Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“As a matter of fact, I fried up the leftovers of some I ate raw the night before.”

“Look, will you hurry and call an ambulance, please,” the girl begged, drawing out the vowel at the end of the sentence as if she were singing. It really seemed as much a test of the echo as a cry of exasperation. I was about to tell her that it was out of the question; the insect dealer opened his mouth too, apparently on the verge of some similar remark; but it was the shill who said it first:

“Forget it. We can’t possibly do that.”

“Oh, I know. Never mind.” She gave in without a fight. “If you’re trying to avoid contact with the outside world, then it doesn’t make sense to call an ambulance, does it? But God, it’s killing me. ”

“Oh, let me give this back to you before I forget,” said the shill. He took my padlock out from a compartment in his bag and threw it at me all of a sudden, though we were barely an arm’s length apart. I missed it, and it fell to the floor — but there was no clank when it hit the stone. It was still twirling around the shill’s finger. More parlor tricks. This time he passed it slowly into my palm. “You can never be too careful with a lock, can you?” he said.

“How about the key, while you’re at it?”

“Sure thing.” He fumbled in his pocket. “Komono, you give back yours too.”

“All right.” Without the slightest hesitation, the insect dealer tossed over his passkey, which flew in a precise parabola, landing smack in the shill’s hand before being transferred to mine. I was not impressed. Such virtuoso performances leave me cold. It’s always the same: the ball goes back and forth, back and forth, in a quick, light rhythm. and then before I know it, somebody switches it for a hand grenade; I catch it, and that’s the end of the game. I had recovered the padlock and keys, but in return I had been forced to acknowledge that the shill and the girl would stay.

“Just tell me when you want out. I’ll open the door right up.”

“No problem. I have no pressing commitments.” He sucked in a bit of saliva at the corner of his mouth. “Besides, in here you don’t have to worry about bill collectors chasing after you.”

“That’s right,” the insect dealer chimed in. Everybody laughed but me. The girl began massaging her ankle as if she’d just remembered. I could see right through her little ruse, but there seemed no point in bringing it up.

“Doesn’t anybody know a good doctor? Someone discreet, who makes house calls.”

“Yes, we’ll need a ship’s doctor. Ships always have one, you know.” The shill sought the insect dealer’s concurrence; the insect dealer nodded. “Not only should he be exempted from paying a fare; he should be paid a salary. Does anybody know a good person?”

I did, but I didn’t want to say so. “For now, why don’t you let me have a look at that leg?” I offered. “I used to work for the fire department. I can at least tell a sprain from a fracture.”

Again everybody laughed. I could only join in, estimating as I did so the distance between her and me. A good eighteen to twenty paces. The thing to do was to stroll over casually, timing it so that as I finished talking I was right by her side. If all went well, I might be able to touch her leg without anybody stopping me.

“They make you learn first-aid procedures even if you’re not a member of the emergency squad,” I said. “Things like splinting a fracture or administering artificial respiration — but this is a bit uncomfortable, so why don’t we go to my cabin? It has a sofa and some cushions. Nothing too fancy, but comfortable.”

Just as planned, I maneuvered myself into place directly opposite the insect dealer, with the girl between us. She nodded and raised her right arm high, signaling that she wanted to lean on my shoulder. Unbelievably, she had accepted my invitation. I knelt down by her side on the left, scarcely breathing, like someone slipping a windfall in change into his pocket. Such a chance would never come again. I could not afford to worry about what anyone else might think.

Her hand rested on my right shoulder. This was no fantasy, but a real woman’s hand. The sensation was so novel that I can scarcely describe it; if anything, it felt as if someone had applied an icy flatiron to the surface of my brain. Under the circumstances, no one could have objected if I slipped an arm around her waist, but I forbore, content merely to imagine what it would be like. As I stood up, a hand reached in my crotch and tickled my balls. It had to be the insect dealer. I ignored it.

The shill had gone ahead toward the bridge — my cabin. He kicked at the toilet below the stairs and let out a nervous laugh. These people laughed a lot for no good reason.

“Sure looks like a toilet,” he said.

“It is one,” I said.

The insect dealer caught up with the shill and peered over his shoulder. “This is a special-order size. Are you sure it isn’t for horses? Does it work?”

“Of course it does.”

“You must be some kind of exhibitionist.” The shill leaned against a stick beside the toilet. “How you could drop your drawers here, in such an open place, is beyond me.”

What he had leaned against was a steel rod sticking up out of the floor like a railway switch; it looked like something to grab for support, but actually it was the flush lever. Before I could warn him, the lever moved, and he staggered back. An earthshaking tremor arose, as if a subway were roaring in. The noise was concentrated in the core of the toilet, as if it had been passed through a parabolic lens and magnified. An instant later, water came surging in with a cloud of spray, rose up just level with the bowl, formed a whirlpool, and vanished with another roar. There was a wet noise of rupture, then a hush.

“How awful.” Shaking my shoulder, the woman emitted a soundless laugh. Judging from the way she carried herself, the ankle was certainly not broken. I doubted if it was even sprained. That was fine with me. I only wanted to stay forever the way we were.

“That water pressure is ridiculous!” The insect dealer looked back at me and said sharply, “Is this really a john? It’s big enough to service ten elephants — all at the same time. The shape is funny too. I mean, it looks sort of like a john, but it’s really not, is it?”

“Well, who says that all toilets have to look alike?” I countered. “There’s no law, is there?” I wasn’t dead sure myself. Maybe it was something else. It was bigger than your ordinary facility, and higher; its back was indistinguishable from its front, and it was unusually wide. The absence of a seat made it difficult to straddle and hard to keep your balance. It was also a peculiar shape: the heavy porcelain bowl rested like a giant tulip on stainless-steel pipes protruding from the floor.

My first encounter with this toilet went back to the time I was confined here under suspicion of rape, and my biological father, Inototsu, had chained me to those very pipes. Every prison cell needs some sort of facility for disposing of human waste. The men at work nearby (who regarded me with a mixture of disgust and awe for having supposedly committed rape so young) used to share their lunches with me and then relieve themselves right in front of me without batting an eyelash, while I was still eating. Also, they would dispose of cigarette butts, the paper bags they brought their lunches in, things like that. Sometimes they would drag over a cat carcass or a bug-infested cushion and flush it away. Kittens could fit in whole, and the mother cat could be managed either by hammering the body to bits or by severing it in two. It was doubtless constructed in such a way as to take advantage of different water levels underground — but why and how it generated such tremendous pressure I never understood. Despite its mystery, it was in fact all-powerful, capable of washing anything away.