Edge

Chapter 4: Awe

December 22, 2012

An atmosphere of bustling tension percolated through the Atami JR station; even those who didn’t work in the media could tell from the multiple helicopters circling overhead that something was wrong. People lining the crowded platforms craned upwards and asked each other what was going on. Most of them didn’t know, and those few who had caught morning news shows casually informed the others that a large group of people had suddenly disappeared. Since the ones giving these answers hardly understood the details, they only added to the doubts.

Hashiba and Saeko wove their way through the noisy crowd, heading towards the ticket gates. Atami was like a second home to Saeko. Hashiba, too, had spent his early school days in the neighboring city of Mishima and knew the old hot-spring town and its geography well. They both knew that the herbal garden was about a ten-minute cab ride from the station, about an hour on foot.

Now, however, the roads would be jammed with traffic. Hashiba had heard from a colleague already at the garden that the going would be slow and that they should definitely avoid the direct route down Route 135. On top of the ever-growing crowds of onlookers, the police and the fire brigade had set up search parties to carry out a wide sweep of the area. According to the colleague, relatives of the near to a hundred missing people had also started to turn up, further exacerbating the traffic situation. The garden’s parking lot, whose capacity was just a few dozen, was already overflowing with cars, and traffic had begun to spill out into the streets outside and near to the park.

Hashiba had called the TV station almost immediately after seeing the news of the mass disappearance back at Saeko’s apartment earlier that morning. It had only taken a couple of minutes to make the decision to head out to Atami. Needless to say, he asked Saeko to accompany him. He spent the journey calling around and making the necessary preparations for filming. But the one thing he couldn’t secure was a means of transportation at the locale itself.

When they passed the ticket gates, the two of them made straight for the nearest taxi bank, still trying to work out what their best course of action would be.

When Hashiba finished another call, Saeko suggested to him, “There’s a back route we could use.”

“A back route?”

“It’s longer, distance-wise. If we make a circle around the hillside villas, we’ll come out on a street that connects to the Atami New Road,” Saeko explained. “If we turn south before Nishikigaura that’ll take us to right behind the garden.”

“You think the traffic will be better?”

“It should be; only the locals know that route. If we get stuck we’ll just have to get out and walk, but it’s our best option.”

“I hope it’ll be close enough to walk.”

“Either way, it’ll be easier than walking all the way from here.”

It was a gamble for Hashiba. If the back roads were crowded too, then there was a chance they could end up stuck further away. Still, just waiting in the face of a developing situation was unbearable; to keep moving seemed healthier on the mind.

“Okay, the back route it is,” Hashiba decided, ushering Saeko into the backseat of the nearest free cab.

As soon as Hashiba finished explaining the route to the driver, drowsiness washed over him. It had been after one in the morning when he finally fell asleep in Saeko’s bed. He’d woken up after seven and gone straight to her father’s study to print out the document they’d found before the morning news reported a mysterious mass disappearance in Atami. They had left on the fly, their breakfast almost untouched.

The events of the night already felt an age away: his visiting Saeko’s luxurious apartment, their fumbling together, his sudden pulling back, the awkward moment following. Still, despite that, Hashiba felt that he and Saeko had crossed a certain threshold. They may not have consummated their relationship, but at least their mutual attraction was out in the open.

Perhaps exhausted too, Saeko sat with her head resting against the glass window and her eyes closed. Hashiba placed his hand on hers and let his eyes droop.

Until this particular case, the disappearances had been limited to a few people. Now, suddenly, the number had soared nearly to three digits. It was true that Hashiba felt not just trepidation but excitement. Though his body craved rest, it was unlikely that sleep would come to him. Even a blink and he would thank himself for it later; there was no way of knowing what the rest of the day had in store for him. The psychic, Shigeko Torii, was due to arrive in the afternoon. The filming wouldn’t begin until she arrived, but he needed to work the location before she got there.

As Hashiba dozed amid such thoughts, the cell phone in his shirt pocket started to ring. Saeko, too, woke with a start, grabbing Hashiba’s hand in surprise — her sleep must have been deeper than his.

Hashiba answered the phone with his free hand. It was Nakamura, the director, who wanted an update on the situation. Hashiba explained that they were still on their way via a back route and went over a few details: Shigeko Torii’s time of arrival at Atami, their hotel for the night. When he finished up the conversation and returned the phone to his pocket, the cab was coming round to the Atami New Road. Saeko had been right; so far, they had managed to avoid the main crush of the traffic and were making good time towards the garden.

Once they got close to Route 135, the traffic got denser and the cab came to a standstill. Hashiba looked over to Saeko and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s not far from here,” Saeko assured.

Hashiba told the driver, “We’ll get out here.”

When they got out onto the street, as though in welcome a helicopter flew by low over their heads.

The main entrance to the garden was closed and before it crowded a throng of people. Hashiba recognized faces from a few competing stations interspersed in the crowd. He cut a path forward, looking for his colleague Kagayama.

“Hashiba,” a voice called out from behind. Turning, he saw Kagayama, whose bald pate reminded him of a vanquished samurai.

“Hey,” he responded with a raised hand. He gestured to show that Saeko had come with him.

“Nice to see you again,” she said.

“Ms. Kuriyama, what a surprise.”

Saeko had come along simply because they had been in the same room when they heard the news. Not wanting Kagayama to catch on to their relationship, Hashiba nonchalantly explained, “Ms. Kuriyama’s hometown is here in Atami.”

“Really?” Kagayama threw his head back in a slightly exaggerated movement.

“Actually, it’s my father’s hometown,” Saeko corrected. “My grandparents have both long passed away, and the house was sold on.”

Just like her to be honest. It was the first time Hashiba had heard that himself. “She’s pretty good with the local geography,” he emphasized her value to the team. “It’s actually thanks to her knowing all the back streets that we got here so quickly.”

“She was right. If you’d tried to come on the 135, you’d be stuck right now.”

The honking carried across from the main road. Congestion on the artery between Atami and Ito must have been incredibly annoying, and indeed the police had come to manage the traffic. It still didn’t seem to budge, though there were signs of easing.

“By the way, Kagayama, have you eaten?”

“Not yet.”

“How about you fill us in on what’s happened so far over some lunch?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The park restaurant was full to capacity and queued up, so the three of them decided to make their way across the road to the resort hotel that stood atop a sheer seaside cliff.

After ordering his lunch, Kagayama lit a cigarette and began to explain to Saeko and Hashiba what he had managed to work out so far. “Have you been to the garden before?” he asked.

Hashiba and Saeko shook their heads together. Saeko explained that the area had been part of a public forest preserve when she used to visit her grandparents and that Herb Gardens hadn’t existed yet.

Kagayama continued with the understanding that neither was familiar with the place. “Well, the garden stretches up a hillside slope. Visitors pay at the main gate and then take the facility’s bus up to the top parking area where they’re let off and make their way back down through the garden on foot, taking in the view of the sea, enjoying the flowers, that sort of thing. There’s a place halfway down to stop and take a break with some herbal tea. There’s also a little shop where you can buy handmade soaps, handmade postcards, souvenirs like that. You could kill a lot of time coming down. Anyway, almost all of the people who disappeared yesterday were here as part of a tour group, on those bus tours. I suppose the itinerary for the Izu area includes a stop here. Now, large groups like that don’t use the garden’s bus. Instead, the tour bus just takes them directly to the top parking area. The tourists make their way down on foot while the bus heads back down to the gate first and waits for them.

“Yesterday, there were two tour buses here after lunch. Each had just under forty passengers. There were also four or five smaller independent groups of visitors. In total, there should have been about a hundred people at the top of the gardens yesterday afternoon. The tour buses arrived at one o’clock, and the passengers were scheduled to meet at the bottom at two. The tour guides had gone back to the bottom to wait with the buses and their drivers. They started to wonder what was going on when, even after two o’clock, not a single person had arrived at the meeting place. The two buses were operating for different travel agencies, and not a single passenger from either had returned. So one of the guides started to make her way up to check what was going on. It didn’t take her long to notice that something was odd. ‘Notice’ may not be the word, she couldn’t but. There wasn’t a soul anywhere in sight.”

Kagayama paused. Hashiba and Saeko tried to imagine the atmosphere of the vacant park, recalling the scene at the Fujimura house in Takato. This time the disappearances hadn’t occurred in an enclosed space. The circumstances were closer to the two disappearances they’d learned about from America’s West Coast: here there were no walls or roofs, or even fences, just a wide, open valley stretching out to the sea beyond. It was one thing for people to disappear from a house; now they had to picture people vanishing out in the open.

“The tour guide must have been pretty bewildered,” Kagayama continued. “She went back down to the buses and reported to the other guide and the drivers. No one was sure what to believe. I don’t blame them. It just doesn’t make any sense for a hundred people to vanish all at once. They got the manager of the gardens involved at half-past two. He called around the facility’s staff, trying to get some information. It was at this point that they realized that it wasn’t just the tourists that were missing. The employees of the garbage disposal firm that tended the gardens were gone too, leaving just their van. So the guides began to call the cell phone numbers that they had of the people who had gone missing. No one answered — or rather, what the manager told me was that the phones didn’t even ring.”

“Wouldn’t even ring? So they were out of range?” Hashiba asked.

“I guess that’s what he meant,” Kagayama replied uncertainly. Many of the passengers were probably elderly tourists, and it wasn’t clear what fraction of them owned cell phones. Even so, for not even a single call to be picked up was quite bizarre.

“Go on,” Hashiba urged.

“They called the police at close to four. The Atami Station, well, I guess they had no idea how to respond. How could they, right? Anyway, they sent a car around to confirm the details but found nothing to suggest that a crime had taken place. Come evening, the garden closed its gates, and after that it was just calling people left and right. One of the buses had been headed for Shimoda, the other back to Tokyo. A travel agency can get in deep crap for not getting their customers back home in time. So the guides phoned their bosses, the passengers’ relatives, in a flurry. By nighttime, the news had made its way to all the papers, television stations, and other media outlets in Tokyo.”

Hashiba found himself subconsciously averting his eyes from Kagayama. Why? There was no reason for him to be feeling guilty about anything. When all this was happening he had been at Kitazawa’s office, listening to his report on the progress made in their ongoing investigations. If he’d been at the TV station he’d no doubt have heard the news, but he’d been engrossed in his date with Saeko. Since he didn’t work in news but rather in the variety show division, he wasn’t expected to be on call. After all, he and Saeko were the ones who had linked the dots between the other disappearances and this case here in Atami, and no one else on the payroll could see the connection. It was his own quick thinking to get Kagayama to come down early, knowing that he lived in nearby Odawara.

“The police investigation went up a whole load of notches early this morning,” Kagayama continued. “Not a single person turned up come dawn … Spending a night out in the hills in this season could be catastrophic especially for elderly folk. The fire and police departments are up there now combing the whole area with search parties.”

A waitress brought their lunch as Kagayama wound up his update on events. While wielding his knife and fork, Hashiba asked a slew of questions that popped into mind. “Do we have an exact figure for the number of people that disappeared?”

“Let’s see …” Kagayama pulled a notebook out from his bag, flipped through the pages, and began reading from his notes. “There were seventy-nine passengers on the tour buses. Nine people had come in their own cars. There were also the three janitors. That makes a total of ninety-one people. Most of the passengers on the tour bus were elderly women.”

“Ninety-one … And the police? What’s their view of all this?” Even if they were utterly at a loss, they needed a hypothesis to conduct an effective investigation.

Kagayama picked up one of the menus from the table and positioned it so that it inclined at a roughly thirty-degree angle. “Let’s say this is Herb Gardens. Basically, the flow of visitors is one way from the parking spaces at the top all the way down to the main entrance at the bottom. There are a number of paths that crisscross with each other, and the visitors can choose any particular route they want. Now, there’s a point right here, in the center, where all of these paths converge. So, let’s imagine that there was a group of kidnappers waiting here for the passengers. They could, potentially, order the passengers to go back to the top, instead of continuing down. Just shouting orders wouldn’t be enough, of course, so we have to assume that they threatened the passengers in some way. Perhaps they were armed. They could have, in theory, sent all the passengers back up without letting a single one through. Then they could have forced them all down a mountain path away from the garden.”

“Kidnappers? What kind of group would do that?”

“It’s just a hypothesis. Maybe it was some new religious cult. They’re also considering the possibility that some members of the group were among the passengers from the beginning. But then again they were mostly elderly women …”

Hashiba snorted. Why would anyone want to lead ninety-one people out of an herbal garden? Besides, there were no signs that cars had been used. It was impossible to pull off such a deed without leaving a trace.

“But there’s no other explanation. Unless, of course, a UFO landed and spirited them all away. I’ve asked around on that but haven’t come up with anything we can use. Some people did joke that they saw a bluish light in the sky above the garden …”

Kagayama himself didn’t seem to be joking at all. Hashiba remembered that during the meeting with Saeko, when one of the writers had suggested the possibility of a link between UFOs and the disappearances, Kagayama’s face had betrayed interest in that track.

“There was an old road that linked Shimoda and Atami since the Kamakura period several centuries ago.” Saeko’s voice sounded relaxed and graceful, as though floating down from somewhere on high. She’d interrupted the flow of the conversation but looked quite serious.

Both Hashiba and Kagayama turned to her, surprised. “An old road?” Hashiba asked.

“It’s more like an overgrown footpath now, but it used to be one of the region’s arteries. There were no coastline roads back then, nothing where Route 135 is now. I think there’s a shrine up top of the garden, the Soga Shrine. The path that winds off it heads towards the Atami Nature Resort.”

“The Soga Shrine? Of the Soga Brothers?”

Saeko nodded. “That’s right, the same Soga Brothers of the Kabuki vendetta. They avenged their father not too far from here.”

She didn’t seem to be proposing that the disappearances had anything to do with the vendetta. Rather, given that no one’s imagination was up to the task of explaining the mystery, she was adding a bit of local historical flavor to the conversation.

Yet, having heard this, Hashiba could not but picture ninety-one people, in single file, being forced along an ancient path that had once been trod by many. They progressed silently, apart from a subtle rustling of the undergrowth, the occasional snapping of a twig underfoot. Like spellbound rats mindlessly plunging into the sea, or ants instinctively swarming around food, each was robbed of individual will. Nevertheless the march had a solemn mood because some heavenly force dominated them.

“Let’s take a look up there, afterwards,” Saeko said.

Her suggestion sounded out of sorts, but they would definitely end up going. Once the cameramen, sound people, and equipment arrived, they would wait for the psychic Shigeko Torii to arrive, and begin filming.

Just then Hashiba’s cell phone, which lay on the table, began to ring.

Probably Nakamura, Hashiba guessed and glanced down at his phone, but the name flashing on the screen caught him completely off guard.

“Err, excuse me for a moment,” he said, snatching up the phone and getting up from his seat. Even while doing so, he worried whether his sudden movement had struck Saeko as unnatural. He was making it quite obvious that the call was private; if it were work-related, there would be no reason to get up. Hashiba glanced over towards Saeko and was relieved to see that she registered no suspicion.

Hashiba stopped outside the bathroom next to the register and answered the call.

“Where are you, darling?” the voice of his wife sounded from the other end of the receiver.

“Sorry,” Hashiba started with an apology. He felt a surge of guilt wash over him, bringing him back from his passion for work. He realized that he hadn’t called home last night when he’d stayed over at Saeko’s place, and now his wife was gently reproaching him for forgetting to call.

“I know you’re busy with work, but couldn’t you find time for just one phone call?”

Hashiba could handle it better when his wife raised her voice at him. When she was really angry, her voice seemed to seep viscously into the wrinkles of his brain matter instead. Hashiba switched the phone to his other hand and swallowed hard.

Recently, there had been a number of times where he’d had to stay out working all night. Last night had been different; he hadn’t called because he didn’t want to alert Saeko. Thinking back to it now, he felt as though he hadn’t been himself. Why had he lied about his marital status? It hadn’t been simply out of lust for her. When she asked the moment had already passed, their sexual longing dissipated.

A devilish whim had won over. There was no other way to put it. He remembered a program he had worked on about a politician who had lied about his academic record. Now Hashiba could understand how the man must have felt. Forced to answer with a yes or a no, to tick a box, knowing very well that he shouldn’t, he had pushed the truth away.

Hashiba cursed his weakness. When she’d asked him about it, Saeko had had this look, almost pleading. It would have been obvious even to a less narcissistic man which answer she wanted to hear. Hashiba had bent the truth because he couldn’t bring himself to crush the hope he had seen in her eyes. Fully aware that a convenient lie would bring consequences, he had given in to the temptation. Walls were hemming in on both sides of him now as payment.

“Some urgent work came in and I didn’t want to disturb you by calling so late. Sorry.”

“It’s not like it ever wakes up Yusuke.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

While pregnant, Hashiba’s wife had contracted a bout of German measles, and Yusuke, Hashiba’s son, had been born hard of hearing in one ear. It hardly affected Yusuke; his determination to pick up on even the smallest sounds made him in fact more sensitive. All the same, Hashiba’s sense of guilt deepened at the thought that he’d hunted for ass while leaving his wife at home with their hearing-impaired child.

His wife was silent for a few beats. Hashiba had a bad feeling about what would come next.

“The results of the test came back,” she said at last, her tone sagging now, heavy, dragging Hashiba down with it.

“So soon?” Four days ago, his wife had undergone a test for breast cancer. She had been told that the results would be back in two weeks. So the results were early; Hashiba didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

“They asked me to come back for more detailed cell testing.” His wife’s voice quivered slightly.

I see … Hashiba was shaken by an awful conviction that his affair last night had somehow affected the result.

Just two weeks ago, his wife had told him that she had found a lump under her breast. She had guided his hand towards the underside of her left breast, and there he had felt the small, unnatural lump — a small change in his wife’s body, the body that he had not touched in a long time. He remembered thinking that, if it was cancer, the lump was already quite large. “It’s probably nothing, just some inflammation,” he had said, not wanting her to worry unnecessarily. “But perhaps we should get it tested, just in case,” he had gently recommended as well. Four days ago, his wife had finally dragged herself to the hospital.

The lump was in exactly the same place as Saeko’s and almost the same size.

Last night his sexual desire had dried up the moment he had felt the lump under Saeko’s breast, but it was not because of worry that she could have cancer. The image of his wife had flashed in his mind, as clear as day, and he had been unable to wipe it away. His wife had employed an unexpected tactic to stop him from continuing the affair.

Would Saeko try to explain this using physics terminology, as the contraction of wave functions? Not that Hashiba really understood the laws of physics — his own impression was simply that he was being punished by heaven. The test results had overlapped, at fifty-fifty, but had been shifted towards the worse by his staying at Saeko’s. Two once equally likely possibilities, through the contraction of wave functions, had converged into a single state, cancer.

Glimpsing a moment of the workings of the world, Hashiba prayed: Even if they do have to remove her breast, please let my wife live.

“If something happens to me, it’s okay if you found someone else, you know.”

Hashiba’s eyes darted over to where Saeko was seated in the distance, deep in conversation with Kagayama. Has she caught on about Saeko? he wondered. Bad test results, cheating husband — if his wife was beleaguered by two fears, it was Hashiba’s duty to assuage her anxiety. “I’ll be home tonight, I promise,” he assured her, adding a few more comforting utterances before he hung up the phone.

He glanced over towards the table where Saeko and Kagayama were still engrossed in conversation. It didn’t look like they had picked up on anything in his behavior. Hashiba shut his eyes and took a deep breath, wiping away the sweat that had gathered on his forehead. He found himself walking into the bathroom. After washing his hands meticulously, he looked up and saw his face in the mirror.

What the hell are you going to do?

Until this point, his life had been smooth, but it was as if a small cut had appeared and was gradually widening. He had to tend to it before it festered.

Yet, Hashiba was at a loss as to where to start. His flesh-and-blood self was genuinely worried for his wife. But the face in the mirror shone with desire for Saeko. The discomfort of reality dissociating from its mirror image wasn’t something that vanished no matter how assiduously he washed his wands.

Late in the afternoon, as if with foresight of the improvement in traffic, Shigeko Torii arrived in a cab. The low winter sun had already begun to cast the shadow of the mountains against the east-facing hills of the park. When her foot emerged from the cab, Hashiba felt that the air grew even chillier. Though it had been almost a month since he had last seen her in person, she had aged far more than one would expect. As her legs found the ground he saw that they were feeble and unreliable. He ran up to the taxi to help, taking the luggage from her lap. The bag, like its owner, seemed somehow weightless.

“Sorry to be a burden,” Shigeko said, bowing her head lightly, revealing her thinning hair and mottled scalp. It was a painful sight, and Hashiba found himself looking away. He busied across to the staff caravan and put Shigeko’s luggage on the back seat.

The timing of her arrival was perfect; they had just wrapped up the last of their interviews of family members of the missing tourists. Most of the people that had come to the park had sent their parents off to enjoy a package trip and were around Hashiba’s age. While all of them were worried, the strangeness of the disappearances gave them an air of puzzlement. Hashiba had tried to imagine how he would feel if his mother had been involved, but instead his thoughts had kept on returning to his conversation with his wife.

Calling Kagayama over, he gestured towards the closed entrance and asked, “They’ll let us in now, right?” Before the day was over they needed to capture incontrovertible images and sounds of the site, mixing in Shigeko Torii’s reactions.

“Yes, we have an agreement.” The place was still closed to the public, but media had a way in. Kagayama had obtained permission to film inside by talking to the hotel that owned the place.

“Right, let’s go.”

There were six of them in all: Hashiba, Saeko, Kagayama, cameraman Mitsuru Hosokawa, sound technician Ryoichi Kato, and Shigeko Torii. They made their way in through the restaurant and met with Herb Gardens’ PR rep, Mitsuo Sodeyama, who would be their guide.

“Thanks for agreeing to take us around.” Hashiba made a low bow in greeting.

“Please all of you get in this bus,” Sodeyama said. While he worked as the PR rep, when he had spare time Sodeyama also drove the garden bus. Today, he had agreed to accompany Hashiba and the others to the parking lot at the top and escort them for the rest of the day. Sodeyama had luckily been in the office at the base last afternoon; if not, he might have been one of those included among the missing.

When they reached the top, he decided to turn the bus around, drive back down, and walk up to rejoin them. Just in case, he didn’t want to leave the bus at the top while he escorted them since they would be taking their time with all the filming.

It was already close to 4 p.m. At this time of day there would usually still be a few groups of tourists making their way down the paths. Today, with the gate still closed to the public, the garden was eerily still. As Sodeyama worked his way up the hillside, he stopped many times to catch his breath. Having just turned thirty, he was confident about his stamina and was used to walking up and down the garden. Yet today, he found himself awfully short of breath. His whole body felt oddly heavy — or rather, it was as though the atmosphere were thinner. Sodeyama had never experienced mountain sickness, but his whole body registered a new, odd sense that the altitude had suddenly shot up.

When he stopped again, he was on a pedestrian path weaving diagonally up a hill that looked down on Athletics Square. One side of the path traced a gentle slope downwards and was covered in rosemary, the tips of the bristling oval leaves flowering white, its grassy scent so heady as to interfere with breathing. Sodeyama wondered whether it could actually be these flowers blooming out of season that gave him the odd sense. He stopped and leaned against the handrail on the valley side and looked back the way he’d come. Through the gap in the valley he could see a section of the serpentine Route 135. As though the earlier lines of traffic had been a mirage, it was almost empty of cars now. Now and then, white shapes meandered across his V-shaped vista.

Sodeyama shivered and pulled his jacket closed. Standing here alone seemed terribly lonely, unbearable. As he forsook the handrail and essayed to continue up the path, pure-white rosemary burst into view even brighter than before. Their whiteness netted his consciousness and halted his step. From tiny frays that gaped all over the place a subtle shift showed its face, and Sodeyama was unable to put the change into words.

He usually drove the bus up and down and didn’t take the pedestrian paths much. Perhaps staff that tended to the gardens could pinpoint the change. All he could do was describe the scene impressionistically, but a simple question reared its head: Did we ever have white rosemary planted here?

Maybe that was it, the color; in his recollection the slope had been covered in red and purple herbs. He found his gaze being pulled towards the dense growth of rosemary. The stem was jostling — thickening and thinning like the throat of an animal swallowing its chewed-up prey. He looked more closely and saw that the impression was caused by a swarm of ants crawling upwards, only upwards, thousands in layer upon layer in an undulating motion. The ants surged up to the base of the petals, then along their shaded sides, toward the tips. From there they could only fall off. The sight somehow brought to mind a crowd of elderly people jostling down a narrow mountain path.

The swarm fell off from the petal tips at a leisurely speed — much more slowly than their own legs had taken them up. They fell in formation and remained in a clump even after they arrived on the ground. Where they fell was a conical mound four inches tall from whose center ants poured out anew, crowded out, overflowing like foam, latching onto the rosemary stem and scrambling towards the white petals at the top. What had seemed like thousands seemed more like millions. Entranced, Sodeyama observed the intense welling. In thrall to a sight he’d never seen before, he nevertheless felt calm. While he maintained the customary poise of an observer, his breathing was becoming even more labored.

For a moment, the air itself seemed to halt. Was it a trick of the eye? The ants falling from the petals appeared to stop all and one, hanging in mid-air. As though that were the signal, the swarm changed course.

The falling ants, the welling ants, all joined into a mottled pattern on the ground, a sharp, narrow spearhead forming on the valley side, and they started making for the tips of Sodeyama’s feet. Overwhelmed, he took a few steps backwards and prepared to flee. There were two options: up and down.

Just then, he heard voices from above. It was the film crew, shouting something. Sodeyama couldn’t stand to be alone; he wanted to be near people and to feel their warmth. Relying on the voices, he ran upwards, ever upwards on the path, but it was like eluding the pursuit of something in a dream: his legs wouldn’t take him forward. At any moment, he felt, the millions of ants would reach his ankles, climb up his Achilles’ heels, and scurry over the back of his knees, up to his buttocks, and he felt his spine tingling — or rather, wasn’t that the sensation of innumerable ant legs scratching at his back?

Sodeyama nearly tripped, his torso twisting, and he saw what was behind him: a black band two feet wide cutting diagonally across the white cobbled path. The swarm was almost geometrical, the seething mass forming a long, narrow parallelogram.

Then, with amazing teamwork, the shape began to morph. The edges began to soften and clamber towards the center. In the blink of an eye, the parallelogram was swelling out into a circle. Enchanted by a change in formation reminiscent of mass choreography, Sodeyama stood staring, torso still twisted back unnaturally.

Achieving a perfect black circle on the white cobblestone path, the mass of ants maintained the shape as it slowly recommenced moving towards him. A ring filled with darkness, it was a moving pitfall gouged into the earth to trap prey. He pictured internal organs, small and large intestines, and somehow felt an intense urge to urinate.

At that moment, he heard the rustling of leaves and the fluttering of innumerable birds, and above them a woman’s scream. Released from his paralysis, Sodeyama charged up the incline.

After getting off the bus at the top of the gardens, Hashiba and the others headed straight for the stone steps above the parking lot. A sign at the foot indicated the way to the Soga Shrine. It seemed that the current theory the police were following was that the tourists and staff had been forced back up the paths, passing the shrine, up into one of the mountain footpaths beyond. Whether the case or not, this was somewhere to stake out with the crew. A helicopter sounded overhead, describing a route towards Amagi. They had heard word that the search parties had already reached close to the Ito Skyline Road; now that it was getting dark they were probably getting ready to call it a day. Nakamura had promised to call Kagayama if there were any developments. The fact that he hadn’t meant that the police were yet to find anything.

Shigeko Torii walked a few paces behind Hosokawa and Kato who were carrying the heavy camera equipment. Every few steps she would stop and take a deep breath, exhaling heavily and stretching her back. Hashiba made sure to follow beside her, supporting her with an arm over one of her shoulders. He was feeling guilty as hell for forcing an elderly person to struggle so.

“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.

A small stone shrine stood at the top of the steps. By the time they reached it, Hashiba had already begun to suspect that Shigeko’s fatigue was more a physical manifestation of mental exhaustion than simple tiredness. Standing next to the small shrine, Shigeko straightened up and made a show of looking around as though listening out for signs or indications of what might have happened. Every now and again her shoulders would shiver in resonance to something as she looked here and there; the way she peered through the air around the shrine gave Hashiba the impression that she was listening for something a normal human could not detect, as though with her entire being. She wore a long cashmere coat that covered her completely, exposing only a small part of her neck to the elements. The exposed skin was prickly with goose bumps, and Hashiba couldn’t help wondering whether they were simply from the cold, or whether they were caused by something she was detecting in the atmosphere around the shrine. The old woman had always said that she was able to detect things through her body first, as though her whole being was an eardrum, finely tuned to pick out anomalous vibrations in the air.

Hashiba tiptoed away and waved the cameramen to start filming, pointing for them to keep out of Shigeko’s way as they did. The low undergrowth that bristled around the roots of the trees surrounding the shrine undulated slowly from a breeze that had already died down. Towards the right Hashiba could make out the beginning of a footpath leading away from the shrine. Could so many people have disappeared down there?

Shigeko had come up to the entrance of the footpath and now stooped forwards, curving her back as she sniffed at the air as though to detect some trace or impression of the missing people. It was clear even to Hashiba that there were no discernible marks in the undergrowth, no broken branches, to suggest anyone had been forced down the narrow mountain path. The bamboo leaves stood straight, and the ground was soft with decaying leaves — if people had come through here he was sure they would have left obvious footprints. Had the search parties started out from somewhere else?

The shrine was remote and quiet as though nothing had happened.

A hollow, wooden clanking sound broke through the silence. It was coming from a set of wooden wish boards, the shrine’s ema, strung up on both sides on makeshift sets of wooden torii gates, two on either side. A few dozen ema hung from wooden bars along each of the structures behind a bench and a wooden box for donations to the shrine. Next to that lay a basket of blank ema, yet to have wishes written on. People would throw three hundred yen into the donations box, inscribe their wishes or words of gratitude onto one of the wooden planks with a marker pen, and then tie it to the bars along the torii with red string.

As though pushed from behind, some of the boards rippled, making the dry clanking sound. Each time they moved, a couple of them twisted around and reversed. Among mundane prayers for the safety of families and hopes to pass exams, one written with a thick red marker bore only the character for happiness. The character was bold and the ink had fanned out around it, bleeding into the wood. As was the custom, the name and address of the person that had bought the ema was inscribed on the back — Yoko Niimura from Gamagori in Aichi Prefecture. The same marker had been used for the name and address, but the touch was softer, the text neater. The ema suddenly jerked to the side, revealing a white, soft-looking thing wriggling behind it. The ema were clanking around despite the lack of wind because something was caressing them from behind.

Just as Hosokawa brought the camera into focus over Shigeko’s head, the six of them saw that the white thing could actually be a wing. Suddenly, the shape emerged through the sides of the boards and landed on the uppermost bar. The cameraman jumped backwards startled, and Shigeko actually pitched forward towards the boards, thrusting her hand forward to support herself and knocking a few off.

Perched on the beam, a seagull stared out inquisitively at them. Atami was close to the sea, and one could often see gulls circling the boats that ferried people out to Hatsushima Island. But they were hardly seen inland, and they weren’t even near the coastline here. The shrine was way up on a hillside over a hundred meters above sea level.

The gull pulled in its wingspan and fixed a careful gaze on Hashiba, Saeko, and Shigeko in turn. It seemed to be paying no attention to the camera or the sound equipment.

“Where have you come from now?” Shigeko asked.

The gull rapped its beak against the wooden beam at its feet a couple of times as though in answer to Shigeko’s question. Maybe it was just pecking randomly. It stood completely still apart from its head, which ducked left and right with its gaze. It looked strangely composed, like it was waiting for a signal.

How could a single stray water bird cause so much tension? Its dark eyes glared at the group of humans, as if commanding them not to move.

“What do you think? Do you feel anything different from when we visited the Fujimura house at Takato?” Hashiba broke the silence, whispering to Shigeko. It was a run-of-the-mill question, but he felt that he needed to diffuse the tension somehow.

“It’s too much for me,” Shigeko wailed, sounding defeated. She crumpled downwards, crouching on the ground. The gull cocked its head again, impassively observing Shigeko for a moment. Then it hopped upwards, spread its wings, and took off into the sky. At the same time the area around the shrine exploded in noise. What looked like hundreds or thousands of gulls pitched up from the grasses around them, casting upwards towards the sky in a flurry of beating wings. Had they all been there, hidden in the undergrowth all this time?

The birds continued to soar upwards in a deafening tumult of beating wings and birdcalls. The huge flock flew higher and higher, twisting upwards, cyclone-like. Saeko covered her ears and let out a piercing scream as the silence was violently broken. She wasn’t conscious of it, but her body reacted, subconsciously recalling the fear she had felt during the earthquake at the Takato house; she reeled backwards, wanting to cover her eyes and ears.

Hosokawa, unsure whether he should be trying to film the birds or Shigeko, tried to get Hashiba’s attention, but Hashiba and Kagayama both stood transfixed by the spectacle of the vast spiraling tornado of gulls in the sky; making his decision he pointed the camera upwards. Gradually the flock began to melt away into the distance. A heavy, black cloud obscured the green of the hillside below. All they could see now was a vast number of pinpricks in the sky, graying against the twilight coming from the sea. Eventually, the points were swallowed up in the swell of clouds beyond, vanishing completely.

Hashiba’s neck had become sore from straining upwards for so long; he massaged his shoulders. The ema with the red marker character on it had fallen back into place, but it looked different somehow, strange. Hashiba looked closer, staring now. He realized that the board was upside down. The character for happiness was symmetrical enough to still be readable upside down — in fact it looked almost the same. However, Hashiba couldn’t shake the feeling that the chance turning of the character wasn’t a good omen. Caught in his reverie he jumped when Kagayama put a hand on his shoulder.

“There’s something really strange about this place.”

Hashiba couldn’t help but agree; there was no other way to describe it. The atmosphere was odd somehow, but it was impossible to put your finger on why it felt that way. The sky was already getting dark now; they wouldn’t be able to film anymore in this light. He saw Saeko and Shigeko had managed to stand up.

“You both okay?” he asked, deciding that at this point it was probably best to go back to the hotel and call it a day.

He thought back to the Fujimura house at Takato. Even there he had not sensed an air as clearly odd as this. Any anomaly they had felt there was probably influenced by Shigeko’s reaction. Here, however, everyone could sense the odor of something in the air. Hashiba looked down at the goose bumps bristling on his arms — he couldn’t remember the last time he had them. Even at his childhood friend’s house in Mishima, when he’d bumped into someone that shouldn’t have been there in the outhouse, he hadn’t reacted like this. Hashiba rolled his sleeves up and saw that his hairs were all standing on end.

Hashiba saw Hosokawa approaching, head tilted to one side and left hand raised to it. Extending the hand he said, “Hey, Hashiba, take a look at this …”

The face of the wristwatch had a large dial for the time and a separate digital display in a small rectangular window that could display the atmospheric pressure, temperature, and bearings. It was the directional index that Hosokawa was drawing attention to:

350, 349, 345, 341, 337, 332, 322, 320, 314, 311, 305, 299, 256, 243, 219, 199, 172, 145, 123, 99, 33, 9, 321, 269, 190 …

Hashiba realized that the numbers were shifting according to a rule — on a compass dial, they would be swinging from north to west, to south — counterclockwise. Furthermore, it seemed to be gaining speed.

“It’s certainly never done this before …”

Of course not. A compass pointed north no matter where you were; it never spun counterclockwise like that.

As the phasing continued to accelerate, Hashiba cried, “There’s something up with the geomagnetic field?”

There seemed no question that the area was experiencing an intense magnetic disturbance. Hashiba wondered if it was something left over from whatever event that spirited away the missing people. Or was it a sign of something else, something yet to occur, another shift towards the abnormal? He looked over to where Saeko stood — trying to catch her eye, perhaps hoping that she would have the answer. At the very least they now knew that there was some sort of connection between the disappearances and a concurrent flux in magnetic fields. Saeko didn’t notice Hashiba’s stare; her eyes were distant, focused out towards the horizon.

“Anyway, let’s get out of here,” Hosokawa nudged, clearly wanting to get away from the shrine as soon as possible.

Hashiba felt exactly the same. “Agreed. Back to the hotel.”

Hashiba was ready to carry Shigeko on his back if he had to, but after she’d stood back up, she seemed able to walk. He stayed at her side and helped her down the stone steps.

As they reached the base they were greeted by Sodeyama, who was out of breath, having just run up the path. He looked terrified.

“What happened?” Hashiba asked.

Sodeyama stooped forwards still gasping for breath, hands on his knees. Eventually, he straightened up, returning Hashiba’s question with one of his own.

“I saw some sort of cloud appear above the shrine. What the hell was that?”

“Gulls. A load of gulls flying away — all at once.”

Sodeyama shook his head in disbelief. “Gulls? Up here?”

“Have you had that here before?”

Sodeyama paused. “It looks like the whole system’s gone mad.”

“The system?” Hashiba wasn’t sure what Sodeyama meant.

“The whole eco-system. Not just plants, but insects, birds. It’s gone haywire …”

It’s not just the eco-system, Hashiba thought. Something’s affecting the local magnetic field too … But he didn’t give utterance to the thought. If he didn’t understand the mechanism of what was happening, there was no point in confusing the situation any further.

Saeko continued to stare eastwards where the huge flock of gulls had flown. She felt chilled to the core, and shivers ran down her spine and stimulated her bladder. She’d been wanting to urinate, and she didn’t think she could hold it anymore. Turning away from the sky, she scanned the area under the Soga Shrine for a toilet. It was then that Saeko noticed.

Night fell quickly at this time of year, and its shadow darkly stretched in the dense growth surrounding the hollow of the garden path. Beyond, Hatsushima Island floated in the sea, but the color of the water was reddish.

Slightly above the pale green hue of the inverted curvature of the valley, an orangey-red sheaf of light hovered lazily. She was looking eastwards; it couldn’t be from the sunset. A light that seemed more ethereal, more beautiful than any sunset she had seen before described a meandering arc as it rose upwards into the sky, there depositing subtly varying layers of red.

During her childhood here in Atami, Saeko had often stood looking out to sea from the hills. But she had never seen anything even remotely like this. It looked almost divine, a heavenly light, bewitching. At the same time, it seemed that every cell in Saeko’s body was ringing out in alarm, as though she wouldn’t be able to get away if she gave in to the spell.

Hashiba came to her side, followed her gaze, and noticed the odd scenery.

“It looks like the aurora,” Saeko said quietly.

Hashiba himself had never seen an aurora. “I didn’t know you could see one in Atami,” he remarked casually.

“You can’t. At the very least, I’ve never heard of such a thing. You’re only supposed to be able to see them close to the poles, from places with high latitude.”

Perhaps because of the beauty of the spectacle, Saeko didn’t feel the terror that such an anomaly should have brought about. Something about the world, at its center, was changing.

Saeko recalled what her father had once said: The world has to be described more beautifully.

She tried to tell herself that she wasn’t afraid thanks to his words, but the relentless pressure on her bladder kept bringing her back to the present.

Shigeko alone seemed to grasp the true consequences of what they saw. With a resigned look, she muttered, “It’s too much. This is beyond me.”

Saeko felt that she understood. If what was at work here transcended human artifice, then no matter what an individual may attempt, it was already too late.

Saeko and the rest of the crew checked into the hotel as soon as they left the herb gardens.

You could see the waves right below you. The hotel directly overlooked the sea into which its foundations stretched and stood as high as the sheer cliffs of Nishikigaura; only the front lobby was adjacent to land, and the guest rooms practically hovered above water. The place was well known for the stunning view of the cliffs looming across the window. The grandeur and scale of the rocky face did more to shatter any sense of the everyday than the white, crashing waves below.

Though it was no longer the case, the area used to have the unfortunate reputation of being one of Japan’s worst suicide spots. Looking across at them at night, Saeko could see why that might have been. The jagged outline of the cliffs seemed to be built for that purpose, as though they invited death.

She stood next to the opened window in her room, letting in the cool night air. After checking in she had gone to soak in the hotel’s hot spring baths but had turned the heating too high in her room. Finally, the temperature was becoming comfortable again. Saeko stood for a while, allowing the air to cool her skin.

She had the room to herself. The male crew were all sharing rooms to save on expenses but had booked separate twin western-style rooms for herself and Shigeko. The digital clock on the bedside desk indicated that it was almost eleven o’clock. Saeko usually kept a late routine — it was still too early for bed. However, the events of the last couple of days had left her exhausted and she felt ready to fall asleep the moment she lay down. She saw the other, empty bed, and lamented the fact that she would be sleeping alone tonight. Thinking how great it would be if Hashiba was with her now, she let out a deep sigh.

After the post-dinner meeting Hashiba had suddenly announced that he had to go back to Tokyo. Until that moment Saeko had been certain that they would be spending the night together. The revelation had disappointed her immensely. As Hashiba had mumbled something about urgent work coming up, he had averted his eyes. She’d wanted to question him but refrained because of the rest of the crew. She’d ended up standing there helplessly watching him get a cab from the hotel for some spurious reason.

If he’d stayed in the hotel it would have been easy for him to sneak across to her room at night. Hashiba would be on the Tokaido bullet train now, probably already coming up to Yokohama. That was if he’d been able to make the last kodama train bound for Tokyo. It was unlikely that the ever-competent Hashiba would have missed it, but the taxi had been summoned to the hotel with very little time to spare so it wasn’t impossible. Saeko found herself hoping that he had missed the train; then he might come back to the hotel after all.

Saeko wasn’t usually the type of person to mould reality around her expectations, and she wasn’t naïve enough to believe in treasures she had yet to obtain. Still, she couldn’t help looking for a sign that he was serious about their relationship. She would be thirty-six next May. After marrying at twenty-nine and getting divorced, Saeko had all but given up on her hopes of remarrying and having children. In the months since, however, the growing loneliness had exceeded her expectations. Now and again she even found herself regretting her decision to divorce, even though it was all she wanted at the time. At times, just picturing herself growing old alone gave her the chills. Yet finding a man she could date, let alone remarry, was a daunting task. There just weren’t any good men left. All the men she did like were already married; she was at that age. By some chance occurrence she had now met and fallen for Hashiba, who seemed perfect. He was sincere, kind, good at his work, and still unmarried. It seemed like something of a miracle.

If she was able to build a life with Hashiba, perhaps she would finally be able to recover from the pain of losing her father. It would be like coming out of a long, dark tunnel. People might think it was foolish, but Saeko didn’t care — it was what she wanted, a modest sort of happiness. She wanted to immerse herself in the bustle of a normal, everyday life. At the very least, it would mean goodbye to her habit of unconsciously switching on the TV set in an empty room.

Saeko shivered with cold and moved to close the window, but something she saw stopped her hand in mid-motion. Her room faced south, away from Atami. There were no electric lights, but it was still possible to make out the uneven contours of the rock face through the different shades of darkness. She strained her eyes, scanning the hazy depth of lighter and darker patches along the vertical cliff face beyond. The darker patches were hollows, and ledges jutting outwards looked a leaden gray from the faint starlight from above. Amidst this background, the white shape was hard to miss. It moved, reflecting light like the moon itself, asserting its existence.

Saeko gasped and strained her eyes further. It wasn’t her imagination — there was something on the cliff top, a white human form. For a moment it was still, then it was moving again. Someone was out there.

The white shape halted on the path running along the top of the cliffs. It clambered over the protective rails and started moving towards the edge. The shape was moving at right around the same height as Saeko’s room. There were probably tens of meters between them, but the image gradually started to resolve, becoming clearer. The figure was short and clad in a white kimono, and her face became visible. The image seemed to grow in size as though it was somehow being broadcast directly into the brain. Saeko could clearly make out the person’s features.

Beyond a doubt, the figure on the cliff edge was Shigeko Torii.

The moment she recognized the face Saeko sucked in air and held her breath. Wasn’t Shigeko resting in the room next door? How had she suddenly got out to the cliffs?

There was no doubt, either, what Shigeko was about to do. Her desire seemed to channel directly into Saeko’s mind.

I’m so tired …

Saeko leant out of the window and started to wave her hands frantically, trying to get Shigeko to stop. But Shigeko seemed to interpret the gesture as a goodbye.

It’s time for me to be with my son again …

After waving back in the same manner, Shigeko promptly continued forward, brushing some branches out of her way, and without even a moment’s hesitation launched herself off the edge.

As the figure tumbled, Shigeko’s face seemed not to head straight downward but to be tugged in towards Saeko for a moment, close enough so that the details of each wrinkle in the wizened visage seemed countable, before finally plunging head first into the waves below. A spray the color of the kimono met the body but there was no sound whatsoever.

Saeko stood for a while looking at the waters below. Gradually, the sound of the waves coaxed her out of her state.

Suicide …

The word flashed across her mind. Nishikigaura had reclaimed its dubious legacy.

Saeko’s heart hammered out of control, and she crouched down with one hand to her chest. The horrific image of Shigeko falling through the air replayed in an endless loop in her mind’s eye; the more she tried to get rid of it, the more viscously it stuck to the folds of her mind. She could see the strange way in which Shigeko’s falling body had seemed to glide momentarily towards her before plunging downwards into the sea. The phenomenon of her descent seemed neither real nor natural.

Then she remembered the night before, what she had seen after her dinner with Hashiba. They had been walking out of the building when Seiji Fujimura had plummeted to the street in front of them. Another suicide — she had witnessed two plunges to the death in as many days. Not only that, but she knew both of the people involved. Saeko struggled to understand the implications of such a coincidence. Even now, she clearly remembered how Seiji’s body had seemed to float downwards, featherlike, his spirit seemingly severed from his body, disobeying the laws of gravity by that much. Nonetheless, his body had crashed into the ground with a thud of reality, and the tree branches had kept on swaying as if testifying to the fall.

Saeko repressed the terrible image; she felt like she might throw up. But she knew she had to do something, she couldn’t just sit here like this. If Hashiba were around she’d bring it to him, but since he wasn’t, Saeko probably needed to go to Kagayama.

She called the room where Kagayama was staying. When he came to the phone, she explained what she’d witnessed in terse phrases.

“Y-You mean …” he stammered, trailing off in mid-sentence.

“What should we do?” Cursing herself for asking such a juvenile question, she clutched the receiver.

“I guess we should check Ms. Torii’s room,” Kagayama proposed.

Saeko hung up and dragged herself out to the corridor and stood waiting in front of the room. She knocked once and waited, not expecting an answer, not after what she had just seen. Shigeko had jumped to her death from the top of the Nishikigaura Cliffs. Right now, her lifeless body would be tossed around in the waves, mangled against the jagged rocks at the base.

Saeko was soon joined by Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa. Kagayama stepped forward and banged his fist against the door.

“Ms. Torii? Are you awake?”

It wasn’t that Kagayama didn’t trust Saeko’s words. He was obviously trying to keep his voice down, but it still echoed through the empty corridor. When he stopped knocking and put his ear against the door, there was nary a sound.

He turned to Kato. “Can you call the hotel manager?”

Kato nodded and started to run down the corridor. Saeko, Kagayama, and Hosokawa stood in heavy silence for the few minutes it took for Kato to come back. They all realized that this could mean the end for the program and looked gloomy.

Accompanied by Kato, the manager walked up to the door and pulled out a master key. He knocked once more to confirm that there was no answer. Then, without further hesitation, he inserted the key in the lock and opened the door.

The room was the same size as Saeko’s, with the bathroom on the opposite side. The manager flipped on the lights and walked into the room. There was a thin lump under the bedclothes, and on the pillow lay Shigeko’s wrinkled face. There were no signs of disorder, the bed sheets were pulled up to the old woman’s shoulders, and her body traced a straight line under the sheets. When Saeko walked to the side of the bed and confirmed that the person was Shigeko, she could not but cover her own mouth. Then, steadying herself against the wall, she struggled to gather her thoughts.

Shigeko’s face looked sunken and pale under the stark, fluorescent lights of the room. The manager looked dejected as he bent forward and spoke into the old woman’s ear. He called out to her a couple of times, but not only was there no reply, she also wasn’t breathing. He put a hand to her neck to check for a pulse, and shook his head.

“I’m afraid she’s passed away.” The manager probably would have preferred to keep the matter quiet, but that wasn’t exactly an option when someone discovered a dead body in a hotel. “I’ll notify the police,” he informed them.

He called the authorities from the room’s phone. As he explained the situation everyone else stood completely still, stunned, while Saeko staggered over to the sofa by the window and collapsed down onto it. It was then that she noticed letter paper, the kind provided by the hotel for free, sitting on the coffee table in front of her. It bore words, and Saeko leant forward and began to read.

I’m so tired now, just exhausted.

I’m so sorry not to have been of more use.

When my son died, the ability to read memories etched into objects just by touching them was given to me. I don’t know by whom, but looking back, it’s been an annoying talent. Sometimes I would touch something and it would reveal its essence to me. Other times, I would get nothing. My gift was incomplete and worked only capriciously. As people came to expect results, there were times when I had to make things up.

But lying to others is less trying than lying to oneself.

At the park this afternoon, I realized my powerlessness, my smallness. What have I been doing until now? The world is falling apart. All I’d do by putting myself forward is further compound my shame.

Is it possible for me to withdraw from this one? My soul is worn, my energy drained. My body doesn’t listen to me anymore.

I apologize for my selfishness. I am grateful for all you’ve done for me.

Mr. Hashiba, I thank you for your many kindnesses. But now, at least, your wish seems ready to be granted.

Saeko, I hope from the bottom of my heart that your wishes come true too.

Myself, I look forward to finally being reunited with my son.

December 22, 2012

Shigeko Torii

It was a suicide note — that much was unmistakable. Saeko indicated the stationery to the others and took another look at Shigeko’s face. There was no sign of pain, only the dignity of a natural death, akin to an ebbing tide. This was in complete contradiction to the fact that there was a suicide note. If the old woman had taken an overdose of pills, there would have been salient signs of a struggle between life and death on her countenance. Instead, Shigeko looked as though she had simply died of old age.

Once the police and ambulance staff arrived Saeko knew that she and the crew would have to stay to answer any questions that may arise. If the police suspected the possibility of foul play at a hotel, they would order an autopsy, and that would drag this mess out for even longer. Saeko wanted to speak with Hashiba before that happened. She left Shigeko’s room and walked back to her own.

She checked the time on her wristwatch. Hashiba would certainly have arrived at the television station by now. She summoned up his number on her cell phone and punched the call button. It went straight through to his voicemail. Strange — he must have turned his phone off for some reason. Even when he was busy, Saeko knew that Hashiba made a point of keeping his phone on. Why would he have turned it off tonight, of all nights? The words in Shigeko’s suicide note came back to her as she stood holding the phone in her hand:

But now, at least, your wish seems ready to be granted.

Somehow Shigeko must have known something that Hashiba wanted. If only she could hear his voice, she knew she would feel better. But it was no use — the dead tone served only to intensify her growing anxiety.

The police investigation was pushed back to the next day, and Saeko spent a tense, mostly sleepless night in her hotel room before waking to meet them at nine the next morning.

The initial tests had shown that there was no possibility of a crime having being committed. “Heart seizure” was the term that came to Saeko’s mind, but she thought “old age” more apt in the absence of any discernible pain. If a full autopsy was carried out they would be able to ascertain whether or not she’d had any other illnesses, especially of the heart, but in any case it was clear that her death was of natural causes. It was the presence of the suicide note that threw confusion over the situation. Sitting with the police now, she realized that their line of questioning was based on the trouble they had reconciling the contradictions implied.

Saeko answered their questions as faithfully as she could. She told them that last night she had gone to close her window to ready herself for bed and seen a white figure out on top of the Nishikigaura Cliffs and that the figure had been that of Shigeko Torii. At that point, one of the detectives interviewing her cut her off mid-sentence.

“You do realize that it would be impossible to make out that kind of detail at that time of night, and from the distance you describe?”

What he said was true, Saeko couldn’t deny it. It had been too dark; she had been too far away for that kind of detail to register. “Still,” she said, “I just knew it was her.”

The two cops cast their gazes out of the window then back to Saeko. “Hrm,” one of them grunted, “so you think it was some kind of premonition?”

That could be it, she supposed. A premonition, a hunch. Shigeko had sent Saeko a message from her deathbed in the room next door. The vision hadn’t been real; rather, the image had been delivered straight into her mind. The cops seemed to have intuited that interpretation.

One of the men was in his thirties, the other in his fifties. With sufficient years on their jobs, they’d probably come across a few instances where a “premonition” was the only explanation. Surprisingly few people dismissed such supernatural phenomena outright as being unscientific; it was more common not to doubt that they were perhaps a possibility.

“What did you do next?” the older one continued.

“I was in shock for a moment. Then I called Kagayama and told him what I saw.”

“Did you feel any uncertainty about what you had seen?”

“I did think that it might have been a hallucination. But after seeing Ms. Torii earlier in the day, I had a bad feeling about her.”

“A bad feeling?”

“I worked with Ms. Torii once before. This time, she looked completely exhausted to the core, like she’d lost the will to live.”

“You saw the suicide note I assume.”

“Yes, I was the one that found it, on the table in front of the sofa.”

“A strange woman. Something about her defies the common understanding of our like.”

The note obviously didn’t sit right with the two, who said as much to each other. Saeko felt the same, but perhaps because she knew something of Shigeko’s nature she found herself less surprised than she might have been.

It was Saeko who asked, “Do you know what Ms. Torii did for a living?”

“I’d seen her a few times on TV.”

“A few people accused her of being a fake. But from what I’ve seen, I believe that her powers were real.”

“And that’s why she could’ve done something like that?”

Leaving a note alluding to suicide and then, immediately afterwards, dying naturally in bed with no signs of an overdose was a feat completely beyond common sense, but Saeko nodded. Shigeko had willed her life to end, and with that clear goal in mind, had made it happen.

“She chose to perish, like some exalted monk of old?” the detective asked without sarcasm. There was no other possible interpretation; all that was left was to accept the facts as they were presented.

The younger one interrupted the exchange. “In the suicide note she refers to herself as powerless, small. She sounded as though she held herself in contempt. Do you know of anything that would have caused her to lose confidence in herself so suddenly?”

“We were visiting the herb garden to film for a show we were putting together on the group who vanished there the day before yesterday.”

“Ah yes, that one.”

“Have you been to the site?”

The two men nodded. “We went there initially but were called to join the rest of the search parties. We scoured the mountains between the park and the Ito Skyline. Couldn’t find any traces at all.”

Saeko looked hard as if boring through the men’s skulls and let her line of sight trail out the window, along Nishikigaura to a single point on the hillsides. For the first time she realized that the herb gardens’ slope was visible from her room. Come to think of it, she had been able to see the hotel from the park yesterday.

Saeko was more sensitive than not. She was proud of her ability to hear things and see phenomena that others wouldn’t or couldn’t notice. It was perhaps because of that sensitivity that she had felt such a heavy physical and emotional strain at the gardens yesterday. Even now, she wasn’t sure how to describe the experience. In purely physical terms, her body’s natural sense of regulation had been disturbed somehow — that was closest to the mark. She thought back to the almost unbearable pressure she had felt on her bladder, the sudden dryness of her throat, the heaviness of her feet. If she were ever abducted by aliens and spirited away to a different planet, she’d feel much the same way.

If she had felt the change so acutely, though, it must have felt worse for a psychic like Shigeko. To use her own word, she’d felt small, and Saeko could grasp the sense of it. If the world, which had provided them with a secure footing until now, had lost its own supports and begun to crumble, a human being could only feel as powerless as an ant.

It couldn’t have helped that Shigeko had a growing sense that Hashiba didn’t need her. Saeko was beginning to understand the process through which the elderly woman had lost her confidence so.

“I think Ms. Torii grew tired of living,” she summarized her thoughts, deciding against trying to explain the shock Shigeko must have felt at the park. After all, they had been there and felt nothing.

Other than Saeko, the detectives spoke with Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa, and after clearing up any possible contradictions between everyone’s stories, left the hotel. With Shigeko dead, it was more than likely that the program would be sent back to the drawing board. Saeko and the others returned to their rooms and began to get ready to check out of the hotel. There was no longer any reason for them to stay in Atami.

The station escalators led Saeko out into the crush of the downtown crowds. It was an evening late in the year, and people walked with fast, narrow steps. The Christmas songs seemed to come from the town as a whole rather than from the shops lining the streets. When it dawned on Saeko that it was Christmas Eve, she stopped next to a high-end jewelry store and found herself looking in through the show windows. At the same time, Hashiba’s face appeared in her mind. In her thirties, Saeko no longer found herself caught up in the frenzy of Christmas, but it still brought to mind the image of couples.

She remembered the last Christmas she had spent with her ex-husband; they might as well have been strangers. When she was young her father had always given her a present, always somehow educational: a backgammon set, a microscope, an electric typewriter, a book binding kit, a telescope, an encyclopedia, a lithograph, a globe … One time he’d come close to setting up a loom in her quarters. She’d often wanted him to get her cute, girlish accessories, but her wish had never been granted.

Coming out of the bustle of the shopping district into a residential area, Saeko saw a house with a display of black flowers.

After the procedural autopsy, Shigeko’s body had been returned to her home in the Oimachi district of Tokyo in preparation for tonight’s wake. Saeko was not particularly surprised when she’d heard that no specific cause of death had been discovered. It was just as she’d expected.

Shigeko’s home was a stand alone that had been built on the land of her old family home with the money she made from her television appearances. The house was too large for just one person, and now its ample spaces only accentuated the sparse mood of a wake where no one seemed truly saddened by the deceased’s passing, driving home just how alone Shigeko had been during her life.

If I were to die now, it would be like this for me.

Just when the thought crossed her mind, she caught a glimpse of Hashiba coming through the front garden gate. She looked around, making sure there was no one else they knew nearby, and ran over and took his hands and nuzzled her head into his chest. Immediately she felt comforted by his warmth, the lingering cold from her walk from the station seeming to just melt away. It may have looked as though she were mourning Shigeko’s death, but in fact she was trying to suppress her joy at seeing Hashiba again. Without such camouflage, her feelings threatened to explode in a manner unbefitting the occasion. Saeko was surprised by how much she had missed Hashiba after only a day apart. Where had her melancholy after her divorce gone?

“I’m sorry, but I have to go straight back to the station after this, then to Atami,” Hashiba whispered, reading Saeko correctly.

Immediately, Saeko’s thawing body turned rigid. Hashiba hadn’t asked her outright, but Saeko had been looking forward to them spending at least Christmas Eve together. Her romantic mood spoilt, she expressed displeasure with a tilt of her head and asked, “Why?”

“To get this program wrapped up,” Hashiba winced and spat out.

He took Saeko aside and began succinctly to explain the changes to the program agreed to in the production meeting the day before. Rather than see Shigeko’s death as a throwback, the producer had actually asked Hashiba to edit together as much as possible of the footage they already had. The film crew had already assembled in Atami.

If Shigeko had died in an accident during the course of filming then the program would have been canceled, but a death from natural causes was deemed not to require such a measure. On the contrary, a well-known psychic’s mysterious death, potentially by suicide, was newsworthy enough for other channels to cover it. They had to get the program out as soon as possible so as to net the highest ratings.

“It’s too soon,” Hashiba let out with a bitter smile.

Hashiba had been the one to ask the elderly Shigeko to come all the way out to Atami for the filming, and Saeko saw that he felt responsible. The ambience at Herb Gardens was weirder than anything before, and even those without any particular psychic powers had registered it and shuddered. How much more of that anomaly did Shigeko, with her honed antenna, sense and ingest? The impact on her body must have been immense.

“But can you finish the program without her?”

They would need to find someone to take Shigeko’s place. At such short notice, however, involving a celebrity was a tall order, and they would likely end up having to book one of the female newsreaders from the station. Even if they managed to book a star, it didn’t really solve matters. The other idea was to get a scientist, and names had been suggested.

Shigeko had offered very little usable commentary at the park about the disappearances, the only memorable moment her resigned remark that it was all too much for her. They could use that footage to say that the incident could not be construed as a supernatural phenomenon and segue into a more scientific direction.

Indeed, the local magnetic field had experienced a disturbance, and aurora-like lights had appeared in the evening sky. Fault lines, sunspots, geomagnetic disturbances, luminous atmospheres — it could all be brought together scientifically, perhaps in a way that suggested an influence on group psychology.

Hashiba outlined the possible format to Saeko: a good-looking female reporter in front of the camera, the scientific advisor playing second fiddle throughout.

“Have you found anyone suitable?” Saeko asked.

“I have a friend who’s a science professor at a national university, and he introduced me to this guy who’s quite a character — Naoki Isogai, a genius of sorts with doctorates in math and physics. He’s youngish, only in his thirties, just back from America and looking for work. They say he’s got a few quirks but also a strong interest in the media. I’d say he’s just about perfect for the role. Actually, I have a favor to ask, Saeko. Do you think you’d be able to meet him tomorrow, either at Shinagawa or Atami? I’d really appreciate it if you could show him around the park.”

Saeko could only nod her assent since she was still part of the crew. “I guess so …”

There was no denying that Shigeko’s death had played havoc with the program’s original concept. The move away from an occult interpretation toward a heavy reliance on scientific analysis was exactly what Hashiba had wanted. Only, Saeko found herself worrying that the program wouldn’t gel if they tried to use both types of footage together.

But if she, who usually worked alone, tried to preach ideals to a man who worked as part of a team, she could end up sounding naïve. In order to get the best ratings, even Shigeko’s death could be used as a trump card. Perhaps it was the norm in television.

“One can only do one’s best, I suppose,” she remarked.

“What do you mean?” Hashiba put an arm around her, not sure how to place the comment.

“Nothing really.” Saeko hadn’t meant anything by it; a phrase her father had often used had come to her.

She could feel the warmth of Hashiba’s arm through her coat, but his touch seemed different than before. It was not only more hesitant but included a delicate movement of the fingers that concealed some sort of bad conscience on his part.

Though Saeko noticed the change from a slight detail, she had no idea of Hashiba’s true inner struggle. All he wanted to do was take her in his arms, kiss her, and make love to her. She was within physical reach now, but he was limited to expressing himself with hesitant fingers. His affection for her was building up to the point where he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back for much longer.

If only he could indulge his male selfishness, how splendid that would be: have both his family and a lover … But if he did this, his wife would die. It was no longer a mere superstition for him but a conviction.

It wasn’t until a few hours after he became privy to Shigeko’s suicide note that he came to feel that a code meant only for him was hidden in the words. When the staff first faxed the letter to him, he was drawn as a matter of course to the sentence that mentioned him directly and hinted that his wish would be granted.

There was no question that Shigeko had sensed his wish to replace her and take the program in a different direction. He’d been suspicious about the psychic’s gift though he was the director, and her somehow reading his thoughts awed him. But his imagination went further. If she’d read his thoughts while working together, then she would have also divined his feelings for Saeko.

Your wish seems ready to be granted.

Coming from an old lady, it sounded like innocuous encouragement, but in the context of the complexity of their relationships, the phrase started to sound more like a warning. Shigeko was not hinting at anything as trivial as his wish regarding the direction of the program. She had seen the truth about his relationship with Saeko and divined that his wife had a lump on her breast and had been asked to come in for further testing. Shigeko had written the sentence with all of that in mind.

Saeko was within his reach now; she could be his. But Shigeko was warning him that to do so would be to sacrifice the other one. On the threshold of death, she had tried to teach him that the web of relations obtaining on the world’s underside meant that his choosing one would cause the other’s disappearance.

In Saeko’s apartment, the moment of consummation had been thwarted from afar when his fingers traced the lump on her breast, and the very next day he’d learned of his wife’s ominous exam results. That was just the tip of the iceberg. The more he became involved with Saeko and sauntered to the point of no return, the worse his wife’s diagnosis would become. With each naked embrace, his wife’s cancer would grow worse and eventually she would die.

The train of thought made Hashiba’s spine tingle. The various events that occurred in the world were, in truth, surface manifestations of a complex tangling of volitions and causalities that remained hidden to ordinary people, but which Shigeko could discern with her mind’s eye. Hashiba understood now, for the first time. That was the true nature of her gift.

Hashiba scrunched his face as if to hold back tears. Just when Saeko noticed this, the confession came spilling out of his mouth.

“Saeko, I want to take things further with you. But, I can’t … I have a family.”

Saeko let out a gasp of surprise. Caught completely off guard, her mind went blank and she couldn’t find any words to utter. But they came out, before she could gather her thoughts, like some conditioned reflex, all too slick.

“That much was obvious.” It wasn’t in retaliation that she was lying. Saeko had really believed that Hashiba was single. She was desperately hiding her turmoil. “I didn’t really think someone as attractive as you could still be single.” Oblivious to Hashiba’s consternation, the words flowed, completely contradicting her feelings, but Saeko could not stop herself. “You’re just too nice. You were just saying what you knew I wanted to hear.”

Hashiba just stood there, neither apologizing nor justifying himself, afraid that any line he attempted might sound smug.

“Why don’t you say something?”

Even at this point, Saeko expected professions of love to come tumbling out of Hashiba’s mouth.

“I’m sorry I lied to you. I hope that we can stay good friends.”

Saeko felt her eyes widen. She wanted to bang her fists against his chest and tell him:

I don’t care if you have a family. Love me. Please, don’t leave me alone.

For the first Christmas Eve in a long while, Saeko found her thoughts dwelling on the fact that she was spending it alone. After the wake — after his confession that he was married with a family — Hashiba had taken a train to Atami. Alone despite it being Christmas Eve, Saeko had dragged herself through the cold and visited Kitazawa’s office. There, she’d asked Kitazawa to help her in looking for any connections between the Fujimura family and her father. She’d only just come through her front door.

While the warmth of her apartment gradually helped dispel the chills from the cold winter air, Saeko felt her icy loneliness become more distinct. Wondering what to do, she unconsciously picked up the remote and clicked on the TV.

The news reported that the emergency services had made no progress in their search for the whereabouts of the ninety-one people who had gone missing in Herb Gardens in Atami.

Saeko suddenly remembered that they had been in the middle of printing out a text from the floppy disk they had found in her father’s notebook. In the rush, they had headed straight for Atami without finishing the document. Well, at least now she had something she could be getting on with this Christmas Eve.

She walked through to her father’s study and sat down in front of the word processor. A number of pages sat in the tray, the ones Hashiba had printed out two days ago. The machine had been proceeding backwards, from the end of her father’s text. She called up the first page, fed a single sheet of paper, and pressed the button to print.

The process was unbelievably slow, the paper crawling up bit by bit. The screen itself was tiny, only able to show half a page at a time. It would take forever to output the whole thing, manually feeding in one sheet at a time and hitting the print button. But Saeko knew that there was no choice but to repeat the process if she wanted to read the thing. She placed a second sheet and went to the kitchen to fetch some wine and cheese. After she had coaxed out ten pages, she decided to start reading while she continued to print out the rest.

The document had probably been written in a hotel in Bolivia that August shortly before her father went missing.

It began like a travelogue of sorts but mixed in elements that read to Saeko like draft ideas for a new book.

August 17, 1994. The Republic of Bolivia.

The Altiplano plateau stretches southwards between the Andes and Occidental mountain ranges. Across to the east, beyond the mountains, lies the tropical rainforest of the Amazon. Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, is located at the north of the plateau, close to the Lago Titicaca — a lake situated 3,890 meters above sea level. Despite its location between the equator and Tropic of Capricorn, the altitude means that the area maintains an average temperature of ten degrees throughout the year, with daily extremes of hot and cold. Now is the dry season and the sun is strong, with hardly a cloud in the sky, but a forceful wind blowing up from the south can cause a sudden drop in the local temperature.

It’s just after two in the afternoon and the temperature is close to twenty degrees. The sky is fresh and clear, a deep and lush shade of blue. When out driving a jeep it has become my habit to wear jeans and a t-shirt. But no matter how lightly I dress I end up covered in sweat. I use my neck towel to wipe the sweat away from my forehead, but it comes straight back. The jeep’s air conditioning is half-broken, and the dusty roads mean that I cannot open the windows.

It has been two days since I left Japan for this trip. My plane stopped over in Miami yesterday; from there I changed for a direct flight to the capital city of La Paz. Once arrived I busied myself checking into the hotel I had booked across from the city museum, sorting out a jeep, and researching basic local geography. The cultural heritage site of the Tiwanaku ruins, my destination for this trip, is located just over seventy kilometers west of the capital.

This morning I left the hotel at eight o’clock and headed northwest in the jeep for the small town of Umamarca which sits in a beautiful gorge on the eastern flank of the Lago Titicaca. I took a drive around the lake to enjoy the spectacular views then drove back following the river towards La Paz. At last I begin to follow the road to Tiwanaku.

The road is barely paved and cuts a straight path through the surrounding grasslands. As I drive, some lines of smoke appear in the sky, looking like beacons. I pull into a small town.

The main street of the town is lined with makeshift stalls of plywood and tin. The Aymara Indio are selling bottles of clean water and seem completely unconcerned by the clouds of dust thrown up by passing cars. The stalls are colored a dingy brown, covered in dust from the road. The stall-keeper Indio wear simple clothing and sit waiting for customers. Others huddle in groups by the roadside, idly chatting. A few pigs roam freely among them. One brushes up against a stall, probably looking for spare food. A pair of copulating dogs run out into the street. Behind the town in the distance looms the vast presence of the Andes, a stunning backdrop for the hovels. Time flows so slowly it might just stand still, signs of a peaceful afternoon everywhere. I feel somehow nostalgic, probably because this place resembles the state of my hometown as it was rebuilt after the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Once through the town, the scenery is reclaimed by endless dry grassland. I relax back into the car seat, draping one hand over the steering wheel and watching the town fade into the distance in the rearview mirror. If it wasn’t for the continuous bumping of the poorly maintained road I would probably start to doze off. As I drive, I am struck by an illusion that the road stretching on into the distance is a one-dimensional number line. The idea spurs me to go through some math in my head in order to fight off the increasing drowsiness.

If I were to think of myself as the zero point, then the road ahead would represent the positive part of the number line. The road stretching behind represents the negative. The town just passed would be one of the numbers on the line, an integer. The line is a construct of real numbers, and among positive integers such as 1, 2, 3 there lie countless fractions. The total number of integers and fractions combine to form what are called the rational numbers. The total count of numbers, however, does not stop there. Here and there we come across the curious existence of what are known as irrational numbers.

The most well-known examples of irrational numbers are the square roots of 2 or 3. Other numbers that cannot be the solution to equations, for example π, are known as transcendental numbers. No matter how many decimal places you calculate them to, all you get is a random sequence of numbers, with no discernible pattern. In other words, these numbers cannot be reduced to a simple fraction.

When I was a student, just to play around I pursued the value of π down to 2,300 decimal places.

… 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693 …

Of course, no matter how many decimal places I wrote down, nothing even approaching a regular pattern emerged. Irrational numbers continue ad infinitum as a chaotic concatenation of numerals with no point of destination. Imagine if I were to suddenly find a repeating pattern in a number that had heretofore been defined as irrational!

That would have been the moment when I truly learned the meaning of fear. I’ve never felt afraid of ghosts or the occult or other such ridiculous nonsense, but that, there, would have filled me with awe and fear. The appearance of a pattern beyond a certain boundary gives rise to the thought of the Will of some entity that pervades the universe.

Consider the curious nature of irrational numbers themselves. The fact that they cannot be expressed in terms of a fraction — that random numbers stretch out endlessly after the decimal place — means that there is no endpoint. Because of this, they cannot be compared to the numbers before and after them and hence cannot be accorded an accurate location on the number line. Therein lies the profundity and uncanniness of irrational numbers. As a youth of eighteen, I shuddered at the thought of such a bottomless abyss.

If integers can be thought of in terms of markings or road signs, then irrational numbers are endless pits dotted across the way. What is astonishing is that irrational numbers are far more numerous than rational numbers. Such a comparison may seem meaningless as both sets of numbers are infinite. The concept of comparing the boundaries of disparate infinities has to come into play, and as proved by Cantor, who completed set theory at the end of the nineteenth century, the boundary of infinity is larger for irrational numbers.

Imagine yourself to be driving along a line of numbers. There is far less solid ground under you compared to the sheer number of bottomless drops. Despite this, the car barges on without falling into any of the pits, just as my jeep is continuing along its path towards the ruins. Mathematical reasoning and reality couldn’t be further removed from one another. There seems to be no danger of disappearing into an abyss.

Integers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, transcendental numbers … There are many types of numbers, but among them zero is truly exceptional. Zero is a form of darkness that does not exist on the number line. Walking along it, we could slip into a basin-like hollow, find the surroundings altered, and reappear suddenly in another dimension. The concept of zero is exactly like a black hole in astrophysics.

When we expand the domain of numbers to include complex numbers, a second dimension opens up around the line, a plane on whose surface bristles an infinite amount of imaginary numbers. We can solve quadratic or second-degree equations without postulating their existence, but not cubic or third-degree equations.

On either side of the road I am traveling expands a vast grassland, home to innumerable types of plant life. Some grasses roll along the ground, blown by the wind, their stalks trembling uncertainly. Other types of grass solely plant strong, deep roots in the earth. One can’t help but wonder just how many types of fauna are concealed in the flora.

Imaginary numbers are like spirits wandering between being and nothingness, and are again much more numerous than real numbers. Unlike real numbers which are expressed as a line, in one dimension, complex numbers extend their realm onto a plane, in two dimensions. Without the help of these phantoms, we are unable to describe the physical world using the language of mathematics. What does this mean in reality?

A shock from below jerks my hands on the steering wheel — the jeep veers off to the side. My drowsiness suddenly dissipates, and I grab the wheel and correct course. It takes me a moment to work out what happened. They say that drowsiness is catching — I must have dozed off.

I pull up to the side of the road thinking it a good idea to get some air and stretch my legs. The sun beats down strongly, the air dry. I stretch my arms and look back at the road the jeep had come down. About twenty meters from me I see a round hole in the asphalt. The road is in pretty bad shape overall, with little pockmarks here and there, and I must have driven straight into one of the larger holes.

I kick at some nearby pebbles and voice an idea: “Our world isn’t built as sturdily as everyone thinks.”

It’s as if we’ve been walking along a bridge that, from good luck or chance, simply hasn’t crumbled yet. Modern technology cannot be maintained without resort to imaginary numbers, which cannot exist in reality. This begs the question: what if a mathematical genius denied that such numbers exist and offered a flawless proof that they don’t? In real-world terms that would be the same as discovering, only after a bridge has been completed and walked across, that its legs contained no bolts whatsoever to enforce them. With that would be born the realization that the bridge could collapse at any minute.

If the world as we know it ever begins to collapse, then our first signal would be a small shift in mathematics. Such a shift would be evidence that we have misinterpreted the world and engaged in negligent building practices.

The number zero poses an even bigger problem. In calculations involving the physical constants of the universe, the moment zero appears in the denominator, it gives rise to infinity and botches all attempt at quantification. Zero has the ability to blow it all up. That is why mathematicians have devised means to tame and paper over zero. It’s almost as though they’ve been telling a string of lies that would be discovered eventually, and I wonder what payback the universe has in store for us when the deceit becomes unmanageable. I shudder at the thought of it. The appearance of zero where it shouldn’t be is a harbinger that the structure of the universe is on the verge of collapse, a sign that mockingly admonishes, “Pardon me, but it is too late to restore the status quo ante.”

I hold my hands up to shield my eyes, and across the road I can make out a greenish sign indicating the distance left to the Tiwanaku ruins: nine miles. I’m comforted that it’s an integer. I also find it in poor taste that it’s almost a round figure but isn’t.

It is my first time to visit the Tiwanaku site. Taking in the view from where I parked my jeep the ruins seem to blend into the nondescript, endlessly vast brown earth. The site is about a kilometer long and five hundred meters wide, and it would probably take about an hour to walk around its circumference. My usual routine when visiting sites is to take a walk around the area to get a sense of the whole before moving on to examining the various parts. Today, I decide the walk would be too much and follow the arrow sign at the entrance, proceeding through the Kantatallita Temple toward the Puerta del Sol — Gateway of the Sun — that stands in the northwest corner of the Kalasaya platform.

In two days I will visit Peru’s “city in the sky,” Machu Picchu, located 2,400 meters above sea level on a sheer mountain ridge. Tiwanaku itself is 3,700 meters above sea level but finds itself on a barren plain. What they have in common are massive stone buildings.

In both cases it is unknown how stones weighing hundreds of tons were carried up to be piled at such high elevations. Why did the Mayans have to brave pain and suffering to build such enormous stone structures? The scale of the endeavor is mind-boggling, and yet one day, they completely abandoned the city of stone, the fruit of so much toil, and disappeared somewhere, their reasons again a mystery.

Visiting the world’s ancient ruins, I often wonder if the stones’ placement, aligning as they do with the movements of celestial bodies, expresses some meaning. This was particularly the case when I visited Stonehenge when living as a student in England. One of the more resilient theories regarding the 5,000-year-old circular structure is that it is a calendar. My visit did not help me to ascertain whether or not this is the case, but if people living 5,000 years ago had knowledge of solar years and the cycle of the moon, then our understanding of the history of civilization is thrown into confusion.

Generally accepted history tells us that in 1543 Copernicus wrote his treatise on the motion of celestial bodies and brought about the paradigm shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view. However, there are various signs that suggest ancient cultures knew not just the orbital period of the Earth but even about precessional movement. Could they really have built these structures to represent the movements of celestial bodies? It indeed seems hard to fathom that the ancients would have gone to so much effort without a clear purpose. Calendar or not, the stones’ arrangement must have some meaning.

Standing to the northwest of Kalasaya with two feet braced on dry earth is the Gateway of the Sun, a large structure carved from a single block of Andesite stone. Apart from the obvious differences in size and surroundings, it looks like a smaller version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. As I’ve already seen in photographs, the eastern face of the gate is covered in exquisite patterns said to represent a language undeciphered to this day. Various theories abound as to the content — that they detail the scientific knowledge of the time, that they contain data on the movement of the heavens …

Indeed, whether it is the Pyramids or Stonehenge, the structures’ connection to the movement of celestial bodies, beginning with the Sun, has always been the issue. Ancient civilizations painstakingly observed the skies to measure time. A day was measured in the 24 hours it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis, and a year was measured in the 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds it takes the Earth to make a complete orbit around the sun. Celestial motion defined time and resulted in a calendar. For mainly agricultural societies, a calendar was necessary to accurately track the seasons. Yet, although grasping the lengths of a day and a year and the changing seasons should have been sufficient for the purposes of farming, a calendar extending 1,200 years into the future was created in this land.

If the inscriptions here are similar to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, I might be able to make them out. Hieroglyphs, inscribed on the Rosetta Stone which Napoleon brought back from an expedition to Egypt, had not been in use for almost two thousand years and become indecipherable. It was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that French linguist Champollion managed the difficult task thanks to the Rosetta Stone.

From a low crouch I take some video footage and Polaroid shots of the gate, then sketch some of the more weathered sections into a notepad. If I have the time, it would be an interesting challenge to try and decipher the glyphs myself. Civilization does not always appear to have progressed in orderly stages from past to present, and perhaps the reason for this is hidden somewhere in the text.

Just as the ability to read and write hieroglyphs was lost, so too was the know-how of constructing pyramids. Much about how the ancient Egyptians were able to build such large structures remains a mystery. We know that π was used for the pyramids built in Egypt between 3000 and 2000 B.C. and in South America. However, our histories tell us that the number was not discovered until much later. And how do ever make sense of the fact that structures based on accurate observations of the heavens were erected well before the advent of modern science?

Temporally speaking, it sometimes seems as though the flow of civilization carelessly blends past and future.

Why were the Nazca Lines drawn if they could only be seen from high above?

Why do accurate maps of Antarctica exist from ancient times if the ice-covered continent was only discovered in 1820?

How did the ancient Indio of South America build a furnace that may have reached temperatures of 2000 degrees centigrade and gauge heavenly orbits so accurately?

If it’s true that Copernicus came across the heliocentric theory in a text from antiquity rather than invent it, then who was the author, from which exact period?

Why were the reed boats used on the Lago Titicaca identical in both design and method of construction to the vessels that sailed down the ancient Nile?

Why do ancient world maps have accurate longitude markings when the chronometers necessary for this weren’t invented until the eighteenth century?

Why does the ancient Hindu sacred text Mahabharata contain a description that obviously appears to depict a nuclear explosion?

Why do the sacred Brahman Vedas, compiled between 1500 and 1200 B.C., clearly note the efficacy of vaccination?

There is ample evidence that a civilization of unclear provenance existed, and the impression is that it emerged without following discrete stages of development.

There are many books already published around this theme, all and one attempting to answer the questions through invoking a lost civilization. They assert that a continent such as Mu in the Pacific or Atlantis in the Atlantic nurtured an advanced civilization but, due to some calamitous event, sank into the ocean, taking most of their knowledge with them.

Myths do not appear out of the blue but form around a nucleus of memory shared by a people. An analysis of the myths of the world reveals that almost all of them describe a flood. It seems certain from this that there was in fact massive flooding on a global scale over 10,000 years ago. Thus the authors postulate that an advanced civilization in the Pacific or Atlantic was lost to a flood and that its landless survivors scattered around the world and taught other peoples their ways. As time passed, however, and the first generation died off, the memory of the civilization grew increasingly dim, with fewer and fewer numbers in each following generation to carry it forward. From our perspective, civilization gradually regressed.

There is something about the names “Mu” and “Atlantis” that excites people.

The arguments are logical, but they are far from gaining mainstream academic acceptance. No submerged metropolis has ever been excavated, and it does not seem likely that a civilization able to calculate π with any accuracy flourished over 10,000 years ago. That being said, the idea of an environmental shift causing a mass flood at around that time seems plausible, whether looked at from the analysis of prevailing world myths or from geophysical theory. The idea of an ancient civilization is perhaps just a romantic notion, but there is credence to the idea of an ancient cataclysm.

A natural disaster, caused by anomalies on a global scale like fluctuations in the geomagnetic field or changes in orbital paths, can be predicted by observing the heavens. That is why the ancient Egyptians and Indio of South America went to such obsessive lengths in hoisting and positioning huge stones in a way that faithfully reflected celestial motion. If it could help them predict disaster, no effort was too grueling.

If their reasons for constructing huge stone structures are recorded somewhere in writing, I would like to look for that text. The ability to read it would of course have long since been lost; it would be a daunting task for us moderns, but when it comes to codes, the tougher the merrier.

I kneel and embrace the rock with both arms, sliding my palms along the textured contours of its surface. To feel it with my whole body, I lovingly run my fingers over the etchings and put my ear to inanimate matter, listening for ancient words.

Burn paper and words are reduced to ash. Indeed, during the Spanish conquest, huge numbers of invaluable cultural relics were burned: books on astronomy, pictures, copied tomes, hieroglyphic texts. But it was not so easy to erase the words of these ancient sites, carved as they are in stone and rock. If something had to be communicated to future generations at any cost, the only choice was to give meaning to a layout of stones and to carve words into them.

Kalasasaya is a wide open space surrounded by double walls. Gigantic rectangular columns line the outer enclosure, and these too are thought to have functioned as precision observatories.

How surprised the Spanish must have been to discover the ruins here. Even today, the local Indio hold to the legend that Tiwanaku simply appeared out of the blue, a long time before the emergence of the Aztecs. Maybe it is just my prejudice, but I find it hard to imagine that the ancestors of the Indio idling in the streets today built this great site.

The ruins haven’t been dated definitively. A historian argues that they’re 500 years old; an archeologist pushes it back to 2,400 years. Yet another, a scientist, claims that the ruins have stood for 17,000 years. Any agreement seems far off.

My heart laden with queries, I decide to climb the Akapana pyramid. It is stepped, and its four sides, each around 200 meters in length, are set down precisely according to the cardinal points of the compass. Unfortunately, only the base maintains its original grandeur, the upper stones having been plundered by the Spanish and resembling a mere hill.

Reaching the top, I look out across the surrounding area. The Lago Titicaca used to be 30 meters higher than it is now; its curving edge must have been close by to the north. The view would have been quite different then. In my imagination the lake fills up, accompanied by tall lush grass, leaving Tiwanaku an island. Deep waterways meander between the mountains and reflect the sky, a blue snake writhing.

The impact of climbing Akapana is fundamentally unlike the euphoria I experienced at Giza and Teotihuacan. A simpler and purer feeling that I have known this land before assails me. It resembles déjà vu but is more intense. It does not weaken with each blink; the longer I look, the stronger the familiarity and the impression that I have lived here in the past. As I close my eyes and relish my nostalgia, I catch a faint scent of citrus on the air. Nothing brings back old memories like the sense of smell. My excessive false remembrance must have brought it in tow.

The southern sun has already begun to chart a descent towards the west, yet the heat is relentless. I hold a hand up to my forehead and strain my eyes against the light.

The inhabitants of Tiwanaku, like those of Machu Picchu, are said to have abandoned the place en masse one day. How do I begin to contemplate the mindset that compelled them to leave this stone city that they had slaved to build? Whether from cities or not, there are instances of humans suddenly deciding to move on. Many historians and archeologists put forward the commonplace view that environmental changes caused food shortages. The same argument has been applied to Tiwanaku. The mainstream explanation is that a progressively drier climate brought about the failure of agriculture, fishing, and livestock rearing and hence societal collapse. The Indio departed, then, in search of more fertile land.

The widespread theory should not be blindly accepted. It is true that peoples migrate for the sake of sustenance, but to see that rationale as an end-all is simplistic. Our premise needs to be that the ancients did not necessarily think as we do. While we moderns have no difficulty handling abstract concepts such as morality, love, and the good, ancients apart from the tiny minority who were literate couldn’t have grasped them as such, since these are only obtained via mastery of a rich, complex system of writing. Their cognition does not align with ours. Applying current reasoning unmodified to those times exacerbates the gap and takes us further from the truth.

What to do, then? We must do away with reasoning by modern analogy and adequately examine their language and cognitive level, then rely on the work of our imagination. How did the ancients conceive of life and death? Only by discarding our yardsticks and reenacting their sensitivities within ourselves are we able to glimpse the truth.

One of the reasons put forward for the sudden abandonment of ancient Machu Picchu is that the inhabitants feared the onslaught of a powerful enemy. True, the Incas stood in terror of the Spanish invasion at the time, but there are no signs that Machu Picchu was ever actually attacked. A grave containing over a hundred bodies has been found, but the remains tell no tale of war.

Machu Picchu was first discovered by the American archeologist Hiram Bingham, who believed he’d found the legendary city of Vilcabamba. But when the excavation failed to turn up the empire’s gold hoard, Bingham concluded that he must have stumbled upon a previously unknown ancient city. The diggers may not have revealed any hidden gold but did uncover, in a tomb near the “Funerary Stone,” 173 mummified bodies of which curiously enough 150 were female. Archeologists explain that Machu Picchu, with its many shrines, was a place for rituals and included many priestesses among its inhabitants. An alternative view holds that when the Incans fled the city fearing a Spanish attack, they killed and buried the older women that would have slowed down their progress.

Be it for food in a new land or from a potential enemy, the mainstream theories of flight are too easily imagined. No matter what interpretation is applied to the fact that 150 out of 173 mummies were women, it can be no more than a fiction devised by some individual. Rather than choose or not choose to believe someone else’s fiction, why not come up with a more convincing story yourself?

The sense of that something like déjà vu is coming back. I am becoming certain that I have seen this same landscape somewhere before. It’s affecting not just sight but hearing, smell, taste, and touch as well. The dusty wind seems to whisper in my ear. The enveloping air feels rough against my skin, and I can taste sunbaked earth on my tongue.

They’re nothing as gentle as sensations. A chill is assaulting the nape of my neck, and my skin is breaking out in goose bumps. At first I’m not sure why, but I gradually recognize the feeling. I’m less gazing at a landscape than being gazed at by something. Not just one, but by many, as though I’m on a stage addressing an audience.

The Underground Shrine is nine meters wide by twelve meters long, cut 1.8 meters into the ground. On the south side descends a set of steps. I stand at the top and look down. The rectangular space is surrounded by an elaborate collection of piled stones, and in the center is a large stone pillar flanked by two smaller ones. The human figure of Viracocha is carved into the central pillar.

This Viracocha appears in many of the ancient South American legends. It is probably better to think of him as a group of people with a certain talent than as one man. Depending on the legend, his name changes, as do the places and ages in which he appears. In each legend, however, he has more or less the same physical characteristics: tall, pale, robed, wearing a goatee on his chin and a belt around his waist.

He is said to have appeared from nowhere one day to bestow various benefits on the locals. He built irrigation ducts, taught how to build stone structures, planted crops, and even healed the sick. He preached mercy, ended fights, encouraged good deeds, exuded dignity, and commanded the respect of all. He was first a scientist, but also an architect and an artist. He was fluent with words and taught Aymara, the world’s oldest language. In short, he was the one who brought civilization and order to a primitive land, a god-like figure.

But Viracocha would never stay in one place for long. As soon as his work was done, he would leave as suddenly as he’d arrived.

The relief carved into the surface of the pillar leans more towards the abstract than the mimetic. Viracocha’s hair is long, and his beard thick around his mouth. His forehead is the shape of Mt. Fuji, his nose rounded, his face plum, and his eyes are simply depicted as circles. His eyebrows and lips are manly, like thick ropes twisted by the ends. Looking closer, however, it becomes apparent that his eyes are brimming with tears. This feature is clearly part of the original carving, not an effect of centuries of wear and degradation.

Is it empathy with the weeping figure? I find myself close to tears and dab a handkerchief to my cheek. The sun now hangs behind the column and gives a halo to the man. When face and sun come to overlap, the illusion is of the sun itself crying.

Later, when I was driving away from Tiwanaku on my way back to La Paz, I came across a young Japanese backpacker hitching for a ride. It was late in the day and the sky was already growing dark, so I felt compelled to pick him up. He was talkative; for the whole trip back he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations. He seemed to favor the idea that they were driven away by a “spurring fear.” Fear has indeed always been a fundamental factor in the patterns of human behavior over time, and his idea isn’t to be dismissed. The next day he was due to set off for Machu Picchu.

I dropped him off in front of the Tiwanaku Museum and made it back to my hotel just before nightfall. Once I got to my room I put my shoulder bag on the table and looked at the clock on the night stand between the beds — it was just after 5 o’clock. I lay back on the sofa and rested for a while, staring at the ceiling.

I planned to relax a bit before going out for dinner. I had already decided where to eat: a casual cafe-type place on the Plaza del Estudiante, only a five-minute walk from the hotel. I called to make a reservation and booked for 8 o’clock when they had an opening. All I had to do then was shower; plenty of time to write down some thoughts inspired by the Gateway of the Sun with its detailed reliefs.

Some while ago I became obsessed with the question of how life (DNA) came into existence. Looking at the gate, feeling that I had seen it before, my conviction deepened that life could be analyzed from the viewpoint of information and that light worked upon its birth and evolution.

But before that I should outline my ideas on how biological organisms came to rely on visual forms of information — on how the eye was born.

The Cambrian era saw the emergence of sight. It was during that massive explosion of biodiversity, it is said, that life first came to observe its external world. The Cambrian era also saw the advent of the hunter. It was through hunting and feeding on each other that life forms diversified. The division of the sexes and sexual reproduction are also thought to be extensions of this development. According to the principle of natural selection and survival of the fittest that form the backbone of the theory of evolution, sight gave hunters a powerful advantage over their prey, therefore guaranteeing the proliferation of the genes that allow sight.

This explanation, however, is too hackneyed. Sight would undoubtedly give the hunter an advantage. At the same time, however, it would also give the hunted an advantage by making it easier to escape.

Overall, the theory of evolution seems to be correct, but there are points that call for doubt. I will go into this in more detail shortly, but once we have brains that wield language, the fundamental precepts of evolutionary theory no longer stand firm.

Now, let’s consider how one’s perceived environment changes through the gift of sight. For an animal without it — an earthworm, for example — the world is not three-dimensional but rather a surface that is knowable through skin contact. Gaining sight is an incredible leap akin to adding a further dimension. It opens the door to a new world on an order fundamentally different from emerging from the sea or learning to fly.

I conceive this miracle of a development as a mechanism in reciprocal relationship with light. Let me offer an analogy.

I once watched a movie that my daughter rented called The Poseidon Adventure. When a luxury cruise liner is capsized by an enormous wave and slowly begins to sink in this adventure story, a clergyman leads a group of people up to the now inverted base of the vessel. A rescue helicopter lands on the base of the upturned ship and waits to see if there are any survivors. The ragtag bunch that makes it through the final hoop and gets to the hull starts banging against the steel plating to alert the rescue team. The presence of survivors confirmed, the team uses a burner to cut away a circular hole in the base of the ship, providing a route to safety.

The evolution of the eye goes similarly. It wasn’t just about the brain, not simply a case of nerve endings extending from the cranium; the route to sight only opened with outside help. The acquisition of the eye was an immense feat accomplished at long last thanks to the cooperation of interior and exterior. What was outside guiding and aiding the nerve endings was the light of the sun.

Light yields information. From that perspective, I cannot help but think that the reciprocal relationship with light was also responsible for the birth of our planet’s first life forms.

Although the exact mechanisms for the development of life remain unknown, the theory that black smokers served as the wombs for primordial life is gaining traction. These form when seawater flows downwards through rifts in the earth’s crust, is heated by the magma below, and blows out as from a nozzle. The theory is that in these crevices of the world at the bottom of the sea, cells steeped in hot water began to organize themselves by chance. But did light reach there? If there was none, or only a tiny amount, then the black smoker was not fit to be the cradle of life.

So what other possible explanations are there? Let me share a hypothesis of mine. It has been my belief that interaction with sunlight was an intrinsic factor in the emergence of life, but there are two apparent contradictions in this argument.

Firstly, if it is true that life developed by chance, then one would expect to see both left- and right-spiraling DNA, but the strands all spiral towards the right. What force determined that they only spiral in one direction?

Secondly, the various species that the Earth is teeming with today are thought to have evolved from life that emerged simultaneously at a single point 500 million years after the birth of the solar system. Why has such an emergence been limited to a single point in the system’s history?

Contemplating what phenomenon, limited in time, could endow a right spiral, I thought of the disappearance of a black hole. Light and particles are released in that event. If a black hole vanished in the vicinity of our solar system 500 million years into the latter’s history, and life on earth was born in relation to the emanating light, then the point of emergence would be limited. Furthermore, since a black hole spins, it could transfer directionality to its surroundings.

The momentary brilliance of a dying black hole drove the birth of life. The power of zero. This resembles the becoming of matter via distortions in the vacuum.

The birth of life is synonymous with the birth of information. Three of the four chemical bases ATGC combine to form an amino acid, and a chain of 200 amino acids is required to form a protein that is relevant for life. That amounts to information, in the language of ATGC. Life equals information. What conveyed the information? Light, of course.

In Genesis in the Old Testament, the first words spoken by God are: “Let there be light.” God created light, and interacting with it life was born.

At this point I’d like to touch on the extinction of the dinosaurs. It might seem that I’m digressing, but that is not the case.

The sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is a major event in the history of evolution, and there are many theories as to the cause. The one currently favored: their fate was affected by the impact of a giant meteorite that altered the climate. There is apparently a large crater in the Yucatan Peninsula that dates back to this.

But we must not fall into this trap. In trying to accurately describe nature through language, there are two kinds of approaches. One is simple and beautiful and clicks immediately when presented. The other subconsciously sponges on the trends of an era, comes off the top of the head, and is mediocre and hackneyed. The Copernican heliocentric hypothesis and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are examples of the former approach, while attributing the extinction of dinosaurs to a meteorite collision is without a doubt an instance of the latter.

The meteorite theory was first raised in the 1970s. What trends obtained then? The world was in the middle of the Cold War, when the idea of an end immediately brought to everyone’s mind images of devastation in the wake of a nuclear exchange. Powerful bombs raining down and putting an end to everything. How very simple.

Its subconscious application is the meteorite hypothesis. A meteorite may very well have fallen, but that this drove the dinosaurs into mass extinction is forced. No matter how drastic the change in climate, some specimens are bound to survive. I believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was biological, the result of the flipping of a switch across their species. They left the stage due to some internal factor to allow mammals to prosper. A pan-species interaction with light flicked an extinction switch that had budded within the dinosaurs.

Much later in time, just around 50,000 years ago, something similar occurred. The baton passed from the hand of the Neanderthals to that of Cro-Magnon man, or Homo sapiens. At that point, both species had spread out of Africa and could be found on the European continent. Then, after a watershed around 50,000 years ago, the Neanderthals began to drift into extinction while Homo sapiens began to flourish; the two species could not interbreed even if they mated. The Neanderthals are said to have possessed larger brains than Homo sapiens. Despite living in the same environment, why did one perish and the other prosper?

The answer is language. The Neanderthals had not developed a language sophisticated enough to describe the physical world, while Homo sapiens had. Language was key in this changing of guards.

Having held forth on the emergence of primordial organisms, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the transition from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens, there is one more hypothesis that I would like to offer.

Whether we are talking about the birth of primordial life, the organ called the eye, or language, given that they all create new information, the same mechanism may have been in play in each instance. It makes sense for us, then, to seek the answer to the mystery of how life evolved on this planet by examining the most recent analogous event — the acquisition of language. Simply put, it is easier for us to examine what occurred 50,000 years ago than 3.9 billion years ago. We are unlikely to ever find the truth by stirring some primordial organic soup in a lab.

If the same mechanism was responsible for the extinction of both the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals, then the question is why they had to die out.

What the birth of the eye prepared was brain development. With the eye, it is as though brain matter forged a path through the skull. Visual perception of external stimuli precipitated further evolution, eventually leading to a brain complex enough to handle language.

What the extinction of the dinosaurs prepared was mammals’ prosperity, which is tantamount to brain development. Dinosaurs are reptilian creatures, born from eggs. Mammals, on the other hand, spend a period of time before birth developing within wombs. This difference is crucial as gestating in ample amniotic fluid promotes brain development. Birthing via eggs places a limit on the evolution of reptiles’ brains.

The key in the transition from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens was acquiring language.

We’re seeing that evolution was led toward the development of a brain capable of using language. When a undesirable swerve from that path threatened, a form of orbital correction took place. The guiding force pulling strings from behind the stage is light.

But why has the universe/god arranged this course leading to the development of a language-capable brain? There is only one answer: the universe/god hoped to be described via language, including the one called mathematics. Absent that, the universe could not extend, evolve, grow.

From a young age I have always been perplexed by why it is possible for us to describe our universe with numbers. When a natural phenomenon is described beautifully and wins the consensus of the totality of DNA, on occasion the universe provides what is perhaps a reward in the form of evidence.

Through pure internal brainwork, Einstein interpreted distortions in time and space caused by matter and energy as gravitational fields in his Theory of General Relativity. Four years after it was established, the universe fixed a seal of approval by showing how the sun bent light during a solar eclipse over West Africa. Seven years after Friedman used reasoning alone to conclude that the universe was not still, James Webb learned through spectral analysis that the further you look into space, the faster it is receding. The discovery of background microwave radiation thirty-three years later also provided an imprimatur to Friedman’s theory. Not long after Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter through calculations, the universe produced positrons for him. When described in the language of mathematics, the universe alters its physical constants and gives rise to new phenomena and matter. Thanks to its reciprocal relationship with language, the universe evolves and grows as well. I could almost believe that it was not until Copernicus’ famous revelation that the earth actually began to revolve around the sun.

The universe needs its mathematical description and gave DNA the potential for language.

We look up to the countless stars in the night sky and dream of life forms unlike ourselves on some other planet. Alas, the only life that exists in our universe is DNA. If intelligent life other than humankind exists, they do in a universe other than ours and beyond our perception. In their own ways, in concert with their own universe, they partake in a different world.

After the Big Bang, our universe began its inexorable outward expansion. If it has an edge, it recedes from us with every second that passes. This growing distant sometimes seems to me like a flight from the cognitive ability of DNA, a game of tag tempting us to give chase.

The importance of the relationship between subject and object is no different in human society. Mutual support and cooperative growth bring about progress, and that’s why the structure’s collapse is a fiasco. If our description of the universe is erroneous and the contradiction begins to spread, our counterpart may not know how to respond, and panic. It may even drop its eternal game of tag, giving up on us.

It’s just as it is with people. If a rift between husband and wife deepens and each side only makes contradictory demands of the other, the relationship fails and ends in divorce. It becomes necessary to dissolve the relationship, in other words to reset.

Say that a man loses his sight from accident or illness and has to go about as a blind person. If he accepts the loss and adjusts his relationship with his environment accordingly, daily life could proceed with few inconveniences. If he chooses to ignore his loss, however, and tries to continue as he always has, then immediately inconveniences would arise. Bumping into the corners of tables, falling off stairs due to missteps, and run over by vehicles, his life would come to a standstill.

Even when the conditions of existence change, there will be no problem if subject and object are ably reconciled. If not, the relationship collapses and life is plunged into a crisis.

The relationship between DNA and cosmos is no different.

The universe is not structured as an existence of steadfast things. It is a network of flowing phenomena that come in and out of being and is neither perfect nor unchanging. For that matter, there is no guarantee anywhere that physics and mathematics are correct; they’ve merely withstood scrutiny until now. All is hypothesis. And that is why we must not spare the effort to describe nature accurately and beautifully through language, if the relationship is to be maintained.

Is the writing on the Gateway of the Sun such a description?

As I think this, purely by chance my bag, sitting on the table next to the word processor, opens its mouth, and a few Polaroids slide out. By force of gravity, they glide down the surface of my sketchbook which rests at an angle. I pick up the sketchbook just as they’re about to fall, put the photos aside, and turn to the page with my sketches of the gate. When I place on the page a few of the Polaroids and compare them to the sketches, my line of sight increasingly favors the photos.

Depicted at the gate’s center is a figure that appears to be a sun god, arms raised and sending rays of light from its angular face. It must be a version of Viracocha. To either side are three tiered sets of squares containing images of beasts. They all look similar, like a bird flying with its wings spread. Below these a fourth tier features geometric patterns mainly consisting of straight lines.

Although the images look alike, there are slight differences in detail. The direction of the bird’s face depends on which side of Viracocha it is, and the wings are extended to varying degrees.

Apart from these is another relief of a bird that seems to be hanging behind for some chance. The more I look at this point, the more it seems to destroy the composition of the whole. More hulking than the other birds, it’s only slightly smaller than Viracocha himself.

The wings look like two boomerangs set in an X shape. It has a head and arms and legs, the limbs more human than anything, the impression that it’s a bird owing solely to the odd wings it carries on its back. Horn-like shapes protrude from the top of its slick reptilian face.

The association that comes to mind is The Plumed Serpent. In South American lore, however, the winged snake is virtually an alias of Viracocha and imbued with positive connotations. The relief I am looking at now gives quite a different impression. The right hand is swung up to chin height; the left dangles next to the groin, palm facing outwards. From the knees downwards, the legs swell out into bulbs out of proportion with the rest of the body. It looks to be stepping forth with a finned left foot.

Depicted with far more dynamism and realism than the other images, off color and not about to harmonize with its surroundings, it looks almost alive.

I realize only when it is pointed out to me that this plumed serpent probably isn’t an abstract creation but rather incorporates a faithful rendering of some actual person’s face and features. No wonder it’s so raw and at the same time repulsive.

The document ended there.

For a moment Saeko just sat, unable to think clearly, barely registering the fact that she had finished.

Images of the Tiwanaku relics cluttered her mind. She tried to focus, to think about why her father might have been writing this. She wondered if it was a journal intended to record the daily events of his trips through these ancient relics. Or was it more an attempt to interpret the mysteries shrouding these ancient civilizations, particularly why they sometimes appeared to possess technology and knowledge beyond their time? He had also written about the sudden decline of such cultures, how many had just disappeared overnight; perhaps the text was an attempt to map out his initial thoughts on group disappearances.

The text read as though it were a rough draft, as though her father had been jotting down his experiences in journal form while brainstorming through thoughts that came to him at the time. Saeko decided that, most likely, he was planning to use this as a base to work from, henceforth focusing on a single theme and rewriting his notes accordingly. Saeko knew her father’s work patterns of old. Towards the end he’d begun to discuss his own interpretations of the emergence of life and evolution. Saeko realized that the postcard she had received from him had contained a summary of the keywords, the key concepts, of this part.

Her father theorized that the collapse of a black hole 4 billion years ago had been the defining factor in the beginning of cellular life on earth. Life had then evolved based on a relationship with light that eventually resulted in the development of a brain capable of describing its environment through language, including that of numbers. He identified a causal link between the developments of sight and language and touched on the causes of mass extinction, first with regard to the dinosaurs, and then the Neanderthals. His arguments deliberately strayed from conventional ideas that evolution was a blind process, that it was governed by chance, and went out of the way to claim that the process was purposive. Saeko recalled his detailing of the extraordinary idea that the universe (or god) had granted the power of language to life to satisfy its desire to be put down in the language of numbers. The interrelationship between life and matter deepened via the medium of light and information and enabled further evolution of the universe.

Saeko recalled a conversation she’d had with Toshiya about the relationship between black holes and informational theory. He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure, and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life.

Saeko wanted to believe her father’s arguments, but the subtext of his writing scared her. Throughout, he seemed to be warning that the collapse of the relationship he outlined could bring about a heretofore unheard-of catastrophe. Her father had conceived the universe as a network of phenomena where everything was caught in a continual flux of becoming and perishing. Anything that pushed too hard against the flow of progress would be naturally de-selected. Saeko couldn’t help but agree with his depiction of the world as unstable, uncertain — fleeting and full of hypotheses — but the rest? The one thing she would never doubt, of course, was her father’s love. Saeko found herself able to clearly imagine her father writing this, all of eighteen years ago. She could almost hear the soft whisper of his voice.

At the same time, something about the way her father came across in the text jarred. The more she thought of the man she knew, the more she began to feel that something was odd with the way he came across in the document. She was sure he had written it, but she had felt a vague dissonance here and there.

She turned back to the first page and began to scan the text to try to work out what was causing this impression. As she read through again she began to realize that the odd feeling she got came from the journal-like passages; somehow they didn’t match the image of the man she remembered. There was the one where he stood before the carving of Viracocha, describing a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia. She remembered how he recounted shedding a tear. Saeko had never known her father to cry — to the day he disappeared eighteen years ago she had never seen him shed a tear. Moreover, the way he wiped away his tears — she had never known her father to carry a handkerchief. The image just didn’t fit; Saeko couldn’t picture her father standing there wiping away tears with a handkerchief. She wondered if her father had simply never revealed this side of himself to her. It was completely possible that he had kept some habits hidden, not wanting to show any weakness in front of his daughter. Of course Saeko knew that people often learned things about their parents after their death, from old friends and such — there was nothing too odd about that. She back-burnered the thought and continued to skim the text.

She stopped once more. Here it was again in the scene where he picked up the hitchhiker. It had been early evening, and on his way back from Tiwanaku her father had come across a young Japanese hitchhiker and decided to give him a lift back to La Paz. She came to the part where he described their conversation:

… he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations.

She hadn’t picked up on it during her first reading, but her father had clearly written that the hitchhiker had leant forward between the seats. Saeko couldn’t quite reconcile the description. She knew from reading his other works that images in her father’s descriptions were usually clear and flowing, easily recreating whatever he wanted to describe. What was it about this one sentence that made it so hard for her to picture the scene?

She went back to the beginning of the passage. Her father had seen the hitchhiker and given him a lift. She’d naturally assumed that the hitchhiker would have sat in the front passenger seat. That was why the description felt strange: if he’d been in the front seat he wouldn’t have had to lean forward to talk with her father. It would only make him hit the windshield, so he must have been sitting somewhere else. He hadn’t been riding shotgun at all but had been in the back of the jeep. With that realization, the description immediately made sense.

But why did her father ask him to sit in the rear seat? Saeko had never known him to do that; she’d always sat next to him in the front. When she’d sat in the back there had always been some reason.

Maybe he just had luggage piled up in the front?

But no, he had already checked into the hotel and would have left his suitcases and any heavy luggage in the room. If he had anything with him at all it would be a light daypack. Saeko dismissed the possibility of excess baggage.

The only other possible reason was that there was already someone else seated next to him. She recalled the passage where her father had almost fallen asleep at the wheel on his way to Tiwanaku. Again there had been a phrase that didn’t sit right. He wrote about tiredness being catching. Saeko picked out the sentence:

They say that drowsiness is catching — I must have dozed off.

The sentence made perfect sense if there had already been someone sitting next to him in the jeep. That someone had probably dozed off, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the jeep, so her father tried to employ his mind to fight the temptation himself.

Saeko went through the rest of the text in her mind, applying this theory to each description in turn. Her father wrote that he had put his bag down and checked the time on the nightstand between the beds. There had been two beds … Her father had been staying in a twin room. As far as she knew, it was her father’s habit to always book a double room when he was staying by himself. Whether he was staying in a standard room or a suite, he always wanted a double bed. He would only ever book a twin room if there was someone staying with him.

He also wrote about phoning ahead to book a table at a cafe for dinner. Now that she thought about it, this was also completely unlike him. Her father usually liked to take a stroll around the hotel’s vicinity and just drop in wherever caught his eye. The only time he would ever take the trouble to book a table was when he was with someone special that he didn’t want to keep waiting while they walked around looking for a place to eat.

Having spent seventeen years traveling around the world with her father, Saeko felt confident that she knew his habits like the back of her own hand. While giving the initial appearance that he was traveling alone, her father had actually been traveling with someone. Someone had handed him a handkerchief for his tears in front of the statue of Viracocha. There was no doubt about it, then. Her father had been traveling with a woman.

The sentence that stood out the most was the one at the very end of the text:

I realize only when it is pointed out to me …

Again, a sign that someone else had been there with him. Moreover, this person had told her father that the bird-like figure looking out from behind Viracocha must have been modeled on someone rather than being an abstract representation. There were no photos included, so all Saeko could do was try to picture the scene in her mind. She thought of the description, the image of a horned reptilian face. The first picture to come into her head was that of a devil. Once in her head, she found it almost impossible to get rid of the image, which stuck like glue. Saeko shivered and a whimper escaped her lips.

She breathed deeply and tried to calm herself, using reason to dispel the image. There was no evidence to any of this; it was just the product of a series of associations. But try as she might, she couldn’t get rid of the idea, and Saeko knew herself too well. If she didn’t control the image now, it would propagate until she was unable to budge, trapped under its weight.

The last thing she wanted was to live through another experience like the night at the Ina hospital. Her mind continued to race, out of control. That night, after the earthquake, she’d been taken directly to the hospital from the Fujimura house. She remembered the feeling of helplessness that had taken hold as she found herself completely immobilized, the conviction that someone had been standing there, watching her from the darkness. The image had taken on the form of a particular person …

She looked down at her father’s document on the desk before her, feeling her back prickle as if to warn her that someone was in the room and standing directly behind her. She tried to tell herself that no one was there, but the terrifying sensation persisted. Her imagination was running off on its own, doing too good a job of recreating the feeling of a presence. It felt more real than if someone had actually been there. Her ears picked up the echo of keys jangling behind her.

There’s no one here, there’s no one here …

Saeko sat repeating the mantra in her head, pleading for the feeling to dissipate.

Kitazawa had known it before Saeko had even pointed it out. There was no chance that the discovery of her father’s notebook at the Fujimura house could be attributed to mere chance. He slumped deeper into the office chair behind his desk. The chair slid backwards and he almost fell off. Quickly, he straightened up.

It was clear that, at some point, something had happened that led to Saeko’s father’s notebook being picked up by the Fujimuras. Kitazawa wondered if it was possible that Shinichiro Kuriyama had known anyone in the Fujimura family. If he hadn’t, could he have come across any of them at some point? Was there anything they had in common?

He decided to start with places; perhaps there had been a time when someone from the Fujimura family had been in the same place as Shinichiro. Kitazawa started to examine the files he had put together so far. The amount of information he’d been able to gather differed greatly depending on the case. He looked at the three files before him. There was one for the Fujimura family, and one for the three disappearances in Itoikawa. Finally, there was the file for Saeko’s father.

When Saeko had enlisted him to research her father’s disappearance she had given him a huge advance payment that allowed him the luxury of spending a longer period of time researching the case than he usually did. As a result, that file was much thicker than the others. In contrast, the file for the Fujimuras had the least information. There were a mix of sheafs that he’d put together and some that Saeko had provided. The Itoikawa file was in the middle. Of the three people that had gone missing from the convenience store, Kitazawa had spent the most time investigating the disappearance of Mizuho Takayama since her parents had hired him specifically to work on the case.

Mizuho had been caught on film just before her disappearance by the cameras in a convenience store. Kitazawa could picture the scene now, having seen the footage — the image of her thin arm writhing on the floor during the earthquake, the silver bracelet on her wrist. She’d been the editor for a trade journal and had been visiting Itoikawa to research an article on local jade handicraft when she’d vanished without a trace.

In fact, Kitazawa had a very comprehensive file on Mizuho’s case. When he’d just started out as a private detective he’d taken on a case concerning a missing woman. During his investigations he’d researched her travel history and discovered that she’d visited Vietnam just two months before her disappearance. Working on a hunch that there could be a link, he’d visited the place in Vietnam and had actually found the woman living there with a lover. She’d explained to him that she’d returned to Japan unable to forget this man she’d had fallen for while travelling and had decided to run away. But she had found herself missing her old life soon enough; to the joy of his client, Kitazawa was able to persuade her to come back to Japan.

Since that time Kitazawa always made a point of researching where people had visited prior to a disappearance, paying special attention to any trips abroad. He noted that Saeko’s investigations into the Fujimura family’s disappearance were missing such information — she hadn’t checked their travel histories. His own investigations had shown no potential links between her father and Kota Fujimura in Japan. As a natural next step he had looked into their history of travel abroad.

Shinichiro Kuriyama had made a vast number of trips out of Japan. His travels spanned all parts of the world: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, Africa … Kitazawa limited the search to the few years prior to the disappearance, but even then the number of places visited was huge: England, France, America, India, Mexico, Russia, Mongolia … Kuriyama’s most recent trip had been to Peru and Bolivia in South America.

In stark contrast to this, the Fujimura family seemed to rarely travel abroad. When they had, it was through a standard tour package: once to Guam, once to Hong Kong. Both had been family trips taken when the two children were still in elementary school. Kitazawa sighed and looked up to the ceiling. He felt heavy, lethargic. It was difficult to concentrate. He probably needed a change of pace.

He went to the bathroom, splashed water over his face, and walked back to his chair. He flicked through the data cards he had put together for each member of the Fujimura family, trying to organize his thoughts. He stopped as soon as he reached Haruko Fujimura’s. The words jumped off the page — South America. She was the only member of the family to have visited the region. Moreover, she had been travelling by herself. It stood out like a sore thumb.

Haruko was the children’s mother, Kota’s wife. During summer vacation in August of 1994 she had travelled alone to South America. She had been twenty-eight at the time, married to Kota but still without kids. Their first child, Fumi, had been born in the following year. Could this be the link Kitazawa had been looking for? The feeling of lethargy seemed to lift as his thoughts began to race with the possibility.

The question was where the two of them could have met. He knew that Shinichiro had only visited Peru and Bolivia, so if they had met, it had to be one of the two countries. But those were large countries, and he had to narrow the focus somehow. He remembered that Shinichiro had penned a number of books on the ancient civilizations of South America. He would have visited one or more of the famous archeological sites during his visit.

Kitazawa didn’t know what sort of ancient ruins existed in Peru and Bolivia. At that moment, Toshiya opened the door and poked his head into the office.

“Dad, come and take a look at this.” Toshiya held up some papers for Kitazawa to look at.

Kitazawa ignored them and waved him over. “Good timing, kid — do you know anything about the ancient civilizations of Peru and Bolivia?”

“Huh? Bit out of the blue …” Toshiya walked across the room, taking care to weave around the clutter of papers and files stacked precariously on the desk.

“I think I’ve found a link between our girl’s dad and the Fujimuras.”

“And that’s got something to do with relics in Bolivia or Peru?”

“Exactly.”

“First place that comes to mind is that Incan site, Machu Picchu. Peru. I bet there are lots more though, hang on.” Toshiya sat in front of the computer and opened a search engine.

Kitazawa watched as his son pulled up a few websites detailing the ancient ruins of the two countries. He recognized a few of the names that came up on the display: Cusco, Nazca, Machu Picchu. They were all pretty well known, he guessed, although he didn’t know much about them. Toshiya clicked through the sites in turn and summarized the contents for his father. He explained that Cusco was well known for being the symbolic capital of the Incan empire, where the emperor had built his palace. Nowadays there were no ruins per se, just some stone foundations of old Incan buildings mostly hidden underneath the more recently built Catholic churches and other Spanish edifices. Nazca, he continued, was famous for the vast drawings visible only from the sky, the Nazca Lines. Again, he dismissed these as not technically being ruins.

Kitazawa remembered a program he’d seen on the wonders of the world that had shown footage of the drawings: giant depictions of spiders, monkeys, a hummingbird. He could see the geometric shapes in his mind’s eye. The program had presented a number of theories as to why the vast pictures had been made but concluded that no single compelling argument had been agreed on to date.

Machu Picchu, the city in the sky. Kitazawa knew that it was famous for its stunning location on the sheer cliffs of the Andes themselves. The site was first discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century when an archeologist stumbled across the vast stone structures of an abandoned city at the foot of the Andes. He had been hiking through the ancient Inca trails in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba.

Kitazawa’s interest was immediately piqued by this image of Machu Picchu as it fitted perfectly with the image of ruins in his mind. He leant over Toshiya and scanned through the text on the monitor for more information. As he did so, one of the numbers on the screen caught his attention. He stopped and went back over the last few sentences, reading more slowly this time.

At the beginning of the 16th Century, the site was abandoned, seemingly overnight. The reasons for the sudden exodus are currently unknown. 400 years later, Bingham’s archeological dig uncovered a mass open grave containing the remains of 173 bodies. Of the bodies, it was determined that 150 were female. In all cases, the bodies had had their limbs severed before death. One theory for this is that the Incans thought to free themselves of anyone that would have slowed them down and thrown these bodies into an open grave. However, the theory does not explain why the limbs of the discarded bodies had been severed. We are still far from finding out the truth of what happened here.

They finished reading the passage and looked at each other. Toshiya took a deep breath; he looked sickened by the mention of mutilated bodies.

“Nasty way to go …”

Kitazawa sat trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Had Shinichiro and Haruko met at Machu Picchu?

Saeko was due to stop off at his office on her way to Atami the next morning, and she would definitely want to know about this development. Her father, Shinichiro, had been travelling in South America at exactly the same time as Haruko Fujimura. There had to be a point of connection. It was the only explanation for their finding his notebook at the Fujimura house. Kitazawa pulled together some papers and looked up at Toshiya.

“Didn’t you say you had something to show me?”

“Ah yes, I almost forgot.”

Toshiya showed his printouts from the Internet. The top page bore the title, “Disappearances at Zero Magnetic Field Points.”

“I was looking for links between the disappearances and magnetic disturbances. This article came up.”

Kitazawa ran through the content of the pages. The article was about people supposedly going missing at a point off Route 152, the Akiha Road, that once connected Tenryu and Imoya. Because it crossed directly over an active fault line — the median tectonic line — the road had been severed and never repaired. Due to this, going north of Hamamatsu required splitting off via Oshikamura towards Komagane, turning left on a T-intersection just by the Bungui mountain pass. The article cited a number of cases of people vanishing mysteriously from the woods there, a short walk from a parking area near the pass, right at the spot where there was a zero magnetic field.

The few reported cases were in the form of direct testimonies by young-sounding witnesses. The article didn’t seem particularly convincing; it was somewhat sensationalist in style, like a souped-up urban legend. But there was one point in particular that caught Kitazawa’s attention.

The location.

The supposed disturbance in the magnetic field was only ten or so kilometers south of the Fujimura house in Takato, too close to be mere coincidence. He decided that the article was worth holding on to and added it to the file that he was preparing to give to Saeko the next morning.

Perhaps she’ll be able to shed some light on this …