by Kōji Suzuki
“I wonder why that is,” Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.
“Is this, like, common knowledge?” It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who’d been ignorant of it.
“Well, I for one wasn’t aware of it.”
“Really?”
“So, what? Does this mean that perhaps there’s some sort of relationship between people’s lifespans and gravity? The data’s so clear and specific, it’s hard to think it’s just a coincidence. By the way, kiddo, how do you define a ‘longevity zone’?”
It was only natural for Hideyuki to stick at that point. Kaoru felt the same way. How exactly should he define a longevity zone? Was it an area with lots of long-lived people in it? Perhaps an area where the average lifespan was longer than in other areas? If that was what he meant, there was nothing to prevent him from seeing all of Japan as one big longevity zone.
He had to use a more limiting definition. It would be more exact, at least, to stipulate that a longevity zone was an area clearly delineated from the surrounding territory, a high percentage of the inhabitants of which were a hundred or more years in age.
But in reality, no such mathematical definition existed. The villages that he’d seen talked about on TV were simply places that had been found, statistically and experientially, to have lots of long-lived people in them, and they were known for it.
“I’m not sure there is a mathematical definition.”
He found it more and more curious that the villages mentioned on TV, defined as impressionistically and sentimentally as they were, should match up so nicely with gravitational anomalies, so clearly visible as numerical values. Kaoru and Hideyuki both were impressed by this.
“Too vague. Still, I wonder why it came out like this?” Hideyuki said this under his breath, as if bothered.
“Have you heard anything about the relationship between gravity and life, Dad?”
“Well, they did an experiment where they had a chicken lay eggs in a zero-gravity environment, and they turned out to be unfertilized eggs.”
“I’ve heard about that. That was ages ago.”
Somewhere in the corner of his mind he recalled the sight of his father’s sperm three months ago. He remembered reading an article about the chickens, which had laid unfertilized eggs in spite of the fact that they had copulated. He’d forgotten exactly what the experiment had been trying to prove. He’d read about it in a mass-market weekly, which had seized on the results of what was actually an old experiment in order to make some point about modern sexuality.
His imagination started to run away with him. Suppose an egg started to undergo cellular division without fertilization, growing through birth to maturity—what kind of human being would result? Kaoru got a mental image of a woman with a smooth, egg-shaped face. He shivered. He tried to banish the image, but the woman’s slippery face wouldn’t leave him.
“Well, nobody’s made a logical connection yet, I don’t think. But anyway, why did you think to compare gravitational anomalies and longevity?”
“Huh?” Sometimes the images taking shape in his brain undermined Kaoru’s ability to think, and he couldn’t hear what was being said to him.
“Stop making me repeat myself.” Few things annoyed the impatient Hideyuki more.
“Sorry.”
“What gave you the idea, in other words?”
Kaoru explained how a TV special on longevity villages had been playing in the background while on the computer he’d been looking at a map of gravitational anomalies, and how he’d had a flash of intuition.
“I think it was just a coincidence.”
“Meaningless coincidences produce nothing. Take jinxes, for instance.”
“Jinxes?”
Kaoru actually had something of an idea why his father would bring up something unscientific like that now. He was trying to give Machiko an entry into the conversation.
Having pretty much finished fixing snacks to go with the beer, Machiko had joined them at the dining room table, where she sat listening to the conversation without offering up a word. Not that she’d looked particularly bored, but she did lean forward just a bit when her husband mentioned jinxes.
Her reaction didn’t escape Hideyuki’s notice.
“Hey, Machi. Know of any interesting jinxes?”
“Why ask me?”
“You like that kind of thing, don’t you? Fortune-telling, charms, stuff like that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you reading the horoscopes every week. Plus, you know a lot about folk-tales from around the world.”
“Okay, jinxes. How about the one that says if you give a handkerchief to your lover as a present you’ll break up?”
“Everybody knows that one. Don’t you know anything, you know, weirder?”
Kaoru thought he could guess what kind of thing his father was looking for. He was probably trying to find an example of a belief that connected, seemingly at random, two disparate phenomena.
“Something weirder? Okay, how about this? If you see a black cat swimming in a river, someone close to you will die.”
Kaoru immediately pursed his lips. “Really?”
“That’s what they say. You’ve heard it, haven’t you, dear?” She looked at Hideyuki for support. But he just laughed and cocked his head.
“Don’t you have any that are just way out there?”
“How about the one that says, when you leave the house, if a chair has its back to the window, you’ll drop your wallet?”
Hideyuki clapped his hands.
“Okay, we’ll go with that one. Now, it may be true or it may be false, but let’s just take it as a given that such a superstition exists.”
“It does!” Machiko frowned.
“Alright, alright!” Hideyuki said, putting his palms together. “Now, we have two phenomena brought together. A chair having its back to the window when you leave the house, and dropping your wallet. Scientifically, these two phenomena have no relation to each other. There are lots of superstitions in the world, and no doubt different kinds come about for different reasons. But what I find fascinating is when you have the exact same superstition existing in two distant places, isolated from each other. If this crazy superstition that Machi just told us about happened to exist in different places on the globe, it’d make you wonder, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.”
“So, are there superstitions like that? That exist in different places in the world?” Kaoru looked back and forth between Machiko and Hideyuki.
Hideyuki prompted his wife. “How about it, Machi?”
“Of course there are. The jinx I just told you about is one. It exists in Europe and in the Americas, too.”
Kaoru and Hideyuki exchanged skeptical looks.
“By the way, Machi, have you ever thought about why superstitions arise?”
“No,” she said, curtly.
“What about you, kiddo?”
“I guess it has something to do with human psychology. I’m not real sure, though.”
By this point there were five empty beer bottles sitting in front of Hideyuki. His conversational engine was finally getting warmed up.
“Ask yourself: what is a superstition? It’s an oral tradition that if you see something or experience something, a certain thing will happen. With a jinx it’s something bad, but of course a superstition can involve something good, or even something that can’t necessarily be categorized as good or bad. To cut to the chase, a superstition is something that connects one phenomenon with another phenomenon. Sometimes science can explain the connection. For example, the superstition that when clouds move from east to west it means it’ll rain can be explained very easily by modern meteorology. There are others that you can understand intuitively, like the one that says being photographed takes years off your life. Or ones about breaking chopsticks or sandal thongs, or seeing black cats or snakes—those aren’t too hard to understand. Those things are just eerie
somehow. There’s something about black cats and snakes that makes people the world over uneasy.
“The problem is superstitions that aren’t reasonable. The ones that strike you as totally arbitrary, like, ‘Why in the world do people believe that?’ The jinx Machi told us about is a good example. What could having a chair back toward the window when you leave the house possibly have to do with dropping your wallet?”
Hideyuki stopped and looked Kaoru in the eye.
“Maybe it’s based on experience.”
“No doubt it is. Maybe people found out through experience that the chances of dropping your wallet are greater if a chair’s back is to the window when you leave your house.”
“But there’s no statistical necessity that it has to be that way.”
“We’re not talking strict accuracy here. Let’s say when you drop your wallet, it just so happens that the chair’s back is to the window. And let’s say that the next time you drop your wallet, the chair’s back is toward the window again. So you tell someone about it, suggesting that the two phenomena are related somehow. Now the important thing is whether or not the person you tell about it has had a similar experience—whether or not they can nod and say, ‘yeah, you’re right’. If the idea is dismissed by a third party, then chances are it won’t be handed down. But once it becomes established as a jinx, then by the mere fact of people’s being aware of it, it can influence their actions, and so it stands a good chance of surviving. Once the relationship is established between the two things, the fact that people are aware of the relationship strengthens the bond even more, see. Reality and imagination begin to correspond to one another.”
“So you’re saying that the phenomenon of a chair having its back to the window when you leave the room and the phenomenon of dropping your wallet exert some kind of invisible influence on each other?”
“You can’t rule out the possibility that they’re connected on some level, deep down.”
What was his father trying to say, using the superstition as an example? Kaoru had the feeling that he could substitute “life” for “superstition” and the argument would still stand up.
“Life,” Kaoru muttered. As if that word were a cue, the three exchanged glances.
“It reminds me of the Loop.”
It was Machiko who brought up the subject. It seemed she felt it was a natural progression from the word “life”.
Hideyuki had started his college career in pre-med. He’d switched fields, to logic, in graduate school, studying the concepts of metamathematics, but one thing led to another and he found his old abandoned interest in the world of living things rekindled. He decided it would be interesting to see if the language of mathematics could explain life. His original interest in biology was reanimated as it found expression in numbers.
Thus it was that when he’d finished his doctorate and received an offer to join a joint Japanese-American research project on artificial life, he’d accepted without a second thought. To create life within a computer? Hideyuki couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more.
He was still young, in his late twenties, married but childless. Five years after he took the appointment, the project was brought to a halt in an entirely unforeseen way. It wasn’t a failure, having achieved a certain manner of success. But it never felt like success to Hideyuki because the way it all ended stuck in his throat.
This project into which he’d poured all his youthful passion, only to see it miscarry, was known as the Loop.
5
Hideyuki presented a new question to Kaoru, forcefully steering the conversation away from the Loop.
“So do you think life emerged by chance or by necessity? Which side are you on?”
“The only answer I can give to that question is, ‘I don’t know’.”
It was all he could say. He couldn’t affirm the necessity argument just because he himself existed. In the absence of confirmed life anywhere else, it was possible that life on earth was an utterly random gift, unique in the universe.
“I’m asking you what you think.”
“But Dad, aren’t you always saying that it’s important to recognize what modern science doesn’t know? To be willing to say ‘I don’t know’?”
Hideyuki chuckled at the question. A look at his face revealed the alcohol taking effect. The number of empties was up to six.
“You don’t have to tell me that. Think of this as a game if you have to. We’re in the world of play. I want to know what your gut tells you, that’s all.”
Machiko had gone into the kitchen to fry up some noodles; now she stopped what she was doing and fixed her gaze on Kaoru, a gleam in her eye.
Kaoru thought about himself. Things like the emergence of life and the universe were beyond the reach of his imagination, when he got right down to it. It was better to take the emergence of one individual as an example, and work up from there.
First and foremost, what about the inception of his own life? When was that? When he’d crawled out of his mother’s womb and had his umbilical cord cut? Or when the egg, after insemination in the fallopian tube, had been safely embedded in the wall of the womb?
If he was going to talk about inception, then he figured he should probably take insemination as the first step. His nervous system had taken shape by around three weeks from insemination.
Now, he thought, just suppose that a fetus of that age had consciousness, the ability to think. To that fetus, the mother’s womb would be the whole universe. Why am I here, the fetus asks. Immersed in amniotic fluid, he begins to wonder about the mechanism of conception. But as he knows nothing of the world outside the womb, he can’t even imagine that his own conception was preceded by reproductive acts. All he can do is make guesses based on evidence he finds within the womb.
So he begins to think of the amniotic fluid itself as his parent—a natural conclusion. He begins to think of the amniotic fluid as the primordial soup covering the primeval earth, churning until twenty kinds of amino acid join hands in brotherhood to make life-enabling proteins; these then begin to replicate themselves … The probability of which is, of course, the same as the monkey at the typewriter, banging keys at random, coining up with a passage from Shakespeare.
A probability so low that even with trillions of monkeys banging away for trillions of years, it was still virtually nil. And if a passage from Shakespeare should appear anyway? Would people still call it a coincidence? Of course not—they’d suspect some kind of fix. A man in a monkey suit sitting at one of the typewriters, or an intelligent monkey …
But the fetus immersed in amniotic fluid thinks his conception was by chance—he can’t make his imagination comprehend the mechanism behind it. And that’s because he doesn’t know about the world outside.
Only when he crawls out of the birth canal after roughly thirty-six weeks in the womb does he for the first time see the outside of the mother who bore him. Only after growing and increasing in knowledge yet further does he come to understand with exactness why and how he was conceived and born. As long as we’re inside the womb—inside the universe—we can’t understand the way it works. Our powers of apprehension are blacked out on that point. They have to be.
Kaoru decided to apply the example of the fetus in its universe—the womb—to the question of life on earth and the universe it occupied.
In most cases, the womb comes pre-equipped with everything necessary to nurture a fetus after insemination. But does it always host a fetus? Of course not. The phenomenon of insemination itself is controlled largely by chance. And many women choose not to have children.
And even if a woman has a couple of children, the length of time in which her womb holds a fetus is still less than two years total. In other words, equipped for a fetus though it may be, the womb is usually unoccupied.
Kaoru decided to take a step back and think about the universe again. Given that we are actually existing within it, it seems reasonable to say that the universe is equipped with what
is necessary to sustain life. In which case, life arose out of necessity, right? But, no, remember the womb: it may be capable of sustaining the life of a fetus, but it’s usually without one. So life arose by chance, then? The universe is not constantly filled with life—indeed, a universe that does not beget life may indeed be more natural.
In the end, Kaoru couldn’t come up with an answer after all.
But there was Hideyuki, drinking his beer and expecting a reply.
“Maybe we’re the only life in the universe after all,” said Kaoru.
Hideyuki grunted. “That’s what your gut tells you?”
Hideyuki stared at his son fascinatedly, then shifted his gaze to his wife.
Machiko was sleeping peacefully, her head pillowed on her hands on the table.
“Hey, go get a blanket for Machi, will ya?”
“Okay.” He immediately went to the bedroom and brought back a blanket, which he handed to Hideyuki. Hideyuki draped it over Machiko’s shoulders and smiled at her sleeping face before turning back to his son.
The eastern sky had begun to whiten without them noticing, and the temperature of the room had dropped. Night in the Futami household was over, and it was just about time to sleep.
Hideyuki’s eyes as he drank the last of the stale beer were hollow.
Kaoru waited until his father was finished drinking, then said, “Hey, Dad. Can I ask you a favor?”
“What?”
Kaoru lay the gravitational anomaly map in front of his father again. “What do you think of this?”
Kaoru’s pinky was pointing at a particular spot on the map, a desert region, the so-called Four Corners area of the western North American continent, where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado met.
“What about it?” Hideyuki brought his eyes close to the map, blinking.
“Look closely at it. Now take another look at the gravitational anomaly figures for this area.”
Hideyuki rubbed his eyes again and again, as the numbers swam in his tired eyes.
