He couldn't figure out how to describe the smelclass="underline" it wasn't rotten or anything, but then again it wasn't exactly fragrant. It was pungent—not strong, exactly, but subtly stimulating to the olfactory membrane.
Lemon.
His mind hit on it at last. Maybe there was a lemon somewhere in the room. But if there was, it had to have been there for a while, in which case it would be rotten, and that wasn't the smell. It was something fresh, like something just peeled. Something not yellow, but still green with youth—something not yet ripe.
He searched the room. He opened every cabinet, searched every shelf, but found nothing. The only thing he discovered was that the dried-up umbilical cord that had been placed before the little altar as an offering was gone. He couldn't think of who might have taken it or when. As far as he knew, Sadako was the only other person aware of its existence, but it was hardly worth accusing her of taking it—in fact, he was kind of relieved the grotesque thing was gone. He was reluctant to bring it up with her at all.
So the umbilical cord was gone, and in its place was the faint scent of unripe lemon.
The umbilical cord?
Once, in a book, he'd seen a color photo of a twelve-week old fetus in the womb. It was curled up, arms and legs stuck out in front of it; its head was much bigger than its body. It was only five or six centimeters long, but it was recognizably human—it was even possible to tell what sex it was. You could see a tiny protrusion in the genital area.
What stuck in Toyama's memory was the thread connecting the little fetus to its mother. The umbilical cord was thicker than the fetus's limbs and lined with red veins; it twisted and looped around, fixed firmly to the placenta. It was this very important conduit that brought oxygen and nutrients to the fetus.
To the fetus, the womb was the entire world; the umbilical cord, then, was the sole connection between the fetus's world and the outside. In that sense it was an interface. Only when it left its mother's body would the fetus realize that there was another world outside the one it had been living in. Looking at the photo, Toyama had tried to imagine what a surprise that would be for the fetus. And it had struck him that, as long as you were inside, you could never know about the outside.
Walking along the sidewalk he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of strangulation centered on a spot just above his navel—his stomach, probably. Chill sweat continued to stream from his pores. The joints in his arms ached, and when he tried to raise them they wouldn't move. He could barely keep walking.
His heart beat violently.
A single fact flashed across his mind.
Everybody who heard Sadako's voice over the intercom from the sound booth twenty-four years ago died of heart disease. .. But I wasn't there. I didn't hear the tape.
He was desperate in his denial, but then another voice seemed to speak.
But you heard it directly from her, didn't you? And the words came to you not through your tympanic membranes, but directly into your brain.
That had to have been his imagination. He wasn't telepathic, and anyway, there was no such thing as words forcing their way directly into a person's mind.
Toyama, I love you.
They came back to him now, those precious words from his beloved. But now they brought with them terror, as well.
The seed of anxiety had been sown. Why were those same words present on the reel-to-reel tape in the studio? Why had Sadako whispered to him so insistently from behind the baby's crying? He had actually heard those words through the medium of tape: he felt terror, shock, anxiety, and nostalgia—it made no sense, but his love for Sadako flamed up again. Only the thinnest of lines separated terror and love for him now; his feelings of twenty-four years ago were back, the same as they ever were, but at the same time he could distinctly feel something wrong with his heart.
He could tell without even having to turn around: the girl in the green dress was on the sidewalk across the street, behind him. Her pace was somewhat quicker than his. He kept walking. He didn't know where he was going, or why he had to keep walking. He just pressed on, without looking back.
When the girl in the green dress was even with him, she crossed to his side of the street, threading her way between moving cars. He detected the fragrance of unripe lemon, the same as he'd smelled twenty-four years ago.
Now she was right next to him. She was close enough to reach out and touch. He stumbled, and the back of his hand brushed her arm. She was alive, sure enough. The touch of his hand confirmed it.
He glanced at the girl out of the corner of his eye.
She was wearing a green one-piece dress with no sleeves—the season being what it was, he got chills just looking at her. It made her stand out among the passersby on the sidewalk. The way she asserted herself in a crowd hadn't changed at all.
Her whole body seemed to be saying, Look! I'm here.
Her hair fell to the middle of her back; her hands were so white as to be almost translucent. The nail on the first finger of one of her hands was split. He looked at her feet. She wore no stockings, just pumps on her bare feet; she had purple bruises on her ankles. She was tall, with a nicely balanced figure—that too was un-changed.
The cramping in his stomach got worse and worse, and Toyama couldn't keep his feet moving. He collapsed on the sidewalk against the girl in the green dress. It seemed that the world was starting to close in on him.
His back came into contact with the girl's bare legs, his greasy sweat dampening her soft skin.
He stayed there like that for a while, cradled on her knees. Passersby looked down at him and said things, but he couldn't make out what.
He thought he heard the word ambulance, faintly.
He didn't like all these people staring at him. He wanted to chase them away, but his body was like a steel bar. He couldn't move. All he wanted was to be still, cradled there on the girl's knees.
He tried to lift a hand and touch her cheek. No such luck. The desire raced in his mind like an engine in neutral. His mind and his body were separate now, and it frustrated him.
Sadako's face was before him now. He'd missed her so much. Now he was staring up at her face, still young, untouched by the intervening quarter century, and he didn't find it strange at all. She was supposed to be dead...but that didn't matter now. Why hadn't she aged?
That didn't matter either. He was just happy to be able to touch her, alive like long ago. His happiness pushed aside his fear of impending death; he found he could endure the rapid collapse of the world upon him. He only wished he could be free of this pain squeezing his stomach.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the approach of an ambulance. The air brought him the rever-berations of its siren. His arms were immobile from his shoulders to his elbows, but he thought he could still move his fingers. His hand crawled toward Sadako, and managed to catch hold of her.
With her free hand, Sadako reached into her hand-bag and pulled out a small object wrapped in tissue paper; the tissue had turned brown in spots. She opened the tissue, took out what it enclosed, and laid it on Toyama's palm. He felt this had happened to him once before, somewhere: she'd plucked something up and laid it on his palm...
In order to see it, he tucked in his chin and looked down toward his waist. The object lay naturally on his palm, weighing virtually nothing.
He tried to pull his hand closer to get a better look at it. The trembling of his palm made the object vibrate as though it had a life of its own. He finally understood: it was an umbilical cord.