No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he made his way up to the cockpit and scanned the area to the west. A concrete embankment ran north to south along the perimeter of Wakasu Marine Park, and lined up parallel to the embankment on his side were numerous tetrapods whose boot shaped ends protruded out of the sea.
If he clambered up over the tetrapod blocks, it would be easy to jump onto the embankment. Enoyoshi estimated that it was no more than a hundred yards from the yacht to the tetrapods. Even allowing for error in his reckoning due to darkness, it was a short distance that Enoyoshi could swim comfortably. His heart began to beat fast. Sink or swim. It was worth a try. It was still quite an adventure to swim in Tokyo Bay at night. He felt his short-lived resolve wither as he gazed down at the waters of the nighttime sea.
The cabin hatch opened and Ushijima came crawling up. He was more intent on moving his lips than his body, as if impatient to tell Enoyoshi something. Enoyoshi extended his hand to help him sit on the bench, but Ushijima just lay on the cockpit floor.
'How do you feel?'
Moving about by himself was certainly a sign that Ushijima was recovering, physically at least. But what he did next was to shudder and croak, 'This boat isn't going anywhere.' His tone made him sound like a stubborn old man.
'Why not?'
'I touched, with this hand.' He held up a palm.
'Touched what?'
'The hands.'
… Ushijima's hand had touched hands?
Enoyoshi began wishing that he'd never asked. There were millions of scary tales about dead spirits pulling at the legs of swimmers, but if Ushijima was trying to tell him some yarn about a hand emerging from the seabed to take hold of their keel, that was too far-fetched even to be a joke.
After a moment of silence, Ushijima opened his mouth again. 'A child is stronger than you'd think,' he said.
Enoyoshi couldn't reply. What was he to say to that? Perhaps the shock had been too great and Ushijima had gone mad. 'Child?' There was nothing but to repeat the word.
'There's a child clinging to the keel.'
At this, Enoyoshi held his breath. The picture of a child's drowned body clinging to the keel formed in his mind.
'You know those hugging dolls they had years ago that you could put on your arm? Reminded me of them, except the face was all bloated like a balloon, you see,' Ushijima said with some feeling.
Calm down, Enoyoshi reprimanded himself. No good would come of letting into his mind a monster born of another's imagination. Enoyoshi had to go over the facts carefully. What had caused the creature to form in Ushijima's mind?
'Was the child you saw a boy?'
'Mm-hmm,' Ushijima replied and nodded. Enoyoshi was on the right track.
'Six years old or thereabouts?'
Ushijima thought for a while and then nodded. Enoyoshi was convinced now that he'd guessed right. Images don't usually spring up from nowhere. In this case, without a doubt, the boy's shoe that had got caught in the propeller provided the grounds, as it were, of Ushijima's imagination.
Enoyoshi tried to trace the steps in Ushijima's psychological process in the sequence in which they had occurred. The catalyst to the chain of associations had been the Mickey Mouse shoe, which must have been lingering somewhere in the back of Ushijima's mind when he attempted the dive. Where had the boy dropped his left shoe? The bridge? The embankment? Or perhaps the boy had drowned and just one of his shoes had come off in the water? If so, the boy's body would indeed be floating around in the sea somewhere.
Ushijima, who'd dived and started groping around on the bottom of the yacht with both his eyes tightly shut, must have touched something slimy clinging to the keel, maybe seaweed, that conjured up the feel of the skin of a drowned boy. Instantly, an image had flashed in Ushijima's mind. In the first place, he could never have seen anything in that sludge at night. Ushijima hadn't seen whatever he'd seen with his eyes. He had seen with his mind's eye an illusion formed by his famous imagination. A drowned little boy clinging to the keel, his face bloated like a balloon, eyes sunken deep into mushy flesh, the tip of a pale tongue sticking out from his mouth… A drowned boy's body clinging tightly to the keel like a hugging doll and immobilizing the yacht…
At this point, Enoyoshi felt sure he knew what Ushijima's answer to his next question would be.
'The boy you saw, he was missing one of his shoes, right?' he asked. Ushijima would surely nod. They'd found only the left shoe wedged in the propeller.
Knowing the answer, Enoyoshi studied Ushijima's reaction. But Ushijima narrowed his eyes, peered up at the sky, and shook his head to say no.
'He had shoes on both feet?'
This time Ushijima's reply was direct: The boy had bare feet.' There was no trace of hesitation or uncertainty in Ushijima's voice, and that was what baffled Enoyoshi.
In any case, he could not just sit there doing nothing. It occurred to him that they should try to restart the engine once more and get the yacht moving. Finding that the cuff of his shirt got in the way when he tried to tug the hand-starter, he decided to remove his shirt rather than simply roll up the sleeve and began to unbutton. Ushijima lay at Enoyoshi's feet, his posture unchanged. From under the open hatch, Minako caught sight of Enoyoshi taking off his shirt and called to him with a note of relief in her voice.
'So you've decided to dive at last.'
No doubt she'd misinterpreted Enoyoshi's removing his shirt. He hadn't the slightest intention of diving under the yacht, and her remark annoyed him. The way she'd said it, she seemed to assume it was his duty as a man to dive and remove the obstacle. Enoyoshi felt no obligation whatsoever to rescue the yacht for her.