He hadn’t intended to startle her, but there was no denying that his approach had been a little too silent, and his voice when he spoke a little too loud. Machiko jumped, her arms jerked, and she knocked over a dish that she’d placed at the edge of the sink.
“Hey, don’t scare me like that!”
She caught her breath and turned around, hands to her breast.
“Sorry,” Kaoru said. He often accidentally took his mother unawares like this.
“How long have you been standing there, Kaoru?”
“Just a few seconds.”
“You know Mom’s jumpy. You shouldn’t startle me like that,” she scolded.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Really? Well, you did it all the same.”
“Didn’t you notice? I was staring at your back, just for a few seconds.”
“Now, why should I notice that? I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, you know.”
“I know, but, I …” He trailed off. What he wanted to say was, People can feel someone staring at them even if they don’t turn around. But he knew that would scare his mother even more.
So he went back to his original question. “When’s Dad getting home?” Of course, he knew it was pointless to ask: not once had his mother ever known when his father was coming home.
“He’ll probably be late again today, I imagine.” She gave her usual vague answer, glancing at the clock in the living room.
“Late again?”
Kaoru sounded disappointed, and Machiko said, “You know your dad’s really busy at work these days. He’s just getting started on a new project, remember?” She tried to take his side. He got home late every night, but never did she betray the slightest hint of discontent.
“Maybe I’ll wait up for him.”
After she’d finished putting away the dishes, Machiko went over to her son, wiping her hands with the dishcloth.
“Do you have something you want to ask him again?”
“Yeah.”
“About his work?”
“Unh-uh.”
“How about I ask him for you?”
“Huh?” Kaoru couldn’t stop himself from laughing.
“Knock that off! You know, I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I did go to grad school, you know.”
“I know that. But … you studied English lit, right?”
Machiko had indeed belonged to a department of English language and literature at the university, but to be exact her focus had been on American culture, rather than English literature. She’d been particularly knowledgeable about Native American traditions; even now she kept up on it, reading in her free time.
“Never mind that, just tell me. I want to hear what you have to say.”
Still holding the dishcloth, Machiko ushered her son into the living room. Kaoru thought it was a little odd: why should she suddenly take an interest tonight, of all nights? Why was she reacting differently?
“Wait a minute, then.” Kaoru went to his bedroom and came back with two pieces of paper. He sat down on the sofa next to his mother.
As she glanced at the pages in Kaoru’s hand, Machiko said, “What’s this? I hope these aren’t full of difficult figures again!” When it came to mathematical questions, she knew it was time for her to admit defeat.
“It’s nothing hard like that this time.”
He handed her the two pages, face up, and she looked at them in turn. A map of the world was printed on each one.
“Well, this is a change. You’re studying geography now?”
Geography was one of her strong suits, particularly North American. She was confident that in this field, at least, she knew more than her son.
“Nope. Gravitational anomalies.”
“What?” It looked like she’d be out of her league after all. A faint look of despair crept into her eyes.
Kaoru leaned forward and began to explain how these maps showed in one glance the earth’s gravitational anomalies.
“Okay, there’s a small difference between the values you get from the gravity equation and those you get by correcting gravitation acceleration for the surface of the geoid. Here we have those differences written on maps in terms of positive or negative numbers.”
The pages were numbered, “1” and “2”. On the first map were drawn what seemed like an endless series of contour lines representing gravitational anomalies, and each line was labeled with a number accompanied by a plus sign or a minus sign. The contour lines looked just like the ones found in any normal atlas, where positive numbers equaled heights above sea level and negative numbers depths below sea level.
But in this case, the lines showed the distribution of gravitational anomalies. In this case, the greater the positive number, the stronger the gravitational force, and the greater the negative number, the weaker the gravitational force at that particular location. The unit was the milligal (mgal). The map was shaded, too: the whiter areas corresponded to positive gravitational anomalies, while the darker areas corresponded to negative ones. It was set up so that everything could be understood at a glance.
Machiko stared long and hard at the gravitational anomaly distribution map she held in her hands, and then looked up and said, “Alright, I give up. What is a gravitational anomaly?” She’d long since given up trying to fake knowledge in front of her son.
“Mom, surely you don’t think that the earth’s gravity is the same everywhere, do you?”
“I haven’t thought about it once since the day I was born, to be honest.”
“Well, it’s not. It varies from place to place.”
“So what you’re saying is that on this map, the bigger the positive number, the stronger the force of gravity, and the bigger the negative number, the weaker, right?”
“Uh-huh, that’s right. See, the matter that makes up the earth’s interior doesn’t have a uniform mass. Think of it like this: if a place has a negative gravitational anomaly, it means that the geological material below it has less mass. In general, the higher the latitude, the stronger the force of gravity.”
“And what’s that piece of paper?”
Machiko pointed to the page marked “2”. This, too, was a map of the world, but without the complex contour lines: instead it was marked with dozens of black dots.
“These are longevity zones.”
“Longevity zones? You mean places where people tend to live longer?”
First a map of gravitational anomalies, and now a map of longevity zones—she was growing more confused by the minute.
“Right. Places whose residents clearly live longer than people living in other areas. This map shows how many of these spots there are in the world,” Kaoru said, indicating the black dots on the map. Four of them were actually marked with double circles. The Caucasus region on the shores of the Black Sea, the Samejima Islands of Japan, the area of Kashmir at the foot of the Karakoram Mountains, and the southern part of Ecuador. All had areas famous for the longevity of their inhabitants.
Kaoru seemed to think the second map needed no further explanation. Machiko, though, was looking at it for the first time. She urged him on. “So?” The real question now was, of course, what the two maps had to do with each other.
“Put one on top of the other.”
Machiko obeyed. They were the same size, so it was easily done.
“Now hold them up to the light.” Kaoru pointed to the living room chandelier.
Machiko raised them slowly, trying to keep the pages aligned. Now the black dots of the one were showing up in the midst of the contour lines of the other.
“Get it?”
Machiko didn’t know what she was supposed to get.
“Stop putting on airs. Tell me what I’m supposed to see.”
“Well, look—the longevity zones correspond perfectly to the low-gravity areas, don’t they?”
Machiko stood up and brought the pages closer to the light. It was true: the black dots representing longevity zone
s only showed up in places demarcated on the first map by low-gravity lines. Very low gravity.
“You’re right,” she said, not bothering to disguise her astonishment. But she still cocked her head as if not entirely convinced. As if to say she still wasn’t sure what it was all supposed to mean.
“Well, maybe there’s a relationship between longevity and gravity.”
“And that’s what you want to ask your father about?”
“Well, yeah. By the way, Mom, what do you think the odds were of life arising on earth naturally?”
“Like winning the lottery.”
Kaoru laughed out loud. “Come on! Way smaller. You can’t even compare the two. We’re talking a miracle.”
“But someone always wins the lottery.”
“You’re talking about a lottery with, like, a hundred tickets and one winner, where a hundred people buy tickets. I’m talking about rolling dice a hundred times and having them come up sixes every time. What would you think if that happened?”
“I’d think the game was rigged.”
“Rigged?”
“Sure. If someone rolled the same number a hundred times in a row, it’d have to mean the dice were loaded, wouldn’t it?” As she said this, she poked a finger into Kaoru’s forehead affectionately, as if to say, Silly.
“Loaded, huh?”
Kaoru thought for a while, mouth hanging open. “Of course. Loaded dice. It had to be rigged. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
“Right?”
“And humanity just hasn’t noticed that it’s rigged. But, Mom—what if dice that aren’t loaded come up with the same number a hundred times in a row?”
“Well, then we’re talking about God, right? He’s the only one who could do something like that.”
Kaoru couldn’t tell if his mother really believed that or not.
He decided to move on. “By the way, do you remember what happened on TV yesterday?” Kaoru was referring to his favorite afternoon soap opera. He loved the soaps so much that he even had his mother tape them for him sometimes.
“I forgot to watch.”
“Well, remember how Sayuri and Daizo met again on the Cape?”
Kaoru proceeded to recount the plot of yesterday’s episode almost as if it involved people he knew personally. Sayuri and Daizo were a young couple in their first year of marriage, and a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of divorce. They were still in love, but coincidence had piled on coincidence until they were hopelessly tangled in the cords that bind men and women: now they were in a morass they couldn’t find their way out of. So they’d separated. And then, one day, by pure chance, they’d run into each other on a certain point of land on the Japan Sea coast. The place was special to them—it was where they’d first met. And as they began to remember all the wonderful times they’d had together there, their old feelings for each other had been reawakened. They cleared up their misunderstandings one by one, until they were sure of each other’s love again.
Of course, a heartwarming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they’d run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.
“Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that—being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there’s somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo’s nosy friends.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this. You’re trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?”
Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn’t yet figured out.
Suddenly he got chills. He shivered. He looked at the sliding-glass door and found that it was open a crack. Still seated on the sofa, he twisted his body until he could close the door.
2
Kaoru just couldn’t get to sleep. It was already thirty minutes since he’d crawled into his futon after having given up on waiting for his father to get home.
It was customary in the Futami household for both parents and their son to sleep in the same Japanese-style room. With its three Western-style rooms, one Japanese-style room, and good-sized living room, plus dining room and kitchen, their apartment was more than large enough for the three of them. They each had their own room. But for some reason, when it came time to sleep, they’d all gather in the Japanese-style room and lie down together. They’d spread out their futons with Machiko in the middle, flanked by Hideyuki and Kaoru. It had been like that ever since Kaoru was born.
Staring at the ceiling, Kaoru spoke softly to his mother, lying next to him.
“Mom?”
No reply. Machiko tended to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Kaoru wasn’t what you’d exactly call agitated, but there was a faint pounding of excitement in his chest. He was sure he’d discovered something in the relative positions of gravitational anomalies and longevity zones. It couldn’t be just a coincidence. The simple interpretation was that gravity was somehow related to human longevity—perhaps even to the secret of life itself.
He’d discovered the correlation purely by chance. There’d been a documentary on TV about villages where people lived to extraordinary ages, and it just so happened that at that moment his computer screen had been displaying a map of world gravitational anomalies. Lately he’d come across a lot of information about gravitational anomalies while fooling around on the computer; he’d gotten interested in gravity. Between the TV screen and the computer screen, something triggered his sixth sense, and he’d overlaid the two maps. It was the kind of inspiration only given to humankind.
No matter how prodigious its ability to process information, no matter how fast its calculation speed, a computer has no “inspiration” function, reflected Kaoru. It was impossible for a machine to bring together two utterly disparate phenomena and consider them as one. Were such an ability to arise, it would be because human brain cells had somehow been incorporated into the hardware. Human-computer intercourse.
Which actually sounded pretty intriguing to Kaoru. There was no telling what sort of sentient life form that would bring into the world. Endlessly fascinating.
Kaoru’s desire to understand the workings of the world manifested itself in a lot of different questions, but at the root of all of them was one basic unknown: the source of life.
How did life begin? Or, alternatively: Why am I here?
Evolutionary theory and genetics both piqued his curiosity, but his biological inquiries always centered on that one point.
He wasn’t a single-minded believer in the variation on the coacervate theory which held that an inorganic world developed gradually until RNA and DNA appeared. He understood that the more one inquired into life the more the idea of self-replication became a big factor. It was DNA that governed self-replication; under the direction of the genetic information it carried came the formation of proteins, the stuff of life. Proteins were made of alignments of hundreds of amino acids, in twenty varieties. The code locked away within DNA was in fact the language that defined the way those acids aligned.
Until those amino acids lined up in a certain predetermined way, they wouldn’t form a protein meaningful to life. The primordial sea was often likened to a soup thick with the prerequisites for life. Then some power stirred th
at thick soup up, until it so happened that things lined up in a meaningful way. But what were the odds of that?
To make it easier to comprehend, Kaoru decided to think in terms of a much smaller, neater number. Take a line of a hundred amino acids in twenty varieties, with one of them turning into a protein, the stuff of life. The probability then would be twenty to the hundredth power. Twenty to the hundredth power was a number far greater than all the hydrogen atoms in the universe. In terms of odds, it was like playing several times in a row a lottery in which the winning ticket was one particular hydrogen atom out of a whole universe full of them, and winning every time.
In short, the probability was infinitesimal. Essentially impossible. In spite of which, life had arisen. Therefore, the game had to have been rigged. Kaoru wanted to know just how the wall of improbability had been surmounted. His uttermost desire was to understand the nature of that dice-loading—without resorting to the concept of God.
On the other hand, sometimes there arose the suspicion that maybe everything was an illusion. There was no way to actually confirm that his body existed as a body. His cognitive abilities may have convinced him that it did, but there was always the possibility that reality was empty.
As he lay there in the dim room, illuminated by only a night light, the stillness was such that he could hear his heart beat. So it would seem that right now, at this very moment, it was no mistake to think that he was alive. He wanted to believe in the sound of his heart.
The roar of a motorcycle sounded in Kaoru’s inner ear. A sound he shouldn’t have been able to hear. A sound that shouldn’t in reality have been able to reach his ears.
“Dad’s home.”
In his mind’s eye Kaoru could see his father on his off-road bike skidding into the underground parking area a hundred yards below. He’d bought that bike new less than two months ago. Now his father got off the bike and looked at it with satisfaction. He used it to commute to work, probably because otherwise he’d have no time to ride it. And now he was home. The signs of it communicated themselves to Kaoru intensely. There was no mistaking them. Separated though they were, Kaoru’s sixth sense enabled him to follow his father’s movements tonight.