Loop

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“Unh-uh.”

Kaoru’s reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru’s eyes.

“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.