Ryu Murakami - Piercing

‘Listen, I’ll be waiting right here,’ Kawashima told the girl. ‘I don’t want to go in, but I won’t move from this spot. I don’t like hospitals, never did. I mean, the truth is, I’m afraid of them. Hospitals scare me.’

His breath made little clouds as he spoke. They were standing in front of a lighted sign that said EMERGENCY OUTPATIENT RECEPTION. The reception room would be brightly lit, and he couldn’t afford to be seen with the girl in a place like that, especially by any doctors or nurses.

‘OK,’ said Chiaki, thinking: So that’s why he’s never around when I wake up — he doesn’t like hospitals. ‘But shouldn’t you have them look at your hand?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Kawashima said. He took three 10,000-yen notes from his pocket and held them out to her. ‘Use this to pay.’

‘That’s OK,’ said the girl, shaking her head. ‘You already paid me extra and everything.’ She stepped towards the door beneath the sign, then stopped and looked back at him. ‘You’ll be right here, right?’

‘I promise.’

‘And you’ll stay with me tonight, won’t you?’

‘Of course. I won’t leave you.’

I’ve got to snuff her as soon as possible and get this over with, Kawashima thought as he watched her enter the building. The longer I put it off, the greater the risk that someone will get a good look at us together.

Chiaki shook her head when the nurse asked if she had her insurance card, and she had to present her driver’s licence and write her name and address on some forms. When she got in to see the doctor she told him she’d fallen off a bicycle. He inspected the wounds on her thigh and said that one of them was fairly deep and would require stitches. He didn’t question her story or ask about the shirt-cloth bandage, and though he must have seen the scars from all the previous incidents he didn’t say anything about them either. He injected her with a local anaesthetic in three different spots, disinfected the scraped knee and the wounds and sewed up the deep one, and covered them all with lots of gauze. He seemed to be in a hurry to finish.

There had been about ten other people in the waiting room. A man with a shaved head sitting in a wheelchair, his eyes half-closed and his mouth hanging open, wearing just a thin cotton robe; a middle-aged woman with thick make-up whose big toe and ankle were swollen grotesquely, and who was supported by two thin young men sitting on either side of her; a group of four men dressed for construction work who smelled of sweat and sat with their heads bent together, discussing something in low voices; an old man with bulging purple veins on his hands reading a newspaper; a man cradling a baby, next to a woman holding a stuffed toy chipmunk and pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

The anaesthetic had taken effect in just a few minutes, but Chiaki still felt a little pain when the suturing needle pierced her flesh, and beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip and the bridge of her nose. Each time the doctor’s arm brushed against her translucent purple panties she thought of the man with the glasses on, the way his eyes looked behind those lenses.

‘Is it OK to have sex?’ she asked as she was leaving the examination room. Without even glancing up from the chart he was scribbling on, the doctor muttered, ‘Just be careful the bandage doesn’t come off.’

Kawashima had taken refuge across the street from the entrance, at a bus stop with partitions to protect him from the freezing wind. He’d decided that loitering outside an emergency room entrance at eleven o’clock on a cold night like this, holding two large bags, just wouldn’t look right. If a cop on patrol were to come along and question him and then ask to look in the bags, he’d find the girl’s S&M toys in one and an ice pick and combat knife in the other. At a bus stop, on the other hand, there was nothing suspicious about carrying luggage of any size. He had a clear view of the hospital doors from here, and if a bus were to come he had only to act as if he were waiting for a different one.

His clothes — T-shirt, sweatshirt, and jeans under a cheap coat of thin material — were no match for this weather, though. He’d finally stopped bleeding, but his fingers were frozen, and he reopened the wound by putting his leather gloves back on. He wondered if he couldn’t separate himself from the cold and the pain, using the technique he’d developed as a boy. There were a lot of things he had to think through right now, while the girl was receiving treatment, but conditions like this robbed you of the power to process information. The technique. .

It had been a cold night in winter, just like this, when he first discovered it. He’d run out of the house and slammed the sliding glass door behind him. Come to think of it, the palm of his left hand was hurting that night, too. Mother had coated it with industrial ammonia — the kind you dilute ten parts to one to use as insecticide. In a little while it had begun to make this awful smell, and he felt the skin of his palm burning. When he tried to wash the stuff off she pulled him away from the sink, and he ran outside. Don’t bother coming back! she shouted through the glass and locked the door, turning the latch slowly, deliberately. Clack . Her silhouette on the frosted glass was terrifying, blurry at the edges and bigger than life, and he was freezing and in so much pain that he thought he was going to lose his mind. I must’ve made use of that, he thought, that feeling that I was going insane. Something came flooding into me, I remember, and something went flooding out, and suddenly I’d managed to separate myself from the pain and the cold and the fear.

The one who’s here right now isn’t me. This pain isn’t mine . That was the general idea, but of course he hadn’t put it into words at the time. The words had all been erased, along with the feelings. He’d used the technique later on in life, too, when he lived with the stripper. He seemed to remember subtly shifting the focus of his eyes, like with one of those 3-D illustrations, but there was no way he could maintain that sort of concentration right now. And it was no use trying to analyse how he’d done it. The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words — the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

About two hundred metres from the bus stop was a phone booth. If only he were inside it. He’d be completely protected from the wind, and he could even call Yoko and hear her voice if he wanted to. He was summoning up the sound of that soothing voice of hers when, absurdly, he began to imagine actually asking her advice.

‘So, anyway, she read the notes. I have no choice but to kill her, right? What else can I do?’

‘Where is she right now?’

‘She’s in the emergency room at this hospital. I’m outside waiting for her.’

‘Won’t she say something to the doctor, or one of the nurses?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, if she was going to do that, she could’ve talked to someone in the lobby of the hotel, right? The security guard or whatever.’

‘I guess that’s true. But if she read the notes, why isn’t she trying to escape?’

‘I don’t get that part, either, but it’s not as if this is a woman who’s in control of herself, or acting rationally. I’m pretty sure she’s a kindred spirit.’

‘Kindred spirit?’

‘I think something happened to her when she was small.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, but I can tell she’s afraid, and starved for something.’

‘So, what are you going to do now?’

A slender figure came out through the emergency room door. She was hopping on one leg and looking anxiously about. One thing’s for sure , Kawashima muttered under his breath as he sprinted towards the girl. I can’t take her back to the hotel in Akasaka .