Piercing

by Ryu Murakami

  And now he remembered whose voice that was. It’s mine, he thought. It’s me as a child. I mean, the voice I created as a child. I knew my own voice would be too weak, too childlike and vulnerable, so I chose the voice of an adult. A generic grown-up, like the man who read the news. But now I’m all grown up myself. I can speak for myself, and act for myself. Look at the woman standing there. See how she fears me. The whole world shall learn to fear me.

  He remembered feeling this way once before. This time the sensation was even more intense, but the first time was when he’d hit his mother. Seeing her after all those years, he couldn’t get over how small she looked. As if she’d shrunk. Like the toy monster they used to sell that expanded in water and shrank when it dried. That was her, all dried up and shrunken. Just to see her like that had been enough for him, but then she had to go and act timid and scared. ‘You forgive your mother, don’t you?’ That’s when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn’t bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn’t any such thing as help in this world.

  Like the woman standing right here, he thought — scared to death and begging me to help her. I’ll have to set her straight. I have to let her know that no matter how much she cries, no one’s going to come to her rescue. She says she doesn’t know where the ice pick is. So maybe the ice pick wasn’t under the bathtub all this time. Maybe the police took it away after all, as evidence. The police. Wait a minute. Weren’t the cops supposed to be surveilling this apartment? Ah, well. No matter. Just have to do it over there in the corner, where they can’t see us. But what about the ice pick? How can I set this woman straight without the ice pick? I’ve got to hurry. Before my arms and legs get too heavy. All the pain is gone, though. No pain. Mustn’t sleep until I’ve taught her this lesson. Very important. Wonder if she’ll try to run. Have to show her she can’t escape. Easy enough.

  ‘Come here a minute,’ he said.

  Chiaki shook her head again and took half a step back. The man lurched forward and grabbed hold of her arm, squeezing so hard that she screamed — or tried to. All that came out of her parched throat was a raspy, whistling sound, like steam escaping. Breathing heavily, the smell of curry thick on his breath and sweat pouring down his blood-slick face, the man dragged her into the kitchenette, to the counter where the espresso machine sat. He ripped the machine’s cord from the socket and used it to bind her wrists together. She tried to break free, but he was much too strong for her and didn’t even seem to feel it when she kicked him, though the kicking made her thigh hurt again. He wound the cord around her wrists three or four times, pulling with all his might, and ended by looping it the other way, between her hands and forearms. He secured it all with a tight knot, and her skin turned a colourless, ghostly white where the cord bit into it.

  ‘Just tell yourself,’ he said as he crammed a balled-up dishcloth into her mouth, ‘it doesn’t hurt.’ He was slurring his words now. ‘Here’s the secret. You have to believe. If you even think it might hurt, even a little, you won’t succeed. You mustn’t doubt, for even one second, that all the pain will be gone. Look at me. Look at me.’

  He yanked on her bound wrists, pulling her so close their noses nearly touched. The wound above his left eye hadn’t closed and blood was still leaking from it. The Halcion must be killing the pain, Chiaki thought. The eye remained open even though it was awash with blood. Coated with a red film, it swivelled about as if it had a mind of its own. Searching for something in its own crimson world. Like the eye of a broken android, she thought, in some science-fiction movie. Her wrists hurt, and the dishcloth stuffed in her mouth made it difficult to breathe, but she couldn’t stop looking at that eye.

  I have to show her there’s no need to run away, thought Kawashima. He kept talking but was having trouble enunciating some of the words. Twice he accidentally bit his tongue, and he tried to stimulate sensation in his mouth by running a fingernail over his gums.

  ‘I would never, lie to you, I want you, to look at me, but focus your eyes, somewhere behind me, like one of those, 3-D pictures, do like that, that’s the secret, my mother, she put ammonia, on my hand, and one time she said, do you want a tattoo, and she sharpened this pencil, a hard one, 4H or 5H, really sharp, and she stabbed my arms, and legs with it, and she hit me, with a milk bottle, and tied up my ears, and fingers, with string, she didn’t care, she’d prise open my eyelids, with her fingers, and bring the tip, of a burning cigarette, or a needle, right up to my eye, it didn’t bother her at all, so now, do you understand, the secret?’

  Chiaki had no idea what the man was raving about, but as she gazed at his swivelling eyeball her ears were registering words like ammonia and tattoo and milk bottle and needle, and when he asked if she understood she nodded. The corner of the dishcloth protruding from her mouth flapped up and down as she did so.

  ‘Now I’m going to, cut your Achilles, your Achilles tendons, so remember, remember to do, like I just told you.’

  It was hard to make sense of what he was saying, and Chiaki absently nodded again, but when she saw the man squat down and sift through the forks and spoons and cooking scissors and other utensils scattered on the floor, the words cut your Achilles tendons replayed in her mind, and she let out a muffled squeal and struggled to get away. The man was holding on to the cord with one hand, and she managed to rip it from his grasp but in doing so brought the espresso machine crashing to the floor. The impact it made caused her to fall backwards and sit suddenly down beside it.

  Where’d my knife go, Kawashima was muttering, when his eye fell on the bag he’d left beside the sofa.

  ‘Hang on, a second, I’ll get, my knife.’

  When he staggered off towards the sofa, Chiaki tried to yank the cord loose from the espresso machine, which lay on its side bleeding dark brown liquid. It was all she could think of to do, but she succeeded only in tightening the loops around her wrists, which were swollen now and turning purple. She could see the man reflected in the shiny stainless steel surface of the machine. He was rummaging in his bag. Gritting her teeth, she began dragging the machine little by little over the floor, hoping somehow to reach the door, but with each tug the cord bit deeper into her. She was breathing rapidly through her nostrils, and her chest began to hurt. The dishcloth was making her gag, and she tried to spit it out; but it was so tightly packed in her mouth that it wouldn’t budge. Somehow she had to make it to the door and kick or pound on it in the hope that someone would respond. She remembered how the man had looked in the bathroom at the hotel, whispering in her ear as she bit his finger, and she imagined him wearing the same bland expression as he sliced through her Achilles tendons. Murdering her with the same poker-face he’d worn waiting for her in the freezing cold.

  I’ve never met a man like this before, she thought. He’s not like You-know-who, of course, but he’s not like any of the others either. When he says he’ll do something, he does it, no matter what. And it isn’t just the Halcion talking. Halcion confuses your mind but it doesn’t change your personality. This is a totally new type of man.

  Urging the machine along a centimetre at a time, grimacing against the pain in her wrists and thigh, she’d managed to drag it out of the kitchenette and on to the carpet when she looked up to see that the man had returned. He was holding a small package wrapped in duct tape. She was still a good two metres from the door, and when she realised she wasn’t going to make it the strength drained from her body once again. She collapsed to the carpet, and the man bent down and grabbed hold of her left ankle.

  Using his grip on her ankle, Kawashima rotated the girl on to her back and pulled her towards him, then sat heavily down on the toppled espresso machine. It made a loud bang, and she raised her head to look.

  The man had her left leg pinned fast between his knees. He was stripping the duct tape from the package but stopped to wipe his bloodied eye with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Chiaki could scarcely breathe. She let her head s
ink back to the carpet. The dishcloth was drenched with her saliva, and drool leaked from the corner of her mouth. Staring up at the ceiling and listening to the tearing sound the tape made, she tried to remember what the man had been saying a while ago. The secret. Just tell yourself it doesn’t hurt. Focus your eyes like on a 3-D picture. Believe. Don’t doubt you can stop the pain. Something like that. She stared at the ceiling, trying to do as he’d said; but the ceiling was a depthless field of white, and it didn’t seem possible to focus on a spot beyond it.

  An irrelevant thought was trying to take shape in her mind — something about the man not being two different people — but she did her best to block it out. She had to concentrate on telling herself that she wasn’t going to feel any pain.

  The bottoms of this woman’s feet are strange-looking, Kawashima was thinking as he stripped the duct tape from the cardboard. Every few seconds he nodded and sleep fluttered through him like a warm breeze. We’re almost there, he told himself sternly. We’re about to hear what it sounds like when you cut the Achilles tendons. He looked down at the figure lying supine and motionless on the floor before him and thought: Who is this woman, though? Her loose skirt was all up around her ribs now, exposing her purple panties and her white belly rising and falling like surf. He was still staring at that small white tummy, with its wisp of peachfuzz, when he tore the last strip of tape from the package. He reached inside the folded cardboard, and it fell away to reveal a thin, sharply pointed, steel rod. It wasn’t the knife after all.

  When he saw what it was he held in his right hand, the image of the baby lying in her crib flashed through his mind, and he gave a little cry. The woman raised her head again at the sound, and when she saw the ice pick, her eyes widened with panic. Her muffled scream caused the veins in her neck to bulge, and she shook her head violently. The corner of the white dishcloth swung languidly back and forth as she did so, and the drool slid down over her jawline and dripped to her neck. Kawashima looked from the ice pick to the woman’s stomach, thinking: Guess I’m going to stab another one. He let go of her leg and slid forward to his knees, so that he was straddling her. He brought the tip of the ice pick to a point just below her navel, and the woman held her breath, stilling the creamy rise and fall of her stomach. He gently stroked the peachfuzz with the tip of the ice pick and was about to bear down hard when another warm breeze riffled through him, and he became aware of an enormous shadow penetrating and entering his body. Then came the odour of ammonia. A sharp, high-pitched voice saying, Don’t bother coming back! The sound of a latch being locked. A blurry silhouette on frosted glass. It’s Mother, he thought. She’s inside me.

  The feeling of oneness with his mother was nauseating. It was as if she’d hijacked his body and held him locked in a tight embrace. He was trying to shout the words, I hate you! when he lost consciousness.

  11

  SANADA CHIAKI MANAGED TO reach the cooking scissors and cut the cord that bound her wrists. She pulled the dishcloth from her mouth and gazed for quite a long while at the man’s face. She had no intention of calling the police. It would only mean spending hours and hours — if not days — at the police station. In the man’s overnight bag she found a notebook and another tape-wrapped package. Inside the package was a big, dangerous-looking knife. She was tired and her throat and chest and wrists and thigh hurt, but she read the notebook from beginning to end. Even after she’d finished she didn’t know if what she’d read was a plan for an actual crime or simply the fantasies of a sick mind. But one thing was sure — the man sleeping over there on the carpet was not some prince who’d worshipped her from afar and come galloping to her rescue. Maybe he was a murderer or maybe he was just some pervert who got off on playing one, but either way she was nothing more to him than a body to rent. She got into bed and buried herself beneath the covers but couldn’t sleep. She wasn’t afraid the man might awaken — the Halcion would keep him knocked out for hours — but she had a lot on her mind.

  She remembered the ice pick pressing against her stomach, and realised that she hadn’t felt any fear at all at that moment. Was it because she’d resigned herself to death? Or because she was just too exhausted from the struggle to feel anything? Or had she in fact been curious to see what it would be like to be stabbed by this man?

  Staring at the ceiling, telling herself there’d be no pain, while the man sat on the espresso machine wrestling with duct tape, she’d had the strangest thought, a thought that seemed completely irrelevant at the time. The man who’d whispered softly in her ear as she bit his finger and the man who’d waited for her outside the hospital in the freezing cold and the man who’d bound her wrists so tightly and wanted to cut her Achilles tendons, were all the same person. That was the thought that had occurred to her, and she let it sink in now. You didn’t get the sense that this man was two or more different people. And that made him unique. Unlike any other man she’d ever known. He wasn’t at all like her father, of course, but he wasn’t like Kazuki or Atsushi or Hisao or Yoshiaki or Yutaka either. All of them were capable of turning from the ideal man into the very worst sort of man in zero point one seconds. Whenever the dark side of a man revealed itself, it always felt to Chiaki as if he’d turned into someone else entirely, and only sex seemed to help counteract the disillusionment and despair. Which was one reason losing her sex drive always made her so anxious.

  Telling herself it was to help her sleep, she cast her mind back to when she and the man had walked along arm in arm, and to when they’d been in the taxi surrounded by the lighted windows of high-rise buildings. Never before had she felt so completely saturated with beautiful feelings. That much she was sure of.

  Chiaki was awakened by the phone in the early daylight hours. It was from the manager of the club. Aya-san, he said through the answering machine, be sure and come by the office today.

  She got out of bed and went to look at the man. He’d been sleeping for over ten hours now, lying on his left side, with his back to the wall. The wound above his left eye was closed, the blood crusty and reddish-black. Draw a chalk line around him, she thought, and he could pass for a murder victim. She put away the cooking scissors and other utensils that littered the floor, and disposed of the severed electrical cord. The blood-caked manual can opener went into the sink to be washed later, along with the dishcloth that had been in her mouth. The espresso machine was pretty much totalled. She wanted to use the vacuum cleaner but didn’t because it might wake him. There were blood and coffee stains on the carpet. She’d have to have it cleaned.

  The man’s wallet was lying next to the espresso machine. His name was Kawashima Masayuki. She found a snapshot behind his driver’s licence. A photo of him and a woman with glasses holding a newborn baby. So that’s Yoko, she thought. The woman with the glasses was smiling, but Kawashima Masayuki had no expression at all except for a stern wrinkle in his brow. Peering at the photo, she was glad he was just a client, just a one-night stand. If I saw this picture after walking arm in arm with him two or three more times I’d probably burn it, she thought; ten times and I’d probably hunt this woman down and kill her. Softly opening the refrigerator, she took out a bottle of Vittel and had some aspirin and Alka-Seltzer. She picked up the ice pick he’d flung to the carpet near the entryway just before passing out and placed it, along with the wallet, the knife, and the notebook, on top of his overnight bag.

  Sanada Chiaki poured two centimetres of isopropyl alcohol into one of the Wedgwood soup bowls and submerged the fourteen-gauge needle and the ball-closure ring. She washed her left nipple thoroughly with antibacterial soap and snapped her hands into a pair of surgical gloves.

  It was while thinking about what would happen when the man awoke that she’d decided to pierce her other nipple. She was sure he’d go back to where the woman with the glasses was waiting. You could hit him with a can opener again or threaten to report him to the police, she thought, but if this man decides he wants to go home he’ll go home.

  Chiaki belie
ved that if you chose something painful, accepted the pain and left something beautiful behind on your body as a result, you got stronger. She had to get at least a little stronger than she was right now, or she wouldn’t be able to bear the loneliness she’d feel when Kawashima Masayuki left. Sitting at her dressing table, she shook drops of undiluted medicinal mouthwash into a ball of absorbent cotton, and used it to sterilise her nipple. She made two small marks on either side of the nipple with a felt-tip pen, checking in the mirror to make sure the line between them was perfectly horizontal. She walked back to the sofa and sat down, then took the needle from the soup bowl and gazed at the tip of it. It was shaped exactly like a hypodermic, only this needle didn’t go down into you but through you, opening a tiny tunnel between the cells. She picked up the small tube of teramycin ointment and squeezed about four centimetres on to the rim of the soup bowl. She was coating the tip of the needle with the ointment, when she noticed that the man had sat up and was watching her.

  Kawashima had awoken feeling as if the left half of his face were on fire, and for a while he was unable to see anything at all. As his vision and mind gradually cleared, he remembered little by little the events of the night before. He sat up slowly just as the girl, naked from the waist up and wearing surgical gloves, was settling back down on the sofa. Now her attention was riveted on her own nipple. She pinched it between the fingertips of her left hand, holding a sharp and very slender metallic object in her right. Images from the night before were still flashing through his mind. So I didn’t stab her after all, he thought. His bag was right next to the sofa, where he’d left it. His coat lay folded on top of it, and on top of the coat were the ice pick, the knife, and his wallet. As soon as I get out of here, he thought, I’ll throw the knife and ice pick away. No need to dispose of the notes. Writing them had been exciting. There was something in those notes, something mysterious and vital. Which was why he’d been so obsessed with the question of whether or not she’d read them.