meter that measured the recording level didn't budge from zero.
Which meant—it was the logical conclusion—that Sadako's voice could not have been recorded on that tape.
Suddenly he felt dizzy—he staggered down the sidewalk, then leaned up against a telephone pole. The dizziness and shortness of breath were particularly bad today.
Usually if he rested for a few minutes his spells would pass, but now the dizziness got so bad he felt like throwing up. He didn't feel like this was going to go away any-time soon.
He entered the building where he worked. His department was on the fifth floor, but he couldn't make it up there yet. He collapsed onto a couch in the ground-floor reception area and waited for the nausea and fatigue to recede. He felt a little better than he had back there on the sidewalk, but he wasn't up to returning to work quite yet.
The reception area began to fade to white.
"Mr. Toyama."
He heard someone, somewhere, call his name. His vision grew hazy, like he was seeing everything through a film. He rubbed his eyes.
"Mr. Toyama."
The voice approached until it was right next to him.
A hand patted him twice on the shoulder.
"Mr. Toyama, what's wrong? I've been calling your name."
He looked up toward the voice, alternately squint-ing and opening his eyes wide.
Fujisaki, a production assistant, and Yasui, a mixer, were standing beside him. Both of them worked for him.
Toyama gazed up at them as though at something painfully bright. Fujisaki frowned. "I'm worried."
What's wrong?
He wanted to ask what was worrying Fujisaki, but he couldn't speak all of a sudden.
"Are you alright, Mr. Toyama?"
"S-s-sorry. C-could you bring me some—water?"
"Right away."
Fujisaki went to the vending machine in the corner and bought a sports drink, which he handed to Toyama.
Toyama drank it down. Only then did he begin to feel a little more human. He said what he had tried to say before.
"What's wrong?"
"You'll have to come hear for yourself. I can't believe it."
Toyama stood up shakily and followed Fujisaki and Yasui to the elevator to the third floor, Studio 2. This was usually used for making classical recordings: it was perfect for strings, for chamber music and the like.
Fujisaki and Yasui had just yesterday gotten back from a recording session in another town. They'd rented a hall in the mountains that was popular for recording and taken the musicians up there: the clean, dry air made for a great sound.
They'd already reported to Toyama that the session had gone well. All that was left in terms of studio work was some editing. Then the album would be done, ready for release as a CD. It would hit the record stores soon.
"Is there a problem?"
Fujisaki held out a pair of headphones and said,
"Just take a listen."
Toyama put on the headphones and sat down at the mixing table. At a look from him, Fujisaki hit play and the tape reel started moving.
He heard a pretty piano melody. Nothing wrong here. He flashed Fujisaki a puzzled look.
"Right there." Fujisaki rewound the tape and played it again. The piano was descrescendoing from mezzo forte to mezzo piano, but there was something else there, besides the piano. It was faint, but Toyama's trained ears were able to pick it out. His eyes started darting about the room. He was visibly shaken. He started to tremble.
"What do you think it is? It sounds like a baby crying to me."
A baby crying, weakly. But that wasn't all there was.
Fujisaki might not have heard it, but Toyama did: somewhere behind the cries, there were words, floating in and out of hearing. There it was. He felt a rush of nostalgia as he recognized the voice.
Toyama, I love you.
He doubted Fujisaki or Yasui could hear it. All they'd be able to hear was the baby. And their thinking was probably that there must have been a baby in a car behind the hall or something, and that their mikes had picked up its crying.
But that's not it. That's not what happened.
Toyama screamed the words, but only in his own mind.
"This is a problem, wouldn't you say, Mr. Toyama?
What do you want to do? This is the master tape, and what's more it's the only take we've got. I could swear this sound wasn't there when we were recording."
Toyama rushed out of the studio, leaving Fujisaki shaking his head.
"Mr. Toyama—where are you going?"
At the door he turned around and gasped, "It's stuffy in here. I need to go get some air." It was all he could do just to get that much out.
He left the studio and went down the hall. While he waited for the elevator to arrive, he pressed his face against the window at the end of the hall and stared down at the street below. Shadow and light swirled in the bright afternoon sun. The street began to turn misty white—as if his retinas were clouding over, although he knew they weren't—and finally everything began to turn black. The cold sweat made his forehead slippery against the glass, a nasty feeling; it was an oily sweat.
Blacks and whites reversed, and all color drained from the world, except for a single point that hit Toyama's eye like an arrow. A woman, in a wrong-for-the-season lime-green dress.
He was reminded of that time in the sound booth in the playhouse, long ago, when despite being lost in his lovemaking with Sadako, the red light on the cassette deck in the corner caught his eye. Shining in the black-ness like that, it only served to underscore the darkness.
This was like a strange transposition of that scene.
That lime-green dress was the only spot of natural color left in the graying landscape, and it made for a violent disharmony. It disrupted the monochrome world with a fearsome, storm-like force. That tiny green speck asserted rulership over all.
The elevator door opened. He went to the first floor and across the reception area. By the time he'd left the building, the world had regained its former color. But the pain that gripped Toyama's chest would not go away.
11
He was unbearably thirsty. He'd just drunk a whole can of sports drink, the one Fujisaki had given him, but the dryness in his throat was becoming unendurable.
He bought a lemon soda at a vending machine right outside the building and drank it. As he did he could feel how much his body needed the fluid, but he didn't even register it as a pleasant taste: it seemed to be converted directly to cold sweat. He threw away the half-drunk soda and began to walk.
Waiting for the elevator, looking out the window, he'd felt a dizziness, and a sense that the world was losing its color, and in the midst of it a single spot of bright green had caught his eye. Now as he walked aimlessly, his mind was still on that green glow.
The scene in the sound booth twenty-four years ago came back to him like yesterday. Partly it was because of the voice he'd just heard in the studio, that whisper lurk-ing behind the baby's cries. The voice was Sadako's. It had to be.
Sounds and smells, he reflected, could be like sparks igniting an explosion of old memories. In this case, the previous twenty-four years had somehow been removed from his memory circuits—somehow the present moment was being fused with the time he spent with Sadako in the sound booth.
That smell.
He'd begun to worry about that odd smell in the sound booth. At first he hadn't even noticed it. But every time he entered the room it impinged on his consciousness a little more, until he'd decided he had to try and nail down its source.