She gently laid her hands on her stomach and listened carefully. No matter how hard she listened, she didn’t hear a thing.
Ayumi Nakano was cast off by this world. Her hands were tightly bound with cold handcuffs, and she was choked to death with a rope (and, as far as Aomame knew, the murderer had yet to be caught). An official autopsy was conducted, then she was sewn back up, taken to a crematorium, and burned. The person known as Ayumi Nakano no longer existed in this world. Her flesh and her blood were lost forever. She only remained in the realm of documents and memory.
No, maybe that’s not entirely true. Maybe she was still alive and well in 1984. Still grumbling that she wasn’t allowed to carry a pistol, still sticking parking tickets under the wipers of illegally parked cars. Still going around to high schools to teach girls about contraception. “If he doesn’t have on a condom, girls, then there shouldn’t be any penetration.”
Aomame desperately wanted to see Ayumi. If she could climb back up that emergency stairway on the Metropolitan Expressway No. 3 and return to the world of 1984, then maybe she would see her again. Maybe there Ayumi is still alive, and I’m not being chased by these Sakigake freaks. Maybe we could stop by that restaurant on Nogizaka again and enjoy another glass of Burgundy. Or perhaps—
Climb back up that emergency stairway?
Like rewinding a cassette tape, Aomame retraced her thoughts. Why haven’t I thought of that before? I tried to go down that emergency stairway again but couldn’t find the entrance. The stairway, which should have been across from the Esso billboard, had vanished. But maybe if I took it from the opposite direction it would work out—not climb down the stairway but go up. Slip into that storage area under the expressway and go the opposite direction, back up to the Metropolitan Expressway No. 3. Go back up the passage. Maybe that’s the answer.
Aomame wanted to race out that very minute to Sangenjaya and see if it was possible. It might actually work out. Or maybe it wouldn’t. But it was worth trying. Wear the same suit, the same high heels, and climb back up that spiderweb-infested stairway.
But she suppressed the impulse.
No, it won’t work. I can’t do that. It was because I came to the 1Q84 world that I was able to see Tengo again, and to be pregnant with what is most likely his child. I have to see him one more time in this new world. I have to meet him again. Face-to-face. I can’t leave this world until that happens.
Tamaru called her the following afternoon.
“First, about the NHK fee collector,” Tamaru began. “I called the NHK business office and checked into it. The fee collector who covers the Koenji District said he had no memory of knocking on the door of apartment 303. He said he checked beforehand that there was a sticker on the door indicating that the fee was paid automatically from the account. Plus he said there was a doorbell, so he wouldn’t have knocked. He said that would only make his hand hurt. And on the day the fee collector was at your place, this man was making the rounds in another district. I don’t think he’s lying. He’s a fifteen-year veteran, and he has a reputation as a very patient, courteous person.”
“Which means—” Aomame said.
“Which means that there’s a strong possibility that the fee collector who came to your place was a fake—someone pretending to be from NHK. The person I talked to on the phone was concerned about this too. The last thing they want are phony NHK collectors popping up. The person in charge asked to see me and get more details. As you can imagine, I turned him down. There was no actual harm done, and I don’t want it to get all blown out of proportion.”
“Maybe he was a mental patient? Or someone who’s after me?”
“I don’t think anyone pursuing you would act like that. It wouldn’t do any good, and would actually put you on your guard.”
“If the man was crazy, I wonder why he would choose this particular door. There are lots of other doors around. I’m always careful to make sure no light leaks out, and I’m very quiet. I always keep the curtains closed and never hang laundry outside to dry. But still that guy picked this door to bang on. He knows I’m hiding inside here—or at least he insists he knows that—and he tries whatever he can to get me to open up.”
“Do you think he’s going to come back?”
“I don’t know. But if he’s really serious about getting me to open up, I’m betting he’ll keep coming back until I do.”
“And that unsettles you.”
“I wouldn’t say it unsettles me, exactly,” Aomame replied. “I just don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either, not one little bit. But even if that phony collector comes back again, we can’t call NHK or the police. And if you call me and I race over, he will probably have vanished by the time I get there.”
“I think I can handle it myself,” Aomame said. “He can be as intimidating as he wants, but all I have to do is keep the door shut.”
“I’m sure he will use whatever means he can to intimidate you.”
“No doubt,” Aomame said.
Tamaru cleared his throat for a moment and changed the subject.
“Did you get the test kits all right?”
“It was positive,” Aomame said straight out.
“A hit, in other words.”
“Exactly. I tried two tests and the results were identical.”
There was silence. Like a lithograph with no words carved on it yet.
“No room for doubt?” Tamaru asked.
“I knew it from the start. The tests merely confirmed it.”
Tamaru silently rubbed the lithograph for a time with the pads of his fingers.
“I have to ask a pretty forward question,” he said. “Do you plan to have the baby? Or are you going to deal with it?”
“I’m not going to deal with it.”
“Which means you will give birth.”
“If things go smoothly, the due date will be between June and July of next year.”
Tamaru did the math in his head. “Which means we will have to make some changes in our plans.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“No need to apologize,” Tamaru said. “All women have the right to give birth. We have to protect that right as much as we can.”
“Sounds like a Declaration of Human Rights,” Aomame said.
“I’m asking this again just to make sure, but you have no idea who the father is?”
“Since June I haven’t had a sexual relationship with anyone.”
“So this is a kind of immaculate conception?”
“I imagine religious people would get upset if you put it that way.”
“If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset,” Tamaru said. “But when you’re dealing with a pregnancy, it’s important to get a specialist to check you over. You can’t just stay shut up in that room waiting it out.”
Aomame sighed. “Let me stay here until the end of the year. I promise I won’t be any trouble.”
Tamaru was silent for a while. Then he spoke. “You can stay there until the end of the year, like we promised. But once the new year comes, we have to move you to a less dangerous place, where you can easily get medical attention. You understand this, right?”
“I do,” Aomame said. She wasn’t fully convinced, though. If I don’t see Tengo, she thought, will I really be able to leave here?
“I got a woman pregnant once,” Tamaru said.
Aomame didn’t say anything for a time. “You? But I thought you were—”
“Gay? I am. A card-carrying homosexual. I have always been that way, and I imagine I always will be.”
“But still you got a woman pregnant.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Tamaru said, with no hint of humor. “I don’t want to go into the details, but it was when I was young. I did it once, but bang! A bull’s-eye.”
“What happened to the woman?”
“I don’t know,” Tamaru said.
“You don’t know?”
“I know how she was up to her sixth month. But after that I have no idea.”
“If you get to the sixth month, abortion is not an option.”
“That’s my understanding.”
“So there’s a high possibility she had the baby,” Aomame said.
“Most likely.”
“If she really did have the baby, don’t you want to see it?”
“I’m not that interested,” Tamaru said without missing a beat. “That’s not the kind of life I lead. What about you? Would you want to see your child?”
Aomame gave it some thought. “I am someone whose parents threw her away when she was small, so it’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to have my own child. I have no good model to follow.”
“Still, you’re going to be bringing that child into the world—into this violent, mixed-up world.”
“It’s because I’m looking for love,” Aomame said. “Not love between me and the child, though. I haven’t reached that stage yet.”
“But the child is part of that love.”
“I think so, in one way or another.”
“But if things don’t turn out like you expect, and that child isn’t part of the love you’re looking for, then he’ll end up hurt. Just like the two of us.”
“It’s possible. But I don’t sense that will happen. Call it intuition.”
“I respect intuition,” Tamaru said. “But once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality. You would do well to remember that.”
“Who said that?”
“Wittgenstein.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Aomame said. “If your child was born, how old would it be?”
Tamaru did the math in his head. “Seventeen.”
“Seventeen.” Aomame imagined a seventeen-year-old boy, or girl, shouldering morality.
“I’ll let Madame know about this,” Tamaru said. “She has been wanting to talk with you directly. As I have said a number of times, however, from a security standpoint I am none too happy about the idea. On a technical level I’m taking all necessary precautions, but the telephone is still a risky means of communication.”
“Understood.”
“But she is very concerned about what has happened, and is worried about you.”
“I understand that, too. And I’m grateful for her concern.”
“It would be the smart thing to trust her, and follow her advice. She is a very wise person.”
“Of course,” Aomame said.
But apart from that, Aomame told herself, I need to hone my own mind and protect myself. The dowager is certainly a very wise person. And she wields a considerable amount of power. But there are some things she has no way of knowing. I doubt she knows what principles the year 1Q84 is operating on. I mean—has she even noticed that there are two moons in the sky?
After she hung up, Aomame lay on the sofa and dozed for a half hour. It was a short, deep sleep. She dreamed, but her dream was like a big, blank space. Inside that space she was thinking about things. And she was writing, with invisible ink, in that pure white notebook. When she woke up, she had an indistinct yet strangely clear image in her mind. I will give birth to this child. This little life will be safely born into the world. Like Tamaru had put it, as an unavoidable bearer of morality.
She laid her palm on her abdomen and listened. She couldn’t hear a thing. For now.
CHAPTER 12
Tengo
THE RULES OF THE WORLD
ARE LOOSENING UP
After he finished breakfast, Tengo took a shower. He washed his hair and shaved at the sink, then changed into the clothes he had washed and dried. He left the inn, bought the morning edition of the paper at a kiosk at the station, and went to a coffee shop nearby and had a cup of hot black coffee.
There wasn’t much of interest in the newspaper. At least as far as this particular morning’s paper was concerned, the world was a dull, boring place. It felt like he was rereading a paper from a week ago, not today. Tengo folded up the paper and glanced at his watch. It was nine thirty. Visiting hours at the sanatorium began at ten.
It didn’t take long to pack for the trip back home. He didn’t have much luggage, just a few changes of clothes, toiletries, a few books, and a sheaf of manuscript paper. He stuffed it all inside his canvas shoulder bag. He slung the bag over his shoulder, paid his bill for the inn, and took a bus from the station to the sanatorium. It was the beginning of winter, and there were few people this morning heading to the beach. Tengo was the only one getting out at the stop in front of the sanatorium.
At the reception desk he wrote his name and the time in the visitors’ log. A young nurse he had never seen before was stationed at the reception desk. Her arms and legs were terribly long and thin, and a smile played around the corners of her lips. She made him think of a kindly spider guiding people along the path through a forest. Usually it was Nurse Tamura, the middle-aged woman with glasses, who sat at the reception desk, but today she wasn’t there. Tengo felt a bit relieved. He had been dreading any suggestive comments she might make because he had accompanied Kumi Adachi back to her apartment the night before. Nurse Omura, too, was nowhere to be seen. They might have been sucked into the earth without a trace. Like the three witches in Macbeth.
But that was impossible. Kumi Adachi was off duty today, but the other two nurses said they were working as usual. They must just be working somewhere else in the facility right now.
Tengo went upstairs to his father’s room, knocked lightly, twice, and opened the door. His father was lying on the bed, sleeping as always. An IV tube came out of his arm, a catheter snaked out of his groin. There was no change from the day before. The window was closed, as were the curtains. The air in the room was heavy and stagnant. All sorts of smells were mixed together—a medicinal smell, the smell of the flowers in the vase, the breath of a sick person, the smell of excreta—all the smells that life brings with it. Even if the life force here was weak, and his father was unconscious, metabolism went on unchanged. His father was still on this side of the great divide. Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.
The first thing Tengo did when he entered the sickroom was go straight to the far wall, where he drew the curtains and flung open the window. It was a refreshing morning, and the room was in desperate need of fresh air. It was chilly outside, but not what you would call cold. Sunlight streamed in and the curtain rustled in the sea breeze. A single seagull, legs tucked neatly underneath, caught a draft of wind and glided over the pine trees. A ragged line of sparrows sat on an electrical line, constantly switching positions like musical notes being rewritten. A crow with a large beak came to rest on top of a mercury-vapor lamp, cautiously surveying his surroundings as he mulled over his next move. A few streaks of clouds floated off high in the sky, so high and far away that they were like abstract concepts unrelated to the affairs of man.
With his back to the patient, Tengo gazed for a while at this scene outside. Things that are living and things that are not. Things that move and things that don’t. What he saw out the window was the usual scenery. There was nothing new about it. The world has to move forward. Like a cheap alarm clock, it does a halfway decent job of fulfilling its assigned role. Tengo gazed blankly at the scenery, trying to postpone facing his father even by a moment, but he couldn’t keep delaying forever.
Finally Tengo made up his mind, turned, and sat down on the stool next to the bed. His father was lying on his back, facing the ceiling, his eyes shut. The quilt that was tucked up to his neck was neat and undisturbed. His eyes were deeply sunken. It was like some piece was missing, and his eye sockets couldn’t support his eyeballs, which had quietly caved in. Even if he were to open his eyes, what he would see would be like the world viewed from the bottom of a hole.
“Father,” Tengo began.
His father didn’t answer. The breeze blowing in the room suddenly stopped and the curtains hung limply, like a w
orker in the midst of a task suddenly remembering something else he had to do. And then, after a while, as if gathering itself together, the wind began to blow again.
“I’m going back to Tokyo today,” Tengo said. “I can’t stay here forever. I can’t take any more time off from work. It’s not much of a life, but I do have a life to get back to.”
There was a two- to three-day growth of whiskers on his father’s cheeks. A nurse shaved him with an electric razor, but not every day. His whiskers were salt-and-pepper. He was only sixty-four, but he looked much older, like someone had mistakenly fast-forwarded the film of his life.
“You didn’t wake up the whole time I was here. The doctor says your physical condition is still not so bad. The strange thing is, you’re almost as healthy as you used to be.”
Tengo paused, letting the words sink in.
“I don’t know if you can hear what I’m saying or not. Even if the words are vibrating your eardrums, the circuit beyond that might be shot. Or maybe the words I speak are actually reaching you but you’re unable to respond. I don’t really know. But I have been talking to you, and reading to you, on the assumption that you can hear me. Unless I assume that, there’s no point in me speaking to you, and if I can’t speak to you, then there’s no point in me being here. I can’t explain it well, but I’m sensing something tangible, as if the main points of what I’m saying are, at least, getting across.”
No response.
“What I’m about to say may sound pretty stupid. But I’m going back to Tokyo today and I don’t know when I might be back here. So I’m just going to say what’s in my mind. If you find it dumb, then just go ahead and laugh. If you can laugh, I mean.”
Tengo paused and observed his father’s face. Again, there was no response.
“Your body is in a coma. You have lost consciousness and feeling, and you are being kept alive by life-support machines. The doctor said you’re like a living corpse—though he put it a bit more euphemistically. Medically speaking, that’s what it probably is. But isn’t that just a sham? I have the feeling your consciousness isn’t lost at all. You have put your body in a coma, but your consciousness is off somewhere else, alive. I’ve felt that for a long time. It’s just a feeling, though.”
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