Chapter 013
LIVE DOVES WERE really creepy.
The way they cooed, their stink, their texture, everything. But mostly their brilliant beady eyes. You couldn’t guess what they saw. Those eyes rejected Hazuki. No, Hazuki’s whole world.
“Groooossss.”
Mio turned away after having stared at the doves cautiously.
“Animals are so disgusting. You like these things, Makino?”
Hazuki couldn’t respond.
The window had been left open for the doves to come in and out, and the whole room had been fitted out for them. Hazuki could count six doves in all.
About a third of the room was dedicated to the doves.
Ayumi had said it was a birdhouse, but it was more like a doveroom. In the space that remained were a table and three chairs, and against the wall was a very simple bed.
Yuko Yabe was sleeping on that bed.
Standing at the doorway was Rey Mao.
They were in an illegal building structure on the roof of Ayumi’s residence.
This was Mio’s idea of a refuge for Yuko.
There was no denying that even though they were in Section A there were no sensors or surveillance units here in the doveroom. There wasn’t even an occupancy indicator.
It appeared to be a good hiding spot.
Except.
If you thought about it, this was also terribly inconsiderate.
In the midst of a serial murder investigation when there was probably an interrogation request out to anyone with any information, they’d hidden the one person, a sick girl no less, who had any information, and they did so without any semblance of a plan. Even a child would know this was totally dangerous.
But.
Hazuki ignored all of that.
They’d taken turns carrying Yuko on their backs beyond Section C borders.
The human body was squirmy, lukewarm, and heavy. The way they sweat, breathed, and smelled was intolerable.
Hazuki didn’t know why she had to get her hands dirty with this. For that matter she didn’t know why they had to move her to a different location or hide her in the first place.
Still, Hazuki was overcome with a feeling of obligation that couldn’t be reasonably explained.
It was because Ayumi hadn’t refused.
She thought. For some reason, Ayumi hadn’t objected whatsoever to Mio’s reckless plan to cart Yuko out to her place.
Just that…
Ayumi’d said she didn’t want to have to touch Yuko.
That was why Hazuki had gone along like it was the most natural thing on earth.
Yeah, that was what it was.
After the matter had been decided, Hazuki had stopped by her home with Mio. If they’d parted ways there it would have been over.
But Hazuki had left again. With Mio’s magic they’d tricked the occupancy sign to read positive. As far as anyone was concerned, Hazuki was in her bedroom right now.
After going to such illegal lengths she was forced to help move a squishy body.
But the transfer itself had gone smoothly.
Barring the business district, there was little human activity at night in the city. There was no fear of being seen by anyone if they took the route away from the weather observation point. They still ran the risk of being stopped by policemen on area patrol, but there was no time to consider another route.
Fortunately Hazuki and her associates were able to finish their task without any run-ins. Ayumi’s home was in a different direction than Yuko’s and also far away from the scene of the murders. Whether the way was clear simply because the police weren’t patroling areas not of interest to the case or if fate had simply worked in their favor, Hazuki couldn’t tell.
The task was complete in approximately seventy-three minutes, and Yuko Yabe was put to bed in Ayumi’s doveroom.
Hazuki looked at the birds alongside Mio. In real life, little animals were not cute.
As she watched their bellies convulse, Hazuki gradually came to the realization that her current situation was quite unusual.
She peered at Rey Mao. The unregistered girl looked somewhat like a police officer standing in front of the entrance like that. Maybe she was guarding the room, but she was just standing there quietly. Hazuki just remembered that Rey Mao hadn’t uttered a single word through the whole transport.
Rey Mao suddenly jumped.
The doors flew open.
Ayumi was standing just beyond them.
Rey Mao widened her eyes in surprise for a moment, then looked concerned.
Ayumi walked into the room without so much as looking at Rey Mao and put the box in her hands down on the table.
In the box was junk food and bottles of water.
“Just what we needed,” Mio said with a laugh.
“Rations? They’re disgusting! More importantly, you think she can take medicine now?”
Ayumi brought out a pill case from the box.
“All I have are these calming supplements.”
“That’s no good!” Mio interrupted.
“Getting drugs nowadays is really hard. If I try sneaking this stuff out I’ll be instantly under suspicion.”
“I’ll say I took it.”
“If they check you more than twice the medical center will access your file.”
“I’ll make something up,” Ayumi said and moved to the adjacent room. “The sooner she’s out of here the better.” Ayumi waved her hand at Yuko.
“Even if she gets better she can’t leave here,” Mio said.
“We’re not keeping her till she recovers. We’re keeping her till the case is solved.”
“Out of the question.”
“I’m sorry.” A frail voice. Yuko lifted her face.
“I’m sorry I’m…”
Causing so much trouble, she seemed to say.
“Just take your medicine. Then go back to sleep,” Ayumi said. She moved to lift Yuko up. Hazuki tried to read Yuko’s face, but Mio was blocking her view.
“Hey, Kono. You can say what you want, but you know that aspirin won’t do anything, right? People were so worried about side effects it’s been stripped of all its potency.”
“I know,” Ayumi said without intonation.
“If you know, then don’t bother giving us placebos!” Mio whipped her head and scrunched her nose, grabbed a package of junk food from the table, and went to the bedside.
“The medicine will take effect better if you eat even just this little bit first. Here. This should get you back on track.”
What would being back on track mean? Hazuki had no idea.
Mio said, “I’ll have a bite myself,” and pulled a chair up to the table, facing Rey Mao, who was still at the door. She told her you should sit down too. Rey Mao didn’t respond and simply glared at her.
“Why are you fronting? You know you’re hungry. I don’t care if you think you’re savage or an animal or whatever, but everybody needs to eat or they’d die. Isn’t that right, Makino?”
Mio pushed some food at Hazuki.
“Even the grossest synthfood tastes good when you’re hungry. Just sit down, Catwoman. Or are you still worried about what Ayumi here said?”
Rey Mao turned her body about-face so that her back was to Mio.
“Whatever.”
Mio put the dummy meat in her mouth, brought some over to the wire fencing, and plopped down.
“You’re not cute, you know. These doves are cuter than you. Ugh. This is meat? It tastes like meat. Ayumi, what do doves eat, anyway? Do they eat meat?”
From the room next door they heard a voice say I don’t know.
“You don’t know? C’mon, they eat meat, right?” Mio started tearing strips off the meat and asked Hazuki.
“I don’t think so…”
Before Hazuki finished answering, Rey Mao said, “Doves don’t eat meat.”
“They don’t? I guess meat-eating birds would be brutal. Like they’d resort to eating each other. They really don’t though, huh?”
Rey Mao said they don’t eat meat at almost the same time Ayumi yelled at them to shut up.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Mio kept nibbling on her food and sulked. Ayumi stared her down cold.
“Don’t interfere.”
“You feed them, right?”
“No.”
“But aren’t they hungry?”
“I don’t know.” Ayumi was seated right in front of Hazuki.
“These birds just moved in on their own. I don’t know what they eat or what they do. If I leave them alone they take over the whole room. That’s why I put up the fence. So that they wouldn’t take over any more space.”
“Then why don’t you shoo them out? Or put screens on your windows.”
“This many doves doesn’t bother me. You, here—that bothers me.”
Mio scrunched her nose again. Tch.
“I’m worse than a bird, huh?”
“At least birds can take a hint. If I mark my territory the birds won’t cross the line. Dividing land and selling it is a human endeavor. Birds don’t care where you put them. And I don’t need this space to live or anything. I have no reason to kick them out.”
“You cohabit, then.”
“The only thing is, if I let them come over here then I can’t eat here.”
“You’re more pragmatic than I thought,” Mio said, bored, drinking water from the pack. “I don’t know about the birds, but this is still your territory right, Ayumi? They invaded your place. Accommodating them is the same as keeping them as pets. Why don’t you just eat them?”
“Doves…”
“You can eat them?” Hazuki blurted out.
“Can’t you? They used to. Right?”
Mio looked at Rey Mao. Before Rey Mao could answer, Ayumi said yes you can very matter-of-factly to Hazuki.
“Have you eaten one before…Ayumi?”
Why. Why did Hazuki feel fragile all of a sudden? Asking her such stupid things.
Ayumi faced the fence and bared the nape of her neck.
“I’ve never eaten one, no.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know how to prepare them.”
“You prepare them?”
Hazuki’s eyes shifted to the strange object that moved around by the wire fence. Its form was organic but its movement was machinelike. It was made of a shiny material, but it was hard to imagine what it felt like to the touch.
It definitely couldn’t make itself understood. That was why it was so frightening.
This small animal had nothing in common with them.
“Dove preparation, huh?” Mio let out. “Sounds like a lot of work. I don’t think I could eat something like that.”
“Not just doves. I couldn’t eat anything that was once alive.”
“But people used to. And it looked like this.” Mio took a bite out of her synthetic meat. Hazuki’s hand hovered over her own container of meat.
“Dove cuisine is not normal in this country.”
“So they eat it mostly…abroad?”
“I guess they must have to kill it and take it apart,” Mio said. She waved at the birds on the other side of the fence.
“I read somewhere that doves used to be a symbol of peace.”
“This one’s pretty combative if you ask me,” Ayumi said in response to Hazuki.
“He looks like war,” Mio said with a laugh.
“They would totally eat each other.”
“No they wouldn’t,” Rey Mao said coldly. “They only eat cereals. Only humans eat everything.”
“But humans eat nothing. You know, I remember reading something once. That even animals that only eat grass will resort to eating meat if left hungry long enough. Pigeons look so fierce, I bet if they were left unfed long enough they’d start eating each other.”
“Animals don’t commit cannibalism.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mio said almost regretfully. Then she looked through the fence again. “I wonder if living things taste good.”
“You want to try, Tsuzuki?” Ayumi said.
“Aren’t you curious?” Mio said.
Mio turned her head to Hazuki. “Don’t you love animals?”
“I mean, I like them, but—”
“If you like them don’t you want to eat them?”
“Eating them means…”
Killing them.
“Right.”
Ayumi grabbed a food pack and said, “You can’t eat them unless you kill them.”
“Ayumi…”
“Makino would never kill an animal.” Ayumi handed the pack to Rey Mao, who remained standing. Rey Mao accepted it without a word. Why is that? Mio asked.
“Because it’s cruel? Because it’s gross?”
“Because she’s human,” Ayumi said.
“That’s a pretty obvious answer even for you, Kono. Didn’t we already decide humans are also animals this afternoon? I think humans aren’t animals anymore. Animals actually eat other animals, but humans have become totally emancipated from having to kill to eat.”
“Emancipated?”
“Yes. We’re no longer qualified to be called animals.”
Speaking of which…
Mio had been saying humans had abandoned the animal kingdom. That timidity had, over a long period of time, forced humans out of the food chain.
“Humans are still animals.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I told you before. Animals live only to live. So if they’re full they don’t eat. They don’t do anything in excess. Here…”
Ayumi opened a package of junk food.
“This does not run or hide and has plenty of protein, so why would a human go out of their way to prepare a dove? That’s all. The absorption of excess nutrients only hinders the sustenance of life.”
Mio said, “I still don’t know about that,” and started chewing on her second piece of dummy meat.
“I mean, going back to cannibalism, if you were starving and about to die, wouldn’t you kill one of these doves, Ayumi?”
“I suppose I would,” Ayumi said. “It’d be easier than eating you, that’s certain.”
“I’m edible too now?”
“If the situation were so bad that I would consider eating doves, it goes without saying I’d have to consider you as well. For that matter Hazuki would have to consider eating doves too.”
“And killing them?”
“Yes, killing them. You have to kill it to eat it.”
“I…I could never eat a dove or kill one for that matter,” Hazuki said.
Why not.
Was it because as Mio had said, “it’s cruel,” or because “it’s gross”?
She thought it was something else altogether.
Mio was definitely right, but it was more than that.
It was because it would be sad.
Yeah, that seemed the closest description of why she felt she couldn’t do that. It would be sad.
“Animals,” Hazuki said without power. She didn’t command the gravitas that Ayumi and Mio did. “Animals don’t think about how sad it is for other animals they kill, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” Ayumi responded without a pause. “Animals don’t think of anything, actually.”
“They don’t?”
“I wonder what it feels like not to think of anything at all,” Mio said as she looked over at Hazuki’s face.
“But you know, I read somewhere that animals do have a consciousness. It said it’s not like animals don’t have emotions. I mean, I don’t know about lesser life-forms,” Ayumi said.
“Having a consciousness or emotions is different from thinking.”
“Different?”
“In order to think, you need to be able to establish time. If you have no sense of time, you can use logic but you can’t think. Animals don’t know how to gauge time. Mammals only live for the moment.”
“Oh yeah? But mammals have memories. They learn.”
“They learn, they memorize, sure. But whether it’s something that happens in a moment or over ten years, one event is still only ever one event for an animal. There’s no depth. It won’t matter if you can connect events—if they don’t have any depth they won’t be empathetic to a situation. So they are forever only in the now. That’s what my sister told me,” Ayumi said.
Mio stared at the ceiling, food still in her mouth, and eventually said, “I see.”
“So you’re saying they have the memory necessary for pattern recognition but they have no concept of the passage of time and therefore cannot connect pattern to pattern from separate experiential events? Now I get it. That’s amazing,” Mio said.
Did she really understand?
Because Hazuki didn’t.
Why couldn’t she just be “forever only in the now”?
Why couldn’t that idea be learned?
Hazuki did not understand this at all.
Sad things were sad.
That’s why humans stopped killing animals, Hazuki thought.
Hazuki didn’t know anything about transcending the ecosystem or protecting the earth’s natural environment the way Mio did, and she hadn’t really thought about it in close personal terms, but everyone knew it was bad to kill animals and eat them. That was why humans had stopped eating animals.
Because it was sad.
“You think it’s sad because you don’t think of that thing as a dove,” Ayumi said.
“That’s not true. That’s…”
A dove. It was nowhere as cute as it was on a monitor screen, but it was the right design.
“This is a dove.”
“All right. Then what’s a dove to you? Is it part of your tribe, does it menace your existence, is it something you want to eat, or do you not care about it at all? An animal will put you in one of those four categories.”
“It’s none of those things.”
Would it be something she didn’t care about if she was so positive about her answer?
“It’s something I don’t care about,” Mio continued. “Since it looks like I can’t eat it and it’s so gross. I totally don’t care.”
“What do you mean by ‘gross’?”
Ayumi faced the fencing.
“It’s because you don’t see doves in there but humans shaped like doves.”
“What? Human-shaped doves?” Mio ripped into the synthetic meat. “Why would I think that? That’s no bird.”
“It’s only gross to you because you’re thinking of them in human terms. Same thing when something is cute.” As Ayumi spoke, in exactly the same way she would normally, she handed Hazuki a bottle of mineral water. Hazuki took it without a word.
“Pitying and adoring animals are both acts of human arrogance. In fact I see no big difference between protecting and hunting them. Human logic is only understood by fellow humans.”
“Feeling sorry for animals is arrogant?”
“Not your arrogance, Hazuki, but humanity’s arrogance,” Mio said.
“Hazuki’s a human, remember?” Ayumi said.
Hazuki felt like she’d been cast off or something.
Then all of a sudden, Rey Mao spun around. Mio was no doubt stunned, coughing up a little water. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. Rey Mao crumpled up the food packaging and said all done.
“Did it move?” Ayumi said.
Rey Mao didn’t answer, saying instead “I’m going home.”
Ayumi looked outside and grumbled, “You’d know.”
“When it sounds. Went east.”
“East—that’s the opposite direction. But it’s really an animal-like feeling, isn’t it? I’m fed up.”
“Hey, Kono. What do you mean did it move? What moved? What sound?”
“On our way here there were some area patrols on the street ahead.”
“Area patrols? I didn’t notice. Makino, did you notice anything?”
Of course she hadn’t.
“Then you, Catwoman. You gonna go like that?”
Rey Mao opened the door without responding, turned around and gave the room a once-over, then pointed her gaze at the entrance to the next room.
“Be careful,” Ayumi said. Rey Mao lifted one hand and took one step outside.
“See you, Mio.”
There was a very short pause.
Just then, as Hazuki stared at the fingertips Rey Mao lifted, just in that brief moment, Hazuki felt unsure and looked to Mio for reassurance. Mio had no sort of reaction, and with food bits still on her cheeks she just sat there looking dazed. While Hazuki was looking at that small dazed face, the door slammed shut.
Hazuki looked for Rey Mao’s back, though the shut door hid it.
Needless to say, the door—a quadrilateral affair with no decorations—broadcast not one piece of information on Rey Mao’s current location, distance, or speed of departure. Nonetheless, Hazuki knew implicitly that Rey Mao was going farther and farther away.
She looked at her monitor. It was already eleven o’clock.
Hazuki stared briefly at the doves and then left Ayumi’s house along with Mio. She said goodbye in a very soft voice, but Ayumi probably did not hear it.
For some reason Mio was silent as well and barely spoke to Hazuki until she reached home, where, thanks to Mio, the occupancy sign was lit even though no one was inside.
It’s as if nothing happened.
Time stood still in her house.
No, it was like it continued to flow despite being stopped. No part of the configuration had changed.
Whether Hazuki was inside or not did not really matter.
On her dining table was the meal that came out while she was gone, in exactly the position it had been left, already cold.
She checked the kitchen monitor. Nothing. No visitors on the log, no items that warranted any special attention. There were two messages in her main monitor, but one was a notification of how many kilowatt minutes she’d used this month and the other was an announcement of a discount on opening new lines of electric wiring service.
There was no point looking at this stuff now, so she put her monitor on sleep mode.
As she stood in the dining area she saw a scene, a setting that had not changed at all in ten years. She began thinking every part of today had been a complete lie.
Of course she remembered the feel of Yuko on her back, the smell, the weight; but the memory had practically no reality to it.
What Mio had said was true.
The world in our monitors, the world displayed in numbers, was the truth, and what took place in actuality was all lies.
Hazuki thought.
One just had to repeat the pattern.
In the end, that was all Hazuki’s past was. There was no such thing as truth in Hazuki’s brief life. What she thought was her past was just an accumulation of patterns.
People misled themselves into believing they knew time or history because they could mince the repetition of patterns. They depended on their ability to measure the passage of time. They counted on their ability to count.
The digitized past was all the same.
A today identical to yesterday.
Last month, last year, last decade, the same.
In that case…
We are the same as animals.
Hasuki stared at her cold food and took three sips of her soup before giving up.
After hesitating for a long time she finally drained it into the garbage disposal.
The food looked like it was squirming. It made her lose her appetite.
Hazuki knew synthetic food that had never lived had no chance of moving, but she couldn’t help think that meat and fish—that is, food that looked like meat and fish—looked like it was glistening, moving, fighting for its life.
Hazuki felt ill. She splashed her face with cold water and gulped down a large amount of mineral water.
This only made her feel woozier, so she took a shower and went to the room she was supposedly in this whole time—the bedroom.
She made her room pitch dark and got into bed.
She felt like she could smell just a hint of animal.