22

Kuga had learnt how to regulate his sleep as part of daily life; he could drop off anywhere. He now stood up, empowered by his dream, and set off to fight the phantoms.

As if to symbolize his spiritual self-enhancement, Kuga climbed an imaginary staircase and reached the heavens above the metropolis. From the lofty heights of the starlit sky, he looked down at the nightlife district. It was in utter chaos. Having passed through the realm of dreams, Kuga had gained full control of his body and freedom of movement. Now he turned to confront the malignant spirits with a smile acquired by purifying the inside of his psyche. His body was several times bigger than normal.

A busy intersection was awash with the wailing of police sirens. There, one-legged sciapods and glyros with legs growing out of their heads were terrorizing passersby, while the star-shaped demon Haborym harried drivers in their cars. Kuga made mystic signs with his fingers and chanted the Buddhist mantra of Acala the immovable one, the incantation of the fire realm. The phantoms hurled looks of bitter reproach at Kuga as they burned up and disappeared.

The scene was like a pastel painting with uncertain depth or perspective, emphasizing the lack of boundaries between dream and reality. Light and dark that resembled neither night nor day alternated like the flickering of a film projector. Buildings swayed and roads undulated as if they were playing a game. Vehicles and people, phantoms, policemen, and police cars passed to and fro like colored shadows cast on the glass window of a projection room. Paprika and Jinnai were running to find a more certain reality, but they knew, in themselves, that they wouldn’t find it anywhere. How very unsettling! Perhaps that was what caused all kinds of uncertainty. Perhaps it was a world in which the winners would be those who could move freely across boundaries.

Still wondering how he’d gotten hold of it, Jinnai was openly brandishing and continuously firing a pistol. That made him wonder if he had some alter ego, or a secret past. He stuck his knife into the neck of a glyro that was clinging to Paprika. He and she were heading toward her apartment together. There they hoped to find the path to a kind of reality.

A large church appeared before them. They both knew it was a trap. But they would have to enter that trap and fight the subconscious of the abnormal, not to mention their own subconscious. They ran up the church steps without a moment’s hesitation. The entrance opened wide and contorted itself, as if to say “Enter!”

“Swine!”

Jinnai took aim at the entrance and fired several shots at it. The steps started frantically shaking up and down, from side to side. The church vanished, and before she knew it Paprika was running up the stairs to her apartment. Alone.

Paprika was concerned over Osanai’s safety. There had been no sign of him, in dream or reality, since his appearance as that perversely beautiful samurai, shot by Ube’s gun. That tragic image of the dying young samurai had remained in her memory like a sashie illustration. She may even have started to feel love for him, coupled with a modicum of pity.

She reached a landing where the floor sloped slightly. The floor indicator was distorted and seemed about to melt and flow away. But Paprika knew she was on the landing between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors. Perhaps she was near the fifteenth floor because she’d thought of Osanai. She walked along the corridor toward his apartment. She could see him in his bedroom. He was lying on his bed naked, looking up at the ceiling with a lifeless expression. He had lost a significant part of his personality.

“But it’s all right. You can get it back,” she said to console him as she leant over his face from above. She had reverted to the form of Atsuko Chiba. “Your own personality, you know. After all. You are so very beautiful.”

Osanai looked up at Atsuko from below. His eyes were like black obsidian holes that threatened to suck everything in. Hypnotized, Atsuko couldn’t help being drawn down to his face. “Ah. You poor thing. You poor thing.”

“Doctor Chiba. I have no sense of reality,” Osanai said in the delirious tone of a man with no soul. “You can only love me in this state.”

Wasn’t that precisely why she could love him? Maybe not. Maybe it was because she had been an accomplice to evil. It was perfectly natural for them, as two individuals who’d fallen from grace together, to have their hearts so violently moved by each other’s beauty. An embrace. An act of mutual seduction that could only occur within a framework of guilt. Atsuko was already naked. The whole room turned dark blue, dark as the bottom of the sea. Atsuko draped herself over Osanai, like a starfish trapping a mollusk. Her hands and feet felt numb. She could even anticipate her convulsions at the point of climax. A devil, a devil has got in. It’s inside me now. Inside my mind, inside my body. If not, what is this sublime sensation of pleasure?

“No,” said Seijiro Inui. “You think of God and the Devil as being two principles, good and evil as conflicting concepts, humans as unstable beings that exist between the two.”

Where’s he looking from, where’s he talking from? Is he somewhere in this room? In the TV screen? Atsuko was so carried away by the surge of sexual desire that she couldn’t even look around her.

“But you’re wrong,” he continued. “Good and evil are a single entity in conflict with humans. God and the Devil, as religious principles, are in conflict with worthless, banal conscience, morals, petty bourgeoisie, reason.”

Inui appeared right next to them. He was lying on the bed naked, resting one hand on Osanai’s shoulder as he spoke. Atsuko no longer felt it unnatural, as she would normally have done. Inui’s words should have sounded like unclear utterances of opaque meaning. But his words resonated in Atsuko’s ear and reached deep into her mind; they were clear in both meaning and language. Atsuko could no longer doubt the truth of his words.

“Yes, you should have known from the beginning. We share good and evil through our dreams. That’s why you feel nostalgic about evil. That’s precisely why all sorts of evil are as familiar to humans as God is. It’s because there’s evil that good exists, because of the Devil that God exists!”

The door burst open with a crash. Tatsuo Noda stumbled into the room, followed by Yamaji and the two inspectors.

“So this is where you are. Inui!” bellowed Yamaji. Inui responded by standing and roaring violently. Paprika was instantly transformed; she was no longer naked, no longer Atsuko Chiba. It was as if her personality had been reversed. As if she had, at that very moment, acquired the ability to cast aside her sensuality and the logic of dreams.

“Arrest him!” she shouted. “I mean Inui, the real Inui! He’s got a DC Mini on his head. I saw it!”

Still completely naked, Inui’s body expanded until it filled the room. “Go back!” he called down from the ceiling. “Go back to your own dreams! To your own subconscious! To your own fears!”

“Don’t think about it!” shouted Paprika. “Don’t let him kindle your fear!”

But it was too late. Before her warning could sink in, Noda’s fear had already been kindled. Oh no! He was on the steel frame of a multistory building under construction. The very place he feared more than any other. Damn! Damn that Seijiro Inui! How did he know about my fear of heights?!

The reality was that Noda had taken himself there. He could see the city and houses spread out far below the swaying steel frame. The frame began to twist beneath his feet, snaking back and forth, trying to make him fall. Noda cried out. He tried to hold tight, but at the moment his hand reached a steel column, it slid away from him. This terrifying scene was being created inside Noda’s mind.

“Help! Somebody! Paprika! Paprika!” he called, lurching violently.

He was crying. If he fell, he would die. He would die in reality. For although he was in a dream, it was also reality for him. A hideous reality that should never be allowed to exist.

Paprika didn’t come to help.