The Laws of Evening: Stories (14 page)

How he would miss fieldwork: this riotous energy all about him, each cell living with all its might, yet synchronized in cycles of deceptive efficiency.

Kenji’s fascination with nature had started when he was six, when his family had evacuated to the countryside to stay with relatives after the Namiki bombing. He still looked back on those months as the finest in his childhood. One day his granny had taken him to a dense pine thicket to pick shiitake mushrooms with other villagers, wicker baskets slung over their backs. They had all roared with good-natured laughter whenever someone forgot and leaned over too far, causing the contents of his basket to come tumbling out….

“Everything in nature is put here on purpose,” his granny had told him, pushing apart mushrooms as soft as flesh, “to keep something else alive. Nature knows exactly what it’s doing.” And the boy, young as he was, had grasped something of this omniscient bounty. He felt secure and protected on those rainy nights when they all hunched over the brazier, mouths watering over roasted mushrooms and quail eggs.

Later, as a young man, Kenji attempted to re-create the wonder of those early days by studying the natural sciences, which promised ever-widening vistas of discovery. His focus on primate sociology was a lucky accident—the influence of a particularly charismatic mentor—or so he had always believed. But in the past few months, as he looked back over his career, it had occurred to Kenji that his specialty was a logical, if somewhat extreme, extension of his nostalgia for living off the land. In primate society was the essence of oneness with nature that humans must once have had, muddied now by all the ills of modern life. At this late age, Kenji felt a rueful tenderness for his early idealism; and in this context, perhaps, he had become unduly disheartened during yesterday’s talk with Dr. Ogawa.

Over the past few weeks, the two men had held some interesting discussions as they drove into town in the evenings (Kana-chan had to stay behind, sorting specimens). Both Kenji and Dr. Ogawa were interested in the concept of evolutionary divergence.

“New studies tell us,” Dr. Ogawa had said, as they descended past terrace after terrace of rice paddies darkening in the twilight, “that human DNA is almost identical to that of primates. Almost
identical
. How is this possible? What accounts, then, for the vast difference between the species?”

A few months ago, Kenji would have made an irreverent quip about not being so sure there
was
a vast difference, following it up with various conjectures of his own. Since the yam rice dinner, however, his old economy had returned. This evening, weary, he merely shook his head with a
hnn
sound.

“Sialic acids,” Dr. Ogawa said with quiet relish. “That’s one of the clues.” Characteristic of his step-by-step thought process, he started at the beginning. Sialic acids acted as a protective layer over a species’s DNA structure, shielding it from invasion and alteration by outside viruses. It had been discovered, only recently, that human sialic acids had a makeup distinctly different from that of primates’.

“Which would suggest,” Dr. Ogawa said, “that each species was influenced, over time, by different viruses.”

Dr. Ogawa’s theory was this: long ago, in humans, some virus had tampered with the delicate balance of electrical impulses that prevents every mammalian brain from exceeding its predetermined size limit. “So now humans are born with open sutures in the skull,” Dr. Ogawa said, “to accomodate further brain growth. Whereas every other mammal continues to be born with a fully knit skull.”

“So what you’re saying,” Kenji said dully, “is that our larger brains, our self-awareness, basically everything that makes us human, is in direct violation of nature’s internal control system?”

“Maa maa, Endo-san, isn’t that a dire interpretation! Evolution is all
about
mutation.”

Kenji could sense his own brain firing, working, but in that slow underwater way, the clean lines of scientific thought tangling in the kelp of his personal sorrows. “A mutation like this would have enormous repercussions,” he said finally. “It casts a whole new light on humans running amok over the biosphere. The human brain as the supreme anomaly, a divine defect….” A sense of futility had washed over him, and in spite of himself he sought Dr. Ogawa’s eyes for reassurance.

Dr. Ogawa’s eyes, squinting suspiciously behind their lenses, seemed small and far away, as if seen from the other end of a telescope. “Defect? What, like de-evolution? What kind of unscientific talk is that?”

“Viruses, too, thrive by ravaging their own environment,” Kenji said. In the deepening dusk, the dirt road glowed whitely before them.

“Interesting. I suppose one
could
find similarities.” Dr. Ogawa turned his headlights on. “But why make moral judgments about life-forms?”

A woodpecker, drilling directly above his head, brought Kenji back to the present. He opened his eyes. His recent problems suddenly seemed alien compared to the sunny scene before him, tasseled grasses waving and everything in perfect harmony down to the
pyoo pyoo
of a whitetail: one giant attuned orchestra. He had a fleeting impression that his arrhythmia was the consequence of straying so far, over the decades, from the simple faith he had once known as a boy. How much this career of his had cost him: the joys of a simple home life, the bonds he might have forged with a son, now grown and distant in Wakayama.

One of the monkeys, a young male, had ambled over to the mirror and now sat hunched before it with his back to Kenji, unmoving. Typical beta behavior, he thought automatically. An alpha would have charged the mirror or bared its teeth. But in another few weeks they would all be sitting sideways before the mirror, monitoring the scene by glancing back and forth between the clearing and the reflected image.

Kenji could make out the monkey’s close-set eyes in the freestanding mirror, peering unblinkingly at its small reddened face. Seen from the rear he looked pitifully human, tiny shoulder blades poking up through the fur, and Kenji had the same urge he used to have when his son was small, to rest his hand on that narrow back. Primates moved him, as did children, by all they were incapable of understanding.

When Kenji came home (they had by now transferred from Red Monkey Inn to a condominium, with its veranda overlooking Kashigawa Valley), his wife was boiling something in the kitchen. Its pungent, earthy smell hit him as soon as he opened the door.

“They’re wild
fuki
shoots from the hills, where your monkeys are,” Sumiko told him. She looked excited and happy. “A woman at the market gave me the recipe.” Her hair was wrapped up, peasant-style, in one of the dyed indigo kerchiefs native to the area. Her dark-skinned face, washed clean of cosmetics and glistening from the heat of the stove, put him in mind of the healthy country women of his childhood.

“Ara, you’re cooking!” he said in mock surprise. “What’s going on? Is this the latest in country chic?”

She gave an embarrassed little laugh, pulling off her new kerchief as she did so, and once again she was the university wife from Tokyo. “So how’s your new medication working?” she asked, businesslike.

“So-so,” Kenji said. He couldn’t help an inward cringe; his condition was a fragile thing, to be cradled in the soft recesses of his mind and handled, only at the right time and with utmost delicacy, by no one but himself.

“Try not to get your hopes up,” Sumiko said. “Remember what the doctor said? That a certain level of fatigue is probably unavoidable?”

“Aaa, aaa, right.”

“Try to be more careful about long hours, and don’t run yourself down. Remember, you have a serious condition.”

“Aaa! Aaa!” He escaped to the bathroom for his predinner bath, which was ready and steaming under its heavy lid. Sumiko had purchased some old-fashioned gourd loofahs, as well as an array of local beauty products. Kenji picked up, then put down, a small jar of soy curd, labeled “The Beauty Lotion of Our Mothers.” It was unseemly, an intelligent woman like Sumiko embracing this wartime trend like she was a member of the masses. It occurred to him, briefly, to wonder about her day-to-day life, so closely linked to his and yet riddled with mysterious gaps. He tried imagining it: a slower pace, a narrower scope, the kind of world he himself had always resisted.

Settled in his bath now, his mind restfully blank, Kenji gazed down at his body wavering beneath the shifting water. It always came as something of a jar, after a full day of observing primates, to view the naked human form: the vestigial shortness of the arms, the pink hairless skin, vulnerable and fetuslike.

Evolution is all about mutation
.

That talk with Dr. Ogawa had, since then, vaguely reminded Kenji of another scientist, and he now remembered, with the satisfying click of a fact falling into place, who it was. Buffon—a French naturalist from the eighteenth century—had proposed that humans, biologically speaking, were born at least a year too soon. Kenji had read him many years ago, in the context of another topic which he could not recall, and at the time he had found the man’s claims entertaining but not particularly relevant to his work. Buffon claimed that man was forced to complete, within society, a psychological development that all other species accomplished within the womb. As Kenji recalled, this had to do with the human head being too large to be carried full term. Man’s problems, apparently, traced back to this prematurity of birth.

Buffon’s idea had been bolstered by another European—Ludwig Bolk, from the 1920s—who proved that mutations inhibiting maturation did occur naturally in animals.

Kenji closed his eyes and conjured up the perfection of this afternoon: the sound of leaves and insects and birds weaving together into one drowsy murmur, the monkeys seated on the ground, gnawing on yams with their hairy legs splayed out before them. Like Eden, according to the Western conception: the paradise from which man was banished almost immediately after his creation. Kenji recalled that Christianity, unlike the Eastern religions, believed humans to be distinct from animals, born under a shadow of original sin. Well, perhaps they had tapped into something. Clues were everywhere. How odd that he had never noticed.

“Dinner’s ready!” called Sumiko from the hallway.

Unfortunately, Kenji’s new medication brought on proarrhythmia, an exacerbation of his preexisting condition. “Saa, who knows why?” his doctor said blandly, ignoring Kenji’s glare of exasperated disgust. “Every so often, antiarrhythmic drugs have tricky side effects.” An appointment was made for a pacemaker installation.

The operation was to take place in three days. This afternoon, sprawled in a chair on the condominium terrace, Kenji mulled over the mirror test that he planned to administer tomorrow. It was the first and most basic of the series: anesthetizing the monkeys, painting green dye on their heads, then seeing if the recovered monkeys touched their own heads while looking in the mirror.

It worried him that, after almost two months of loose observation, he had come up with no significant brainstorms, unusual connections, or inspirations for more tailored tests. Loose observation was usually his most fertile period, when chance details coupled with spontaneous insights guided the course of his study, refining a general hunch into a testable hypothesis. But this time, although he earnestly, even desperately, watched the monkeys grooming or fingering the mirror or leaping lightly from branch to branch, nothing clicked into place. He was like a thick-witted detective at a crime scene, unable to make sense of clues right before his eyes.

Never mind, Kenji told himself. He gave a curt sigh and glanced at his watch. It was a little after four. In a few hours, his new assistant from the university, whom he had recruited to handle the monkey anesthetization as well as any lifting or dragging, would be coming by to go over the checklist.

“I still don’t see why you can’t put off your experiment until we get back from Tokyo,” Sumiko said. She was sitting beside him on the terrace, alternately squinting at an instruction manual and weaving something out of rattan.

With one hand, Kenji brushed away her words as if they were flies. She’s like Ogawa, he thought with a flare of helpless fury. A horse with blinders.

They sat silent. The terrace overlooked the south end of Kashigawa Valley, and the cluttered towns lay faint and ephemeral in the dense daze. To Kenji’s left loomed the hills of his final project, so close he could distinguish the colors of certain trees. Despite the patchwork of lime-colored rice paddies encroaching on their lower regions, the hills gave off an ancient air, as if they had never been shadowed by anything but clouds and an occasional red hawk.

After some time, Kenji glanced over at his wife. Her arm, weaving the rattan stalk in and out, moved as serenely as a swimmer’s.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“A pouch,” she replied, “for hard-boiled eggs.”

“Aaa.”

They fell silent once more. Below them in the valley a train whistle sliced the air, echoing the mournful, delayed quality of Kenji’s mind.

“The first time I ever rode the slow train,” Sumiko said, “my mother packed hard-boiled eggs in a straw pouch. We peeled them on the train, and ate them.” She said this absently, unmindful of his response, as a mother might talk to herself in the company of a child. Kenji felt himself freeze as he instinctively did before creatures in the wild, peacefully eating and as yet unaware of a human presence.