Piercing

by Ryu Murakami

  Chiaki knew she was on the verge of snapping again. Looking down at the thigh the man had just rejected, she felt the rage building. He’s just like all the others after all, she said to herself. But just like them how? And who did she mean by ‘the others’? These questions occurred to her, but she didn’t have the energy or will to deal with them now. It was almost as if she could see the rage — the one thing without which she couldn’t survive, without which she’d be helpless. As if she could see the rage come foaming up the pathways from her fingers and toes to her heart and brain. Why do I need this, though, she asked herself, and tears welled up in her eyes. Why do I need this stupid rage? There were times when, having been slowly stretched to the breaking point, she snapped like a rubber band, and other times, like now, when it happened with no warning at all, as if the rage had been cut loose with a blade.

  Something terrible always happens when I get like this, she thought. And when it’s all over I’ll feel so bad I’ll want to die. I hate it. I hate it, but I never have the power to stop it, so it must be something I really need. This rage that makes me want to destroy everything I see — all the people and things, and myself too, burn everything down to the ground. I must need it. But why would a person need something like that? In elementary school that time, alone in the equipment room with the young gym teacher. I lifted my skirt and took his hand and tried to slide it inside my underwear. I thought that was what grown-up men liked, and I wanted to make him happy. But he pulled his hand away. The rage took over and I started screaming as if I’d burst into flames, and the gym teacher reached for my hand, saying, I see — you just want to be friends with me, don’t you? and I bit his hand until it bled. This man too, Chiaki thought and glared at him again. I know he’s going to make me angry. Sooner or later he’ll do or say something to make me lose it. Whether he tries to kiss me or tries to run away or tries to lick me down there or tries to hit me or gets down on his hands and knees and begs for forgiveness, I’ll end up in a rage, like I always have, sooner or later, with all the others.

  I hate that, she thought, I hate that that always has to happen.

  She closed her eyes again, remembering walking along arm in arm with this man, and sitting next to him in the taxi with the lights of the skyscrapers all around. She remembered how cold his arm was to the touch, and the memory cheered her a little. I wanna do that again, she thought, silently mouthing the words. I wanna walk with him like that again.

  ‘I’ll fix the soup,’ she declared, and stood up and limped towards the kitchenette. She could feel the man’s eyes on her as she walked away from the bed. He’s probably really disappointed, she thought. I didn’t let him do anything after all, so now he’ll be all discouraged. What’ll I do if he tells me he’s leaving?

  The thought frightened her, and she decided to mix some Halcion into his soup.

  ‘I put in too much curry powder, didn’t I? Sorry! Was it too spicy?’

  No, it was good, Kawashima told her, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He’d devoured two rolls and finished every drop of the creamy yellow soup. Come to think of it, he hadn’t eaten anything since that sandwich at Haneda Airport when he bought the overnight bag. He could feel his body warming from the inside out, melting some of the tension.

  Chiaki beamed contentedly at the empty soup bowl and carried it to the sink. She turned on the hot water and took a moment to check the contents of the McCormick’s spice bottle in the cupboard. It was still about half-full. The label said THYME, but inside the dark glass was a light-blue powder made of crushed Halcion tablets. The dealer near Shibuya Station had suggested this method of hiding the stuff. She’d mixed the equivalent of about two tablets into the man’s soup. The reason she’d added extra curry powder was of course so he wouldn’t notice, but Halcion was so bitter that she’d worried he might taste it anyway. The man had wolfed it all down, however, along with two buttered rolls, and never suspected anything. He must’ve been awfully hungry. He’d eaten in silence, sweat forming on the bridge of his nose.

  She had slipped half a teaspoon — about three tablets — into Kazuki’s food that other time, but Kazuki used Halcion regularly. She couldn’t imagine this man being a regular user, though. He’d feel the effect of two tablets within thirty minutes and drop like a tranquillised elephant, dead to the world, within an hour. One tablet would’ve been enough, really, but a lot of times Halcion stimulated a man’s sex drive before knocking him out. She’d imagined the man getting all goopy-eyed and horny on her and thought: If he tried to jump me right now, it would only bring back those awful memories. Once he fell asleep, though, he was all hers. He wouldn’t wake up even if you cut off his finger.

  Kawashima was tired. Gazing at the girl’s back as she washed the bowl, he wondered why her attitude had changed so suddenly. Would she try to entice him again after washing up? Or had the idea of being stabbed to death begun to scare her? She’d really given him the evil eye before getting up to make the soup, though. What had brought that on?

  He was tired of racking his brains like this and thought longingly of the bed back in his hotel room in Akasaka. He could call the late-thirties erotic masseuse and put all this behind him. It was one a.m. According to the plan, he should have finished disposing of all the evidence and been back in that room by now. He wondered how it would have felt, and wished he could read through the notes. They were in the bottom of his bag.

  The girl was washing the bowl meticulously, using only very hot water — no soap — to scrub off the grease and residue. She’d hold the bowl up to the light as if peering through it, and when she spotted the slightest blemish she’d start all over again. When she finally finished with the bowl, she began the same procedure with the enamel soup pan. Kawashima surveyed the room and noticed that there wasn’t so much as a stray scrap of paper lying about. No half-read magazines or newspapers, no open bags of chips or boxes of chocolates, no crumpled-up tissues, no fruit peels. The cosmetics on the dressing table were arranged as precisely as pieces on a chessboard, the little jars and bottles all grouped according to size and shape. The L-shaped sofa and the audio rack were equidistant — to within a centimetre, he would have wagered — from the coffee table that separated them, and neither the audio rack nor the bookcase held anything unrelated to their functions. The shelves weren’t cluttered with letters or postcards or pills or wallets or memo pads or business cards or paperclips or coins. All such odds and ends were stashed just outside the kitchenette, in a stack of translucent storage cases. He was seated at the two-person dining table, the blond wood of which was polished to such a shine that he could see himself in its surface. The place was like a real-estate agent’s model apartment, he was thinking. Immaculate and lifeless. The only exception was the corner of the bed where they’d been sitting. The duvet was turned back, exposing the wrinkled sheets, and the shadows of the wrinkles formed a pattern of irregular, curving stripes on the lustrous silk. Like the rolling hills of some undiscovered country, or scars of violence on smooth shoulders or breasts. Kawashima recalled the suffocating anxiety he’d experienced sitting there next to the girl and looked away, thinking: It must take a lot of work to keep a room this clean, though.

  He was imagining the girl labouring for hours at a time to eradicate every last speck of dust when, suddenly, the room shook with such force that he had to grab the edge of the dining table. He looked around frantically, only to see that nothing had fallen or tipped over and that the girl, drying the soup pan in the kitchenette, seemed to have noticed nothing. Not an earthquake, then, he thought anxiously, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. He sat still, waiting to see if anything else happened, but nothing did. He was just tired, that was all.

  His thoughts drifted back to the notes. If only he could lie in bed and read through them! It occurred to him that he’d already forgotten a lot of what he’d written down, probably because things had taken so many unexpected turns. He knew he’d filled seven pages with small, dense writing, but couldn’t rem
ember, for example, what it was he’d written first. He thought it concerned either which type of prostitute he should choose or which hotel, but he wasn’t sure. He’d scribbled in a sort of stream of consciousness, without any outline or organisation. If only the girl would go to sleep, he thought. He could read the notes right here.

  She’d finished cleaning up and was standing in the kitchenette with her arms crossed, watching him. He noticed her checking the clock and glanced at his wristwatch. Twenty-five minutes had passed since she’d carried his empty bowl away. Watching her silently eyeing him from the kitchenette, he began to wonder how she’d managed to figure out his plan. Which part of the notes had she read? He’d been away from the hotel room for no more than a few minutes — maybe only two or three. How much of his crabbed handwriting could she have deciphered in that time? It would be impossible to understand what the whole thing was about just by reading a page at random. Wouldn’t it? And she hadn’t exactly been in a lucid state of mind. But somehow she’d figured it all out. She knows things she couldn’t have known without reading the notes, he thought. The fact that I was staying at a different hotel. The fact that I hadn’t called her for the purpose of S&M play. What else?

  There was something else, he was thinking, when another tremor shook the room. Again he grabbed hold of the table. The girl was still standing there with her arms crossed, watching him. She seemed to be smiling. The room trembled once more. Then again. Gravity doubled, or tripled, and he had to hang on to the table or risk collapsing to the floor. What is this? he wondered, and was horrified to find himself being sucked inside something dark and enormous. It was as if a huge, diaphragm-shaped iron shutter were closing before his eyes. If I don’t get out of here, he thought, I’ll be trapped inside. His mother materialised, smiling, in the shrinking window of light. Or was it the suicide girl? Her voice rang in his ears:

  I told you so! Look at you — locked inside a narrow cell with no windows!

  ‘Stop it!’ he shouted and tried to stand up, but it was as if he’d been turned to stone.

  Didn’t I tell you you’d end up sitting all day long with your ear pressed against a wall, listening to some voice only you can hear? With your neck permanently twisted to one side? I always said this would happen to you when you grew up! I told you you’d go insane!

  It was Mother, all right. The opening continued to shrink. Soon all the light would be gone. Someone was laughing. No. Not someone. Everyone. A vast sea of people laughing. Or cheering. The roar of a crowd in some great colosseum. Beneath the colosseum, in a windowless little dungeon cell, a thick iron shutter was about to seal him in.

  He looked down. It was as if his own unconscious had become visible to him in the form of a rising tide. The waves lapped at his feet, then his ankles, his shins, his knees. A tide of swamp-water, sluggishly awash with vomit and flotsam: long-discarded items, all torn, tattered, rusting, bent, scorched, melted, crushed, cracked, oxidised, rotting, fermenting, festering with bacteria and crammed with every imaginable horror. He was up to his chin in the stuff now, and the fear was coalescing into a giant, repulsive insect that emerged from the swamp to crawl up his face and entangle its legs and feelers in his hair. The legs bristled with prickly thorns, and the feelers ended in sharp points that stung his forehead and scalp. Kawashima let go of the table, reaching up to tear the thing away, and fell. His knees hit the floor. The swamp washed over his head, and he shouted for Yoko at the top of his lungs.

  At first Chiaki couldn’t make out what the man was mumbling. Those two tablets really did the job, she was thinking — definitely his first time taking Halcion. She’d been unable to suppress a smile when he was trying to maintain his grip on the table, but when he tore at his hair and fell to his knees with a look of utter agony on his face, she found herself sympathising a little. The first time she’d taken Halcion, she too had had an unpleasant experience. A panicky feeling at the ferocious onslaught of sleep. Atsushi or Kazuki, she forgot which, had been with her, and she’d fallen asleep clutching his hand. What was it the man was mumbling, though? Maybe he’s calling my name, she thought, listening carefully, but no. It was another woman’s name. Yoko. The blood turned cold in her veins. She gave a contemptuous little snort, as if to disparage her own emotion, and a shudder ran through her body. And then, just like that, something snapped and rage took over.

  Chiaki reached for the kitchen drawer, but used too much force opening it, and it came all the way out. There was a great crash as the contents spilled on to the floor, and another as the drawer itself followed. Squatting down, she fished among the scattered utensils until she came up with a manual can opener. She tested its heft and closed her fist around the handle.

  It was as she approached the man, who was grappling with his overturned chair, trying to climb to his feet, that Chiaki remembered why this uncontrollable rage of hers was so necessary. She needed it to contend with all the insults. Insults were the calling cards of hostility. And only violent rage gave her the courage it took to stand up to the hostility all around her. Rage alone could show you the way to action.

  ‘Yoko, Yoko,’ the man was mumbling. ‘Help me, Yoko.’

  Chiaki took aim at his droopy-lidded eyes and slammed the can opener down. My name isn’t Yoko. She heard the stainless steel meet the bone of the eye socket, a sound like a shovel crunching into frozen earth. The man covered his head and tried to crawl away, but Chiaki followed, sobbing and raining down blows to his shoulders and arms and mouth and cheeks and ears.

  The first blow dredged Kawashima up from the swamp of unconsciousness. The shock and the subsequent fierce pain reawakened his deadened senses, and the iron shutter was blasted to bits just before closing completely. He was bathed in a sudden, blinding light that screamed of danger, and he tried to shield his face and head. It was like waking from a long but fitful sleep, and it felt as if all the windows in the apartment had shattered and wind was howling through the room.

  He heard the voice quite clearly.

  Don’t say you’re sorry, no matter how much it hurts. If you apologise you’ll only be beaten harder. It was the same voice he’d heard by the disposable diaper shelf and again tonight, when looking at the new bandage on the girl’s thigh, but to Kawashima it seemed as if he were hearing it for the first time in years. This was the voice, he remembered very distinctly now, that had always protected him as a child. Don’t ask for forgiveness. The attack will be over soon. When you’re sure it’s over, look in her eyes. If you can do that, it won’t be a defeat. You will not have lost if you can look her right in the eyes.

  The moment Chiaki realised she was sobbing, her shoulder and arm succumbed to exhaustion and she found herself gasping for breath. The tears coursing down her cheeks dripped from the tip of her chin to the carpet. She was gazing at a single teardrop that sat like dew on the shaggy strands, when all the strength drained from her body. I used up the rage, she thought as the can opener slipped from her hand to the carpet, I used up all the rage. The man, she noticed now, was peeking out between blood-drenched fingers, watching her. There was something scary about the look in his eye. Was he angry? What if he got up and left? She wondered if she should wrap her arms around him, apologise and beg him to stay, but she wouldn’t have had the strength to do that anyway.

  The girl was just standing there with her face all contorted and her shoulders and chin jerking with silent sobs. Look at her, the voice said. She’s crying. She’s afraid. You see? You can let down your guard now — she’s crying, and she isn’t holding the weapon any more. Kawashima slowly lowered his hands. The sleeves of his sweatshirt were soaked with blood, and he couldn’t see out of his left eye because of all the blood from the gash. The back of his left hand was cut and bleeding as well, but he scarcely felt it. Why was the pain fading away, though, when he hadn’t even used the technique? It must be the power of the voice, he thought. The voice that came from somewhere inside his own skin and echoed in his ears. That voice had taught him so many thin
gs. He hadn’t heard from it much since meeting Yoko, but it had helped him out all through childhood. That voice was the only one he could trust.

  Chiaki watched the man lower his arms, thinking how ridiculous he looked. He reminded her of the sloth she’d once seen in a Disney movie. The sloth that fell out of a tree. Sloths spend their lives hanging from branches, the narrator had said, and being on the ground is a serious threat to their safety because their muscles aren’t built for it. The sloth was desperately trying to get back to the tree, but its movements were slow and weird and comical: clinging to the ground, awkwardly waggling one arm or leg at a time and hardly making progress at all. This man was exactly like that sloth. His movements were totally primitive and retarded-looking, but Chiaki wasn’t able to appreciate the humour right now. The left side of his face was like a half-mask of thick, dark red blood, but it wasn’t that; it was the way his right eye was staring at her. No one had ever looked at her that way before. It was an ogling, spacy stare, but one that flickered with sorrow and hatred and defiance. He was trying to get to his feet again. And he was saying something to her in a voice she could barely hear.

  ‘Did you find the ice pick beneath the bathtub? The ice pick. Was it under the tub? You must’ve looked under the bathtub, right? When you moved?’

  She didn’t understand what he was talking about, but the look in his eye scared her, and she shook her head.

  ‘I need it now. You didn’t look under the bath when you moved?’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘That’s funny,’ Kawashima muttered. The smell of burning tissue was not only deep in his nostrils now but swirling through every cell in his body. Showers of sparks shot out where his senses intersected, but he wasn’t aware of them in any objective sense, or of the fever saturating the space between his temples. He was already one with the burnt protein smell and the sparks and the fever. The voice was no longer reverberating inside him, but that was all right. The voice helped me out earlier for the first time in a long time, he was thinking, but I can take it from here.