“Now you’re boasting. You’re saying if I get a hole in my heart, I should stick my finger in it and wait quietly for help? No way.”
“I also saved a man who tried to kill himself by sticking a pistol in his mouth. The bullet pierced his upper jaw, travelled up beside his nose, destroyed his right eye, and came to rest in the cerebrum. His face was a mess, but there wasn’t much damage to the brain, so his life was saved.”
“Goddamn stupid thing to do.”
“Well, in his case you might be right. As soon as he was back on his feet he took himself up to the roof of the hospital and jumped off. He landed head first in a flowerbed. Died instantly.”
“There’s nothing a doctor can do about instant death. I’m planning on having one myself. It’d be terrible not to quite manage the job. I’ve run through my money, see, and I’ve got no desire to go back into the world again. Come on, doc, promise me you won’t try and save me.”
The doctor was silent. It seemed pretty clear Kita was up to something really tricky again. Sure he could let him die, but he needed to be sure those pre-sold organs stayed unharmed. He might have to put his skills to work repairing any organ that happened to get damaged, then wait until Kita was well again and make sure he was there for his next suicide attempt.
“Is there some way I can do a thorough job when I crash the car, do you know? Tell me.”
“I’ve no experience there I’m afraid. I suggest you give up the idea. It’s pretty painful, you know.”
“No, I’ve made up my mind.”
“You’ll burn to death if the car bursts into flames. And in that case, your organs—”
“Would be roasted entrails, I should think,” Kita finished for him.
“We’d have to remove the gasoline so you don’t burn. I’ll get you a cremation later.”
Kita remarked that he didn’t mind the thought of cremation, but he quite fancied being left out for the birds to pick clean. Now it was finally Friday morning, he was having a few final wishes.
“There aren’t any vultures in Hokkaido. If you want a sky burial, you should go somewhere like Tibet. Have you ever heard of the Japanese who was given a sky burial? He didn’t actually want one, it’s just that he happened to die in a hospital way up in the mountains in Tibet so his burial followed the local custom. They don’t have the wood to fuel any furnaces for cremation in Tibet, see. But they do have vultures. There are specialists in sky burial funerals, you know. They have the body carried down into the valley and placed on a large flat rock, where they cut up the flesh and break the bones. They use a rock to smash it all up, cranium, knees, the lot, so the birds can feast on the brain and marrow as well.”
“I wonder how the guy felt. Maybe he felt all tingly when the birds were eating him.”
“Well he’d be dead, so he wouldn’t feel anything. But I wouldn’t like a sky burial myself.”
Kita looked at the doctor in surprise. “You got some special reason why you don’t like the idea? I had you down for the type of guy who didn’t care what happened after death,” he said.
“I just don’t like birds,” the doctor replied shortly.
“There’s that northern fox here in Hokkaido, isn’t there? I wonder if we could manage a fox burial. Would they eat me, do you think?”
“I doubt it.”
“How about I give it a try? Whatever happens, you’ll cut me up to take out the organs, won’t you? So how about dismembering my remains then like they do in sky burials so foxes can eat the rest?”
The doctor coldly rejected this proposal. “I’m not a funeral director or a butcher, you know. I’m a doctor.”
The guy dug in his heels over the oddest things. And here he was, harming his medical profession by turning killer and treating human life in this high-handed fashion, and he turns out to be afraid of birds!
“I’ll bet your father would’ve liked a sky burial, you know,” Kita remarked jokingly.
“Hmm, yes,” the doctor said, nodding thoughtfully. “He would have made a wonderfully nutritious corpse,” he added quietly.
Chapter 8
FRIDAY
Five in the morning. A sense of the sea somewhere nearby. There was light all around by now, but the sky was like poured concrete.
Kita pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out, leaving the engine running. Outside, the air was cold and grass-scented. Before him stretched a gently undulating plain. If he couldn’t get himself eaten by vultures or foxes, at least he might be able to disintegrate into particles in the wide-open spaces someplace like this, and turn to fertilizer. A spare and simple burial of this sort would suit him perfectly, thought Kita.
The doctor had laid back his seat and was sound asleep. Kita set off into the plain, making his way among the tufts of tall grasses and plants he’d never seen before. The muddy red earth stuck to the soles of his sneakers as he walked along in search of a flat rock to lay himself down on. The chill morning air enveloped him. Suddenly seized with a need to piss, he found a suitable place and relieved himself. I’ll do this maybe twice more before I die, he thought. And I’d better make sure there’s nothing left inside me to emerge when I do die. Also, I’d really like to take a bath. And get some new clothes. And a haircut.
Behind him he heard the sound of someone pushing through the grass. He turned to see the doctor making his way towards him, out of breath. As always, his face was expressionless, but the exhaustion of the last few days showed in the stubble on his chin and in his sunken eyes.
“I wasn’t trying to escape,” Kita explained.
The doctor stared resentfully at him, breathing hard. He held a handful of plants in each hand. There were no flowers, and each limp, drooping leaf had five fingers, like a baby’s hands. “I’d heard about this growing here, but I never really believed it,” he said proudly.
“What is it?” Kita asked.
“Marijuana,” the doctor replied.
“You know about plants too, eh?” Kita said casually, turning away.
“It relaxes you, see. You need to relax before the big event,” the doctor said, like a sports coach. Kita felt a bit like an athlete before an important race.
They went back to the car, and the doctor laid the freshly picked marijuana on the hot hood. He launched into another unasked-for sermon.
“You dry it like this, then roll it into a cigarette to smoke it. That way you’ll die happy.”
“Is there a town nearby? I feel like a change of mood. There’s still a little time before the event.”
“There’s one about ten miles on from here I think.”
“Where are we?”
“I’d say we’re somewhere in the Yufutsu Plain.”
The sound of this name brought it home to Kita that there was no going back to Tokyo. He shouldn’t feel any more attachment to the place. There was no need to walk those familiar streets or climb those steep hills ever again. He’d never be back there in the crowds flowing past Shibuya Station or through the Shinjuku underground passages.
“The town will still be asleep, so we should take a bit of a rest too.” The doctor yawned, and with the fresh outdoor air in his lungs, immediately went back to sleep. Kita followed his lead, but once his eyes closed images from the past few days began to flit through his head. The face of Shinobu reading the Bible, and of Mizuho, whose days were spent with the phantom of her dead child, wafted through his brain like drifting smoke. His mother, whose mind had slipped back twenty years into the past, rose like steam before his eyes. And then he shifted into reminiscence mode.