Koji Suzuki - Loop

He'd have to rely on his legs to carry him the rest of the way.

From time to time he would stop and gaze up at the vast gorge that the little stream had carved into the land. That stream alone marked his road now. How long had it taken to make this canyon, thousands of yards deep? Contemplating the time and energy required made him dizzy.

Endless years and ceaseless repetition. The high-rise in which Kaoru made his home in Tokyo would easily fit into this valley. It had taken three years to build. But the valley-it'd taken hundreds of millions of years, and the water was still working on it, bit by bit.

The sun was sinking in the west now. The rays that found their way into the valley were climbing up its side, licking the sides of the valley as if it were some huge organism.

He paused in his leaping from rock to rock to plunge both hands into the stream for a drink. The water was cold. He could feel its chill spreading from his esophagus to his stomach. It was a boon to have the stream alongside: he wouldn't suffer thirst. He scooped up more water, then sat down on a rock for a breather.

A hushed air hung over the secluded land. He stumbled across a memory. He'd once before breathed air that was otherworldly like this. It put him in mind not of the deep recesses of Mother Nature, but of a place with a much higher concentration of civilization. An intensive care unit.

His father went into the ICU every time he had to have more cancer removed. In that sealed-off space, where the only sound was the rhythm of the respirator, the patients' flesh became so enveloped in stillness that it was hard to tell if they were alive or dead. Every time he visited his father there, Kaoru came away with the impression that it was only the machines that were really alive in that place-the people had sunk to a level below the inorganic.

He got chills as he remembered the tubes sprouting from his father's face and head, the pain he must have been in-the greater the number of tubes the more they seemed to speak of the ebbing of his father's life. There was something in the silence of this valley that reminded him of the ICU.

I wonder how Dad's doing.

Now that his thoughts had arrived at memories of his father's condition, he felt he couldn't rest any longer. His father just had to hold out until Kaoru returned-otherwise, he would have come all the way here for nothing.

He worried about his mother, too. Was she still obsessed with Native American legends, praying for a miracle to save his father? Kaoru wished she could deal with things a little more realistically.

And what about Reiko?

He felt his chest tighten at the thought of her. He took the two photos of her from his breast pocket. One had been taken in the cafeteria at the hospital. In the photo, Kaoru was holding his head up high, while Reiko rested her head on his shoulder. Ryoji had taken the picture. What had gone through his mind as he'd captured this image? His mother's affection for Kaoru was revealed in her pose. She had more of a womanly aura in this photo than a motherly one. Ryoji couldn't have enjoyed seeing her like this. What he saw through the viewfinder had to have bothered him.

Every time Kaoru thought about Reiko he took out this photo and looked at it, but the sad memories of Ryoji it brought back were always stronger than any recollections of Reiko that it held.

He looked at the second photo. In it, Reiko was sitting alone on the floor of what was probably her living room at home. She sat casually, legs bent to one side, hands behind her, on a thick carpet. Her hairstyle was different. The photo was probably two or three years old, but as to whether it had been taken before or after the onset of Ryoji's illness there was no clue.

Not long after their relationship had turned physical, Kaoru had asked Reiko for a photo from her younger days. It had been a bad choice of words. "Are you trying to say I'm old?" she'd scowled, poking him in the ribs. But the next day she'd brought him several photographs.

One had been taken at a party at her home. She was surrounded by friends, and she was holding a glass. Her face was flushed from drinking.

In another she was posing with one hand raised and the other on her hip. In another she was wearing an elegant orange kimono and standing nonchalantly beside a chrysanthemum doll.

In yet another, she was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. It was a perfect shot, catching her just as she turned around in response to someone calling her from behind.

Kaoru imagined that Ryoji had taken this one. He'd sneaked up behind her, called "Mom!" and then clicked the shutter. The reaction on her face was unfeigned-surprise mingled with laughter to create a most unusual expression. A valuable photo, capturing a side she usually didn't show.

Kaoru was particularly fond of that picture, but he'd decided to leave it behind when he departed for the desert. He'd elected to take only two photos of her, the one of the two of them together and the one of her sitting on the floor. He kept them safe in his pocket.

In that second photo she was wearing a knit wool one-piece dress. From the waist up, it looked like a sweater; in fact, it was less a proper dress than a really long sweater. The U-shaped neckline was modest to a fault, providing not the slightest glimpse of the swelling of her bosom. Not that her breasts were that large to begin with. They were just big enough to fit in the palms of Kaoru's hands. Their perfect volume and firmness fascinated him, though.

The dress material didn't accent the lines of her waist, either. Instead, his gaze was drawn to her legs.

Because of the way she was sitting, the hem of the dress had hiked up to just above her knees. She was leaning back, knees raised slightly off the carpet. In the space between them there was a darkness that extended far back. Time after time, Kaoru had buried his face in that soft valley.

Day after day they'd waited for Ryoji to be taken away for his tests. Then in the brilliant light of day Kaoru would lay Reiko down on the bed, hike up her skirt, pull down her panties, and examine her sex organ. It was no more than one organ of the many that made up her body, but he found it inexplicably fascinating. His love for her had endowed it with inestimable value.

When he'd raise his head from between her legs he could see the almost too-bright light pouring in between the open curtains. The full rays of the sun made him feel that he was doing something terribly immoral. But this was a temptation he could not resist. He'd lower his face again, avoiding the sunlight, praying that this moment would last forever as he received her fluids with his tongue.

And now, as a result of moments like those, she had conceived his child.

Kaoru glanced at her slender waist in the photograph.

I wonder how big it is now.

He could guess: the embryo was probably about three quarters of an inch long now, looking something like a seahorse. At the moment, his affection for this new being that inherited his genes was not as strong as his affection for Reiko, who was carrying it.

But he had no more time to lounge on the rocks. All the faces passing through his mind were now urging him to hurry. Kaoru stood up and set off for the peak.

The sun was going down behind the ridge. Kaoru quickened his pace. He'd have to find a likely place to camp before it got completely dark.

He came to a flat spot surrounded on three sides by huge rocks. Looking around, he decided it wouldn't be a bad place to spend the night.

He'd been here before. As an Indian, as the man whose point of view he'd assumed via the computer in the ruins of Wayne's Rock. The tribe had passed through a place that looked exactly like this.