Kaoru lay down beside them, hugging his pillow and clutching the paper holding the promise that they’d go to the desert. Curled up like that, he looked something like a fetus.
Recently Kaoru had begun to look older than his twenty years. It wasn’t so much that his face had aged as that his unusually large frame projected a robust presence. He exuded an air of adulthood. People he met tended to tell him he was mature for his age.
Kaoru thought that was only natural, considering how he’d been forced to become his family’s pillar of strength at the age of thirteen. Ten years ago, in elementary school, he’d been skinny and short, and people had often thought him younger than he was. Supposedly he’d been something of a know-it-all, tutored as he’d been in the natural sciences by his father and in languages by his mother. His main job had been to give his imagination free reign, to wonder about the structure and workings of the universe, rather than to involve himself in mundane chores.
Ten years ago—it felt like another world altogether. Back then, playing with his computer, sitting up talking with his parents into the wee hours of the night, the road ahead of them had been clear and without shadow. He could remember how he’d started linking about longevity and gravity, and how that had turned into a family plan to visit the Four Corners region of North America. He’d even gotten his father to sign a pact to that effect.
Kaoru still kept that contract in his desk drawer. It had never been fulfilled. Hideyuki still wanted to honor it, but Kaoru the medical student knew better than anybody how impossible that was.
Kaoru had no skill that could tell him when or by what route the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus had infiltrated Hideyuki’s body. No doubt the virus had turned one of his body’s cells cancerous years before he first complained of stomach problems. Then that newborn cancer cell had probably undergone its first cellular division not long after he’d promised that trip to the desert. And those cancer cells had silently, steadily reproduced themselves until the family trip had become an unattainable dream.
Hideyuki’s initial plans to visit some laboratories in New Mexico had been delayed; only three years after the initial promise had he been able to finally work the visits into his schedule. He’d arranged for a three-month stint at the Los Alamos and Santa Fe research centers. He’d planned to depart for New Mexico two weeks early, so he and Machiko and Kaoru could visit the site of the negative gravitational anomaly that still fascinated Kaoru so.
And then in early summer, two months before they were scheduled to leave—after they’d already bought the plane tickets and the whole family had their hearts set on the trip—Hideyuki suddenly complained of stomach pain.
Why don’t you see a doctor, Machiko said, but he wouldn’t listen. Hideyuki decided it was a simple case of gastritis, and made no lifestyle changes.
But as the summer wore on, the pain became worse, until finally, three weeks before their departure date, he vomited. Even then, Hideyuki insisted it was nothing. He kept refusing to be examined, reluctant to cancel the plans they were so excited about.
Finally, though, the symptoms became unendurable, and he agreed to go to the university hospital and see a doctor who happened to be a friend of his. The examination found a polyp in his pylorus, and he was admitted to the hospital.
Naturally, the trip was cancelled. Neither Kaoru nor Machiko was in any mood to travel. The doctor in charge informed them that the polyp was malignant.
Thus did Kaoru’s thirteenth summer turn from heaven into hell: not only did the trip fall through, but he and his mother ended up spending most of the sweltering summer going back and forth to the hospital.
Don’t worry, I’ll get better next year, and then we’ll go to the desert like I promised, just you wait and see, bluffed his father. Their one comfort was Hideyuki’s positive attitude.
Machiko believed her husband, but, at the same time, whenever she let herself imagine what might happen, she became despondent. She grew weaker emotionally, and physically.
And that was why it fell to Kaoru to take a central role in the family. It was Kaoru who stood in the kitchen and made sure his mother ate enough when she couldn’t bring herself to think about food; it was Kaoru who swiftly absorbed enough medical knowledge to plant thoughts of an optimistic future in his mother’s head.
There was an operation in which two thirds of Hideyuki’s stomach was removed, and it went well; if the cancer hadn’t metastasized, there was every chance he’d get well. By the beginning of autumn Hideyuki was able to return home, and to his laboratory.
It was around that time that a change began to appear in Hideyuki’s attitude toward Kaoru. On the one hand, as a man he had a new respect for the dependability his son showed while he was in the hospital, but on the other hand he began to be stricter with his son out of a new determination to make him into a stronger man. He stopped calling him “kiddo”, and encouraged him to spend less time on his computer and more time exercising his body. Kaoru didn’t resist, but went along with his father’s new expectations: he could detect a certain desperation in his father, as if he wanted to transfer something from his own body to his son’s before it disappeared.
He knew his father loved him, and he felt special, as if he’d inherited his father’s will; pride coursed through him.
Two years passed uneventfully, and Kaoru’s fifteenth birthday came around. But changes had been taking place inside his father’s body. Those changes were revealed by a bloody stool.
This was a red light signaling the spread of the cancer. With no hesitation this time, Hideyuki saw the doctor, who gave him a barium enema and x-rayed him. The x-ray showed a shadow on the sigmoid colon about half the size of a fist. The only conceivable course of action was surgery to cut it out.
There were, however, two possibilities for the surgery. One option would leave the anus; the other would remove more tissue and require the insertion of an artificial anus. With the former, there was the fear that they would miss some of the invading cancer cells, leaving the possibility of a recurrence, while the latter option of removing the entire sigmoid colon allowed for more surety. The doctor’s opinion was that from a medical standpoint the artificial anus would be preferable, but because of the inconvenience and lifestyle changes that would bring, he had to leave the final decision up to the patient.
But Hideyuki didn’t flinch as he coolly chose the artificial anus. If you open me up and can’t say with certainty that the cancer hasn’t spread that far, then I want you to cut it all out without hesitation, he’d volunteered. He intended to bet on the option with the best odds of survival.
Once again the summer found him back in the hospital for surgery. When they cut him open, the doctors found that the cancer hadn’t invaded as far as they had feared; normally, in this situation, leaving the anus in would give at least even odds of success. But the surgeon in charge decided, in view of the patient’s expressed wishes, to remove the sigmoid colon entirely.
Once again autumn found Hideyuki checking out of the hospital. For the next two years he’d lived in fear of signs of a relapse, as he strove to get used to life with a colostomy.
Exactly two years later there was another sign, this one a yellow light, as it were. Hideyuki became feverish and his body took on a yellowish cast, symptoms that got worse day by day. One look at his jaundiced condition told the doctors that the cancer was attacking his liver.
The doctors hung their heads. They thought they’d made sure, over the course of two previous surgeries, that the cancer