Loop (18 page)

"Three months?!" She gave a feeble scream. "I can't. Something's going to happen to my body, I know it."

"Two months, then."

She stared at him resentfully.

"I can't promise anything," she said at last.

"You
have
to promise me. For the next two months you can't kill yourself, no matter what happens."

Kaoru placed both hands on the table and leaned toward her. Overwhelmed by his sudden intensity, she recoiled at first, but then a look of relief, of eerie lucidity, came over her. Her indecision seemed about to give way, in one direction or the other. If she could just settle on a direction for now, her suffering would be lessened, at least a bit.

He felt it best to distance himself from her for now, if only to redeem himself from the dishonour of being physically denied. Two months would be about right.

"Two months," she murmured.

"That's right. Let's meet again two months from now. Until then, you have to keep living, no matter what."

"Just stay alive?"

"As long as your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep breathing, and you think of me once in a while, that's enough for me."

She showed him a faint smile.

"I don't know about that last part."

It was the first flash of brightness she'd shown that day. It reassured him.

He needed her to trust him unquestioningly. If she started to inquire-if she asked him, for example, whether or not he was confident in what he was about to do, he wouldn't have satisfactory answers to give her. He felt he had several clues in hand. The unexplained fact that the number of bases in each gene of the virus came out to equal 2" x 3. The fact-only a hunch, actually-that the virus had emerged someplace in the vicinity of Kaoru himself. If he could discover the secrets of its creation, maybe that would lead him to the means of its destruction. He had two months. He'd have to face this situation burdened with the knowledge that Reiko's fate, and his, depended on it.

In the elevator, on the way up to the twenty-ninth floor, Kaoru's ears began to ring. The elevator was designed to be unaffected by the change in air pressure, but today he felt a pressure on his inner ear that he'd never felt before. Simultaneously, an afterimage flickered before him.

The sound of Ryoji's bones cracking as his body hit the concrete still lingered in Kaoru's ears. He hadn't actually seen the boy falling; his impression was that he'd heard the body's impact as he himself was running to the window. It was nothing more than that, just an impression, but still the memory of the sound refused to fade away. Now, as the elevator climbed, something had triggered that memory, reviving images Kaoru had never actually seen.

In a somewhat depressed mood, Kaoru opened the door to the apartment and called out, "I'm home."

No reply. Thinking nothing of it, he took off his shoes and placed them in the cabinet by the door. When he looked up again, his mother Machiko had appeared as though out of nowhere.

"Would you come here a minute?"

She grabbed his arm and dragged him to her room before he could respond. Her eyes flashed with the excitement of discovery.

"What is it, Mom?"

Flustered, he offered no resistance, but let himself be dragged along by her intensity.

It had been some time since he'd set foot in his mother's room. Once the room was neat, but now it was piled high with disorderly stacks of books and magazines and photocopies. His mother's expression had changed, too. In fact, she looked like a changed person. Although they lived together, Kaoru felt it had been a long time since he'd really looked at her face.

"Would you tell me what's going on?" Kaoru's nerves were frayed, it being so soon after Ryoji's suicide. He worried about his mother's psychological state.

She seemed blissfully unaware of Kaoru's concern.

"I want you to take a look at this."

She handed him a magazine.
The Fantastic World,
the title read in English.

"What about it?" he asked in disgust. The title told him all he needed to know about it.

Machiko grabbed the magazine from his hands and flipped through it. Opening it to page forty-seven, she handed it back to him with uncharacteristic roughness.

"Read this article."

Kaoru did as he was told. The article was titled "Back from the Brink: A Full Recovery from Final Stage Cancer".

Another one of these.
He understood now. Lately his mother had been pouring all her energy and devotion into looking for a revolutionary way to treat cancer. But she was looking for it outside the bounds of modern medicine, in the "fantastic world" of myths and folk-tales. It was easy enough for him to dismiss it all as just so much alchemical nonsense. But she was his mother, and he had to humour her even if it was uncomfortable. He started reading the article.

Franz Boer, a retired surveyor living in Portland, Oregon, had been infected with the MHC virus several years ago. The cancer had spread throughout his body, and doctors had given him three months to live.

But he'd rejected the doctors' recommended course of treatment, instead embarking on a journey. As part of his trip he spent two weeks in a certain unnamed place. When he finally returned to Portland after a month, the doctor who examined him shook his head in disbelief. His inoperable cancer had completely disappeared.

Cells were collected from the 57-year-old man and tested to see how many times they had undergone cellular division. The result was a far greater number of times than was normal for a man his age.

In other words, Franz Boer had gained two things in that unidentified place: a reprieve from his sentence of death, and, not the same thing, longevity. But Boer, who lived alone, died in an accident before he could tell anybody where he'd obtained his miracle. Now everybody was frantically trying to figure out where he'd gone and what he'd done.

There was little to go on. One persistent reporter had learned that, soon after he'd been told he was dying, Boer had rented a car in Los Angeles. But there was nothing to indicate where he'd be going.

That was the gist of the article.

Machiko watched eagerly for Kaoru's reaction. Stories of miracle recoveries were everywhere these days. But he knew she was expecting something from him. He raised his head slowly with a quizzical expression.

"What do you think?" she asked.

Boer had probably taken a plane from Portland to L.A. Renting a car there, it was possible he'd been heading for the Arizona-New Mexico desert. It fit.

"I know what you're trying to say: Franz Boer was making for the longevity zone I've been talking about for so long."

His mother didn't bother to nod. She just leaned closer with her burning gaze. That gaze told him that she was sure of it.

"There's one more piece of evidence."

"And what would that be?"

"Look at this."

She brought out from behind her back a foreign book and handed it to Kaoru.

The title read
North American Indian Folklore.
Beneath the title was an illustration of the sun with a man standing beneath it on a hilltop catching the sun's rays full in the face. The man wore a feathered headdress, and his figure was blackened, silhouetted by the sun, as he stood in an attitude of prayer. The book looked to be old: its cover was faded and the edges of its pages dirty from handling.

As soon as Machiko handed him the book, Kaoru turned to the table of contents. It ran to three pages, seventy-four items. Each heading contained at least one word he was unfamiliar with.
Hiaqua,
for example-he'd never seen that word before, but he could tell at a glance it wasn't to be found in an English dictionary. He flipped through a few more pages, until he came to a series of photographs. One showed an Indian on one knee with bow and arrow.

Kaoru looked from the book to his mother's face, seeking an explanation.

"It's a book of North American Indian folktales."

"I can see that. What I want to know is, what does it have to do with that article you just had me read?"

Machiko shifted her weight. Her glee at being able to teach her son something came out in her body language.

"The Native Americans had all sorts of myths and traditions, but they had no written language, so most of them come down to us through generations of oral transmission."

She took the book back and paged through it.

"That means that most of these seventy-four tales were gathered and recorded by non-Indians. Look." She pointed to a page. "See? At the beginning of each story there's a notation by the title saying who collected it, when, and where. It also says what tribe the story was handed down in."

Kaoru looked at the title of the story Machiko was pointing to.

"How the Mountaintops Reached the Sun "
-
the Shopanka tribe

Next there was an entry telling how a white man had come in contact with the Shopanka tribe, heard the story, and written it down. Only then, at last, did the book go on to say how the mountaintops in fact reached the sun.

All seventy-four stories were short, mostly a page or two, and had similar titles-lengthy phrases, not single words.

"Kaoru, I'd like you to read this story."

She had the book open to what seemed to be the thirty-fourth story: at least, it had the number 34 written above the title.

The title turned a light on in his brain.

Another coincidence?

The title was:
"Watched by a Multitude of Eyes."

The title was in the passive voice. There was no indication of who was being watched by what.

Kaoru stepped back, groped behind him for a chair, and sat down. He started reading. Without realizing it, he'd slipped into Machiko's world.

Watched by a Multitude of Eyes -the Talikeet tribe

[In 1862, at the height of the Civil War, a covered wagon train was crossing the Southwestern desert on its way west. A white minister, Benjamin Wycliffe, got separated from the wagons and was rescued by the Talikeet. He lived with them for several days.

One calm evening, the Indians gathered around the campfire to hear one of their elders speak. The Reverend Wycliffe happened to be nearby, and he
heard the tale. The flames reaching up into the night sky combined with the elder's singsong voice to make a powerful impression on Wycliffe 's mind. He recorded this story that very evening.]

All living things were born from the same source, long long ago. The sea and the rivers and the land, the sun and the moon and the stars, are birth-parents to people and animals, and love them mercifully, but they themselves are contained within the womb of a being larger than themselves. Man feels the land to be filled with spirits because his heart is connected to the heart of this being. When man does something bad, this great being is pained in his heart, and this causes disaster to fall upon man.

Once when the stars were flowing across the sky on the stream of the being's blood, one of the stars came down to earth as a man called Talikeet. He married a lake named Rainier, and they had two sons. They lived together with their children happily on the land in the womb of the great being, never disobeying the will of the spirits.

The brothers grew up strong and were able to help their father and mother. They were skilled and courageous hunters, always bringing home game for their parents.

Then one day, Talikeet's leg began to hurt, and he told this to his wife and children.

They worried about him, but only Talikeet himself knew the reason why his body hurt.

Before he had drifted down to this land, he had been aware of being watched by a multitude of eyes. Men were permitted to hunt animals and eat them. Bigger animals were permitted to catch smaller animals and eat them. But they must not eat too much. And they must not store up too many animals they had killed. They must respect and honour the animals they hunted. To see that this was done, the great being who was also the father of all nature set a huge eye on a mountaintop. The eye which was set on top of the mountain was very large, but it was the only one, so it could not watch all men in all directions at all times. Eventually men began to hide from the eye and do things that went against the will of the great being.

Then the great being placed eyes within men's bodies so that they could not escape his sight.

"It is that eye which is causing me pain now," Talikeet explained to his wife and children.

"But, Father, I do not think you have disobeyed the will of the great being."

"I'm sure I did without realizing it," said Talikeet.

Then he died.

The brothers and their mother were very sad, and they resented the actions of the great being.

Time passed, and then the older brother's waist began to pain him. Then the younger brother's back began to hurt. When they showed each other their bodies, they found fist-sized "eyes", one on the older brother's waist and one on the younger brother's back. They were surprised and asked their mother Rainier for help.

Rainier went down the river and visited the forest spirit. There she learned how to help her sons.

This was the forest spirit's answer. "Go due west and wait for a warrior to appear. Once you are sure of his true intentions, then follow his guidance." So she took her sons and journeyed due west, waiting for a warrior to appear. The "eye" on the older brother's waist grew larger, while the "eye" on the younger brother's back even wept great tears.

Finally a powerful man appeared astride a beast and guided the brothers to a pass in the mountains.

They crossed many rivers. The prairies turned to deserts, and the mountains stretching down from the north broke off. Going around them to the south, they reached a high hill. Standing on the hilltop looking west, they saw water flowing from a mountaintop through a valley until it became a river which flowed into the great sea to the west. Looking east, they saw a like river flowing into the great sea to the east. They were on a bow-shaped ridge connecting valleys on either side of the mountains, at the source of two rivers flowing into the two seas.