by Mariko Koike
As the ambulance attendant had predicted, the wound wasn’t as serious as the volume of blood might have suggested. The chief of medicine at the nearby surgical hospital to which Tamao was transported had carefully stitched up the cut and prescribed the appropriate medications, while declaring confidently that it wouldn’t be necessary for the patient to remain at the hospital overnight. Nevertheless, Tamao was clearly in a great deal of pain. She cried nonstop through the entire process, and her parents were greatly relieved when her normal, healthy color returned the following day.
The doctor told Teppei and Misao that there was no need to worry about infection, and assured them that as long as they gave Tamao the prescribed meds on schedule, fed her nutritious meals, and made sure the affected leg was kept immobile, she should recover completely in ten days or so. After this healing period Tamao would be ready to go back to kindergarten, and any scarring should be minimal. In fact, as Tamao grew, the scar on her knee might very well disappear entirely.
So there was really nothing to fret about—at least, not where Tamao was concerned. However …
“Ooh, yuck!” Tamao said. Misao had been trying to force the foul-tasting liquid medicine down her daughter’s throat, and when Tamao involuntarily swallowed it, tears sprang to her eyes and she stuck out her tongue in disgust.
“Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as medicine that tastes like candy,” Misao said with a strained expression. That wasn’t true, of course, but Tamao accepted her mother’s white lie at face value. “If you don’t take this medicine like a good girl, germs could get into your cut and it might get infected. Then it wouldn’t get better, and it would start to hurt again, too. We don’t want that to happen, do we?”
“What kind of germs?” Tamao asked.
“Germs that would make the cut on your leg feel sore and painful. Then the bacteria—the germs—might spread through the rest of your body, and you could end up running a fever and having a really bad tummyache, among other things.”
“Would I not be able to walk, then?”
“That’s certainly a possibility. Wouldn’t that be awful? That’s why you need to be patient right now, and keep taking your medicine.”
“I just want to play,” Tamao moaned.
“I know, and you can play as much as you want just as soon as you get better. You’ll be able to start going to kindergarten every day, too.”
“But the medicine tastes yucky, and I hate the way it feels in my mouth.”
“I know, sweetie. You only have to hang in there a while longer.”
Tamao was sitting on the living room couch, nervously jiggling her uninjured left leg up and down. “Damn it to hell!” she blurted out.
Misao grimaced. “Who taught you that? Where did you hear it?”
“Oh, Tsutomu says it all the time: ‘Damn it to hell.’ Kaori says it, too.”
Misao shrugged and looked at Teppei with an expression that was meant to convey, A little help here, please? But Teppei’s thoughts were elsewhere, and he didn’t meet her eyes.
There was something he just couldn’t wrap his mind around. Three days earlier, when he got the phone call saying that Tamao had been injured, he had immediately left the office and rushed to the private surgical hospital where she was being treated. As soon as he arrived at the examination room, Misao went to a nearby restroom to try to wash the worst of the blood out of the clothes Tamao had been wearing.
Teppei had thought of a number of questions on his way to the hospital. “Is it safe to assume that my daughter’s cut was caused by a foreign object?” he asked the doctor right away. “Maybe there was something sharp in one of the storage lockers, and it somehow came into contact with her leg?”
“Strictly speaking, I can’t really endorse that theory, Mr. Kano,” the handsome doctor responded, with a faintly smug smile. He didn’t appear to be much older than forty, and the professional gravitas conferred by his white coat was the only thing that kept him from looking like a libidinous lounge lizard.
“What do you mean by that?” Teppei asked.
The doctor turned his face, with its remarkably rosy, lustrous cheeks, toward Teppei. “If we consider the circumstances, there are a few things that might have caused a laceration this deep,” he said briskly. “It would have had to be something very sharp—for example, an old kitchen knife, or a sharp-edged piece of stainless steel. However, even if a static object like that had chanced to graze the skin, it wouldn’t have caused this type of gaping wound.”
Reluctantly, Teppei raised a troubling question: “Do you suppose the children might have gotten into a fight, among themselves?” If that turned out to be the explanation, dealing with the Inoue family could become very awkward in the future.
The doctor just smiled again and said, “No, that doesn’t appear to be what happened. Your wife was asking the same thing, though.”
“Then what did happen?”
“Well, it’s an unusual case, but this is what I’m thinking right now,” the doctor began slowly, reflectively rubbing the back of his neck. “It might be what we call a weasel slash: that is, a flesh wound caused by contact with some type of sharp object propelled through the air by a sudden gust of wind. The scientific term for the phenomenon is ‘atmospheric vacuum,’ and it occurs fairly often in the mountains when people are out skiing or hiking or whatever.”
“‘Weasel slash’? So you’re saying that something can just come along and slice someone’s leg open for no reason, out of the blue?”
“No, I didn’t say ‘for no reason.’ As you know, around this time of year, in early spring, it isn’t unusual for a sudden burst of wind—weasel wind, if you will—to crop up in a matter of minutes, almost like a miniature tornado. That gust can pick up a rock or a jagged piece of wood, and if someone’s extremities chance to be in the path of the sharp-edged flying object, that person might conceivably get slashed and sustain a wound like this. The fact is, something of the sort happened to my older sister, many years ago. Her leg—or rather her ankle, to be precise—was sliced open in the blink of an eye. It was really something to see.”
“You don’t say,” Teppei mumbled. “So I guess we just have to look at this injury as a freak accident, and chalk it up to being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
The doctor looked thoughtful. “The only hole in the theory I mentioned is that the kind of wind that could cause a weasel slash doesn’t usually develop indoors in a closed space. Are you absolutely certain your daughter was inside the entire time?”
“From what I heard, she and her friends were playing down in the basement of our building.”
“Even so, I’m very nearly positive that the injury must have happened outdoors. It’s possible your daughter didn’t notice it at the time. Then, after the children went inside to play in the basement, the cut began to bleed profusely, and that’s when she finally realized she was injured. That makes sense to me.”
“But wouldn’t someone notice such a deep cut right away?”
“Not necessarily,” the doctor said. His supercilious smile seemed to say, Don’t worry, you aren’t the first ignorant parent I’ve had to explain this to. “Children have an extraordinary ability to keep on playing obliviously through pain or fever,” he went on. “You’d be amazed. I once had a patient, a five-year-old boy, who fell off the slide at a playground and broke a bone in his leg. It was a clean fracture, but he picked himself up and continued to run around on the damaged limb for the next few minutes, as if nothing was wrong.”
Teppei wasn’t satisfied with the doctor’s answers to his questions, by any means, but a moment later Misao came back into the exam room, so he didn’t pursue the conversation.
After he and Misao had taken Tamao home in a taxi and put her to bed, Teppei decided to take a look around the basement. Evidently someone else had already been down there—probably one or both of the caretakers, although it could have been Eiko Inoue—because the entire floor had been mopped, and no trace
s of Tamao’s blood remained. Teppei might not have been able to locate the site of the accident (or of its aftermath, if you subscribed to the doctor’s delayed-reaction theory) if Misao hadn’t spoken of finding their daughter next to an unused storage locker at the rear of the basement. That gave Teppei an idea of where to look, and when he noticed some extra-large puddles of mop water in the immediate area, he was certain he’d found the place. He stood there for a long moment, gazing around.
All the storage compartments were padlocked, and there was no way to open them without a key. Teppei tried running his hand along the outside edges of the closest storage locker. If someone was racing around the basement and accidentally crashed into one of the lockers, that person might conceivably sustain an injury that broke the skin. However, it was still difficult to imagine a scenario in which a small child collided headfirst with a locker and only sustained a cut on one knee.
Teppei went over to his own storage compartment, unlocked it, and carried one of the old chairs to the back of the basement. He clambered up onto the seat and surveyed the area, but the only thing atop the tidy rows of storage lockers was several months’ worth of dust. Teppei didn’t see anything that could have made a scratch on a human being, much less opened up a flesh wound.
From his elevated vantage point, he did spy Tsutomu Inoue’s ancient tricycle. It was lying on its side in one of the corridors between the lockers, and Teppei got down off the chair and went over to examine it. There wasn’t a single bit of bent or broken-off metal on the tricycle, and he couldn’t find any dried blood, either. So I guess it wasn’t the attack of the killer tricycle, he thought self-mockingly. But what else could it have been?
Sharp objects, sharp objects: maybe something like a worn-out straight razor that someone had carelessly tossed out, or a pocketknife, or a kitchen utensil? Teppei didn’t find anything of the sort. Apart from the furniture and other items locked away in the storage compartments, the only things lying around the basement were a few bundles of old newspapers and a pile of cardboard boxes containing some kind of dubious “health food,” left behind when the corporate occupants of 201 moved out. Evidently no one had ever bothered to come back for those boxes.
It occurred to Teppei that a shard of glass might have been lurking unnoticed on the floor, but he made a complete circuit of the basement with his eyes peeled and didn’t see a speck of glass. There was no sign that any of the fluorescent overhead lights had been cracked or broken, and all the serpentine pipes on the ceiling appeared to be intact, as well.
In the end, Teppei concluded that it was probably just as the doctor had surmised. The children had been running around outdoors and, by chance, Tamao had been in the path of a sudden, coruscating surge of wind laden with sharp pebbles (or something), but she didn’t notice the so-called weasel slash on her knee until after she and her friends had gone to play in the basement.
Later, Teppei and Misao were able to piece together what had happened by cross-referencing Tamao’s version of events with the accounts of Tsutomu and Kaori, who had also been on hand. At the time of the accident—or at least, at the point when Tamao collapsed near the back wall—the three children had been playing by themselves in different parts of the basement.
Tsutomu had been roaring around on his old tricycle, while Kaori was leading Cookie on the leash, pretending they were out for a walk. As for Tamao, she was using Tsutomu’s plastic toy pistol to knock on the doors of the storage lockers, one by one, in an impromptu variation on the popular Japanese game of “Knock-Knock Tag,” in which children march around calling out, “Hello, is anybody home?” the way adults do when they pay unannounced visits.
Since they were all engaged in solitary pursuits, nobody was watching Tamao when she sustained the injury—or, in keeping with the doctor’s theory, when she finally realized she was bleeding. The odd thing was that the injured party herself kept insisting that she had no idea what caused the cut on her knee, or when the accident took place. According to Tamao, she was playing at the back of the basement when she suddenly felt cold all over. She happened to glance down and saw blood gushing out of her knee. The wound hadn’t yet begun to hurt, so the pain must have kicked in a couple of minutes later.
As Tamao stood there, completely befuddled, Cookie bounded up to the wall with a great burst of energy. Kaori was flustered because the leash had just been ripped out of her hands, and she came running after the dog. Cookie proceeded to go berserk, growling and barking and jumping around as if she’d taken leave of her senses.
Tsutomu arrived on the scene a minute later. He and Kaori were both so unnerved by the dog’s bizarre behavior that, in his words, “We thought maybe Cookie was sick or crazy or something.” The Inoue children had been actively afraid that the dog might attack them, so in his role as a protective big brother, Tsutomu put his arms around Kaori and held her close. After a minute Tsutomu looked around to make sure Tamao was safe, and that was when he noticed her sitting on the floor nearby, covered with blood and wearing a dazed expression.
Tamao must have begun to feel the pain right about then, because she started to bawl at the top of her lungs. Galvanized into action, Tsutomu ran over to the elevator, hopped on, and rushed upstairs to tell his mother.
In his quest for the truth, Teppei had also questioned Eiko Inoue and both the Tabatas, but they’d been unable to cast any light on the mystery of what had caused Tamao’s injury. Tamao herself remembered almost nothing, and there was no one else to talk to.
Teppei didn’t think there was any chance that the children were lying when they claimed to have been in the basement the entire time. If they had been playing outdoors, there would have been no reason to conceal that information, but they were all adamant about the fact that they hadn’t set foot outside on that particular afternoon.
There’s something weird about this building. Teppei kept remembering his unsettling conversation with the bar hostess who lived on the fifth floor, on that balmy cherry-blossom night when they’d walked home from the station together. Although he didn’t recall her exact words, he knew she had said something like, “I can’t understand why anyone would want to use that horrible basement. You couldn’t pay me to go down there. I don’t mean to spook you, but you really ought to sell your apartment and move away from here as soon as you can…”
That was just the booze talking, Teppei assured himself as he returned his attention to the newspaper he had been holding during this lengthy reverie. Why am I even thinking about such things?
He firmly believed that everything in life could be explained away as happenstance. Tamao’s accident was simply a freakish confluence of unusual coincidences. True, the doctor did say it was unlikely that a weasel wind could develop indoors, but if that wasn’t what happened, then what did? Did the air itself somehow become sentient and three-dimensional, and slice Tamao’s knee to ribbons with malicious intent? That was absurd, of course. No, there had to be a reasonable scientific explanation. Maybe some kind of atmospheric aberration, like a chance convection of incoming air, had created a powerful vortex. The air in the basement was always still and stagnant, so some other air must have flowed in from outside and created that curious phenomenon, just for a few minutes. Yes, that must be how it went down …
Misao, meanwhile, seemed to have bought into the doctor’s explanation that the injury was caused by a sudden, shard-laden wind that had kicked up out of nowhere. Or rather, she was making a concerted effort to believe the “weasel slash” theory. As for Teppei, he had no desire to beat that particular dead horse anymore. The important thing was that Tamao was safe; there was no need to obsess about what had caused her injury. It was just one of those things where no matter how long and hard you thought about it, you would never be able to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
“Honey?” Misao said as she emerged from the kitchen, and Teppei lowered his newspaper in response. Tamao was still sitting on the sofa with her leg propped up, watching a cartoon on TV. Keeping a
maternal eye on Tamao, Misao walked over to where Teppei was sitting.
“Listen,” she said quietly, “don’t you think we ought to drop in on Mr. Shoji, to say thanks and let him know how Tamao is doing?” Her tone sounded slightly on edge or, at best, businesslike. Either way, Teppei thought it was probably just because she was tired.
“Do you really think that’s necessary?” he asked. “Besides, he’s probably moved away by now.”
“No, he’s definitely still around. I was on the balcony this afternoon and I saw him going out. I haven’t run into him since the day of the accident, and it’s been bothering me that we haven’t at least gone down to pay our respects.”
“‘Pay our respects’? What could we possibly say to him? I mean, are you proposing that we drop in and say something like, ‘Thank you very much for magically getting the elevator to move the other day’? You can’t be serious. That would be like bowing down to some divine being with supernatural powers.”
“You can laugh, but it really did seem like magic at the time. Eiko said the same thing. Mr. Shoji laid both his hands on the elevator doors and chanted something, and a few seconds later the elevator started to move. I wish you could have been there. I swear, everyone was speechless with astonishment.”
“It was just coincidence,” Teppei said shortly. He was starting to get a bit annoyed. What was it with everybody these days (though if he was honest he had to include himself, as well), thinking and talking about weird supernatural stuff all the time? They were like a gaggle of elementary school students sitting around the campfire on an overnight field trip, squealing with terror over spurious tales of ghosts and monsters. “It was coincidence,” he said again. “The elevator had some kind of temporary electrical glitch, and it just happened to straighten itself out at that exact moment.”
“Hmm. I wonder.”
“There’s nothing to wonder about. I’m telling you, that’s what happened. Apparently your Mr. Shoji is just some kind of tiresome meditation teacher or something, trying to cash in on the human appetite for pseudo-spiritual baloney. He probably sized up the situation and saw it as a chance to impress some potential customers by showing off his so-called skills. I mean, a lot of people seem to be susceptible to that kind of con artist these days. And then before long he starts bragging about seeing apparitions and communicating with spirits beyond the grave. Charlatans like that are only ever interested in the ‘other side’: which is to say, in something that exists only in people’s wishful imaginations. In reality, the dead are just that—dead—and it’s simple consideration toward those who have passed on to accept that fact. All that matters is the here, and the now, and the people who are still alive.”
