Koji Suzuki - Birthday

The sound booth was located next to the lighting booth. It played an important role in supporting and in-tensifying the drama unfolding onstage. His job was to watch the progress of the play and provide music and sound effects at just the right moments, in response to signals from the stage director and in synch with the lighting man. This troupe was quite particular about how the music was handled. The actors' movements and lines were meant to match the rhythms of the songs he provided, so if his timing on the start button was off, it would ruin the whole play. They required constant concentration from their soundman: he wasn't able to relax, even for a moment, until the play was over.

Onstage, his favorite actress was performing, with great earnestness, the part she'd at long last landed. It was her debut—her career as an actress depended on each one of these precious moments, and she was savoring them.

He liked her personally, which only made him more determined to get the sound cues exactly right. His every thought was concentrated on the finger that would press play. He could feel sweat beading on his fingertip.

The music would play, and she'd sing a snippet of song: that was how the scene went. He'd push the play button, and from the speaker in front of the stage would come the sound, a snippet that he'd recorded and edited himself. That was what was supposed to happen.

He pressed play.

But what came from the speaker was no sound he'd ever heard before. Not only was it not music, it was too creepy even for one of their sound effects. Though he could hardly make it out, he thought it sounded like someone moaning—when the scene called for a cheerful little song. It was more than enough to destroy the play.

He watched the tape reel spin. It was his tape, the one he'd put together: no doubt about that. And he knew exactly what sounds were on it, and where. This keening wail was totally unforeseen.

Who the hell put this on here!

There was no time to think of a solution. Doubt as-sailed him from every side, and in his panic he allowed an effect scheduled for the next scene to play now. The ringing of a telephone echoed through the theater. The situation was beyond salvaging now.

The actress was young and inexperienced, and she couldn't improvise her way out of the situation. She simply stopped and looked up at the sound booth. With the house lights down and the booth's work light on, she'd be able to see him from the stage.

She looked up at him with a weapon-like clarity of gaze, and an accusatory gleam began to come into her eyes.

How dare you ruin my debut like this!

He gave up. He had no explanation for how those moans had gotten there. There was no way he was to blame—if anything, he was the victim. But he couldn't even voice his excuses: his body had stiffened, and he couldn't move. It felt like sleep paralysis.

Now all the actors onstage had stopped performing and were looking up at the sound booth. Audience members, too, following the actors' gazes, were beginning to turn around in their seats, half standing up to stare at him. His whole body felt the force of their recrimina-tions.

It's not my fault! It's not my fault!

He didn't speak the words aloud, but somehow the microphone picked up the voice in his head and ampli-fied it until it resounded throughout the theater.

"It's not my fault! It's not my fault!"

This attempt at self-vindication, more like a desperate cry, only poured oil on the flames. The crowd's reproach reached an even higher pitch, engulfing the hall.

But the sharpest gaze of all belonged to the young actress making her first appearance on a stage. The woman who had joined the troupe at the same time as him, with whom he'd done odd jobs together when they were interns, the woman with whom he'd exchanged encouraging words, the woman who had gradually become the object of his affections... He wanted to help her. He couldn't. Far from it: he was dragging her down. All he wanted, and he wanted it from the bottom of his heart, was for her to succeed as an actress, and now he was stealing that future from her, and all he could do was gnash his teeth... He could say he loved her all he wanted, but in reality it all came down to this.

Clutching at his chest, drowning in sweat, Toyama awoke from his dream.

For the first few minutes after waking up from the dream, he didn't know where he was. Then, as he got his breathing under control and looked around, Toyama began to grasp the situation. Mirrored ceiling, a circular bed that wasn't his, a woman in a towel sitting next to that oversized bed...

He tried to look up at her, and suddenly his chest hurt like it was being squeezed. He shivered; he could feel a cold sweat break out on his back. His chest and back had been giving him a lot of pain lately; this time, too, it made him uneasy. Not again, he thought; maybe he ought to see a doctor after all.

"You were having a nightmare."

She flashed him a playful smile, as if he'd shown her something really amusing.

Toyama groaned and lay there supine and motion-less for a time. He was afraid that if he made the wrong move now he'd get dizzy and fall over. He waited for his breathing to relax.

At length he gingerly rolled over on the bed. He might be alright.

He quietly separated himself from the woman, weighing what he'd dreamed against what he knew to be real; he heaved a sigh. How many times had he dreamed terrifying things, knowing all the while that it was a dream? And each time, even knowing it for what it was, he cowered before the same dream, and then felt relief when he was able to confirm it wasn't real.

He looked at his watch and asked the woman, "Hey, how long have I been asleep?"

"Fifteen minutes, maybe? I saw you were asleep and went to take a shower. When I got back, you were having a nightmare. You're being punished for all the bad stuff you do, don't you think?"

Toyama gave a bitter smile and buried his face in the pillow. He had more than an inkling of what she was talking about. Here he was, forty-seven, married, a father, and he was still fooling around. No doubt the woman assumed his wife must've found out and confronted him, and thus the cold sweat.

He wasn't drunk. It wasn't even night. It was two in the afternoon. Once they left the hotel they'd be under the clear blue skies of late November. He'd had a little lull at work, so he'd called up an old flame under the pre-tense of doing lunch; they'd gone to a hotel; sated from food and sex, and tired from accumulated fatigue, he'd suddenly been overcome by sleep; and in those few minutes, that fragmentary dream... It wasn't hard to assign it meaning. The same dream had tormented him over and over as a twenty-three-year-old college student. That was twenty-four years ago.

The dream came in lots of variations. Sometimes, he'd be sitting in the sound booth cuing the tape, which he'd mended with adhesive tape, and it would break, with an audible snap. Sometimes the tape would produce a strange noise unconnected with the scene onstage. What all the variants had in common was the fact that his actions produced some sound that ruined the performance of the woman he loved just as she was going to make her stage debut.

He'd had that nightmare twenty-four years ago. At the time he'd been manning the sound booth for Theater Group Soaring: it had been an all-too-plausible scenario then, and in fact something along those lines had actually happened to him.

But he hadn't had the dream for twenty-four years—

why was it back now? He thought he knew the answer to that.

The guy's business card was still in his card-case.

Kenzo Yoshino, Daily News, Yokosuka Branch Office.