by Kōji Suzuki
“Kaoru, would you mind …” Reiko trailed off again, fixing him with a clinging gaze. “Would you mind watching over his studies?”
“You mean, as his tutor?”
“Yes.”
Teaching children was his specialty, and he had time for one or two more students. But he wasn’t sure Ryoji actually needed a tutor. Just from their brief talk together it was obvious that Ryoji was far more capable than other students his age.
But it wasn’t only that. If the cancer had already spread to his lungs and his brain, Kaoru knew that all the tutors and all the studying in the world wouldn’t make any difference in the end. There was no chance that this kid would return to school. But then, maybe that was precisely why she wanted to hire a tutor, in the hopes that letting him prepare to go back to school and resume his studies would restore his faith in the future. Kaoru knew how important it was for those surrounding the patient to show by their actions that they hadn’t given up hope.
“Sure. I have time to come by twice a week, if that would do.”
Reiko took two or three steps toward Kaoru and placed her hands demurely in front of her, one over the other. “Thank you. Not only will it benefit his schoolwork, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to have someone to talk to.”
“Okay, then.”
No doubt Ryoji didn’t have a friend in the world. Kaoru could understand, because he’d been the same. He’d been just a little of a social outcast at school. But in his case, he’d had a good relationship with his parents that had saved him from feeling lonely. Crazy as his father could be, he’d been the best possible conversation partner for Kaoru. With his father and mother around, Kaoru hadn’t been inclined to wonder why he’d been born into this world. He’d never had doubts about his identity.
What Reiko sought in Kaoru was a father figure for her son. Kaoru didn’t have a problem with that. He was confident he could play that role, and do it well.
But, he wondered: Does she also want a husband figure for herself?
Kaoru’s imagination began to run away with him. He wasn’t as confident on that score. But he wanted to at least try to be the man Reiko needed.
They arranged a date and time for his next visit. Then Kaoru left Ryoji’s hospital room.
4
Kaoru and Ryoji ended up talking with each other a lot, even outside their scheduled lessons. Usually their talks ended up focusing on general science topics. Kaoru was reminded of his own childhood, when his desire to understand the world had led him to delve deeply into natural science.
At one time, Kaoru had desired to formulate a system or theory that would encompass and explain things normally dismissed as non-science—paranormal phenomena. But the more he learned, the more he came to see that no matter what unified theory he came up with, there would still be phenomena that couldn’t be accounted for within it. That realization combined with his father’s illness turned his exploring impulses into an interest in a practical field of study, namely medicine.
Kaoru snapped out of his reverie and looked at Ryoji, a younger fellow-inquirer into the workings of the universe.
Ryoji was sitting cross-legged on his bed as always, rocking gently back and forth. Reiko was in a chair by the window, watching them talk, and she must have been fairly sleepy, for she’d started moving her head back and forth in time with her son’s movements.
“So is that what you’re interested in right now?”
Ryoji had been peppering Kaoru with questions about genetics.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Ryoji turned his normally hollow gaze forward and began to stretch where he sat on the bed. He was smiling like he always did, although there was nothing funny about what they were discussing. It wasn’t a healthy smile. It was the desperate grin of someone at the end of his own life scorning the world. Kaoru thought he’d gotten used to it, but it could still annoy him if he looked at it long enough. If his father smiled like that, he’d give him a good talking-to—he’d rip into him, father or not.
There was only one way to wipe that smile off Ryoji’s face: goad him into a passionate debate.
Kaoru changed the subject. “So what are your thoughts on the theory of evolution?” It was a natural progression from genetics.
“What do you mean?” Ryoji squirmed and rolled his eyes at Kaoru.
“Okay, how’s this for starters? Does evolution move randomly or toward a predetermined goal?”
“What do you think?” This was one of Ryoji’s less pleasing habits. He always tried to ferret out his interlocutor’s thinking first, instead of coming straight out with his own opinion.
“I think evolution moves in a certain direction, but always with a certain latitude for choice.” Kaoru couldn’t bring himself to give a ringing endorsement of mainstream Darwinian evolutionary theory. Even now that he was taking his first steps toward becoming a specialist in a natural science, he couldn’t completely abandon the idea that there was a purpose behind it all.
“The direction theory. That’s pretty much what I believe, too.” Ryoji leaned toward Kaoru, as if he’d accomplished something.
“Shall we start with the emergence of life?”
“The emergence of life?” Ryoji looked truly astonished.
“Sure. How you look at the emergence of life is an important question.”
“It is?” Ryoji furrowed his brow and looked like he wanted to get out of this question but quick.
Kaoru didn’t appreciate this attitude of Ryoji’s. For a kid like him it should be fun to play around with questions like this. The question of why life on earth was able to gain the ability to evolve was intimately connected with the question of how life first emerged on earth. Kaoru, at least, had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of debating this with his father.
“Well, let’s move on, then. Let’s grant that life emerged, by some mechanism we don’t yet understand. So, next …” Kaoru stopped to let Ryoji step in.
“I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind.”
“Are there no variations?”
“Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the color of the leaves, the type of fruit—all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn’t get sunlight it’ll wither, if it doesn’t get enough nutrients the trunk’ll be thin. Maybe it’ll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples.”
Kaoru licked his lips. He didn’t mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.
“So you’re saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it’s all because they were programmed that way from the start?”
“Well, yeah.”
“In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began.”
Ryoji responded innocently. “Whose will? God’s?”
But Kaoru wasn’t thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.
He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.
Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after orogenic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.
But the image that came to Kaoru’s mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water’s edge and maki
ng mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn’t believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.
Right in front of Kaoru was Ryoji’s bald head. Because Ryoji was hunched over, the top of his head came up to the tip of Kaoru’s nose. At this very moment, within that emaciated little body, a violent cellular conflict was being enacted. As it was within Kaoru’s father Hideyuki. He’d lost most of his stomach, part of his large intestine, and his liver. And still, more as-yet-unknown cancer cells had taken up residence in some new spot in his body and were writhing there even now.
An unexpected inspiration came to Kaoru.
Cancer cells invaded a normal organ, changing its color and shape and constructing new bulges, until the normal functioning of the organ was impaired and it died. The obviously negative aspects of this were what stood out, but at the same time it was possible to detect in the cancer’s actions a certain groping towards something. By infiltrating the blood and lymph to penetrate cells elsewhere, it was experimenting with transplanting its immortal nature bit by bit. But to what end?
To create somewhere within the body a new organ adapted to the future. Maybe the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus was nothing but a sort of trial-and-error attempt to create a new organ.
In the process, large numbers of human beings would die, just as most of the fish had died at the water’s edge. But just as after a hundred million years sea life had finally made it onto the land, someday, after countless sacrifices, maybe the human race would find itself with a new organ. Humanity would have evolved. Maybe an evolutionary leap comparable to the movement from the water to the land was impossible without something like a new organ. When would it happen?
Human cancer deaths were surging upward, but without knowing when the cancer cells had started their work it was impossible to know if the human race had just begun its fumbling toward evolution, or was about to complete it. The only thing certain was that the pace of evolution was accelerating. The time it took for apes to evolve into humans was shorter than what had been needed for sea creatures to evolve into amphibians, so much shorter that there was almost no comparison. So it was possible. The intervals in the evolutionary process were gradually getting shorter, so maybe it wasn’t too soon for this to be evolution, too.
Kaoru wanted to think so. He wanted to turn his attention to anything that would afford him hope. He wanted to believe that his father would be the first one to successfully evolve, rather than just another sacrifice.
To be reborn. Kaoru would have wanted that, if it were possible. No doubt everybody wanted to live again. The gift of eternal life.
Since it was a property of the MHC virus to create immortal cells, it was only natural to fantasize about human immortality. Maybe even Ryoji had a chance.
Kaoru almost said so, but bit back the words. Anything that sounded like an affirmation of the illness might have the effect of loosening the boy’s attachment to living.
He heard faint snoring right behind him. Reiko, who had been nodding off for some time, had finally lowered her face to the table and gone to sleep. Kaoru and Ryoji looked at each other and giggled.
It was still early, not even eight o’clock. Outside the window, the evening cityscape was starting to emerge from the summer dusk. From below the window came the sounds of highway traffic, suddenly loud.
Reiko’s elbow twitched, knocking an empty soda can to the floor, but she didn’t awaken.
Kaoru spoke cautiously. “Your mom’s asleep. Maybe it’s time I was leaving.” The lesson had ended long ago.
“Weren’t you about to say something to me just now, Kaoru?”
Ryoji looked discontented, as if he hadn’t had his fill of talking yet.
“We’ll pick up where we left off next time.”
Kaoru stood up and looked around the room. Reiko had gone to sleep with her right cheek pillowed on her hands and her face turned in his direction. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was half open, and the back of her hand was wet with drool. Fast asleep, she looked quite cute.
It was the first time he’d thought that about a woman ten years older than him. Kaoru felt affection for her entire body, and harbored a momentary desire to touch her.
Ryoji reached out and shook her shoulder. “Mom, Mom.” She still didn’t wake up.
“It’s no good. She’s out like a light.”
Ryoji trained his innocent eyes on Kaoru, and then on the extra bed provided for relatives accompanying the patient. “Mom gets tired taking care of me, so I like to let her sleep when she can. She’ll have to wake up in the middle of the night tonight anyway,” he said, as if he weren’t making a veiled entreaty.
Kaoru felt an unaccustomed warmth in his body, as if Ryoji had managed to peek inside his heart. He realized that what the boy was really saying was, Would you pick her up and move her to the extra bed real gently so she doesn’t wake up?
If he could manage to pick her up, it was only about six feet to the bed. Reiko’s knees beneath her short culottes were pressed tightly together as if to fend off any attempts to touch her. Carrying a woman to bed was nothing for someone of Kaoru’s physical strength, but his guard went up at the thought of touching her—he wasn’t sure he’d be able to control his desires in the face of that stimulus.
“When she’s like this you couldn’t move her with a lever.” Ryoji’s expression as he said this was suggestive; then he pointedly turned his face away from Kaoru, even as he seemed to be looking right through him. It was as if he knew Kaoru was interested in his mother as a woman, and was egging him on.
Look, I know you want to touch my Mom. It’s okay. You have my permission. I’ll even give you the opportunity.
Ryoji was provoking him, biting back laughter while he did it.
Kaoru wordlessly set up the extra bed. It wasn’t so much that he was caving in to Ryoji’s challenge as that he was eager to yield to whatever he felt on touching Reiko. If his feelings were going to deepen, let them. As yet he didn’t understand the effect physical contact with her would have on his psychological state.
Kaoru placed his arms behind Reiko’s neck and under her knees, and in one motion lifted her up and placed her on the bed.
As he laid her down, her lips brushed against his neck, just for a moment. She opened her eyes slightly and flexed her arms so as to hug him closer, then loosened her grip with a contented look on her face, and fell back to sleep.
Kaoru stayed silent and motionless for a little while, afraid she’d wake up if he moved. For several seconds, his body covered hers. With his face between her chest and belly, he could feel the resilience of the flesh of her abdomen; his eyes were trained on her face. He was looking up at her face from below, essentially. He could see the fine lines of her jaw, and above it the two black holes of her nostrils. He’d never seen her face from this angle before.
At length he stood up again. As he separated himself from her body, he asked himself, repeatedly: Am I falling in love with her?
The touch of her lips was still vivid on the skin of his neck.
“Well, then, I’ll see you next week.”
Kaoru put his hand hesitantly on the doorknob, so as not to reveal the pounding of his heart.
Ryoji still sat cross-legged on his bed, rocking back and forth, cracking his knuckles. Unlike a few moments ago, his face held no look of provocation or mockery now—he’d stifled all expression.
“Good night.”
Kaoru slipped out of the room. He could feel Ryoji’s unnatural smile fixed on the door as he shut it behind him.
Kaoru had a flash of intuition. This meeting was not mere coincidence. His
future would be intimately tied with Reiko and Ryoji.
5
Among Kaoru’s pleasures in life were his visits to the office of Assistant Professor Saiki in the Pathology Department. Saiki had been a classmate of his father’s in this very university, and now, with his father in this unfortunate condition, Saiki was always ready to lend an ear or some advice. Officially, he wasn’t Kaoru’s advisor, but he was an old friend of the family, someone Kaoru had known since childhood.
These days there was a specific purpose to Kaoru’s regular visits. Cells from the cancer torturing his father were being cultured in Saiki’s lab, and Kaoru liked to come by to look at them under the microscope. To adequately fend off this enemy’s attacks, he felt he needed to know its true visage.
Kaoru left the hospital proper and entered the building containing the Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and Microbiology laboratories. The university hospital was a motley collection of new and old buildings; this was one of the older ones. The Forensic Medicine classrooms were on the second floor, while the third housed Pathology, where he was headed.
He climbed the stairs and turned left into a hallway lined with small labs on either side. Kaoru stopped in front of Professor Saiki’s door and knocked.
“Come in,” Saiki called out. The door was open a crack; Kaoru stuck his head in. “Oh, it’s you.” This was Saiki’s standard response on seeing Kaoru.
“Is this a bad time?”
“I’m busy, as you can see, but you’re welcome to do what you like.”
Saiki was involved in examining cells taken this afternoon from some diseased tissue; he barely looked up. That was fine with Kaoru; he’d rather be left alone to make his observations in freedom.
“Don’t mind if I do, then.”
Kaoru opened the door of the large refrigerator-like carbon dioxide incubator and searched for his father’s cells. The incubator was kept at a constant temperature and a nearly constant level of carbon dioxide. It wouldn’t do for him to keep the door open long.
