Koji Suzuki - Loop

"I want to know just one thing about you first," Kaoru said.

Hana composed herself, without answering.

"If it's not too forward of me, I'd like to know how old you are."

Hana laughed. No doubt she'd been asked this any number of times.

"I'm thirty-one years old. I'm married and have two children. Both of them boys."

Kaoru's jaw dropped open in amazement. She looked no more than a girl, and yet she was telling him she was thirty-one. And a mother of two! An unexpected response, to say the least.

"I can't believe it."

"Everybody says that."

"I was sure you were younger than me." At twenty, though, he was eleven years her junior.

"How old are you?"

He told her. She furrowed her brow and in a low voice said, "Really?"

"I look older, don't I? But I'm really twenty."

Kaoru put a hand to his cheek. He hadn't shaved since arriving in the desert, so he figured he might look even older than usual.

He couldn't quite get over the shock that this woman was in fact older than him. It was bound to make him act differently with her.

Learning each other's true ages seemed to change something between them. After that, whenever Hana looked in on him, Kaoru watched for the chance to tell her a little more about himself.

Hana was a good listener. She only came by the room a few times a day, and they only had a limited time to talk, maybe ten minutes at a time. But she made good use of it, never getting off track, always eliciting more about Kaoru's past life.

And Kaoru found he enjoyed talking to her, telling her things. It allowed him to make sure of himself as he was now. Of course, doubts did come to mind, but he shunted them aside and he spoke haltingly of himself.

He told her of his childhood, what he'd thought about, the kind of dreams he'd had. Bits and pieces of life with his father and mother. Their plans to go off to America together, to the desert…

There were things that were hard to talk about. Most of all, his father's cancer: how it had dashed their travel plans, how their lives had revolved around hospitals ever since. How after several years his cancer had been identified as coming from the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, and how there was essentially no hope of him recovering. How Kaoru's mother refused to give up, but had immersed herself in Native American legends until she found hints of a miracle cure, belief in which had allowed her to go on undaunted. How Kaoru, forced to balance his father's illness and his mother's headlong rush into spiritualism, had abandoned his early desire to study astrophysics for medical school.

As he spoke, Kaoru began to feel a nostalgia for it all. Over a period of four days he spoke to her for a total of two, maybe three hours. He certainly couldn't tell her everything about his life in that amount of time; he had to cut out a lot of things. But he remembered a lot of things too. Sometimes he'd have to fight back tears, and then sometimes he'd burst out laughing as he told her about some crazy thing his father had done.

A life that could be told in a mere two or three hours-could it be real? As he talked, his more distant memories began to cloud over.

"Haven't you ever been in love?"

Her question was perfectly timed. At that very moment Kaoru was wondering whether or not he should tell her about Reiko. He'd been leaning toward avoiding the subject, and if Hana hadn't spoken, he very well might not have mentioned her.

Telling her about his affair with Reiko would naturally involve telling her about Ryoji. The experience still filled him with sadness, and more than that with pain. Regrets always came to mind first, shame for his ill-considered actions. He realized that the room where he and Reiko had taken their pleasure and the room he was in now were rather similar. Of course, Ryoji's room had boasted a west-facing full-length window overlooking the green of the park and admitting the rays of the setting sun, while this room had no window at all. But that aside, in terms of size and the colour of the walls, the rooms were very much alike.

No matter how hard he tried, he'd never be able to communicate to Hana the carnal joy that Reiko had given him.

Kaoru confessed his feelings honestly. Now and then Hana looked at him disbelievingly, shaking her head and saying, "Oh, no," in a commiserating tone. Then when Kaoru revealed that Reiko was carrying his child, Hana's expression froze.

"And this child-it's going to be born?"

A strange way to phrase the question, he thought, but he didn't stop to worry about it.

"Of course, I want her to have it. That's why I came here."

Hana closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling and she seemed to be praying, although he couldn't hear her words.

In this windowless room, the only way to gauge the passage of time was by his watch. If it was to be believed, this was the evening of the fourth day. After he finished telling her about his and Reiko's child, Hana said, "That should do for today." She seemed not to be permitted to do whatever she wanted with her time; she was always cutting their talks short when she found the right moment.

"I want to hear the rest tomorrow, though." She spoke with kindness. This woman whom he'd once thought of as a child had now become a merciful mother-figure.

She placed a hand on his arm and contemplated him for a while, and then walked to the door. Once there, she stopped, glanced back at the bed, and then went out into the hallway.

The expression on her face as she looked back at him burned itself into Kaoru's mind. He'd seen it somewhere before.

He thought about facial expressions, deciding that they usually fell into a finite set of categories. People generally made the same sort of face placed in the same sort of situation: hearing a piece of good news, for example, or jumping from a high place. He tried to figure out what category Hana's expression belonged to.

Something came to mind immediately, something that had always stayed with him.

The situation had been almost exactly the same. A woman, dressed in white like Hana, walking out of a sickroom, turning around for a last look at the patient. A nurse.

Once, his father had been moved to a larger room, as a temporary measure. He'd just had surgery to remove the cancer from his rectum, and seemed to be making good progress. It had been a four-person room, and every bed held a cancer patient.

One of the nurses who frequented the room had been particularly popular with the patients. She was no great beauty, but she was attractive enough, and more than that she was the type of woman who just radiated goodness. She was always long-suffering toward her patients, listening to their demands with never a look of complaint. Kaoru's father had liked her, too. He'd joke with her and touch her bottom, all for the pleasure of being admonished by her like a child.

A time came when she left the hospital, albeit temporarily. She was in her second year of marriage, and in fact was seven months pregnant. She'd put in for a year's maternity leave.

On her last day at the hospital, she came by Kaoru's father's room to say goodbye. Kaoru was visiting his father at the time. She told the patients that she expected them all to be happy and smiling when she came back in a year, to which one of the patients joked, By the time you get back, honey, I'll have checked out of this place.

Kaoru seemed to remember the other two patients, but not his father, saying similar things. It was impossible to tell how sincere the patients were being. In any case the nurse just nodded in agreement as she made the rounds of each bed to say her goodbyes.

Then, as she left the room, she turned back to glance at the patients in their beds, exactly as Hana had done just now. The look in the nurse's eyes had not evaded Kaoru's notice then: it had been one of certainty that there were those among the patients she would not see, could not see, when she returned in a year. And not because they'd have checked out. Her look was a wistful one of final-for this life, at least- farewell.