Spiral (8 page)

Repentant, Ando pleaded silently with the snake, hoping it'd understand that he hadn't meant to kill.

That was more than twenty years ago. But now, Ando recalled the incident with startling clarity. Snake curses were nothing but superstition, he knew. He doubted reptiles even had the ability to recognize their own offspring. Yet… the alarm kept on ringing.
Enough! Stop thinking!
Ando cried voicelessly. But still the image of a baby snake, white belly upturned, floating away in the ditch, parent snake swimming along behind, continued to pester him like threads that wouldn't come untangled.

I was cursed.

He was losing control of his thoughts. Against his will, he could see the chain of karmic cause and effect looming before him. He couldn't shake off a vision of the murdered baby snake getting caught in the tangled vegetation lining the sides of the ditch, of the parent snake catching up with it and entwining itself around it, the two of them floating there… The image reminded him of DNA. The DNA within a cell's nucleus, he realized, looked like two snakes coiling around each other and flying up into the sky. DNA, by which biological information is transmitted endlessly from generation to generation. Perhaps a pair of snakes perpetually ensnared humanity.

Takanori!

His silent call to his son was filled with misery. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to hold himself together for much longer. Ando lifted his head and looked out the window. He had to distract himself, to interrupt this chain of associations at once. Through the windshield he could see the bright red Keihin Express train go by, slowly. With Shinagawa Station right ahead, it was moving no faster than a slithering snake.
Snakes again.
There was no way out. He closed his eyes and tried again to think of something else. The tiny hand grabbed at Ando's calf as it slipped away into the sea. He could feel the touch again. It was the snake's curse, it had to be. He was about to let out a sob. The situations were too similar. The baby snake, its head crushed, carried away by the flow. Two decades later, its parent's curse had manifested itself. Takanori was close by, but Ando couldn't save him. The beach in June, before the season had officially opened. He and his son, paddling out to sea, holding onto a rectangular float. He could hear his wife, back on the shore, call:

Taka! That's far enough. Come back!

But the boy was too busy bobbing up and down and splashing about. Her voice didn't reach him.

Honey, come back, okay?

Hysteria was beginning to tinge her voice.

The waves were getting taller, and Ando, too, thought that it was time to turn back. He tried to turn the float around. Just at that moment, a whitecap rose in front of them, and in an instant overturned the float and threw both him and the boy into the sea. His head went under, and it was then that he first realized they were so far out that even his own feet didn't touch the bottom. He started to panic. When his head broke above the surface again, his son was nowhere to be seen. Treading water, he turned around until he could see his wife running into the sea toward him, still fully clothed. At the same time, a hand grasped at his leg. His son's hand. Ando tried hastily to turn around towards the boy to draw him up, but that had been the wrong move. Taka's hand slipped away from his calf, and all Ando's hand managed to do was graze his son's hair.

His wife's half-crazed cries shot over the early-summer sea as she rushed through the water.
I know he's close, but I can't reach him!
He dived under the surface and moved blindly about but couldn't manage to make contact with that small hand again. His son had disappeared-for good. His body never surfaced again. Where had it drifted to? All that remained were the few strands of hair that had tangled in Ando's wedding ring.

At the railroad crossing, the bar finally lifted. Ando was weeping, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs. The cab driver noticed anyway and kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror.

Get a hold of yourself, before you totally fall apart!

It was one thing to break down alone in bed, quite another to do it in broad daylight. He wished there were something, anything, he could think about that could bring him back to the here and now. Suddenly he saw Mai Takano's face in his mind. She was working on a fruit parfait with such enthusiasm that he thought she might lick the dish when she was through. The collar of a white blouse peeked out from the neck of her dress; her left hand rested on her knee. Finished with the parfait, she wiped her lips with a napkin and stood up. He was beginning to see. Sexual fantasies about Mai were the only thing that could draw him out of the abyss of his grief. He realized that he hadn't fantasized about a woman once since his wife had left him-or rather, since the death of his son. He'd lost all of his former attachment to sex.

The cab jostled up and down until it was straddling the tracks. At the same time, Mai's body was bobbing up and down in Ando's mind.

Mai Takano got off the Odakyu Line at Sagami Ohno and went out to the main street, but she couldn't decide which way to turn. She'd walked this route in reverse two weeks ago, but now she'd lost all sense of direction. When she'd gone to Ryuji's parents' house for the wake, it was in a car from the M.E.'s office. This time, making her way there on foot from the station, she hadn't gone more than a hundred feet or so before she found herself in unfamiliar surroundings. It wasn't a new experience for her. She always got lost when she tried to get somewhere she'd only been to once.

She had his parents' phone number, so all she had to do was call. But she was embarrassed to ask his mother to come pick her up. She decided to trust her intuition a little more. She didn't have far to go, she knew. It was only a ten-minute walk from the station.

Suddenly she saw Ando's face in her mind. She'd made a dinner date with him for the coming Friday, but now, she wondered if it'd been careless of her to accept. She was starting to regret it. To her, Ando was a friend of Ryuji's, someone with whom she could share memories of him. If she could get Ando to tell her stories about Ryuji's college days, maybe she'd understand Ryuji's impenetrable ideas better. In other words, she had to admit that some calculation had gone into her decision to go out with Ando. But if Ando started entertaining the sort of thoughts a man can have about a woman, things could turn unpleasant. Since entering college, Mai had learned the hard way that men and women wanted vastly different things. What Mai wanted was to keep the relationship on a level where she and the man could provide each other with intellectual stimulation; her boyfriends' interests, however, always tended to gravitate in another direction. She was forced to turn them down as gently as possible. The trauma her rejections caused them was always more than she could take. They'd send her long apologetic letters which only rubbed salt in her wounds, or they'd call and the first thing out of their mouths would be, "Listen, I'm really sorry about what happened last time." She didn't want them to apologize. She wanted them to learn and grow from the experience. She wanted to see a man turn embarrassment into energy and engage in a genuine struggle toward maturity. If the man did that, she'd resume the friendship any time. But she could never be friends with a guy whose psyche remained forever, and unabashedly, that of a child who refused to grow up.

Ryuji was the only man she'd ever been serious about. He wasn't like the juveniles who surrounded her. The things she and Ryuji had given each other were invaluable. If she could be sure that a relationship with Ando would be like the one she'd had with Ryuji, she'd accept any number of dinner invitations from him. But she knew from experience that the chances weren't very good. The likelihood, in Japan, of her meeting an independent guy, a man worthy of the name, was close to zero. Still, she couldn't quite put Ando out of her mind.

Just once, Ryuji had mentioned him to her. The conversation had been about genetic engineering, when suddenly he'd digressed and dropped Ando's name.

Mai hadn't ever understood the difference between genes and DNA.
Weren 't they just the same thing?
Ryuji had set about explaining to her that DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information. In the course of the discussion, he'd mentioned that the technology existed to break DNA down into small segments using restriction enzymes, and to rearrange it. Mai had commented that the process sounded "like a puzzle". Ryuji had agreed: "Absolutely, it's like solving a puzzle, or deciphering a code." From there, the talk had digressed, until Ryuji was telling her a story from his college days.

When Ryuji had learned that the nitty-gritty of DNA technology involved code-breaking, he'd started to play cipher games with his friends in med school, between classes. He told her an interesting anecdote about these games. Many of the students were fascinated by molecular biology, and so, before long, Ryuji had recruited about ten guys to play with. The rules were simple. One person would submit a coded message, and then everybody else would have a certain number of days in which to decipher it. The first one to get it right won. The game tested their math and logic skills, but also required flashes of inspiration. The guys loved it.

The codes varied in difficulty, depending on the skill of the person devising them, but Ryuji had been able to solve most of them. Meanwhile, only one classmate had ever been able to crack any of Ryuji's codes. Mitsuo Ando. Ryuji told Mai how shocked he'd been when Ando had broken his code.

I got chills. It was like he'd read my mind.

And so the name Mitsuo Ando had made a deep impression on Mai.

Which was why she'd been so astonished when the detective had introduced her to Ando at the M.E.'s office. He had to be
the
Ando-he'd even introduced himself as an old friend of Ryuji's. Knowing Ando had been the only one to ever unlock one of Ryuji's codes, Mai had felt she could trust him. She just knew his skills with the scalpel had to be way up there, and that he'd easily figure out the cause of death.

Mai was still under the sway of the words of a man who'd been dead for two weeks. If Ryuji hadn't mentioned Ando to her, she probably never would have been able to call the M.E.'s office to ask about the cause of death; she never would have ended up seeing Ando again on campus. She certainly never would have made plans to have dinner with him. One chance word from Ryuji had subtly bound her.

Mai turned off the main road into a maze of residential streets. There she spotted a convenience store sign that she recognized. She knew where to go from there. Once she turned at the convenience store, Ryuji's parents' house would be straight ahead. As two-week-old memories started to come back to her, she quickened her step.

It was a nondescript house, built on a parcel of about four hundred square yards. From the wake, she remembered that the first floor contained a largish living room adjoined to a smaller Japanese-style room.

No sooner had Mai rung the doorbell than Ryuji's mother appeared at the door. She'd been waiting impatiently for Mai, and showed her up to the second floor, to the room Ryuji had studied in from grade school on through his sophomore year at college. After his junior year, Ryuji had moved out of the house, even though it was well within commuting distance, and taken a room near campus. The only times the room had been used as a study since were when Ryuji had come home to visit.

Ryuji's mother set down a plate of shortcake and a cup of coffee and left the room. As Mai watched her shuffle down the hall, head drooping, she was touched by the woman's grief at losing her son.

Left alone, Mai took her first good look around the room. It was a Japanese-style room with a matted floor. In one corner a carpet had been spread out under a desk. Bookshelves lined the walls, but she could only see their upper portions; the lower shelves were hidden by the confusion of cardboard boxes and appliances that littered the floor. She took a quick count of the boxes. Twenty-seven. These held everything that had been carted over from Ryuji's East Nakano apartment after his death. The larger furniture-the bed, the desk, etc.-they'd given away. The boxes seemed to contain mostly books.

Mai sighed, then seated herself on the floor and had a sip of coffee. She was already trying to resign herself to the possibility that she wouldn't be able to find it. Even if it were in there somewhere, it'd be quite a task to find a few manuscript pages among all those things. Perhaps the pages weren't even
in
those boxes.

The twenty-seven boxes were all sealed with tape. She took off her cardigan, rolled up her sleeves, and opened the nearest one. Paperbacks. She picked up a few. One turned out to be a book she'd given him as a present. Longing washed over her. The smell of Ryuji's old apartment clung to the cover.

This is no place to let yourself wallow in emotion.

She choked back her tears and went back to work taking things out of the box.

But when she got to the bottom, there was still no sign of the pages. Mai tried to deduce what they could have gotten mixed in with. Maybe one of the books he'd been using as a reference, or one of the files in which he'd kept his research materials. She kept breaking the seals on the boxes.

Her back started to break into a sweat. Taking books out of boxes and putting them back in was surprisingly strenuous work. After she'd finished her third box, she took a breather and entertained the idea of filling in the missing pages by herself. Ryuji's challenging theory of symbolic logic had already been made public, albeit in piecemeal form, in specialist journals. The project at hand, however, wasn't quite so esoteric. Ryuji had also been writing a book-length study aimed at the general reader that dealt with logic and science in the context of various social problems. What he was saying in it wasn't too difficult. In fact, the work was being serialized in a monthly put out by a major publisher. Mai had been involved from the start, when she'd volunteered to make clean manuscript copies of what Ryuji wrote; she'd even attended meetings with his editor. As a result, she felt she had a good handle on the flow of Ryuji's argument as well as on his writing style. If one or two pages were all that was missing, she felt confident she could come up with something to fill in the gap without creating any inconsistencies.