Koji Suzuki - Loop

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.

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.

But the plastic Petri dish in which his father's cells were being cultured was in its usual place, and he had no trouble finding it.

So this is what immortality looks like, he thought. It mystified him, as it always did.

His father's liver had been removed-having changed from its normal reddish-pink to a mottled hue covered with what looked like white powder-and was now sealed in a glass jar, preserved in formaldehyde, in another cabinet, where it had been stored for three years now. Sometimes it seemed to squirm or writhe, but maybe that was a trick of the light.

The liver was dead, of course, pickled in formaldehyde. Whereas the cancer cells in the Petri dish were alive.

The dish contained cells grown from Kaoru's father's cancer cells, cultured in a medium with a blood serum concentration of less than one percent.

With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won't multiply beyond a single layer no matter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.