked up again, he saw, just beyond a rise covered with desert plants, a line of old trees stretching northward into the desert. Most drivers wouldn't even have noticed them, but Kaoru was paying attention. He was exactly three miles past the gas station.

  He could see what looked like a dirt road running alongside the line of trees. He stopped the bike at the entrance to the road. Up close he realized that what had looked like trees were wooden poles spaced dozens of yards apart; black electrical line sagged from some of them. Power lines, disused for what looked to be quite some time.

  If he hadn't been keeping his eyes open, he probably wouldn't have realized there was a road here. It was little more than a slightly levelled off space next to the power poles. The strip was the only place where cacti didn't grow, raising their gnarled arms skyward-proof that this was indeed a road, or at least had been at one time.

  Kaoru scanned the northern horizon, wondering if following the power poles down this road would take him to the village of Wayne's Rock. The road disappeared over a hill. Wayne's Rock was invisible from the state road. But Kaoru had the feeling that distant ruins were calling to him.

  At least I won't get lost: all I have to do to get back to the state road is follow the power poles, he thought to himself.

  With that he grasped the handles, turned left, and sped off toward the middle of the desert. It was the first time since getting to America that he'd taken the bike off-road.

  3

  There was a dip in the road ahead of him; he could see it coming, but it didn't look that big. But when he went over it the bike flew more than he'd expected. He dropped his waist back and into the jump, and when the bike landed he wrestled with the violent motion of the handlebars until with precise timing he stabilized the bike. One mistake and he might have tipped over. He cursed himself for his recklessness, and did his best to avoid the craters in the road from then on.

  After some initial ups and downs, the road flattened out and ran straight for a while. The dilapidated wooden poles still ran alongside the road, a dotted line linking civilization and wilderness.

  "Aha," he said. He'd spied some broken-down buildings ahead, in a ravine cut into a hill. Both the road and the line of poles disappeared into the village. At some point, at least, this town had been connected to an electricity supply and phone service. He couldn't see any poles beyond the village. The lines seemed to end here.

  He stopped on a hill maybe a hundred yards before the village. Still straddling the bike, he counted about twenty houses made of brownish stone. Even if there were some on the other side of the ravine that he couldn't see, the whole settlement probably held only a few dozen houses. He couldn't imagine what had led the first inhabitants to decide to dwell here. What had they been seeking out here in the middle of the desert? Judging from the way the houses were constructed, the first settlers had gotten here a long time ago. But the whole village was barren and windswept now. He couldn't see anyone. Even from a hundred yards away he could tell that the place was abandoned.

  He remembered the words of the man at the gas station. There's nothing there. It looked like he was right. This was a ghost town, rotting away until only traces of its former inhabitants remained.

  The sunlight was coming from the west now. A look at his watch told Kaoru it was past five o'clock. It wasn't quite yet time to head back to the state road and look for a town with people living in it.

  So Wayne's Rock was a pile of ruins in the middle of the desert. The place filled him with a primal fear, and he asked himself why. Was it because the place represented for him such a fusion of unnatural contradictions? Why had Kenneth Rothman, a cutting-edge information engineer, chosen to live in such a remote place anyway? There were too many things Kaoru didn't understand.

  But he'd come too far to back down now. He opened the throttle, gunned the engine, and was cheered by the extravagant noise he was able to summon forth. He sped down the road into the village.

  On the way he spied a sign of the type common at the edge of American towns: WELCOME TO WAYNE'S ROCK

  It looked like a bad joke to Kaoru.

  As he approached, netlike patterns on the walls began to stand out. Sand and gravel, probably blown by the wind, clung to spots where the stone of the walls was crumbling. Several cars stood abandoned on what looked to be the town's main drag. These, too, were covered in sand.

  There was a gas station/convenience store here, too. A single pump stood on the cracked concrete apron; the nozzle was off the hook, and the hose lay on the ground, twisted and black like a cobra, the nozzle its head curled to strike. The store's windows were boarded up tight, and shards of glass were scattered over the ground.

  He rode slowly down the main street, peeking at the empty houses on each side, searching for nameplates or the like.

  There were more trees inside the town than in the desert surrounding it. Perhaps people had chosen to live here because there was water to be had. The trees thrived on that water, flourishing in and around the ruins. The street was lined with them, and at first they did indeed give an impression of health. But when the wind stirred their limbs and exposed their trunks, Kaoru noticed the strange lumps and pits in the rough bark. He approached one and inspected it to find that the bark on the swollen parts was a different colour from the rest. The trunks were mottled in colour like human skin peeling from severe sunburn.

  The limbs were affected, too, and even the leaves, which looked so fresh, were covered on the back with ocher-coloured spots. Only at first glance were the trees normal: scratch the surface and they were riddled with disease.

  He'd only seen the cancerous trees of Arizona in a newspaper photo in which it had been impossible to make out the details of their deformation and discoloration, but from the looks of things these trees were showing the same symptoms. Virus-induced cancer, and pretty far advanced, too. It must have taken years for them to get this bad. This was no recent infection.

  Kaoru hurriedly looked around him, apprehensive. If the trees here were so far gone, how bad was the damage to animals and humans?

  He
heard no sound but the wind, but still somehow he felt as if rattlesnakes, scorpions, or some other poisonous desert creature were burrowing under his feet. Some malicious life form, or its shadow, was hiding here, behind cliffs or cacti, under clods of earth, and it struck fear into him.

  He had one foot on the bike's footrest and one on the ground. Both feet were encased in leather boots. No foreign object could penetrate to his feet, he knew, but still he shrank from touching the earth with them.

  He was desperately thirsty. He had some mineral water in his pack on the luggage rack, but to get it he'd have to dismount the bike and place both feet on the ground. He really didn't want to do that, so he decided to endure the dryness of his throat and ride on deeper into the town.

  Some of the houses had walls made of piled-up stone, but some had walls made of carefully worked dried mud. Most of the roofs had caved in: he'd probably be able to stand in the middle of any of these houses and see the sky overhead.

  Kaoru actually steered the bike under the eaves of one of the houses and went inside to try. Sure enough, the setting sun was casting its rays slantwise through a broken space in the roof; dust danced in the bands of light, clouds of dirt glowed with the same colouring.

  Where had all the people gone? Were they all dead? Had the MHC virus gotten them all? Or had they escaped, moved to a town with a hospital?

  "Hello?" Kaoru called into the depths of the house. No response; he hadn't expected any. He thought he saw the shafts of light quiver from the vibrations of his voice.

  Through the crumbling wall he could glimpse a flat space like a plaza. It was surrounded by houses.

  He dismounted, pointing the bike toward the edge of the village so he could leave in a hurry. He left the engine running. He reached into his pack for the mineral water and slaked his thirst.

  He had a purpose in coming here, and he had to fulfil it. He needed to track down Kenneth Rothman, and to do that he first needed to find Rothman's residence.

  On the ride in he'd carefully looked for names on the houses, but he hadn't seen Rothman's. It looked like he was going to have to leave the bike and check each one on foot.

  He entered the house criss-crossed by the sun's rays and walked through it toward the plaza in the back. It looked to be some sort of communal space for the village. An old Spanish-style monument, made of plaster in the form of a woman and surrounded by a railing, stood in the centre. It was the focal point of the village, which he could see now consisted of two rows of houses arranged in a semicircle; on the other side of the plaza was a hillside.

  Kaoru stood in the middle of the plaza and imagined a view of this village from above. The double line of houses made a fan shape.

  Behind the monument was a basin like indentation in the ground, inside which gaped a circular rim. A well. So there was water here. That's why the village had grown up here. He peered in, and the stench of fetid water hit him. The whole village looked parched, and yet the well smelled like water.

  The shallow walled basin resembled a snail in shape. You came around from the outside and then down a set of stairs spiralling down to the rim of the well, as if you were tracing the snail's shell.

  The well had no lid. The wind blowing over it made a flute-like sound.

  Right beside the well's edge he saw some small black shapes, about the size of his fist. At first he thought they were rocks, but after staring at them for a while he realized they were dead rats, belly up. There must have been over a dozen in the plaza.

  Kaoru's gaze naturally followed the trail of dead rats, until he realized the black forms were concentrated beneath a tree at the edge of the plaza, a tree that he could tell from here was cancerous. There was a bench under the tree. And sitting on the bench was a human corpse, the same colour as the rats. With the sun at its back, the corpse was just a black shape.

  Kaoru went toward the bench, stopping about ten yards from it. The corpse was male, and it looked half mummified. Its legs were spread, its arms hung down limply, and its head was thrown back against the back of the bench, jaw thrust forward. Several long strands of beard hung from the chin, a beard that Kaoru had once described as goatish… Only the gold chains around the wrists and neck hadn't rotted. They gleamed with an inorganic light.

  Kaoru gingerly approached the man and examined his face. The Kenneth Rothman Kaoru had met-five years ago, when he'd stayed at the Futami house for several days during a visit to Japan-had an impressively narrow face, its most conspicuous feature being his long beard, and he used to wear gold chains around his neck and wrists such as those here. It seemed reasonable to conclude that this corpse was Rothman's.

  He must have died here at home, without seeking treatment.

  Kaoru looked all around, and something snagged his gaze. The hillside was covered with vegetation appropriate to an arid climate, and amidst it he could see flowers about the size of his palm, coming in and out of view as the wind blew the branches about.

  A lone tree in bloom. Its trunk was thin, its branches slender, its leaves looked soft, but this tree alone displayed vitality.

  All the trees on the hillside were cancerous: he could see the veins in the leaves standing out hideously. This tree and this tree only seemed to have retained its original colouring. And on the end of its drooping branches grew pale pink blossoms.

  Some plants propagate through asexual reproduction, and some through sexual reproduction. Kaoru had observed that the ones covering the mountains in this area were of types that reproduced asexually. Blossoms, however, meant sexual reproduction. He'd heard of cases of asexually-reproducing plants suddenly shifting to sexual reproduction, blooming for the first time in their existence, before rapidly aging and withering away. Such a plant couldn't go on blooming forever, it seemed: the pleasure of producing flowers came in return for dying.

  It occurred to Kaoru to pick one of the blossoms and place it next to Rothman's corpse as an offering.

  Plants that reproduce asexually can go on living essentially forever, in the right environment. In the Mojave desert there are confirmed instances of such plants that have survived for over ten thousand years. Just like cancer cells in a Petri dish.

  What Kaoru was witnessing now, though, was the opposite: only the tree which had gained the ability to reproduce sexually had escaped the cancer. And of course, before too long, this tree with its blossoms would follow the natural order of things and die.

  A programmed death accompanied the pleasure of blooming, while a life form which had turned into cancer would go on living forever, unaging, but never producing flowers. It looked like a clear-cut choice between two alternatives. Which would Kaoru choose? A bright, shining mortality, or a dull life that went on forever? It didn't take him long to know the answer: he'd choose the life that bloomed.

  Kaoru climbed the hill toward the flowers.

  4

  He snapped off a blossom and turned to descend the slope. As he did so, a sharp, narrow band of light glancing off one of the rooftops arrayed beneath him caught his eye. The roofs were made of stone of the same colour as the land; they blended in dully with their surroundings. They shouldn't be able to reflect light, thought Kaoru, searching for the source of the flash.

  A careful look revealed a black rectangle on the roof of a crumbling red-brick building. The rectangular object had a steel rim, and this seemed to have caught a ray of the setting sun.

  The panel glowed there on the roof with an alien light. It looked altogether too new to be sitting on a ruined building like that. Maybe such a system was necessary precisely because the village was so far from the main road, but still it looked out of place.

  He could tell even at this distance that the black panel was part of a solar power system. It was quite big enough to produce enough electricity for a single household. If each house had possessed one, there would have been no need for the electric poles lining the road into town, but he couldn't see a similar panel on any of the other roofs in the village. This one seemed to h
ave been specially installed on this house alone.

  Rothman had installed his own private research lab at home. Maybe he'd used solar power.

  Kaoru laid the blossom down on the corpse's knee and threaded his way between the houses, looking for the one with the solar panel. He'd marked its position from the hillside, but he quickly lost his sense of direction as though he were in a maze.

  He wandered this way and that until he found the approach ahead blocked. He'd strayed into a house, and now he was in some sort of hallway.

  The wind whistled as it blew in through gaps in the walls, but here it had no place to go, so it eddied around his ankles. He thought he could hear native American singing, a sort of call-and-response with the wind, or maybe it was the cry of a bird, or the sound of branches rubbing together.

  Kaoru fell still and pricked his ears. His sense of hearing was confused: he couldn't tell what was near and what was far. One moment he thought he was hearing a human voice at a distance, and the next he experienced the illusion that it was whispering in his ear. It was a hoarse, male voice, muttering-he could hear it- by the wall to the right. It stopped, and when it started again the wind had wafted it over to the left-hand wall.

  The voice and the whistling seemed to come from everywhere; the sound seemed to gain a vibrato effect as it slipped through the gaps in the walls.

  Was it the dryness of the air that kept him from feeling afraid? Totally devoid of humidity, the air seemed to lack the little hands that would have grabbed him and given him chills. The moisture rapidly drained from any exposed skin; soon, he was afraid, he'd feel nothing at all.

  He tried to ignore his other senses and concentrate on his hearing. Gradually he came to detect the source of the sound. Still concentrating on it, he ducked through a hole in one wall, then another, and then found himself in a somewhat different world.