37



Two Different Kinds of News

*

The Thing That Disappeared



"Cinnamon carried you here," said Nutmeg.
The first thing that came to me when I woke was pain, in different, twisted forms.
The knife wound gave me pain, and all the joints and bones and muscles in my body gave
me pain. Different parts of my body must have slammed up against things as I fled
through the darkness. And yet the form of each of these different pains was still not quite
right. They were somewhere close to pain, but they could not exactly be called pain.
Next I realized that I was stretched out on the fitting room sofa, wearing navy-blue
pajamas that I had never seen before and covered with a blanket. The curtains were open,
and bright morning sun streamed through the window. I guessed it must be around ten
o'clock. There was fresh air here, and time that moved forward, but why such things
existed I could not quite comprehend.
"Cinnamon brought you here," said Nutmeg. "Your wounds are not that bad. The one
on your shoulder is fairly deep, but it didn't hit any major blood vessels, fortunately. The
ones on your face are just scrapes. Cinnamon used a needle and thread to sew up the
others so you won't have scars. He's good at that. You can take the stitches out yourself
in a few days or have a doctor do it."
I tried to speak, but I couldn't make my voice work. All I could do was inhale and let
the air out as a rasping sound.
"You'd better not try to move or talk yet," said Nutmeg. She was sitting on a nearby
chair with her legs crossed. "Cinnamon says you were in the well too long- it was a very
close call. But don't ask me what happened. I don't know a thing. I got a call in the

middle of the night, phoned for a taxi, and flew over here. The details of what went on
before that I just don't know. Your clothes were soaking wet and bloody. We threw them
away."
Nutmeg was dressed more simply than usual, as if she had indeed rushed out of the
house. She wore a cream- colored cashmere sweater over a man's striped shirt, and a wool
skirt of olive green, no jewelry, and her hair was tied back. She looked a little tired but
otherwise could have been a photo in a catalog. She put a cigarette between her lips and
lit it with her gold lighter, making the usual clean, dry click, then inhaling with eyes
narrowed. I really had not died, I reassured myself when I heard the sound of the lighter.
Cinnamon must have pulled me out of the well in the nic k of time.
"Cinnamon understands things in a special way," said Nutmeg. "And unlike you or
me, he is always thinking very deeply about the potential for things to happen. But not
even he imagined that water would come back to the well so suddenly. It had s imply not
been among the many possibilities he had considered. And because of that, you almost
lost your life. It was the first time I ever saw that boy panic."
She managed a little smile when she said that.
"He must really like you," she said.
I couldn't hear what she said after that. I felt an ache deep behind my eyes, and my
eyelids grew heavy. I let them close, and I sank down into darkness as if on an elevator
ride.



It took two full days for my body to recover. Nutmeg stayed with me the whole time.
I couldn't get up by myself, I couldn't speak, I could hardly eat. The most I could manage
was a few sips of orange juice and a few slivers of canned peaches. Nutmeg would go
home at night and come back in the morning. Which was fine, because I was out cold all
night-and most of the day too. Sleep was obviously what I needed most for my recovery.
I never saw Cinnamon. He seemed to be consciously avoiding me. I would hear his
car coming in through the gate whenever he would drop Nutmeg off or pick her up o r
deliver food or clothing- hear that special deep rumble that Porsche engines make, since
he had stopped using the Mercedes- but he himself would not come inside. He would
hand things to Nutmeg at the front door, then leave.
"We'll be getting rid of this place soon," Nutmeg said to me. "I'll have to take care of
the women again myself. Oh, well. I guess it's my fate. I'll just have to keep going until
I'm all used up -empty. And you: you probably won't be having anything to do with us
anymore. When this is all over and you're well again, you'd better forget about us as
soon as you can. Because ... Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. About your brother- in- law.
Noboru Wataya."
Nutmeg brought a newspaper from the next room and unfolded it on the table.
"Cinnamon bro ught this a little while ago. Your brother- in- law collapsed last night in
Nagasaki. They took him to a hospital there, but he's been unconscious ever since. They
don't know if he'll recover."
Nagasaki? I could hardly comprehend what she was saying. I wanted to speak, but the
words would not come out. Noboru Wataya should have collapsed in Akasaka, not
Nagasaki. Why Nagasaki?

"He gave a speech in Nagasaki," Nutmeg continued, "and he was having dinner with
the organizers afterward, when he suddenly went limp . They took him to a nearby
hospital. They think it was some kind of stroke-probably some congenital weakness in a
blood vessel in his brain. The paper says he'll be bedridden for some time, that even if he
regains consciousness he probably won't be able to speak, so that's probably the end of
his political career. What a shame: he was so young. I'll leave the paper here. You can
read it when you're feeling better."
It took me a while to absorb these facts as facts. The images from the TV news I had
seen in the hotel lobby were still too vividly burned into my brain- Noboru Wataya's
office in Akasaka, the police all over the place, the front door of the hospital, the reporter
grim, his voice tense. Little by little, though, I was able to convince myself that what I
had seen was news that existed only in the other world. I had not, in actuality, in this
world, beaten Noboru Wataya with a baseball bat. I would not, in actuality, be
investigated by the police or arrested for the crime. He had collapsed in public, in full
view, from a stroke. There was no crime involved, no possibility of a crime. This
knowledge came to me as a great relief. After all, the assailant described on television
had borne a startling resemblance to me, and I had had absolutely no alibi.
There had to be some connection between my having beaten someone to death in the
other world and Noboru Wataya's collapse. I clearly killed something inside him or
something powerfully linked with him. He might have sensed that it was coming. What I
had done, though, had failed to take Noboru Wataya's life. He had managed to survive on
the brink of death. I should have pushed him over the brink. What would happen to
Kumiko now? Would she be unable to break free while he was still alive? Would he
continue to cast his spell over her from his unconscious darkness?
That was as far as my thoughts would take me. My own consciousness gradually
slipped away, until I clos ed my eyes in sleep. I had a tense, fragmentary dream. Creta
Kano was holding a baby to her breast. I could not see the baby's face. Creta Kano's hair
was short, and she wore no makeup. She told me that the baby's name was Corsica and
that half the baby's father was me, while the other half was Lieutenant Mamiya. She had
not gone to Crete, she said, but had remained in Japan to bear and raise the child. She had
only recently been able to find a new name for the baby, and now she was living a
peaceful life growing vegetables in the hills of Hiroshima with Lieutenant Mamiya. None
of this came as a sur prise to me. In my dream, at least, I had foreseen it all.
"How has Malta Kano been since I last saw her?" I asked.
Creta Kano did not reply to this. Instead, she gave me a sad look, and then she
disappeared.



On the morning of the third day, I was finally able to get out of bed by myself.
Walking was still too hard for me, but I slowly regained the ability to speak. Nutmeg
made me rice gruel. I ate that and a little fruit.
"How is the cat doing?" I asked her. This had been a matter of concern to me for
some time.
"Don't worry, Cinnamon is looking after him. He goes to your house every day to
feed him and change his water. The only thing you have to worry about is yourself."

"When are you going to get rid of this place?"
"As soon as we can. Probably sometime next month. I think you'll be seeing a little
money out of it too. We'll probably have to let it go for something less than we paid for
it, so you won't get much, but your share should be a good percentage of what you paid
on the mortgage. That should support you for a while. So you don't have to worry too
much about money. You deserve it, after all: you worked hard here."
"Is this house going to be torn down?"
"Probably. And they'll probably fill in the well again. Which seems like a waste now
that it's producing water again, but nobody wants a big, old - fashioned well like that these
days. They usually just put in a pipe and an electric pump. That's a lot more convenient,
and it takes up less space."
"I don't suppose this place is jinxed anymore," I said. "It's probably just an ordinary
piece of property again, not the 'hanging house.' "
"You may be right," said Nutmeg. She hesitated, then bit her lip. "But that has
nothing to do with me or with you anymore. Right? In any case, the important thing is for
you to rest now and not bother with things that don't really matter. It will take a while
until you're fully recovered."
Nutmeg showed me the article on Noboru Wataya in the morning paper she had
brought with her. It was a small piece. Still unconscious, Noboru Wataya had been
transported from Nagasaki to a large university hospital in Tokyo, where he was in
intensive care, his condition unchanged. The report said nothing more than that. What
crossed my mind at that point, of course, was Kumiko. Where could she be? I had to get
back home. But I still lacked the strength to walk such a distance.
I made it as far as the bathroom sink late the next morning and saw myself in the
mirror for the first time in three days. I looked terrible - less like a tired living being than a
well- preserved corpse. As Nutmeg had said, the cut on my cheek had been sewn together
with professional- looking stitches, the edges of the wound held in good alignment by
white thread. It was at least an inch in length but not very deep. It pulled somewhat if I
tried to make a face, but there was little pain. I brushed my teeth and used an electric
shaver on my beard. I couldn't trust myself to handle a razor yet. As the whiskers came
off, I could hardly believe what I was seeing in the mirror. I set the shaver down and took
a good look. The mark was gone. The man had cut my right cheek. Exactly where the
mark had been. The cut was certainly there, but the mark was gone. It had disappeared
from my cheek without a trace.



During the night of the fifth day, I heard the faint sound of sleigh bells again. It was a
little after two in the morning. I got up from the sofa, slipped a cardigan over my
pajamas, and left the fitting room. Passing through the kitchen, I went to Cinnamon's
small office and peeked in side. Cinnamon was calling to me again from inside the
computer. I sat down at the desk and read the message on the screen.
You have now gained access to the program "The Wind -Up
Bird Chronicle." Choose a docu ment (1 - 17).
I clicked on #17, and a document opened up before me.