1Q84 (65 page)

The clothes she would wear that evening were nicely folded and stacked on the bed. Next to them she had placed a blue gym bag. Inside was a complete set of stretching equipment. She checked the contents of the bag once more for safety’s sake: jersey top and bottom, yoga mat, large and small towels, and small hard case containing the fine-pointed ice pick. Everything was there. She took the ice pick out of the case, pulled off the cork, and touched the point to make sure it was still plenty sharp. To make doubly sure, she gave it a light sharpening with her finest whetstone. She pictured the needle sinking soundlessly into that special point on the back of the man’s neck, as if being sucked inside. As usual, everything should end in an instant—no screaming, no bleeding, just a momentary spasm. Aomame thrust the needle back into the cork and carefully returned the ice pick to its case.

Next she pulled the T-shirt-wrapped Heckler & Koch from its shoe box and, with practiced movements, loaded seven 9mm bullets into the magazine. With a dry sound, she sent a cartridge into the chamber. She released the safety catch and set it again. She wrapped the pistol in a white handkerchief and put it in a vinyl pouch. This she hid in a change of underwear.

Now, was there anything else I had to do?

She couldn’t think of anything. Standing in the kitchen, Aomame made coffee with the boiled water. Then she sat at the table, drinking it with a croissant.

This may be my last job
, Aomame thought. It’s also going to be my most important and most difficult job. Once I’ve finished this assignment, I won’t have to kill anyone anymore.

Aomame was not opposed to losing her identity. If anything, she welcomed it. She was not particularly attached to her name or her face and could think of nothing about her past that she would regret losing.
A reset of my life: this may be the one thing I’ve longed for most
.

Strangely enough, the one thing that Aomame felt she did not want to lose was her rather sad little breasts. From the age of twelve, she had lived with an unwavering dissatisfaction with regard to the shape and size of her breasts. It often occurred to her that she might have been able to live a far more serene life if only her breasts had been a little larger. And yet now, when she was being given a chance to enlarge them (a choice that carried with it a certain necessity), she found that she had absolutely no desire to make the change. They were fine as they were. Indeed, they were just right.

She touched her breasts through her tank top. They were the same breasts as always, shaped like two lumps of dough that had failed to rise—because of a failure to properly combine the ingredients—and subtly different in size. She shook her head.
But never mind. These are me
.

What will be left of me besides these breasts?

Tengo’s memory will stay with me, of course. The touch of his hand will stay. My shuddering emotion will stay. The desire to be in his arms will stay. Even if I
become a completely different person, my love for Tengo can never be taken from me. That’s the biggest difference between Ayumi and me. At my core, there is not nothing. Neither is it a parched wasteland. At my core, there is love. I’ll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever—his strength, his intelligence, his kindness. He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken
.

The thirty-year-old Tengo inside of Aomame was not the real Tengo. That Tengo was nothing but a hypothesis, as it were, created entirely in Aomame’s mind. Tengo still had his strength and intelligence and kindness, and now he was a grown man with thick arms, a broad chest, and big, strong genitals. He could be by her side whenever she wanted him there, holding her tightly, stroking her hair, kissing her. Their room was always dark, and Aomame couldn’t see him. All that her eyes could take in was his eyes. Even in the dark, she could see his warm eyes. She could look into them and see the world as he saw it.

Aomame’s occasional overwhelming need to sleep with men came, perhaps, from her wish to keep the Tengo she nurtured inside her as unsullied as possible. By engaging in wild sex with unknown men, what she hoped to accomplish, surely, was the liberation of her flesh from the desire that bound it. She wanted to spend time alone with Tengo in the calm, quiet world that came to her after the liberation, just the two of them together, undisturbed. Surely that was what Aomame wanted.

Aomame spent several hours that afternoon thinking about Tengo. She sat on the aluminum chair on her narrow balcony, looking up at the sky, listening to the roar of the traffic, occasionally holding a leaf of her sad little rubber plant between her fingers as she thought of him. There was still no moon to be seen in the afternoon sky. That wouldn’t happen for some hours yet.
Where will I be at this time tomorrow?
Aomame wondered.
I have no idea. But that’s a minor matter compared with the fact that Tengo exists in this world
.

Aomame gave her rubber plant its last watering, and then she put Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
on the record player. It was the only record she had kept after getting rid of all the others. She closed her eyes and listened to the music, imagining the windswept fields of Bohemia. How wonderful it would be to walk with Tengo in such a place! They would be holding hands, of course. The breeze would sweep past, soundlessly swaying the soft green grass. Aomame could feel the warmth of Tengo’s hand in hers. The scene would gradually fade like a movie’s happy ending.

Aomame then lay down on her bed and slept for thirty minutes, curled up in a ball. She did not dream. It was a sleep that required no dreaming. When she woke, the hands of the clock were pointing to four thirty. Using the food still left in the refrigerator, she made herself some ham and eggs. She drank orange juice straight from the carton. The silence after her nap was strangely heavy. She turned on the FM radio to find Vivaldi’s Concerto for Woodwinds playing. The piccolo was trilling away like the chirping of a little bird. To Aomame, this sounded like music intended to emphasize the unreality of her present reality.

After clearing the dishes from the table, Aomame took a shower and changed into the outfit she had prepared weeks ago for this day—simple clothes that made for easy movement: pale blue cotton pants and a white short-sleeved blouse free of ornamentation. She gathered her hair in a bun and put it up, holding it in place with a comb. No accessories. Instead of putting the clothes she had been wearing into the hamper, she stuffed them into a black plastic garbage bag for Tamaru to get rid of. She trimmed her fingernails and took time brushing her teeth. She also cleaned her ears. Then she trimmed her eyebrows, spread a thin layer of cream over her face, and put a tiny dab of cologne on the back of her neck. She inspected the details of her face from every angle in the mirror to be sure there were no problems, and then, picking up a vinyl gym bag with a Nike logo, she left the room.

Standing by the front door, she turned for one last look, aware that she would never be coming back. The thought made the apartment appear unbelievably shabby, like a prison that only locked from the inside, bereft of any picture or vase. The only thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought instead of goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this place without question or discontent.

“Good-bye,” she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.

The situation showed little development for a while. No one contacted Tengo. No messages arrived from Komatsu or Professor Ebisuno or Fuka-Eri. They all might have forgotten him and gone off to the moon. Tengo would have no problem with that if it were true, but things would never work out so conveniently for him. No, they had not gone to the moon. They just had a lot to do that kept them busy day after day, and they had neither the time nor the consideration to let Tengo know what they were up to.

Tengo tried to read the newspaper every day, in keeping with Komatsu’s instructions, but—at least in the paper he read—nothing further about Fuka-Eri appeared. The newspaper industry actively sought out events that had already happened, but took a relatively passive attitude toward ongoing events. Thus, it probably carried the tacit message, “Nothing much is happening now.” Having no television himself, Tengo did not know how television news shows were handling the case.

As for the weekly magazines, virtually all of them picked up the story. Not that Tengo actually read them. He just saw the magazine ads in the newspaper with their sensational headlines: “Truth about the enigmatic disappearance of the beautiful bestselling teenage author,” “
Air Chrysalis
author Fuka-Eri (17): Where did she disappear to?” ” ‘Hidden’ background of beautiful runaway teenage author.” Several of the ads even included Fuka-Eri’s photo, the one taken at the press conference. Tengo was, of course, not uninterested in what the articles might say, but he was not about to spend the money it would take to compile a complete set of weeklies. Komatsu would probably let him know if there was anything in them that he should be concerned about. The absence of contact meant that, for the moment, there had been no new developments. In other words, people had still not realized that
Air Chrysalis
had (perhaps) been the product of a ghostwriter.

Judging from the headlines, the media were focused on the identity of Fuka-Eri’s father as a once-famous radical activist, the fact that she had spent an isolated childhood in a commune in the hills of Yamanashi, and her present guardian, Professor Ebisuno (a formerly well-known intellectual). And even as the whereabouts of the beautiful, enigmatic teenage author remained a mystery,
Air Chrysalis
continued to occupy the bestseller list. Such questions were enough to arouse people’s interest.

If it appeared that Fuka-Eri’s disappearance was going to drag on, however, it was probably just a matter of time until investigations would begin to probe into broader areas. Then things might get sticky. If anyone decided to look into Fuka-Eri’s schooling, for example, they might discover that she was dyslexic and, possibly for that reason, hardly went to school at all. Her grades in Japanese or her compositions (assuming she wrote any) might come out, and that might naturally lead to the question of how a dyslexic girl had managed to produce such sterling prose. It didn’t take a genius to imagine how, at that point, people might start wondering if she had had help.

Such doubts would be brought to Komatsu first. He was the editor in charge of the story and had overseen everything regarding its publication. Komatsu would surely insist that he knew nothing about the matter. With a cool look on his face, he would maintain that his only role had been to pass the author’s manuscript on to the selection committee, that he had had nothing to do with the process of its creation. Komatsu was good at keeping a straight face when saying things he didn’t believe, though this was a skill mastered by all experienced editors to some degree. No sooner had he denied any knowledge of the deception than he would call Tengo and dramatically say something like, “Hey, Tengo, it’s starting: the heat is on,” as if he himself were enjoying the mess.

And maybe he was. Tengo sometimes felt that Komatsu had a certain desire for self-destruction. Maybe deep down he was hoping to see the whole plan exposed, a big juicy scandal blow up, and all connected parties blasted into the sky. And yet, at the same time, Komatsu could be a hardheaded realist. He would be more likely to cast his desire aside than to sail over the edge toward destruction.

Komatsu probably had it all figured out so that no matter what happened, he at least would survive. Just how he would manage it in this case, Tengo did not know, but Komatsu probably had his own clever ways of exploiting anything, be it a scandal or even total destruction. He was a shrewd player who was in no position to be criticizing Professor Ebisuno in that regard. But Tengo told himself with some confidence that Komatsu would be sure to contact him if clouds of suspicion began to appear on the horizon concerning the authorship of
Air Chrysalis
. So far, Tengo had merely functioned as a convenient and effective tool for Komatsu, but now he was also Komatsu’s Achilles’ heel. If Tengo were to disclose all the facts, that would put Komatsu in a terrible position, so Komatsu could not afford to ignore him. All Tengo had to do was wait for Komatsu to call; as long as there was no call, the “heat” was not “on.”

Tengo was more interested in what Professor Ebisuno might be doing at the moment. No doubt he was making things happen with the police, hounding them with the possibility that Sakigake was involved in Fuka-Eri’s disappearance, exploiting the event to pry open the religious organization’s hard shell. But were the police moving in that direction? Yes, they probably were. The media were already foaming at the mouth over the relationship of Fuka-Eri and Sakigake. If the police did nothing and important facts later emerged along that line, they would be attacked for having failed to investigate. In any case, however, their investigation would be carried out behind the scenes, which meant that no substantial new information was to be gleaned from either the weekly magazines or TV news.

Coming home from the cram school one day, Tengo found a thick envelope shoved into his mailbox in the apartment building’s front entrance. It bore Komatsu’s name as sender, the logo of his publisher, and six special-delivery postmarks. Back in his apartment, Tengo opened it to find copies of all the latest reviews of
Air Chrysalis
and a letter from Komatsu. Deciphering Komatsu’s scrawl took a good bit of time.

Tengo-

It kind of makes me want to see the look on their faces if they found out the truth.