Page 21 of No Longer Human


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I had intended to take one shot a day, but it became two, then three; when it reached four I could no longer work unless I had my shots.

All I needed was the woman at the pharmacy to admonish me, saying how dreadful it would be if I became an addict, for me to feel that I had already become a fairly confirmed addict. (I am very susceptible to other people’s suggestions. When people say to me, “You really shouldn’t spend this money, but I suppose you will anyway ...” I have the strange illusion that I would be going against expectations and somehow doing wrong unless I spent it. I invariably spend all the money immediately.) My uneasiness over having become an addict actually made me seek more of the drug.

“I beg you! One more box. I promise I’ll pay you at the end of the month.”

“You can pay the bill any old time as far as I’m concerned, but the police are very troublesome, you know.”

Something impure, dark, reeking of the shady character always hovers about me.

“I beg you! Tell them something or other, put them off the track. I’ll give you a kiss.”

She blushed.

I pursued the theme. “I can’t do any work unless I have the medicine. It’s a kind of energy-builder for me.”

“How about hormone injections?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s liquor or that medicine, one or the other. If I haven’t got it I can’t work.”

“You mustn’t drink.”

“That’s right. I haven’t touched a drop of liquor since I began with that medicine. I’m in fine physical shape, thanks to you. I don’t intend to go on drawing stupid cartoons forever, you know. Now that I’ve stopped drinking and have straightened myself out, I’m going to study. I’m sure I can become a great painter. I’ll show you. If only I can get over this critical period. So, please. How about a kiss?”

She burst out laughing. “What a nuisance you are. You may already have become an addict, for all I know.” Her crutches clacked as she hobbled over to the shelf to take down some medicine. “I can’t give you a whole box. You’d use it all up. Here’s half.”

“How stingy you’ve become! Well, if that’s the best you can do.”

I gave myself a shot as soon as I got back home.

Yoshiko timidly asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Of course it hurts. But I’ve got to do it, no matter how painful it is. That’s the only way to increase the efficiency of my work. You’ve noticed how healthy I’ve been of late.” Then, playfully, “Well, to work. To work, to work.”

Once, late at night, I knocked on the door of the pharmacy. As soon as I caught sight of the woman in her nightgown hobbling forward on her crutches, I threw my arms around her and kissed her. I pretended to weep.

She handed me a box without a word.

By the time I had come to realize acutely that drugs were as abominable, as foul—no, fouler—than gin, I had already become an out-and-out addict. I had truly reached the extreme of shamelessness. Out of the desire to obtain the drug I began again to make copies of pornographic pictures. I also had what might literally be called a very ugly affair with the crippled woman from the pharmacy.

I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.” I paced back and forth, half in a frenzy, between my apartment and the pharmacy.

The more I worked the more morphine I consumed, and my debt at the pharmacy reached a frightening figure. Whenever the woman caught sight of my face, the tears came to her eyes. I also wept.

Inferno.

I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno, to write a long letter to my father in which I confessed my circumstances fully and accurately (with the exception, of course, of my relations with women). If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.

The result was to make everything only the worse: the answer, for which I waited day and night, never came, and my anxiety and dread caused me to increase still further the dosage of the drug.

I made up my mind one day to give myself ten shots that night and throw myself into the river. But on the afternoon of the very day I chose for the event, Flatfish appeared with Horiki in tow, seemingly having managed with his diabolical intuition to sniff out my plan.

Horiki sat in front of me and said, with a gentle smile, the like of which I had never before seen on his face, “I hear you’ve coughed blood.” I felt so grateful, so happy for that gentle smile that I averted my face and wept. I was completely shattered and smothered by that one gentle smile.

I was bundled into an automobile. Flatfish informed me in a quiet tone (so calm indeed that it might almost have been characterized as compassionate) that I should have to go for the time being to a hospital, and that I should leave everything to them. Weeping helplessly, I obeyed whatever the two of them decreed, like a man bereft of all will, decision and everything else. The four of us (Yoshiko came along) were tossed in the car for quite a long time. About dusk we pulled up at the entrance to a large hospital in the woods.

My only thought was, “This must be a sanatorium.”

I was given a careful, almost unpleasantly considerate examination by a young doctor. “You’ll need to rest and recuperate here for a while,” he said, pronouncing the words with a smile I could only describe as bashful. When Flatfish, Horiki and Yoshiko were about to go, leaving me there alone, Yoshiko handed me a bundle containing a change of clothes, then silently offered from her handbag the hypodermic needle and the remaining medicine. Is it possible she actually believed after all that it was just an energy-building medicine?

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