EDGE (56 page)

“It’s something to do with Kota Fujimura.”

On the mention of the name Seiji broke out into a coughing fit. His convulsions jangled the crutches balanced on his lap. “Atta-girl. You’re getting warm now.”

He still wanted her to get to the answer herself. Saeko tried to imagine what might have happened next.

It would have been sometime after two in the morning when they finally arrived at the Fujimura house. What happened then? Did her father get in a fight with Kota over the love triangle with Haruko? A horrifying image crossed her mind and she shuddered. Crimes of passion, of a jealous husband killing his wife’s lover, weren’t uncommon. Could Kota have killed her father that night? Was her father murdered and tossed into the lake? She could hardly bear the thought of it, let alone put it into words, but the only way forward was to ask.

“Was … Did Kota kill my father?”

“What a mundane answer,” Seiji’s grin was full of scorn. He shook his head.

Saeko’s instincts told her that he was telling the truth. So Kota hadn’t killed her father.

What else could have happened? If there had been no violence, perhaps the two of them had been able to talk. In fact, Saeko already had something to help her work out the contents of their discussion.

She clearly remembered the words that had come to her during the
filming, when she’d placed her hand on her father’s notebook on the table in front of her.

If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you
.

She hadn’t known the voice at the time. Now she finally had an idea whose it might be. She’d been thorough in her research into the Fujimura family, but since they’d gone missing, she’d never heard their voices.

At the time, she’d assumed that the words referred to the notebook. But now that she was able to picture the scene between her father and Kota, their point became clear.

Perhaps because she had connected the voice’s timber to its speaker, the sequence of events flowed like a dam had broken. Eighteen years ago, her father had faced Kota in this room. The cabinet, the table, the chairs, and everything else in it stimulated her imagination now, and a conversation began to play out in her mind.

It was late, two or three in the morning. Perhaps having gone to bed, Haruko wasn’t with them. Kota was in the living room, her father in the dining room.

Kota was doing all the talking; her father listened in silence. Kota sat on the floor, legs outstretched, his back against the living room wall. Her father was half obscured in the shadows, but she imagined him leaning against the wall, too. They were back to back but in different rooms with a thin partition between them.

A single light shone from above in the darkened living room, a spotlight illuminating Kota from above. Saeko’s image was three-dimensional, like a hologram, but the light was weak and hazy, the outlines blurred. She couldn’t discern Kota’s expression. The tone of his speech flitted randomly between the formal and informal; its content, too, seemed full of contradiction, courtesy and insult and resignation and excitement intertwining. One moment, his tone would be loud and mocking. The next he would speak almost too quietly to make out the words, suddenly more serious, even solemn. The random fluctuations were enough to instill a deep sense of unease in Saeko.

The night was quiet, and the low rasp of Kota’s monologue filled it:

You should be grateful. I mean, if you don’t want to, then just turn me down. Although I don’t think you’ve got that in you …

I’ve got to say, though, I feel pretty damned lucky. Meeting you like this. It was worth putting out the bait. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in this place, this dull place, accomplishing nothing as a serpent stripped of its
wings. But here you are, and now I can finally take flight. I can take back my wings, fly as high as I wish. It’s not all bad for you, either. If you hadn’t met me, you’d have been informed of a loved one’s death. We both stand to gain
.

You know what I’m talking about. If you choose to do nothing, your pretty, sweet little daughter is going to die tomorrow morning. She’ll set out for the library, then out of nowhere—a speeding truck. She’ll be dragged, half-alive, a hundred meters under the wheels of the thing. What a pitiful sight, torn to pieces like that. There’s only one way to alter that fate
.

Just swat down United Airlines Flight 323 that took off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris
.

Don’t look so surprised. Your daughter’s life and UA323 are tied together with an invisible string and are related, taking one means losing the other. You know very well how the world’s structured—the relationships that obtain behind it all
.

All we have to do is make an agreement. A contract, if you will. You give me your powers. It will save your daughter. And you get a nice little prize called Haruko in the bargain
.

If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you
.

Saeko’s heart felt like it would burst, and she stroked her chest. Was it true? She had indeed seen an article that UA323 had crashed; it had said that all 515 people on board were presumed dead. But she’d had no way of knowing that she was fated to die if the 515 had not. If her father had called her the evening before—at eight o’clock, as he never failed to—then she would indeed have gone to the library the next day. He hadn’t called, she’d worried, and her schedule had changed as a result.

Saeko often found herself asking what would have happened if she’d made a different decision. What if Hashiba hadn’t discovered the lump? They would have made love, and that would have seriously altered her subsequent path. It was the same with her father. If he hadn’t embraced Haruko that night in Narita, he would never have obtained the information about Kota’s third nipple. He would not have traveled to Takato and would have had his daughter’s death on his hands.

The sound of rasping laughter filled her ears. Again she heard Kota’s voice fill the room:

The number of people? Why get hung up on that at this point? Have you got it all wrong? What the invisible string connects isn’t one life and another, but phenomena—a traffic accident and a plane crash. There just happens to be
a disparate number of victims
.

Now, don’t get so huffy. It’s not like you to fret over the imbalance. You can’t possibly not know that it’s not about the head count. Are you feeling a little confused? Are you telling me that if the price of your daughter living were just one stranger’s life, then you’d take the deal without batting an eye? In that case, what if the number was ten? Or a hundred, or a thousand? Where do you draw the line? The number of people sacrificed doesn’t change the choice
.

This is business as usual behind the stage, just unknown. Accidents, illnesses, disasters, terrorism, you name it. A lot of people die every so often. Ever wondered why it should have been them and not you? Well, it doesn’t matter who. Death rains down arbitrarily. It just happened to be them and not you. If what’s going on behind the stage became known, I bet humans wouldn’t be able to take it. Life, in the first place, rests on the sacrifice of others. Knowing the sacrifices’ names and faces, though, would easily unhinge people. It’d be hard not to picture the sorrow of the bereaved. Not knowing allows people to go about their lives not caring
.

As I’m sure you know, you can choose to strip me of my power. But doing so will bring about the death—the appalling, tragic death—of your beloved daughter. There’s only one way to save her. You give me your power, and the man that is Shinichiro Kuriyama disappears from the face of this planet, for good. Sure, to make phenomenal ends meet, a plane will have to crash too, but I couldn’t care less
.

Please don’t just die, though. In any case, you couldn’t even if you wanted to. You’ll just have to keep falling
.

Shinichiro Kuriyama ends here. From now on, you live as Kota Fujimura. You’ll get Haruko for yourself. You have to become my successor for this to work smoothly. My departure will leave a gaping hole. It’s your job to stay and fill that hole. You’re the only one that can, after all, since you understand how this works. All that studying you’ve done, all that physics. Hell, I’m just preaching to the choir here, right? Clear as day to you, I’d imagine
.

It’s just so exciting! All the possibilities, all the things I can do. In the world I alight upon as a god, I’ll be able to conduct all sorts of nifty experiments
.

Say, I could jump back 50,000 years to the point where language is about to emerge and insert a self-referential contradiction in the system. How do you like the idea of tampering with calculus to inject the tricks of zero and infinity? The more humans wield language and describe nature, the more contradictory it would all become. Each little step on the path of development would effectively tighten the noose around humanity’s neck. Eventually, the contradiction would grow so extensive it would reach the point of no return. What happens
to the universe then? I bet the fireworks will be spectacular. Gets me hard just thinking about it
.

That’s why I’m just so hugely grateful to you for coming to me. Only one of us can wield power at any one time. So I’d like to have it. What would you do with it anyway? Just selfish stuff
.

Anyway, it’s getting late. I think I’ll be on my way now. You can look after everything. Stay here as a puny demon and be a good husband, live a quiet life, raise a happy family, and all that. It suits you
.

Kota’s monologue wound to a close. Saeko saw him stand up and brush down the back of his trousers. He turned his back to Saeko and now talked directly to the wall that separated him and her father.

So this is goodbye. Just make sure to do as we arranged
.

Then he walked out of the light, disappearing into darkness.

Saeko could hear a gentle sobbing pierce the silence from the other side of the wall. The pathetic sound bled through the partition.

She pictured her father crying, hands over his mouth, defeated. Eventually, the sound died away. A silence enveloped the room as Saeko’s consciousness returned to the present.

The room was as it had been before. The lights were on, and the muted TV set continued to broadcast the now familiar images from around the world. Seiji sat at the other end of the living room table and was staring at her.

Saeko had heard her father talk about his greatest fear enough times. It was to have to continue living after experiencing the loss of his daughter. He had not had a choice, and traded his soul and 515 lives for her, made a pact with the Devil.

That was the meaning of Seiji’s words: it had all begun with her. Faced with releasing evil into the world or losing his daughter, her father had chosen the former. It had all been to save her, and that was why she was here now, alive.

She felt the weight of 515 lives on her shoulders.

She often found herself wondering, without knowing why, whether she somehow had something to do with her father’s disappearance. She had always known that he loved her more than anyone else on earth.

Her father had been living here all this time, up until a year ago. He had been living here as Kota Fujimura. Saeko struggled to hold back her
tears as she looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time.

She had searched for a long eighteen years yet had found nothing, no clues as to what had happened. And all that time, her father had been living here in Takato, just a couple of hundred kilometers from Tokyo. He had raised a family; he and Haruko had had a son and a daughter together. They’d been living a normal life. Saeko recalled the strange sense of familiarity, something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on when she’d first come to this house and just now again when she’d looked through the family albums. That was explicable if indeed this family had been raised by her father.

She could guess why he had to replace Kota Fujimura. Their relationship was like that of matter and anti-matter, god and devil. Their encounter resembled their twin emergence.

If you added energy to empty space, matter popped out, leaving behind a mirror image of itself, anti-matter. Saeko had a simple analogy.

Considering the universe as an empty, two-dimensional space—a blank sheet of paper—this state represented the most basic form of symmetry, with no room for the development of matter. If you applied some energy to the space, say by taking a pair of scissors and cutting out the shape of a heart from the center, immediately the status quo of balance and symmetry shifted. In effect, the heart shape would exist outside of the originally prescribed number of dimensions. The spontaneous destruction of symmetry could be thought of as a phase transition.

The excised heart would leave an empty space in the paper with exactly the same proportions as the heart itself. The heart represented matter while the empty space represented anti-matter. At the beginning of the universe, the same quantities of matter and anti-matter existed, but now only the former was observed. Did its opposite slip into a place that transcended the dimension of time? In that case, the two would rarely meet. But if they did by happenstance, and the heart-shaped cutout returned to its original position, outwardly it would resemble the disappearance of both. The mutual destruction would release the massive amount of energy initially used to cut the shape out.

If the same logic applied, then after Kota’s disappearance, her father had to live here and cease to be Shinichiro Kuriyama.

Yet, in the end, she could not meet her father. He had vanished along with his new family, just January that year, the day of the abnormal sunspot activity. Why did they have to disappear? Saeko couldn’t think of the reason. Only Seiji would know the answer.

“Why? Why did the Fujimuras have to disappear?”

Saeko studied Seiji’s facial movements for any hint of what might have happened. She noticed that his face had changed somehow. The poisonous look had all but vanished, and his eyes looked calmer. It was as though she was looking at a different person.