Koji Suzuki - Loop

"What are you doing, kiddo?" He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

"Observing your… things," said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

"What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you."

Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

So his parents' secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father's attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

"What am I going to do with him?" she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pyjama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.

Kaoru's mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.

"Sorry to get you out of bed," Hideyuki said to Machiko.

"That's okay. I'll bet you're hungry, aren't you?"

"A little."

"Why don't I make something?"

Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.

"Have a drink first."

Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn't like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn't mean she wasn't a drinker, though- she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.

When he'd seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie.

As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of him in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn't bother Hideyuki in the least.

Kaoru's mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn't asked him, he recounted the day's events with brio, mentioning co-workers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.

Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. "By the way, Kaoru, why don't you show your father what you showed me?"

"Huh? What?" He'd been taken by surprise.

"You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies."

"Oh, those." Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he'd put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.

"You'll be amazed at what he's discovered," his mother said, but Kaoru didn't feel it was that great a discovery.

"What's this?" said Hideyuki, holding the print-outs up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.

"I get it, this is a map of the earth's gravitational anomalies."

He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn't have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn't figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.

"Alright, you got me. What is this?"

"The earth's longevity zones."

"Longevity zones?" No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.

"Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies."

Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father's mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. "That's right!" he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.

"I wonder why that is," Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.

"Is this, like, common knowledge?" It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who'd been ignorant of it.

"Well, I for one wasn't aware of it."

"Really?"

"So, what? Does this mean that perhaps there's some sort of relationship between people's life-spans and gravity? The data's so clear and specific, it's hard to think it's just a coincidence. By the way, kiddo, how do you define a 'longevity zone'?"

It was only natural for Hideyuki to stick at that point. Kaoru felt the same way. How exactly should he define a longevity zone? Was it an area with lots of long-lived people in it? Perhaps an area where the average lifespan was longer than in other areas? If that was what he meant, there was nothing to prevent him from seeing all of Japan as one big longevity zone.

He had to use a more limiting definition. It would be more exact, at least, to stipulate that a longevity zone was an area clearly delineated from the surrounding territory, a high percentage of the inhabitants of which were a hundred or more years in age.

But in reality, no such mathematical definition existed. The villages that he'd seen talked about on TV were simply places that had been found, statistically and experientially, to have lots of long-lived people in them, and they were known for it.

"I'm not sure there is a mathematical definition."

He found it more and more curious that the villages mentioned on TV, defined as impressionistically and sentimentally as they were, should match up so nicely with gravitational anomalies, so clearly visible as numerical values. Kaoru and Hideyuki both were impressed by this.

"Too vague. Still, I wonder why it came out like this?" Hideyuki said this under his breath, as if bothered.

"Have you heard anything about the relationship between gravity and life, Dad?"

"Well, they did an experiment where they had a chicken lay eggs in a zero gravity environment, and they turned out to be unfertilized eggs."

"I've heard about that. That was ages ago."

Somewhere in the corner of his mind he recalled the sight of his father's sperm three months ago. He remembered reading an article about the chickens, which had laid unfertilized eggs in spite of the fact that they had copulated. He'd forgotten exactly what the experiment had been trying to prove. He'd read about it in a mass-market weekly, which had seized on the results of what was actually an old experiment in order to make some point about modern sexuality.

His imagination started to run away with him. Suppose an egg started to undergo cellular division without fertilization, growing through birth to maturity-what kind of human being would result? Kaoru got a mental image of a woman with a smooth, egg-shaped face. He shivered. He tried to banish the image, but the woman's slippery face wouldn't leave him.

"Well, nobody's made a logical connection yet, I don't think. But anyway, why did you think to compare gravitational anomalies and longevity?"

"Huh?" Sometimes the images taking shape in his brain undermined Kaoru's ability to think, and he couldn't hear what was being said to him.