Audition

by Ryu Murakami

  Aoyama had avoided looking at Gangsta since seeing him open his eyes, but now he realised with a gasp that the dog was dead. The light and lustre were quickly receding from those desolate eyes, and an astonishingly long grey tongue had slithered out from his open mouth. It was as if an enormous parasite were exiting the animal’s corpse to seek another host. Aoyama wondered if the same would happen to him. He remembered reading somewhere that when prisoners were executed, their bowels and bladders emptied and their tongues hung out long and distended. He envisioned people looking down at his corpse, with his ankles severed, his tongue touching his chest, his trousers soiled, and the light gone from his eyes. It was a vision of astonishing clarity, as if he were actually witnessing the scene from somewhere outside himself: policemen milling about the room, a white-coated coroner examining his eyes, trying to judge the time of death by the degree of moisture remaining on them. Eyes that had lost the lustre of life, like the glass facsimiles on stuffed tigers or bears. Rie-san weeping into the skirt of her apron. Shige standing there numb with shock.

  Where had this grim and vivid vision come from? He was thinking that it must be the drugs when he felt something explode in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t a nameable sensation like nausea or vertigo or heartburn but an oppressive, violent sort of eruption. Whatever it was, it caused his blood to start circulating again, if only tentatively, and his legs began to tremble. It was as if something inside him were rebelling against the brain’s command to surrender to death, refusing to give in.

  He had to escape. He tried to flex the muscles of his legs, but they seemed to be disconnected from his brain. He had regained some control over his hands, however, and he clenched and unclenched his fists. Gradually the feeling began to return to his fingers. He could move his head as well. He hunched over and grabbed his right hand with his left, then lifted it and bent his head forward to bite the palm. He could feel the bite, but just barely. Yamasaki Asami turned to look at him, and he knew she’d finally snagged the electrical cord. He chewed furiously on his hand, biting down rhythmically, and was getting some feeling back all the way up his left arm. Just as he went to switch to his right palm there was a loud pop, the music stopped in mid-note, and all the lights went off. Apparently Yamasaki Asami, slicing through the cord, had caused a short and triggered the breaker.

  It was quite dark outside now, and even darker in here. Yamasaki Asami had melted into the shadows, but her voice came from right beside him.

  ‘Where’s the breaker? You ought to be able to talk by now. Where is it?’

  Though she was close enough to reach out and touch, it was too dark for him to see more than the bare outlines of her face. But it was unmistakably the very face he’d once kissed and caressed, and dreamed of again and again. She might have been about to close her eyes and search for his mouth with her own. How many hundreds – no, thousands – of times had he pictured those features, so beautiful even when contorted in the throes of passion? For a moment he almost forgot about everything – his agony, his determination to escape – but the moment ended with a hard right hook to the side of his face. The punch was a shockingly powerful one, delivered with the fist that still gripped the fork. It wasn’t as if she’d lashed out impulsively, compelled by some extreme emotion. It was, rather, a calm and methodical blow, intended only to reaffirm who was in control here. The tines of the fork had struck the corner of his mouth, splitting his lip. Blood ran down his chin, and the pain seemed to pierce his skull. Aoyama bent forwards and covered his head with both hands.

  ‘The breaker,’ she repeated, but without any inflection or affect in her voice. Obviously she hadn’t the slightest compunction about inflicting injury and pain.

  ‘Kitchen,’ Aoyama said in what came out as barely more than a whisper. The breaker box was in fact built into the wall of a utility room next to the kitchen. In the darkness, it would take her some time to find the door and then to locate the box above the washing machine. Enough time, perhaps, for him to crawl up the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms were. Shige’s room could be locked from inside, and had a telephone with a separate line.

  Yamasaki Asami held the fork up for him to see, and then brought it down hard towards the coffee-table. Aoyama stiffened, but she wasn’t aiming at his leg; the fork pierced the skin of Gangsta’s neck with a nasty squish. The skin around the dead dog’s neck was thick and loose, and the fork didn’t penetrate far but dislodged and fell to the table the moment she let go.

  As she disappeared into the kitchen, the pain in the left side of Aoyama’s face reasserted itself. It felt as if he’d had a tooth pulled without anaesthetic. Blood from his split lip seeped into his mouth, and the warm, sticky taste of it weakened his will to fight. He could hear her walking around in the kitchen, the rubber soles of her sneakers squeaking on the floorboards. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and could just make out her silhouette, hands stretched before her as she groped her way through the kitchen. She moved cautiously, as if afraid of upsetting any dishes or glassware.

  He used his hands to bend his legs, one at a time, and pull them on to the sofa beside him. Then he reached down to plant both palms on the floor and slide to the thick carpet. He managed to do this without making any significant noise. Using his hands and elbows, he began to crawl towards the stairs, and moments later he was out of breath. With the heater and ventilation system shut down, the dark room was weirdly silent. He stopped and tried to keep from panting by taking slow, deep breaths through his nose. He’d been able to vocalise the word ‘kitchen’ just now; maybe he should try shouting for help. From the houses next door came faint sounds – a television set on one side and someone playing a piano on the other. Even shouting at the top of his lungs once or twice was unlikely to bring anyone running – except for Yamasaki Asami, of course, who would make him pay dearly.

  He dragged himself onwards. The sun had set completely now, and it was too dark to see the stairs, but he knew where they were. His forehead and armpits were wet with perspiration, though the room was cooling down quickly. He was beginning to get some feeling back in his toes, and he dug them into the carpet to help propel him forwards.

  He had just reached the bottom of the stairs when he heard a sound and looked back to see the kitchen lit up with a bluish glow. She’s found the breaker, he thought, and the sweat on his forehead seemed to freeze. But the light, he soon realised, was from a gas burner on the stove. She’d turned it on to provide illumination. Now she’d surely discover the door to the utility room.

  He began his ascent. The steps were thick wooden planks, fitted into the wall at one end and bolted at the other to a fat steel pipe that slanted from the ceiling to the floor. There had originally been no railing, but at Ryoko’s insistence they’d had one installed when Shige began toddling around on his own. The short banisters were threaded by a thick vinyl rope that served as a handrail. Aoyama rolled to his side and grabbed hold of the first banister with his right hand and the vinyl rope with his left. Pushing with his toes, he pulled himself up until he was sitting on the first step, then paused to catch his breath. He repeated the process with the next step, and the one after that. There were twelve steps in all, and facing the landing at the top was the door to Shige’s room. Built in a sturdier era, the door was of solid hardwood. No woman could break it down with anything less than an axe or a sledgehammer. Aoyama had reached the fifth step and was trying to stifle the wheezing when he heard the door to the utility room click open.

  Don’t panic, he told himself. The utility room was cluttered and dark, and the breaker box was high up the wall. She probably wouldn’t be able to reach it and would have to look for something to stand on. Aoyama banged his shin hard on the corner of the sixth step as he was raising himself up to the seventh, but he scarcely noticed the pain – more because of his own adrenaline than the drugs. His palms were perspiring, making it difficult to maintain a grip on the vinyl rope, and he kept wiping his hands on his shirt and
trousers. Each little noise issuing from the kitchen caused his scrotum to contract. What sort of human being was this, he wondered. Piercing the base of his tongue with her hypodermic needle, severing the dog’s legs with her saw, cutting the electrical cord with her little pink knife, slamming her fork into his face and then planting it in the dog’s neck, all with the same expression she’d worn when brushing dog hairs from her sweater. You didn’t normally strike someone unless in the grip of some powerful emotion. That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.

  Lifting himself from the seventh step to the eighth, he remembered something Yamasaki Asami had once told him.

  When my real father died, my mother’s new husband came to the funeral in his wheelchair. I was five, I guess, in kindergarten. At that age, you don’t really understand what death is – at least I didn’t. I was watching the priest, who was chanting sutras, and a wasp flew down and buzzed around his head. The priest was trying to shoo the wasp away and still keep chanting, and it seemed so funny to me that I started to laugh. And then I couldn’t stop laughing. I bowed my head and just kept giggling and giggling, and I guess everyone thought I was having some sort of breakdown. But my mother’s new husband was watching all this. It wasn’t long after that day that he hit me for the first time. And I remember he was shouting at me as he hit me, saying that anyone who could laugh out loud at her own father’s funeral wasn’t even human. He said it over and over, that I wasn’t human, and kept hitting me and hitting me . . .

  Aoyama took hold of the tenth banister and pulled himself up, pushing against the steps with his toes and knees. Two more steps and he’d be on the landing. His arms and shoulders were exhausted, but sensation was returning to his legs, the blood beginning to surge through them. He took hold of the eleventh banister with his right hand and grabbed the vinyl rope with his left. The door to Shige’s room, painted a creamy white, glowed softly in the darkness above him. There hadn’t been any sounds from the kitchen for some time now. I might actually make it, he thought. And no sooner had he thought this than he heard Yamasaki Asami laugh. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘So there you are!’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back. Don’t go away!’

  Aoyama panicked. Two more stairs would bring him to the landing, but he was having trouble getting a good purchase on the step below with his trembling knees and bare, sweating feet. Lurching for the last length of vinyl rope, his hand slipped and he very nearly slid down the stairs. Shock and fear ballooned inside him, pushing all thought from his brain. It was as if he’d been dropped into the middle of a not unfamiliar nightmare: someone was chasing him and he could barely move. His arms and legs were only partially under his control, and negotiating the stairs was like trying to climb out of quicksand.

  The lights came back on.

  ‘I’ll cut your feet off up there, then,’ she said as she collected the wire saw from the coffee-table. She walked to the stairs and slowly started up.

  No! Aoyama tried to shout. No! No! No! No! He couldn’t even tell if his voice was audible. The balloon of fear was pushing with ever greater pressure against his temples, and when she touched his legs the balloon burst and the nightmare bled into reality.

  ‘Turn this way a little. You want to see your feet come off, don’t you?’

  She wrapped the silvery metal cable around his left ankle, peered up into his eyes and pulled on the rings. The saw sank into the flesh and disappeared, and there was a loud pop as the Achilles tendon gave way. And the next moment, as if by magic, his foot, from the anklebone downwards, separated from his leg and fell to the step below. For an instant the bone showed white in the tendrilous cross-section of what had been his ankle, but then the blood seeped up and overflowed.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing at the amputated foot and shaking the other. ‘It’s like a big red sea anemone, don’t you think?’

  Blood was gushing out of the stub of his left shin. It made a glubbering sound as it flooded over the side of the step and slopped to the carpet below. Aoyama was dumbly taking this in when, belatedly and all at once, the pain demanded his complete attention. He was immersed in pain, as if he’d fallen into a vat of the stuff. And then something mysterious happened. He was shaking his head violently, to stave off unconsciousness, when a strange silence filled the universe and he received a message:

  Kick her.

  She was squatting on the step below, wrapping the wire saw around his right ankle. Aoyama put his weight on his right foot and contracted his abdominal muscles to raise his left leg. She looked up, and he gave a grunt and poked her in the face with his bleeding stump. It was a pathetic, feeble kick, but it caught her right in the eye and was just enough to make her lose her balance. She let go of the wire saw and tried to grab the vinyl rope, but he thrust the stub in her face once more, connecting more solidly this time, with a sickening sort of splat. One eye daubed in red, she went over backwards, twisting as she fell. There was a thump as her head went down and her legs flew up, and another as she began a second somersault at the bottom of the stairs. The second one carried her over the carpet and ended when her back slammed against the wall. She sat there as limp and still as a discarded rag doll. Next to her was Aoyama’s left foot, which had tumbled down the stairs behind her.

  He wasn’t sure how badly she was hurt, but he had other things to attend to. He was losing blood fast and slipping deeper into shock. Her right shoulder twitched and she tried to raise her head but then let it droop again. Aoyama hooked his elbow around the vinyl rope to steady himself. He was sitting on the ninth step, trembling so violently that his teeth were chattering. He squirmed out of his shirt and undershirt and pressed the latter against his bleeding stump. It was immediately saturated with blood, and he wrapped the shirt around it, securing it by tying the sleeves. He saw Yamasaki Asami place both hands on the floor, trying to rise to her knees, as he reached down to unwrap the wire saw from his right ankle. The saw was much heavier than it looked and inexplicably clean of any blood or gristle. He set it down beside him, then removed his belt and wrapped it around his leg, just below the knee, to make a tourniquet. He was too weak to pull the belt tight, so he fastened it and twisted the buckle until the leather bit deeply into his flesh.

  As she tried to push herself up, Yamasaki Asami’s right forearm bent in an unnatural way, and she stopped and slowly raised her head to peer at him. Her face was thickly smeared with his blood, and she was probably bleeding herself. She had struck the corner of a step with her shoulder and the edge of another with the back of her head. She managed to sit up, her broken right arm dangling. She lifted her left arm to wipe her face with the sleeve of her sweater, then gingerly touched the spot where her head had met the step. Aoyama was fighting unconsciousness by biting his lip as hard as he could and concentrating on keeping her in focus. There was no question of trying to drag himself up to the next step. She looked at him again and mumbled something he couldn’t hear.

  The doorbell rang. She flinched and turned towards the entryway, pulling a small canister from the hip pocket of her jeans as she did so. Mace, Aoyama was thinking, when the door opened.

  ‘What the—?’

  It was Shige. Yamasaki Asami staggered to her feet and moved towards him, holding the canister out in front of her, but tripped over her own equipment bag.

  ‘Run, Shige!’ Aoyama’s attempt to shout came out as a choked gargle. Shige stood frozen, holding his skis and looking around him in bewilderment: his wounded father; the strange, bloodied woman lurching towards him; the remains of Gangsta on the coffee-table.

  ‘Run!’ Aoyama gurgled again, and Shige thrust his skis at Yamasaki Asami. She stumbled forwards and to the left, dodging the skis, and Shige spun around behind her. Aoyama was hoping that she’d continue on through
the open door and flee, but she didn’t. She pivoted to face Shige again and muttered something Aoyama couldn’t make out. Shige dropped the skis and ran into the living-room. He looked down at Gangsta’s corpse and up at his father, then shouted at the woman, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  She plodded after him, her right arm hanging at her side.

  ‘Kill her!’ Aoyama wheezed, to his own astonishment. ‘Kill her, Shige! Kill her!’

  Yamasaki Asami looked like a sleepwalker, or a zombie, plodding unsteadily after Shige with one arm raised before her. She squeezed the canister, but the spray shot off at an oblique angle and hung in the air of the living-room, the pungent smell of it wafting up even to where Aoyama sat crouched at the top of the stairs. She was still muttering, as if to herself. Shige ducked and spun towards the coffee-table to avoid the spray. He grabbed the glass yogurt container off the table, took a step towards the woman and hurled it in her face. It shattered against the bridge of her nose, splattering her face with white goo and leaving a gash between the eyebrows. Blood flowed from the gash and mixed with the yogurt, and she stopped dead in her tracks, still mumbling something. The violence of his own act seemed to paralyse Shige for a moment. Yamasaki Asami wiped her face with her sleeve, then raised her left hand and pressed the cap of the canister again. Shige jumped back and to the right, but a small amount of spray hit the left side of his face. ‘Ow! Shit!’ he cried, covering up with his hands and blundering towards the drinks cabinet.

  Yamasaki Asami started after him, but suddenly came to a halt. Her lips were no longer moving, and her eyes had lost their focus. She put her hand to her head as she stood there, hunched and teetering. Now Shige was opening the bottom compartment of the drinks cabinet. He reached behind the wine bottles and emerged with the combat knife. Removing it from its hardened plastic sheath, he grasped the handle in his fist, blade down, and bounded towards her. She was still hunched over, holding her head, when he buried the blade in the nape of her neck. Her knees buckled, and she crumpled to the carpet. Shige ran to the foot of the stairs.