Birthday (3 page)

...Why ?

Sugiyama leaned close and whispered into Mai's ear,

"I guess we'd better not."

The blunt inadequacy of the words belied his usual eloquence. Sugiyama should have been able to come up with some pretty-sounding explanation for why he'd stopped in the middle. But he hadn't even tried. He had simply said "let's not."

Mai's mind went blank with confusion. She felt humiliated, robbed of her dignity as a person, reduced to the status of a dress-up doll.

They'd agreed to have sex. Why did he feel it necessary to do a u-turn like that? Was her body so unattractive? His refusal to explain allowed all sorts of doubts to bloom in her mind. She couldn't understand what had killed his desire. She could only despair.

Is it because my breasts are so small?
she asked herself. But he hadn't needed to undress her to find that out.

It was obvious, to a degree, even when she was clothed.

Hurt, and without finding out why, she left Sugiyama's apartment and went home.

Their relationship ended there.

She'd had boyfriends since, and they'd tried, but she'd never crossed the line. Those dozen or so seconds of blankness always came back to haunt her. She felt like he'd evaluated her nakedness; she didn't like it. She'd rather stay a virgin for the rest of her life than go through that again.

There could be no mistake, no gap in her memory, about it. There was no point to any further scrutinizing the fact that she'd never had sex. That was a sure premise.

So then why am I pregnant?

Cause and effect. When something happened, there was a reason for it. The only immediate cause she could think of—yes, having watched that tape.

Then, she remembered something else, too.

I was ovulating the day I watched it.

She knew it, based on her cycle and on the ther-mometer. Her ovulation, that tape. The two had somehow come together to produce the change in her body.

The line between shadow and light was climbing the wall now. The sun was sinking, and the rectangular space was coming under the inexorable rule of darkness again.

Mai felt an appraising gaze on her body, like Sugiyama's. But there was nobody at the lip of the fissure peering in. The gaze emanated from within her own womb. The eyes she carried within were watching her.

As if to prove it, her belly undulated again with small but sharp movements.

In the end, she never was able to locate the missing pages among Ryuji's household effects. She'd promised the editor she'd have the manuscript to him by the next day. She had until the next afternoon to provide a clean copy of the final installment of the series.

It was late in the evening. Mai had locked herself in her studio apartment. She had spread the manuscript out before her on the table, and now sat there groaning, her head in her hands. It was a small room—five mats or so in size. She sat on the floor with a backrest propping her up at a low table that she used as a desk. This was how she always studied. From where she was sitting, her bookcase was close enough that she could reach out and touch it. The bookcase housed a fourteen-inch TV with a built-in VCR.

She didn't know what to do about the manuscript.

Over and over she'd look up and heave a sigh. How was she going to make up for the missing section?

Mai had been concentrating on filling in the gap with her own words. There was a clear leap in logic from the previous installment to this final one. She'd been trying to supplement the argument; that was what had her stalled and groaning, her head aching.

Suddenly it occurred to her. Instead of trying to add, why not subtract?
I'm stuck because I'm trying to add 
words, and they won't come.
It would be much easier to pare down what was there until it made sense. She wouldn't be as liable to twist Ryuji's thoughts that way.

As soon as she'd decided on her new plan, her spirits rose. Now there looked to be a good chance of getting it done by morning.

The videotape seized that moment to catch her eye.

It was what she'd found instead of the missing pages.

She'd brought it back with her and placed it carelessly on top of her television. She could watch the tape now, to refresh her mind, and still have time to finish the manuscript by morning.

Thinking back now, Mai felt she had been snared, and quite cunningly. She didn't know who had set the trap, but she'd certainly been carried along by that un-seen being's schemes.

From where she sat on the floor it was a natural motion for Mai to reach out and pick up the videotape.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. / 1989.

There was no case, just the cassette.

The handwriting on the label told her that the tape didn't belong to Ryuji. Made by an unknown third party, brought into his apartment by some unknown route, it had made its way into Mai's room now to emit its strange pull.

She reached out and put the tape into the VCR. The unit came on automatically. She switched the channel to video and pressed play.

There's still time—throw it away!

But the static of the tape drowned out the voice of instinct.

She couldn't fight her curiosity. The screen dis-solved into a chaos to match the static. Then an image like spilled ink leapt into her vision. It was too late to turn back now. Mai steeled her nerves and sat up straight. The tape seemed to emanate arrogance, to demand close attention from whoever watched it.

Watch until the end. You will be eaten by the lost.

The thick stream of ink formed itself into a threat.

The blinking points of light emitted an artificial brightness not possible in reality. When it pierced her eyeballs it should have been unpleasant, but she couldn't look away.

The tape was a collection of fragmentary images whose meaning was unclear. But each scene, taken on its own, had great impact, a real you-are-there quality that seemed to come straight at her. She began to wonder if the images weren't having a physical effect on her, so powerful they were.

A spray of red flashed across the screen at one point, then to change into a stream of lava that Mai saw at once was flowing down the scorched sides of a volcano.

Sparks danced up into the night sky. A perfectly natural scene.

The next moment, the character for "mountain," 
yama,
was floating in black against a white background, fading in and out of view. Then a pair of dice were tumbling around in a lead bowl.

In the following scene, a person appeared for the first time. An old woman sitting on a tatami mat, facing forward and mumbling something. It was a dialect Mai couldn't make out. The old woman seemed to be lectur-ing somebody, preaching.

A newborn baby gave its first cry. As Mai watched it, the baby grew larger and larger. Mai felt that she was holding the onscreen baby with her own two hands. Her palms touched skin covered in amniotic fluid. It was slick, and she felt like it slipped out of her hands. Reflex-ively she drew back her hands.

At the same time, the baby disappeared, and a crowd of voices erupted in cries of "Liar!" and "Fraud!" She saw a hundred faces crammed into a grid like a huge chess-board; each face wore an accusatory expression when she looked at them. The faces divided like cells until they became tiny dots filling the screen.

In the center of the black screen floated the character
sada.

A man's face suddenly came into view. An abrupt transformation. His breathing grew ragged and huge beads of perspiration appeared on his face. Scattered trees stood behind him.

He seemed to be running—his naked shoulders gleamed with sweat. His sunburned skin was peeling.

Both the background and the man's appearance were summer itself. His eyes were bloodshot, murderous. His mouth was twisted, and he was drooling; he looked upward, and then disappeared from view.

When he reappeared, a chunk of flesh had been gouged out of his shoulder, and he was bleeding pro-fusely. Great drops of blood fell onto the screen.

The baby cried again, somewhere. A chaotic cry, it vibrated not against her eardrums but directly against her skin cells. Mai recalled the touch of the infant's flesh.

In the center of the screen there was a bright, round hole. It was like looking up in the dark at a full moon directly overhead. After a while, a rock fell from the moon, then another.

This person's looking up from the bottom of a well.

The moment she saw the scene, Mai grasped the situation. Maybe her intuition was at work, guessing at the fate that would later befall her.

Because, at that point, there was no reason for her to think that the moonlike circle was the lip of a well.

Finally, more words appeared.
Those who have 
viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour 
one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must 
follow these instructions exactly...

And then the scene changed. The concatenation of images was replaced by a commercial for mosquito-re-pelling coils that she'd seen on TV numerous times. A commercial had been taped over the instructions for avoiding death. They had been erased.

With a trembling hand Mai pushed the stop button.

Her jaw was shaking; she was trying to speak, but the words wouldn't come. But she was alone—who was she trying to talk to?

The existence of a videotape that killed its viewers in a week's time...

When Asakawa had asked her about Ryuji's death, he'd said,
He didn't tell you anything there at the end?

No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?

The tape had been in Ryuji's room. Ryuji had watched it, and a week later he'd died mysteriously.

If she hadn't watched the tape herself, she'd never buy such a scenario. But she had watched it. Every scene had exuded a reality that she could feel in her very cells.

Something was rising within her. She'd been sitting, stunned, in front of the VCR, but now she felt like she had to throw up. She dashed into the bathroom.

I shouldn't have watched it.

It was too late for regrets. Besides, she hadn't so much watched it of her own free will as been forced to watch it, by the will of another, she felt.

Mai stuck her finger down her throat and vomited until her stomach was empty. At that moment she wanted to rid herself of everything that was inside her.

She felt like some foreign object had gotten into her.

Choking on bile, she began to weep. She knelt in front of the toilet, weakened, gasping for breath.

For a time, she could feel herself slowly vanishing—

and then she passed out.

Since watching the tape, Mai suffered frequent lapses in her consciousness. She was unable to recall the events of the preceding week in order and complete.

She'd suddenly realize that several hours had passed and not know where she was. It was as if something had possessed her soul.

... As if something had possessed my soul.

That was definitely the phrase for it. She was dimly aware that her body was being controlled.

The foreign object that had entered her during her viewing of the tape gradually grew. Perhaps her watching it while ovulating had facilitated the thing's invasion of her. Or maybe it happened to everyone who watched the video—maybe it was how they went down the road to death.

Mai pictured countless sperm charging toward the egg in her oviduct. Once, in a sex-ed textbook, she'd seen a very graphic representation of it. Viral microorganisms, generating and proliferating within her from watching that tape, overwhelming her oviduct—if that wasn't it, then she had no idea how she'd ended up a virgin with the body of a pregnant woman.

There was life within her belly, that was for sure. It pulsed, and it waved its arms and legs inside her tightly-stretched womb.

The end of the rope tickled her somewhere in the vicinity of her bended knees. It seemed to hang lower than it had the last time she'd looked, at midday.

Who hung that rope there, and why?

But she hardly needed to pose the question. The sensation of tying one end of the sash to the railing on the rooftop revived in Mai's hands. Images were being inserted into her consciousness, like flash photos, and she could see herself from a bystander's perspective in the darkness. That was Mai herself tying the knot with im-patient finger, overriden by a will not her own. Her legs and waist were shaky and were ready to give out at any moment, yet, driven by an unfathomable sense of duty, she was focused on tying the makeshift rope.

The rope was all ready at the time she left her apartment. There was one other item she'd prepared along with it, but the memory was missing. She wondered what it was. Something in a plastic bag, she knew. She could recall the feel of something squishy.

The life that had started growing within her after viewing the tape had, at some point, begun to exert its influence over her body. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would abruptly come to, and listening she'd hear the pulse of whatever it was in her belly. It only took four or five days for her abdomen to swell to the point that she seemed ready to deliver, and the same time for her enlarged nipples to start leaking milk.

Why was she there at the bottom of the crack in the top of a building? All at once, Mai knew.

To give birth.

She didn't believe for a moment that the thing within her was her own child. She wasn't even sure it was human.

A beast.

No—she didn't even feel it was a life form.

But she felt a sense of responsibility; she had to birth this unknown thing without anybody knowing.

She didn't know where the sense came from, but come it did, and there was no resisting it. It drove her to act, to fulfill her role as a cocoon.

At around the same hour the day before, Mai had taken off her underwear, snuck out of her apartment, and ascended to the roof of this building in the warehouse district, where few people walked at night and few cars passed. A dilapidated old building by the Shore Road.

She had climbed over the gate on the second floor landing and climbed the spiraling fire escape to the top of the building. Once there, she'd climbed by ladder to the rooftop and gone over to the machine room. On the seaward side of it there was a deep exhaust shaft, like a coffin floating in the sky.