Birthday Read online

  She felt like some foreign object had gotten into her.

  Choking on bile, she began to weep. She knelt in front of the toilet, weakened, gasping for breath.

  For a time, she could feel herself slowly vanishing—

  and then she passed out.

  Since watching the tape, Mai suffered frequent lapses in her consciousness. She was unable to recall the events of the preceding week in order and complete.

  She'd suddenly realize that several hours had passed and not know where she was. It was as if something had possessed her soul.

  ... As if something had possessed my soul.

  That was definitely the phrase for it. She was dimly aware that her body was being controlled.

  The foreign object that had entered her during her viewing of the tape gradually grew. Perhaps her watching it while ovulating had facilitated the thing's invasion of her. Or maybe it happened to everyone who watched the video—maybe it was how they went down the road to death.

  Mai pictured countless sperm charging toward the egg in her oviduct. Once, in a sex-ed textbook, she'd seen a very graphic representation of it. Viral microorganisms, generating and proliferating within her from watching that tape, overwhelming her oviduct—if that wasn't it, then she had no idea how she'd ended up a virgin with the body of a pregnant woman.

  There was life within her belly, that was for sure. It pulsed, and it waved its arms and legs inside her tightly-stretched womb.

  6

  The end of the rope tickled her somewhere in the vicinity of her bended knees. It seemed to hang lower than it had the last time she'd looked, at midday.

  Who hung that rope there, and why?

  But she hardly needed to pose the question. The sensation of tying one end of the sash to the railing on the rooftop revived in Mai's hands. Images were being inserted into her consciousness, like flash photos, and she could see herself from a bystander's perspective in the darkness. That was Mai herself tying the knot with im-patient finger, overriden by a will not her own. Her legs and waist were shaky and were ready to give out at any moment, yet, driven by an unfathomable sense of duty, she was focused on tying the makeshift rope.

  The rope was all ready at the time she left her apartment. There was one other item she'd prepared along with it, but the memory was missing. She wondered what it was. Something in a plastic bag, she knew. She could recall the feel of something squishy.

  The life that had started growing within her after viewing the tape had, at some point, begun to exert its influence over her body. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would abruptly come to, and listening she'd hear the pulse of whatever it was in her belly. It only took four or five days for her abdomen to swell to the point that she seemed ready to deliver, and the same time for her enlarged nipples to start leaking milk.

  Why was she there at the bottom of the crack in the top of a building? All at once, Mai knew.

  To give birth.

  She didn't believe for a moment that the thing within her was her own child. She wasn't even sure it was human.

  A beast.

  No—she didn't even feel it was a life form.

  But she felt a sense of responsibility; she had to birth this unknown thing without anybody knowing.

  She didn't know where the sense came from, but come it did, and there was no resisting it. It drove her to act, to fulfill her role as a cocoon.

  At around the same hour the day before, Mai had taken off her underwear, snuck out of her apartment, and ascended to the roof of this building in the warehouse district, where few people walked at night and few cars passed. A dilapidated old building by the Shore Road.

  She had climbed over the gate on the second floor landing and climbed the spiraling fire escape to the top of the building. Once there, she'd climbed by ladder to the rooftop and gone over to the machine room. On the seaward side of it there was a deep exhaust shaft, like a coffin floating in the sky.

  A perfect place for the pupa to escape its cocoon. A perfect place for the soul to discard its shell. It wasn't far from Mai's apartment, and it was almost guaranteed that no one would see.

  Mai had tried to climb down into the shaft using the sash-rope. She'd fallen and sprained her ankle.

  What time is it, I wonder.

  During the day she'd been able to guess the time based on the shifting sunlight, but it was several hours past sundown now. Stars shone, but they didn't help her.

  She had no way to gauge the passage of time.

  Twenty-four hours, perhaps, had gone by since she left her apartment.

  Suddenly sadness overcame Mai. She'd been there for twenty-four hours, but for most of that time her consciousness had been elsewhere; she'd only been herself for two or three hours at the most. During those hours, she had known astonishment, and fear, and unutterable dread, but this was the first time she'd felt sadness.

  Her body no doubt knew that her time was approaching.

  She tried to get up but couldn't; she tried to cry out but found her throat as though blocked. Meanwhile, the movements within her womb grew more violent as the power pressing on her from inside overflowed with life.

  Her vitality was being transferred out of her. She reflected on her twenty-two years with chagrin. Had she lived merely to have her body taken over, to give birth to this unknown thing? How pitiful.

  Mai knew the meaning of her own tears. Fear of the thing that was trying to nullify her life was also forcing her grief to the surface.

  It was mid-November. They'd had bright, clear weather for several days now, but it was cold in the middle of the night. The chill of the concrete seeped through her back and into her bones, only adding to her sorrow.

  And now a thin film of water coated the inner surfaces of the walls. A leak from somewhere? The clamminess made things still worse.

  She was sobbing now.

  Help! Help me!

  She couldn't voice the words. Then the labor pains started, and they washed away her sadness and the cold, along with every other feeling and sensation, on a mam-moth ocean wave. The smell of the sea was stronger now. It had to be high tide.

  She remembered something her mother had told her once, when she was little.

  You were born at high tide.

  Her mother believed that if the rhythm of nature wasn't disrupted, people were born at high tide and died at low tide.

  But Mai had the encroaching feeling that life and death were going to be simultaneous. Did that mean it was high tide or low tide now? Shifts in gravity, either way, influenced life and death.

  The contractions subsided a bit; the rhythm of the waves slowed. She thought she could hear a melody, low over the rhythm. The horns of ships and distant cars provided effective accents. Was it just the city's night sounds coming together in all their layers to sound like music, or was there actually a melody playing somewhere in the building? Or still...

  Mai couldn't decide if she was really hearing music.

  She wouldn't be able to distinguish a real sound from an auditory hallucination. All she knew was that listening to it calmed her down.

  The mysterious melody softened her pain and put her into a peculiar mood. Suddenly, she knew where the music was coming from. But, no, it couldn't be. She tried to suppress her own realization, raising her head and staring at her belly.

  Who's that singing—down there...

  She imagined the life inside her singing to ease its mother's pain. Her dark womb, filled with amniotic fluid—didn't it bear a resemblance to the space Mai was in? And the thing singing softly in that dark place was about to show its face.

  The voice was that of a young female. At moments it seemed to be coming from right next to Mai's ears, at others to wend its way up to her from below her feet. Finally, the voice stopped singing and began speaking, low and soft.

  The words were those of a woman who had died, once. She said so.

  I died at the bottom of a well, you know.

  The woman gave her name
as Sadako Yamamura.

  She proceeded to describe her past in brief.

  Mai was unable to disbelieve. The voice said that the images on the videotape had not been recorded by any camera. Rather, they'd been experienced by Sadako's five senses and then projected by the operation of her thoughts. It made sense to Mai and she accepted it; when she had watched the images on the tape, her perceptions had been completely fused with those of this unknown woman Sadako. The image of the baby, incredibly vivid, flashed across Mai's mind.

  Her cervix was fully dilated. All alone, Mai heaved, in rhythm with her contractions. Her tortured moans echoed in the narrow space, she could hear them. But it didn't sound like her own voice and she felt strange.

  The labor pains were coming closer together than at first, and as the interval shortened, energy concentrated and released itself more intensely towards birth, uterus and muscle contracting again and again.

  Giant waves crashed one after another in Mai's brain. In time with them she sucked in a lungful of air, pushed, and bit back the scream that wanted to come out as she focused all her strength on her lower body.

  High tide must have been approaching, the moon rounding the earth.

  A sudden violent contraction came over Mai. Energy concentrated in her lower abdomen and was poised to shoot through the exit as a lump. Mai stretched out her arms, reaching for something, anything, to cling to.

  It's coming!

  When the intuition coursed through her, consciousness receded.

  7

  She had probably only been out for a few minutes.

  As consciousness returned, Mai's retinas registered the small shadow wiggling between her thighs.

  The baby crawled out of her womb without a cry. It twisted and turned, trying to sit up. It was using its hands skillfully, like a swimmer. Its movements, all the more because they weren't accompanied by cries, asserted that it already had a will of its own.

  Mai found herself completely devoid of the joy and awe that motherhood was supposed to bring. The thing was finally born—that fact alone gradually spread across her body. Relief at having expelled the foreign object won out over all other emotion.

  As her eyes adjusted, she could see the little form more clearly.

  Covered with amniotic fluid, its skin glistening in the starlight, the baby was grabbing furiously at some rope-like thing with both hands. A wrinkly rope, extending from Mai's body... The baby had in its grasp the umbilical cord.

  The thing had been born, but it was not yet fully separate from Mai's body. The umbilical cord still connected them. Just as the sash-rope still hung down into the rooftop crevice. Mai wanted to sever the cord and be done with it. Yet, powerless, she was forced to just lie there and let happen what might.

  The baby was as active as Mai was enervated. It stretched out the ropy umbilical cord with its hands and then placed it in its mouth. It was trying to sever the cord. Naturally, its teeth hadn't come in yet; the way it clamped the cord between its red gums and shook its head from side to side, the thing was a far cry from an infant: its little face was demonic.

  In the end, the process was like ripping apart sausage links. Having cut the cord, the baby took a wet towel from the plastic bag lying at Mai's feet and started to wipe off its body.

  Mai herself must have prepared the wet towel at the same time she'd made the sash-rope. The bag had probably landed at her feet when she'd fallen into the hole.

  She hadn't seen it from the way her head lay.

  She'd been preparing to give birth without realizing it. She must have been taking commands from the embryo growing in her womb. Not that that made any sense.

  Mai's uterus continued to contract. She pushed a little more, and thought she could feel the placenta coming out. Once the placenta and fetal membranes had been expelled, her belly was flat again.

  Now that she could see over herself, she had a much clearer view of the baby.

  It was wiping off its body, slowly, as if trying to get the wrinkles out of its skin. It had known in the womb what it had to do once it got out. It moved with alarming dexterity.

  After it had finished wiping itself off, the baby assumed a relaxed, crouching pose and started moving its mouth.

  What's it doing?

  From the way it moved its face and hands, it looked to be eating something. Its ravenous expression stimulated Mai's own appetite, and she raised her head.

  Dark, discolored blood clung to its tiny lips. She could hear it chewing flesh.

  It was eating the placenta.

  Stuffing its cheeks with the placenta—no doubt extremely nutritious—the baby seemed to surge with vitality. As it ate this piece of Mai, who herself was hungry and weak, it wore a satisfied smile.

  Their eyes met in the darkness. For a moment, the little face took on an expression of pity.

  Mai managed to speak.

  "Are you Sadako Yamamura?"

  The baby's gaze was steady as it bowed a head plas-tered with downy hair. The thing was apparently affirming that it was Sadako.

  The sash-rope dangled just above the baby, caressing its shoulder.

  Like one determined, the baby grabbed the end of the rope. Then it stood there like that for a while, staring at Mai. Mai could tell that it meant to go up into the world outside—to climb up the rope and to make its escape.

  Just as she'd thought, the baby started to pull itself up the rope. Partway up, however, it stopped and looked down at Mai. It blinked and gave her a meaningful look.

  Was it trying to tell her something? Its face was expres-sionless—she saw no hostility there, no sympathy, no hatred, nothing, perhaps because it wasn't possible to read any kind of expression into such a tiny, wrinkled face.

  Finally it reached the rim of the exhaust shaft. It stood there, silhouetted against the stars. Mai could see the outline of its poorly severed umbilical cord—it looked like the tail of an animal or the horn of a demon.

  The baby stood there at the rim for a while, looking down at her. Mai found herself clinging to that black shape.

  Help me.

  There was no one else around. The only one she could turn to for help was this being she'd given birth to. She would normally be caring for it, but their posi-tions were reversed.

  But her wish was in vain. The baby began to pull the rope up just as it had forcibly shredded the umbilical cord. If it allowed the connection to remain, perhaps it couldn't truly stand on its own.

  Mai understood, but she wished it would just leave the rope, at least. Why did it have to take away her only conduit to the outside world? Don't cut the spider's thread, I'll never be able to crawl up out of hell!

  Mai begged, implored; she hated the baby's cruelty.

  But its movements were calm and measured. Perhaps it, too, was acting under the compulsion of some tragic sense of duty. It gave no indication, in any case, that it would heed Mai's request.

  I beg of you, don't abandon me.

  The rope finished its ascent, and the baby's face disappeared from the rim of the exhaust shaft. What was it doing now? Mai could hear it doing something; it hadn't left yet.

  The baby peeked back over the edge again, and then, with a quick movement of its left arm, tossed something down to Mai. Against the dim sky it looked like a snake twisted in a spiral. It was the sash-rope, all coiled up. It landed weightlessly on Mai's midsection and lay there in rings. Just a prank? Mai could detect no meaning in it, only the stench of malice.

  The baby flashed her a grin. Then, without a trace of reluctance, it disappeared into the night.

  Where was it going and what did it desire to become?

  Mai kept seeing the umbilical cord hanging from its belly. The image resonated with her and would not leave. It reminded her of a demon—no image fit it better.

  She heard the horn of a ship on Tokyo Bay. The sound was like a wolf's howl, a creature's vivid wail. In response came the faint yapping of a dog from somewhere in the residential neighborhood farther inland
.

  The sea was near, and there were people living surprisingly close by, but Mai was in a place governed by the laws of another world.

  The tide was at its fullest, she figured: it would begin to recede now. It didn't matter. Life and death were not at odds; they coexisted snugly right where she was.

  Mai gave a wan laugh and looked around at the darkness the baby had left behind, and allowed herself to think about its future.

  She hoped, of course, that morning would come soon, but she had a feeling that night would continue for quite some time yet. She wasn't sure if her consciousness could hold out until dawn.

  Suddenly she had the feeling that the stars had come right down close to her. Or was it that her body had started to float? It didn't feel too bad.

  Death was almost there.

  LEMON HEART

  1

  November 1990

  ............................................................, and

  his dream was set in a theater, one that seated about four hundred people, the kind he was so used to, and had been for so long. He wasn't in the audience seating or onstage, but in a sound booth overlooking the stage from behind the seats; evidently he was in charge of sound effects. In front of him, illuminated by a work light, were the mixer in its cabinet and a reel-to-reel tape deck. He was seated on a chair, the index finger of his right hand on the tape recorder's play button and his left hand on the mixer, adjusting sound levels; his gaze was fixed on the play onstage. He knew, all too well, that this was a dream. And he knew, roughly, what was going to happen next, if he didn't wake up first, which didn't look like it was going to happen...and it was this self-awareness that he found so mystifying. He couldn't figure out what to call this neither/nor state he was in, as he crossed and recrossed the border between sleep and wakefulness.

  The sound booth was located next to the lighting booth. It played an important role in supporting and in-tensifying the drama unfolding onstage. His job was to watch the progress of the play and provide music and sound effects at just the right moments, in response to signals from the stage director and in synch with the lighting man. This troupe was quite particular about how the music was handled. The actors' movements and lines were meant to match the rhythms of the songs he provided, so if his timing on the start button was off, it would ruin the whole play. They required constant concentration from their soundman: he wasn't able to relax, even for a moment, until the play was over.