Authors: Koji Suzuki
EDGE (37 page)
Even when the conditions of existence change, there will be no problem if subject and object are ably reconciled. If not, the relationship collapses and life is plunged into a crisis.
The relationship between DNA and cosmos is no different.
The universe is not structured as an existence of steadfast things. It is a network of flowing phenomena that come in and out of being and is neither perfect nor unchanging. For that matter, there is no guarantee anywhere that physics and mathematics are correct; they’ve merely withstood scrutiny until now. All is hypothesis. And that is why we must not spare the effort to describe nature accurately and beautifully through language, if the relationship is to be maintained.
Is the writing on the Gateway of the Sun such a description?
As I think this, purely by chance my bag, sitting on the table next to the word processor, opens its mouth, and a few Polaroids slide out. By force of gravity, they glide down the surface of my sketchbook which rests at an angle. I pick up the sketchbook just as they’re about to fall, put the photos aside, and turn to the page with my sketches of the gate. When I place on the page a few of the Polaroids and compare them to the sketches, my line of sight increasingly favors the photos.
Depicted at the gate’s center is a figure that appears to be a sun god, arms raised and sending rays of light from its angular face. It must be a version of Viracocha.
To either side are three tiered sets of squares containing images of beasts. They all look similar, like a bird flying with its wings spread. Below these a fourth tier features geometric patterns mainly consisting of straight lines.
Although the images look alike, there are slight differences in detail. The direction of the bird’s face depends on which side of Viracocha it is, and the wings are extended to varying degrees.
Apart from these is another relief of a bird that seems to be hanging behind for some chance. The more I look at this point, the more it seems to destroy the composition of the whole. More hulking than the other birds, it’s only slightly smaller than Viracocha himself.
The wings look like two boomerangs set in an X shape. It has a head and arms and legs, the limbs more human than anything, the impression that it’s a bird owing solely to the odd wings it carries on its back. Horn-like shapes protrude from the top of its slick reptilian face.
The association that comes to mind is
The Plumed Serpent
. In South American lore, however, the winged snake is virtually an alias of Viracocha and imbued with positive connotations. The relief I am looking at now gives quite a different impression. The right hand is swung up to chin height; the left dangles next to the groin, palm facing outwards. From the knees downwards, the legs swell out into bulbs out of proportion with the rest of the body. It looks to be stepping forth with a finned left foot.
Depicted with far more dynamism and realism than the other images, off color and not about to harmonize with its surroundings, it looks almost alive.
I realize only when it is pointed out to me that this plumed serpent probably isn’t an abstract creation but rather incorporates a faithful rendering of some actual person’s face and features. No wonder it’s so raw and at the same time repulsive.
The document ended there.
For a moment Saeko just sat, unable to think clearly, barely registering
the fact that she had finished.
Images of the Tiwanaku relics cluttered her mind. She tried to focus, to think about why her father might have been writing this. She wondered if it was a journal intended to record the daily events of his trips through these ancient relics. Or was it more an attempt to interpret the mysteries shrouding these ancient civilizations, particularly why they sometimes appeared to possess technology and knowledge beyond their time? He had also written about the sudden decline of such cultures, how many had just disappeared overnight; perhaps the text was an attempt to map out his initial thoughts on group disappearances.
The text read as though it were a rough draft, as though her father had been jotting down his experiences in journal form while brainstorming through thoughts that came to him at the time. Saeko decided that, most likely, he was planning to use this as a base to work from, henceforth focusing on a single theme and rewriting his notes accordingly. Saeko knew her father’s work patterns of old. Towards the end he’d begun to discuss his own interpretations of the emergence of life and evolution. Saeko realized that the postcard she had received from him had contained a summary of the keywords, the key concepts, of this part.
Her father theorized that the collapse of a black hole 4 billion years ago had been the defining factor in the beginning of cellular life on earth. Life had then evolved based on a relationship with light that eventually resulted in the development of a brain capable of describing its environment through language, including that of numbers. He identified a causal link between the developments of sight and language and touched on the causes of mass extinction, first with regard to the dinosaurs, and then the Neanderthals. His arguments deliberately strayed from conventional ideas that evolution was a blind process, that it was governed by chance, and went out of the way to claim that the process was purposive. Saeko recalled his detailing of the extraordinary idea that the universe (or god) had granted the power of language to life to satisfy its desire to be put down in the language of numbers. The interrelationship between life and matter deepened via the medium of light and information and enabled further evolution of the universe.
Saeko recalled a conversation she’d had with Toshiya about the relationship between black holes and informational theory. He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure,
and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life.
Saeko wanted to believe her father’s arguments, but the subtext of his writing scared her. Throughout, he seemed to be warning that the collapse of the relationship he outlined could bring about a heretofore unheard-of catastrophe. Her father had conceived the universe as a network of phenomena where everything was caught in a continual flux of becoming and perishing. Anything that pushed too hard against the flow of progress would be naturally de-selected. Saeko couldn’t help but agree with his depiction of the world as unstable, uncertain—fleeting and full of hypotheses—but the rest? The one thing she would never doubt, of course, was her father’s love. Saeko found herself able to clearly imagine her father writing this, all of eighteen years ago. She could almost hear the soft whisper of his voice.
At the same time, something about the way her father came across in the text jarred. The more she thought of the man she knew, the more she began to feel that something was odd with the way he came across in the document. She was sure he had written it, but she had felt a vague dissonance here and there.
She turned back to the first page and began to scan the text to try to work out what was causing this impression. As she read through again she began to realize that the odd feeling she got came from the journal-like passages; somehow they didn’t match the image of the man she remembered. There was the one where he stood before the carving of Viracocha, describing a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia. She remembered how he recounted shedding a tear. Saeko had never known her father to cry—to the day he disappeared eighteen years ago she had never seen him shed a tear. Moreover, the way he wiped away his tears—she had never known her father to carry a handkerchief. The image just didn’t fit; Saeko couldn’t picture her father standing there wiping away tears with a handkerchief. She wondered if her father had simply never revealed this side of himself to her. It was completely possible that he had kept some habits hidden, not wanting to show any weakness in front of his daughter. Of course Saeko knew that people often learned things about their parents after their death, from old friends and such—there was nothing too odd about that. She back-burnered the thought and continued to skim the text.
She stopped once more. Here it was again in the scene where he picked up the hitchhiker. It had been early evening, and on his way back from Tiwanaku her father had come across a young Japanese hitchhiker
and decided to give him a lift back to La Paz. She came to the part where he described their conversation:
… he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations.
She hadn’t picked up on it during her first reading, but her father had clearly written that the hitchhiker had leant forward between the seats. Saeko couldn’t quite reconcile the description. She knew from reading his other works that images in her father’s descriptions were usually clear and flowing, easily recreating whatever he wanted to describe. What was it about this one sentence that made it so hard for her to picture the scene?
She went back to the beginning of the passage. Her father had seen the hitchhiker and given him a lift. She’d naturally assumed that the hitchhiker would have sat in the front passenger seat. That was why the description felt strange: if he’d been in the front seat he wouldn’t have had to lean forward to talk with her father. It would only make him hit the windshield, so he must have been sitting somewhere else. He hadn’t been riding shotgun at all but had been in the back of the jeep. With that realization, the description immediately made sense.
But why did her father ask him to sit in the rear seat? Saeko had never known him to do that; she’d always sat next to him in the front. When she’d sat in the back there had always been some reason.
Maybe he just had luggage piled up in the front?
But no, he had already checked into the hotel and would have left his suitcases and any heavy luggage in the room. If he had anything with him at all it would be a light daypack. Saeko dismissed the possibility of excess baggage.
The only other possible reason was that there was already someone else seated next to him. She recalled the passage where her father had almost fallen asleep at the wheel on his way to Tiwanaku. Again there had been a phrase that didn’t sit right. He wrote about tiredness being catching. Saeko picked out the sentence:
They say that drowsiness is catching—I must have dozed off.
The sentence made perfect sense if there had already been someone
sitting next to him in the jeep. That someone had probably dozed off, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the jeep, so her father tried to employ his mind to fight the temptation himself.
Saeko went through the rest of the text in her mind, applying this theory to each description in turn. Her father wrote that he had put his bag down and checked the time on the nightstand between the beds. There had been two beds … Her father had been staying in a twin room. As far as she knew, it was her father’s habit to always book a double room when he was staying by himself. Whether he was staying in a standard room or a suite, he always wanted a double bed. He would only ever book a twin room if there was someone staying with him.
He also wrote about phoning ahead to book a table at a cafe for dinner. Now that she thought about it, this was also completely unlike him. Her father usually liked to take a stroll around the hotel’s vicinity and just drop in wherever caught his eye. The only time he would ever take the trouble to book a table was when he was with someone special that he didn’t want to keep waiting while they walked around looking for a place to eat.
Having spent seventeen years traveling around the world with her father, Saeko felt confident that she knew his habits like the back of her own hand. While giving the initial appearance that he was traveling alone, her father had actually been traveling with someone. Someone had handed him a handkerchief for his tears in front of the statue of Viracocha. There was no doubt about it, then. Her father had been traveling with a woman.
The sentence that stood out the most was the one at the very end of the text:
I realize only when it is pointed out to me …
Again, a sign that someone else had been there with him. Moreover, this person had told her father that the bird-like figure looking out from behind Viracocha must have been modeled on someone rather than being an abstract representation. There were no photos included, so all Saeko could do was try to picture the scene in her mind. She thought of the description, the image of a horned reptilian face. The first picture to come into her head was that of a devil. Once in her head, she found it almost impossible to get rid of the image, which stuck like glue. Saeko shivered and a whimper escaped her lips.
She breathed deeply and tried to calm herself, using reason to dispel the image. There was no evidence to any of this; it was just the product of a
series of associations. But try as she might, she couldn’t get rid of the idea, and Saeko knew herself too well. If she didn’t control the image now, it would propagate until she was unable to budge, trapped under its weight.
The last thing she wanted was to live through another experience like the night at the Ina hospital. Her mind continued to race, out of control. That night, after the earthquake, she’d been taken directly to the hospital from the Fujimura house. She remembered the feeling of helplessness that had taken hold as she found herself completely immobilized, the conviction that someone had been standing there, watching her from the darkness. The image had taken on the form of a particular person …
She looked down at her father’s document on the desk before her, feeling her back prickle as if to warn her that someone was in the room and standing directly behind her. She tried to tell herself that no one was there, but the terrifying sensation persisted. Her imagination was running off on its own, doing too good a job of recreating the feeling of a presence. It felt more real than if someone had actually been there. Her ears picked up the echo of keys jangling behind her.