“I can’t guarantee anything. There’s no way of knowing what danger this poses for us. And we’re not exactly going to get a testimony from anyone that’s done this before.”
“But surely as a physicist, you could at least …”
Isogai cut Kato off mid-sentence by holding up a hand. “What I’ve told you so far is nothing more than a hypothesis that seems to hold up to the evidence at hand. There’s no such thing as perfect science. All I can say for sure is that if we continue to stand here and debate this, we’ll die. On the other hand, a chance for survival has presented itself. I’ll leave you to decide among yourselves. Chris and I have already chosen where to place our bets.”
Hashiba was torn about what to do. “If a wormhole is going to open here in the park, then one should also open at the house in Takato, right?”
“Takato? Yes, it would.”
Hashiba was in line with Isogai; they had to take whatever chances they had left. The problem was Saeko. She was at the Fujimuras’ in Takato, but a wormhole was likely to open there too. He could try to make it there by car but there was no guarantee that he would make it in time. Moreover, he could only allow himself to go to Saeko if he was sure that the world was really about to end. If there was any chance that they might survive, however slight, he knew he had to opt for his family, his wife and child, as a matter of course. He had to call them to Atami, so why was he even hesitating? He finally felt the force of desire that had built up within him begin to subside.
Would he be able to make his wife understand the situation? First thing, he’d call Saeko and tell her. Then he’d call his wife and explain everything he knew, taking as much time as necessary. Just as he was about to make the call, he thought of one more thing he wanted to check with Isogai.
“I don’t care if you make a blind guess at this point, I just need to know. What do you think this other universe will be like? Could it be a place where we could survive?”
Isogai answered without pause for thought, as though he had already considered the same question himself. “I think it’s likely to be sometime in the past. That’s my gut feeling.”
“You mean it could take us back in time?”
“Don’t picture the kind of situation from a sci-fi novel or movie where you travel into the past on a time machine. We’ve been saying ‘wormhole’ for the sake of convenience, but it’s not like going back to the past through a tube-shaped tunnel. How should I say … Yes, it’s like a journey beyond dimensions.”
“A journey beyond dimensions …”
“Putting aside the axis of time, we humans grasp space in three dimensions. Everyone knows by now that Earth is spherical, after it was gazed upon from our moon 380,000 kilometers away. But before the Age of Exploration, not one person was able to understand the fact experientially. For humans whose realm of activity was limited, the world could only be grasped as a circular, two-dimensional plane that was believed to have an end where the sea cascaded like a waterfall.
“We can’t get a clear view of the horizon due to the bumps and indentations on our planet, but let us say there exists a smooth sphere on which we are inhabitants.”
Isogai paused, and Hashiba exercised his imagination and pictured standing on such a sphere and looking around. The world was a slightly curved disc shaped by the horizon.
Seeing that Hashiba had a mental image, Isogai continued, “One day, you decide to measure how large your world is. Securing one end of an infinitely long rope on the ground, you take the other end and head off toward the horizon. What happens? The farther you advance, the farther the horizon seems to flee. As you try to measure the distance, the end of the world stays ahead of you and the rope keeps extending. If you were walking at first but are running now, then the horizon escapes you only that much faster.
“But note that if you keep going in the same direction, you’ll eventually make a trip around the globe and end up where you started. Standing there, you’ll feel that you’ve seen the place before and perhaps feel nostalgic. Now, let’s say someone had seen you off at your starting point. How would your actions have appeared to him? He gazed at your back as it grew smaller and smaller toward the horizon. You kept on walking and dropped off the horizon, disappearing for a while. From the viewer’s perspective, you vanished from the world. He was surprised, but not as much as when you approached from his back while he waited there for the missing person.
“For someone who mistakes a three-dimensional sphere for a two-dimensional plane, the world can proffer a phenomenon as strange as that. The same goes for the universe. Let’s say you wanted to measure how large the universe is and boarded a faster-than-light spaceship and headed for the end of the world. Can you picture what would happen?”
Hashiba had imagined himself taking such a journey. Beyond the end, outside of the universe, there was darkness, emptiness … Or was there even any boundary that separated an inside and an outside?
“The same thing happens,” Isogai instructed.
“The same thing?” Hashiba tried to picture himself returning to the same location after heading out to the end of the universe, but he found it difficult.
“Almost without a doubt, we exist on the surface of a multi-dimensional structure. We don’t know if there are five, or ten, but since we’re on the surface and our movement is limited, our spatial recognition is truncated at three. For someone who is affected by the structure without realizing it, the universe would seem to be expanding. If the observation speed and range increased, the rate of expansion at the margins would also appear to increase. The notion of dark energy is just an attempt to tie up loose ends; no such thing exists.
“If you went on a journey beyond dimensions to the end of the universe, just as that horizon would recede, all that would ever present itself is a world with a more than ten billion light-year radius. If you keep your bearing, then just like the traveler on the sphere you’ll return to the same point. If your constraints are somehow removed by passing through a gap in the multi-dimensional structure or a space-time bubble, your journey back to the starting point could be instantaneous. But in that case, there could be a shift. The addition of a temporal axis to the multi-dimensional structure gives it a limitless complexity that we can’t imagine in concrete terms. Time would probably shift.”
“That’s why we’d end up in the past?”
“Yes, the past. From the tip of time where we stand, the future is uncertain and undecided. The past can be described in words, not so with the future. The past, it is.”
“But traveling back into the past and affecting history would change the present …” Even Hashiba was aware of time-travel paradoxes.
“So what if it did? The sort of paradox where killing your grandfather fifty years ago leads to your extinction today is predicated on there being only one universe. When we go through the wormhole, we’ll probably go to a past world, but for that world, the future is unknown and not tied to a preceding historical path and can be cut out anew.”
What Isogai was saying seemed to draw on his own unique viewpoints and wasn’t persuasive on every point. Still, the idea of cutting out a new future made Hashiba feel like the courage to act was being bestowed upon him.
5When Saeko finally managed to get through to Hashiba’s phone, he immediately began to explain that a wormhole could open just before the phase transition reached Earth. For a moment, it was enough to make Saeko completely forget about the noises she’d heard in the living room.
“I know it’s a lot to take in. Did I explain it well enough?” Hashiba asked uncertainly. He had gone into great detail about the mechanism of the phase transition and the wormhole.
“It makes sense. Yes, that would fit,” Saeko was quick to reassure him.
Wormholes weren’t such a new concept. She remembered the time when her father had explained the basics of spatial inflation theory and the possibility of their existence. It was at least logical that wormholes could open before a phase transition. The
other universe might also be suitable for human life since physical laws were preserved in the face of manipulations of CPT—charge, parity, and time.
“Saeko? Hello? I think we’re losing the sig—”
The magnetic anomaly seemed to interfere with communication devices, and Hashiba’s voice faded into a background of static. The line went dead.
Saeko noticed an eerie silence and realized that there were no noises coming from the living room. Whether the TV had been turned off or the volume muted, it felt certain that someone was there.
The quiet and what Hashiba had told her deepened her sense of solitude. Even if a wormhole did open before the phase transition reached them, even if she could cross it to embark on a trans-dimensional journey, there would be nothing there for her. Just loneliness. Soon she would lose all of her friends, everyone she had ever cared for. She’d dealt with the devastating disappearance of her father when she was in high school, and the thought of even more loss was too much to bear. Was there even any point in living under such circumstances? Saeko pulled her jacket together, suddenly cold, as though her loneliness was causing the temperature of the room to drop.
Her thoughts returned to the room next door. Was it just her imagination? Was she being too jumpy? Just trying to think was making her head spin. She had already locked the door, but would that stop whoever it was from getting into the bedroom? Saeko looked at the thin door; if someone really tried, it wouldn’t be too hard to break in.
If Isogai was correct, a portal to another world could open somewhere in the house. Saeko felt that the living room would be the most likely place. According to the evidence—the half-empty glasses of tea, discarded banana skins, and such—that was where the family had disappeared. If it had opened upstairs, it was possible that only the children would have disappeared. No, it had happened when all four family members had been gathered together.
If she were to stand a chance of escaping the phase transition, she couldn’t stay cooped up in the bedroom. Though she knew she had to get back to the living room, her body wouldn’t play along. Saeko understood something then: you had to be brave in order to act. It took far more courage to make some move than to await salvation.
Her father had not wanted for her a passive life of drifting with the current. Why else had he taught her how to interpret the world? It was so she could overcome obstacles and face strange worlds. Without the courage to take a step into a new realm, life wasn’t worth living.
Saeko was pacing towards the door.
What remained was a matter of will. Should she go, knowing that her loneliness would only worsen? Was it better to step into the unknown and bet on survival?
Saeko turned the lock and crossed the threshold. The Fujimuras’ living room had no door and simply opened up from the hallway. Saeko sneaked to the edge and peeked in.
The TV set glowed under the fluorescent ceiling lights, and the flickering screen showed the sky in California, horizon faintly crimson as dawn approached. From the vantage point of the camera the chasm in the ground resembled a dark belt strapped to the land below and snaking towards San Francisco.
Saeko caught sight of the mirror hanging on the far wall. It reflected the full figure of a man. Somehow, she was able to keep her reaction to a minimum. A part of her had already expected someone to be there.
Conscious of her gaze, he caressed his expressionless face and shook his head in the mirror. He was seated, not deeply, on a sofa set against the wall, a pair of crutches too large for him arranged at his back in the shape of a cross. He lowered his right hand, with which he’d caressed his face, down to his chin, and turned out the palm of his left hand, which hung loosely to the side of his crotch. His calves appeared swollen; they were set in casts used to keep broken bones in place.
The figure reminded Saeko of the last passages in her father’s manuscript. Examining the image of Viracocha at the Gateway of the Sun, he had seen a half-bird, half-man creature lurking in the background. The creature’s wings were described as overlapping boomerangs on its back; there was mention of horn-like protrusions on its slick reptilian face.
Saeko only had her father’s description to go on since she’d never visited the site. She hadn’t even seen the Polaroid photos. Yet she was certain that the man she beheld was identical to the creature looking out from behind Viracocha. The crutches behind him looked like boomerangs, or wings.
Saeko knew him. The wrinkles had disappeared from his plum-shaped face, which now looked greasy. It was Kota Fujimura’s elder brother, Seiji.
He uttered, “You kept me waiting, you know.”
Saeko felt her legs almost give way at the sound of his voice, and “give way” was an apt turn of phrase. After a discomfiting itch assailed her around the waist, she had the sensation of her pelvis literally disappearing. But she couldn’t afford to collapse. She held out a desperate hand and tried to steady herself.
What he wanted, she immediately intuited, was for her to crumple. There was no way she could show any weakness in front of him; he wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage. Instinctively, she knew that now was the time to stand firm. It was clear that the thing before her was not on her side.
The images on the TV set had changed again, back to Calcutta and the five disks of light in the sky, which now seemed to shine even brighter. Saeko wondered if the lights had indeed grown brighter or the sky had simply become darker due to the planet’s rotation. Either way, it somehow gave her the courage to speak.
“What are you?” she asked, trying to hide the tremors in her voice.
“You know, I like the name ‘winged snake,’ but it’s more like the opposite: a snake with its wings clipped.”
The myth of the plumed serpent was often intertwined with legends of Viracocha in South America. The two were of a kind, benevolent beings both that brought enlightenment, culture, and order to those around them. Seiji was as alien to these concepts as anyone could be. The words that came to mind with him were: base, depraved. She remembered her evening with Hashiba when Seiji had crashed down on the ground before them.
“Are you the Devil?” she asked. The Devil, who brought fear and evil to society, was depicted throughout the ages in various guises, sometimes as a fallen angel.
“Aww, now even you call me a devil? Heh heh.”
The Devil conquered by working on fears and anxieties that arose in the other. Her instincts had been right; if she’d collapsed or shown any fear, he’d be on top of her licking her face with his serpent tongue.
Bracing herself, Saeko concentrated. Her only way out was through analyzing the situation. First she had to figure out his intent. What did the man want? A solution might present itself if that became clear. She had to keep him talking.
“What did you do with my father?”
Seiji said nothing, seeming to ignore the question. He twisted his upper body slightly and plunged a hand into one of his trouser pockets, scratching liberally at his groin, jangling a set of keys. He was taunting her, making fun of her. The metallic sound echoed down the empty hallway; he knew she hated the sound. Saeko wanted to cover her ears but knew that she couldn’t. She stared back at him, resolute.
While her question about her father had been instinctive, it wasn’t a shot in the dark. A passage from his notes had given rise to it. Her father didn’t know Seiji when he’d seen the half-bird, half-human relief carved behind Viracocha, so he wouldn’t have registered their similarities in appearance. But Saeko was sure that Haruko had been with him at the time. Seeing the bird-like image, Haruko would have seen the similarities to her brother-in-law. What if she had pointed this out to her father? It would have immediately piqued his interest; he was never one to treat such things as mere coincidence. If she had gone so far as to tell him that the carving was an almost exact likeness of her husband’s brother, then all the more so.
That was why he’d needed to visit Takato directly after getting back to Japan. He had felt compelled to meet Seiji.
&nb
sp; Something happened here on that day her father disappeared—August 22, 1994. He vanished, leaving only his notebook, later found at the Buddhist altar in the bedroom. She realized now that it wasn’t Haruko who had placed it there, but Seiji. He’d done it to lure her back.
Seiji pulled the keys out from his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him, slowly, deliberately, hinting at some hidden meaning.
“What happened to your father? Hmm … Some things are better left unknown, toots.”
A burning rage began to spread through Saeko, overpowering her fear. She had been right; this man did have something to do with her father’s disappearance. She looked around for something, anything she could use as a weapon, but the kitchen was too far away and no suitable object caught her eye.
Seiji pulled an ivory toothpick from the key holder and began to pick away at the dirt underneath his fingernails. The whole time he kept his eyes trained on Saeko, as though reading her thoughts. The way he moved was animalistic, repugnant. Despite her desire to look away, Saeko made sure to hold his stare.
Finishing his demonstration, Seiji looked up, raising his chin.
“So, sweet stuff,” he said, poking at the tip of his forefinger with the toothpick, “want me to poke at that lump in your breast?”
Bracing even harder than before, Saeko fought a welling urge to vomit.
6The six men walked up the pitch-black hillside of the herb gardens. Most were busy calling family and close friends, attempting to explain what was about to happen, what they needed to do. Only Isogai and Chris walked in silence.
Hashiba had just finished his call to his family. To his surprise, his wife had been quick to believe his explanation and had agreed to come directly to Atami. He felt a debt of gratitude to the mass media; the broadcasts of all the abnormal activity around the globe had helped to lend authenticity to his explanations of the impending phase transition. He had also been able to dissuade her from taking the train, which would have taken too long, as she’d wanted to ride via Chigasaki. She had agreed to take a taxi no matter how much it cost; it was by far the best hope for getting to the park on time. Faced with an overwhelming disaster, it was only natural for a person to want clear instructions. Fear and indecision made people ready to cling to anything that sounded decisive.