Dark Water (7 page)

Yukari was not much of a talker, and Kensuke could see how it must have been much easier for her to express her cherished ideal of paradise on earth as a picture rather than in words.

Kensuke just stared at the picture without answering Aso's question. After all, it wasn't the kind of question you could answer on the spot.

'Why don't we build our own paradise?' His hands clasped to his chest, Aso trilled grotesquely, mimicking Yukari. Then, dramatically jerking his face closer to Kensuke: 'Nothing pissed me off worse in all my twenty-three years. That idiot just doesn't have a clue about how utterly miserable her notion of living on and on for all eternity is.'

Kensuke sided with Yukari. 'You're being too harsh. We're all different in how we look at things.'

'Don't call me harsh! She tried to force her idealistic crap on me.'

'So you went and dumped her on Battery No. 6, right?'

'Right. Banished her to a desert island, I did. I think I made the punishment fit the crime. If she wants to build a paradise, then she can damn well build it herself.'

'But that island is off limits, isn't it?'

'Took a rubber dinghy over there in the middle of the night.'

Yukari didn't know that Battery No. 6 was legally closed to the general public and so had no qualms at all about their nocturnal adventure. They took the dinghy in the car, but it mostly fell to Yukari to inflate and to row the thing to their destination. Yukari would have followed Aso to the end of the earth without the slightest suspicion. Once they had landed on the battery island, Aso used chloroform to knock her out, leaving her unconscious while he made his getaway. The way he described abandoning Yukari on Battery No. 6, he made it all sound so simple.

Kensuke remained unconvinced. After all, a mere three hundred yards separated Battery No. 6 from the Marine Park. It was not too far a distance to swim. Even if you couldn't swim, many pleasure boats cruised by the island. All you had to do was stand on an embankment and shout to make yourself heard. Surely, he pointed out to Aso, Battery No. 6 was as easy to get off as it was to get to.

'No problem, I took all her clothes.'

'You mean you left her there naked?'

'Look, I know her pretty well. She'd rather die than be seen naked in public. She's that sort of woman.'

Kensuke was left speechless. He didn't know the whole story between Aso and Yukari, but he did know that they were in a relationship, and Aso must have felt something for her during that time. He didn't feel it was right, even as a joke, for Aso to be saying that he'd stripped someone naked and left her for dead. Whether or not Aso was telling the truth, describing such an act to a third party was brutal enough.

The atmosphere was oppressive and Kensuke remained silent. Glancing furtively sideways, he noticed that Aso seemed to be on the verge of saying something but swallowing the words each time.

I'd better be off then,' he said. He shifted from Park to Drive mode and lowered his hand to disengage the hand brake.

It was as Kensuke opened the car door that he put his final question to Aso. 'When did you do it? When did you leave Yukari there?'

'It must have been around the time of the Obon festival.

The city was deserted, everyone gone home to the country.'

Obon, when the ancestors returned… That made it about ten days ago.

Kensuke got out of the car and went round towards the driver's seat. Aso had the car window open, and his arm was dangling outside, his hand tapping the side of the car. He thrust this hand out in Kensuke's direction.

'So long,' he said.

He'd extended his hand for a handclasp, and Kensuke took it reflexively. It felt cold to the touch. Cold, but clammy with perspiration. It was the first time Kensuke had ever shaken hands with Aso.

'Be seeing you,' Kensuke said, and Aso nodded firmly, twice, before driving off in his BMW.

As he followed the car with his gaze, Kensuke was sure of one thing. There had indeed been a purpose to this visit, and so with the previous. Aso had come to say goodbye. The tone of his 'So long…' and the cold feel of his hand came back to Kensuke. As his friend's BMW approached the intersection, the brake lights went on. Without signalling, the car turned left and disappeared out of sight.

For some time afterwards, Kensuke was troubled by a recurring fantasy. A naked young woman lurking in the deep recesses of some uninhabited island was arousing him mercilessly. Kensuke did not have a girlfriend at the time.

He often dreamed of frolicking in the woods. The flesh-coloured trunks of trees resembling crape myrtle sprouted up like sinuous tendrils from the earth, none of them adorned with a single leaf. As Kensuke walked among them, his legs got entangled in the curling branches and he'd sink deep down into the ground. No analysis was necessary to see that the smooth tree trunks symbolized Yukari's legs. Another recurring dream Kensuke had featured snakes writhing across the ground and transforming themselves into Yukari's legs. In the wilderness and in places that were clearly some island, Yukari metamorphosed into various plants and creatures and lived on.

Kensuke couldn't find out if the story was true by asking Aso. Even if Aso said, 'I was lying,' the story wouldn't just go away. The possibility that Aso's confessing it was a lie was the real lie would remain forever.

Kensuke tried dialling the number on the calling card that Yukari had given him, and got neither her parents' home nor her apartment, but rather, a sort of dormitory where the members of her religious cult lived. Kensuke told the feeble voiced woman who took the phone that he wanted to speak to Yukari.

'She's not here,' the woman said, and that was all she said.

Kensuke had expected Yukari to come to the phone without much of a to-do, so this stole his tongue. After a pause, he managed to ask, 'Where may I find her?'

The woman replied simply, 'I don't know.'

'How long has Yukari been away?'

'I haven't seen her face the last couple of weeks.'

When Kensuke asked her for Yukari's parents' number, she merely responded with a question of her own: 'Ms Nakazawa has a home?' The way she said it made Yukari seem like a vagabond with no family.

'So she doesn't have one?' Kensuke pressed.

'I wouldn't know,' the woman responded unceremoniously.

Kensuke couldn't tell whether Yukari did in fact have no home or whether the commune had simply been given no information. He put the phone down. All he had been able to confirm was that Yukari had not been back to the dormitory for about two weeks now. The awful thing was that Aso's story was beginning to show signs of plausibility.

It did occur to him to visit Battery No. 6 and check for himself, but the Tokyo authorities had declared the place off limits. Kensuke was due to take the public employment exam in order to become a teacher, and could not afford to get in trouble with the metropolitan government. Besides, he didn't have the courage to make a clandestine landing on Battery No. 6 under cover of darkness.

He felt he needed to see Aso again to get to the bottom of the matter. If Aso hadn't been lying, Kensuke needed to do something before it was too late. He didn't know what sort of criminal charges accrued from stripping a woman naked and leaving her on Battery No. 6. He figured that if she died of starvation, prosecution was inevitable.

He was thus on the verge of contacting Aso when news came that he had been hospitalized in his alma mater's affiliate. A chest X-ray had apparently shown a patch on Aso's lungs. A bronchoscope, and tests, revealed that a particularly virulent form of cancer had claimed most of his body already. His brain was blighted too, and surgery was impossible. Even with some desperate chemotherapy, Aso had only two months or so left to live.

Strangely enough, Kensuke was left unfazed by the news. He closed his eyes and calmly let the fact sink in that the time had come. The happy days that they'd shared sped all in a jumble across his mind's eye, but the idea that 'it was unbelievable' simply didn't occur to him - only the terrible pity of dying at twenty-three, Kensuke's own age.

Aso had probably sensed, even before he took the tests, that he didn't have much time left. And so he'd come that day to say goodbye. Given death as a premise, Aso's recent behaviour made sense. Just as Aso had seen his own death looming, Kensuke had intuited that his friend's days were numbered, and had no doubt been bracing for this.

Ten minutes or so after he'd digested the news, Kensuke suddenly began to sob. It wasn't that he was sad; rather, it was because confusing emotions besieged him deep inside. After crying for some time, he felt an irrepressible desire to go and see Aso. It was Kensuke's turn to say goodbye.

Kensuke thought he'd chosen a slow time for his visit but, in addition to Aso's mother, there were a few others gathered there in the private room. Aso lay on the bed, in no condition to carry on a normal conversation. The man who'd come to see Kensuke in a car just a month ago now lay before him hardly able to breathe and wreathed in tubes. The cancer cells that riddled Aso's body had wrought so dramatic a change in so short a time. His left lung had completely ceased to function; apparently, the end would come when the phlegm accumulated in his windpipe.

Right before he left, Kensuke approached Aso's pillow, bent low, and asked in a gentle whisper: 'Was that true, about Battery No. 6?'

Kensuke felt certain Aso wouldn't tell a lie on his deathbed. If he'd only shaken his head then, Kensuke's suspicion would have been allayed.

Instead, Aso smiled and nodded.

In disbelief, Kensuke tried again: 'Are you sure?'

Aso nodded twice in succession. Kensuke thought he saw a look of satisfaction on Aso's face, but it could have been his imagination.

Placing his hand on Aso's, Kensuke told him, 'Hang in there,' and left the hospital room. No doubt, it would have been more appropriate just to say 'Goodbye.' Two days later, Aso was dead at the young age of twenty-three.

The assembly point was the lounge of the Dream Island Marina. Sasaki looked quite busy lapping his ice cream. Aside from him and Kensuke, the only one there was a metropolitan official named Naito; the councillors representing Minato Ward had yet to turn up. It was ten minutes past the appointed time of 10:00 a.m. Summer vacation had just begun, and on this weekday morning, many young men and women came to the marina. Whenever a young woman passed by, Sasaki's face would lift from his ice cream and follow the woman as she walked off. Kensuke poked him in the ribs with his elbow.

'Leader, it's disgraceful. At your age.'

'Don't "leader" me, okay?' replied Sasaki wryly.

'You told me this was going to be a serious expedition.'

'Leave me alone, will you?'

Kensuke's sarcastic barbs were having their effect, and Sasaki waved his hand as though to chase away an annoying fly.

'Making a mountain out of a molehill' was a saying that existed to describe Sasaki. His trademark impulse to blow things up tenfold had been applied to the Battery No. 6 inspection crew, which in Sasaki's telling was to consist of the best scientific minds the city could muster. But Kensuke had arrived to find only Sasaki and a city official.

'Where are the other members?' the baffled Kensuke had asked, blinking.

Sasaki had given this excuse cringingly: They're all busy and called in one after another to cancel.'

Naito, the city official, revealed a different story when Kensuke questioned him about the matter. Apparently, just one ward councillor and one city official were required for the inspections, but Sasaki had nagged them persistently to be taken with them. All Sasaki's talk about having been 'commissioned by the ward council' and having 'organized a survey team' had been barefaced lies. The truth was that Sasaki had tapped Kensuke so he wouldn't look too bad just tagging along by himself.

'Here comes Mr Kano. We're ready to go.' Spotting the representative of Minato Ward, Naito rose to his feet. Reflexively, Sasaki and Kensuke also stood up.

Waiting aboard the small cruiser tied up at the wharf were the captain and a single deck hand, also government employees. The team, now six members in all, motored out of Dream Island Marina under the bright summer sun at half past ten and headed for Battery No. 6, which was but a stone's throw away.

On their way they passed under four bridges. The girders of one of them, so low as to be almost within touching distance, blocked out the rays of the sun for a moment, and the whole weight of the thing seemed to bear down on them. As they passed under the fourth bridge, the Rainbow Bridge came into view and beyond it Battery No. 6. Kensuke recalled how he'd looked down at the island from the Rainbow Bridge's pedestrian walkway shortly after the bridge's completion. At the observatory, using the binoculars, he'd peered into the depths of the woods that overgrew the battery. Now, for the first time, he was seeing the island from approximately sea level.

As the profile of the island loomed larger, Kensuke was getting his hopes up. He was finally gaining access to the setting of a nine-year-old fantasy that had burgeoned and morphed with a will of its own. Battery No. 6, an irregular pentagon with a surface area of about twelve acres and a perimeter of about a third of a mile guarded by a stone wall sixteen feet high, apparently had a freshwater well on it despite its being a manmade island in the middle of the bay. Thinking that with water you could survive, for nine years Kensuke had kept Yukari alive on that walled island. He understood it was a ridiculous notion. Yet he couldn't discount that bizarre smile of satisfaction Aso had displayed on the threshold of death. Had Aso, his brain invaded by cancer, succumbed to his own lie? Or had he perhaps, hoping for a place to live after death, conflated the image of heaven with the uninhabited island?

Likely expecting to be fed, a large flock of seagulls circled the cruiser. Flying just above the surface, the birds skimmed Battery No. 6 and swept up high over it. As if shaking the gulls loose, the cruiser pulled alongside the landing on Battery No. 6.