Loop (7 page)

In reality, Kaoru was the one who held the family's finances in his hands, and he knew that they didn't have much to spare. He had to keep his job. But of course he wasn't about to complain to his father about their budgetary straits. There was nothing to be gained by letting his father know things were tight. So Kaoru lied to Hideyuki, telling him that he worked because he wanted more spending money.

When they were together, Kaoru wanted to set his father's mind as much at ease as possible. It wouldn't do to betray the fact that because his illness had decreased the family's income, Kaoru and his mother were having to squeeze by. Luckily, as a medical student Kaoru had no trouble hanging out his shingle as a tutor, and in fact he made quite a bit of money that way. The hospital connected to Kaoru's medical school had a lot of child patients whose parents didn't want them to fall behind in their studies when they went back to school; tutors were always in demand.

One day early in his summer vacation, Kaoru visited the hospital to tutor a junior high schooler in math and English, and then had a light lunch in the cafeteria. His father was a patient in this very hospital. Kaoru had just heard that there was a possibility that the cancer had spread to his father's lungs; his mood was black. His father had recently gone into his annual litany.
This year,
he said,
we 're going to see those longevity zones in the North American desert.
But the words had rung hollow. And then came-as if on cue-the indications that the cancer had spread.

Kaoru was sitting in the cafeteria, sighing over his father's illness and his family's future, when he saw Reiko Sugiura and her son Ryoji.

The cafeteria was on the third floor of the hospital, surrounding a courtyard on three sides; the walls facing the courtyard were of glass. There was a fountain in the courtyard, and sitting at a table in the cafeteria one was eye level with the top of its spray. The cafeteria was so carefully decorated, and its food so pleasant to the taste, that it felt more like a stylish outdoor cafe than part of a hospital. Gazing at the water from the fountain had a truly relaxing effect.

Kaoru's eyes were drawn naturally toward the beautiful woman being shown to an empty table.

Her tanned body was sheathed in a summery beige dress, and her face was so nicely formed that it was eye-catching even without the aid of cosmetics. If it weren't for the child at her side, she could have passed for ten years younger than what Kaoru guessed she had to be.

The woman and boy sat at the table the waiter indicated, which happened to be diagonally adjacent to Kaoru's. Kaoru watched them seat themselves, and, after that too, he found his attention drawn to the woman, his eyes riveted to the legs stretching out from beneath her mini dress.

He realized this was the same mother and child he'd seen at the hotel pool two weeks ago. One of his students' grades had gone up so much that the kid's parents had given Kaoru an all-summer free pass to that pool. On the first day he'd gone to swim there he'd encountered this pair, sitting poolside in deck chairs.

From the first moment he'd laid eyes on the woman in the green bathing suit, he was sure he'd seen her somewhere before, but when and where he couldn't say. Kaoru was normally confident in his powers of recall, but poke about as he might in the recesses of his memory he couldn't place the woman. The experience left him with an unpleasant aftertaste that wouldn't go away. A woman as beautiful as this he wouldn't expect to forget, and yet evidently he had. At the time, he'd tried to put her out of his mind, telling himself he was mistaken, but then something about her finally triggered memories of the star of a soap opera he'd watched as a child. He wondered if it was the same woman.

The boy made an odd impression, particularly his physique. The blue swim cap that he wore pushed back on his head, the goggles, the check-pattern shorts that Kaoru could tell at a glance weren't for swimming in, his skinny bowed legs, and most of all his abnormally white skin. He resembled an "alien corpse" Kaoru had seen on some fake TV show a long time ago. Everything about the boy looked strangely off-kilter. The pair stuck in Kaoru's memory: this woman he'd seen somewhere before and this weird-looking boy.

And now they were sitting at the next table over. Kaoru, sitting by the window so he could gaze down at the fountain, found he could catch their reflection faintly in the glass. He observed this instead of staring at them directly.

After a few moments, Kaoru figured out why his first impression of the boy had been of unbalance. It was his hair, or rather his lack of it. When Kaoru had first seen the boy poolside, his swim cap had been missing the bulge that would normally have told of a full head of hair.

Today, too, the boy was wearing a hat when he sat down at the table, but after a few moments he took it off, revealing his head to be perfectly devoid of hair.

Kaoru realized what that meant. The boy was here to be treated for cancer. He'd assumed mother and child were both here to visit a patient, but now it turned out that the mother was accompanying her son to chemotherapy. Hideyuki was undergoing chemotherapy, and his hair too had fallen out, but somehow seeing a child suffer that side effect was even more heart-rending. Kaoru thought about that day at the pool, that swim cap hugging the boy's bare scalp directly-no wonder he'd left such a peculiar impression.

Kaoru rested his head on his hand and watched the beautiful thirty-something woman and her son, who was probably a fifth or sixth grader, eat their lunches without talking. Without being conscious of it, he was comparing them to his father, hospitalized here. His father was forty-nine, while this boy had to be eleven or twelve. Both were taking anti-cancer medication.

The mother in her airy beige dress looked too bright and cheerful for a hospital. Once in a while she raised her head and glanced out the window. She didn't look like she was tasting what she ate-she was just eating to eat, looking at no one in particular with an expression that could have been a smile or the equivalent of a sigh.

She paused with her spoon in the air, then returned it to the plate, then started to bring it to her mouth again, and then suddenly shot a glance in Kaoru's direction. At first her gaze was sharp, as if to ask,
What are you looking at?
But as her eyes met Kaoru's her gaze softened. Kaoru found himself unable to look away.

It seemed she recognized him from the pool. She looked like she wanted to say something. Kaoru bowed his head slightly, and she answered with the same gesture.

And then her attention was taken up by her son, who chose that moment to toss aside his chopsticks and spoon and throw a tantrum. The sight of Kaoru fled her mind.

Even then Kaoru continued to watch the two. He was powerless to resist-it was as if his consciousness had been uprooted and physically carried to where they were.

Several days later, in the courtyard this time, Kaoru had the opportunity to speak to this mother and her child. By some lucky chance they ended up sitting side by side on the same bench, making it possible for a conversation to start naturally without either one making the first move.

The mother introduced herself as Reiko Sugiura and her son as Ryoji. Ryoji's cancer, which had first appeared in his lungs, now looked like it had spread to his brain, and his days were filled with tests preparatory to radiation and chemotherapy.

Not only that, but it seemed that the agent that had turned his cells cancerous was none other than the recently isolated Metastatic Human Cancer Virus-the progress of the illness, from first appearance through subsequent metastasis, was nearly identical to Kaoru's father's case.

Kaoru felt a sense of kinship. A sense that they were comrades fighting the same enemy.

"Brothers in arms."

The expression was Reiko's, but it echoed Kaoru's thoughts. However, Kaoru doubted her words, having observed their expressions in the cafeteria the other day. It was resignation he'd seen then, wasn't it? At the very least, their faces hadn't been those of people dedicated to battling an illness. Kaoru still remembered the affectless way she'd eaten.

He took this opportunity to clear up the doubt that had been nagging at him since their first encounter.

"Haven't we met somewhere before?" It embarrassed him as he said it, it sounded so much like a pickup line, but he couldn't think of any other way to ask it.

Reiko responded with a laugh whose import escaped him. "I get that a lot. I'm told I look like an actress on an old TV show," she said shyly.

It sounded like a lie to him. She didn't just look like the actress-he couldn't help but think they were one and the same. But if she was the actress, and was lying so she could escape her past, then he didn't feel he should press the issue.

When they parted, there in the courtyard, Reiko gave him their room number and said, "Why don't you come visit us sometime? Please."

Three times they'd met, he and Reiko Sugiura. Now more than ever, he couldn't take his eyes off her.

It was the very next day that Kaoru took Reiko at her word and knocked on the door to Ryoji's room.

Reiko greeted him, with a smile that might have been a bit overdone, and showed him into the room. Ryoji was sitting up in bed reading a book, his legs dangling over the side. As a medical student, Kaoru knew how much the room cost the moment he entered. It was a private room with a private bathroom complete with bathtub. The daily rate was five times that for a normal shared room.

"Thank you for coming," Reiko managed to say. Evidently she'd only invited him as a social courtesy, not really expecting him to come. Now that he was actually here she couldn't disguise her happiness. She turned to Ryoji and tried to stir his interest. "Look who's come to see you!"

It hit Kaoru that Reiko had invited him up as someone for her son to talk to. He should have realized it before.

It was Reiko, not Ryoji, who had piqued Kaoru's interest. Kaoru didn't know much about women, but he'd sensed something sexual, some kind of desire, in her unwavering gaze. She had full lips and wide, alluring eyes that drooped a little at the corners; her breasts weren't especially large, but still there was something undeniably feminine in her five-foot frame. She had a refined air about her that he hadn't found in women his own age, and it aroused something within him.

In comparison with that, there was nothing for him to hold onto in Ryoji's gaze. As he sat down facing the boy in the proffered chair, he was astonished at how little light the boy's eyes held. Ryoji didn't even try to meet Kaoru's gaze. He was looking in Kaoru's direction, but plainly he wasn't seeing anything. His eyes looked right through Kaoru, their gaze wandering across the wall behind. For a long time, they wouldn't focus.

Ryoji set his book down on his knee with a finger still stuck in between the pages. Trying to find something to talk about, Kaoru leaned forward to see what the boy was reading.

The Horror of Viruses.

Patients want to know as much as possible about their illness. Ryoji was no exception. Naturally he was concerned about this foreign thing that had invaded his body.

Kaoru informed the boy that he was a medical student, and asked him a few questions about viruses. Ryoji answered him with a level of accuracy and detail astonishing in a sixth grader. Clearly he understood a great deal about viruses. Not only did he understand how DNA worked, he even had his own views on matters at the farthest reaches of current knowledge about the phenomenon of life.

As they went back and forth, questioning and answering, Kaoru began to imagine he was looking at a younger version of himself. He looked on this child, armed with scientific knowledge, the same way his father had looked on him. Kaoru felt like an adult.

But it wasn't to last long. Just as they had warmed up to each other, just as the conversation was really taking off, Ryoji's nurse showed up to take him to an examining room.

Kaoru and Reiko were alone now in the small sickroom. Kaoru was suddenly fidgety, while Reiko, who had been leaning on the windowsill, now coolly came over and sat down beside the bed.

"I had no idea you were twenty."

Kaoru had mentioned his age during his conversation with Ryoji; Reiko had noticed. Kaoru was always being told he looked older than he was; he was used to it.

"How old do I look to you?"

"Hmm. Maybe about five years older…?" She trailed off apologetically, afraid she'd offended him.

"You mean I look old?"

"You look mature. Really… together." To say he looked old might hurt him; to say he looked "mature" would sound like a compliment, she evidently figured.

"My parents got along well when I was growing up."

"And that makes kids look older than their age?"

"Well, they always looked like they'd be happy enough to be left alone, just the two of them, so I had to learn to be independent pretty early."

"Ah." Reiko's expression said she wasn't convinced. She looked at her son's empty bed.

Kaoru found himself thinking about Reiko's husband. Something about Ryoji suggested that he didn't have a father. Maybe there had been a divorce, maybe he'd died, or maybe he'd been absent from the start. In any case, Kaoru had the impression that Ryoji's relationship with his father was, at the very least, extremely attenuated.

"In that case, maybe my son will never become independent," said Reiko, still staring at the bed.

Kaoru braced himself and waited for her next words.

"It was cancer…"

"Oh." He had expected that.

"It was two years ago. Ryoji didn't mourn his father's death one bit, you know."

Kaoru could understand that. The kid probably hadn't let her see him cry once.

"That's how it is sometimes."

But he didn't mean it. When he imagined his own father's death an uncontrollable sadness came welling up from the depths of his heart. He wasn't sure he'd be able to overcome it when he faced the actual event. He realized that, at least in that sense, maybe he wasn't all that independent yet himself.