Ryu Murakami - Piercing

He looked down. It was as if his own unconscious had become visible to him in the form of a rising tide. The waves lapped at his feet, then his ankles, his shins, his knees. A tide of swamp-water, sluggishly awash with vomit and flotsam: long-discarded items, all torn, tattered, rusting, bent, scorched, melted, crushed, cracked, oxidised, rotting, fermenting, festering with bacteria and crammed with every imaginable horror. He was up to his chin in the stuff now, and the fear was coalescing into a giant, repulsive insect that emerged from the swamp to crawl up his face and entangle its legs and feelers in his hair. The legs bristled with prickly thorns, and the feelers ended in sharp points that stung his forehead and scalp. Kawashima let go of the table, reaching up to tear the thing away, and fell. His knees hit the floor. The swamp washed over his head, and he shouted for Yoko at the top of his lungs.

At first Chiaki couldn’t make out what the man was mumbling. Those two tablets really did the job, she was thinking — definitely his first time taking Halcion. She’d been unable to suppress a smile when he was trying to maintain his grip on the table, but when he tore at his hair and fell to his knees with a look of utter agony on his face, she found herself sympathising a little. The first time she’d taken Halcion, she too had had an unpleasant experience. A panicky feeling at the ferocious onslaught of sleep. Atsushi or Kazuki, she forgot which, had been with her, and she’d fallen asleep clutching his hand. What was it the man was mumbling, though? Maybe he’s calling my name, she thought, listening carefully, but no. It was another woman’s name. Yoko . The blood turned cold in her veins. She gave a contemptuous little snort, as if to disparage her own emotion, and a shudder ran through her body. And then, just like that, something snapped and rage took over.

Chiaki reached for the kitchen drawer, but used too much force opening it, and it came all the way out. There was a great crash as the contents spilled on to the floor, and another as the drawer itself followed. Squatting down, she fished among the scattered utensils until she came up with a manual can opener. She tested its heft and closed her fist around the handle.

It was as she approached the man, who was grappling with his overturned chair, trying to climb to his feet, that Chiaki remembered why this uncontrollable rage of hers was so necessary. She needed it to contend with all the insults. Insults were the calling cards of hostility. And only violent rage gave her the courage it took to stand up to the hostility all around her. Rage alone could show you the way to action.

‘Yoko, Yoko,’ the man was mumbling. ‘Help me, Yoko.’

Chiaki took aim at his droopy-lidded eyes and slammed the can opener down. My name isn’t Yoko . She heard the stainless steel meet the bone of the eye socket, a sound like a shovel crunching into frozen earth. The man covered his head and tried to crawl away, but Chiaki followed, sobbing and raining down blows to his shoulders and arms and mouth and cheeks and ears.

The first blow dredged Kawashima up from the swamp of unconsciousness. The shock and the subsequent fierce pain reawakened his deadened senses, and the iron shutter was blasted to bits just before closing completely. He was bathed in a sudden, blinding light that screamed of danger, and he tried to shield his face and head. It was like waking from a long but fitful sleep, and it felt as if all the windows in the apartment had shattered and wind was howling through the room.

He heard the voice quite clearly.

Don’t say you’re sorry, no matter how much it hurts. If you apologise you’ll only be beaten harder . It was the same voice he’d heard by the disposable diaper shelf and again tonight, when looking at the new bandage on the girl’s thigh, but to Kawashima it seemed as if he were hearing it for the first time in years. This was the voice, he remembered very distinctly now, that had always protected him as a child. Don’t ask for forgiveness. The attack will be over soon. When you’re sure it’s over, look in her eyes. If you can do that, it won’t be a defeat. You will not have lost if you can look her right in the eyes.

The moment Chiaki realised she was sobbing, her shoulder and arm succumbed to exhaustion and she found herself gasping for breath. The tears coursing down her cheeks dripped from the tip of her chin to the carpet. She was gazing at a single teardrop that sat like dew on the shaggy strands, when all the strength drained from her body. I used up the rage, she thought as the can opener slipped from her hand to the carpet, I used up all the rage. The man, she noticed now, was peeking out between blood-drenched fingers, watching her. There was something scary about the look in his eye. Was he angry? What if he got up and left? She wondered if she should wrap her arms around him, apologise and beg him to stay, but she wouldn’t have had the strength to do that anyway.

The girl was just standing there with her face all contorted and her shoulders and chin jerking with silent sobs. Look at her , the voice said. She’s crying. She’s afraid. You see? You can let down your guard now — she’s crying, and she isn’t holding the weapon any more . Kawashima slowly lowered his hands. The sleeves of his sweatshirt were soaked with blood, and he couldn’t see out of his left eye because of all the blood from the gash. The back of his left hand was cut and bleeding as well, but he scarcely felt it. Why was the pain fading away, though, when he hadn’t even used the technique? It must be the power of the voice, he thought. The voice that came from somewhere inside his own skin and echoed in his ears. That voice had taught him so many things. He hadn’t heard from it much since meeting Yoko, but it had helped him out all through childhood. That voice was the only one he could trust.

Chiaki watched the man lower his arms, thinking how ridiculous he looked. He reminded her of the sloth she’d once seen in a Disney movie. The sloth that fell out of a tree. Sloths spend their lives hanging from branches, the narrator had said, and being on the ground is a serious threat to their safety because their muscles aren’t built for it. The sloth was desperately trying to get back to the tree, but its movements were slow and weird and comical: clinging to the ground, awkwardly waggling one arm or leg at a time and hardly making progress at all. This man was exactly like that sloth. His movements were totally primitive and retarded-looking, but Chiaki wasn’t able to appreciate the humour right now. The left side of his face was like a half-mask of thick, dark red blood, but it wasn’t that; it was the way his right eye was staring at her. No one had ever looked at her that way before. It was an ogling, spacy stare, but one that flickered with sorrow and hatred and defiance. He was trying to get to his feet again. And he was saying something to her in a voice she could barely hear.

‘Did you find the ice pick beneath the bathtub? The ice pick. Was it under the tub? You must’ve looked under the bathtub, right? When you moved?’

She didn’t understand what he was talking about, but the look in his eye scared her, and she shook her head.

‘I need it now. You didn’t look under the bath when you moved?’

She shook her head again.

‘That’s funny,’ Kawashima muttered. The smell of burning tissue was not only deep in his nostrils now but swirling through every cell in his body. Showers of sparks shot out where his senses intersected, but he wasn’t aware of them in any objective sense, or of the fever saturating the space between his temples. He was already one with the burnt protein smell and the sparks and the fever. The voice was no longer reverberating inside him, but that was all right. The voice helped me out earlier for the first time in a long time, he was thinking, but I can take it from here.