Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

He brought his foot back into the water and just sat there hugging his knees. After a while, a question came to him. He now knew why Mai hadn’t gotten a heart attack, but what about Asakawa?

“He was male,” Ando murmured.

But maybe he’d given birth to something after all.

Perhaps the water was too hot. Ando suddenly felt thirsty.

January 15th, Coming of Age Day, was a holiday, which made it a three-day weekend. On the first day of the long weekend, Ando got a call from Miyashita asking if he wanted to go for a drive. The invitation was like a port in a storm for Ando, who’d been wondering how he was going to get through three workless days all alone. He wasn’t sure if he liked the way Miyashita asked him- like he was hiding something-but Ando had no reason not to go along. He said yes, then asked, “Where are we going?”

“There’s something I want to show you,” was all Miyashita would say. Ando figured his colleague had his reasons, and so refrained from pressing the matter. He’d get the answer out of Miyashita when he saw him.

Miyashita picked Ando up at home. As soon as he climbed in the car, Ando asked again where they were going.

“I can’t tell you. Now stop asking questions.” And so even as they departed, their destination was unknown to Ando.

The car left the No. 3 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway for the Yokohama New Road. They seemed to be heading for Fujisawa. They couldn’t go too far and still expect to keep it a day trip. Maybe as far as Odawara or Hakone, possibly the Izu peninsula, but no farther than Atami or Ito. After several guesses at the destination of the mystery tour, Ando decided to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Just before they were to merge with traffic, they came to a halt. The entrance to the Yokohama New Road was always jammed, and was especially so today, at the start of the long weekend. In an effort to keep Miyashita from getting too bored at the wheel, Ando decided to tell him the hypothesis he’d come up with a few days ago as to why Mai alone had displayed no abnormalities in her coronary artery. It was Ando’s theory that Mai had been ovulating the day she watched the video, and that the ring virus had shifted the focus of its attack to her egg. Then, just before falling into the rooftop exhaust shaft, Mai had given birth to some unknown life form. Something that had only gestated for a week. If she’d just given birth, that explained why Mai hadn’t been wearing any panties.

Miyashita heard him out and then was silent for a time. His striking round eyes seemed to be staring straight ahead, but then he changed lanes with an agility that belied his lax expression, poking his way into the passing lane.

“I thought more or less the same thing when we looked at Mai’s virus under the electron microscope,” said Miyashita, paying no attention to the blaring horns behind him.

“What do you mean?”

“The broken viruses looked familiar. After a while it hit me that they looked like spermatozoa.”

“You too?”

“Nemoto said the same thing.”

“So all three of us got the same impression.”

“Yes. Sometimes you have to pay attention to intuition.” Miyashita flashed Ando a grin, turning his attention from the road ahead.

“Watch where you’re going!” As the brake lights of the car ahead drew closer, Ando clenched his leg muscles.

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to end up like Asakawa,” Miyashita said, trying to look unconcerned as he stepped on the brake. But his front bumper was almost touching the car in front of them. Wiping away a cold sweat, Ando wondered if there was something wrong with Miyashita’s depth perception. Driving like that they were sure to get in an accident sooner or later.

“Speaking of Asakawa, it’s still a mystery as to why he didn’t die of a heart attack.”

“Right. Men don’t ovulate.”

“But maybe there was something physically different about him, just as with Mai.”

“The virus probably found another exit.”

“Exit?”

“A better way to spread and flourish.”

Once they passed the exit for the Hodogaya bypass, the traffic snarl eased somewhat, and they made better time. No doubt the road signs had inspired Miyashita to use the word “exit” as he had. He continued.

“You know, it’s up to us to figure this out.” All trace of his customary nonchalance was gone from his voice.

“Believe me, I’m trying.”

Miyashita changed the subject. “What did you do over New Year’s break?”

“Nothing. Just lay around the apartment.”

“Hmph. I took my family down to a fishing village at the southern tip of the Izu peninsula. We stayed at a little B&B that wasn’t even listed on the travel brochures. Guess why I picked such a remote place? Well, one of my favorite novels is set in the village, and I’d always wanted to visit it. In the book it said that if you gaze out over the ocean at the horizon from that village, you see a mirage. I believed it.”

Ando couldn’t figure out where Miyashita was headed. He just nodded and listened.

“I know it’s insensitive to say this to you, but family’s a really wonderful thing. We could hear the surf from that inn, see, and it woke me up in the middle of the night. And as I gazed at the faces of my wife and daughter, it sank in just how dear they are to me.”

Ando knew all too well the dearness of family. He tried to imagine a New Year’s holiday with family in a southern Izu fishing village, where one could see mirages… Alone, the loneliness would be overwhelming, but the presence of loved ones would make the experience heartwarming. Ando began to wallow in thoughts of his own broken home, but Miyashita wouldn’t give him time.

“My wife’s a real looker, isn’t she?”

When Ando replied, though, he wasn’t recalling Miyashita’s wife, but his own. “Absolutely,” he nodded, thinking of how guileless and fresh she’d looked when they’d first met.

“Me, I’m short, fat, and ugly. And her! She’s beautiful, and she’s got a great personality. I’m a lucky man, and I know it.”

Miyashita’s wife was taller than him, and she looked just like a very popular actress. Next to her, Miyashita definitely seemed some inferior breed. But he was talented, and if he just kept it up, there was no way he wouldn’t get tenure at their med school. Ando laughed ruefully. There was nothing inferior about that.

“So I don’t want to die. I think I’ve been too optimistic. See, all along I’ve been at this case as a disinterested observer. In fact, I’ve enjoyed wondering where it might all lead.”

Ando had been taking things a bit more seriously. Still, his, too, was the standpoint of the disinterested observer. Even if he failed to solve the case, he wasn’t afraid of coming to any particular harm as a result. In that, his situation was fundamentally different from Asakawa and Ryuji’s.

“Me, too.”

“But I realized that maybe I’ve been underestimating the danger.”

“Realized when?”

“After the holiday, when we got back from Izu.”

“Did something happen there?”

“There was no mirage.”

Ando frowned. Miyashita wasn’t making sense.

“Just because of that?”

“Have you ever visited the setting of a novel?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ando figured that most people felt, at least once, the urge to visit the setting of a favorite book.

“How did it go?”

“Like, ‘Well, I suppose this is it.’”

“Was it different from what you’d expected?”

“Most of the time you’re bound to feel let down.”

“The setting as you’d imagined it from reading the novel was different from the way the place looked in reality.”