Loop (28 page)

Kaoru straddled the bike and started the engine.

He had a clear image of where he needed to go now. He'd follow the gorge due west, then pass over a hill with a spring, and then cross two tall peaks.

Kaoru knew that at the moment it was important for him to rely on a greater power and do as he was directed. Clearly, someone or something was intervening.

When had it started, this intervention? Maybe he'd known it would turn out like this for ten years, ever since the family had gotten the idea for this trip. Maybe all he was doing now was carrying out a long-prepared plan.

Let's go.

He grabbed the handlebars, made a U-turn, and went back the way he had come.

His plan was to head back to the main road and check into a motel where he could rest and replenish his gas and supplies. Then he'd start his traversing of the desert, on his road that wasn't a road.

Two days after leaving Wayne's Rock, Kaoru finally turned off the highway into the desert. He rode ten miles over flat country until a middling-sized mountain appeared, then he rode up its side.

The higher he went the stronger he felt the hush. The stream narrowed, and he could hear the sighing of the trees. There were as yet no traces of the MHC virus to be seen here. The vegetation was still healthy, the sight of it refreshing.

He could feel the plants' exhalations gently on his skin. He pressed on, higher, deeper into the stillness.

He'd never expected to find this much greenery in the middle of the desert.

When the valley had come into view, he'd been unable to accurately guess at its scale. But now that he'd ridden right up to it, it was no mere stand of trees, but a true forest, all contained within a huge ravine.

The trees only grew on the inner slopes of the declivity; the rest of the landscape was an unrelieved brown wasteland. Hidden in a valley this deep, he doubted the forest would be visible even from the air.

Jagged boulders pierced the sky and trees filled the spaces between them. Even with an off-road bike, he could ride no farther. The rocky outcrop-pings came together to shelter a creek which shrank the farther up along its flow he went. He'd have to dismount here.

He lay the bike down gently in the brush amidst some trees. He took what he needed from the back of the bike and slung his pack over his shoulders. He exchanged his riding boots for sneakers and then looked around, trying to memorize the spot so he could find it again.

He'd have to rely on his legs to carry him the rest of the way.

From time to time he would stop and gaze up at the vast gorge that the little stream had carved into the land. That stream alone marked his road now. How long had it taken to make this canyon, thousands of yards deep? Contemplating the time and energy required made him dizzy.

Endless years and ceaseless repetition. The high-rise in which Kaoru made his home in Tokyo would easily fit into this valley. It had taken three years to build. But the valley-it'd taken hundreds of millions of years, and the water was still working on it, bit by bit.

The sun was sinking in the west now. The rays that found their way into the valley were climbing up its side, licking the sides of the valley as if it were some huge organism.

He paused in his leaping from rock to rock to plunge both hands into the stream for a drink. The water was cold. He could feel its chill spreading from his esophagus to his stomach. It was a boon to have the stream alongside: he wouldn't suffer thirst. He scooped up more water, then sat down on a rock for a breather.

A hushed air hung over the secluded land. He stumbled across a memory. He'd once before breathed air that was otherworldly like this. It put him in mind not of the deep recesses of Mother Nature, but of a place with a much higher concentration of civilization. An intensive care unit.

His father went into the ICU every time he had to have more cancer removed. In that sealed-off space, where the only sound was the rhythm of the respirator, the patients' flesh became so enveloped in stillness that it was hard to tell if they were alive or dead. Every time he visited his father there, Kaoru came away with the impression that it was only the machines that were really alive in that place-the people had sunk to a level below the inorganic.

He got chills as he remembered the tubes sprouting from his father's face and head, the pain he must have been in-the greater the number of tubes the more they seemed to speak of the ebbing of his father's life. There was something in the silence of this valley that reminded him of the ICU.

I
wonder how Dad's doing.

Now that his thoughts had arrived at memories of his father's condition, he felt he couldn't rest any longer. His father just had to hold out until Kaoru returned-otherwise, he would have come all the way here for nothing.

He worried about his mother, too. Was she still obsessed with Native American legends, praying for a miracle to save his father? Kaoru wished she could deal with things a little more realistically.

And what about Reiko?

He felt his chest tighten at the thought of her. He took the two photos of her from his breast pocket. One had been taken in the cafeteria at the hospital. In the photo, Kaoru was holding his head up high, while Reiko rested her head on his shoulder. Ryoji had taken the picture. What had gone through his mind as he'd captured this image? His mother's affection for Kaoru was revealed in her pose. She had more of a womanly aura in this photo than a motherly one. Ryoji couldn't have enjoyed seeing her like this. What he saw through the viewfinder had to have bothered him.

Every time Kaoru thought about Reiko he took out this photo and looked at it, but the sad memories of Ryoji it brought back were always stronger than any recollections of Reiko that it held.

He looked at the second photo. In it, Reiko was sitting alone on the floor of what was probably her living room at home. She sat casually, legs bent to one side, hands behind her, on a thick carpet. Her hairstyle was different. The photo was probably two or three years old, but as to whether it had been taken before or after the onset of Ryoji's illness there was no clue.

Not long after their relationship had turned physical, Kaoru had asked Reiko for a photo from her younger days. It had been a bad choice of words. "Are you trying to say I'm old?" she'd scowled, poking him in the ribs. But the next day she'd brought him several photographs.

One had been taken at a party at her home. She was surrounded by friends, and she was holding a glass. Her face was flushed from drinking.

In another she was posing with one hand raised and the other on her hip. In another she was wearing an elegant orange kimono and standing nonchalantly beside a chrysanthemum doll.

In yet another, she was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. It was a perfect shot, catching her just as she turned around in response to someone calling her from behind.

Kaoru imagined that Ryoji had taken this one. He'd sneaked up behind her, called "Mom!" and then clicked the shutter. The reaction on her face was unfeigned-surprise mingled with laughter to create a most unusual expression. A valuable photo, capturing a side she usually didn't show.

Kaoru was particularly fond of that picture, but he'd decided to leave it behind when he departed for the desert. He'd elected to take only two photos of her, the one of the two of them together and the one of her sitting on the floor. He kept them safe in his pocket.

In that second photo she was wearing a knit wool one-piece dress. From the waist up, it looked like a sweater; in fact, it was less a proper dress than a really long sweater. The U-shaped neckline was modest to a fault, providing not the slightest glimpse of the swelling of her bosom. Not that her breasts were that large to begin with. They were just big enough to fit in the palms of Kaoru's hands. Their perfect volume and firmness fascinated him, though.

The dress material didn't accent the lines of her waist, either. Instead, his gaze was drawn to her legs.

Because of the way she was sitting, the hem of the dress had hiked up to just above her knees. She was leaning back, knees raised slightly off the carpet. In the space between them there was a darkness that extended far back. Time after time, Kaoru had buried his face in that soft valley.

Day after day they'd waited for Ryoji to be taken away for his tests. Then in the brilliant light of day Kaoru would lay Reiko down on the bed, hike up her skirt, pull down her panties, and examine her sex organ. It was no more than one organ of the many that made up her body, but he found it inexplicably fascinating. His love for her had endowed it with inestimable value.

When he'd raise his head from between her legs he could see the almost too-bright light pouring in between the open curtains. The full rays of the sun made him feel that he was doing something terribly immoral. But this was a temptation he could not resist. He'd lower his face again, avoiding the sunlight, praying that this moment would last forever as he received her fluids with his tongue.

And now, as a result of moments like those, she had conceived his child.

Kaoru glanced at her slender waist in the photograph.

I wonder how big it is now.

He could guess: the embryo was probably about three quarters of an inch long now, looking something like a seahorse. At the moment, his affection for this new being that inherited his genes was not as strong as his affection for Reiko, who was carrying it.

But he had no more time to lounge on the rocks. All the faces passing through his mind were now urging him to hurry. Kaoru stood up and set off for the peak.

The sun was going down behind the ridge. Kaoru quickened his pace. He'd have to find a likely place to camp before it got completely dark.

He came to a flat spot surrounded on three sides by huge rocks. Looking around, he decided it wouldn't be a bad place to spend the night.

He'd been here before. As an Indian, as the man whose point of view he'd assumed via the computer in the ruins of Wayne's Rock. The tribe had passed through a place that looked exactly like this.

The Native American legend his mother had shown him had said to follow the warrior's guidance. No warrior would be appearing to him in reality, but the place to which he would have guided Kaoru had he appeared was already stored in Kaoru's memory. All he had to do was follow the strands of memory, comparing them one by one with reality, and he'd find his route.

There was no longer any doubt. The place would appear to him somewhere up ahead. Tonight, though, he must have rest. Kaoru unshouldered his pack and rested his legs.

Every step on the road thus far had further awakened Kaoru's senses. With no rhyme or reason, sensation after sensation had flooded his consciousness. He felt terror, jealousy, exultation, with no grounds for feeling them-they just came over him, stimulating his senses. He suspected that if he persisted in tracing their source back into the past, he'd eventually arrive at the moment of his own birth.

He spread his mat out on a flat rock and then curled up in his sleeping bag. It wasn't all that cold yet, but he knew that as the night wore on the temperature in the desert would plummet. In his bedroll he nibbled on some bread and sipped at some whiskey.

Suddenly he sat up and looked around. He had felt, or imagined he'd felt, something's breath on the back of his neck.

He could feel the chill of the stone through the mat and sleeping bag. The breathing was regular, rhythmic, like the working of a respirator, or the breathing of a predator eying its prey, trying to calm itself, body and spirit.

From the same direction, Kaoru could feel something gazing at him. He could plainly sense the will behind it. The gaze bored into the base of his skull, quickening his pulse.

He couldn't bear it any longer. He looked behind him. There he saw, maybe ten yards away in the shadow of a tree, a naked man on one knee training a bow and arrow on him. The man's skin was dark, so dark that he could have blended in with the night, but somehow Kaoru was able to make him out.

The man's long hair was tied back simply; he wore no feathers or other headdress. He looked to be of medium height and build, and his muscles hardly bulged, but he held the bow with the air of an expert.

Kaoru tried to move, and found that he couldn't. It was as though he was in one of those half-waking states where the mind is aware but the body is immobile. All he could do was stare at the arrow.

The man's right thumb was bent where he was pulling taut the bowstring. He was aiming at Kaoru's head. The arrowhead was of gleaming obsidian. Kaoru knew at a glance that this was no rubber toy.

The man's face was expressionless. Kaoru could detect there no hatred, but no charity either. No rapture. Only the stare of a hunter determined to faithfully perform his allotted part.

Kaoru stared dumbfounded at the slowly receding arrowhead. He felt no fear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew this was not real.

But when he could see that the energy accumulating in the bow had reached a certain peak, suddenly the image of himself transformed into a beast burst into Kaoru's head. Reflexively he tried to duck. But the arrow had already been released. Its silently revolving tip grew to dominate Kaoru's field of vision. Kaoru leaned forward, as if throwing himself at the arrow, and then consciousness receded.

He was only out for a moment. When he awoke, he just lay there for a while, staring at the trunk of a tree that towered over him. He thought he'd fallen forward, but now, somehow, he was lying on his back. He brought his hand up to his right eye, the one the arrow should have pierced. It was unharmed. He stood up and looked around for the man with the bow. Gone. He'd disappeared without a trace.

Kaoru realized he must have been hallucinating. Maybe it was because of the peculiar atmosphere of the valley, maybe a memory imprinted on his brain long ago had been resurrected. The brown-skinned man had vanished, leaving the strong sensation of death in Kaoru's mind. He felt as if he'd absorbed death directly, like some kind of radiation.