Piercing Read Free Page A

lightbox. He got his leather jacket from the closet, put it on over his sweater, and headed for the door.

3
    THEIR APARTMENT WAS ON the second floor of a four-storey building. He closed the door noiselessly behind him, checked several times to make sure it was locked and made his way down the stairs. There was no guard or watchman in the lobby: to enter through the glass doors you had to either punch in a code or have someone buzz you in over the intercom. To exit, of course, you simply touched the sensor plate marked OPEN, but the landlord had stressed the importance of taking precautions to prevent strangers slipping inside as you walked out. Not long before, someone apparently disguised as a delivery man had burgled one of the apartments; kids had been known to spray-paint graffiti on the lobby walls; and some jerk had once melted the intercom’s plastic number pad with a lighter.
    Outside, Kawashima zipped up his jacket and raised its fluff-lined collar, reflecting that he rather enjoyed the cold. In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.
    Yoko had awakened but hadn’t seemed to notice anything, and for the moment, standing on the empty street of their neighbourhood in Kokubunji, away from the room with the sleeping baby, he felt a certain degree of relief.
    It’s just my neurosis, he reasoned with himself. I just get freaked out imagining I might stab the baby. It’s not as if I actually want to stab her. Who doesn’t imagine things that make them anxious? Maybe nothing this extreme, but, like, having to give a speech at a wedding, for example - a lot of people are terrified of screwing up and being ridiculed or laughed at. Or you can accidentally make eye contact with some psycho on the train and think, What if he gets off behind me and follows me home? Thanks to the imagination, there’s no end to things in this world that can trigger anxiety. Normally, of course, you can free yourself from fears like that just by facing them, or telling someone about them.
    Normally.
    On the ground floor of the building next door was a video shop. At the end of a long day, after dinner and a bath, Yoko liked to sit with a glass of wine or beer and watch a movie. One night in the last month of her pregnancy, the two of them had watched Basic Instinct together. Kawashima wanted to flee the room as soon as he saw the first scene, which depicted a murder by ice pick, but Yoko said, ‘I’m not sure this is good for the baby, but it’s an interesting story, isn’t it?’ It was that attitude of hers, that detached amusement, that helped him calm down and sit all the way through the film.
    Often during the past ten days he’d wondered why his fear was of stabbing only the baby and not Yoko. Remembering the time they’d watched Basic Instinct together gave him the answer: because Yoko could talk to him. Talking with someone helped neutralise the power of the imagination. And Yoko had a delicate but skilful way of dealing with the wounds he carried inside. Her attitude was neither insensitive nor indulgent - neither, Why don’t you just get over it? nor, Oh, you poor thing! She never went out of her way to avoid the subject, and when it came up her comments were always both clear-eyed and supportive.
    ‘When you have a chronic illness,’ she’d tell him, ‘getting frustrated or impatient with it just makes things worse, right?’ Isn’t that what they say? That you have to live in harmony with an illness? To think of it as an old friend?’
    Or: ‘Why is it that when people grow up they totally forget how vulnerable and helpless they were as children?’
    Or: ‘Until Rie was born, I never knew how stressful having children can be. I’m sure even your mother must wonder what she could have been thinking back then.’
    The way she’d say these things never failed to soothe and comfort him. The first scene of Basic Instinct was a jolt to