Some things were clear at a glance. Ryuji had broken down the video into separate scenes.
“Last night I suddenly got the idea for this. You see what it is, right? The video consists of twelve scenes. I’ve given each one a number and a name. The number after the name is the length of the scene in seconds. The next number, in brackets, is—are you with me?—the number of times the screen goes dark during that scene.”
Asakawa’s expression was full of doubt.
“After you left yesterday I started to examine other scenes besides the one with the infant. To see if they had any of these instants of darkness, too. And, lo and behold, there were, in scenes 3, 4, 8, 10, and 11.”
“The next column says ‘real’ or ‘abstract.’ What’s that?”
“Broadly speaking, we can divide the twelve scenes into these two categories. The abstract scenes, the ones like images in the mind, what I suppose we could almost call mental landscapes. And the real ones, scenes of things that really exist, that you could actually look at with your eyes. That’s how I divided them up.”
Here Ryuji paused for a second.
“Now, look at the chart. Notice anything?”
“Well, your black curtain only comes down on the ‘real’ scenes.”
“Right. That’s absolutely right. Keep that in mind.”
“Ryuji, this is getting annoying. Hurry up and tell me what you’re driving at. What does this mean?”
“Now, now, hold your horses. Sometimes when one is given the answers up front it dulls one’s intuition. My intuition has already led me to a conclusion. And now that I have that in mind, I’ll twist any phenomenon to rationalize holding onto that conclusion. It’s like that in criminal investigations, too, isn’t it? Once you get the notion that he’s the guy, it suddenly seems like all the evidence agrees with you. See, we can’t afford to wander off the track here. I need you to back up my conclusion. That is, I want to see, once you’ve taken a look at the evidence, if your intuition tells you the same thing mine told me.”
“Okay, okay. Get on with it.”
“Alright: the black curtain only appears when the screen is showing real landscapes. We’ve established that. Now, cast your mind back on the sensations you felt the first time you saw these images. We discussed the scene with the infant yesterday. Anything besides that? What about the scene with all the faces?”
Ryuji used the remote to find the scene. “Take a good, long look at those faces.”
The wall of dozens of faces slowly retreated, the number swelling into the hundreds, the thousands. When he looked closely at them, each one seemed different, just like real faces.
“How does this make you feel?” Ryuji asked. “Like somehow I’m the one being reproached.
Like they’re calling me a liar, a fraud.”
“Right. As it happens, I felt the same thing—or, at least, what I felt was very similar to the sensation you’re describing.”
Asakawa tried to concentrate his nerves on where this fact led. Ryuji was awaiting a clear response.
“Well?” asked Ryuji again.
Asakawa shook his head. “It’s no good. I’ve got nothing.”
“Well, if you had the leisure to spend more time thinking about it, you might notice the same thing I did. See, both of us have been thinking that these images were captured by a TV camera, in other words by a machine with a lens. No?”
“They weren’t?”
“Well, what’s this black curtain that momentarily covers the screen?”
Ryuji advanced the film frame by frame until the screen went black. It stayed black for three or four frames. If you calculated one frame at a thirtieth of a second, then the darkness lasted for about a tenth of a second.
“Why does this happen in the real scenes and not the imagined ones? Look more closely at the screen. It’s not completely black.”
Asakawa brought his face closer to the screen. Indeed, it wasn’t totally dark. Something like a faint white haze hung suspended within the darkness.
“A blurred shadow. What we have here is the persistence of vision. And as you watch, don’t you get an incredible sense of immediacy, as if you’re actually a participant in the scene?”
Ryuji looked Asakawa full in the face and blinked once, slowly. The black curtain.
“Eh?” murmured Asakawa, “Is this … the blink of an eye?”
“Exactly. Am I wrong? If you think about it, it’s consistent. There are things we see with our eyes, but there are also scenes we conjure up in our minds. And since these don’t pass through the retina, there’s no blinking involved. But when we actually look with our eyes, the images are formed according to the strength of the light that hits the retina. And to keep the retina from drying out, we blink, unconsciously. The black curtain is the instant when the eyes shut.”
Once again, Asakawa was filled with nausea. The first time he’d finished watching the video he’d run to the toilet, but this time the evil chill was even worse. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something had climbed into his body. This video hadn’t been recorded by a machine. A human being’s eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin—all five senses had been used to make this video. These chills, this shivering, were from somebody’s shadow sneaking into him through his sense organs. Asakawa had been watching the video from the same perspective as this thing within him.
He mopped his brow again and again, but still it was damp with cold sweat.
“Did you know—hey, are you listening? Individual differences aside, the average man blinks twenty times a minute, and the average woman fifteen times. That means that it might have been a woman who recorded these images.”
Asakawa couldn’t hear him.
“Heh, heh, heh. What’s the matter? You look like you’re dead already, you’re so pale,” Ryuji laughed. “Look on the bright side. We’re one step closer to a solution now. If these images were collected by the sense organs of a particular person, then the charm must have something