Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Turning pale, she’d read the whole thing again from the beginning several times. But the more she read, the more obvious it was that there was a gap at the end. His line of reasoning, which had been reiterated and expanded upon in installment after installment, came to a sudden halt with the words, “However, for that very reason…” The phrase seemed to promise an antithesis, but the sentence was cut off there. The deeper she got into his train of thought, the more she was convinced that a very important passage, probably several pages long, had disappeared. And the whole thing-twelve installments, some five hundred pages-was already slated for publication in book form. This was the conclusion she was dealing with. This was serious.

So she had immediately called Ryuji’s parents and explained the situation to them. Within two or three days of the funeral, they had emptied out Ryuji’s apartment and had had all his books and personal effects brought to his old room. If the missing pages had gotten mixed in with something else, they had to be somewhere in the room, Mai had explained to Ryuji’s parents. She needed their permission to look through Ryuji’s things.

But now, confronted with the stacks of boxes, she felt like whining.

Oh, why did you have to go and die on me?

What a feat, though, drawing his last breath immediately after finishing his manuscript. She found it hateful.

I want you to come here right this minute and tell me what happened to those pages!

She reached out for her coffee, now quite cold. If only she’d read through the manuscript sooner, she wouldn’t have been in this mess. She couldn’t regret that enough. If she couldn’t find the missing pages, she’d have no other option but to try to supply them herself. She shrank in fear from the thought that what she wrote might diverge from Ryuji’s intentions. It would really be quite presumptuous of her. True, she had already been accepted into graduate school, but for a girl barely twenty to doctor the conclusion of the very last work of a logician from whom everybody had expected such great things…

I can’t do it.

Telling herself she’d just have to find the pages, she opened the next box.

Sometime after four, the room, which faced east, began to get dark, so she turned on a light. It was November, and the days were getting noticeably shorter. But it wasn’t cold. Mai got up and drew the curtains. For a while now, she’d been bothered by the feeling that someone was watching her through the window.

She’d already gone through half the cardboard boxes, and she hadn’t yet found the missing pages.

Suddenly, Mai could hear her heart beating. The inside of her chest was pounding. She stopped what she was doing and sat there, one knee up, back bent, waiting for the palpitations to subside. This had never happened to her before. She pressed a hand over the left side of her chest and tried to figure out what was causing it. Was it guilt over having lost her teacher’s work? No, that wasn’t it. Something was hiding in the room with her. A minute ago, she’d thought it was outside the room staring at her, but evidently she’d been wrong. She half expected a cat or something to dash out from behind a box.

She felt something cold on the back of her head and neck. A stabbing gaze. She turned around. She saw her pink cardigan draped over a box where she’d left it when she got to work. The spaces between its fibers glittered like eyes, reflecting the lamplight. Mai picked up the cardigan to reveal a video deck.

The jet-black deck sat on top of a box, its cords wrapped around it. It had to be the one that had been in Ryuji’s apartment. There was no TV set to be seen, however, and the deck hadn’t been hooked up.

Gingerly, Mai reached out and touched the edge of the deck. The cords were wrapped around its middle, top to bottom, leaving the deck resting on them as on a see-saw.

Did I put my cardigan on this?

She couldn’t remember. Of course, there was no other explanation. Before starting on the boxes, she’d taken off her cardigan and carelessly laid it on the video deck. That had to be it.

She locked gazes with the deck for perhaps a minute, and all thoughts of the missing pages disappeared from her mind. In their place swirled questions about a video.

She couldn’t forget what Kazuyuki Asakawa had asked her the day after Ryuji’s death. “He didn’t tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?”

Mai uncoiled the cords from around the body of the machine. She picked out the power cord and looked for an outlet. An extension cord lay unassumingly under the desk. She plugged the deck into it. Four zeros started flashing on the machine’s timer display-its pulse, like that of a dead person brought back to life. Mai extended her right index finger and waved it around in front of the deck. She couldn’t decide what to do. A voice told her not to touch it. Mai pushed EJECT anyway. The slot opened, a motor whirred, and a videotape emerged. There was a label on the spine, and a title written on the label.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989

Sticking out of the deck like that, the tape looked like a huge tongue. The deck resembled an obnoxious child, winking and wiggling his tongue at her.

Mai took firm hold of the black tongue and pulled it out.

Just when it was about to pull up to the hospital, Ando’s cab was overtaken by an ambulance whose siren was wailing. They were on a narrow, oneway street lined with shops, and in order to let the ambulance pass, they had to wedge the car between two delivery trucks parked on the side of the road. It looked like it might take a while to pull out again, so Ando decided to get out then and there. The eleven-story hospital towered over them, almost close enough to touch. It would be quicker to walk.

As he stepped off the street toward the main entranceway of the hospital, Ando could see the ambulance that had just passed them pull into the space between the old and new wings. It had taken the ambulance so long to negotiate the narrow streets that it had ended up arriving at the same time as Ando had on foot.

The siren fell silent, but the ambulance’s rotating light remained on, throwing its red mottled pattern onto the hospital walls. Stillness descended from the clear blue sky and created a zone of silence around the ambulance like the circle of brightness from a spotlight. To go in, Ando had to walk past the ambulance. The red light finally stopped rotating, and the echoes of the siren were disappearing into the sky. The atmosphere was thick with the prospect that, any second now, the back doors of the ambulance might burst open and spew forth emergency medical personnel unloading a stretcher-but nothing happened. Ando stood and watched. Ten seconds, twenty seconds passed, but the doors didn’t open. Silence prevailed. Thirty seconds. The air was frozen. Nobody came running out of the hospital, either.

Ando snapped out of his reverie and resumed walking. And suddenly, the ambulance doors opened with great force. A paramedic jumped out and helped his colleague inside the ambulance unload a stretcher. Ando didn’t care what had prevented them from carrying out the patient immediately-these guys were too damn slow. Now they were holding the stretcher at a slant, and Ando’s face came momentarily level with the oxygen-masked face of the patient. Their eyes met. The patient seemed to twist toward Ando, and stopped just as abruptly. His eyes were lifeless. He’d been picked up in critical condition, and now he’d met his end. In his line of work, Ando had witnessed any number of deaths. But never like this, by chance. Taking it as an ill omen, Ando averted his eyes from the dead man. He was no different from Miyashita with his astrology. First the snake on the embankment, and now this chance encounter with death. Lately, Ando had been looking for meaning in a lot of trivial events. He’d always scoffed at people who believed in jinxes and fortunes, but now, he realized, he was one of them.