Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

I’m being sucked down a narrow tube. Am I off to the other world at last? My body’s being drawn out like a piece of spaghetti. This hurts. I can’t breathe. I can see a hole. A small hole. All I can do is try and escape through it. The other world must lie beyond it. A brilliant light is shining in. An unbearable tingle! Who’s doing this to me? Is this a sign I’ve arrived?

Some time before night fell, the doctor discovered the broken guardrail on a curve of Route 336 between Ogifushi and Sakaimachi, where the road ran along a cliff above the sea. He informed the local police and requested an investigation, and early Saturday morning the diving team arrived, donned aqualungs, and dived to the bottom. There they discovered the white Camaro, but the body of the driver wasn’t in it. A three-hour search was conducted with two boats and a crew of six divers, but there was no sign of the body. The most convincing theory was that it had been washed far out to sea. If he had by any chance managed to survive he would surely have sought help from a passing car or someone living nearby, but no one had seen him, and there was no way of confirming the death.

The doctor returned to the capital. There was nothing more he could do.

He was deeply exhausted. No sooner was he flat on his back at last than the ceiling began to spin. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers to them, then looked at the ceiling again. The window, the wall, the door, the chair, all looked like spinning fragments of crystal. It was as if he was gazing down a kaleidoscope.

Could this be some message from his brain telling him to stop staring at things? Now he came to think of it, these eyes had spent too much time recently looking at bloodied organs, corpses that had just breathed their last, and flat ECGs on a screen.

He held his eyes tightly shut, but now it was his own body that was beginning to spin on the bed. He’d spent the last few days hurtling from place to place, playing both doctor and killer, he told himself. If he didn’t rest, he’d burn out, but the impetus from all this frenetic activity kept his body spinning even after he’d hit the bed.

He swallowed a sleeping pill to force the spin to a halt, and slept the sleep of the dead. He planned to dream away these last few days of utterly futile effort, then to proceed to forget all about the dream and get back to good ol’ lazy, uneventful everyday life again.

He was woken by the sound of the telephone.

A woman’s voice informed him it was checkout time. He had no memory of having slept so long, but the clock told him it was noon. What? he thought. He suddenly couldn’t believe that he’d been wandering in the realm of dreams for thirteen solid hours. What day is it? he asked her.

“It’s Sunday.”

Oh yeah, Easter Sunday, Resurrection day. Yesterday was Saturday, and the day before was Friday thirteenth.

The doctor booked himself in for another day, ordered up a room service brunch, and ran the water for a bath.

As the hot water began to soak into his parched skin, a heartfelt sigh escaped him. His blood vessels expanded, a sweat broke out on his forehead – and then suddenly the bathtub he was lying in began to spin down a whirling hole.

Here we go again, thought the doctor. He tried ducking his head under water and massaging his temples, but things went on spinning. He felt seasick, as if he was in a boat on rough seas. This just didn’t make sense. He jumped out of the bath, grabbed his bathrobe, and began to pace the room.

As long as he was moving, he discovered, he didn’t feel dizzy, but as soon as he lay down it was back again. Maybe a good stiff drink would improve things a little. He tossed back a beer from the minibar and tried a few warm-up exercises. Soon after, his room service clubhouse sandwiches arrived, so he set to and sated his appetite in hopes that would work. But once he leaned back on the sofa it wasn’t long before the room began to heave up and down and tilt from side to side on a rough sea, and then it was back spinning again. He drank another beer, then emptied two mini bottles of whisky, but the goddamn spinning just went on. He felt he would vomit unless he got up and started pacing the room again.

This was all Kita’s fault!

There was no question. It was Yoshio Kita, the man who’d disappeared into the North Pacific on Friday, who was behind this dizziness. The doctor had no idea if he’d really died or not, since he hadn’t personally managed to check the corpse. This was what was getting to him, and making his middle ear act so strangely.

As a general rule, if someone smashes through a guardrail and plunges fifty feet into the sea inside his car, he’d have an eighty percent chance of dying. What’s more, since this particular man chose to do this as an act of suicide, the odds would surely be higher than usual. But no body had been found. The doctor had failed to lay his hands on the cornea and organs he’d paid for. He had been ejected from the story without a chance to ascertain anything for himself, and there was nothing he could do about it. Except somehow get through this dizziness.

Rest was denied him. He was forced to keep on going, round and round, pointlessly. He was being ordered to keep going, keep trying, or else he’d just spin in place. And who was doing the ordering?

The doctor pulled back a few days. Just who was it that had given him his orders and involved him in this chain of events? Heita Yashiro, that’s who. But he’d settled things with that guy already. If you made your living dealing in other people’s lives, you could only say it served you right to have a kidney stolen. And it was a safe bet that Yashiro, though he was probably still alive for a while yet, wouldn’t want to lay eyes on the doctor again. It was too late to get that kidney back now. It was tucked away inside someone else’s belly, busy filtering out the poisons. Yashiro had done quite a bit to poison the world, but at least his kidney would be helping someone else get rid of some. Meantime, some of his own poisonous dealings had caught up with him and shortened his life considerably.

So who had ordered the doctor to try to save Kita, then? Shinobu, of course. He had no idea whether he’d managed to do as she’d asked or not, in the end. Still, he felt he had to report in to his employer. He picked up the phone and rang her. He found on his cell phone a message from her, almost a prayer for Kita’s safety.

They hadn’t found Kita’s body, he informed her. She wanted to meet right away, she said. She added, however, that wherever she went she was inevitably trailed by gangsters, gawkers, and cops. Could he come to her place, in the guise of a consulting doctor? And make sure to dress the part as obviously as possible, please.

Well at any rate, now that he’d been given the task of making his final report he was at least freed from his dizziness for a while.

He shaved, carefully parted his hair, put on a tie, picked up the Boston bag of medical equipment he’d been carting everywhere, and hailed a taxi. Upon arrival, he swept ostentatiously into the flat, white coat fluttering, before the eyes of the doubtless lurking onlookers crouched in their cars or hidden in the shadows.

Shinobu had undergone a change in the last two or three days. She had a new poise and dignity about her. Yet there was also an air of unswerving determination, quite unlike the single-minded devotion of those few days. Could it be that this over-the-hill idol was suddenly drawing fresh breath now that the eyes of the world were on her again?

“You’ve changed,” the doctor observed bluntly.

“I’ve lost three kilos in the last five days,” she replied, gazing at him levelly. The doctor flinched a little before the strength in her eyes. This was not the look of a girly idol who flirts and fawns.