Koji Suzuki - Birthday

The rope was all ready at the time she left her apartment. There was one other item she'd prepared along with it, but the memory was missing. She wondered what it was. Something in a plastic bag, she knew. She could recall the feel of something squishy.

The life that had started growing within her after viewing the tape had, at some point, begun to exert its influence over her body. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would abruptly come to, and listening she'd hear the pulse of whatever it was in her belly. It only took four or five days for her abdomen to swell to the point that she seemed ready to deliver, and the same time for her enlarged nipples to start leaking milk.

Why was she there at the bottom of the crack in the top of a building? All at once, Mai knew.

To give birth.

She didn't believe for a moment that the thing within her was her own child. She wasn't even sure it was human.

A beast.

No—she didn't even feel it was a life form.

But she felt a sense of responsibility; she had to birth this unknown thing without anybody knowing.

She didn't know where the sense came from, but come it did, and there was no resisting it. It drove her to act, to fulfill her role as a cocoon.

At around the same hour the day before, Mai had taken off her underwear, snuck out of her apartment, and ascended to the roof of this building in the warehouse district, where few people walked at night and few cars passed. A dilapidated old building by the Shore Road.

She had climbed over the gate on the second floor landing and climbed the spiraling fire escape to the top of the building. Once there, she'd climbed by ladder to the rooftop and gone over to the machine room. On the seaward side of it there was a deep exhaust shaft, like a coffin floating in the sky.

A perfect place for the pupa to escape its cocoon. A perfect place for the soul to discard its shell. It wasn't far from Mai's apartment, and it was almost guaranteed that no one would see.

Mai had tried to climb down into the shaft using the sash-rope. She'd fallen and sprained her ankle.

What time is it, I wonder.

During the day she'd been able to guess the time based on the shifting sunlight, but it was several hours past sundown now. Stars shone, but they didn't help her.

She had no way to gauge the passage of time.

Twenty-four hours, perhaps, had gone by since she left her apartment.

Suddenly sadness overcame Mai. She'd been there for twenty-four hours, but for most of that time her consciousness had been elsewhere; she'd only been herself for two or three hours at the most. During those hours, she had known astonishment, and fear, and unutterable dread, but this was the first time she'd felt sadness.

Her body no doubt knew that her time was approaching.

She tried to get up but couldn't; she tried to cry out but found her throat as though blocked. Meanwhile, the movements within her womb grew more violent as the power pressing on her from inside overflowed with life.

Her vitality was being transferred out of her. She reflected on her twenty-two years with chagrin. Had she lived merely to have her body taken over, to give birth to this unknown thing? How pitiful.

Mai knew the meaning of her own tears. Fear of the thing that was trying to nullify her life was also forcing her grief to the surface.

It was mid-November. They'd had bright, clear weather for several days now, but it was cold in the middle of the night. The chill of the concrete seeped through her back and into her bones, only adding to her sorrow.

And now a thin film of water coated the inner surfaces of the walls. A leak from somewhere? The clamminess made things still worse.

She was sobbing now.

Help! Help me!

She couldn't voice the words. Then the labor pains started, and they washed away her sadness and the cold, along with every other feeling and sensation, on a mam-moth ocean wave. The smell of the sea was stronger now. It had to be high tide.

She remembered something her mother had told her once, when she was little.

You were born at high tide.

Her mother believed that if the rhythm of nature wasn't disrupted, people were born at high tide and died at low tide.

But Mai had the encroaching feeling that life and death were going to be simultaneous. Did that mean it was high tide or low tide now? Shifts in gravity, either way, influenced life and death.

The contractions subsided a bit; the rhythm of the waves slowed. She thought she could hear a melody, low over the rhythm. The horns of ships and distant cars provided effective accents. Was it just the city's night sounds coming together in all their layers to sound like music, or was there actually a melody playing somewhere in the building? Or still...

Mai couldn't decide if she was really hearing music.

She wouldn't be able to distinguish a real sound from an auditory hallucination. All she knew was that listening to it calmed her down.

The mysterious melody softened her pain and put her into a peculiar mood. Suddenly, she knew where the music was coming from. But, no, it couldn't be. She tried to suppress her own realization, raising her head and staring at her belly.

Who's that singing—down there...

She imagined the life inside her singing to ease its mother's pain. Her dark womb, filled with amniotic fluid—didn't it bear a resemblance to the space Mai was in? And the thing singing softly in that dark place was about to show its face.

The voice was that of a young female. At moments it seemed to be coming from right next to Mai's ears, at others to wend its way up to her from below her feet. Finally, the voice stopped singing and began speaking, low and soft.

The words were those of a woman who had died, once. She said so.

I died at the bottom of a well, you know.

The woman gave her name as Sadako Yamamura.

She proceeded to describe her past in brief.

Mai was unable to disbelieve. The voice said that the images on the videotape had not been recorded by any camera. Rather, they'd been experienced by Sadako's five senses and then projected by the operation of her thoughts. It made sense to Mai and she accepted it; when she had watched the images on the tape, her perceptions had been completely fused with those of this unknown woman Sadako. The image of the baby, incredibly vivid, flashed across Mai's mind.

Her cervix was fully dilated. All alone, Mai heaved, in rhythm with her contractions. Her tortured moans echoed in the narrow space, she could hear them. But it didn't sound like her own voice and she felt strange.

The labor pains were coming closer together than at first, and as the interval shortened, energy concentrated and released itself more intensely towards birth, uterus and muscle contracting again and again.

Giant waves crashed one after another in Mai's brain. In time with them she sucked in a lungful of air, pushed, and bit back the scream that wanted to come out as she focused all her strength on her lower body.

High tide must have been approaching, the moon rounding the earth.

A sudden violent contraction came over Mai. Energy concentrated in her lower abdomen and was poised to shoot through the exit as a lump. Mai stretched out her arms, reaching for something, anything, to cling to.

It's coming!

When the intuition coursed through her, consciousness receded.

She had probably only been out for a few minutes.

As consciousness returned, Mai's retinas registered the small shadow wiggling between her thighs.

The baby crawled out of her womb without a cry. It twisted and turned, trying to sit up. It was using its hands skillfully, like a swimmer. Its movements, all the more because they weren't accompanied by cries, asserted that it already had a will of its own.