Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Ando and Miyashita followed the waitress to a table by the window. The restaurant was on the top floor of the university hospital and boasted a fantastic view of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. In addition, university employees got a discount. Both men had taken off their lab coats before coming, but still the waitress could tell at a glance that they weren’t members of the general public visiting a patient. She handed them the special employees’ lunch menu. Merely glancing at it, both Ando and Miyashita ordered the special of the day and coffee.

As soon as the waitress left, Miyashita said, with a portentous air, “I read it.” From the moment Miyashita had asked him to lunch, Ando had known he’d start out with that phrase. Miyashita had read Asakawa’s Ring report and was now ready to comment on it.

“So what did you think?” Ando leaned forward.

“I won’t lie. I was amazed.”

“But do you believe it?”

“Hell, it’s not a question of belief. It all adds up. The names of the victims and the times of death he gives check out. We’ve seen the incident reports and the autopsy records ourselves, you and I.”

He was right, of course. They had copies of the coroner’s reports and associated documents for the four victims who’d been at Villa Log Cabin. The times of death given therein accurately reflected what Asakawa had written. There were no inconsistencies to be found. But what took Ando aback was how a pathologist as sharp as Miyashita showed no apparent resistance to the idea of curses and supernatural powers playing a role in all this.

“So you just accept it?”

“Well, it’s not as if I don’t have reservations. But, you know, when you really think about it, modern science hasn’t managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven’t been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it’s something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And when we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body-machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I’m prepared to accept anything that happens in this world. I actually kind of envy people who can still believe in the omnipotence of modern science.”

Ando himself had at least a few doubts about the so-called omnipotence of modern science, but evidently they weren’t as grave as Miyashita’s. How could one feel comfortable in the scientific community if one harbored that kind of skepticism?

“That’s pretty extreme.”

“I’ve never told you this, but I’m actually a philosophical idealist.”

“An idealist, huh?”

“Like the Buddha said, form is empty and emptiness is form.”

Ando wasn’t quite sure what Miyashita was trying to say. He was sure that between philosophical idealism and reality is empty there was a lot being left unsaid, but now wasn’t the time to pursue the finer points of Miyashita’s worldview.

“Anyway, was there anything that particularly bothered you about the report?” Ando wanted to see if he and Miyashita harbored the same doubts about it.

“Oh, any number of things bothered me.” The coffee arrived, and Miyashita stirred his full of cream and sugar. His ruddy face caught the sun full-on through the window. “First, why is Asakawa and only Asakawa still alive after having seen that videotape?”

Miyashita took a sip of coffee.

“It’s because he figured out the charm, no?”

“The charm?”

“You know, the part that had been erased at the end of the tape.”

“The bit that wanted to force the viewer to do something.”

“So if Asakawa did it without realizing it…”

“Did what?”

“It was right there at the end of the report, wasn’t it? ‘The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself. The charm: make a copy of the video.’”

Then Ando explained to Miyashita a few things he didn’t know. There had been a video deck in Asakawa’s car at the time of the accident, and Ando had found a taped-over copy of the videotape in Mai’s apartment.

A light seemed to go on in Miyashita’s head. “A-ha, so that’s what he meant. Asakawa thought the charm was to make a copy of the video and to show it to someone who hadn’t seen it yet.”

“I have no doubt that’s what he thought.”

“So, where was he heading with the VCR on the morning of the accident?”

“Someplace where he could find two people who would watch the tape, of course. He must have been desperate to save his wife and young daughter.”

“But he’d have had a hard time showing such a dangerous tape to a complete stranger.”

“I imagine he went to his wife’s parents. It couldn’t have been his own parents, since his father’s still alive and well. I spoke to him on the phone just the other day.”

“So her parents exposed themselves to a temporary risk in order to save their daughter and granddaughter.”

“Looks like we need to find out where they live and check with the local police.”

If the video, complete with extortionate addendum, had been reproduced and circulated, then there might well be more victims in the area around Shizu Asakawa’s parents’ house. But if there were, the media hadn’t picked up on them yet. The video’s progress was still below the surface, out of the public eye.

Miyashita, too, seemed to have arrived at the thought that the videotape had the ability to spread like a virus. He spoke mockingly. “Looks like you’ll be cutting up a lot of bodies.”

This jolted Ando into a realization. Judging from the situation, it was more than likely that Mai had watched the tape. It was now almost two weeks since she’d disappeared. Perhaps he’d end up dissecting her himself. He imagined her beautiful form on the operating table, and it horrified him.

“But Asakawa’s still alive.” He said it like a prayer.

“The biggest problem we have is this: if Asakawa did manage to make two copies of the videotape, why did his wife and daughter die?”

“Put another way, why is Asakawa himself still alive?”

“I don’t know. The smallpox virus is tangled up in this, right? In light of that, it makes perfect sense for this ‘charm’ to be copying the video to help it propagate.”

“It makes sense up through Ryuji’s death. But the deaths of Asakawa’s wife and daughter throw the question wide open all over again.”

“So, being copied wasn’t what the tape wanted?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t know how to interpret the situation. Either the charm had aimed at something else, or something untoward had happened in the copying process. Or maybe the tape killed people who watched it regardless of whether or not they enacted the charm. But that would make it even harder to explain why Asakawa survived.

Lunch arrived, and the two men fell into silence for a while, absorbed in eating.

Finally, Miyashita rested his fork and said, “I find myself in a dilemma.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if there is such a videotape, I’d want to watch it. But it might kill me. I’d say that’s a dilemma. A week’s not much time.”

“Not much time?”

“To figure it out. It’s really intrigued me. Scientifically speaking, what we have here is a video, a medium that attacks the human brain through its sense of sight and sound, which can somehow implant a smallpox-like virus inside the body.”