Nan-Core (12 page)

“Because I said I couldn’t when I first met you.”

“I’d try regardless, if I wanted to.”

“Then it’s because I’m a dirty whore.”

“No! It’s nothing like that. Could I … Could I tell you about the
sin I committed? I haven’t ever told anyone about it.”

“Please. Tell me whatever you want.”

“I killed someone. A child.”

“I’ve killed as well. Four, maybe five people.”

“Ha ha. Are you just trying to make me feel better by saying that?”

“No. It’s the truth.”

You ignored me and furrowed your eyebrows tight, trying to work up the strength to say what you needed to.

“I’m … impotent,” you spat, then clamped your lips shut again. Then you continued, the words rushing out. “I can’t sleep and I can’t have sex, all because of what I did.”

I couldn’t tell if you were suffering because of the impotence or because of the sin thing in your past, but I realized that I was impotent in some way as well and decided that was why it felt like we were on the same wavelength.

But what you said next caught me completely off guard. The kid you’d killed had been a small boy of eleven years. You told me how, years ago, you’d tried to help a boy who had been trying to recover a hat that had fallen into a roadside gutter; how you’d lifted up the heavy iron grate but after a while couldn’t handle the weight any longer; and how you dropped it on the kid whose head was still inside the mouth of the gutter.

Could such a thing even be possible?

“Where did this happen?”

I already knew your answer before you told me. I was covered in a sheen of sweat, making my skin feel slimy and frog-like. All my emotions back then had been intensely drawn towards the boy on the brink of death. For the man holding up the grate, instead of his face I mostly remembered his trembling and bunched-up muscles
along his neck and arms. I recalled that he’d had long, wavy hair that fell to his shoulders.

“What happened afterwards?”

“They ruled it involuntary manslaughter, and I was given a suspended sentence. I managed to pay the settlement by selling the property my parents left me. I was left without a yen to my name but was allowed to live freely, as you see me now.”

Was there a connection between that incident and the fact that you had become you? It was surely your guilty conscience that had caused you to give five thousand yen to me, a mere passerby, that first night. So does that mean we would never have known each other if you hadn’t committed that sin?

“When I close my eyes to try and sleep I see his thin legs on the backs of my eyelids. I see those legs when I’m on top of a woman, no matter how hard I try to lose myself in the act. I can see his blue sneakers as his legs spasm, kicking one last time into the ground.”

I knew what guilt was in theory, but I’d never witnessed firsthand anyone suffering from it.

“The kid’s little sister saw it all. I was told she started to have bad panic attacks after that. It wasn’t just her. Their mother and father, too … The wounds I gave them won’t heal for the rest of their lives. There was another girl there, too. Probably middle-school age, although I was too caught up to properly see her face. She was passing by and tried to lend a hand, holding up the grate. Even then I couldn’t …”

“What happened to her?”

“She was gone by the time I thought to look. She must have been terrified. She was just a passerby, yet I did something regrettable to her. She, too, was probably so damaged she never recovered.”

There was an odd feeling of something itchy and unpleasantly
warm spreading in my lungs, making me feel like I couldn’t breathe properly. When I sucked in some air as deeply as I could my throat trembled like I was panting. By the way you looked I realized that guilt, the sense of having done something wrong, could be so intense as to tear a person to shreds.

“The other girl is fine.”

“How could you know that?”

“Well, what I mean is, if she was someone weak-willed, she wouldn’t have tried to help with something so dangerous. So I’d say she’s pretty strong.”

You stared at me for a while, looking mystified. Then you unfolded your arms and reached out, gently placing a palm on my cheek.

“Thanks. You really are very sweet.”

It was around then that I started to feel ill. Nothing I did seemed to help. I became completely hypersensitive and didn’t want to do anything. It was like being constantly motion sick.

I couldn’t eat anything at our usual place—just the smell of food I caught from ducking under the entryway curtain was enough to make me retch.

You were the one to suggest that I might be pregnant. It wasn’t unusual for me to miss periods so I hadn’t given it much thought. Besides, I always used contraceptives at work. That was only because my clients were scared of catching something. The idea of getting pregnant had always seemed completely irrelevant to me, whether I used a condom or not. I was a vessel, but I was already full—with Mitsuko and Michiru, with the boy you thought you’d killed, with Ramen and the others.

Yet it happened anyway. I was pregnant despite not knowing
who the father was or how I’d slipped up. How disappointingly easy it is to get pregnant.

I refrained from seeing a doctor even after I was sure of my condition. I figured that any seed that had taken root in my worn-out body would get flushed away soon enough. More importantly, I didn’t have the money for an abortion.

I was amazed to find out that you were considering something completely different.

“Let’s marry. We can get married and raise the kid together,” you said.

We were in your room one night and we were sitting opposite each other, drinking milk before you went to bed. I felt my throat clench painfully.

“I can’t. I can’t have a child.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t be someone’s mother. That’s too strange. I’m afraid bad stuff might happen later on if I act weird.”

“Weird or no, you’ll still be a mother when the baby’s born.”

“It won’t be born. I’m sure I’ll miscarry.”

“No, don’t say that. We’ve been gifted with this baby. It’s fate, it has to be. Let’s raise it together.”

You said “fate” with a kind of solemnity, like the word itself was special. You’d decided it was providence: You had taken the life of one child, so you would raise another whose paternity was unknown. Does fate amount to forgiveness of one’s sins? Is fate the same as my Nan-Core? But does something like destiny really exist? Were you my destiny? I was seized by a type of chaos I’d never experienced before you entered my life.

Little by little, my stomach swelled. I was no longer able to keep working. On the day we officially registered our marriage, you gave
me a ring with a little blue stone. A keepsake from your mother, you said. By then we were already living together, sharing a small three-room apartment, and you had managed to leverage your qualifications to land a job with a proper company. Just like that, you put an end to your life of dropping in and out of part-time work.

The baby was born on a rainy morning.

My phone rang. The display said it was a payphone but I knew it was Yohei.

“What is it, where are you calling from?” Jolted by the sudden return to reality, my tone came out sharp and demanding.

“The hell is your problem, man. You sound like you’re being strangled.”

“Why are you calling me from a payphone?”

“Because I’m still at Gran’s. They don’t allow mobiles here. Lots of people with pacemakers and things.”

“And Dad?”

“He said he wasn’t feeling too good so he just left. He said there’d be taxis out front so he’d catch one of those and go home. I hope he’s all right. He was kind of pale, I think he was feeling sick.”

I remembered how ill he’d looked just a few hours earlier when I’d seen him from the window of the coffee shop, but I didn’t have time to start worrying about that. “Exactly how long ago did he leave?” I asked, shaking the notebook impatiently.

“About ten minutes?”

“You … Why didn’t you call me right away?”

“I couldn’t help it. Dad passed the baton to me so I had to look after Gran. I couldn’t leave her alone and make a call in the middle of dinner, could I? It’s hard enough to make her eat as it is.”

“Fine. I’m hanging up now.”

“So, think you’ll get through the notebooks? It already sounds like you’ve found some more crazy bullshit,” he snickered. “Anyways, you can flip out all you like, just don’t forget your promise. Eight o’clock, same steakhouse as last time.”

It was already a little after six. Dad was coming from the nursing home, and assuming he had gotten into a cab ten minutes ago it would be another twenty or so before he was back. I decided to play it safe and leave in ten. I resolved to read until time was up and let my eyes trace over the characters on the page, but I was nervous and jumpy and couldn’t absorb their meaning.

It felt like I’d been forced into a dead end. If I wanted to keep reading, was there nothing to do but repeat this process the next Sunday? I knew I couldn’t wait that long. I was on the third notebook, almost at the end. After a moment’s hesitation I decided to take just the third one with me.

I couldn’t know if Dad was planning to check on the notebooks during the coming week, but even if he was, I had a hunch he wouldn’t actually bother taking them out of the manila envelope. At least, I prayed that he wouldn’t.

Before sliding the other notebooks into the envelope I picked up the notebook marked four and flipped through the pages. The first third had writing, but the rest were blank. Temptation got the better of me and I scanned the last few lines. The writing was chaotic and each sentence was
followed by a large gap.

You won’t let me live.

You killing me is my only salvation.

Because you are my you—

Please, don’t ever forget that.

But if some enchantment, like that which I felt when you spoke of fate, were to bring me back and you were to take me in your arms again, I would like to have another child. It would be your true child, one that will take the place of this child that I am going to kill.

That is my wish.

The writing ended there. I didn’t have time to dwell on it so I gathered three of the notebooks and slipped them into the envelope before putting it back in the box, then closed the closet door. After checking I hadn’t left anything that would give my presence away I left the study. I made a beeline for the front door, as single-minded as I had been on the way in, and got into my shoes.

I took the long route through side streets on my way back to the station, not wanting to bump into Dad’s taxi. I went into the coffee shop I’d used to watch out for Dad earlier, and just as I leaned into one of the chairs, some thread of tension within me finally snapped, causing my mind to momentarily go blank.

I asked for coffee when a girl came to take my order and remembered—feeling oddly as though it was someone else’s business—that it was time for Shaggy Head to start closing down for the day. I knew I should call in, but it felt like too much of a hassle, so I ended up just gazing aimlessly around the shop’s busy interior.

In my mind, I retraced the final lines I’d skimmed over in the study.

You killing me … This child that I am going to kill
.

The phrasing seemed simple, but somehow too vague. It wasn’t clear what sequence of events had led the author to believe she was going to be killed, nor whether the child she was going to kill was the baby she had given birth to on the rainy morning. I was almost finished with the third notebook, but I still couldn’t make out the overall picture. There was only one thing I thought I knew for sure: that the man the narrator
called “you” was my Dad.

As evidence, there was the account of the man losing his parents in an accident while still in elementary school. That was a perfect fit for Dad. He had been in second grade when he lost his parents in a major plane crash, and after that he was raised by a spinster aunt on his mother’s side. Also, the fact that the man had used his “qualifications” to find work was another match. Dad held a number of certificates in bookkeeping.

I think I would have still realized the man was Dad even without such details to help put things together. It was completely natural for the two men to overlap and become one: this man who had raised a kid as his own without knowing who the father was, and my father, who stared with dark eyes at photographs of abused children as though he was the one responsible for their suffering.

The problem was the author. It was either Mom or my real mother. I couldn’t tell which, but I was certain it was one or the other. There was definitely a part where the narrator was said to be five years younger than the man. I knew for a fact that Mom was five years younger than Dad. But it wasn’t proof if the two women—Mom, and my real mother—happened to be the same age. Had the narrator really died, as intimated in the closing section? Or had she continued to live, later to give birth to “your” (Dad’s) child?

Thinking about it was only wasting time.

I was about to open the notebook when I saw that the coffee I’d ordered was sitting near the edge of the table. It was already getting cold. I took a sip and began to read the remainder of the text.

The baby was born on a rainy morning.

Born at last to an impotent father and a prostitute mother. It was a boy, and I’m sure that only served to strengthen your belief in fate. I was still in a daze, overwhelmed by the abnormality of what had happened to my body, and looked on as you gingerly took the baby into your arms.

The birthing process had been a disassembly that justified the term far more than any of the other experiences I’d had in the past. I thought my body had split in half to let the baby out. It was over, though, and I had somehow returned to my usual shape.

“He’s so small,” you said then fell quiet, never taking your eyes off the baby. There was a smile playing at the corners of your mouth.

Through the window I could see it was raining hard, but I couldn’t hear anything. As I started to fall asleep I felt strangely comforted, feeling like your smile was actually for me and not the baby.