Virus: The Day of Resurrection (37 page)

“Say something!” the woman cried hoarsely. “Please! Just say something to me.”

The room was hot enough to broil something in. The air conditioning at this six-story upmarket apartment had gone out one week before, at the same time that the water had stopped running. Three days ago, ignoring her high fever, the woman had taken a bucket and gone down to the first floor to draw water. Out in the hallway, the bodies of three men and women had been quietly rotting in the 32-degree heat. The bodies of a French poodle and a Siamese cat were also present, hair falling out, teeth bared. The streets were entirely silent, and now even the rising pillars of black smoke were gone. In the garage, dust had collected on a great many expensive luxury cars, and even in the pool in the apartment’s garden there had been three bodies: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl wearing a flower-print dress, a silver-haired gentleman in a polo shirt, and a young man in narrow pants. The young man’s body looked to have already been dead for some time; his abdomen was swollen and looked like that of a sumo wrestler. His eyes had already fallen out. The woman had hesitated for a long while at the waterside, and at last drawn water from the place farthest from the floating corpses. The water had stopped running even on the first floor, and there wasn’t any other water to be had.

For three days, the woman had been slaking her thirst with that stinking water. By now, however, most of the water in the bucket had evaporated, and she realized that she was near the end.

Although she was tormented in the blistering heat by dreams of being burnt at the stake, the woman still lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep, and lived on. And then there were other times when she dreamed that she was the last person left living in the whole world and jolted awake in terror.

“No!” she screamed in that hoarse, husky voice. “I don’t want to die all alone! No!”

Her voice echoed faintly in the empty room. Silence. Then madly, she turned through the television channels again and turned the dial on the radio. Silence.

She clawed at her hair and cried out like a bird. But in reality no voice came out. There was nothing that she could hear. Suddenly, she experienced a hallucination that the telephone beside her pillow had begun ringing, and in her dream state she snatched up the receiver.

It had been nothing more than the song of a wind chime on some distant veranda of one of the other rooms.

Listening to the receiver she had pressed up against her ear, however, the woman was shocked to discover that the telephones in this area were still working. As though dreaming, she began turning the dial at random. Suddenly, she heard a voice. Hardly able to believe it, she shouted into the handset, “Hello! Hello!”

“… southeasterly breeze, cloudy but clearing off later in the day, with scattered showers,” a male voice said mechanically. It was a deep voice. A dead voice. “The temperature is likely to rise, exceeding thirty-six degrees at midday. Repeating … The morning of July 6 will be …”

What day was today? The day she had fallen down in the doorway while trying to leave the room. It had definitely been July 3 that day. How many days had passed since then?

“Hello …” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Please answer me … somehow I’m all alone, and I’m about to die …”

“The Kyoto-Hyogo region will be clear and cloudy off and on in the morning …”

A cold shadow, dark as India ink, was seeping into the room from all four corners, drawing closer and closer to the woman, closing in on her, enveloping her.

“Help me!” she screamed. “It’s getting dark! It’s pitch black!”

Suddenly, she half-remembered a name. It was the name of a man … a man who was far, far away at the very end of the earth. But before she could remember his name clearly, the cold, black mantle came down over her. There was only a nothingness—an intense, all-freezing solitude that lay at the other end of the bottomless blackness.
I’m scared,
she thought
… shizumi.

And that was the end. Next to her dry, lifeless, bluish, darkened face, the ivory-colored ebonite continued to murmur softly.

“There will also be thunderstorms in the mountains …”

4. The First Week of August

“Hey! Is there anyone there?” It was the voice of a child, still young, and high pitched. It sounded as if it would break down and cry at any moment, yet there was a sense of desperation in it too. “I’m Toby. Umm … I’m in New Mexico … in the mountains a little way from, uh, Santa Fe. Ahoy … Can anybody come and help me? I’m Toby Anderson from Santa Fe … I’m five years old.”

“Stop it!”

Yoshizumi squeezed hard on the arm of Tatsuno, who had been about to press the microphone switch. “Radio transmissions are banned right now—we can’t transmit from our side.”

“It’s a child!” Tatsuno shouted. “All alone. He’s asking for help!
A five-year-old child is—
”

“What can we do for him?” Yoshizumi asked, turning away. “Talking to that child would be nothing but more pain for us and more pain for him.”

“He’s only
five years old
!” Tatsuno’s body was trembling as though he had contracted malaria. “Can you really let a five-year-old child—a child who’s looking for help—die all alone?”

“Ahoy, um … somebody answer …” The faint, tender voice sounded oddly clear coming from the speaker. “This wireless is Daddy’s. My daddy says that if anyone uses it but him, they’ll be punished by the government. But … since Daddy and Mommy died, I’m calling you, even if maybe I’m not supposed to. Ahoy … somebody help me … aren’t you there, Mr. Policeman? Can’t somebody come here? It’s been three days since I had anything to eat. The refrigerator and the electricity stopped, and the ham is spoiled now. Somebody answer, please.”

“Get away from there, Tatsuno.” Yoshizumi grabbed Tatsuno’s shoulder. “Switch it off.”

“No!” Tatsuno stubbornly shook his head as his shoulders trembled and tears ran down his face. “I’m at least going to listen. To the very end of the very end. I’ll listen to him, so that I’ll never forget what this child says for as long as I live.”

“Somebody come, please …” With this, the child at last broke down into tears. “Isn’t anyone there?” said the sobbing child in the distant mountains of New Mexico. “Somebody answer me. Somebody … help me. Mommy and Daddy are dead. So are Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft next door, and their dog Liberty. Their horse Atkins fell down and is almost dead …”

“If nobody answers … I’ll kill myself.”

Yoshizumi held on fast to Tatsuno, who, unable restrain himself any longer, practically lunged for the switch. In the narrow room, the two of them grappled each other for real. A chair was overturned and a bookshelf fell down. Both of the men were now bleeding from the nose and fought with eyes shut from bruises. Their clothing was in tatters, but still they pounded away. Tears streamed down their faces. Even so, both of them continued to fight on meaninglessly as they wept, as though all responsibility for the worldwide tragedy lay in the other. They were filled with anger, caught up in the struggle with a ferocity that seemed almost murderous. When other members of the team heard the commotion and finally pulled them apart, they heard a faint sound from the speaker, which had been silent up till that moment.

Bang.

The two of them stood frozen there with their blood-spattered faces and stared at the speaker. But the speaker was only humming softly now, and no further sounds could be heard.

“He was saying the horse was on the point of death,” Yoshizumi offered hesitantly. “It must have been the horse …”

Suddenly, Tatsuno threw off the arms that had been restraining him and leapt forward. He drove a vicious uppercut into Yoshizumi’s face. Yoshizumi smashed against the table and then slid down onto the floor. Tatsuno sat down on the floor, covered his face, and broke down into tears.

That woeful lamentation, like the thin sound of a flute, faded in and out as it was transmitted through the corridors from dome to dome of icebound Showa Base.

5. The Second Week of August

“This is Professor Eugene Smirnoff, instructor for History of Civilization at Helsinki University. I don’t think there’s anyone left who would still remember me. And even if somebody who does is still alive out there, I don’t think that they’re listening to this broadcast. However, I have to keep speaking, and this is the day of my regular radio lecture. And this is the last … For a variety of reasons, this will probably be my final lecture. Fortunately, this radio station can still broadcast, thanks to its having its own generator. Certainly, from the look of things here, the people from the station who indulged my last request in making preparations for these broadcasts now seem to all be deceased. The man lying facedown in the mixing room is not moving. I, too, am presently running a forty-degree temperature and am being struck with heart palpitations at regular intervals. I myself do not know how many more minutes I have left to live. However, there is no doubt that my fondest wish as a scholar is to die while giving a lecture, and the fact that that wish seems about to be granted is my greatest joy.

“I wonder if anyone is out there listening to me? No, on second thought, let’s not indulge in vain wish-making. Here in Finland, our government collapsed ten days ago, and the citizenry is also lost. The tiny number that are still surviving are no longer the citizens of any nation, but the people of the country of the dead …

“The topic of today’s lecture is a simple one. Over the past decade of lecturing in universities all across Europe, I have never once said plainly what I will say today. It was so obvious that it was too obvious—nothing more than a zero, a point of departure, and something that couldn’t have been changed no matter what anyone did. And also, it was the destination point in my field: the history of civilization. It was the simple fact that human beings have always been animals. Nothing more than animals.

“To be honest, I no longer really know what I should say. Or perhaps I should say instead that there is nothing left to say. By this point, it is meaningless to make funerary speeches over the sudden end at which humanity has arrived after three and a half million years. It is with heartrending emotion, however, that I find myself unable to refrain from speaking across these airwaves to which no one is listening to a deserted world that has become filled with empty, vacant houses. God is dead already. In the late nineteenth century, we killed Him with our own hands. Spreading out before me there is nothing but darkness and black emptiness—a meaningless
ding an sich
. The consciousness of a destroyed human is nothing, and the ancient darkness is again falling across this beautiful—but meaningless—astronomical body. Will the earth again give rise someday to highly developed intelligent life? Will it be observed and interpreted by nonhuman consciousnesses someday? How many hundreds of millions of years will it take? Or was the life span of humanity, in the period from its birth to its death, the only chance that this dark and lonely body in the heavens will ever have? Through the loss of the human race, was it just humanity that lost its only chance, or was this also the only chance for this grain of dust drifting across the great sea of the universe?

“You’ll have to excuse me—my mind is a little confused from the fever … do forgive me, please. Ah, anyway, my vision seems to be growing blurry. I feel I am no longer able to speak logically. Eventually, probably in the next few minutes, I am going to die, so please, just let me say whatever comes to mind.

“Truly, this is an unspeakable end for humanity. Who in the world of the twentieth century could have ever predicted that the brilliant human race—so full of life, that had been climbing up the last few stairs to a new stage of civilization—would meet with this kind of unexpected, unbelievable demise? It’s a completely meaningless end. You could say that it’s pure nonsense. There’s no dignity about it, no hope. We were not given the slightest forewarning that death itself was at the gates. While humanity was looking up toward the future, it was unexpectedly attacked at its feet. Without even time for bewilderment or panic, we all just suddenly dropped dead. How can such a thing be? How can such a stupid thing as that really be possible? Our destruction is already a
fait accompli
, but whatever you do and however you think about it, isn’t this … isn’t it just too sad for the human race?

“No, shouting and lamenting over it won’t do any good at this point. And yet, just before the end, perhaps the most human thing we can do is to resist, to hold on to hope even in the face of the deep blackness facing mankind.

“But even so, this deep blackness we face … what a hopeless deep blackness it is! And humanity has clung too tightly to human things. Already more than half a century has passed since Nietzsche wrote
Human, All Too Human.
Over half a century has already passed since the syphilitic genius named Friedrich Nietzsche—having adopted the idea that God was dead from the
fin-de-siècle
thinkers, from A.V. de L’Isle-Adam, and from Dostoyevsky’s declaration—predicted the
ubermensch
who with groping hands must challenge the fierce void that is itself the rugged material world into which we are born naked, with no one to help us, all alone in a bare, godless, material universe, with neither help nor rest. Though over half a century has passed, human beings, in their weakness, have held fast to themselves—in other words, we have held fast to human things, standing on the brink of the depths of the void and the
ding an sich
. Ultimately, we lacked the courage to face up to our own true selves—our bare forms noble though petty, everything though nothing, almighty though powerless, filled with all the cruelty of matter and all the infinite kindness of spirit. Human, all too human.