Everyone was too caught up in their own thoughts to understand what Isogai was asking them. Finally exasperated by the fact that no one was moving, he clapped his hands and threw them up into the air.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time with Chris. Alone.”
Hashiba got up, dipping his head apologetically. He said to Hosokawa and Kato, “You guys go back to our room, I’ll bring Kagayama.” He was still in the bathroom with the door closed with no sign of coming out anytime soon.
“We’ll help with him,” Hosokawa offered his assistance.
“Thanks, but we’ll be fine. It’d be a great help if you both go back and start to pack up the equipment.”
The two of them nodded and shuffled out of the room. It was Hashiba’s responsibility to make the decision to give up on the filming. Other than that, he’d let the others decide what they wanted to do by themselves. They had two cars at their disposal, and if they rode them back towards Tokyo together, they might still be able to spend their last moments with their families.
Hashiba opened the door to the bathroom. An acrid smell of vomit wafted out of the room. Kagayama sat on the floor, hands over the open toilet. His shoulders rocked up and down as he sobbed. Hashiba put one hand over his nose and patted Kagayama’s back with the other. He turned the bathroom light on, but the extractor fan seemed to be broken. The sour smell hung, stagnant in the air.
“Come on, man, let’s get out of here.”
As he stood rubbing Kagayama’s back, Hashiba became aware of a sound that rang above Kagayama’s sobbing. The fan in the wall would be connected to the outside by some form of ducting. The pipes seemed to be picking up sounds from the parking lot outside, relaying them into the bathroom. An endless succession of horns mixed in cacophonous harmony with an a capella rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Hashiba could hear the voices of a couple talking happily. Mostly the words themselves blended into the background noise of engine sounds and Christmas songs, but a single sentence rose above the noise; a bright, female voice:
“Let’s kiss, here in front of everyone — it’s been a special day, after all …”
The girl’s voice seemed to be whispering directly into Hashiba’s ear, playful and sweet. As though urged on by the voice, he immediately thought of Saeko, and he pulled his phone out from his pocket and pushed her speed dial. The call went straight to her voice mail again.
She must still have the phone turned off.
Hashiba left a message, attempting to describe what they had found out. He talked for about half a minute before hanging up. He realized that if she left the same message for him, he’d suspect that she had gone crazy.
The master bedroom was the only Japanese-style room in the house, located directly across the main corridor from the living room. The first time Saeko had visited the house she had only had a brief glance in. At the time, the sun had been shining in through the south-facing veranda windows. Nonetheless she remembered the room looking dark and bland, probably because it was almost devoid of furniture; there were just a couple of closets and a black-lacquer Buddhist altar stuck in the middle. Her first impression of the room had been formed by the dark flash of the altar reflecting the sunlight.
The altar had been adorned with a single photo, an elderly man that Saeko guessed was Haruko’s father-in-law, Kota’s father. Hashiba had said that this was where he found her father’s notebook, directly under the image.
Saeko didn’t know the name of the man. She hadn’t thought to look up his information when researching the disappearance of the family. She didn’t know when he had passed away, and this was the only photo she had ever seen of him. Saeko realized that her knowledge of the family was still limited.
Even so, it was odd that Hashiba had come across her father’s notebook at the altar built to honor Haruko’s father-in-law. Perhaps if it was her father’s altar, that would still make sense. But the idea of depositing the personal item of a man you were having an affair with on the altar to your father-in-law was abnormal. Maybe Saeko had misinterpreted their relationship; maybe it wasn’t adulterous. Or … the thought struck her that the notebook could have been placed there by a third, unconnected, person. But if so, by whom, and when? Was it here from before the family went missing or planted here afterwards? Whichever the case, Saeko still couldn’t understand just why someone would place her father’s notebook here, on this altar. At least she had now decided where to start looking around the house — the master bedroom, the room of Haruko and her husband.
Saeko stood, making to leave the living room. As she did so an image on the TV set caught her eye, arresting her in mid-movement. She’d turned down the sound, but an unnatural-looking set of lights glowed on the screen. At first, Saeko thought she was seeing a reflection of the lights from the ceiling of the living room, but when she looked up she saw that there was only a single, rectangular-shaped fluorescent lamp. The light coming from the screen looked more like a number of round bulbs.
The broadcast seemed to have shifted away from the footage of the chasm in California. Had something new happened? A caption on the bottom of the screen said the location was Calcutta, and a digital clock on the screen gave the local time, just after 6 p.m., early evening. The camera panned across huge crowds of people gathered together. A red sun hung in the sky to the west, slowly charting its path through the horizon. But the crowd wasn’t looking at the horizon; they seemed to be staring upwards, somewhere between the darkening sky and the sunset.
The crowd looked awestruck, and many sat in prayer. It was quite a sight, tens of thousands of people all staring up at the sky, praying to something. The cameras panned upwards to show what they were looking at. High in the sky above hung five disks of light, saucers like UFOs arranged in a neat circle. The shapes were unmoving and emitted a uniform, pale light. The captions scrolling along the screen told Saeko that they were located tens of kilometers up in the sky. It was clear that this was not a man-made phenomenon. It looked like a set of five full moons hanging together, or glowing white flowers, rounded in a bunch. The next image that popped into her mind was the light in an operating room, shining down on a patient from all angles, designed to leave no shadows. Saeko had never had an operation, so she wondered why she thought of such an image. Once it had taken hold, she couldn’t shake the impression that the five lights in the sky were a set of halogen bulbs. She could picture them bolted into an invisible ceiling, suspended by a metallic arm stretching out behind.
The image she was seeing was doubtlessly being broadcast around the world, with hundreds of millions of people watching. Nonetheless, Saeko suspected she was probably the only person in the world imagining the lights as part of a gigantic operation room. Saeko began to feel that she was lying horizontal on a surgical table and looking up at the lights. She shook off the unnerving sensation and walked out of the living room. She opened the door to the bedroom across the hallway and flicked the switch for the lights. As they revealed the room to her, she remembered a set of words:
“If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you.”
The same words had come to her the last time she was here, when she had picked up her father’s notebook from the table. She stopped and looked around, checking that no one was in the room. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself, guarding against her imagination’s tendency to get the better of her and create a chain reaction until she heard things that weren’t there. She was redoubling her efforts to stay objective.