“Look, kiddo, it’s your ancestors,” he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.
“Eww,” said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.
He didn’t know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.
Sometimes Kaoru didn’t know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother’s sufferings.
So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his “ancestors”.
The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd—he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.
These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother’s eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn’t follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body’s basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life—it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.
All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father’s sperm was something he’d never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.
Was I really born from something this tiny?
He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn’t existed anywhere until they’d been made within his father’s body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.
So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn’t notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.
“What are you doing, kiddo?” He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.
“Observing your … things,” said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.
“What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you.”
Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.
He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.
So his parents’ secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father’s attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.
Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.
“What am I going to do with him?” she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pajama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.
Kaoru’s mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.
“Sorry to get you out of bed,” Hideyuki said to Machiko.
“That’s okay. I’ll bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“A little.”
“Why don’t I make something?”
Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.
“Have a drink first.”
Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn’t like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a drinker, though—she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.
When he’d seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie. As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of him in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn’t bother Hideyuki in the least.
Kaoru’s mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t asked him, he recounted the day’s events with brio, mentioning coworkers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.
Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. “By the way, Kaoru, why don’t you show your father what you showed me?”
“Huh? What?” He’d been taken by surprise.
“You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies.”
“Oh, those.” Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he’d put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.
“You’ll be amazed at what he’s discovered,” his mother said, but Kaoru didn’t feel it was that great a discovery.
“What’s this?” said Hideyuki, holding the printouts up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.
“I get it, this is a map of the earth’s gravitational anomalies.”
He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn’t have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn’t figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.
“Alright, you got me. What is this?”
“The earth’s longevity zones.”
“Longevity zones?” No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.
“Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies.”
Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father’s mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. “That’s right!” he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.
“I wonder why that is,” Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.
“Is this, like, common knowledge?” It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who’d been ignorant of it.
“Well,