The sun peeped out from between the clouds. Come to bless him, eh? This needed some kind of fanfare. Shame the only audience was himself.
Right, that had the ol’ death hormones pumping now. Turn on the radio. They’d just set in on the prelude to Carmen. Fabulous timing. He was fired up and ready to go. Energy flooded him.
Turn the car around and back up five hundred yards. Another U-turn. Check the clock. Fourteen eleven. That would mean he died at around two fifteen on the thirteenth. That’s if the car’s clock was set right. OK Mr Yoshio Kita, you ready boy? The prelude was reaching its crescendo. Wait, he hadn’t written a will. Oh well, what the heck. He’d told his last wishes to Shinobu. Sorry doc, but my organs are going to be fish food.
Full throttle! Tyres screaming. There’s that tingle, really pumping. Ooh, here comes the erection. Man, this is almost too much. OK, here goes. Bye!
The guardrail leaped towards him. One good solid punch to the jaw and he was through. Suddenly there was something pressing hard against his chest. The air bag. The Camaro was airborne. Now it was falling. Up comes the sea. My God, what a force. Just like an ejaculation.
And then, a shock that went straight through his bone marrow.
Can’t breathe. Something pressing against his stomach. Something sticking into his shin. Pain. Was he in the sea? The car was sinking. Carmen still playing. This some kind of aquarium? Why didn’t the water come in? Goddamn, I’m still alive. Didn’t it work? Maybe I can’t die unless the water comes in. Maybe the glass’ll break if I just wait. Or should I break it? Intense cello music. And some sound like water poured onto a hot fry pan. Water! The water’s beginning to come in. This is going to take a while. Got to break the glass to lessen this pain.
Kick it. And again. What about the power window? Nope, broken. Head-butt it. The head’s the hardest part of the body.
The glass broke. Kita was swallowed by the sea.
Through the band of light above him, he could see a stream of bubbles rising. Fish had already come flocking around the Camaro where it lay on the sea floor, sounding it out. Kita had escaped the car and was floating in the water, bent over. Ah, it’s me, he thought. He felt he’d forgotten something in the car, so turned back to check. There was a child playing there, ducking in and out of the trunk. “Hey, what’re you doing? You’ll drown!” Kita called. “I drowned long ago,” the child replied.
“Are you my little brother?”
“Never laid eyes on you before.” This kid was only three, but he was sassy. Around him was a belt of kelp, covered with minuscule writing. Do you hate me, kid? I pushed you into the river. You must have suffered. I’m sorry. I wanted to see you again. To apologize… But the child had disappeared, leaving the kelp floating empty.
Kita was in a familiar child’s room. On the wall were the letters “WXY,” carved in the wood with a knife. In Kita’s mind when he was a child, this had signified the body of a woman having sex. These letters began to move, and shifted to the figure of his mother washing her hair in the bathroom. His kid brother was crying in the bathtub. Yoshio! Yoshio! came a cry. His father was digging a hole. I’m putting a pole up here for the koinobori carp streamers. Ah, I’m way back in the past. Looking up at the sky. I’ve seen this blue sky full of scaly clouds before somewhere. Sorry, Kita, I just can’t go on being with you any – Stop it, don’t apologize! You’ll kill my love. Now a child yelling, Papa! Papa! I’m not your Dad. Who are you? Is that Shingo? Do you recognize me? Yeah, you used to love Mummy, didn’t you? That’s right. You might’ve lived if I’d married your Mum, you know. No, you’re wrong. I’ve never been born. Shingo goes skating off into the distance. And now here comes Shinobu, riding in an Alfa Romeo. Kita! Come to the hospital with me. No, I hate hospitals. No no, don’t say that. I think I’m pregnant, see. My kid? Of course. So come on, quick, come to the hospital. But hang on there, I’ve just committed Death By Choice. Oh, everyone these days wants to die. Kids, middle aged folks… Did you know, my friend Jesus had a time when he wanted to die, when he was just past thirty. But before that he’d had a life and death battle with the world. He chose to lose the battle, and he won. You’re just like Jesus. Come on, quick! You’re going to be reborn.
I’m being sucked down a narrow tube. Am I off to the other world at last? My body’s being drawn out like a piece of spaghetti. This hurts. I can’t breathe. I can see a hole. A small hole. All I can do is try and escape through it. The other world must lie beyond it. A brilliant light is shining in. An unbearable tingle! Who’s doing this to me? Is this a sign I’ve arrived?
Chapter 9
SOMEDAY
Some time before night fell, the doctor discovered the broken guardrail on a curve of Route 336 between Ogifushi and Sakaimachi, where the road ran along a cliff above the sea. He informed the local police and requested an investigation, and early Saturday morning the diving team arrived, donned aqualungs, and dived to the bottom. There they discovered the white Camaro, but the body of the driver wasn’t in it. A three-hour search was conducted with two boats and a crew of six divers, but there was no sign of the body. The most convincing theory was that it had been washed far out to sea. If he had by any chance managed to survive he would surely have sought help from a passing car or someone living nearby, but no one had seen him, and there was no way of confirming the death.
The doctor returned to the capital. There was nothing more he could do.
He was deeply exhausted. No sooner was he flat on his back at last than the ceiling began to spin. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers to them, then looked at the ceiling again. The window, the wall, the door, the chair, all looked like spinning fragments of crystal. It was as if he was gazing down a kaleidoscope.
Could this be some message from his brain telling him to stop staring at things? Now he came to think of it, these eyes had spent too much time recently looking at bloodied organs, corpses that had just breathed their last, and flat ECGs on a screen.
He held his eyes tightly shut, but now it was his own body that was beginning to spin on the bed. He’d spent the last few days hurtling from place to place, playing both doctor and killer, he told himself. If he didn’t rest, he’d burn out, but the impetus from all this frenetic activity kept his body spinning even after he’d hit the bed.
He swallowed a sleeping pill to force the spin to a halt, and slept the sleep of the dead. He planned to dream away these last few days of utterly futile effort, then to proceed to forget all about the dream and get back to good ol’ lazy, uneventful everyday life again.
He was woken by the sound of the telephone.
A woman’s voice informed him it was checkout time. He had no memory of having slept so long, but the clock told him it was noon. What? he thought. He suddenly couldn’t believe that he’d been wandering in the realm of dreams for thirteen solid hours. What day is it? he asked her.
“It’s Sunday.”
Oh yeah, Easter Sunday, Resurrection day. Yesterday was Saturday, and the day before was Friday thirteenth.
The doctor booked himself in for another day, ordered up a room service brunch, and ran the water for a bath.