From the Fatherland, with Love, page 56
If he were rich, he was pretty sure he’d buy up all the reptiles from importers everywhere and release them back into their natural habitats. And if he had his own police force and army, he’d just arrest all the importers. It was true that some species were in danger of extinction in their native lands as a result of war, poverty, and destructive development, but that didn’t justify exporting them. Keeping reptiles as pets was, to Shinohara, the ultimate symbol of human self-indulgence. He identified with the tortoise ramming its head against the walls of its display case. People who thought it fun to keep tegu lizards in cases too small for them displayed a mentality exactly like that of his parents. “It’s so cute!” they cooed as they fed the thing or gave it water or moved its case into the sunlight or warmed it with lamps. Even under the best conditions, lizards and tortoises never lived as long in captivity as in the wild; these people were slowly but surely killing the pets they found so adorable.
When he was a little boy, Shinohara’s parents had dismissed his bouts of anxiety as nothing to worry about. The symptoms had first appeared when he was seven. In kindergarten, he had enjoyed playing with Lego blocks. He would lock the little pieces together to make houses, rockets, robots, and so forth, and his parents displayed these little masterpieces on shelves in the living room. But one day when he was in second grade, Shinohara took a pair of those kindergarten-era creations in his hands and suddenly began to panic. In order to see the things as rockets or robots, a sort of compact or agreement was necessary. Everyone agreed to recognize these little blocks, when stacked in a certain way, as something else. Within Shinohara’s internal landscape, however, that compact had suddenly evaporated. All he could see were little plastic boxes with interlocking pegs.
From that time on, he often had spells during which the building blocks of reality itself seemed to come apart. He would experience, during waking hours, the twilight state everyone enters just before falling asleep. Memories of the past would arise at random—scenery and conversations, the voices and faces of parents, friends, teachers. If his mother, for example, was standing before him during one of these episodes, her face would become all pixilated and confused with the clock on the wall and the noise of the traffic outside and the world of imagination in his own head. There was a breakdown of the compact that linked his awareness to his senses. It was like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle and only being able to see the individual pieces. Everything around him—the TV, a comic book, a box of cookies, his book bag, his desk, his milk glass—disintegrated into something unrecognizable. He would perceive his parents and little sister slipping farther and farther away, even as they sat in the same room talking to him, and would feel trapped inside a kind of membrane that separated him from his surroundings. When he tried to tell his parents what he was experiencing, however, all they would say is, “It’s all right, son. Nothing to worry about.”
About the time Shinohara entered middle school, a birthday party was held for his father, a national university professor who specialized in medieval European architecture. A lot of people were invited to their house in Setagaya, Tokyo, including some foreign diplomats who were acquaintances of his mother, a translator of French. After dinner with wine, his little sister played the cello. Sitting there, Shinohara found that he didn’t know what that noise he was hearing was, or what that gourd-shaped wooden thing was, or who that was who was sawing away at it, or who these people were who’d gathered to watch, or what the objects they were sitting on were called, or what it meant to “sit,” or what all these things had to do with one another. After a jolt of electrifying anxiety, he dashed up to his bedroom, where he took dozens of scorpions and spiders out of their cases and put them in two paper shopping bags. Returning to the living room, he walked up behind his mother and father, who were listening attentively to their daughter’s recital, and dumped the bags over their heads.
When asked how a boy like him, growing up in such privileged circumstances, could be so dissatisfied and unhappy, he blamed it on the fact that his parents doted solely on his sister; but that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that no one understood the terror he felt on those occasions when the building blocks of reality began falling apart. He went through hell both at home and in school. Only when he was watching his scorpions and spiders catch and eat live bait, or when he was reading books about poisons, did reality remain reliably stable. His parents misunderstood this, however. They believed the reason for his mental disturbance was that he was raising such bizarre fauna. They urged him to get interested in music, like his sister, or learn a foreign language or take up a sport, and they bought him a flute, Chinese-language tapes, and tennis gear. This was essentially the same as gazing at a stir-crazy turtle or lizard and calling it “cute.” It was proof of an inability to see or consider things from the other’s point of view. In middle school, Shinohara began getting serious about centipedes and millipedes, buying them over the Internet straight from their native lands. And if the Lego blocks of reality began to slip out of kilter, he would use his centipedes from Guyana or Myanmar to threaten and even assault classmates or family members.
He was still in middle school when he learned of a newly discovered, extremely poisonous type of centipede from Haiti. A Dominican supplier with whom he’d been dealing for several years suggested he place an order immediately, before they were banned from sale. Shinohara purchased a hundred specimens, which arrived along with the necessary CITES Certificate of Origin. These centipedes were so full of vitality that raising and breeding them was no work at all. Since there was nothing else he wanted, Shinohara spent all his allowance on his many-footed little friends, and with the help of some fake IDs even managed to rent a small room in the city to keep them in. What was so wonderful about these creatures was that you could hide them—the smaller ones, at least—almost anywhere. You could keep dozens of them in a small Tupperware container and even carry a couple in your wallet. Though Shinohara was placed in an institution during his second year of middle school, he made use of his centipedes to effect an immediate escape. His parents had him removed from the family register but paid him off with a fairly large lump sum, so he packed a suitcase with several hundred centipedes and hit the road. He was biding his time at a park in the city, unleashing a pet or two on the occasional homeless person, when he made the acquaintance of an old friend of Ishihara’s, a man with a face like an alien, who encouraged him to head for Fukuoka.
Only after arriving in Fukuoka had he become interested in poison-dart frogs. The first ones he got his hands belonged to the species Dendrobates amazonicus. They were an entire cosmos in a package no bigger than the nail of his little finger. Just by looking at his frogs, or by making a vivarium for them, or breeding insects to feed them—just by being involved with them—Shinohara was able to connect with an unshakable reality. You could search the entire world, if not the entire universe, without finding many things as beautiful as these frogs. They carried their tadpoles around on their backs and raised them anywhere water accumulated, even in the creases of leaves, and they’d been surviving in the richest, most seductive, and most dangerous environment in the world—the tropical rainforest—since long before human beings ever saw the light of day. Their evolutionary adaptation hadn’t involved tools or language but the poison they excreted through their soft, metallic-hued skin. Amphibian skin lacked keratin or scales, and the frogs excreted poison to protect them from harmful bacteria and viruses. They needed this powerful poison, and the unbelievably beautiful coloring that went with it, in order to survive in tropical jungles.
Maybe it was because he’d been eating only Calorie Mate, but his bowel movement hardly smelled at all. As he was buckling his belt, he peered into the cage of dead parrots and saw something moving inside. One bird’s bloated stomach had ruptured, releasing a crawling mass of maggots. They were several times larger than the maggots of the fruit flies he bred for his frogs. At the all-night meeting after Takei died, when he had suggested they use flies and centipedes rather than frogs, the others had all looked at him as if he were delirious. “You think the Koryos are gonna run away screaming from flies?” Ishihara said, and began flapping his hands, hopping about and making a buzzing sound in an apparent imitation of a housefly. Shinohara said, “Hold that thought,” and trotted over to Building H. He returned with two breeding bottles and a Tupperware container. Ishihara laughed when he saw the breeding bottles and said, “Shino! Where’d you get the co-eds’ dill-dolls?”
They were plastic cylinders about three centimeters in diameter and twenty centimeters long, stoppered with little cylindrical sponges. When transporting them like this, Shinohara secured the stoppers with rubber bands. He held up one of the bottles, at the bottom of which was the medium where the insects laid and incubated their eggs. This one contained four-day-old fruit flies, feed for his larger dart frogs. He walked up to the rocking chair, held the breeding bottle in front of Ishihara’s nose, and removed the sponge stopper. “Poo,” Ishihara said, wrinkling his face and turning away in reaction to the smell that immediately filled the air. The medium was a fermented mash of banana, apple, cornmeal, and wheat mixed with apple vinegar and dry yeast. Shinohara turned the bottle upside down and tapped the lid on the arm of the rocking chair. What looked like gray powder fell out, landing on Ishihara’s thigh and stomach and then seeming to bounce right off. In the next instant he was on his feet, babbling unintelligibly, his face coated with a second skin of flies the size of grains of sand. Kaneshiro, Takeguchi, Fukuda, and Yamada, who had all been sitting near Ishihara’s chair, emitted a collective “Whoa!” and scrambled away on all fours.
Some of the flies seemed to be jumpers and others fliers, and collectively they moved like wind-whipped smoke. There was no telling how many hundreds or thousands of them there were. At first they remained clustered near the rocking chair, but as Ishihara and others nearby flailed about, slapping themselves and dancing spastically, the flies divided into several platoons to seek warmth elsewhere and soon peppered the faces and exposed skin of everyone in the room. “What the hell are you doing, letting those things loose in here?” Kaneshiro shouted, frantically trying to brush flies off his trouser legs. Flies had somehow found their way into Toyohara’s Hawaiian shirt as well, and as he tried to unbutton it they began to congregate on his hairy hands and fingers, a sight that made him panic and jump up and down and squeal like a child throwing a tantrum.
Imitating the sound of an ambulance siren—Pii-po! Pii-po!—Mori had run to the kitchen and grabbed a can of cockroach spray. He aimed it at a platoon of flies, but because they weighed almost nothing the pressure of the spray merely pushed them out of range, and Matsuyama snatched the can away, saying it hurt his eyes. Miyazaki and Shibata covered their faces with their hands and complained that the little bastards were climbing right inside their mouths and noses and ears. “This other one,” Shinohara said, pointing at the second breeding bottle, “contains crickets. Shall I let them out?” Ishihara aimed the Colt at him. “Don’t even think about it!” he said in an unprecedentedly no-nonsense tone of voice. “What are you going to do about this?” he demanded, gesturing at the floor of the Living and the flies that carpeted it. “Where am I and I going to sleep tonight?” All but Shinohara were in something like a state of panic now, as flies continued to land on their cheeks and foreheads and necks and arms. They shook their heads and writhed about, slapping at the relentless pests, which were so tiny and light and agile that they couldn’t be swatted, captured, or discouraged. “Seriously,” said Ando, thrashing away. “What happens now? Will they go away after a while?” Smiling, Shinohara spread his arms and gazed happily at his open hands and the flies that covered each finger. “A small swarm like this will disperse and move on eventually,” he said. “How long is eventually?” Ishihara shouted. He was stomping around in a frantic circle, trying to crush the flies underfoot, but the downdraft kept ejecting them from the danger zone just before the soles of his sneakers made contact with the floor. “Not to worry,” Shinohara said. “They’ll all be gone in a couple of weeks or so.” Ishihara exploded with genuine anger now. “Two weeks, my ass!” he bellowed, and dragged the vacuum cleaner out from its corner.
Take this, you little buggers… Suck you all down to a vacuumy grave… Muttering under his breath, Ishihara hit the switch and wielded the tube like a fencing sword. “Touché,” he said, as he sucked up a small gathering at his feet, and everyone cheered. A cloud of about twenty flies was orbiting his head, however, and apparently one of them found its way into his inner ear. Ishihara flung the tube aside and began rolling his head around on his shoulders, looking like a kabuki actor winding up for a dramatic pose, then tore at his hair and sank to his knees, crying, “I’m sorry! Forgive me! My bad! Someone open the windows!” Sato, Felix, and Matsuyama ran to do so. “See? We’re opening the windows!” Ishihara told the flies. “Please leave. Please go away now!” Shinohara shook his head. “They’re not going to go out there, where it’s colder. Never happen. But if we make it colder in here—or much warmer, for that matter—they’ll slow down a lot.” Shinohara was removing the Tupperware container from his pocket as he spoke. The Satanist Orihara shouted, “Stop!” and moved forward in a crouch, as if ready to tackle him. “What’ve you got in there?”
Shinohara raised his free hand and said, “Back up. These guys are not to be messed with.” He held the translucent container aloft. Something dark and squishy was wriggling around inside. “What is it?” Kaneshiro asked, but Shinohara put a finger to his lips to shush him, then took from his back pocket a pair of thick leather gloves such as welders use. He put them on and stood perfectly still, staring at the container as if to focus his attention. He glanced at Ishihara and the others nearby and jerked his chin to indicate that they should move farther away. No one was going to argue with him now. Nor did they doubt the rumors about him any longer—that he had driven two middle-school teachers to attempt suicide, or that he’d forced the head hoodlum in the institution to help him escape, or that he’d threatened a female probation officer with his bugs, stripping her naked and having his way with her. They all backed off slowly, gasping for breath and swatting at the flies that brazenly circled their heads and clung to their faces and arms. Shinohara was moistening his lips with his tongue as he stared at the Tupperware box. Finally he pried the lid open a crack and immediately turned the container around, so that the opening was facing away from him. After a beat, a reddish-brown thing about the thickness of a grown man’s finger stuck its head out, then wriggled free and dropped to the floor. Shinohara quickly closed the lid and squared off to face the thing, which was about as long as a man’s finger as well. Its reddish-brown body gleamed dully in the fluorescent ceiling lights.
“Is it a worm?” Yamada whispered, and Mori gave him a nudge in the ribs: “Dummy. He said ‘flies and centipedes,’ remember?” Shinohara squatted down, with his gloved hands before him goalkeeper-style, and edged slowly forward to narrow the distance between himself and the centipede. At the instant the outline of his shadow reached the creature, it raised what appeared to be its head, reared back, and dived at his knee. It was like a spring flying out of a broken mechanism, a burst of released energy, and it flew at its target not in an arc but a straight line. Shinohara caught the centipede in his left-hand glove like a shortstop fielding a grounder. Then, after clamping the right-hand glove on top to keep the thing from escaping, he took hold of it with a deft twist of his right thumb and forefinger. Still swatting flies, Takeguchi, Okubo, Sato, and Miyazaki hesitantly moved closer, but when they saw the centipede’s underside, with its countless wriggling legs, they stopped dead in their tracks and clapped their hands over their mouths. “See how it’s changed color?” Shinohara said, displaying the thing’s back. The reddish brown had indeed turned a bright crimson. “Does it hurt if they sting you?” Okubo asked. “They don’t sting, they bite, and yes, it hurts like hell. And like scorpions and spiders, it’s often the smaller ones that are the most poisonous.” Shinohara held the ferocious creature up to the light, and everyone joined the wide semicircle around him—except Ishihara, Kaneshiro, and Ando, who were still brushing the flies from their faces and clothing and looking on sourly from some distance away. Toyohara had ripped off his Hawaiian shirt and was sweating heavily as he tried to extract the flies tangled in his bushy armpits. He alone was oblivious to the centipede; the others were eyeing it and its owner with a mixture of fear and hatred. The monster’s creepy little yellowish legs were jointed and much longer than those of Japanese centipedes.
“They use those long, articulated legs to jump,” Shinohara told them. “If you get bitten by one of these guys, you break out in a painful rash, often accompanied by fever and diarrhea.” When he was in middle school Shinohara had tested his centipedes’ poison by dabbing a diluted mixture on his skin, or licking it. Even when well diluted, the poison caused his skin to swell and redden and sting quite painfully; and after licking the stuff, his tongue went numb, his heartbeat quickened, and the muscles in his arms and legs began to ache. He’d been bitten just once, not long after being disowned and leaving home with more than five hundred centipedes in his suitcase. He had raised several generations by then, mixing supplements containing vitamins, minerals, calcium, and essential amino acids into their food, and occasionally a centipede with exceptional jumping ability would materialize. One of these had pounced on the back of his hand with startling speed and taken a bite. Shinohara pulled the thing off and crushed it underfoot, making sure that the head—or more properly the forcipules that secrete the venom—didn’t remain embedded in his skin. If it had been one of the more common types of centipede and produced only histamine toxins, sucking the poison out of the wound would have been sufficient, but for a bite from this species he needed an extractor, a device that resembled a hypodermic needle. Fortunately he had one and used it promptly, but nonetheless his arm swelled up and turned dark red from elbow to fingers, and the muscles in his neck ached so much he could hardly move for two days.
