Confessions (4 page)

After hearing Manami’s story, I started wondering how her father was getting along, and for the first time since we’d parted—for the first time in five years—I called him. That was when I learned that he had finally begun to suffer from the symptoms of AIDS. The character in the book you read fell ill almost immediately, but in reality the virus often has an incubation period of between five and ten years. In his case, it had taken almost fourteen years, which is apparently remarkably long. At any rate, I wasn’t quite sure what to say when he told me, but before I could answer he promised in a lifeless voice that he would never try to see Manami again. There was no trace in his tone of the energetic man you see on TV. I asked if he would like to go away somewhere with Manami and me over winter break. It wasn’t an offer made out of pity for a dying man—I simply wanted to spend time as a real family. But he declined in the same lifeless tone.

The first time he ever hugged Manami was after she was already dead. He came to watch with me the evening after she died, and he held her and wept and blamed his past sins for what had happened. They say you can only cry until your tears dry up, but that never seemed to happen to us. We found ourselves hoping in vain for an end to the tears, and bitterly regretting that we had never made time for the three of us to be together.

It seems that I’ve been telling you a great deal about my regrets this afternoon.

After the funeral, a great many people came to our house to pay their final respects. Her preschool teachers and classmates, and so many others. We asked them not to bring the traditional condolence money, but they brought Snuggly Bunny dolls and candy and left those instead in front of Manami’s photograph. I’m sure she sleeps easier surrounded by her favorite bunny—or so I tell myself.

Mrs. Takenaka came to visit me just last week, as soon as she got out of the hospital, exactly a month after Manami died. She knelt in front of our household altar and wept and apologized to Manami’s spirit. She had read in the local papers that Manami had crept into the pool area to feed a dog, and she was devastated by a sense that she was somehow responsible for Manami’s death. Since the incident had occurred on school property and because I was so exhausted, I had let the principal check the newspaper story before it was published rather than doing it myself, but after seeing Mrs. Takenaka I regretted that. There they are again—more regrets.

Mrs. Takenaka had gathered up all the things Manami had left at her house and brought them to me in a paper bag. A change of clothes and underwear, her chopsticks and spoon, stuffed animals and a few small toys. But among these familiar objects, which were now painful mementos, was one that was not so familiar: a pouch in the shape of Snuggly Bunny’s head made out of soft velour. It was the one Manami had begged for at the store, the one I had refused to buy her—but what was it doing in Mrs. Takenaka’s bag? Manami had always told me when Mrs. Takenaka or anyone else had given her something, even if it was no more than a piece of candy. The pouch, Mrs. Takenaka said, had turned up in Muku’s doghouse, which might explain why it was frayed in places. But she had worried that Manami would miss it, so she had brought it to put on the altar despite its condition.

I thanked her for all the kindness she had shown Manami and for coming to see me before she had fully recovered, and then I drove her home. Muku was playing with a baseball in the overgrown yard. Mrs. Takenaka said that the ball had come from the school, but it struck me as unlikely that even the best batter on the team could have hit a home run that would have cleared the nets and the pool and landed in her yard. She explained that she had sometimes seen students who were cleaning the pool area after school playing catch on the pool deck, and that the ball was probably theirs. The punishment for minor infractions at school was cleanup duty at the pool or the sports sheds, and I had forgotten that some of you in this very class had received this punishment during the past few months.

Was Manami alone at the pool that day? I suddenly began to have my doubts. Back home, I took a closer look at the Snuggly Bunny pouch. Had it really belonged to Manami? If so, who had bought it for her? As I held it in my hand, I realized it was oddly heavy. Unzipping it, I discovered what seemed to be a metal coil visible under the thin cloth of the lining. Fighting back a horrible suspicion, I went to school the next day and brought in two students for separate interviews.…

From the noise in the hall it sounds as though the other classes have let out. If any of you have club activities or have to go to cram school, or if you simply want to leave, please do so. I know this has been unpleasant and that I’ve gone on a long while now. What I have to say from here on out is even more unpleasant, so if you don’t want to hear, please leave. No one? Then I’ll take that to mean that you are all staying of your own free will.

I’ll call the two killers A and B from here on.

There was nothing in particular that drew my attention to A in the first months he was here at school. Apparently he had managed to impress some of the other boys in this class, but I didn’t know that, and I didn’t notice him until after the midterm exams during the first quarter. He scored a perfect one hundred percent, and, since he was the only one in the entire grade to do so, his scores became known not just to those of you in his homeroom but to other classes as well. I know that most of you were proud of him, but I found out that there was some grumbling in those other classes. A comment made by another child—let’s call him C—was reported back to me. C had apparently gone to elementary school with A, and he said that A had an unfair advantage since he was “doing ‘live’ experiments.” I was disturbed to hear this, so I had C come talk with me in the science room. Before he agreed to tell me what he knew, he insisted I tell no one else. Then he described A’s activities during the last year of elementary school, how he had gathered stray cats and dogs from the neighborhood and, using a device he invented and dubbed the Execution Machine, he had tortured and finally killed the animals. At first C had spoken quietly, looking down at the desk, but as he talked he got more and more excited. “He took pictures of the dead animals and
posted them on his website!
” he concluded, as if describing his own exploits, and I remember shuddering to see how much he admired what A had done.

I had him tell me A’s website address before he left, and then I went straight to the computer in the teachers’ office to have a look. There was nothing there but a message in a forbidding font saying that “A new machine is currently under development.” There had been nothing about any of this in the files that were sent over from the elementary school when A started here, but I took the precaution of phoning his sixth grade homeroom teacher. “No, I never heard anything like that. He was a serious student and his grades were excellent,” he said, apparently unconcerned by my call. In the weeks that followed, I kept an eye on A, but he was, as I’d been told, a serious boy who seemed to have a good attitude toward school and life in general—all in all, a model student—and before long I went back to paying very little attention to him. You can call me naïve, but I suppose I had my hands full elsewhere.

One day toward the middle of last June I was alone in the science lab preparing an experiment for the ninth grade class when A came to see me. He examined the lab equipment with apparent interest, and then he asked me what I had studied in college. When I told him I had majored in chemistry, he asked how much I knew about electrical devices. I had done courses in physics as well, but remembering that A’s father owned an electronics shop, I told him that I doubted I knew as much as he did.

At this, he suddenly held out a small, black imitation-leather coin purse with a zipper. It looked perfectly innocent, the type of thing you could buy anywhere. I wondered what he wanted me to do with it, but when I looked up he was leering at me. “Open it,” he said. “There’s a surprise inside.” I knew it was a trick of some sort and took it from him very carefully. It seemed a bit heavy for its size and I was sure there must, in fact, be something inside. Telling myself I wasn’t going to be shocked by a frog or a spider, I gripped the tab on the zipper, but as I did a strong shock went through my fingers. For a moment I thought it was static electricity, but I quickly realized that was unlikely on a rainy day in June. As I stood looking at the purse and my fingers, A spoke up.

“Pretty amazing, isn’t it? It took me more than three months to make.” He sounded proud of himself. “Still, the shock wasn’t as strong as I thought it would be.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You mean you were using me as your guinea pig?”

“What’s the big deal?” he said, still grinning and as calm as ever. “Don’t people take drugs or get shocked all the time for chemistry and biology experiments? As long as you control the amount.”

I remembered what C had told me, and that A’s website said his new machine was under development.

“Why are you making a dangerous thing like this?” I asked him. “What are you planning to do with it? Kill small animals?” My fingers were still tingling from the shock.

A made an exaggerated show of being surprised, like some comedian miming astonishment. “Why do you have to be so touchy?” he said. “I can’t believe you don’t see how great this is. Just forget it. I’ll show it to someone else, someone who’ll appreciate it.” He snatched the purse out of my hand and left.

At the faculty meeting that week I reported that A had made a purse with an electrified zipper and explained how dangerous it could be, and I relayed what C had told me about A’s activities in elementary school. But they seemed to think I was talking about something equivalent to a static shock, and the principal just said to give him a stern warning and be vigilant. I also called A’s house to talk with his parents, not to accuse A but to let them know that his experiments could be dangerous and ask them to keep an eye on his activities. His mother didn’t take kindly to the call.

“I’m impressed you have so much free time to be calling me about this,” she said, her voice dripping with irony. “Especially since you’ve got your own child to look after.”

I started checking A’s website daily. I was sure that when he’d said he’d show it to “someone else” what he’d really meant was that he’d post it there. But the site continued to say the device was under development.

The next week A showed up again with the purse, a thick file, and a paper, which he wanted me to sign. It turned out to be an entry form for the National Middle School Science Fair—the one advertised in the poster at the back of the room. The deadline was the end of June. Since the projects were due before summer vacation, I had simply mentioned the competition briefly in class. It had never occurred to me that A would want to enter his purse.

In the blank for the title, he had written, “Theft-Prevention
Shocking
Coin Purse.” Under “Objectives”: “To protect my precious allowance from thieves.” The blanks were all filled in except for the name and signature of the project advisor. From the project design section of the entry materials in the file, I could see that he had added a safety catch to the purse that would allow the owner to handle it, while anyone trying to open the zipper would be shocked. There was also a detailed explanation of the design and manufacturing process, with elaborate illustrations.

At the end, he had written about the remaining problems, primarily the fact that the purse would deliver only a single shock. He proposed to continue working on the design as he developed “college-level, specialized knowledge,” and he concluded with what I took to be an intentionally childish flourish: “I’ll keep trying to improve my invention until even my grandmother can use it with peace of mind!” The application was written out by hand, though I knew A had a computer at home, and I could see that it had been carefully calculated to suggest the earnest efforts of a middle school boy.

“I know you didn’t really help me with it,” A said, after I’d had a quick look at the application. “But I have to have someone sign it, and you’re my homeroom teacher and you teach science. Please?” When I hesitated, looking down at the entry form, he went on. “I made it for all the right reasons. I just want to protect kids’ stuff. But you say it’s dangerous. Why don’t we let the experts decide who’s right?” It sounded like a challenge, almost a declaration of war. In the end, he won and I lost. The Theft-Prevention
Shocking
Coin Purse received the Governor’s Award at the prefectural level and went on to the national competition. There it was lavishly praised and took honorable mention in the middle school division, the equivalent of third place in the whole country.

I called A to the science lab to find out the truth about Manami’s death. At the time, I thought I could actually accomplish something by doing this. I suppose I was trying to deal with my own feelings of guilt.

He came around noon, after a half day of school, with an innocent grin on his face. I held out the Snuggly Bunny pouch.

“Open it. There’s a surprise inside,” I told him, repeating his invitation to me, but of course he refused to touch it. A shame, really. I had made my own improvements, increasing the power to the level of a stun gun. It wasn’t difficult to do. With a little research, anybody could make something like this—the real question is why anyone would want to.

When he realized why I had called him, he began telling the whole tale in a tone that was almost triumphant, as though he had been waiting for this day all along. The coin purse that he’d taken to the science fair was, as I’d suspected, the prototype of his Execution Machine.

When he’d finished the first model, he had tried it out on his video game friends. They’d been impressed but not enough to satisfy A. He wasn’t showing them a jack-in-the-box. They were incapable of understanding what he’d accomplished, so he decided to show it to someone who could appreciate it. That’s when he brought it to me. My reaction did satisfy him, but that was a misunderstanding on his part. It wasn’t the purse that had frightened me but A himself, his whole way of looking at the world. But he was convinced the purse had scared me, and intentionally provoked me before he left, thinking I would spread the word about his dangerous invention to the other teachers and his classmates. He was mistaken again. I did report the incident, as I’ve said, but no one else seemed the least bit interested. It occurred to A, of course, that he could present his invention on his website, but he was afraid no one would understand it, so he decided to take it to people who could properly appreciate it.