The Hunter (20 page)

"So about the escaped wolf-dog, did you hear what happened to it?" Takizawa asked as he felt his spine grow cold. He knew if the creature ever came charging out of an alley at him, he'd be scared shitless.

"The story was, it took off into the mountains, went feral. A dumb dog is easy to capture alive or lure out, but wolf-dogs are smart, you know what I mean? It went deep into those steep hills around Chichibu, and now it's the leader of a pack of wild dogs. That's the word anyway."

For a dog as sturdy as a wolf-dog, getting from the wilds of Chichibu to the city center would not be hard. But why would a wolf-dog gone feral seek out particular victims in the city? Inconceivable. So, interesting as it was, this particular information had no bearing on their case. The possibility of a connection seemed extremely low.

"Where'd you hear this rumor?"

"Let me think. I guess it was when a bunch of us from the training center got together. Somebody was talking about it."

"Any other stories about wolf-dogs?" pursued Takizawa. "Someone bought a wolf-dog or saw someone training one, anything like that?"

When it came to these vital questions, the man only shrugged. Something set the dogs barking again. When one started up, the rest joined in, as if in response.

"What are they?" Takizawa asked with a frown, jerking his chin in the dogs' direction.

"We've got six German shepherds. Another three are retrievers, but those don't bark."

Hearing this, Takizawa's indignation faded. Still, fully trained police dogs working a crime scene were bearable, but no way was he going near those growling monsters in the back yard. He looked at Otomichi, who seemed bizarrely warmed by the barking; the desire to go see the dogs was written all over her. But as soon he finished his questions, Takizawa held up a palm and said, "Well, thanks very much." Give me a break, he was thinking. The last thing I want to do is go look at a cage full of humongous dogs. Besides, he suddenly noticed as the wind shifted, he didn't like their smell either.

"Very helpful. If you think of anything else, give us a call." Takizawa said his goodbyes to this fellow, who, if you met him on the street in that getup, would be a dead ringer for a yakuza, and then he turned his back on the training center and hurried away. Otomichi's footsteps followed quietly behind him. Even after he had managed to get fairly far away, the sound of barking still rang in his ears.

Through the window along the staircase, beyond the iron fence painted light green, he could see waves of steam rising into the winter sky. The steam, coming out of the kitchen chimney, sparkled in the morning sun before disappearing into the atmosphere.

When the steam disappears, it will be spring, thought Funatsu, sticking a hand under his white hospital coat and fishing out a bunch of keys from the pocket of his pants. The key ring was fastened to his belt with a chain. Either Funatsu was too short, or the chain was, because once he had selected the right key, he had to twist his body and press his right hip up against the door in order to get the key into the keyhole. One thing he had to do, as he made his rounds from floor to floor, was to make absolutely sure the doors were locked; this requirement added a certain accent to the routine.

"Doctor!"

As soon as Funatsu opened the door, he was submerged in the loud voice of a patient and in the warm air rushing outside.

"Good morning, Aki!"

Aki, who would soon be forty-six, was standing right in front of the door in a pale pink jersey suit. Swiftly locking the door behind him, Funatsu smiled at her.

"Doctor, you know what I've been thinking?"

"No, what?"

"I've been thinking about
kurabayapunikuria."

"What's that?"

This flaccid-faced woman, once an ordinary housewife, now pouted unless called by her girlhood name. At Funatsu's question, she looked at him with a smile that bore a discernible touch of triumph.

"I already told you!"

"You did? I forget—what was it again?"

"When I met you in
konidera,
I told you about it along with
merahon."

As Aki spoke, several other patients noticed that the doctor had arrived and began drifting his way. Others continued to shuffle up and down the corridor, their posture tilted forward, oblivious to everything else.

"Don't you even know that, Doctor? I told you about
yunmashuin,
too... •" Aki continued to chatter.

A patient, about the same age as the woman, came up alongside her and burst into shrill cackles. "Doctor, never mind her! This lady's plumb crazy. Honey, nothing you say makes one bit of sense."

Aki showed no reaction to this; she just stood vacantly still. The cackler was an old-timer on the ward. She had no symptoms of neologism, the coining of new words that was a symptom of schizophrenia. Instead, she was in the grip of a delusion that more than a decade of treatment had done nothing to dissolve: she was convinced her real mother was an American and she herself was a former first lady. She didn't stop there: she had Austrian royal blood, descended from Russian nobility, and had come to Japan on a special mission. For the sake of world peace, she was to explain cosmic principles to select foreign visitors.

"Hey, Doctor, my legs hurt. Below the knees they're stuffed with voices screaming, 'Let me out! Let me out!'"

"Got any cigarettes, Doc?"

As he stepped forward, a swirl of complaints, requests, and pleas poured forth from all sides. Funatsu walked straight down the corridor, making simple replies to everyone, as he headed for his office. Here again, he had to open the door with one of the keys attached to his belt; but the nurses inside had seen him coming and opened the door for him.

"When is it ever going to warm up, huh?" he said with a grin, and the nurses and clinical nurse specialists nodded in agreement: "Not soon enough for me," and the like. Within this limited area, ordinary conversation took place in an ordinary way. Funatsu inquired if there had been any significant change in the patients in his care and asked how the newly committed patients were doing. Then he asked about a sixteen-year-old girl who had had an episode the day before and was now in a special cell.

"It's only been a day. Once she comes to, I'm afraid she might get agitated again," one CNS replied with a sigh. Even a young girl could exhibit ferocious strength if she became agitated and violent. It took two or three grown men working together to subdue her. Funatsu listened to the CNS, thinking that the girl probably ought to stay where she was for another week.

"And Emiko," he said. "She's going home for a week starting tomorrow, no problems there?"

One of the nurses shook her head as she smiled and said, "She's really looking forward to it."

"I wish I could transfer her to an open ward."

"Since she's been able to go for visits home, she's calmed down so much," the nurse said. "It's because that dog means so much to her."

Funatsu remembered the dog that the girl's father always brought with him when he came to pick her up. He himself, along with the other members of the staff, looked forward to seeing the dog again. It had been coming by for a couple of years now, as he recalled, and had won everybody's heart. It was an ideal pet in all respects: handsome looks, gentle disposition, trained superbly. Funatsu had never seen a finer dog. As the nurse suggested, there was no doubt that the dog, whose name was Gale, had a positive influence on Emiko. In the last two years her symptoms had undergone no worsening or complication.

"All day long she's been asking what time her father is coming to pick her up."

"I'll go check on her," Funatsu said as he prepared to return to the ward.

Several patients were waiting outside the door for him, and as he walked down the corridor, they trailed along behind him, with nothing to say, rather like seaweed.

The hospital where Funatsu worked treated many patients, most of them suffering from schizophrenia or alcoholism. Housed in this closed ward were patients whose symptoms were in flux; patients with poor orientation skills; and patients who, if returned to an open ward where they had freedom of movement, would be at risk of running away or engaging in unsafe or antisocial behavior. Their symptoms being severe, many patients were prescribed strong medication that left them semi-conscious all day; most were therefore unaware that they had been forcibly cut off from society and deprived of their freedom. Even so, those who followed Funatsu around were in better shape than the rest. Others stayed in bed all day or sat alone facing the wall or lay motionless, as if dead. What was going on inside their heads, what voices they heard, what visions they saw, all were beyond Funatsu's power to understand—even if the patients frequently confided in him and even if he had spent years observing their behavior.

When he unlocked one of the tatami-mat rooms that accommodated twelve patients, Funatsu observed a patient, with the covers pulled over her head, being repeatedly jabbed by Emiko from the next bed. When Emiko saw the doctor, she moved hastily away from her neighbor, sat up straight, and lowered her head politely. Her gaze wandered, and she appeared suddenly ill at ease.

Funatsu slipped off his sandals and, stepping onto the tatami in his stocking feet, went over to Emiko and knelt down on one knee in front of her. She put her hands behind her and fiddled with the straw matting while twisting her body around.

"Emiko, you know your father's coming for you tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah, I know."

"And you know that this time you'll be away for a whole week?"

"I said I know."

Funatsu could not help but think how Emiko looked like a mollusk, though it was terrible of him to think so. Her body kept wriggling as if without spine while her head swung loosely back and forth.

"Heh-heh-heh," she laughed uncertainly.

"Are you glad? "

"Sure, I'm glad. I can play with Gale. Go to the river, take walks, and stuff."

"Be sure to dress warmly. Don't go and catch a cold."

"Gale's always warm. He's warm and furry!"

Some of her pronunciation was hard to figure out. She was wearing a sweat suit that was pilling almost everywhere. It looked like it hadn't been washed in a while, limp, the ribbing in the collar all stretched out. Her shoulder-length hair, which had been tied back in pigtails, probably by a nurse, was oily, dandruff showing.

"OK, I want you to take a bath today, all right? You want to look your best for your father, don't you?"

This seemed to make Emiko laugh, and she nodded her head. In the next moment, she suddenly turned toward Funatsu and began to bow over and over. "If I take a bath, can I go home?" she asked obsequiously, trying to read his expression with the air of a crafty adult.

"Yes. If you get all clean and fresh, you can go home."

"Goody!" Her body still twisting, Emiko reverted to a laughing child.

Funatsu gently stroked her head, and got up to leave. But just before he got out the door he heard Emiko say, "Hey!" Thinking she was calling him, he turned around, but her attention was on the patient in the next bed, whom she was jabbing all over again.

"Nah-nah-na-nah-nah,"
she was going on. "Gale's coming tomorrow. I'm going home with him and my dad."

When Funatsu was around, Emiko was on her best behavior, but the second he took his eyes off her, she would pick on other patients, sometimes get a little rough. Her movements, though slow, were jerky and clumsy. She was unable to stick to doing one thing, and would sometimes behave with astonishing coarseness. Even so, compared with nine years before, when she was first hospitalized, her symptoms had eased dramatically. But considering that roughly seventy-five percent of all speed addicts required only five or six months of treatment, Emiko's hospitalization had gone on for an exceptionally long time.

She was, what, twenty-six now? thought Funatsu as he unlocked the iron door with a key chained to his waist, went out on the landing, and locked it again. Emiko, whom Funatsu had had charge of since shortly after coming to work here, was once the youngest addict in the ward. At seventeen, her face was paper-white and wasted, and she had suffered from paranoid delusions as well as visual and auditory hallucinations. In addition, she had gonorrhea, and she was pregnant. She looked so frail that if you held her down too hard you worried she would snap in two; and yet she used to howl, "I want
shabu.
Gimme
shabu!" Shabu
was the street name for amphetamines, her drug of choice.

Be nice if she could go home permanently.

From the recovery period, when indications first show improvement, through the anchoring period, when progress slows, Emiko had displayed an amazing range of symptoms typical of chronic amphetamine abuse. As a rule, the condition does not cause dimming of consciousness or forgetfulness. It begins with apathy, fatigue, lassitude, inactivity, absence of initiative, and progresses to restlessness, hypokinesia, catalepsy, negativism, tonic hyperactivity, . . . There are also symptoms of pseudo-dementia and paralogia.

Even so, Funatsu and other residents had expected her to be out of the hospital and back functioning in society within six months; she might well drift back into drugs and have to be re-hospitalized, they knew, but that was the kind of life this girl was going to live. Yet, after all this time, she was still here. What should have been the best, most radiant season of her life—a time when, if not for amphetamines, she might fall in love, marry, become a mother—was spent locked away behind iron bars. Time for Emiko flowed differently than it did for others: persistent childishness was definitely one of her behavior patterns. She had not so much reverted to childhood as remained a child; she lived in a dimension removed from the passage of time.

Emiko's father came the next afternoon, arriving in a big station wagon as usual, the dog along for the ride. Funatsu and as many of the nurses who could get away trooped outside, less to see Emiko off than to catch a glimpse of the wonder dog.

"Gale! Gale, Gale, Gale!"

As soon as she stepped out the front door of the hospital, Emiko, whose movements were ordinarily sluggish, started running toward her father, who was standing beside the car. Emiko ran as fast as she could and threw her arms around the bundle of fur sitting patiently next to him. The dog's head, larger than Emiko's, was almost a meter above ground. Clutched and pummeled by Emiko, the dog closed his eyes in seeming bliss.

"Oh, Gale, I missed you so much!"

Normally Emiko's emotions and expressions were flat, her reactions dull; but at times like this, her voice was eager, alive. As if he understood everything Emiko said, the dog licked her face, slowly and tenderly.

"She's been quite stable, so I don't think there's anything to worry about," said Funatsu, going over to the man whose sunburned face had broadened into a smile. "I can't get over the power that dog has over her," he added, thinking how he'd like to pet the animal himself. "No matter what we do, we can't get Emiko to laugh like that."

Emiko's father was a squat, taciturn man with a low center of gravity. Watching his daughter embrace the big dog, he smiled calmly. His profile was chiseled. The days and years flowed by for everyone, Funatsu was given to think, but this man had had a lot to bear.

"Emi, won't this be nice? A whole week with Gale!" a nurse called out.

Emiko nodded happily and answered "Yes!" in a voice even more animated than before. But the concept of a week was something Emiko could not understand. Just because she could carry on a conversation did not mean she comprehended it.

"Emiko, could I pet Gale, too?" another nurse asked.