Secret Rendezvous

by Kōbō Abe

  The matter was brought before the council. After inquiry, opinion was agreed that her case merited further investigation, but that there was no sign of any crime involved. After all, she had not only yielded to the engineer unresistingly, but actually expressed a desire to continue the experiment with him. Therefore it was perhaps only natural to suspect her of harboring strong hopes that the experiment would provide a cure for her frigidity. Some members of the council went so far as to accuse her of wanting to be raped.

  Respecting her own wishes, the council had entrusted her to the Psycholinguistics Center with a recommendation for long-term observation. The engineer, of course, could hardly protest. He had escaped the consequences of his crime, and moreover, he had begun to fall passionately in love with her.

  The horse, however, had had private misgivings about it all. As a member of the council he had cast an affirmative vote, but that was no reflection of his true opinion. It made little sense for a daredevil of a woman like her, with a test tube for a mother, to be so cooperative. There had to be some underlying motive. What could she want so desperately that in order to get it she was willing to endure the anguish of working face to face with her own rapist? Something that belonged to him, perhaps, such as his technical skill. For such a young woman it seemed a shade too sly, but perhaps the tapes of sexual acts were a mere pretext, and her real interest lay in the general surveillance operation itself.

  His instinct had been right on target. Before anyone realized it, the surveillance project had left the experiment behind and taken on a life of its own. It had continued to grow and proliferate, soon becoming so elaborate that it constituted a business in itself. She became the horse’s secretary, and the electrical engineer became chief of security. In retrospect, it even seemed as though she might have secretly set the whole chain of events in motion on purpose.

  (The girl from room eight turned over in her sleep. Maybe the light streaming in through the ventilator is too bright. I released the lock on the wheelchair and turned it facing a different way. She half-opened her eyes and smiled. I felt a peace like balancing on the point of a needle. When I put a finger up to her mouth she sucked on it noisily. The rain from last night which had soaked into the ground must have begun to evaporate; the air is heavy and suffocating. Today will be hot again.)

  Incidentally, I have already said as much on several occasions, but the assistant director and the horse are, of course, one and the same. The horse is the end-product of the assistant director’s philosophy that a good doctor makes a good patient. By hospital standards he is supposed to have acquired a whole new personality, but common sense tells me it doesn’t even amount to the difference in myself before and after brushing my teeth. In short, since the assistant director was unable to make his own penis cooperate, he decided to borrow the lower half of some other man’s body, have the sensations in that borrowed penis electrically transmitted to his own sex center, and thus experience sex vicariously. The weird experiment that I had observed through the hole in the ceiling of room eight in the cartilage surgical ward the first night after sneaking into the hospital (see notebook two for details) had been designed to achieve that purpose.

  His vicarious experience had been even more successful than they had hoped. When I looked in, the still-unconscious emergency doctor had just had an ejaculation, thanks to the young nurse’s massaging, and at the same time the assistant director had just had his very first orgasm; for a short time, he had even achieved an eighty-percent erection of his own. However weird, though, an experiment is only an experiment. Had that been all, probably nothing would have come of it. Weighted down with the urgent problem of my wife’s disappearance, I had no time or mental energy to devote to other people’s problems.

  That same day, however, I heard about the assistant director’s horse-man fantasy. Poor visibility does not mean total inability to see; it means only that something in the way can be seen too well. It was as though all sorts of colors of paint had been smeared over the lens of a telescope that was hard to see through to begin with.

  It happened right where notebook two ends—just after the secretary got the key to the emergency doctor’s room and led me half-forcibly to building E4. She came inside with me as though it were quite natural; indicating the nude photos around the bed with her chin, she broke the silence with a sudden, morose question.

  “Of all these women, which one would you most like to see masturbating?”

  I hesitated for an answer, but she pressed me further.

  “I want to know which one’s your type.”

  “That’s an awfully sudden question … you must have the wrong idea about me. I just…”

  “Did you hear the results of the X ray?” She quickly changed the subject. “It’s a cranial fracture, they say, in the back of the head. … If he doesn’t regain consciousness by the day after tomorrow, they say it’ll be all over.”

  “I never dreamed it would come to such a thing….”

  “It’s all right; anyway, he’s still single. His only living relative is an aunt with Meniere’s disease who works in the uniform factory. So tomorrow, if it looks like his condition is going to stay the same, they’re going to chop it off.”

  “Chop what off?”

  “Right about here.” She made a sawing motion with her hand, in the vicinity of her navel. “They’re going to cut him in two and use the lower half of his body for the assistant director’s substitute penis.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “The assistant director is on cloud nine.”

  “That must be against the law, a thing like that….”

  “Would you masturbate for me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It says in the Psycholinguistics Center’s compatibility test that when you can imagine someone masturbating without feeling any aversion, then there will be an ideal union of mind and body .”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’ve never met anybody like that yet. I’d started to give up, but with you I have a feeling that I wouldn’t mind watching a little.”

  “Well, I mind. The answer is no.”

  “Please? Why not, since I want you to?”

  “Seriously, what are they going to do with just the lower half of his body?”

  “Tie it on the back of the assistant director’s waist so he’ll look like a horse.”

  “A horse .. .”

  “Come on, masturbate for me, please?”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  I still could not understand her sadistic outbursts. They had to be deliberate spite, I thought, or else some sort of practical joke. Pleading the excuse that I wanted to listen to the tapes in the playback room awhile longer, I barely managed to make an escape. The substitute penis, the compatibility test—I could hardly believe any of it. All I knew was that I wanted to run far away from that terrible miasma, holding my nose.

  But, as I have written many times already, the assistant director is in fact a horse-man.

  Was the emergency doctor severed in two as the secretary predicted, then, and made into a horse’s lower half?

  As it happened, during that night the nurses had made the emergency doctor’s penis into quite a plaything. A few actually attempted intercourse with it, but more often they would play with it, twisting it inside a vacuum cleaner hose or testing its hardness by seeing how many sheets of copy paper it could break through, until finally by morning it had become a bloody pulp, no longer usable. Some said there had been an instigator, but the facts were not clear. It wras also rumored that it had been carried off by another department afterward, but no one knew exactly what had become of it.

  Nevertheless, the assistant director is in fact a horse.

  Therefore they must have stolen the lower half of someone else’s body.

  Actually, from the time I first began writing notebook one, the chief of security was already dead. Of course he was; nobody could stay alive, reduced to just
his lower half. His top half was cremated the same day and buried respectfully in the hospital cemetery. In accordance with Buddhist ritual, he was given a posthumous name, and since he was a distinguished staff member a formal announcement of his demise was issued. To all appearances he died an eminently respectable death.

  It was the afternoon of the second day. The assistant director had been staring dumfounded at the remains of the emergency doctor, so badly damaged by the nurses’ horseplay that the essential part was beyond repair. Then all at once the body of the chief of security fell into his hands, with that enormous appendage of which its owner had been so proud (one can’t deny he was justified; it measured 7.2 centimeters around and nineteen centimeters long, they say). The chiefs only chronic disease had been mild epilepsy, and so, omitting an autopsy, they cut his body in two while it was still fresh. Special treatment was given to the open wound on the bottom half, and to this moment that half is being carefully preserved by life-sustaining equipment, so that the horse can use it at any time as an auxiliary lower body.

  The question remains, can this incident legitimately pass as a simple death? Hospital terminology may have another term for it, I don’t know, but in my book it’s a clear case of murder. Police authority surely extends even to this place. If they want me to take the witness stand, I am ready anytime.

  I had gone to the chief’s office to exchange my old tape for a new one (the twenty-third). The chief was bent over the account books, totaling the week’s sales. All at once five of those shaven-headed young fellows in sweat pants came rushing in without knocking. Four of them held his arms and legs while the fifth pushed a chair cushion against his face. Nobody said a word the entire time; the killing was done with utmost dexterity.

  Just a couple of weeks before, an article in the paper had reported that smothering with pillows was now the preferred method of hired assassins. As soon as I realized it was my turn next, my much-vaunted muscles turned as stiff as dried sardines and refused to move. The men ignored me, however. One of them even gave me a conspiratorial wink, which only increased my discomfort. Spiritedly lifting up and carrying out the chiefs body, they laid it on a wheeled bed waiting in the corridor, straightened the legs, and dashed off with it.

  Immediately the phone rang. It was the secretary.

  “That went very well.,,

  “So it was you, after all….”

  “We’ve got to decide on his successor now. Do you want me to recommend you?”

  From the other end of the receiver I could hear surging battle cries, like those of men rushing headlong into the depths of some midnight festival. She must have been calling from the basement security station. Perhaps the bunch carrying the body had arrived. She shouted something back in a tone of exasperation, and the line was cut off. It hadn’t sounded like real exasperation so much as a kind of collusion, like a refusal already expected by both sides.

  How on earth had she got them to do such a thing? She did have the personal motive of retaliation for the rape. It was a bit late for that, though, and hard to imagine that she could have won their sympathy all of a sudden after so much time. Or had something in the chief’s everyday manner turned the men against him? With their sweat suits and close-shaven heads all alike, karate training, regimental behavior … if forced to do something against their will, they might very well mutiny. But to my knowledge, their rules of conduct were all devised by a young man acting as leader (a goiter patient, son of a hospital florist), without any outside interference. At first, I myself had taken the chief to be a standoffish type, the sort of person it’s hard to feel at ease around. Now it seems to me that that was just a sign of the unsociability that tends to characterize most technical experts. Apart from maintenance control of the surveillance system and enlargement of the cassette sales organization, his sole concern in life had been somehow to curry favor with the secretary; in fact, he had seemed a man of awkwardly single-minded bent. Our acquaintance lasted barely two short days; more and more, I wish that I had got to know him better.

  The chiefs spring-equipped chair kept spinning gently and noiselessly around. In all honesty, I was frightened out of my wits. And when I discovered it wasn’t the assistant director who was behind the deed, I was even more terrified. The poor little girl from room eight lies twitching the thin, dry skin over her lips as she murmurs voicelessly in her sleep; how can I ever explain to her the cruel fate her father has met? In any case, I am not under any circumstances going to let her near that assistant director, who’s now a horse; nor is there any reason I should.

  The horse scolded me for purposely stalling with the notebooks, and trying to gain time. Of course, that’s what I want to do; there is no way I can take this crazy business and write it up without somehow incurring their displeasure. They may think they can make me write an alibi for the horse, but they have another think coming. I know a trick or two myself now.

  Strange as it may sound, I can sense that at this moment I’m only a step away from complete control over the hospital. Early in the morning on the day after the murder, the council held an emergency session and unanimously chose me as the new chief of security. I haven’t actually accepted the position yet, but since the secretary went ahead and put three black stripes back on my uniform, everybody thinks it’s all settled, and I don’t know what I can do about it. The electronic surveillance system has swollen to unmanageable, mammoth size, and continues to absorb new information all the time; even though no one is actually in charge of it any more, the mere suggestion that such a person might exist seems to inspire awe and submissiveness. Especially among patients, the idea seems to produce a certain masochistic sense of relief; reactions run the gamut, from those who make long, involved, self-damaging confessions into hidden microphones, to those who turn themselves into private radio stations by attaching FM transmitters to their bodies, and go around broadcasting sounds of themselves defecating or jerking off in public to the accompaniment of hoots and jeers. During the short time I spent seated by the playback equipment, less than seventy-two hours, I became familiar with hundreds of such regular patrons, male and female.

  Not that I have figured out the best way to make use of this power. But if I wanted to. I’ll bet I could have the entire hospital at my feet in a minute. My predecessor didn’t seem particularly aware of this fact, but even in the hands of those who little deserve it, power is still power. Everyone tries to humor me now; all I have to do is turn the other way and keep my feelings under cover. Even the council has taken to giving me a copy of the discussion agenda beforehand. Informers and letters of apology come one on the heels of the other.

  Today during lunch break at the dining hall entrance, one of the collectors gave me a hand-printed leaflet. A collector is a spy who goes around with a hi-fi FM receiver slung across his shoulder, looking for extra radio waves. It has become commonplace to fasten small FM transmitters to other people’s eaves, beds, cosmetics” cases, sandal heels, umbrella handles, and other places, so they are spread out fairly evenly across the hospital grounds; even so. depending on location^and direction, some areas still escape the web of the security room’s central administrative system—underground rooms of reinforced concrete with few openings, for example, or the shadows of special storehouses with walls of galvanized iron. Such places are favorite hunting spots for collectors. Even the late chief of security was a mere collector until the Psycholinguistics Center sought his help as a technical adviser; for a while, even after the experiment began he had contracts with four or five of the best collectors, and was accepting offers for tapes. Why is it, I wonder, when everybody listens on the sly, that collectors alone are treated like informers, and made the objects of such prejudice? Perhaps that is the other side of power.

  The contents of the leaflet did not amount to much. On the top half was a line drawing of a black sphere covered with holes, with a human figure sticking its head into each hole. Centrifugal force seemed to be at work, since they were all floating wi
th their bodies out radially in a most natural way.

  People running, people typing, people squatting on the toilet, people busy making lace, people having coitus with their neighbors … the whole thing looked in a way like an old land mine, or like a collection of people all sharing the same huge head. Underneath was a string of sentences written in slogan style.

  “Everyone is basically alone. Are you afraid of good health? Can you say the word ‘discharged’ without lowering your voice? That word people once greeted with bouquets of flowers. Discharged! Go ahead, shout it out loud! Get well soon and be discharged early! Discharge Promotion League.”

  Incidentally, I could be mistaken but I think I have a rough idea of how the secretary compensated those five young shaven-headed fellows for handling the murder.

  She stayed out of sight after that and didn’t show up again until very late the next morning, close to noon. In one hand she was holding an envelope that contained a short letter of appointment for me, a bankbook, and a seal; her eyelids and nose were noticeably white, giving her a triumphant air, while the rest of her skin seemed muddy. Unless I imagined it, the slant of her hips had changed; they seemed to have fallen slightly. Even her way of walking seemed changed; now she walked with short, scuffling steps. My imagination whirled. If a woman not used to such activities had gone to bed with five young men one after the other, it was bound to affect the way she walked. And if my guess was right, this woman had an unlimited capacity for such compensation. A highly dangerous explosive was wandering around in our midst.

  When I leave here after dark, it might be better to leave the notebook behind. The walls and ceiling are full of cracks, any one of which would make a good hiding place. I could put a map in with a letter, and mail it to some trustworthy person… .

  (The girl woke up. I raised the back of the wheelchair for her. The change in her bodily shape is fairly evident now, but actually it seems to suit her, making her look rounder and younger.