Parasite Eve (12 page)

    The kidney.

    Mariko opened her eyes wide.

    At last she sobered to the
reality of her transplant and a flood of memories washed across her mind: the
sudden phone call during the night, the hospital, the tests, the blood
transfusion, listening to the doctors and nurses as they explained everything
to her...

    Mariko gathered all her might
to speak, but her voice emerged only as a hoarse and barely audible whisper.
The nurse stopped and cocked her head.

    “Person who gave me,” Mariko
repeated desperately.

    “What? Who?”

    The two nurses looked at each
other, unable to understand her question.

    “The per son... who gave
me... the kidney. What happened. Where...”

    “...ah.”

    One of them nodded and smiled
at Mariko.

    “No need to worry about that,
okay, dear? The operation went very well. Your donor must be very happy about
it right now in heaven. In fact, the person who gave you your kidney says you
have to get better as soon as possible.”

    “No,” Mariko complained.
“Tell me please... Was this person really dead? Did this person really
want
to give me a kidney?”

    The nurses looked upset. They
smiled uncomfortably and tried to smooth things over.

    “Alright now. Let’s just calm
down, okay? You’re still feverish from the operation, so...”

    Mariko shook off the nurse’s
hands and screamed as loud as she could, but an explosion of dizziness swarmed
in her head and she shut her eyes. Her voice fell to a rasp that she herself
couldn’t hear.

    When she opened her eyes
again, her father was at her side. A difficult expression was on his face.

    “Everything’s fine. The
operation went well.”

    She forced a smile. He looked
a little uncomfortable in his germ-free attire. She could not see his mouth,
but his eyes darted around in discomfort, their focus clearly averted from her.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

    “You’re running a fever,
which is fairly normal after transplant surgery. We’ve given you some
medication to make it go down,” said Yoshizumi, who’d entered the room along
with her father. This doctor was the last person Mariko wanted to see right
now. She clamped shut her eyelids even tighter.

    The nurses took turns
throughout the day to stay with Mariko and monitor her condition. They took
blood pressure and urine samples every hour and regulated her transfusions. On
the verge of sleep at almost every moment, she entrusted her body to them.
Yoshizumi came in to check her data and talk with her. Mariko did not remember
it, he said, but after the operation, she was given a radioisotope-tagged drug
and a renogram. These checked whether blood was flowing properly in her newly
transplanted kidney. He told her gently that there were no indications of ATN
or any infections but that the catheters and drainage tubes would have to be
left in just a little longer. Mariko closed her eyes again and pretended not to
listen.

    Her room was single
occupancy, not too large. The doorway vas concealed by a protruding section of
the wall, behind which there seemed to be some kind of basin for washing hands
and gargling. Before people came in, there was always the sound of splashing
water.

    Mariko was fed through a
mouth tube. She could not even begin to describe the flavor of the thing, but
it was actually tolerable. “You’ll only have to put up with this a little more,
then you’ll be able to eat tasty stuff again!” a nurse encouraged her. Mariko
nodded vaguely. She then recalled an exchange between her and Dr. Yoshizumi
from two years ago...

    “So I can eat oranges again?”

    Mariko was in such good
spirits then she was almost embarassed with herself. She asked about all the
edible things she could think of.

    “And apples? And potato
chips? I can have as much miso soup as I  want? And ice cream? Even
chocolate?”...

    Mariko felt herself urinating
intermittently. Because of the catheter, she did not experience the usual
discomfort of a full bladder. Instead, her urethra became warm, the catheter
felt different, and she could tell that urine was coming out. When she was
aware of it, it was all she could think of. It was an odd sensation. For a year
and a half, she had never urinated, undergoing three dialyses per week instead.
She had trouble remembering what it was like to go to the bathroom or to have
the urge to do so.

    She had an intermittent dream
in which she was sleeping, indeed, in a hospital bed. Details were hard to make
out in the dark room. The door was closed and she had no clue as to what lay on
the other side. A pale light shone from the crack underneath it. At least the
hallway lights were on. She had to think for a moment about where she was and
why she was there before soon remembering being in recovery from transplant
surgery. She felt paralyzed, only able to move her hands. She touched around
her abdomen gently. Something was palpitating inside her body. Distinct from
her heartbeat, something with a life that wasn’t Mariko was pulsing on its own.
She felt around more carefully, trying her best to guess what it might be.
Whatever it was, it seemed to be struggling to get out of her body.

    At that moment she heard a
flabby sound.
Flap...

    She opened her eyes and
looked around. Nothing felt out of the ordinary. And just when she was ready to
pass it off as a trick of the ears...:
Flap
.

    It came from beyond the door,
like the echo of vinyl slippers shuffling along the corridor. Thinking it was
just somebody coming to her room, she exhaled in relief, but an instant later
knew that wasn’t it. The hairs all over her body stood on end. The pace was too
slow for a person walking.

    And again.
Flap...
Her
hands on her pulsing lower abdomen, Mariko locked her gaze firmly upon the
door. The thing inside her seemed to be beating faster now.
Flap
.
Slowly, the sound was drawing near. A cold shiver swept through her. She could
hear nothing else, not the wind, not the cars and motorbikes in the street.
Only the footsteps and the beating in her body. The footsteps were now just
outside the door.

    FLAP.

    And that was when she’d wake
up.

    A worried nurse tried to
comfort her and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. But upon waking up,
unable to separate dream from reality, Mariko would scream. By midnight her
temperature had risen far past 100° F. While she fought the fever, she had the
same dream over and over.

    On the second day of
recovery, she was allowed to sit up just a little. The upper half of the bed
was jacked up thirty degrees. Yoshizumi came in with some nurses early that
morning to collect more samples. Mariko noted her father’s presence as well.

    “Everything okay? I heard you
had a bad dream last night,” Dr. Yoshizumi asked smiling, taking her pulse.
That grin, practically pasted onto him, frightened Mariko.
He’s never
forgiven me for it
, she thought, and turned away from him.

    “Mariko. Talk to me please?”

    Yoshizumi would not shut up.
He treated her like a child half her age and it made her nauseous. She was
still in grade school when she had her first transplant and maybe back then it
was okay to treat her like a kid. But she was in middle school now and
Yoshizumi didn’t seem to notice.

    “You still have a bit of a
fever, hm?” Unable to get any sort of response from her, Yoshizumi may as well
have been talking to himself. “You also have a little blood in your pee. We
totaled the protein count yesterday at a whopping 2.7 grams. That’s not good, but it won’t stay that way. Don’t worry, it’s quite normal right after a
transplant. And I expect your fever will have gone down by tomorrow. What
matters is that you’re peeing. You know, that pretty much means the operation
was a success. No signs of infection, either.”

    Yoshizumi’s voice rang in her
ears, and scenes from after her first transplant came back to her. Yoshizumi’s
expression when he began suspecting that she’d failed to take her meds. The
look in her father’s eyes. Mariko closed her eyes and shook her head but was
unable to rid those looks from her mind. She couldn’t stand it any longer.

    She was screaming, “You want
this transplant to fail, don’t you!” Yoshizumi drew back in shock. The nurses
and Mariko’s father stood completely motionless with eyes wide open, unsure of
how to react.

    “What are you saying...”

    “I know you do!” Mariko
screamed, interrupting him. “You think it’s my fault it didn’t work the last
time. You think I’m a bad girl, so you want this transplant to fail too!”

    “Mariko, stop! Please...”
said her father, visibly upset. But she could not suppress her rage. She was no
longer in control of the words spilling from her mouth. Yoshizumi tried to
touch her, to which she objected loudly and started weeping. The nurses were
equally overwhelmed. One of them took Mariko’s hand, trying her best to appease
her. Mariko pried it away from her grasp.

    At that moment the drainage
tube in her side twisted and pain shot through her entire body. She cried out
and buried her face in the pillow. She realized what she’d been doing, and her
anger subsided.

    While she lay quietly, her
back and waist began to hurt. At her request the nurse shifted her body, but
the pain didn’t recede. Her perceptions grew dim from the fever and the searing
pain in her back. Simply keeping her eyes open was becoming impossible without
discomfort.

    Mariko dreamt again that
night. She was sleeping in the same dark room and the footsteps returned on
cue. Slowly but surely, they were approaching her door. Her eyes were glued to
the light leaking from under it.

    Why did the sound frighten
her so much?

    She kept telling herself it
was just a nurse making her rounds, but this did not shake the uneasiness that
gripped her heart. Someone was coming and it was no nurse or doctor. This was
something, she thought, far more
scary
.

    Two things were beating so
fast in her body that it was hard for her to breathe: one, her heart racing
with fright; the other something less familiar that was clearly enjoying
itself, quivering excitedly in her abdomen every time the sound drew closer.
Both seemed to pound in her head and ears, and her entire body was hot. Her
chest and her abdomen, running away each with their wild beat, threatened to tear
her asunder at any moment.

    Flap.

    The shadow of a figure
entered the glow under the door. Mariko let out a voiceless scream. For a
moment the shadow stood motionless outside her door. Then, with a light
flap
,
it turned toward the door. Mariko’s heart nearly jumped from her body, and the
thing that dwelled in her abdomen squirmed around ecstatically. Her waist
rumbled, making the bed creak. Her back was drenched with sweat.

    Mariko’s eyes were fixed on
the door. And she was aghast.

    For the knob was turning,
ever so slightly. Silently, and so slowly you could hardly tell it was moving
at all, the knob was turning. Whatever was on the other side was trying to get
in.

    THUMP.

    Mariko’s abdomen leapt up.
The bed bounced and her body was In the air for a second.
The kidney
,
she thought. The new kidney was trying to come out of her. Choked with fear,
Mariko still could not take her eyes from the door knob. She finally realized
who was coming for her. She despaired. Her heart, which had been beating so
wildly, fell silent.

    The door began to open. Light
poured in through the crack.

    Mariko screamed, and woke up.

4

    Toshiaki resumed his duties
the day after the funeral. As always, parked his car in the college parking lot
at 8:20 and was in his lab by 8:30.

    No one else was in yet this
morning. He turned on the light and ked over to his desk, now overflowing with
a week’s worth of leaflets and pamphlets from various companies extolling their
new products. He’d usually, at least, skim through the English-language
catalogues of cloning vectors and cytokines, but he was hardly in the mood
right now and placed them in a rack at the side of his desk. He heard a
clanging noise and the door opened. He looked up and turned around.

    Asakura put her hand over her
mouth as she saw him, her body straightening from surprise.

    For a while, neither could
speak, and the awkwardness was quite something. Asakura moved her mouth like a
dying fish as she searched for words, while her eyes darted nervously about the
room.

    Toshiaki managed a smile and
raised his hand in greeting.

    “... morning.”

    Asakura started, but the
tension was now gone.

    “Good morning!” she said with
a smile and a bow.