“I doubt we’ll meet again,” he said, and put out his hand.
She took it in a weak grip. “What will you do?” she asked.
What indeed? He wasn’t cut out either for doctoring or for killing, but he’d realized this a bit late. Yet he too had been given a kind of cruel freedom, and he had to bear the painful reality of it. “I think I might try working in a convenience store.” For some reason, it seemed to him that this would be what he was most suited for. A bright, white space that somewhat resembled a hospital ward, providing “convenience” to a series of transient, anonymous clients. A quick word of thanks directed at their departing backs. A presence neither hated nor loved, merely considered convenient… could it be that he’d spent all these years unconsciously wishing to fulfil just such a role? If only his path had crossed with Kita’s and Yashiro’s and Shinobu’s simply through the fleeting exchange of employee and customers, he’d have been spared all the hassle and misdeeds of this past week. At this thought, the doctor suddenly found himself imagining the expressionless convenience store employee as a kind of priest of infinite wisdom, quietly living his life in accordance with the laws of nature.
“If you really do plan on working in a convenience store, we may meet again in fact.”
The doctor nodded. Then he bowed, and left the room almost certainly never to come back. Why not head straight for a convenience store? he thought. But three steps on, he had a sudden thought. Just possibly, if Kita hadn’t died, he’d suddenly turn up there wanting a packet of instant curry.
The sky was a pale pink. He’d never seen such a sky. There ought to be sea below it, but everything was dyed such a pink that there was no distinguishing one from the other.
His skin was so goose-pimpled with cold that you could have grated cheese on it. The cold was fierce, but there was no point in worrying over it. His body didn’t register the cold.
He wished someone would explain to him what he was doing here. Why was he lying here sodden, on this rocky beach? Why was he so horribly thirsty? Why was blood running from his hairline? Was there any reason why he wasn’t wearing shoes?
When he drew in a breath, his chest wheezed like an ocarina, and he coughed and spluttered. No one was there, yet he felt as if someone was gently patting his back. Trying to tell him to stop? Someone was beside him, but he couldn’t see anyone. Or was it a rock? A rock that bore a strong resemblance to his mother. When had his mother become a rock? But when he looked more carefully, it looked rather like the grumpy face of that killer, who shared his mother’s Alzheimerish puzzled look about where and who he was. Kita had forgotten whether the killer had died or was still alive. And what had happened to his mother after she lost her memory?
It was cold. He wanted to go somewhere a bit warmer. If he prayed for it, no doubt he’d find he was lying on a paradisiacal summer beach. Here goes – one, two, three.
There must be some mistake here. He couldn’t remember how things were supposed to be. Before he’d got here… yes, he could remember swimming. Underwater, in his clothes, through the swaying seaweed, deep down in the salty water with bubbles racing upward. While someone was making him tingle.
Had he been dreaming? And if so, did that mean that this gooseflesh and his sodden trousers and socks were part of the same dream? Was blood red in dreams just like in real life? Maybe the sky and sea were this pink colour because it was a dream. There was a certain special way to behave in dreams. He didn’t need to do anything. The dream would do it all for him. But whose dream was this? The stone’s dream? The sea’s?
How he longed to get into a good hot bath. OK, let’s try a bath dream. And he’d love to eat some noodles or curry. Right, let’s have a curry dream while he was at it.
The sky had turned a dark brown. The sea was dark red. Time was constantly slipping forward somewhere at the edges of his consciousness. The blood on his forehead had apparently dried now, and his clothes were barely damp. Well at any rate, he thought, let’s chase time.
He set off to walk along the water’s edge, picking up a driftwood stick to use as a crutch. He must have walked for close to an hour, his easy tempo following the rhythm of the waves, yet still time seemed to be racing ahead of him. His toe had been cut up on shell fragments, and he could walk no further. But when he sat down, he found himself looking at a shoe like a weather-beaten old fisherman’s face, washed up on the shore. He put his wounded foot into this and walked on some way further, and then he came across a sneaker that looked like some fat kid just woken from sleep. With two shoes, he could now walk at a pace that kept up with the passage of time – but now the wind had changed direction and was blowing in from the sea, catching him like wind in a sail and pushing him up towards the mountains.
He listened attentively. Sometimes the wind sounded like the cry of a bird, sometimes like the moan of a discontented woman, and then again like an electronic hum, or like clothing being ripped. It paused for a second, and then he found himself enclosed by trees with brown, scaly trunks, far from the sound of the sea. Softly, a muddy darkness began to descend over the wood. His nostrils drew in the scent of pine resin and night dampness.
He curled up in a hollow made by the roots of a great pine, snuggled down like a bagworm under a layer of leafy branches and grass he’d gathered, and closed his eyes.
His eyes were prized open by a shaft of light shining down through the branches. “Wake up!” someone seemed to be saying. He looked about him. A skylark was singing madly, and to his ears it seemed to be shouting hysterically “Die! Die!” But another skylark that shot across the tree above him from a different direction was wailing “Free!”
He’d spent the night in his curled position, and now pain like a needle shot through his back. And with the pain, his consciousness of himself returned.
What the hell am I doing here? Kita shivered. A combination of cold and fear raced along his dulled and frazzled nerves into every corner of his body.
Sure enough, the thing he most feared had become reality. His plan to reach the other world had somehow misfired, and he’d been denied entry. Had he chosen the wrong method? Was death itself turning its back on him? Or was it that the other world was actually much more distant than he’d imagined, and he had to cross endless mountains, rivers, valleys and seas to reach it?
He’d assumed humans died more easily than this, but this had obviously been a fatal error. Here he was, it turned out, unable to become a corpse, dragging around this useless garbage of a body. Did he have to recycle himself, was that it? If only he’d managed to transform himself neatly into a drowned corpse, this self and its shame, memories, words, and despair would all long since have evaporated, and he’d be floating gracefully upon the waves, with everything given over to nature’s hands. But no, it seemed becoming a corpse wasn’t anything like so easy. That’s what someone was trying to tell him.
Think of all the men and women who’d tried to stand in the way of his suicide. There was no question they’d all been sent as messengers from beyond that mysterious curtain. They’d appeared because, from the moment Kita had decided to commit Death by Choice and kill himself the following Friday, he’d been minutely observed from beyond this inhuman curtain of death. He’d had the death part of his sentence excised and been left simply with the choice, the freedom. In other words, he’d been ordered to be free even from death.