After dark

10

Eri Asai is still sleeping.

The Man with No Face, however, who was sitting beside her and watching her so intently, is gone. So is his chair. Without them, the room is starker, more deserted than before. The bed stands in the center of the room, and on it lies Eri. She looks like a person in a lifeboat floating in a calm sea, alone. We are observing the scene from our side—from Eri’s actual room—through the TV screen. There seems to be a TV camera in the room on the other side capturing Eri’s sleeping form and sending it here. The position and angle of the camera change at regular intervals, drawing slightly nearer or drawing slightly farther back each time.

Time goes by, but nothing happens. She doesn’t move. She makes no sound. She floats face-up on an ocean of pure thought devoid of waves or current. And yet, we can’t tear ourselves away from the image being sent. Why should that be? We don’t know the reason. We sense, however, through a certain kind of intuition, that something is there. Something alive. It lurks beneath the surface of the water, expunging any sense of its presence. We keep our eyes trained on the motionless image, hoping to ascertain the position of this thing we cannot see.


Just now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai’s mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can’t be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.

As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri’s mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.


Gradually we begin to tire of passively observing the TV screen from this side. We want to check out the interior of that other room directly, with our own eyes. We want to see more closely the beginning of faint movement, the possible quickening of consciousness, that Eri is beginning to exhibit. We want to speculate upon its meaning based on something more concrete. And so we decide to transport ourselves to the other side of the screen.

It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind, and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss. Which is exactly what we do. We let ourselves become a pure single point and pass through the TV screen separating the two worlds, moving from this side to the other. When we pass through the wall and leap the abyss, the world undergoes a great deformation, splits and crumbles, and is momentarily gone. Everything turns into fine, pure dust that scatters in all directions. And then the world is reconstructed. A new substance surrounds us. And all of this takes but the blink of an eye.

Now we are on the other side, in the room we saw on the screen. We survey our surroundings. It smells like a room that has not been cleaned for a long time. The window is shut tight, and the air doesn’t move. It’s chilly and smells faintly of mold. The silence is so deep it hurts our ears. No one is here, nor do we sense the presence of something lurking in here. If there was such a thing here before, it has long since departed. We are the only ones here now—we and Eri Asai.

Eri goes on sleeping in the single bed in the center of the room. We recognize the bed and bedclothes. We approach her and study her face as she sleeps, taking time to observe the details with great care. As mentioned before, all that we, as pure point of view, can accomplish is to observe—observe, gather data, and, if possible, judge. We are not allowed to touch her. Neither can we speak to her. Nor can we indicate our presence to her indirectly.

Before long there is movement in Eri’s face again—a reflexive twitching of the flesh of one cheek, as if to chase away a tiny fly that has just alighted there. Then her right eyelid flutters minutely. Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to each other, their spreading ripples intermingling. The process takes place before our eyes. A unit of thought begins to form this way. Then it links with another unit that has been made in another region, and the fundamental system of self-awareness takes shape. In other words, she is moving, step by step, toward wakefulness.

The pace of her awakening may be maddeningly slow, but it never moves backward. The system exhibits occasional disorientation, but it moves steadily forward, step by step. The intervals of time needed between one movement and the next gradually contract. Muscle movements at first are limited to the area of the face, but in time they spread to the rest of the body. At one point a shoulder rises gently, and a small white hand appears from beneath the quilt. The left hand. It awakens one step ahead of the right. In their new temporality, the fingers thaw and relax and begin to move awkwardly in search of something. Eventually they move atop the bedcover as small, independent creatures, coming to rest against the slender throat, as if Eri is groping uncertainly for the meaning of her own flesh.

Soon her eyelids open. But, stabbed by the light of the fluorescent lamps ranged on the ceiling, the eyes snap shut again. Her consciousness seems to resist awakening. What it wants to do is exclude the encroaching world of reality and go on sleeping without end in a soft, enigmatic darkness. By contrast, her bodily functions seek positive awakening. They long for fresh natural light. These two opposing forces clash within her, but the final victory belongs to the power source that indicates awakening. Again the eyelids open, slowly, hesitantly. But again the fluorescent glare is too much. She raises both hands and covers her eyes. She turns aside and rests a cheek against the pillow.

Time passes. For three minutes, four, Eri Asai lies in bed in that same position, eyes closed. Could she have gone to sleep again? No, she is giving her consciousness time to accustom itself to the waking world. Time plays an important role, as when a person has been moved into a room with vastly different atmospheric pressure and must allow the bodily functions to adjust. Her consciousness recognizes that unavoidable changes have begun, and it struggles to accept them. She feels slightly nauseated. Her stomach contracts, giving her the sensation that something is about to rise from it. She overcomes the feeling with several long breaths. And when, at last, the nausea has departed, several other unpleasant sensations come to take its place: numbness of the arms and legs, faint ringing of the ears, muscle pain. She has been sleeping in one position too long.

Again time passes.

Finally she raises herself in bed and, with unsteady gaze, examines her surroundings. The room is huge. No one else is there. What is this place? What am I doing here? Again and again she tries to trace her memory back, but it gives out each time like a short thread. All she can tell is that she has been sleeping in this place: she is in bed, wearing pajamas. This is my bed, these are my pajamas. That much is certain. But this is not my place. My body is numb all over. If I was asleep here, it was for a very long time, and very deeply. But I have no idea how long it could have been. Her temples begin to throb with the determined effort of thinking.

She wills herself out from under the covers, lowering her bare feet cautiously to the floor. She is wearing plain blue pajamas of glossy material. The air here is chilly. She strips the thin quilt from the bed and dons it as a cape. She tries to walk but is unable to move straight ahead. Her muscles cannot remember how to do it. But she pushes onward, one step at a time. The blank linoleum floor questions her with cold efficiency: Who are you? What are you doing here? But of course she is unable to answer.

She approaches a window and, resting her hands on the sill, strains to see outside. Beyond the glass, however, there is no scenery, only an uncolored space like a pure abstract idea. She rubs her eyes, takes a deep breath, and tries to look out again. Still there is nothing to see but empty space. She tries to open the window but it will not move. She tries all of the windows in order, but they refuse to move, as if they have been nailed shut. It occurs to her that this might be a ship. She seems to feel a gentle rocking. I might be riding on a large ship, and the windows are sealed to keep the water from splashing in. She listens for the sound of an engine or a hull cutting through the waves. But all that reaches her is the unbroken sound of silence.

She makes a complete circuit of the large room, taking time to feel the walls and turn switches on and off. None of the switches has any effect on the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps—or on anything else: they do nothing. The room has two doors—utterly ordinary paneled doors. She tries turning the knob of one. It simply spins without engaging. She tries pushing and pulling, but the door will not budge. The other door is the same. Each of the doors and windows sends signals of rejection to her as if each is an independent creature.

She makes two fists and pounds on the door as hard as she can, hoping that someone will hear and open the door from the outside, but she is shocked at how little sound she is able to produce. She herself can hardly hear it. No one (assuming there is anyone out there) can possibly hear her knocking. All she does is hurt her hands. Inside her head, she feels something resembling dizziness. The rocking sensation in her body has increased.

We notice that the room resembles the office where Shirakawa was working late at night. It could well be the same room. Only, now it is perfectly vacant, stripped of all furniture, office equipment, and decoration. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling are all that is left. After every item was taken out, the last person locked the door behind him, and the room, its existence forgotten by the world, was plunged to the bottom of the sea. The silence and the moldy smell absorbed by the four surrounding walls indicate to her—and to us—the passage of that time.

She squats down, her back against the wall, eyes closed, as she waits for the dizziness and rocking to subside. Eventually she opens her eyes and picks something up that has fallen on the floor nearby. A pencil. With an eraser. Stamped with the name veritech, it is the same kind of silver pencil that Shirakawa was using. The point is blunt. She picks up the pencil and stares at it for a long time. She has no memory of the name veritech. Could it be the name of a company, or of some kind of product? She can’t be sure. She shakes her head slightly. Aside from the pencil, she sees nothing that promises to give her any information about this room.

She can’t comprehend how she came to be in a place like this all alone. She has never seen it before, and nothing about the place jogs her memory. Who could have carried me here, and for what purpose? Is it possible I have died? Is this the afterlife? She sits down on the edge of the bed and examines the possibility that this is what has happened to her. But she cannot believe that she is dead. Nor should the afterlife be like this. If dying meant being shut up alone inside a vacant room in an isolated office building, it was too utterly lacking any hope of salvation. Could this be a dream then? No, it is too consistent to be a dream, the details too concrete and vivid. I can actually touch the things that are here. She jabs the back of her hand with the pencil tip to verify the pain. She licks the eraser to verify the taste of rubber.

This is reality, she concludes. For some reason, a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit. Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? No, that is not likely, either. After all, who gets to bring her own bed along when she enters the hospital? And besides, this simply doesn’t look like a hospital room. Neither does it look like a prison cell. It’s just a big, empty room.

She returns to the bed and strokes the quilt. She gives the pillow a few light pats. They are just an ordinary quilt and an ordinary pillow. Not symbols, not concepts; one is a real quilt, and the other a real pillow. Neither gives her anything to go by. Eri runs her fingers over her face, touching every bit of skin. Through her pajama top, she lays her hands on her breasts. She verifies that she is her usual self: a beautiful face and well-shaped breasts. I’m a lump of flesh, a commercial asset, her rambling thoughts tell her. Suddenly she is far less sure that she is herself.

Her dizziness has faded, but the rocking sensation continues. She feels as if her footing has been swept out from under her. Her body’s interior has lost all necessary weight and is becoming a cavern. Some kind of hand is deftly stripping away everything that has constituted her as Eri until now: the organs, the senses, the muscles, the memories. She knows she will end up as a mere convenient conduit used for the passage of external things. Her flesh creeps with the overwhelming sense of isolation this gives her. I hate this! she screams. I don’t want to be changed this way! But her intended scream never emerges. All that leaves her throat in reality is a fading whimper.

Let me get to sleep again! she pleads. If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality! This is the one way Eri can now imagine escaping from the room. It’s probably worth a try. But she will not easily be granted such sleep. For one thing, she has only just awakened. And her sleep was too long and deep for that: so deep that she left her normal reality behind.

She lodges the silver pencil between her fingers and gives it a twirl, vaguely hoping this thing she found on the floor will evoke some kind of memory. But all her fingers feel is an endless longing of the heart. Half-consciously, she lets the pencil drop to the floor. She lies on the bed, wraps herself in the quilt, and closes her eyes.

She thinks: No one knows I’m here. I’m sure of it. No one knows that I am in this place.


We know. But we are not qualified to become involved with her. We look down at her from above as she lies in bed. Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away from her. The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image of Eri Asai, until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness. The movement is beyond our control.

The next thing we know, we are back in Eri Asai’s room. The bed is empty. We can see the TV screen. It shows nothing but a sandstorm of interference. Harsh static grates on our ears. We stare at the sandstorm for a while to no purpose.

The room grows darker by degrees until, in an instant, all light is lost. The sandstorm also fades. Total darkness arrives.