Parasite Eve Sephirotto Part 2

"Kiyomi is dead."

s.h.i.+nohara s.h.i.+vered. He looked unconsciously around the empty room. The fluorescent light flickered, then regained radiance, casting its usual shadows on the floor, each particle of light falling like rain.

"What?"

s.h.i.+nohara surprised himself with the volume of his voice. Two minute globules of his saliva traced arcs in the air before descending out of sight.

"But Kiyomi lives."

"Hey, back up..."

"Extract Kiyomi's liver cells for me. I'm not a doctor, so I'd never be able to handle it.

But I can count on you, right?"

"Kiyomi? What happened to her?"

"I'm coming there right now. You'll do this for me?"

"What are you talking about? Where are you right now?"

"I'll be there soon."

And with that the line went dead.

s.h.i.+nohara stood in place for a while, grasping the receiver tightly. Frozen in bewilderment, he was unable to make heads or tails of this. The only thing he could say for sure was that his old pal was not himself.

He thought of Tos.h.i.+aki's last statement, I'll be there soon, and frantically looked about the room. Did he mean to this office? He had called from an outside line. Where was Tos.h.i.+aki now?

Just then, not even one minute after the call, the door opened behind him. Startled, s.h.i.+nohara looked over his shoulder. Tos.h.i.+aki was standing there, a faint smile upon his face.

The cup slipped from s.h.i.+nohara's hand and shattered into pieces.

6.

Mariko Anzai was in her room, poring over the math homework spread out across her desk. She was singing along to a tape of her favorite pop singer that a friend from school had made for her. Her a.s.signment was surprisingly difficult for a change, but since this was her favorite subject, she was up to the challenge. Just when she had figured out the problem she was working on, the phone rang.

"Alright, alright..." she muttered, receiving the interruption with mild irritation. She stood up and went out into the hallway.

The clock showed 8:20. Outside her own room, the house felt all too cold and silent.

Her father had yet to return home from work, but these days it was not unusual for him to be out until 11:00. Since becoming the head of his department, it was always like that. He was quick to attribute his lateness to his busy schedule, but Mariko knew the real reason. You just don't want to look at me more than you have to.

The phone's ringing threaded into the patter of her slippers on the hallway floor. These seemed to be the only two sounds in the house. She picked up the receiver unceremoniously.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Good evening. My name is Odagiri. I am a transplant coordinator. I must apologize for the unexpected call, but is s.h.i.+genori Anzai at home?"

Mariko held her breath and looked reflexively at her left wrist. The sleeve of her sweats.h.i.+rt was rolled up, exposing the IV hole to which her eyes were drawn. Further up along her arm was another hole concealed beneath the sleeve, and both began to tingle.

"Dad hasn't come back from work yet..." she replied unsteadily and with an uncomfortable smile.

"Is this Mariko by any chance?"

"Um, yes... this is Mariko."

"Ah, good. Actually, I'm calling because a donor for your kidney transplant has been found and I wanted to pa.s.s along the good news."

Her heart skipped a beat. A kidney transplant... The words ran along her spine and pocked her skin with goose flesh.

When Mariko's first kidney transplant failed, her father was insistent about registering her on a waiting fist for kidneys from nonliving donors. Only a year and a half had pa.s.sed since then. She was amazed that an organ had surfaced so soon. Mariko retraced her memories of the past eighteen months...

"Suitable nonliving donors are rare, which means we'll just have to be patient and wait."

This is what a doctor named Yos.h.i.+zumi had told her with a pat on her head. But to Mariko, still in elementary school at the time, these words were meaningless. She never planned on going through a second transplant. She'd only heeded her father's request to save his face.

When her father heard Yos.h.i.+zumi's words, he asked the doctor uneasily, "Wait? For how long?"

"I can't say for sure. At the larger metropolitan area hospitals, over ten transplants from cadavers are performed every year, but that's because Tokyo itself produces a relatively ample supply of donors. Hereabouts, we carry out only a procedure or two a year. There are also those who are 'brain dead' but the idea of extracting organs from them doesn't sit well with most of society, at least here in j.a.pan. So all we can do is wait for a kidney from a heart failure patient. We need the freshest organ possible, but the way things are now, many obstacles stand in our way that significantly narrow down the number of available kidneys.

Compatibility is also a concern. There's a waiting list, but it has an order that must be strictly adhered to out of fairness to all potential recipients. If a suitable kidney is found in another region, it's possible to have it s.h.i.+pped here. Even so, it's not so uncommon for patients to wait five, even ten years."

"Ten years..."

Mariko could still remember clearly her father's hopeless expression at that moment.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do it right this time..." Yos.h.i.+zumi said with a hint of bitterness.

Mariko simply looked downward, biting her hp.

She was sure they blamed her. They thought the operation had failed because she wouldn't listen. They all acted nice towards her, but actually hated her so much they wanted to hit her. What did they know, anyway?

"Have you gotten sick at all recently? A cold, maybe?" said the woman on the phone, yanking Mariko from her unpleasant reverie. Mariko curtly replied that she had not come down with anything. She pressed her left hand to her chest, trying as much as she could to calm the heartbeat rising inside of her. Am I really going to have another transplant? This time, it would not be her father's kidney as before, but one from a complete stranger's lifeless body. The idea sank into her guts like a stone into water.

Images of the fish she dissected in a science cla.s.s experiment and of a cat run over in the street came to her mind. The organ of a dead human being, a corpse's kidney, was going to be placed into her body. A dreadfully cold sensation ran through her.

No way.

I don't want a transplant!

Unaware of Mariko's pained thoughts, Odagiri continued in her fast-talking manner.

"Do you know what time your father will return from work?"

"W-well...he's always late, so..."

"When he gets home, please tell him to call me as soon as possible, okay? If you can, call him right now. Ask him whether or not you want to proceed with the operation. If we don't hear back from you soon enough, we'll be forced to go down the waiting list. So please.

The sooner the better."

By the time s.h.i.+genori Anzai returned home, it was past eleven. His section was preparing for the release of next year's word processor models. He had been incredibly busy these past few weeks, unable even to enjoy his days off. Work had become exactly the bad habit he always imagined it would.

He opened the front door in a weary daze and noticed the hall light was off. Thinking it curious, he flipped it on and looked down. Mariko's shoes were on the floor, so he knew she was home. Ordinarily, she would have left the light on for him.

After loosening his necktie, Anzai went into the kitchen and grabbed some cold cut ham and a can of beer from the refrigerator. Taking the ham between his teeth, he opened the door to the living room, sat on die floor, and clicked on the television. An airplane crash in South America was being discussed on die late night news.

As he watched images of the accident, he thought about how seldom he saw his daughter these days. She was probably still awake, but then, he no longer did such things like go to her room and say hi.They were both busy in the mornings, too, and hardly exchanged a word. They ate their meals separately, something that had already become normal for them.

Things would probably stay this way until Mariko went off to college. Anzai guzzled down his beer.

The news ended about 20 minutes later. He needed to take a look at some files, so he switched off the television and stretched.

"Dad," Mariko suddenly called from behind him. Anzai turned around quickly to see her standing there in her pajamas. Her eyes looked a bit swollen.

"What is it? Something wrong?"

Mariko was silent for a long while. Her cryptic att.i.tude irritated him a little.

"You had dinner, right?" he said. "Still hungry? You shouldn't keep eating so late, you know."

"...a while ago, there was a call..."

Picking up on her tenseness, Anzai put his beer on the table and stood up.

"A phone call...? From the hospital you mean? Was it the doctor?"

"No... it was the transplant co-something."

Transplant. Anzai stiffened.

"What did they want? Did you listen to what they had to say? When did they call?"

"Around 8:30..."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?!"

Anzai clicked his tongue at her, then ran to the phone. He got the number from her and dialed it. Had their turn come? There was no other explanation. So why, he wondered, had Mariko been so hesitant to tell him? Soon, a voice came from the other end.

"Should we plan on proceeding with the transplant?"

"Of course, by all means!" Anzai said excitedly. The coordinator began by briefly laying out the most immediate concerns. She wanted Mariko to come to the hospital as soon as possible. If the results of her examinations checked out, all they would have to do was wait for the donor's heart to stop.

With immeasurable grat.i.tude in his voice, Anzai thanked her and hung up.

"Mariko, you're getting a transplant! I never thought they'd find one this soon. You'll be able to eat tasty meals again!"

He looked at Mariko with a smile, but she was trembling with a pale face that was far from rejoicing. She shook her head from side to side. Anzai swallowed back his joy and extended a hand towards her.

"What is it Mariko? They're going to fix everything. Aren't you happy?"

"...no," she said wearily.

Why was she being so disagreeable?

"What's with you tonight? Everything's going to be fine now. You were so happy the first time, weren't you?"

Mariko shook off her father's hand.

"No! I don't want a transplant!"

Anzai approached her, but she only turned away, tears in her eyes. She began heaving up sobs. The sudden good news must have confused her. He had no idea how to calm her.

"Mariko."

With knees shaking, she stepped back to the wall and screamed, "I'm not Frankenstein's monster! I don't want to become a monster!"

7.

Dr. Takas.h.i.+ Yos.h.i.+zumi was contacted by Odagiri at 11:30 pm with news of a donor from the university hospital. Yos.h.i.+zumi, who had just been looking over all the patients' data spread out over his desk, sat upright at the word "donor."

"She's a 25-year-old woman, brain dead from an intracerebral hemorrhage. I met with her family this afternoon and we have their consent."

Nodding to the coordinator's every point, Yos.h.i.+zumi jotted down a more abbreviated form of what she said in a memo pad. Azusa Odagiri had a.s.sumed her position as coordinator just last year, yet she was already known for her meticulousness and her skill with donor families. In recent cases Yos.h.i.+zumi had handled, he owed much to Odagiri for her sound dealings, which had enabled successful operations.

Yos.h.i.+zumi worked at the City Central Hospital, the main inst.i.tution for kidney transplants in the region. When the families of brain-dead patients offered for the deceased's organs to be donated, an attending physician made a call to the CCH. The transplant coordinator then met with the family personally to explain the details of the transplant process. If they accepted her proposal, she obtained their signatures on consent forms. The procedure was, in effect, no different for patients who had registered at organ banks, became no transplantation could really be performed against a bereaved family's wishes.

"We have a candidate recipient. I'll wire the data over to you."

Yos.h.i.+zumi nodded in approval and pushed the startup b.u.t.ton on his PC.

Now that the information was being transferred, preparations were already half-finished. At the CCH, recipients were usually chosen after the following steps. First, a sample of the donor's blood was extracted and sent to the lab to check its ABO and HLA types. A routine test was also made for diseases like AIDS. With this data in hand, the coordinator began the selection process.

At the CCH, designated the regional center for kidney transplants, there were data on file from many patients hoping for an organ. These included name, date of birth, nature of compatibility, as well as histories of blood transfusions, transplants, and dialysis. In the region alone, approximately 600 people were on the waiting list for kidneys of the dead. The first to be chosen were those whose blood types most closely matched the available donor.

Then, from within that group, candidates were ranked by HLA compatibility. Since there were two kidneys for every donor, two different recipients were usually chosen.