Parasite Eve (13 page)

    The awkwardness faded.
Toshiaki apologized for the inconvenience of his absence and thanked Asakura
for her help at the funeral.

    “Please, think nothing of
it,” she said.

    “How are the data coming
along?”

    Asakura’s face beamed when
she heard these words, and she nodded.

    In most science departments,
undergraduates were assigned to staff members and conducted experiments on
their own in their instructors’ field, and the School of Pharmaceutical
Sciences was no exception. Ten seniors were assigned every year to Toshiaki’s
Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals course. Aside from the professor, the staff
included an associate professor, an assistant professor, and two research
associates, who were each charged with certain students. Toshiaki had taken two
under his wing this year. Having already completed their first term exams, they
were now able to devote themselves to lab work. However, they both hoped to
enter the graduate program and would be taking a vacation, once August came
around, to prepare for their entrance exams at the end of the month.

    Asakura had gone through all
this and was part of the graduate program now. Toshiaki had mentored her
throughout her senior year, and she had continued with the same concentration,
with him, for her master’s. Now in her second year, she would be graduating
soon; in fact, she’d already secured employment at a leading pharmaceutical
firm. All she needed to do now was assemble her data for her master’s thesis.

    “The MOM19
[23]
level has increased, as you expected,” explained
Asakura as she showed Toshiaki a printout of the previous week’s results.
During her senior year and her first master’s year, there was still something
rickety about the experiments she set up, but her intuition and versatility
were now those of a real researcher. Her explanations were concise, yet
thorough, and Toshiaki understood her perfectly.

    “Also, the cells you’d
transfected were growing fast, so I had to transpose them. I mean the ones you
introduced the retinoid receptors into.”

    Asakura stated these words
without fanfare, but they gave Toshiaki chills.

    Did she know about the other
cells? He studied her face assiduously for signs as he nodded. Just then, the
door opened and in walked one of his seniors, who was quite taken aback at
Toshiaki’s unexpected return.

    “Good morning,” said Toshiaki
gently and began talking with the student, missing his chance to probe what
Asakura knew about the cells.

    Perhaps because Toshiaki had
been able to talk with Asakura, he was able to greet the other staff members
without much awkwardness. They all bowed and uttered condolences to him, but
things didn’t get too soppy.

    “You shouldn’t return to work
so soon. Take a break,” Mutsuo Ishihara, the professor, told him. Toshiaki
thanked him but turned down the offer.

    “To be honest, I was actually
getting more depressed being away from my work.”

    Ishihara raised an eyebrow.

    “I see,” he said worriedly.
“Just don’t overdo it.”

    That night, after the staff
had gone home, Toshiaki stepped into the Cultivation Room with a feigned
nonchalance and opened the incubator. He took out the stainless steel sheet
from inside. There appeared to be no change in Kiyomi’s cell flasks from the
night before. He gazed at the word “Eve” written on the lid; he’d chosen this
name because Kiyomi’s birthday fell on Christmas Eve.

    After performing the primary
culture on her liver cells, he had come here every night to look at them. At
two or three in the morning, after all the students would have left, he came to
“meet” with the cells, not even turning on the lights, making sure nobody
caught on to his secret visits. Bathed in the pale glow of the clean bench,
Toshiaki would put his eyes up to the microscope and peer at the cells.

    He imagined that Kiyomi would
have been frightened by a figure hunched over a microscope in a gloomy room
during the dead of night. She had always been very sensitive, looking away
during the murder scenes of TV dramas, calling for his help whenever she needed
to get rid of an insect in the house. He had never been able to describe his
experiments to her in detail. Even after they married, for some time Kiyomi
innocently kept asking him about his research. He gladly informed her about the
more general findings of his work, but took care to avoid talking about
dissecting rats, cultivating cancer cells and bacteria, and such matters. He
knew not to, after the mention of a routine mouse injection had been enough to
frighten her. Toshiaki also made sure no odors from the lab animals lingered on
his clothing when he got home.

    But now Kiyomi herself was in
a culture flask. Even on the night of the wake, after gazing upon her face one
last time, he had come here to observe Eve. On that night, Toshiaki was seized
by strange delusions that Kiyomi had divided and disseminated.

    She was surely more than just
a corpse and the cells now in his possession. Each of her kidneys now thrived
in other people.

    “I’m sorry but you can’t meet
them,” he’d been told over the phone the day before.

    He’d held the receiver, just
sitting still for several seconds, before he could plead again.

    “Why not? Please. Just once.”

    But the woman on the phone
told him that the patients’ privacy had to be respected and that any such
action would be an intrusion.

    Toshiaki had called the City
Central Hospital after struggling in vain not to. He simply couldn’t resist
after he’d read the letter from the transplant coordinator, Odagiri. The letter
was very polite. It explained that Kiyomi’s kidneys had been transplanted into
two recipients and that one of them was a 14-year-old girl. It spoke of her
favorable recovery and expressed a deep gratitude on behalf of everyone
involved. At the end of the letter, a postscript said to contact her should
there be anything they could do for him.

    Kiyomi’s kidneys were still
alive, resuscitated in other bodies. Toshiaki’s heart ached at the thought. He
desperately wanted to meet these people. If anything, he hoped to find traces
of Kiyomi in those who harbored her gifts.

    In the end, he could do
nothing but hang up the phone in defeat.

    Of course, the hospital’s
response made perfect sense. If the donor’s family were allowed to meet the
recipient, unpleasant arguments of a financial nature could easily arise. If
the organ in question was ultimately rejected by the recipient’s body, the
result could be no little hurt on both sides. By keeping the two parties
ignorant of the other’s identity, it was ensured that their lives would be
lived without any unnecessary trauma. Though Toshiaki found no fault with this
reasoning, he refused to abandon the notion altogether.

    He wanted so much to
feel
Kiyomi’s existence, despite her body having already been reduced to ashes. All
he could do now to satisfy his desire was to look at her liver cells. Ever
since the coffin was carried away, his apartment had become dark and terribly
cold, enshrouded though it was in the brightness of early summer.

    Toshiaki had returned to his
lab duties with these thoughts swimming in his head. If he went back to work,
he could meet with Kiyomi anytime and not have to resort to lurking in the
university halls under cover of night. He could spend more time with her.

    Toshiaki removed another
flask from the incubator and placed it under the microscope. He then turned on
the lamp switch and drew his eyes close to the lenses.

    As he turned a small wheel
with the middle finger of his left hand to bring the image into focus, Kiyomi’s
cells emerged in full clarity. They had grown protrusions and looked like
stars, adhering to the bottom of the flask. In this one area alone, about
ten-odd cells covered the bottom completely. Toshiaki moved the stand, shifting
the field of view left and right to check the other cells. He had added a
number of growth factors to the solution for the primary culture, and Eve
looked alive, very much so.

    After looking at the cells
for a while, Toshiaki noticed something strange. He squinted.

    The cells had increased in
number.

    Unlike cancer cells, normal
liver cells did not multiply all that much. A built-in control system made sure
that they divided only when, and as much as, necessary. Cancer cells were
precisely those that weren’t subject to this control. When cultivating cancer
cells, adding a serum, their nutrient, was enough to have them multiply up to
the brim of a flask over the course of just a few days. In order to continue
with the cultivation, one actually had to remove the cells from the flask and
to redeposit just a portion of them. Meanwhile, in order to cultivate liver
cells, which had weak self- replicating capabilities to begin with, one had to
introduce growth inducers to the solution, in addition to the serum, to make
sure the cells didn’t die. Even then, liver cells never divided and
proliferated vigorously like cancer cells. In fact, they usually died out after
a few weeks.

    But these cells were
different.

    Cell coverage was dense, but
far from uniform, gathered in some places like little archipelagos and only
sparsely in others, a pattern that arose only when cells were multiplying.
Toshiaki had been careless not to see it until now. Their growth rate must have
been increasing with each passing day. He suspected for a moment that perhaps
they were fibroblasts that had been mixed in, but when he examined the cell’s
shapes he confirmed that it was indeed the liver cells.

    Toshiaki checked each flask
and plate. All showed similar signs of growth. The plate wells were already
overcrowded, so much so that if he didn’t transpose them, the cells would begin
to die.

    This was getting interesting.

    Eve consisted of normal liver
cells but was growing at the rate of cancer cells. There was a small
possibility that the presence of cancer-related genes was causing this anomaly,
but Toshiaki had no reason to suspect that Kiyomi had been suffering from liver
cancer. It looked like he had in his possession an extremely rare cell type.
Some unique mutation, the likes of which had never been reported before, was
transpiring within these cells. Establishing lines of these could not be that
hard, either.

    Toshiaki flicked on the clean
bench lamp and ignited the gas burners. He took some trypsin and a culture
medium from the refrigerator. He tossed a 15 cc tube, still in its wrapper, on
the bench. Finally he placed a cell plate on the bench with care.

    He sat in front of the bench
and began gathering the cells. They would have to be cloned
[24]
. His obsession with Eve was only growing stronger now
that it promised to aid his research on mitochondria. Countless questions
swarmed in his head. Had the mitochondrial form in these cells changed with
this metamorphosis? Were
β
-oxidation enzymes being induced? How
about the formation of retinoid receptors? If the mitochondria had indeed
changed, was it in fact responsible for the cellular reproduction? If so, how,
why?

    Kiyomi’s face floated before
his eyes. She was smiling, so cheerfully. Her large eyes, her gently curving
eyebrows, her lips that shone with a rosy hue, without the aid of rouge, those
soft cheeks, all were set aglow by her smile. Toshiaki loved her smile. He
could almost hear her pleasant, rolling voice.

    He recalled the first time
they met. Kiyomi, not used to drinking, was flushed from the beer she’d had,
but this detracted nothing from the loveliness of her laugh. Toshiaki talked
too volubly about his research, but she listened with interest. Her curiosity
didn’t abate even after they started going out. Toshiaki was touched by her
sincere desire to know more about him, though it seemed she also concealed a
certain jealousy towards his work. She sounded lonely when he was delayed by
his experiments late into the night. He was sympathetic to her complaints, but
was also vexed that he couldn’t convey to her that his love for her and his
love for research were two completely different dimensions of his life. It was
not a matter of choosing one over the other. To him, research was a necessity,
but Kiyomi never seemed willing to grasp that.

    But the two had become one
now. Toshiaki felt strangely elated. Studying these cells was, at one and the
same time, spending quality time with her.

    As he continued with the
limiting dilution of the cells, he felt a slight fever rise in him. He felt
that Kiyomi was calling out to his body. Despite not being able to meet the
recipients, he
did
have these cells. Working with them, he could connect
with Kiyomi.

    He had to nurture the cells
with care. He would prolong their life, as much as possible, and produce
significant data. He knew this would have made Kiyomi glad, too. He’d come home
late so often, even after they were married, and couldn’t give her all the
attention she deserved. He would now make up for it by pouring all of that lost
love into Eve.

    With a firm resolve, he
reached for the next plate.