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convertible, the top down, speeding along the shore. The light breeze, fragrant with
the smell of the sea, rustled her hair. A sign along the road had two vertical lines.
These meant
Warning: You May Be Pregnant
.
Aomame sighed and tossed her book aside.
She knew very well there was no need to try the third test. She could do it a
hundred times and the result would be the same. It would be a waste of time.
My
human chorionic gonadotropin would still maintain the same attitude toward my
womb—keeping the corpus luteum intact, obstructing my period from coming, helping
form the placenta. Face it: I’m pregnant. The human chorionic gonadotropin knows
that. And so do I. I can feel it as a pinpoint in my lower abdomen. It’s still tiny—
nothing more than
a hint of something.
But eventually it will have a placenta, and
grow bigger. It will take nutrition from me and, in the dark, heavy liquid, grow—
steadily, unceasingly
.
This was the first time she had been pregnant. She was always a very careful
person, and only trusted what she could see with her own eyes. When she had sex she
made absolutely sure her partner used a condom. Even when she was drunk, she never
failed to check. As she had told the dowager, ever since her first menstruation
at age
ten, she had never missed a period. Her periods were regular, never more than a day
late. Her cramps were light. She merely bled for a few days, that was all. It never got
in the way of her exercising or playing sports.
She got her first period a few months after holding Tengo’s hand in the elementary
school classroom. Somehow, she felt that the two events were connected. The feel of
Tengo’s hand may have stirred something inside her. When she told her mother she
got her period, her mother made a face, like it was one more burden to add to all the
others she carried. It’s a little early, her mother commented. But that didn’t bother
Aomame.
It was her problem, not her mother’s or anybody else’s. She had stepped
into a brand-new world.
And now she was pregnant.
She thought about her eggs.
Of my allotted four hundred or so, one of them (near
the middle of the bunch, she imagined) went and got herself fertilized. Most likely on
that September night, during the terrible storm. In a dark room when I murdered a
man. When I stuck a sharp needle from the base of his neck into the lower part of his
brain. But that man was completely different from the men I had killed before. He
knew he was about to be murdered, and he wanted it to happen. I actually gave him
what he
wanted.
Not as punishment, but more as an act of mercy. In exchange for
which, he gave me what I was seeking. An act of negotiation carried out in a deep,
dark place. Very quietly, fertilization took place that night. I know it
, she thought.
With these hands I took a man’s life, and almost simultaneously, a new life began
inside me. Was this part of the transaction?
Aomame shut her eyes and stopped thinking. Her head empty, something silently
flowed inside. And before she knew it, she was praying.
O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and
may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy
blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen.
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Why would a prayer come to my lips at a time like this? I don’t believe in things
like heaven or paradise or the Lord, yet the words are chiseled into my brain. Ever
since I was three or four and didn’t even know what they meant, I could recite this
prayer from memory. If I made the slightest mistake, I got the back of my hands
smacked with a ruler. Though you couldn’t normally see it, when something happened
it would rise to the surface, like a secret tattoo
.
What would my mother say if I told her I got pregnant without having had sex? She
might see it as a terrible sacrilege against her faith
. In any case, it was a kind of
immaculate conception—though Aomame was certainly not a virgin. But still. Or
maybe her mother wouldn’t be bothered to even deal with it, not even listen to her.
Because she sees me as a failure, someone who long ago had fallen from her world
.
Let me think about it in a different way
, Aomame thought.
I won’t try to force an
explanation on the inexplicable, but instead I’ll examine the phenomenon from a
different angle, as the riddle that it is
.
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