Читать книгу Loop - Koji Suzuki - Страница 8

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He hated to disturb his mother’s peaceful slumber. Kaoru went to the bedroom door and hesitantly slid it open. But Machiko was already sitting up in her futon, running her fingers through her hair. Kaoru didn’t need to wake her up—his father’s noisy homecoming had taken care of that.

“Oh, Mom. Sorry.” He was apologizing for his father.

“That’s alright.” The expression in her eyes was as gentle as ever.

Kaoru’s mother almost never scolded him. Probably because he never asked for anything unreasonable, she’d always given him what he wanted. Though he was still a child, he could tell from her words and actions how absolutely she relied on him; it made him happy, but also gave him a feeling of grave responsibility.

The Futami Family Three-Way Deadlock, was how Kaoru thought of his and his parents’ relationship. It was just like a game of rock-scissors-paper—each of them had someone they could always beat, and someone they’d always lose to.

Kaoru was strong against his mother, but weak when it came to his father. So he’d always end up going along with his father’s unreasonable courses of action, doing whatever he was told. Hideyuki was strong enough vis-à-vis his son that he could treat him high-handedly, but somehow he couldn’t manage such a firm front with his wife. When his wife was in a bad mood, he seemed to pale and shrink.

So he had to fob the task of waking his sleeping wife off on his son. Kaoru’s mother, meanwhile, was lenient with her son’s demands, but could at times respond severely to her husband’s impossible behavior, scolding him as she would a child.

His father would sometimes boast about how this marvelous balance of power maintained harmony in the family. He’d joke about their relationship pseudo-scientifically, calling their family a “self-sustaining structuralization of chaos”. The peculiar situation wasn’t the result of intent on anybody’s part—it had arisen naturally through the interaction and altercations of the three parties involved.

“What’s Hide doing?” Machiko scratched her neck and ran her fingers slowly through her hair.

“Drinking beer.”

“At this late hour? He’s hopeless.”

“He wants to know if you’ll join him.”

Machiko stood up, laughing through her nose.

“I wonder if he’s hungry.”

“I don’t know. Probably he just wants to see you, don’t you think?”

Kaoru said it with a straight face, but Machiko just laughed, as if to say, You don’t know what you’re talking about.

But Kaoru was already quite aware of his parents’ erotic side.

One night three months ago—a night in mid-June, a rare dry night in the middle of the rainy season, hot enough to forebode the tropical nights to come—Kaoru had been shocked to run into his father in the kitchen in an unexpected state.

That night Kaoru had been shut in his room using his computer, when his thirst finally became too great to ignore. He’d gone to the kitchen to get some mineral water. His parents had apparently shut themselves in their separate rooms, saying they had work to do, and the apartment was quiet. His parents often went to their rooms to work and fell asleep like that. Kaoru had expected it to be the same that night. He didn’t realize they’d been in the same room after all.

He didn’t turn on the light. He stood there in the darkness and poured some mineral water into a glass, and then popped a piece of ice into his mouth.

Then he opened the refrigerator door again to put the plastic bottle back in, and that was when he found himself facing Hideyuki, who had suddenly entered the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator shone on his father’s naked body.

Hideyuki jumped, but in surprise, not embarrassment.

“I didn’t know you were there,” he said, and with no thought for his nakedness he grabbed Kaoru’s glass from him and gulped down its contents.

What surprised Kaoru was not only that his father was completely unclothed, but that his genitalia was larger than it normally was. It was covered with some sort of thin bodily fluid, and it gleamed slickly. It always hung limply when Kaoru and his father were in the bath together. But now it arched and pulsed, exuding the confidence of having fulfilled its role as a part of its owner’s body.

The whole time his father was drinking the mineral water, Kaoru couldn’t tear his gaze from it.

“What’re you looking at? Jealous?”

“Unh-uh.”

Kaoru’s reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru’s eyes.

“Look, kiddo, it’s your ancestors,” he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.

“Eww,” said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.

He didn’t know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.

Sometimes Kaoru didn’t know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother’s sufferings.

So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his “ancestors”.

The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd—he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.

These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother’s eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn’t follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body’s basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life—it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.

All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father’s sperm was something he’d never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.

Was I really born from something this tiny?

He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn’t existed anywhere until they’d been made within his father’s body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.

So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn’t notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.

“What are you doing, kiddo?” He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

“Observing your … things,” said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

“What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you.”

Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

So his parents’ secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father’s attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

“What am I going to do with him?” she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pajama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.