1Q84 (102 page)

Tengo opened the bottle of mineral water he had brought with him and took a drink. Then he sat down on the stool again.

“I told you this before, but I’m grateful to you. I believe I’m not your real son. I’m almost sure of it. I’m grateful to you for having raised me even though we had no blood tie. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for a man to raise a small child alone. Now, though, when I recall how you took me around on your
NHK
collections, I feel sick at heart. I have only terrible memories of that. But I’m sure that you could think of no other way to communicate with me. How should I put it? It was probably the best you could do. That was your only point of contact with society, and you wanted to show me what it was like out there. I can see that now. Of course, you also calculated that having a child with you would make it easier for you to collect the money. But that wasn’t all you had in mind, I suspect.”

Tengo paused briefly to let his words sink in and to organize his own thoughts.

“Of course, as a child, I couldn’t see it that way. It was just embarrassing and painful to me—that I had to go around with you making collections while my classmates spent their Sundays having fun. I can’t tell you how much I hated it when Sundays came around. But now, at least to some extent, I can understand what you did. I’m not saying that it was right. It left me with scars. It was hard for a child. But what’s done is done. Don’t let it bother you. One good thing it did was to make me tougher. I learned firsthand that it’s not easy making your way through this world.”

Tengo opened his hands and looked at his palms for a while.

“I’m going to go on living one way or another. I think I can do a better job of it from now on, without such pointless detours. I don’t know what you want to do. Maybe you just want to go on sleeping quietly, without ever waking up again. That’s what you should do if you want to. I can’t stand in your way if that’s what you are hoping for. All I can do is let you go on sleeping. In any case, I wanted to say all this to you—to tell you what I have done so far in life and what I am thinking. Maybe you would have preferred not to hear any of this, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry to have inflicted it on you. Anyhow, I have nothing more to tell you. I’ve pretty much said everything I thought I ought to say. I won’t bother you anymore. Now you can sleep as much as you like.”

After five o’clock, Nurse Omura, the one with the ballpoint pen in her hair, came to the room and checked the amount of intravenous fluid in the bag. This time she did not check his father’s temperature.

“Anything to report?” she asked.

“Not really. He’s just been sleeping the whole time,” Tengo answered.

The nurse nodded. “The doctor will be here soon. How late can you stay here today, Mr. Kawana?”

Tengo glanced at his watch. “I’ll be catching the train just before seven, so I can stay as late as six thirty.”

The nurse wrote something on his father’s chart and put the pen back into her hair.

“I’ve been talking to him all afternoon, but he doesn’t seem to hear me,” Tengo said.

The nurse said, “If I learned anything in nursing school, it’s that bright words make the eardrums vibrate brightly. They have their own bright sound. So even if the patient doesn’t understand what you’re saying, his eardrums will physically vibrate on that bright wavelength. We’re taught to always talk to the patient in a big, bright voice whether he can hear you or not. It definitely helps, whatever the logic involved. I can say that from experience.”

Tengo thought about this remark. “Thank you,” he said. Nurse Omura nodded lightly and, with a few quick steps, left the room.

After that, Tengo and his father maintained a long silence. Tengo had nothing more to say, but the silence was not an uncomfortable one for him. The afternoon light was gradually fading, and hints of evening hung in the air. The sun’s last rays moved silently and stealthily through the room.

Tengo suddenly wondered if he had said anything to his father about the two moons. He had the feeling that he had probably not done so. Tengo was now living in a world with two moons. “It’s a very strange sight, no matter how many times I see it,” he wanted to say, but he also felt that there wouldn’t be much point to mentioning it. The number of moons in the sky was of no concern to his father. This was a problem that Tengo would have to handle on his own.

Ultimately, though, whether this world (or
that
world) had only one moon or two moons or three moons, there was only one Tengo. What difference did it make? Whatever world he was in, Tengo was just Tengo, the same person with his own unique problems and his own unique characteristics. The real question was not in the moons but in Tengo himself.

Half an hour later, Nurse Omura came into the room again. For some reason, she no longer had a pen in her hair. Where could it have gone? Tengo found himself strangely concerned about the pen. Two male staff members came with her, wheeling a movable bed. Both men were stockily built and dark-complexioned, and neither of them said a word. They might have been foreigners.

“We have to take your father for some tests, Mr. Kawana,” the nurse said. “Would you like to wait here?”

Tengo looked at the clock. “Is something wrong with him?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, not at all. We just don’t have the testing equipment in this room, so we’re taking him to where it is. It’s nothing special. The doctor will probably talk to you afterward.”

“I see. I’ll wait here.”

“You could go to the lunchroom for some hot tea. You should get some rest.”

“Thank you,” Tengo said.

The two men gently lifted his father’s thin body, with the intravenous tubes still attached, and transferred him to the wheeled bed, moving the bed and intravenous stand into the corridor with quick, practiced movements. Still they did not say a word.

“This won’t take too long,” the nurse said.

But his father did not return to the room for a long time. The light coming in the window grew slowly weaker, but Tengo did not turn on the lamp. If he did so, he felt, something important here would be lost.

An indentation remained in the bed where his father had been lying. His father now probably weighed next to nothing, but still he had left a clear impression of his shape. Looking at the indentation, Tengo had a strong feeling that he had been left behind in this world all alone. He even felt that the dawn might never come again, once the sun had set tonight.

Sitting on the stool by the bed, steeped in the colors of the approaching evening, Tengo stayed in the same position, lost in thought. Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had not actually been thinking at all but had been aimlessly submerging himself in a vacuum. He stood up slowly, went to the toilet, and relieved himself. After washing his face with cold water, he dried his face with his handkerchief and looked at himself in the mirror. Then, recalling what the nurse had said, he went downstairs to the lunchroom and drank some hot green tea.

His father had still not been brought back to the room when Tengo returned there after twenty minutes downstairs. Instead, what he found, in the hollow that his father had left in the bed, was a white object that he had never seen before.

Nearly five feet in length, it had smooth, beautiful curves. At first sight, it seemed to be shaped like a peanut shell, its entire surface covered with something like short, soft down that emitted a faint but even glow. In the rapidly darkening room, the pale bluish light enveloped the object softly. The thing lay still in the bed, as if to fill the individual space that his father had temporarily left behind. Tengo halted in the doorway, hand on the knob, staring at the mysterious object. His lips seemed to move somewhat, but no words emerged from them.

What
is
this thing?
Tengo asked himself as he stood there, frozen to the spot, eyes narrowed. How had this come to be here in his father’s place? No doctor or nurse had brought it in, that much was obvious. Around it hovered some special kind of air that was out of sync with reality.

Then it suddenly hit him:
This is an air chrysalis!

This was the first time that Tengo had ever seen an air chrysalis. He had described some in great detail in the novella, but of course he had never seen a real one with his own eyes, and he had never thought of them as things that actually existed. But what he saw before him now was the very object his mind had imagined and his words had described: an air chrysalis. He experienced such a violent sense of deja vu that it felt as if a metal band had been tightened around his stomach. Nevertheless, he stepped inside the room and closed the door. Better not let anyone see him. He swallowed the saliva that had been collecting in his mouth, making a strange sound in his throat.

Tengo crept toward the bed, stopping when there was no more than a yard between him and it, examining the air chrysalis in greater detail. Now he could be sure that it looked exactly like the picture he had drawn of an air chrysalis at the time he wrote the story. He had done a simple pencil sketch before attempting to create a description of an air chrysalis, first putting the image in his mind into visual form and then transferring it into words. He had left the picture pinned to the wall over his desk while he rewrote
Air Chrysalis
. It was shaped more like a cocoon than a chrysalis, but “air chrysalis” was the only name by which Fuka-Eri (and Tengo himself) could possibly call the thing.

During his revision, Tengo had created most of the external features of an air chrysalis and added them to his descriptions, including the gracefully narrowed waist in the middle and the swelling, round, decorative protuberance at either end. These came entirely from Tengo’s mind. There had been no mention of them in Fuka-Eri’s original narrative. To Fuka-Eri, an air chrysalis was simply that—an air chrysalis, something midway between an object and a concept—and she seemed to feel little need to describe its appearance in words. Tengo had to invent all the details himself, and the air chrysalis that he was now seeing had these same details exactly: the waist in the middle and the lovely protuberances at either end.

This is the very air chrysalis I sketched and described
, Tengo thought.
The same thing happened with the two moons
. For some reason, every detail he had put into writing had now become a reality. Cause and effect were jumbled together.

All four of Tengo’s limbs felt a strange, nervous, twisting sensation, and his flesh began to crawl. He could no longer distinguish how much of this present world was reality and how much of it fiction. How much of it belonged to Fuka-Eri, how much was Tengo’s, and how much was “ours”?

A small tear had opened at the very top of the air chrysalis: the chrysalis was about to break in two. The gap that had formed was perhaps an inch long. If he bent over and brought his eye to the opening, he could probably see what was inside. But Tengo could not find the courage to do so. He sat down on the stool by the bed, staring at the air chrysalis while his shoulders rose and fell imperceptibly as he struggled to bring his breathing under control. The white chrysalis lay there still, emitting its faint glow, quietly waiting, like a mathematical proposition, for Tengo to approach it.

What could possibly be inside the chrysalis?

What was it trying to show him?

In the novella
Air Chrysalis
, the young girl protagonist discovers her own other self inside. Her
dohta
. She leaves her
dohta
behind and runs away from the community alone. But what could possibly be inside of Tengo’s air chrysalis? (Tengo felt intuitively that this air chrysalis must be
his own
.) Was it something good or something evil? Was it something that would guide him somewhere or something that would stand in his way? And who could possibly have sent this air chrysalis to him here?

Tengo knew quite well that he was being asked to act. But he could not find the courage that would enable him to stand and look inside the chrysalis. He was afraid. The thing inside the chrysalis might wound him or greatly change his life. The thought caused Tengo to grow stiff, sitting on the little stool like someone who has lost a place of refuge. He was feeling the same kind of fear that had kept him from looking up his parents’ family register or searching for Aomame. He
did not want to know
what was inside the air chrysalis that had been prepared for him. If he could get by without knowing what was in there, that was how he wanted to walk out of this room. If possible, he wanted to leave this room
now
, get on the train, and go back to Tokyo. He wanted to close his eyes, block his ears, and burrow himself in his own little world.

But Tengo also knew that this was impossible.
If I leave here without seeing what is inside, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I’ll probably never be able to forgive myself for having averted my eyes from that
something,
whatever it might be
.

Tengo remained seated on the stool for a long time, unsure of what he should do, unable to go either forward or back. Folding his hands on his knees, he stared at the air chrysalis on the bed, glancing occasionally out the window, as if hoping to escape. The sun had set, and a pale afterglow was slowly enveloping the pine woods. Still there was no wind, nor could he hear the sound of the waves. It was almost mysteriously quiet. And as the room’s darkness increased, the light emitted by the white object became deeper and more vivid. The chrysalis itself seemed like a living thing to Tengo, with its soft glow of life, its unique warmth, its nearly imperceptible vibration.

Finally Tengo made up his mind, stood up from the stool, and leaned over the bed. Running away now was out of the question. He couldn’t live forever like a frightened child, averting his eyes from the things before him. Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.

The tear in the air chrysalis was unchanged, neither bigger nor smaller than before. Squinting, he looked in through the opening, but he could not see very far inside. It was dark in there, and a thin membrane seemed to be stretched across the space inside. Tengo steadied his breathing and made sure his hands were not shaking. Then he put his fingers into the inch-long opening and slowly spread it apart, as if opening the two leaves of a double sliding door. It opened easily with little resistance and no sound, as if it had been waiting for his hands.