Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

“So what does it feel like to massage a corpse?” Kita suddenly asked.

“You have to like corpses. If you think it’s pointless, you can’t get your arms and back working strongly enough. You have to tell yourself it’s for humanity and the world as you press.”

“How do you do it?”

“You get on the corpse, shake your head around wildly, yell ‘Don’t die, you crazy fool!’ and go like this.” The doctor placed his hands against the dashboard and leaned into it, breathing heavily. The car swayed slightly.

“I guess it would feel pretty good to the guy being massaged.”

The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose, and irritably tutted again. The next time he makes a bad joke, he thought, I’ll give him a shot to put him to sleep.

He closed his eyes again, but he didn’t want to return to the dream, so he imagined music. The prelude to Mozart’s Don Giovanni . He used to listen to this opera a lot in his student days, so he thought he could remember most of the melody, but it began to repeat itself half way through and he couldn’t move it on. Oh well. To cheer himself up, he taunted Kita, “By the way, maybe it’s natural to get an erection when you’re close to death.” He’d apparently noted the shape of Kita’s pants of the corner of his eye. “I think it’s a normal reaction,” he went on, red-faced.

“It felt like having sex with a car back there. Literally car sex.”

“A car accident is sex with a car, you know. You don’t need a man and a woman for that. All you need to do is step on the accelerator. You reach climax in no time.”

It was four in the morning. Kita had no idea where he was going. There wasn’t a building to be seen along the roadsides. No hospitals, no graveyards. The road simply stretched ahead to carry them along. Kita pressed harder on the accelerator again. His forehead grew hot, and a thrill ran down to his thighs.

The doctor chuckled reminiscently, and murmured, “You know, after a car accident you sometimes find people with a blissful expression on their face. Just like they’ve come through wild sex.”

That young hot-rodder had been like that. He’d been playing tag with a motorcycle cop, failed to take a corner, and piled into a noodle shop. That was the first time the doctor had seen that ecstatic look. The accident happened right near the hospital where he worked, and the patrol car had taken him to the site. Three broken ribs appeared to have pierced his stomach. The helmet was smashed, but his head was unhurt, and he was conscious. When he was carried into the operating room, he was drooling and grinning, his eyes glazed. When they removed the bloody clothes and set about dealing with his injuries, they found his pants were wet with semen. He’d apparently ejaculated at the moment of impact. His penis was still engorged.

The boy had seized the nurse’s arm and said, “Suck me off.” She was appalled. He went on, “One more time, one more time before I die!”

“Pull yourself together!” the nurse scolded him. She took hold of his penis.

“Thank you,” he said, and lost consciousness.

It must have felt really good, for he developed a taste for it. He managed to crash his motorbike not once but three times, and get himself brought back to the same hospital. Each time, he had the blissful expression of Saint Sebastian. The third time he came in, however, the back of his brain had been gouged out, and he died three hours later.

“By the way, what happens to your penis if you die with an erection?”

“I’d say you’d lose it,” the doctor replied curtly.

“Wouldn’t it stay for a while?”

“Who knows. Why do you ask?”

“It’d be pretty amazing to have an erection when you’re already dead. How was it with that Saint Sebastian fellow?”

The doctor shook his head. “It didn’t work for him that third time,” he told Kita. “The guy’s brains had spilled out, after all. There wasn’t even any point in massaging his heart.”

After a brief silence, Kita announced, “I’ve decided how I’m going to kill myself.”

“In a crash?” The doctor frowned, and scratched his head. “You’d already made that decision when you stole the car, hadn’t you?”

“That thrill just drives me wild. I’m going to commit love suicide with my car, like your Saint Sebastian.”

“But dying in a crash won’t be good for your internal organs, you know. We can’t use a liver or kidney that’s been pierced by a rib.”

The doctor was still after his organs, it seemed. “I’ll make sure it’s OK,” Kita promised, but the doctor gazed steadily at him.

“Are you really sure you’ll succeed first time? It’s a question of probabilities, see.”

“You’re saying I might not die?”

“I once saved a young man’s life even though his heart was cut open. He was struck by a truck and brought in unconscious with dreadfully heavy bleeding. I was sure he was done for, but I opened his chest up then and there, without anaesthetic, pinched the wound in his heart together and stopped the flow of blood, and spent a long time sewing him up. Six months later he left hospital and went back to work.”

“Now you’re boasting. You’re saying if I get a hole in my heart, I should stick my finger in it and wait quietly for help? No way.”

“I also saved a man who tried to kill himself by sticking a pistol in his mouth. The bullet pierced his upper jaw, travelled up beside his nose, destroyed his right eye, and came to rest in the cerebrum. His face was a mess, but there wasn’t much damage to the brain, so his life was saved.”

“Goddamn stupid thing to do.”

“Well, in his case you might be right. As soon as he was back on his feet he took himself up to the roof of the hospital and jumped off. He landed head first in a flowerbed. Died instantly.”

“There’s nothing a doctor can do about instant death. I’m planning on having one myself. It’d be terrible not to quite manage the job. I’ve run through my money, see, and I’ve got no desire to go back into the world again. Come on, doc, promise me you won’t try and save me.”

The doctor was silent. It seemed pretty clear Kita was up to something really tricky again. Sure he could let him die, but he needed to be sure those pre-sold organs stayed unharmed. He might have to put his skills to work repairing any organ that happened to get damaged, then wait until Kita was well again and make sure he was there for his next suicide attempt.

“Is there some way I can do a thorough job when I crash the car, do you know? Tell me.”

“I’ve no experience there I’m afraid. I suggest you give up the idea. It’s pretty painful, you know.”

“No, I’ve made up my mind.”

“You’ll burn to death if the car bursts into flames. And in that case, your organs—”

“Would be roasted entrails, I should think,” Kita finished for him.

“We’d have to remove the gasoline so you don’t burn. I’ll get you a cremation later.”

Kita remarked that he didn’t mind the thought of cremation, but he quite fancied being left out for the birds to pick clean. Now it was finally Friday morning, he was having a few final wishes.

“There aren’t any vultures in Hokkaido. If you want a sky burial, you should go somewhere like Tibet. Have you ever heard of the Japanese who was given a sky burial? He didn’t actually want one, it’s just that he happened to die in a hospital way up in the mountains in Tibet so his burial followed the local custom. They don’t have the wood to fuel any furnaces for cremation in Tibet, see. But they do have vultures. There are specialists in sky burial funerals, you know. They have the body carried down into the valley and placed on a large flat rock, where they cut up the flesh and break the bones. They use a rock to smash it all up, cranium, knees, the lot, so the birds can feast on the brain and marrow as well.”