Parasite Eve (29 page)

    “Hey. Didn’t know you were
up.” Toshiaki rubbed his eyes and sat up. His eyes were puffy and he was
clearly not fully awake.

    With a huge grin on her face,
she said;

    “I want to register at a
kidney bank.”

    At breakfast, Kiyomi noticed
Toshiaki giving her strange looks. When she turned to him, he look flustered
for a moment. Then he averted his eyes and spread margarine on his toast with a
scraping noise.

    “What is it?” she said,
getting suspicious.

    Toshiaki looked down as if
what he was about to say didn’t come easily. After a moment, he muttered,
simply:

    “Don’t you remember?”

    “Remember what?”

    “This morning. You said you
wanted to register at a kidney bank, totally out of nowhere.”

    Kiyomi looked up from her
breakfast in surprise. She had no memory of it.

    “It’s your choice, of course,
but... I was just a bit shocked since I didn’t think you cared about such
things.”

    She blinked. Toshiaki looked
away and took a bite of his toast. This was no joke.

    She wanted to ask him what
was going on, but for some reason her mouth would not open.

    She had to really concentrate
to finally move her lips. When the words came out, they were not ones that she
had willed.

    “So how do I register?”

    Since that day, Kiyomi
started to become unsure of herself. She feared that she was doing things
without her own knowledge, and this zapped her desire to do anything at all.
After Christmas too, Toshiaki tried to make love to her, but she kept refusing.
Who knew what might come crawling out of her again, and maybe she’d never come
back the next time it happened.

    Then one day her donor card
arrived in the mail. A phone number was printed on it, and underneath it:

ORGAN DONATION
DECISION CARD

In the event competent
medical authority declares me brain-dead, I hereby agree to the brain-death
declaration and to donate my kidneys for transplantation purposes.

    She fiddled with the card,
holding it between her index finger and thumb on opposite corners while turning
it. She had gone through the registration process without even realizing it. It
was around that time that she mysteriously began seeing a whole slew of news and
articles about organ transplants. She never noticed them much before, but now
she was running into them everywhere. There must have always been plenty of
reports about transplants; she probably just used to overlook them since she’d
had little interest in the topic before. And yet, why they seemed so prevalent
now was beyond her.

    Winter passed and a new
school year began. Temperatures rose, cherry blossoms bloomed.

    One day in the middle of
June, Toshiaki shouted with joy and came running over to give Kiyomi a hug.

    “Yes! It went through!”
hollered an excited Toshiaki to his equally startled wife. “My
Nature
article!”

    He embraced her and spun her
around, but Kiyomi hadn’t a clue.

    “Wait, what happened
exactly?”

    “The piece I wrote for
Nature
was accepted for publication. I got the notification today. Don’t you remember
that conversation we had once? I told you I wanted to get published in a top
scientific journal someday.”

    She remembered it now.

    “So that means...” said
Kiyomi, at last comprehending the situation.

    “You got it! So, what do you
think of your husband now! Aren’t you happy for me?”

    “Of course, that’s terrific
news!”

    Kiyomi embraced him and was
about to tell him, “Congratulations.”

    The words that came out of
her mouth were quite different.

    “You’re wonderful, Toshiaki.
I knew you were the one I’ve been looking for.”

    She immediately covered her
mouth, surprised at what she had just said.

    “Don’t be silly, Kiyomi. We’re
already married,” said Toshiaki, confused. Kiyomi turned away.

    “No, that’s not what I
meant...”

    “What, then?”

    “I love you.”

    She broke away from their
embrace.

    Those hadn’t been her words.
Someone was manipulating her!

    A coldness spread across her
back as if an icicle had been planted there. She suddenly felt her own body to
be a grotesque thing, clamped onto by some unknown entity that now wriggled all
over her. She wanted to take off
everything
, and just run away. Toshiaki
embraced her again. Rigid in his arms, chilly from her own cold sweat, she
shivered.

    One week later, the time came
for the annual open lectures sponsored by the School of Pharmaceutical
Sciences.

    The school had sixteen
seminar groups, and each year, four of them assumed these duties by rotation.
Toshiaki’s course was among the four this year.

    On the day of the lecture, he
told Kiyomi he was going to meet with Ishihara beforehand since he was
assisting with the professor’s slides.

    “Is it alright if I came
along?” Kiyomi said, without even thinking.

    The skies were clear on the
day of the open house. A pure blue expanse spread above the Pharmaceutical
Sciences building just like the day they first saw each other again.

    Ishihara’s lecture was the
first of the afternoon. Toshiaki and Kiyomi entered the hall ten minutes early.
As Toshiaki set up the projector, Kiyomi walked leisurely around the room,
admiring the view from the windows. She was searching for her sense of reality.
As she walked, she had a hard time believing that her own feet were actually
moving one in front of the other as they should. Her consciousness seemed
somehow separated from her body.

    “We all have countless
parasites living inside us,” began Professor Ishihara, in nearly the same
manner as when Kiyomi attended his lecture a few years before. Toshiaki changed
each slide at the professor’s signals. About half of the presentation was as
Kiyomi remembered it, but certain data had been updated in light of new
discoveries. She gazed at the screen, listening intently. She understood much
more of it now than when she had been a student.

    What amazed her, however, was
that she was somehow able to grasp all the new material as well. More than a
quick under standing of unfamiliar concepts, it felt like she was remembering
things long forgotten.

    Before long, the slides
ended, and the room brightened again.

    “I’ll open up the floor now
if anyone has any questions...”

    At that moment, Kiyomi’s
right arm twitched.

    By the time she realized it, her
hand had shot straight up into the air.

    Ishihara was visibly
surprised at this. Some of the students turned around and gave her a quizzical
look. Toshiaki, who was about to pack up the slide projector, stopped what he
was doing.

    “Go ahead, please.” The
professor smiled and pointed at her.

    Kiyomi wondered if she was
dreaming as she stood, poised and tall. Her lips moved of their own accord. She
had no idea what she was saying.

    “In today’s lecture, you
pointed out that mitochondria are, in essence, enslaved by the nuclei of their
hosts. True, mitochondrial DNA codes only rRNA and tRNA and just a few other
enzymes of the electron transport chain, so it would seem impossible for
mitochondria to survive on their own. According to your explanation, this came
about because the nucleus extracted hereditary information originally held by
mitochondria. But don’t you think it’s a bit rash to conclude that mitochondria
were therefore enslaved by nuclei? Couldn’t we say the opposite is true? In
other words, it could well be the case that mitochondria actively sent genes
into nuclei, of their own volition. Not all of the nuclear genome has been
sequenced yet. Perhaps, in the portions that haven’t been analyzed yet, we’ll
find crucial genes that mitochondria secretly inserted into nuclei. What if the
proteins encoded by those genes are as yet unknown nuclei-shifting receptors
that can manipulate copies and translations of the host’s genes? This would
cast mitochondrial symbiosis in a whole new light, I think. In short, isn’t the
following hypothesis tenable? Namely that, in the near future,
these
parasites we call mitochondria will enslave their hosts?
”

    The room was dead silent,
save for the low whir of the slide projector fan. No one moved a muscle. Ishihara
just stood there with mouth agape.

    Leaves rustled as a gust of
wind blew the trees outside. At this, everyone turned away or coughed
nervously. The professor scanned the room and, picking Toshiaki out from among
the crowd, glared at him as if to say, “What the hell was that all about?” The
students began to stir. Kiyomi sat down calmly. She straightened her back and
smiled, staring Ishihara right in the eye.

    “Er, well, that was out of
the blue, but an excellent question.”

    The professor forced an
embarrassed cough. He was trembling slightly and at a total loss for an answer.
Kiyomi flashed him a look of ridicule. Upon noticing this, he choked back his
discomfort and faltered as he attempted an answer. But soon his words ebbed
into silence. He was certainly accepting of criticism, but the ideas she had
proposed were too outlandish for him. It was simply a viewpoint no researchers
held. He tried his best to wrap his mind around it, but failed.

    Just as I thought... I was
right. Only Toshiaki genuinely understands mitochondria. HE IS MY TARGET.

    I?

    Kiyomi looked up suddenly.

    At that moment, she regained
control over her body. She slumped forward. Her hand unconsciously grabbed the
desk, stopping herself just before she hit her chin on the seat in front of
her.

    Who was this “I”?

    She could not shake the
feeling that her heart was slouching forth into a bottomless abyss.

    That morning, Toshiaki and
Kiyomi left home at the same time.

    Kiyomi woke up at her usual
hour, prepared breakfast, and ate together with her husband. It was a
traditional meal featuring salmon and eggs cooked in the Japanese style. When
they stepped outside of the apartment door, a weak morning sunlight shone down
from a break in the clouds. Walking down the stairs together, they bumped into
the couple who lived on the second floor, and they all exchanged slight bows.

    “Okay, I’m off,” said
Toshiaki.

    Kiyomi beamed him a smile and
waved to him as he got into the driver’s seat. Then she got into her recently
purchased compact. She put her handbag on the passenger’s seat and started the
engine. The night before, she had written a letter to Chika for the first time
in a long while. Kiyomi had become lazy about keeping in touch with old friends
and wanted to regain some semblance of reliability. The letter was only
pleasantries, but she thought it might rekindle what was once a frequent
exchange between them.

    After making sure the letter
was in her bag, she unconsciously took out her wallet to see if she had her
driver’s license with her. Sandwiched carefully in between her license and
auto-registration membership was her kidney donor card.

    She started the car forward.
Toshiaki pulled out behind her. She turned right, Toshiaki turned left, his
waving figure reflected in her rear-view mirror.

    Kiyomi drove for about five
minutes through the neighborhood streets until she came out onto the main road.
A bit congested, but no more than usual. It was a route she had traveled
hundreds of times. Before long, the street sloped gently downward. The flow of
traffic quickened as the road bore to the right. She watched the sky spreading
out overhead through the windshield.

    And just after she saw the
traffic light change to yellow beyond the curve, her sight faded to black.

20

    “Mariko is sleeping,” said
the nurse as she and Anzai passed each other in the hallway. He responded with
a small bow.

    Visiting hours would be over
soon. He could not put himself rough this routine much longer, spending a few
awkward hours in Mariko’s room before returning to work.

    There were, in fact, times
when Anzai wondered why he even came at all. She was still putting up a front.
He tried talking to her, but it was useless. Even before all this, they had
hardly, talked. Try as he might, the words just never came out.

    So why was he even here?

    He was only coming out of
duty to his daughter.

    Anzai had to admit that he
was much more at ease at work. He no longer understood his own feelings.