Spiral

Ando briefly considered the possibility of a suicide. Distraught at his lover’s cruel treatment of him, a man decides to take his own life and swallows poison. He decides to call the woman who’s driven him to it, to accuse and torment her. Instead, all he can manage is a dying scream.

But, according to the report, suicide didn’t seem to be a possibility. There were no signs on the scene of anything that might have contained poison, nor any proof that Mai had taken such an object away from the premises. Besides, one look at the shape she was in dispelled any such suspicions. One had to be quite obtuse to the subtleties of relations between the sexes not to see at a glance how deeply Mai Takano had respected her professor. The moistness that welled up in her eyes now and then was not due to guilt about having driven her lover to take his own life; it came from profound sorrow at the thought of never being able to touch his body again. For Ando, it was like looking in a mirror; he confronted his own grief-stricken face every morning. That kind of devastation couldn’t be faked. Then there was the fact that she’d come down to the M.E.’s office to claim the body after the autopsy. But most important of all, Ando couldn’t imagine a guy as dauntless as Ryuji Takayama killing himself over something like a break-up.

Which left the heart or the head.

Ando had to look for signs of sudden heart failure or cerebral hemorrhaging. Of course, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that an examination of the stomach contents would turn up potassium cyanide. Or signs of food poisoning, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or one of the other unexpected causes that he occasionally came across. But his suspicions had never been far off the mark before. Takayama had sensed something wrong with him all of a sudden, and he’d wanted to hear his girlfriend’s voice one last time. But there hadn’t been enough time to do more than scream before his heart stopped beating. That had to be it more or less.

The technician who was assisting Ando that day poked his head into the office and said, “Doctor, everything’s ready.”

Ando stood and said, to no one in particular, “Well, time to get started.”

One way or another, he’d have the facts once he’d dissected the body. He’d never failed to establish a cause of death before. In no time, he’d figure out what had killed Takayama. The thought that he might not didn’t even cross his mind.

2

The autumn morning sunlight slanted into the hallway leading to the autopsy room. There was something dark and dank about the corridor, nonetheless, and as they walked, their rubber boots made a sickening sound. There were four of them: Ando, the technician, and the two policemen. The rest of the staff—another assistant, the recorder, and the photographer—were already in the autopsy room.

When they opened the door, they could hear the sound of running water. The assistant was standing at the sink next to the dissecting table, washing instruments. The faucet was abnormally large, and water cascaded from it in a thick, white column. The 350-square-foot floor was already covered with water, which was why all eight of them, including the two police witnesses, wore rubber boots. Usually, the water was left running for the duration of the autopsy.

On the dissecting table, Ryuji Takayama awaited them, stark naked, his white belly protruding. He was about five-three, and between the layer of fat around his middle and the muscles on his shoulders and chest, he was built like an oil drum. Ando lifted the body’s right arm. No resistance, other than gravity. Proof that life had indeed left the body. This man had once prided himself on the strength of his arms, and now Ando could move them about as freely as he would a baby’s. Ryuji had been the strongest of any of them in school; nobody was a match for him at arm-wrestling. Anybody who challenged him found his arm slapped flat on the table before he could even flex his biceps. Now, that same arm was powerless. If Ando let go, it’d flop helplessly onto the table.

He turned his gaze to the lower torso, to the exposed genitalia. The penis was shriveled amidst thick black pubic hair, and the glans was almost entirely hidden by the foreskin. The member was incredibly small, almost cute, given the robustness of the body. Ando found himself wondering if Ryuji and Mai had been able to have normal sexual relations at all.

He took up the scalpel and inserted it below the jaw, slicing the thick muscle in a straight line all the way down to the abdomen. The body had been dead for twelve hours and was completely cold. He broke the ribs with bone-cutters, removing them one by one, and then took out both lungs and handed them to his assistant. In med school Ryuji had been a diehard anti-smoker, and from the look of his lungs, he’d remained one to the end. They were a handsome shade of pink. With practiced movements, the assistant weighed and measured the lungs, announcing his findings to the recorder, who wrote them down. All the while, the room was bathed in flashes of light as photos were taken of the lungs from every angle. Everybody knew his job well, and everything went forward without a hitch.

The heart was enveloped in a thin fatty membrane. Depending on the light it looked either whitish or yellowish, and it was a bit larger than average. Eleven ounces. The weight of Ryuji’s heart. Point thirty-six percent of his total body weight. Just looking at the outer surface of the organ, which a mere twelve hours ago had still been pumping life-blood, Ando could tell it had suffered severe necrosis. The left part of the heart, below the fatty membrane, had turned a dark reddish-brown color, darker than the rest of the heart. Part of the coronary artery, branching off the surface of the organ to coil around it, was blocked, probably by a thrombosis. Blood had been unable to flow past that point, and the heart had stopped. Classic indicators of a heart attack.

Based on the extent of the necrosis, Ando had a pretty good idea where the blockage had occurred: in the left coronary artery, just before it branched off. With a blockage there the chance of death was extremely high. The cause of death, then, had pretty well been established, though he’d have to wait for test results, which wouldn’t come in for a day at least, to know what had caused the blockage. Ando pronounced with confidence a case of “myocardial infarction due to blockage of the left coronary artery” and moved on to extracting the liver. After that, he checked for abnormalities in the kidneys, spleen, and intestines, and examined the stomach contents, but nothing caught his eye.

He was about to cut the skull open when his assistant craned his neck suspiciously.

“Doctor, take a look at that throat.”

The assistant pointed to a spot inside the throat where it had been split open. Part of the mucus membrane on the surface of the pharynx had ulcerated. The ulcer wasn’t large, and Ando might have overlooked it had it not been for his assistant’s alertness. Ando had never seen anything like it before. It was probably unrelated to the cause of death, but he cut out a piece of it anyway. He’d have to wait until they ran tests on the tissue sample before he could tell just what it was.

Now, he made incisions in the skin around Ryuji’s head, and peeled back the scalp from the back to the forehead. The man’s wiry hair now covered his face, his eyes, nose, and mouth, and the white inner surface of the scalp was exposed to the overhead light. Anyone who saw it could tell that the human face was constructed out of a single slab of flesh. Ando removed the top of the skull and lifted out the brain.

It was a whitish mass covered with innumerable wrinkles. Even among the elite students who were assembled at their medical school, Ryuji had stood out for his brains. He was good at English, German, and French, and he’d ask questions in class that you couldn’t follow if you weren’t reading the latest foreign bulletins. That managed to intimidate even the lecturers. But the deeper he’d gotten into medicine, the more Ryuji’s interests had shifted toward the pure realm of mathematics. For a while, everyone in their class had been hooked on code games. They’d each take their turn devising a code, and the others competed to see who could break it first. Invariably, it was Ryuji. When it was Ando’s turn and he came up with a code he was sure couldn’t be cracked, Ryuji figured it out with ease. At the time, Ando had been less exasperated by Ryuji’s mathematical genius than chilled by the feeling that his mind had been read. He simply couldn’t believe that his code had been broken. Nobody else was able to solve it. But, in turn, Ando was the only one who ever broke one of Ryuji’s codes. Although he could claim that one triumph, nobody knew better than Ando himself that it had come through sheer luck, not through any logical acumen. He’d gotten tired of wrestling with the code and gazed out the window, where his eyes happened to settle on a sign for a flower shop. The phone number on the sign gave him an idea, and he stumbled on the key to the sequence of characters. It was pure chance that his thoughts had traveled in the same direction as Ryuji’s. Ando was convinced to this day that his moment of triumph had just been a fluke.

Back in those days, Ando had felt something akin to envy toward Ryuji. Several times he’d felt his self-confidence crumble under the burden of kmowing that he’d never dominate Ryuji, that he’d always be under Ryuji’s sway.

And now Ando was staring at that brain that had been so remarkable. It was only slightly heavier than average, and looked no different from any normal person’s brain. What had Ryuji been using these cells to think about when he was alive? Ando could imagine the process that had led Ryuji deeper and deeper into pure mathematics until eventually he’d abandoned numbers altogether and arrived at logic. If he’d lived another ten years, he’d surely have contributed something major to the field. Ando admired, and hated, Ryuji’s rare gifts. His brain’s cerebral fissure looked deep, and the frontal lobe loomed like an unconquerable ridge.

But it was all over now. These cells had ceased functioning. The heart had stopped due to a myocardial infarction, and the brain had died, too. In effect, physically at least, Ryuji was now under Ando’s dominion.

He checked to rule out cerebral hemorrhaging, and then replaced the brain in the skull.

Fifty minutes had elapsed since he had taken his scalpel. Autopsies usually took around an hour. Ando had basically finished the examination, when he paused, as if he’d remembered something. He reached a hand into Ryuji’s now-hollow abdominal area and felt around with his fingertips until he pulled out two round objects the size of a quail’s eggs. The pair of testicles, a grayish flesh-color, looked curiously adorable.

Ando asked himself who was more to be pitied, Ryuji, who’d died without issue, or himself, who’d accidentally let his son die at the age of three years and four months.

Me, of course.

He thought so without hesitation. Ryuji had died in ignorance. To the end, he’d never been tormented by the kind of sorrow that bored into your chest. There were no limits to the joy of having a child. But the sorrow of losing that child just never went away—would never go away, Ando felt, even if he lived another thousand years. His heart full, Ando dropped the testicles onto the dissecting table. They were dead now, without having created anything.

All that was left was to sew the body back up. Ando stuffed the empty chest and abdominal cavity full of rolled-up newsprint, to give it volume, and began stitching. He stitched up the head, too, then washed the body clean and wrapped it in a bathrobe. Stripped of its internal organs, the body looked skinnier.

You’ve lost weight, Ryuji.

Ando couldn’t figure out why he’d addressed the corpse in his head like that. Usually he didn’t. Was there something about Ryuji’s cadaver that made him want to talk to it? Or was it simply because he’d known the guy? Of course, the conversation was one-way—Ryuji didn’t answer. But when the two assistants picked up the body to put it in the casket, Ando thought he could hear Ryuji’s voice from somewhere deep inside his own chest. He got a ticklish feeling around his navel. He scratched himself, but the feeling didn’t go away. Before long it was as if the itch had left his body and was hovering in the air.

Disconcerted, Ando stood next to the coffin and stroked Ryuji’s body from the chest to the belly. He felt something sticking out near the abdomen, and he opened the bathrobe. Looking closely, he saw that the edge of a piece of newspaper was sticking out through the stitches just above the navel. Ando thought he’d sewn up the incision carefully, but somehow there it was, just a corner. The newspaper they’d packed the cavity with must have shifted when they moved the body, and the corner had found its way into an opening. It was lightly blood-stained and had bits of fat clinging to it. Ando wiped away the white membrane until he could see numbers printed on the paper. They were small, hard to read. His face drew closer to them. He read the numbers, six digits arranged in two rows of three:

178

136

He couldn’t tell if this was part of the stock market report, or maybe two telephone numbers that had happened to be in alignment, or perhaps program codes on the television schedule. In any case, what were the chances of the corner of a randomly folded newspaper containing nothing but six digits? For no reason he could think of, Ando etched the numbers into his brain.

178, 136.

Then he poked the newspaper back into the belly and gave it a couple of taps with his latexgloved fingers. After making sure the paper didn’t pop out again, he closed Takayama’s bathrobe and once again ran his hand down the body’s chest. There was nothing anomalous to interrupt the roundness of the torso. Ando took a couple of steps back from the coffin.

Suddenly, inexplicably, he shuddered. He raised his hands to peel off his gloves and found that the hair on his arms stood on end. He leaned on a stepladder standing nearby and stared at Ryuji’s face. The eyelashes trembled as if the eyes, now peacefully shut, would open any minute. The splashing of the water was suddenly very loud. Everybody else in the room was busy with his own tasks, and Ando seemed to be the only one aware of the intense aura rising from the body. Is this guy really dead? … Bah! What an idiotic question. The swatches of newspaper, which occupied the cavity where the guts used to be, shifted, causing the abdomen to rise and fall gently. Ando marveled at how the assistants and the cops could be so detached.

Ando felt the urge to urinate. He imagined the dead Ryuji walking around, complete with the rustle of crumpled sheets of newspaper, and the need to evacuate his bladder became almost unbearable.

3

Having finished the morning’s autopsies, Ando headed toward Otsuka Station on the JR Line to get some lunch. Walking along, he stopped over and over to look behind him. He didn’t know what caused his anguish, or what it meant. It wasn’t that his son was on his mind. And he’d probably performed over a thousand autopsies. So why did this one in particular bother him so? He always performed his work meticulously. He couldn’t remember ever seeing newspaper sticking out from between his sutures. It was a mistake, though a minor one to be sure. But was that what was bothering him? No, that wasn’t it.

He entered the first Chinese restaurant he passed and ordered the lunch special. The place was far emptier than it usually was at five minutes past noon. The only customer aside from Ando was an older man sitting near the register slurping noodles. He wore a leather alpine hat and shot Ando an occasional glance. It bothered Ando. Why doesn’t he take off his hat? Why does he keep looking at me? Ando was looking for significance in the tiniest thing; his nerves, he realized, were on edge.

His mind was like a sheet of photosensitive paper, and on it were imprinted the digits from the newspaper. They flickered against his eyelids, and he couldn’t brush them away. They were like a melody stuck in his head.

Something made him glance at the pay phone that sat behind the alpine-hat man. Maybe he should try dialing the numbers. But only small towns had six-digit phone numbers—there certainly weren’t any in Tokyo. He knew full well that even if he dialed the number, there’d be no connection. But what if someone picked up anyway?

Hey, Ando, that was a hell of a thing to do to a guy. Fulling out my balls—oh, man!

If Ryuji’s voice came on the line to cajole …

“Here you are, sir.” A voice spoke in a monotone, and the lunch set was placed on the table before him: soup, a bowl of rice, and stir-fry. Among the vegetables in the stir-fry there lurked two hard-boiled quail eggs. They were the same size as Ryuji’s testicles.

Ando gulped once, and then drained his glass of lukewarm water. He didn’t categorically deny supernatural phenomena; still, he felt stupid for being so obsessed with the numbers. But obsessed he was. 178,136. Did they mean something? After all, Ryuji had been into codes.

A code.

In between sips of his soup, Ando spread a napkin out on the table, took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, and wrote down the numbers.

178, 136

He tried assigning each letter of the alphabet a number from 0 to 25, so that A equaled 0, B equaled 1, C equaled 2, and so on. This would make it a simple substitution cipher, the most basic kind of code. He decided first to treat each number as a one-digit numeral, substituting the corresponding letter of the alphabet for each.

BHI, BDG

Put it all together: “bhibdg”. Ando didn’t have to go to a dictionary to see that there was no such word in any language. The next step was to break down the numerals into combinations of one- and two-digit numbers. Since there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, in terms of a simple substitution cipher this meant that he could, for the time being, rule out numbers larger than twenty-six, such as 78 or 81. He began writing down the possible combinations on the napkin.

17R 8I 1B 3D 6G

Or:

1B 7H 8I 13N 6G

Or:

17R 8I 13N 6G

Only one of the combinations produced an actual word: R-I-N-G.

Ring.

Ando thought it over, recalling what he knew about the English word. He was most familiar with its use as a noun to mean “circle”. But he also knew that it described the sound a bell or a telephone makes; it could be a verb meaning “to cause a bell or a telephone to sound”, and by extension, could mean calling someone on the phone or summoning someone by means of a bell.

Was it nothing more than a coincidence? A piece of newspaper sticking out of Ryuji’s stomach, six digits on that scrap of newspaper—and Ando had played with them until he came up with the word “ring”. Was this all pure chance?

Somewhere in the distance he heard an alarm. He remembered the fire bell he’d heard once as a child in the small town he’d grown up in. Both his parents worked overtime and never came back until late, so he was home alone with his grandmother. They covered their ears when the clamor of the bell broke the night’s silence. Ando could remember curling up on his grandmother’s knees, trembling. Their town had an old firewatch tower, and the bell meant that fire had broken out somewhere. But he didn’t know that. All he knew was that the sound carried with it an air of terrible dread. It seemed like a harbinger of tragedy to come. And in fact, a year later on the exact same day, his father died unexpectedly.

Ando found that he’d lost his appetite. In fact, he felt nauseated. He pushed aside the food, which had only just arrived, and asked for another glass of water.

Hey, Ryuji, are you trying to tell me something?

When they’d signed over to the family the coffin containing his body, all hollowed out like a tin toy, Ryuji had seemed to relax his white, square-jawed visage a tiny bit, giving the impression, almost, of a smile. Only an hour ago, Mai had seen that face and bowed, to no one in particular. They’d probably hold the wake tonight, and then cremate the body tomorrow. This very moment, the hearse was probably well on its way to the family’s house in Sagami Ohno. Ando wished he could watch Ryuji’s body turn to ash. He had the strange feeling that his old classmate was still alive.

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