Death and the Flower

by Kōji Suzuki

  “Until forty years ago, it was a railway, not a highway, that extended from the southern tip of Florida through the Florida Keys. But one night a ferocious hurricane tore the railway to pieces, and the current highway was built in its place …”

  It was only now that Tatsuro recalled those few sentences.

  Right. In the past there really was a railroad here.

  Once this realization occurred to him, the unlikely discovery of tracks on a deserted island ceased to shock him. Until sixty years ago, a rail line had traversed this island rather than where the highway was today. The derelict pier that hinted at a former fishing hub, the two-story building that resembled a station, and the remains of a settlement surrounding the clearing … In light of all of these traces, it made better sense to think that the railway used to run here across this island.

  Tatsuro’s sense of dread abated. Now that there was a plausible explanation, the veil of mystery was peeled away. The atmosphere seemed to take on a different cast, and even the sounds were assuming a more mundane aspect.

  His spirits restored, Tatsuro strolled through the clearing, stopping in front of each abandoned edifice to peek inside. He pictured the people who had resided here more than sixty years ago. How had they lived? It was easy to imagine that fishing had been central to their livelihoods. When the weather was good, they would head out in their fishing boats, and on stormy days they would remain indoors. Even if there were long spells when the haul was poor, the island was rife with nature’s bounty. Vegetable protein grew high overhead throughout the year in the form of coconuts and breadfruit. They weren’t quite isolated from civilization. The train that linked the island to the peninsula could bring in various goods as necessary.

  The image taking shape in the back of Tatsuro’s mind was that of a utopia in which families lived carefree, easy lives. But one night, a ferocious hurricane had ravaged the entire region, tearing the village and railway to shreds. The highway built to replace the railroad had bypassed the island, and the community had died off and fallen into extinction.

  Just like my family, Tatsuro muttered, and once again he was filled with turmoil. He felt out of joint, as though his senses had somehow become divorced from his body. All of a sudden he was struck by the odd notion that the settlement before him was an artifice of his mind.

  His wife had liked to tell him, There’s a lot of hidden meaning in scenery, sometimes what you’re thinking is projected whole onto what we see.

  She had been a devoted follower of a certain new religious sect and given to issuing such strange pronouncements. At times she told simple fortunes.

  Someday for sure your paintings will come into demand.

  She’d said that, too, and just as she’d predicted, lately Tatsuro’s art was experiencing a surge of positive appraisals. In a year or two he’d be able to quit his teaching job. It was ironic that his wife, who had wanted more than anything to see him succeed as an artist, hadn’t lived to see it happen. She’d never learn that two years or so after their family was sundered, Tatsuro—who’d failed to muster much creative drive while steeped in the warmth of his family—would come by a preternatural level of focus, the quality of his art progressing by leaps and bounds as a result. What he expressed on the canvas was precisely his emotional devastation, but people found his use of colors remarkable: a precarious fragility, as it were. For Tatsuro, painting was the act of plastering over the two voids that had formed inside him. He simply hadn’t been able to go on living without his art. He could hardly survive if he left the two dark stains unattended.

  The wooden wall he was facing was painted yellow, and just in front of it, a pipe jutted up from the ground. It looked like a snake rearing up to strike. The neck of the thin black pipe stretched two feet high straight up from the ground and ended in a spigot that hung down. No wonder the Japanese word for spigot was “snake mouth.”

  I wonder if it still works?

  Naturally Tatsuro had no intention of drinking the water even if the mouth spouted any, but he tried anyway. It was badly rusted and refused to turn at first, but after several tries it finally yielded, spinning freely and rising in his hand. Tatsuro took a couple of steps back and steadily observed the spigot.

  For several moments nothing happened. But just as he began to walk away, he heard a faint groaning noise from somewhere. The vague commotion drew closer, resembling the mingled voices of a large crowd rather than the sound of plumbing. When the noise reached the spigot, the upright pipe began to shake, waving its neck back and forth like a living snake, and spewed muddy water from its mouth. As the flow continued the water gradually grew clear, but even then the pipe continued to rock, blasting the ground with bursts of water that seeped instantly into the earth. What sort of plumbing ran beneath this island? Where did the water come from? Somehow it made Tatsuro think of the veins and blood running through his own body. Then, once again, he remembered something his wife had said.

  The earth itself is a living organism.

  A gentle breeze carried a blend of voices and a mechanical sound to Tatsuro’s ears. He turned around. Voices of several people. A boat’s motor. It was coming from the direction of the pier. Quickly, Tatsuro headed back the way he came.

  Hiding in the brush, he espied the pier and spotted a fishing boat approaching the island. A shirtless man stood on deck, still holding in his hand the t-shirt he’d just removed. His hair was almost completely white while his skin was darkly tanned. On the bridge, a much younger man steered the boat. The shirtless man stood at the prow and shouted loudly at the man on the bridge.

  Tatsuro strained his eyes and ears. He could hear the shirtless man’s voice clearly, but the words were completely unintelligible. It wasn’t English, nor Spanish, another language common in these parts. It was a tongue Tatsuro had never heard before. But from the man’s body language, Tatsuro understood that he was directing the young man on the bridge to approach the pier. The shirtless man readied a mooring line.

  Once the prow of the boat was lashed to the pier, two boys came barreling out of the cabin. They ran around the deck carrying thin rods that looked like fishing spears, and the shirtless man was shouting at them to stop: It’s dangerous. Even though Tatsuro didn’t speak their language, he somehow understood what they were saying. Just then, someone else who had been crouched on the deck rose up. It was a middle-aged woman who wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The woman appeared to be tending to fishing gear. She spread open a net and began to fold it.

  The shirtless man stepped down onto the pier and walked towards the boat’s stern. The woman tossed him a mooring line, and the man fastened it to a cleat. Now the boat was secure. The motor had fallen silent, and in the brief moment of quiet the passengers stepped onto the pier. The young man and the shirtless man transferred the day’s catch from boat to pier by hand. The children shouted and ran straight towards the grove where Tasturo was hiding, but the adults called them back and made them help out. All of their faces were alive and exuberant. The feeling they radiated was that of returning home after a day’s work.

  We’re home!

  Just watching them filled Tatsuro with relief too.

  The heaving ruins behind him began to take on a warmer hue at the same time. The village, abandoned until now, was coming back to life and breathing, ready to welcome people home.

  It didn’t take Tatsuro long to realize that what he’d taken for a deserted settlement was in fact still inhabited. The artifacts of everyday life he’d missed just peering in from the threshold slumbered in the interior. He was confident that if he returned to the village now, he would detect the sure scent of human life.

  So it hadn’t fallen into ruin after all.

  Even with the railroad destroyed, one family had chosen not to leave the island, and their descendants remained here to this day. Indeed, the plumbing still worked. Perhaps there was even electricity.

  Hadn’t fallen into ruin.

  Tatsuro murmured those same wo
rds over and over again. In his excitement he held his breath, half rising from his crouch as he continued to watch the five islanders who appeared to be a family. Then it dawned on him how things might seem from their perspective.

  What do I look like to them? The answer was simple. Nothing but an intruder.

  Had he shown his face and greeted them before they’d docked, perhaps he could have alleviated any suspicions. But now it was too late. If the children discovered a stranger in the bushes, they would probably scream. In response, the white-haired man would come running to investigate, and Tatsuro would be unable to explain himself. Even if he managed to convey through gestures that he had parked his car by the side of the highway and swum across to the island, if they asked for a reason, he would have no answer. After all, he himself didn’t know why. Why had he swum across to such an island? First and foremost, Tatsuro doubted that they could communicate by speech. The white-haired man was aged but muscular and fit. The younger man who had been steering on the bridge had a friendly face, but there was no telling how vicious he might turn.

  It seemed that the safest option was to leave the island before they noticed him. Before the five of them came up this path with their fishing gear, he’d cut sideways through the brush and get to the beach and then hit the surf. Loath to set foot on the sandbar again, Tatsuro intended to circumvent the elliptical shoal altogether and to swim all the way. The strait was only about a hundred yards across, but the detour would make his journey much longer. Still, it was far preferable to wading across that cold, slimy sandbar.

  Tatsuro was walking north, parallel to the highway, through low plants that dotted the subtropical waters. He couldn’t see the pier from where he was, so naturally the islanders wouldn’t be able to see him, either. When the water was above waist-deep he began to swim—quietly, using the breaststroke, to disturb the water’s surface as little as possible. Glancing towards the highway, he saw that Yuko was walking along the shoulder, parallel to him, matching his pace. She waved vigorously and jumped repeatedly, and it was clear that she was calling out to him at the top of her lungs. Yet he couldn’t hear her. Treading water, he craned his head and strained his ears, but not a word reached him. Mostly he just wished his daughter would pipe down. Here he’d given the islanders the slip and if she didn’t stop shouting they might notice. Though unlikely to do him harm, there was no need to aggravate them.

  Tatsuro treaded higher and used the momentum to dive beneath the surface. He swam underwater for a few strokes, came up for air, and went back down, scanning the bottom to locate the sandbar. Near its edge where it sloped down into deeper water, he caught sight of two rope-like shadows tangling and swaying back and forth. At first he took them for seaweed, but soon their movements indicated that they were animals. They had streamlined heads at the end of their thin, speckled bodies.

  Sea snakes.

  There were crater-like depressions all over the seabed. From each hole a snake protruded, its tail hidden in the sand. Not just their heads but the better part of their slinky bodies undulated in the water. Tatsuro stopped moving and let his limbs go limp, allowing his body to float up. He timorously glanced towards the sandbar where the water was barely two feet deep. There, too, was a similar spectacle—countless long black cords wavering and craning towards the surface. Some poked only their heads out of the craters, while others extended almost their entire bodies, their heads nearly reaching the water’s surface. The entire sandbar was a nest of sea snakes.

  Tatsuro finally understood why, wading across it to reach the island, he had felt such creeping unease and dread. The skin of his feet had known instinctively what lurked in the sand. Something lived there, he’d certainly fathomed that, but not whether it posed a threat to humans. Trusting his own body’s hunch, interpreting it, Tatsuro concluded that the countless snakes shimmering up from the seabed had to be poisonous. Only that could explain why his nerves had been so on edge.

  His strength helplessly drained from his body, and not because he was letting it go limp. He remembered all too well. Just before reaching the island, when he was about to swim off the sandbar across deeper water, he’d felt a sharp pain at the tip of his left foot. When he’d sat cross-legged on the pier to inspect it, there had been two tiny red perforations at the base of his toe.

  I was bitten by a sea snake.

  Even as the thought dawned on Tatsuro, it somehow didn’t seem real. It wasn’t that the snake’s venom was finally beginning to take effect. Rather, what was sucking the strength from his body was the very realization that he’d been bitten. Slowly, he drifted with the tide. Sometimes face up, sometimes face down, alternating his gaze between the highway and the opposite horizon, he wafted on the surface. Everything seemed somber, hushed. He couldn’t even hear the sound the water made when he turned his body. Running parallel to the highway, the horizon seemed like the great beyond. By contrast, the highway and the occasional cars that streamed past were clearly of this world. In that case, what did the island hovering between the two signify? A relay point between this world and the next?

  Floating on his back, Tatsuro took slow breaths. With his ears underwater and his chin slightly turned up, he could fill his lungs with plenty of air. He felt, however, an unpleasant ticklishness all along his nether side. The snakes stretching up from the ocean floor didn’t actually reach him, but as if red tongues were licking his back, discomfort spread from there all across his body.

  The silence that enveloped him was eerie. Why didn’t he feel more panicked? The man who was breathing calmly in and out seemed like someone other than himself to Tatsuro. He wondered why human beings feared snakes. Did our distant ancestors’ terror of reptiles, especially of dinosaurs, linger in our species’ collective memory? No, that wasn’t it. Taking a cue from the two intertwined black snakes he’d just seen, Tatsuro arrived at the answer.

  The double helixes of DNA that comprise our genes.

  A photographed replica he’d seen showed cellular DNA as two intertwining threads, joined by base pairs, spiraling heavenward. The picture hadn’t made him associate the double helix with snakes. Yet, just now, glimpsing sea snakes stretching up from the seabed, he’d instinctively thought of DNA. It occurred to him then that humanity’s deep-rooted fear of snakes was an effect of our awe and fear for that which dominated individual organisms since the dawn of life.

  People have an unconscious understanding of the workings of the universe. We also instinctively know the microscopic world—our cells’ makeup, even the atom’s structure. Science is only powerful when it elucidates what we already vaguely comprehend.

  That was another thing Tatsuro’s wife had said.

  He felt bound. A single chromosome chain had divided meiotically from his wife’s reproductive cells and intertwined with a strand from his own cells to bring their son and their daughter into the world. His son was dead, but his daughter was walking along the highway at the same pace as her drifting father and yelling at him.

  “Papa!”

  It was then that her voice reached his ears. At the same instant, saltwater rushed into his throat, sending him into a fit of violent coughing. He lifted his face from the water and took a breath. It was like poking his head into another world. Suddenly, he could hear the gurgling of water he hadn’t been registering until then. The shift resembled the way gulping down saliva restored equilibrium to his eardrums after a painful change in air pressure. With a loud pop deep in his ears, the world changed dramatically as if on cue, the quietude banished far away.

  Tatsuro’s arms and legs churned the sea’s surface, and he saw water bubbles that had been sinking down bob back upwards. He struggled like mad.

  “Papa!” his daughter was screaming.

  When he looked in the direction of her voice, her expression was fraught. His daughter—all alone on the highway, unable to drive or speak the language, suitcase-less. The sole inheritor of his chromosomes was calling out to him. He let his tingling left foot go limp and man
aged to stay afloat with only the slow movements of his arms.

  As soon as he got out of the water, he sat down on a rock and gasped violently. His pulse was probably close to 200 bpm. The tremors that arose from every cell in his body resonated and syncopated with the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  That was close.

  He had been on the verge of crossing over to the other side. Tatsuro didn’t fear death, but his body trembled uncontrollably at the thought of leaving his daughter behind to fend for herself.

  His left foot was still numb. He stretched the leg and rubbed around the knee. Yuko was crouching right by his straightened leg. Her eyes welling with tears, her face red with agitation, she was coughing up sobs.

  “Oh, Papa, please …” she said simply, fixing him with a reproachful glare. Her anger and fear had yet to subside.

  Tatsuro placed a hand on her shoulder and stood up, but when he tried to walk he was overcome by vertigo. His vision grew dark and he felt like throwing up. His stomach was full of the seawater he’d swallowed. He closed both eyes and bent over, hands on knees, and waited for the feeling to pass. Still in the same posture, he glanced at his watch.

  Just fifteen minutes.

  It had been 2:15 p.m. when he’d pulled the car over and set out for the island. Now it was exactly 2:30. Only fifteen minutes had elapsed. It simply didn’t add up. There was a major discrepancy between the series of rich images burnt into his retinas and that time span. In particular, it completely failed to account for the minutes he had spent walking around the island.

  Since he had swum around the sandbar, they were standing quite a bit north of where the car was parked. As he and Yuko walked the distance, over a hundred yards, Tatsuro tried to make sense of what had happened to him. But no—referencing a third-person view beat trying to make sense of his own actions.