Parasite Eve (11 page)

2

    The sunlight was unmerciful.

    Sachiko Asakura shielded her
eyes with her hands and looked towards the sky. Cotton-like clouds drifted
swiftly from right to left across the blue expanse. The jet stream was swift
that day, but standing as she was far below, upon asphalt, Asakura could only
feel the intense, steady heat filling the stagnant air. Feeling the effects of
the summer weather most acutely in her black one-piece suit, she wiped off
beads of sweat from the nape of her neck with a handkerchief. She ran into the
shade, fleeing from the sunlight.

    The funeral service was just
ending. Asakura, along with other students and staff members, had come to
Toshiaki’s home , to help with the service. The undertakers and relatives had
everything under control, but she had insisted on helping out with the
reception. The coffin was to be carried out soon and she had just taken a step
outside to make sure the hearse had arrived.

    Toshiaki lived in a
government condo. The ashen walls were cracked here and there, giving them a
feeling of antiquity. Twenty four families lived in his four-story wing.
Toshiaki had shared a happy life on the third floor with his now deceased wife.
This was the first time Asakura had ever seen his place. The area had probably
been little more than a field of rice paddies once upon a time.

    Now it was host to a cluster
of homes and had the air of a declining residential district.

    The parking lot was packed
with cars, with just enough space to pass between them. Every vehicle shimmered
with distorted heat trails; grazing them carelessly would surely have burned
the skin. The narrow street in front of the complex was also subdued, as still
and silent as the woman towards whom its paved lines led all who were gathering
here today. The occasional echo of a motorbike engine from the distance was the
only sound to be heard. All of a sudden, a gloom fell upon everything. When
Asakura looked upwards, she saw that new clouds had rolled in to cover the sun.
She took one step forward, pulling away from the apartment wall. At that
precise moment, the light returned, glaring up her surroundings anew. She
squinted into the glare.

    “Finally the first floor,”
said a voice, followed by a rattling sound. When Asakura turned around, a group
of men carrying Kiyomi’s coffin were edging their way down the stairs. The
concrete steps were narrow, flaked with peeling paint, and the men were having
trouble turning the coffin on a stair landing. Toshiaki led the procession,
holding a mortuary tablet in his hands. At his side were Kiyomi’s parents, with
a photo of the deceased.

    Someone from the undertaker
wove the hearse through the crowd of parked cars and backed it up carefully to
the side of the building. The back door was opened. A few grunts later, the
coffin was loaded inside. Asakura watched silently in the background.

    Once the coffin was in place,
the mourners all gathered in a semicircle around it. Seeing that final
blessings were about to be given, Asakura hurried over to meet up with the
others, standing modestly behind them. Because of her height, she could see
Toshiaki’s face clearly in the center of the congregation.

    “I want to thank you all for
coming today...” he began in a tone that was plain, almost disturbingly so.
There was no cadence in his voice, like he was just going through the motions.
The only one unable to control her tears was Kiyomi’s mother. She was petite,
and her hair had luster. A few wrinkles were carved into her forehead and
around her mouth, but she looked surprisingly childlike; she must have been
adorable as a young girl. Kiyomi’s father, on the other hand, had the air of a
distinguished man in the prime of his life. He listened patiently to Toshiaki’s
words with eyes and head cast downward. But his shoulders sometimes trembled,
betraying the sadness he was unable to contain. Toshiaki’s flat voice, only the
more unfitting in contrast, gave off the unreality of a shimmer at the bottom
of a cascade of sunlight.

    Toshiaki’s look during this
entire ordeal kept nagging at Asakura. The darkly clad man who sat near the
altar during the ceremony was not the man she knew as mentor and role model.
His features used to be gentle, taking on a penetrating look whenever it came
to research. This was not the Toshiaki she saw every day in the lab. His face
was pale, offset by dark patches under his eyes. Sometimes his back teeth
chattered like he was having chills, and his fingers twitched slightly. She’d
seen him like this for the first time the night before, when she and her
classmates had come to see how he was holding up. He’d changed so much that for
a moment she couldn’t speak.

    A large black-and-white
photograph of Kiyomi adorned the altar, and the picture showed the smiling face
of a woman who still possesed a child’s innocence. Asakura had met her only
once; Toshiaki had brought along his wife for last month’s open session of the
School of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Asakura recalled her charming smile and how,
though Kiyomi had to be a few years older than her, she’d actually looked
younger, thanks probably to her features. Asakura had felt flustered; even the
woman’s name, Kiyomi, was pretty.

    She’d stolen glances at
Kiyomi’s face from a distance as the beauty lay in her coffin. Apparently
Kiyomi had hit her head in a car accident, hence the white cloth covering her
skull. This gave her a slightly different impression but did little to taint
her attractiveness. Her face was made up and her lips were frozen in a faint
smile. Her white cheeks, so pale they appeared translucent, were of fine
complexion, and at one point Asakura could barely suppress a sudden strange urge
to touch them.

    Throughout the entire
ceremony, Toshiaki kept looking at her photo, only half-listening to
condolences. For the most part, he looked vacant, but sometimes cast the photo
a smile like he’d just remembered to. Asakura had noticed a similar expression
on him the night before. It was so tranquil that it terrified her. She’d had to
look away, like she’d unwittingly taken a peek at some secret between the man
and the deceased.

    Toshiaki resumed his speech,
during which Kiyomi’s name was intoned innumerable times. The sunlight beat
down harshly and everyone was getting tired. Some continuously wiped their
foreheads with handkerchiefs, but most just stood in place, waiting patiently
for him to finish.

    Toshiaki had changed
completely. After Kiyomi’s death, his soul seemed to be in turmoil. Helping out
with the funeral, Asakura felt that this was a man she didn’t know and was
unable to say a word to him. She was only feeling more perplexed. It was like
that when he made his sudden appearance at the lab a few nights before. He just
shouted at her when she was trying to express her worries, then set himself to
work at the clean bench, clearly possessed. Afterwards, he went back to the
hospital without a word. As he left, his countenance was one of dreamy
intoxication. While he was gone, Asakura secretly peered into the incubator to
see what he had been doing. A new culture flask and a six-well plate
[22]
were left inside. On the lid, the
word “Eve” was scribbled in Toshiaki’s handwriting. She didn’t know anyone by
that name. Gently removing the flask, she observed it under the microscope and
saw the shapes of healthy cells but could not identify them. She did not
understand why Toshiaki had yelled at her just to perform a routine cellular
procedure. Feeling very uncomfortable about it all, she’d hastily returned the
flask to the incubator, placing it as close to its original position as
possible, a little scared she’d be found out.

    Toshiaki’s tone changed
subtly as he came to his closing statements.

    “Kiyomi will now be carried
out of our lives...but this does not mean she is dead. Kiyomi’s kidneys have
been transplanted into two patients. Let us never forget that she thrives
within them.”

    Under his plain delivery,
Toshiaki appeared to be hiding a faint excitement. There was a certain force in
his words that one didn’t associate with eulogies, and Asakura didn’t miss the
grin that crossed his features. Toshiaki thirstily licked his lips in between
words. As she watched this, Asakura’s mouth went dry, too. The scattering
sunlight covered everything in a bleary whiteness, and the mourners were
sweating like dogs by now, but they all remained quiet, eyes cast downward to
the asphalt. Only Toshiaki’s face was raised. Asakura, who was getting really
nervous, couldn’t tear her gaze away from it until he closed his salutation:

    “Kiyomi will live on.”

    When she came to her senses,
people were already making to leave. Toshiaki and several relatives separated
into two cars and pulled out onto the street. The others gathered in the shade
of the entrance to bid them farewell from there.

    The hearse left, followed by
the black sedan that Toshiaki had climbed into. Emitting low engine rumbles,
the vehicles turned at the intersection. A cool glint flashed off the black
body of the hearse just before it disappeared from view.

    Everyone stood there for some
time.

    “We will now prepare to
receive the ashes,” said a man, who appeared to be a relative, provoking sounds
of relief from the small Crowd. The man returned to the apartment steps and the
rest followed suit. Asakura trailed behind.

    “The husband was a bit
strange, don’t you think?”

    When Asakura heard this, she
looked up, startled at such a ¡direct comment. Two middle-aged women were
talking in front of her. They appeared to be relatives or close acquaintances,
but their indifferent gossip indicated otherwise.

    “‘Kiyomi will live on.’ Gives
you the creeps, doesn’t it?”

    They probably thought they
were taking care not to be overheard, but their high-pitched half-whispers were
all too audible to Asakura. She felt uncomfortable and wanted to get away, but
the pair’s conversation crept into her ears as if she were their designated
audience.

    “He was pretty weird during
the wake, too. I guess he was just devastated by the suddenness of it all. Must
be having a hard time accepting it.”

    “Well, apparently he’s been
acting like this for a while. I heard that for a while there, Kiyomi was, you
know, brain-dead.”

    “I had no idea... Ugh, I hope
I never end up that way.”

    “Me neither. You know, he
allowed kidney transplants... They say he’s been acting odd ever since.”

    “How could he let them do
that? I mean, he let them take out his wife’s kidneys? Didn’t he feel bad?”

    “Exactly. Why mangle her body
like that? I bet he thought letting them go ahead made him look good.”

    Asakura could not endure this
any longer. She felt sick in her stomach and clambered up the stairs to get
away from them. Pushing aside the two, who kept rattling on, she raced up with
a sort of desperation.

3

    Mariko was bedridden after
the operation, only faintly conscious and still under the watchful eyes of the
staff. In her daze, she couldn’t even make out how she lay. It felt a lot like
putting on glasses when you didn’t need them.

    Waking up from anesthesia the
day before, Mariko had found herself in a sickroom with fluorescent lighting in
the ashen ceiling. She realized she was no longer in the OR, which gave her
some relief. A masked nurse came over to her, peered into her face, and called
for the doctor.

    The nurse’s voice resounded
in Mariko’s ears, making her wince. Forehead throbbed, vision quickly melted.
The ceiling faded out of focus, then vanished from sight.

    “You can relax, okay? The
operation is over,” said a man’s voice from somewhere, but it only became part
of the growing pain in her skull.

    She dropped off to sleep for
a few hours afterwards. When she opened her eyes again, two nurses were on
either side of her. One of them noticed Mariko trying to lift her head.

    “Easy does it. You’re still
recovering, dear. Sleep some more,” she said. Surely enough, when Mariko tried
moving her head, it ached intensely. She laid her head back on the pillow in
defeat. She felt hot and dizzy like she had a terrible cold.

    Something was sticking into
her groin. When she opened her eyes, she saw a nurse fiddling with a tube.
Mariko moved her waist a little and felt that the tube led into her body. Somewhat
embarrassed by this realization, she turned her face aside. She then became
aware of another one in the left side of her chest. She knew all about these
tubes, as they had been used to remove bodily fluids after her previous
transplant. The other nurse took her arm and put something black around it.
Mariko’s arm began to throb with a strong pulse.

    “I’m just taking your blood
pressure, okay?” said a tiny voice.

    The two nurses continued
their examination. Mariko closed her eyes and let them do their work. She felt
something strange below her navel on the left side, and thought she might try
to touch it, but could not since the nurse was still taking her pulse. She
wondered if it was her newly acquired kidney.