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  Of course, a heart warming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they'd run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.

  "Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that- being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there's somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo's nosy friends."

  "I think I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?"

  Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn't yet figured out.

  Suddenly he got chills. He shivered. He looked at the sliding-glass door and found that it was open a crack. Still seated on the sofa, he twisted his body until he could close the door.

  2

  Kaoru just couldn't get to sleep. It was already thirty minutes since he'd crawled into his futon after having given up on waiting for his father to get home.

  It was customary in the Futami household for both parents and their son to sleep in the same Japanese-style room. With its three Western-style rooms, one Japanese-style room, and good-sized living room, plus dining room and kitchen, their apartment was more than large enough for the three of them. They each had their own room. But for some reason, when it came time to sleep, they'd all gather in the Japanese-style room and lie down together. They'd spread out their futons with Machiko in the middle, flanked by Hideyuki and Kaoru. It had been like that ever since Kaoru was born.

  Staring at the ceiling, Kaoru spoke softly to his mother, lying next to him.

  "Mom?"

  No reply. Machiko tended to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  Kaoru wasn't what you'd exactly call agitated, but there was a faint pounding of excitement in his chest. He was sure he'd discovered something in the relative positions of gravitational anomalies and longevity zones. It couldn't be just a coincidence. The simple interpretation was that gravity was somehow related to human longevity- perhaps even to the secret of life itself.

  He'd discovered the correlation purely by chance. There'd been a documentary on TV about villages where people lived to extraordinary ages, and it just so happened that at that moment his computer screen had been displaying a map of world gravitational anomalies. Lately he'd come across a lot of information about gravitational anomalies while fooling around on the computer; he'd gotten interested in gravity. Between the TV screen and the computer screen, something triggered his sixth sense, and he'd overlaid the two maps. It was the kind of inspiration only given to humankind.

  No matter how prodigious its ability to process information, no matter how fast its calculation speed, a computer has no "inspiration" function, reflected Kaoru. It was impossible for a machine to bring together two utterly disparate phenomena and consider them as one. Were such an ability to arise, it would be because human brain cells had somehow been incorporated into the hardware. Human-computer intercourse.

  Which actually sounded pretty intriguing to Kaoru. There was no telling what sort of sentient life form that would bring into the world. Endlessly fascinating.

  Kaoru's desire to understand the workings of the world manifested itself in a lot of different questions, but at the root of all of them was one basic unknown: the source of life.

  How did life begin? Or, alternatively: Why am I here?

  Evolutionary theory and genetics both piqued his curiosity, but his biological inquiries always centred on that one point.

  He wasn't a single-minded believer in the variation on the co-acervate theory which held that an inorganic world developed gradually until RNA and DNA appeared. He understood that the more one inquired into life the more the idea of self-replication became a big factor. It was DNA that governed self-replication; under the direction of the genetic information it carried came the formation of proteins, the stuff of life. Proteins were made of alignments of hundreds of amino acids, in twenty varieties. The code locked away within DNA was in fact the language that defined the way those acids aligned.

  Until those amino acids lined up in a certain predetermined way, they wouldn't form a protein meaningful to life. The primordial sea was often likened to a soup thick with the prerequisites for life. Then some power stirred that thick soup up, until it so happened that things lined up in a meaningful way. But what were the odds of that?

  To make it easier to comprehend, Kaoru decided to think in terms of a much smaller, neater number. Take a line of a hundred amino acids in twenty varieties, with one of them turning into a protein, the stuff of life. The probability then would be twenty to the hundredth power. Twenty to the hundredth power was a number far greater than all the hydrogen atoms in the universe. In terms of odds, it was like playing several times in a row a lottery in which the winning ticket was one particular hydrogen atom out of a whole universe full of them, and winning every time.

  In short, the probability was infinitesimal. Essentially impossible. In spite of which, life had arisen. Therefore, the game had to have been rigged. Kaoru wanted to know just how the wall of improbability had been surmounted. His uttermost desire was to understand the nature of that dice-loading- without resorting to the concept of God.

  On the other hand, sometimes there arose the suspicion that maybe everything was an illusion. There was no way to actually confirm that his body existed as a body. His cognitive abilities may have convinced him that it did, but there was always the possibility that reality was empty.

  As he lay there in the dim room, illuminated by only a night light, the stillness was such that he could hear his heart beat. So it would seem that right now, at this very moment, it was no mistake to think that he was alive. He wanted to believe in the sound of his heart.

  The roar of a motorcycle sounded in Kaoru's inner ear. A sound he shouldn't have been able to hear. A sound that shouldn't in reality have been able to reach his ears.

  "Dad's home."

  In his mind's eye Kaoru could see his father on his off-road bike skidding into the underground parking area a hundred yards below. He'd bought that bike new less than two months ago. Now his father got off the bike and looked at it with satisfaction. He used it to commute to work, probably because otherwise he'd have no time to ride it. And now he was home. The signs of it communicated themselves to Kaoru intensely. There was no mistaking them. Separated though they were, Kaoru's sixth sense enabled him to follow his father's movements tonight.

  Kaoru imagined his father's every little movement, tracing each one in his mind. Now he was turning off the ignition, now he was standing in the hall in front of the elevator with his helmet tucked under his arm, now he was looking up at the floor indicator lights.

  Kaoru counted to see how long it took him to get to the twenty-ninth floor. The elevator door opened and his father strode quickly down the carpeted corridor. He stood in front of the door to apartment 2916. He fished his card-key from his pocket and inserted it…

  Imagined motions and sounds were replaced by real ones starting with the click of the front door opening. He felt a palpable moment of precariousness, caught between imagination and reality, and a cry rose within his breast.

  It was Dad after all!

  Kaoru wanted to jump up and go to greet his father, but he forced himself to hold back. He wanted to try and forec
ast what his father would do now.

  Hideyuki seemed to be walking down the hall in the apartment with no care for who might be trying to sleep. The helmet under his arm banged loudly against the wall. His humming was nothing short of its normal volume. At the best of times, Hideyuki seemed to make more than the usual amount of noise when he moved. Maybe it was because he radiated so much energy.

  Suddenly Kaoru found himself unable to read what his father would do next. All sound stopped, and he had no idea where his father was. His mind was a blank, but then the sliding door to the room where he slept was flung roughly open. Without warning, light from the hall flooded the room. Not that it was that bright, but still Kaoru had to narrow his eyes against it. He hadn't foreseen this. Hideyuki walked onto the tatami mats until he was right next to Kaoru's futon. Then he knelt and brought his mouth close to his son's ear.

  "Hey, kiddo, wake up."

  Kaoru pretended he'd just this minute woken up, saying, "Oh, Dad. What time is it?"

  "One in the morning."

  "Huh."

  "C'mon, wake up."

  This happened a lot to Kaoru-getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night so he could keep his dad company over beer, conversing till dawn. Kaoru would always end up missing school the next day, sleeping the whole morning away.

  Last week he'd been late for school twice on account of his father. Hideyuki evidently didn't think much of what his son was studying in elementary school. Kaoru often found himself exasperated at his father's lack of common sense: to a kid, school wasn't just a place to study, it was also a place to play. His dad didn't seem to get that.

  "I want to go to school tomorrow."

  Kaoru whispered so as not to wake his mother, sleeping next to him. He didn't mind getting up to talk-in fact, he'd like nothing better-but he wanted to make it plain that it shouldn't go too late.

  "Pretty responsible for a kid. Who do you take after, anyway?" With a devil-may-care tone in his voice, he ignored Kaoru's efforts to keep the noise down. Frustrated, Kaoru leapt out of his futon. If he didn't get Dad out of the room now, he'd wake Mom up.

  Yeah, who did he take after? In terms of facial features, Kaoru and his father sure didn't have much in common. In terms of personality, too, Kaoru was a lot more sensitive-high-strung, even-than his rough-and-tumble father. Of course, he was still a child, but still, Kaoru was sometimes puzzled by how little he and his father resembled each other, outwardly or inwardly.

  Kaoru put his hands on his father's back and pushed him across the room into the hall. Then he kept pushing him until they'd made it to the living room, at which point he sighed and said, "Boy, you're heavy," and stopped.

  If his son was going to push, Hideyuki was going to lean back, which he did, putting up a playful resistance which he supplemented with a forceful fart and a vulgar laugh. Then he noticed that where Kaoru had shoved him to was right next to the kitchen counter: as if he'd just remembered something, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it.

  He took out a beer, poured some in a glass, and held it out to the still-panting Kaoru.

  "You want some too?"

  Hideyuki hadn't stopped for a drink on the way home. He was stone-cold sober. This was the first alcohol he'd seen today.

  "No thanks. Mom'll get mad at you again."

  "Stop being so responsible."

  Hideyuki took a showy swig and wiped his mouth. "I guess when a kid's got a dad like me, he's got to have his shit together, huh?"

  With an audible gulp Hideyuki drained his second glass, and in no time he'd finished the bottle.

  "I'll tell you, this stuff tastes best when I'm looking at you, kiddo."

  For his part, Kaoru didn't mind keeping his father company when he was drinking. His father took such obvious pleasure in his alcohol that Kaoru had fun just watching him. As the fatigue of the day's work left his father, Kaoru's mood, too, lightened.

  Kaoru went to the fridge, got another bottle, and filled his father's glass.

  But instead of saying "thanks," Hideyuki issued his son an order.

  "Hey, kiddo, go wake up Machi."

  Hideyuki was referring, of course, to Kaoru's mother.

  "No way. Mom's asleep. She's tired."

  "So am I, but do you see me sleeping?"

  "But you're up 'cause you want to be."

  "Never mind that, just go wake her up."

  "Do you need her for something?"

  "Yeah. I need her to drink beer."

  "Maybe she doesn't want to drink."

  "Alright. Tell her I want her and she'll come running."

  "We don't need her. We're okay, just the two of us, aren't we? Besides, there's something I want to ask you."

  "Gimme a break. I'm asking you here. We don't want Machi to feel left out, do we?"

  "This always happens…"

  Kaoru headed for the bedroom, dragging his feet. For some reason it always fell to Kaoru to wake his mother. Supposedly his father had tried it once a few years ago, and she'd reacted very badly; now he was gun-shy.

  In the Futami household, Dad always got his way in the end. Not because Hideyuki exercised his patriarchal authority, but rather because, of the three of them, he was the most juvenile.

  Kaoru respected his father's talent as a scientist. But he couldn't help noticing that he was distinctly lacking as a grown-up. Kaoru wasn't sure exactly what his father was missing, but his child's mind figured that if growing up was a process of eliminating childishness in favour of adult wisdom, then it was precisely that function that his father lacked.

  3

  He hated to disturb his mother's peaceful slumber. Kaoru went to the bedroom door and hesitantly slid it open. But Machiko was already sitting up in her futon, running her fingers through her hair. Kaoru didn't need to wake her up-his father's noisy homecoming had taken care of that.

  "Oh, Mom. Sorry." He was apologizing for his father.

  "That's alright." The expression in her eyes was as gentle as ever.

  Kaoru's mother almost never scolded him. Probably because he never asked for anything unreasonable, she'd always given him what he wanted. Though he was still a child, he could tell from her words and actions how absolutely she relied on him; it made him happy, but also gave him a feeling of grave responsibility.

  The Futami Family Three-Way Deadlock, was how Kaoru thought of his and his parents' relationship. It was just like a game of rock-scissors-paper-each of them had someone they could always beat, and someone they'd always lose to.

  Kaoru was strong against his mother, but weak when it came to his father. So he'd always end up going along with his father's unreasonable courses of action, doing whatever he was told. Hideyuki was strong enough vis-a-vis his son that he could treat him high-handedly, but somehow he couldn't manage such a firm front with his wife. When his wife was in a bad mood, he seemed to pale and shrink.

  So he had to fob the task of waking his sleeping wife off on his son. Kaoru's mother, meanwhile, was lenient with her son's demands, but could at times respond severely to her husband's impossible behaviour, scolding him as she would a child.

  His father would sometimes boast about how this marvellous balance of power maintained harmony in the family. He'd joke about their relationship pseudo-scentifically, calling their family a "self-sustaining structuralization of chaos". The peculiar situation wasn't the result of intent on anybody's part-it had arisen naturally through the interaction and altercations of the three parties involved.

  "What's Hide doing?" Machiko scratched her neck and ran her fingers slowly through her hair.

  "Drinking beer."

  "At this late hour? He's hopeless."

  "He wants to know if you'll join him."

  Machiko stood up, laughing through her nose.

  "I wonder if he's hungry."

  "I don't know. Probably he just wants to see you, don't you think?"

  Kaoru said it with a straight face, but Machiko just laughed, as if to say, You don't k
now what you're talking about.

  But Kaoru was already quite aware of his parents' erotic side.

  One night three months ago-a night in mid-June, a rare dry night in the middle of the rainy season, hot enough to forebode the tropical nights to come-Kaoru had been shocked to run into his father in the kitchen in an unexpected state.

  That night Kaoru had been shut in his room using his computer, when his thirst finally became too great to ignore. He'd gone to the kitchen to get some mineral water. His parents had apparently shut themselves in their separate rooms, saying they had work to do, and the apartment was quiet. His parents often went to their rooms to work and fell asleep like that. Kaoru had expected it to be the same that night. He didn't realize they'd been in the same room after all.

  He didn't turn on the light. He stood there in the darkness and poured some mineral water into a glass, and then popped a piece of ice into his mouth.

  Then he opened the refrigerator door again to put the plastic bottle back in, and that was when he found himself facing Hideyuki, who had suddenly entered the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator shone on his father's naked body.

  Hideyuki jumped, but in surprise, not embarrassment.

  "I didn't know you were there," he said, and with no thought for his nakedness he grabbed Kaoru's glass from him and gulped down its contents.

  What surprised Kaoru was not only that his father was completely unclothed, but that his genitalia was larger than it normally was. It was covered with some sort of thin bodily fluid, and it gleamed slickly. It always hung limply when Kaoru and his father were in the bath together. But now it arched and pulsed, exuding the confidence of having fulfilled its role as a part of its owner's body.