Field notes on divine evolution
There are moments, of course, where he half-expects for things to be corrected. (Or, what does a cactus have to do with anything?)
Watanuki eyes the cactus with some trepidation and a great deal of disgust.
(Yuuko had received it as payment for driving mad a man who had raped his daughter. "And what have we here," the man had grinned when Yuuko first approached, eyeing the pale taut expanse of her belly, the fullness of her bust, and his daughter had turned away in shame.)
(Not his wife, though. She watched with a stone face as Yuuko reached out and peeled away the man's rationalizations and his cracked mind until there was nothing left but gibberish, and then she handed over the cactus—Yuuko gestured for Watanuki to take it—and she had led her daughter away and never stopped looking back. Their shadows were poisoned violet, smoldering with grief.)
Yuuko orders him to place it in the sunroom off of the kitchen, where plants that Watanuki does not know the names of fill the air with vague and pungent odors, which make him sneeze. The cactus takes firm root in its new pot, like a proud heart. It soon starts blooming, odd hearty flowers that cap the stocky trunk as though transfixed by a clumsy child. The cactus now resembles nothing so much as a very ugly woman wearing a hat of extravagant loveliness.
Watanuki dislikes the cactus because it reminds him of that girl's blank face, slack with horror, her mouth ajar. There's no way that a stupid plant can be a fair price for saving someone. Watanuki looks at the showy flowers—they look a little as if they are made from wax—and wonders who was gypped in the exchange.
"She didn't ask to be saved," Yuuko points out to him with appalling calm, once Watanuki has shattered open angrily at the utter meanness of it all. "She just wanted him to stop, or to hurt, or maybe just to die a little. She never asked to be made whole again herself." Yuuko inhales a deep lungful of smoke, tenderly mouths a few faint rings into Watanuki's face. He chokes.
"She'll have to do that on her own, a little by little, until she wakes up and realizes that she survived." (A pause, another exhibition of smoke rings. This time she breathes little fishes through them.) "Or until she stops surviving," Yuuko adds, and for a moment Watanuki realizes how horrible it must be for Yuuko, to have to sit back and watch and wait for someone—anyone—to make a wish, even the wrong kind.
(But the moment passes and he hates her for being who she is, enigmatic and heartbreaking and more incapable that anyone he will ever, ever meet. Talking to her is like digging so many graves.)
He still hates that cactus. Its presence makes Watanuki grind his teeth and he goes home with a headache, that damn worry line between his eyes again, and a raw feeling like heartburn in his chest that lasts and lasts all through the night.