Piercing (11 page)

In other words, her clinging to him like this was by no means an indication that she hadn’t read the notes. He’d have to spend more time with her before he’d know for sure.

‘Emergency room, eh?’ the driver said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. ‘Anything wrong?’

The girl laughed in a weird voice - a voice remarkably like the beeping of an ATM - and said, ‘I’m having a baby.’

Kawashima shook his head. What an imbecilic thing to say. The driver had seen her standing at the kerb, and would surely have noticed how slender she was. You could have encircled her waist with two hands.

‘Aren’t I?’ she said, looking up at Kawashima.

He didn’t bother to reply. He glanced at her moist eyes for a moment, but the expression on his face gave her nothing.

‘You look good with those glasses on,’ she said.

He stared straight ahead, thinking: Hurry up and get us to the hospital.

‘Your eyes are really pretty through the lenses.’

Chiaki had begun to sense that this man, her mystery man, was in fact very wealthy. He was so calm and dignified, and really kind of handsome up close. And somehow she knew she could trust him completely. Normally, whenever she said something she really believed, something straight from the heart, or made a clever joke, all she’d get from people were phony reactions. But this man wasn’t saying anything or reacting at all, so she knew he wasn’t a phony, or a liar. He’d been wearing that cheap suit at first, and the things he had on now - the coat, the sweatshirt and jeans, the shoes, even the glasses - were chintzy too, but maybe he was in disguise. Maybe he’d disguised himself because he was embarrassed about the whole idea of S&M. He’d reserved her for six hours but never even touched her in a sexual way. And he’d paid her for six even though she said she’d only charge him for four. He was nothing like all her other clients -
Hurry up and take it off, hurry up and show it to me, hurry up and lick it, hurry up and suck it
- he was different, in every way. And even though her leg had been hurting really bad, she’d got wet when he put her panties on for her. He must’ve gone to that hotel incognito for one night of fun, she thought, just to try something new. I bet he’s from Kyoto or Kobe, someplace like that. And I bet he’s even got another room at a different hotel, probably some unbelievable luxury suite.

‘Hey,’ she said softly, smiling up at him. ‘What hotel are you staying at really?’

Kawashima’s body stiffened.

I knew it, Chiaki said to herself - he’s a secret rich man.

Sure enough, thought Kawashima - she read the notes.

 

Most of the hospital’s windows were dark. The driver dropped them off at the side entrance and watched them move slowly, arm in arm, up the walkway to the door.

‘Listen, I’ll be waiting right here,’ Kawashima told the girl. ‘I don’t want to go in, but I won’t move from this spot. I don’t like hospitals, never did. I mean, the truth is, I’m afraid of them. Hospitals scare me.’

His breath made little clouds as he spoke. They were standing in front of a lighted sign that said EMERGENCY OUTPATIENT RECEPTION. The reception room would be brightly lit, and he couldn’t afford to be seen with the girl in a place like that, especially by any doctors or nurses.

‘OK,’ said Chiaki, thinking: So that’s why he’s never around when I wake up - he doesn’t like hospitals. ‘But shouldn’t you have them look at your hand?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Kawashima said. He took three 10,000-yen notes from his pocket and held them out to her. ‘Use this to pay.’

‘That’s OK,’ said the girl, shaking her head. ‘You already paid me extra and everything.’ She stepped towards the door beneath the sign, then stopped and looked back at him. ‘You’ll be right here, right?’

‘I promise.’

‘And you’ll stay with me tonight, won’t you?’

‘Of course. I won’t leave you.’

I’ve got to snuff her as soon as possible and get this over with, Kawashima thought as he watched her enter the building. The longer I put it off, the greater the risk that someone will get a good look at us together.

 

Chiaki shook her head when the nurse asked if she had her insurance card, and she had to present her driver’s licence and write her name and address on some forms. When she got in to see the doctor she told him she’d fallen off a bicycle. He inspected the wounds on her thigh and said that one of them was fairly deep and would require stitches. He didn’t question her story or ask about the shirt-cloth bandage, and though he must have seen the scars from all the previous incidents he didn’t say anything about them either. He injected her with a local anaesthetic in three different spots, disinfected the scraped knee and the wounds and sewed up the deep one, and covered them all with lots of gauze. He seemed to be in a hurry to finish.

There had been about ten other people in the waiting room. A man with a shaved head sitting in a wheelchair, his eyes half-closed and his mouth hanging open, wearing just a thin cotton robe; a middle-aged woman with thick make-up whose big toe and ankle were swollen grotesquely, and who was supported by two thin young men sitting on either side of her; a group of four men dressed for construction work who smelled of sweat and sat with their heads bent together, discussing something in low voices; an old man with bulging purple veins on his hands reading a newspaper; a man cradling a baby, next to a woman holding a stuffed toy chipmunk and pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

The anaesthetic had taken effect in just a few minutes, but Chiaki still felt a little pain when the suturing needle pierced her flesh, and beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip and the bridge of her nose. Each time the doctor’s arm brushed against her translucent purple panties she thought of the man with the glasses on, the way his eyes looked behind those lenses.

‘Is it OK to have sex?’ she asked as she was leaving the examination room. Without even glancing up from the chart he was scribbling on, the doctor muttered, ‘Just be careful the bandage doesn’t come off.’

Kawashima had taken refuge across the street from the entrance, at a bus stop with partitions to protect him from the freezing wind. He’d decided that loitering outside an emergency room entrance at eleven o’clock on a cold night like this, holding two large bags, just wouldn’t look right. If a cop on patrol were to come along and question him and then ask to look in the bags, he’d find the girl’s S&M toys in one and an ice pick and combat knife in the other. At a bus stop, on the other hand, there was nothing suspicious about carrying luggage of any size. He had a clear view of the hospital doors from here, and if a bus were to come he had only to act as if he were waiting for a different one.

His clothes - T-shirt, sweatshirt, and jeans under a cheap coat of thin material - were no match for this weather, though. He’d finally stopped bleeding, but his fingers were frozen, and he reopened the wound by putting his leather gloves back on. He wondered if he couldn’t separate himself from the cold and the pain, using the technique he’d developed as a boy. There were a lot of things he had to think through right now, while the girl was receiving treatment, but conditions like this robbed you of the power to process information. The technique . . .

It had been a cold night in winter, just like this, when he first discovered it. He’d run out of the house and slammed the sliding glass door behind him. Come to think of it, the palm of his left hand was hurting that night, too. Mother had coated it with industrial ammonia - the kind you dilute ten parts to one to use as insecticide. In a little while it had begun to make this awful smell, and he felt the skin of his palm burning. When he tried to wash the stuff off she pulled him away from the sink, and he ran outside.
Don’t bother coming back!
she shouted through the glass and locked the door, turning the latch slowly, deliberately.
Clack
. Her silhouette on the frosted glass was terrifying, blurry at the edges and bigger than life, and he was freezing and in so much pain that he thought he was going to lose his mind. I must’ve made use of that, he thought, that feeling that I was going insane. Something came flooding into me, I remember, and something went flooding out, and suddenly I’d managed to separate myself from the pain and the cold and the fear.

The one who’s here right now isn’t me. This pain isn’t mine
. That was the general idea, but of course he hadn’t put it into words at the time. The words had all been erased, along with the feelings. He’d used the technique later on in life, too, when he lived with the stripper. He seemed to remember subtly shifting the focus of his eyes, like with one of those 3-D illustrations, but there was no way he could maintain that sort of concentration right now. And it was no use trying to analyse how he’d done it. The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words - the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

About two hundred metres from the bus stop was a phone booth. If only he were inside it. He’d be completely protected from the wind, and he could even call Yoko and hear her voice if he wanted to. He was summoning up the sound of that soothing voice of hers when, absurdly, he began to imagine actually asking her advice.

‘So, anyway, she read the notes. I have no choice but to kill her, right? What else can I do?’

‘Where is she right now?’

‘She’s in the emergency room at this hospital. I’m outside waiting for her.’

‘Won’t she say something to the doctor, or one of the nurses?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, if she was going to do that, she could’ve talked to someone in the lobby of the hotel, right? The security guard or whatever.’

‘I guess that’s true. But if she read the notes, why isn’t she trying to escape?’

‘I don’t get that part, either, but it’s not as if this is a woman who’s in control of herself, or acting rationally. I’m pretty sure she’s a kindred spirit.’

‘Kindred spirit?’

‘I think something happened to her when she was small.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, but I can tell she’s afraid, and starved for something.’

‘So, what are you going to do now?’

A slender figure came out through the emergency room door. She was hopping on one leg and looking anxiously about.
One thing’s for sure
, Kawashima muttered under his breath as he sprinted towards the girl.
I can’t take her back to the hotel in Akasaka
.

He really did wait for me, Chiaki thought when she saw the man running to her out of the frozen darkness. She thought he looked like a steam locomotive in an old cartoon, lugging those two big bags and expelling clouds of white smoke. And it was comical the way he dangled her Lancel bag from the crook of his left arm, like a lady. Of course he can’t hold it in his hand because of his finger, she thought - but just look at him, running like that for all he’s worth. How cute can you get?

Not wanting to wait a single extra second to feel his arm around her shoulder, supporting her, Chiaki started towards the man, dragging her numb, anaesthetised right leg.

 

‘Come to my place,’ she said as they settled into a taxi. ‘You’ll come and stay with me, won’t you?’

Kawashima’s lips and cheeks were stiff with the cold, and he merely nodded rather than trying to speak. Her place would certainly work for him. He couldn’t take her to the hotel in Akasaka, where he was registered under his real name, and had been thinking he might have to make do with a love hotel after all.

Chiaki never thought to question the man’s motivation for accompanying her to the hospital - or for waiting outside, for that matter. She had long since lost sight of the fact that he was merely a client who’d happened to call her club and ask for a girl to be sent to his hotel room. All she could see were his selfless efforts on her behalf, which, in her mind at least, were beginning to take on epic proportions.

He stood out there in this freezing weather waiting for me, she thought. His arm felt like
ice
- I never even knew a body could
get
that cold. I was afraid he wouldn’t really wait for me, and when he wasn’t right outside the door I almost fainted, but then there he was, humping it across the street as fast as he could go, huffing and puffing clouds of steam. It was like being in a movie, like being lead actress in some big romantic scene.

It was warm inside the taxi, but the man was still shivering. His face, just above and to the right of hers, looked distorted, the features out of balance. It was as if only some of his facial muscles had thawed while the rest remained frozen solid. His hair, exposed all that time to the cold wind, was dry and mussed, his teeth were chattering, and his nose was runny. His eyes were watering, too, and he kept blinking. His face was a complete mess, in fact, and yet it was also the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. She had a sudden urge to hit that face. Not just give him a little slap on the cheek but slug him as hard as she could, with her fist or a bottle or a wrench or something, right in the eye. He’d be bleeding and begging her to stop, and she’d just laugh. He’d be even cuter weeping and asking for forgiveness, she thought. And after that he’d stay by her side for ever, no matter what.

Chiaki wanted to communicate these feelings to him. How nice it would be if she could tell him everything, even all the bad stuff. She could see herself tugging on his sleeve, going:
Listen, listen, I know you probably don’t like to hear about things like this? But I really really hate my father. I do. Everybody thinks he’s a good man, a nice, respectable gentleman, and he was head accountant for the biggest company in our home town and didn’t even have any interests or hobbies outside of work except for spending like an hour every day feeding the goldfish, but from about the time I started elementary school, whenever my mother was away or after she’d gone to sleep, he’d do nasty things to me. He really did. That’s why I’ve always just wished he would hurry up and die, and he’s told me to drop dead too, lots of times. I really and truly wish he would die, but when I was in middle school my tonsils kept getting inflamed and finally I got a really bad fever and they decided to take them out? And we lived in this small town outside Nagoya that didn’t even have a real hospital, so our local doctor was going to perform the operation, and at the dinner table my mother was worrying about that, saying she wondered if the doctor really knew what he was doing, and my father said, ‘If anything happens to Chiaki I’ll kill that son of a bitch,’ and then he burst into tears. I mean, I was amazed. At the time our family was a shambles because I’d finally told my mother what he was doing to me, and after that he turned into this really mean and angry person who was always yelling, but him saying that about the doctor and crying, that’s the thing I remember most. You don’t see a grown man cry very often, right? I changed
my
personality too, right after I entered junior college, except I did it on purpose, and after that boys started liking me more, and I have three boyfriends right now, sort of, but don’t be jealous, OK? You don’t have anything to be jealous about. They’re all losers, really. One’s named Kazuki; he’s a college student, but in high school he crashed his motorcycle, and his shoulder and knee are messed up, and he’s always saying he wants to die. I like to watch boys when they’re sleeping really soundly? So about six months ago I crushed up three Halcion tablets and mixed them in Kazuki’s Campari and orange, and ever since then he won’t eat or drink anything I give him. They’re all like that. Yoshiaki’s this guy who when I tried to stab myself in the leg he got all hysterical, and then when I pricked him just a little with the knife he ran away. He’s twenty-eight now but he’s still just a clerk in a video store. Atsushi is young, the same age as me, and he just became a hairdresser, and he’s half-white but near-sighted and doesn’t have any parents. He’s an orphan. He’s always going on and on about his childhood, and when he gets drunk he might tell me he’s going to kill me or he might start bawling like a baby, and sometimes he calls me Mommy. Atsushi’s the one who taught me about piercings. He’s got five rings in his ear, eighteen gauge to ten gauge, but when I told him to get one in his nipple to match mine, and to get a
Sailor Moon
tattoo - because I like
Sailor Moon?
- or if not that, a skull, he stopped calling me. I was eighteen when I changed my personality, and in the three years since then I’ve had about twenty boyfriends, but they were all more or less like that. So you can understand how happy I am to finally meet someone like you!