Maeda awoke as though from something deeper than sleep. His head felt heavy, his body stiff. Where was he? He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. The pillow yielded under the weight of his head as readily as a cloud would have. He remained in that state, neither asleep nor quite awake, for what, for all he knew, might have been ten thousand years. His eyelids fluttered open at last. “Tomoko?” He reached out with both hands, as though unsure which side of the bed he lay on. His left hand encountered resistance; then he felt his hand taken and caressed. He smiled. Yes, he remembered now. Astonishing, astonishing what that woman had done to him---such a plain, such a homely woman; if you noticed her at all---on a train, say, or on a crowded street---your first inclination would be to turn away, not in disgust exactly, but… well, suffice it to say that she was anything but physically attractive; moreover, she took no pains to make herself attractive, or at least mask her unattractiveness---and yet it was that woman, that woman who had awakened desires in him he had thought not dormant but absent. He’d been mistaken, obviously.
Was it night or day? Night, if the pitch darkness was truly indicative---but this was the point: nothing seemed truly indicative of anything. He could not so much as guess as to his surroundings. All he could be sure of was that he lay on a bed with Tomoko beside him. Even the bed was conjectural. It could have been a futon; but a vague, undefinable feeling he had of being above the floor suggested a bed. The same kind of feeling gave him the impression of being upstairs---upstairs from what? From the ground floor, from ground level. It was strange: no matter how long he lay staring into the darkness, his eyes did not grow accustomed to it; they made out not the dimmest outline, not the faintest shape; and yet this impenetrable blackness was not oppressive; on the contrary, it was somehow comforting.
“Maybe I’ve died and this is eternal life.” The thought was accompanied by a piercing sensation of joy, a joy so intense that it was all he could do to keep from crying out. Yes, to lie in this blackness, silent, motionless, not knowing where he was and not caring, with no hunger to satisfy, no restlessness to relieve, aware of nothing except Tomoko’s presence beside him---to lie like that through all eternity… “So Tazawa was right after all, and Rogozhin. Evil does save the world, just as they said; and murder, however ghastly and appalling it may appear to those who see only appearances, in fact is a blessed liberation from a diseased, corrupt world; it dispatches us to our true home. And their other victims? The homeless man, the children, Yoshiko… how much blood do they have on their hands, those two? There may be hundreds, thousands of victims. Perhaps I’ll meet them, like Odysseus in the land of the dead; only he encountered gibbering, disembodied ghosts, whereas I find myself in a realm of joy…”
“Tomoko,” he whispered. He felt her stir beside him; she stroked his face, his chest, and he realized now for the first time---it had not occurred to him to wonder about it before---that he was naked under the covers. “Tomoko, Tomoko.” Could this really be death? Oh, how good, how good if it was! Because if it was, then all death did was remove the shadow of death from life!
Next episode: doesn’t depend on me
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