T H E ele
p H A N T V A N ISHEs S T O R I e S
B Y HARUKI
M U R A K AM I
[nota saya: Saya ambil cerita-cerita di bawah ni dari internet. Banyak ejaannya tak betul
seperti I’m dieja Fm, mungkin kesilapan dalam program
komputer pihak yang
memasukkannya. Saya edit setakat yang saya perasan. Selain ini,
cerita-cerita di
bawah ni pamer unsur-unsur tak baik yang diamal dalam
budaya warga Jepun
yang tak patut anda ikuti. Saya sebenarnya gemar kaji
cerita-cerita Haruki Murakami
kerana ia memaparkan realiti kehidupan penduduk Jepun. Selain karya realisme, cerita-
cerita beliau yang berbentuk surealisme juga amat
menarik.]
CONTENTS
1.THE WIND-UP BIRD AND TUESDAY’S WOMEN
2.THE SECOND BAKERY ATTACK
3.THE KANGAROO COMMUNIOUE
4.ON SEEING THE 100% PERFECT GIRL ONE BEAUTIFUL APRIL MORNING
5.SLEEP
6.THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. THE 1881 INDIAN UPR1SING,
HITLER'S
INV ASION OF POLAND,
AND THE REALM OF RAGING WINDS
7.LEDERHOSEN
8.BARN BURNING
9.THE LITTLE GREEN MONSTER
10.FAMILY AFFAIR
11.A WINDOW
12.TV PEOPLE
13.A SLOW BOAT TO CHINA
14.THE PANCING DWARF
15.THE LAST LAWN OF THE AFTERNOON
16.THE SILENCE
17.THE ELEPHANT VANISHES
1.THE WIND-UP BIRD AND
TUESDAY’s womEN
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls.
Another moment until the
spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to
Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along
with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti - cooking music.
I hear the telephone
ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking.
It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London
Symphony Orchestra
are coming to a crescendo. Still, on second thought, I figure I
might as well turn down
the flame and head into the living room, cooking chopsticks in
hand, to pick up the receiver. It might be a friend, it occurs to me, possibly
with word of a new job.
"I want ten minutes of your time,"
comes a woman' s voice out of the blue.
"Excuse
me?" I blurt back in surprise. "How's that again?"
"I said, just
ten minutes of your time, that' s all I want," the woman repeats.
I have absolutely no recollection of ever
hearing this woman's voice before. And I
pride myself on a near-perfect ear for voices, so I’m sure
there's no mistake. This is the voice of a woman I don't know. A soft, low,
nondescript voice.
"Pardon me, but what number might you
have been calling?" I put on my most
polite language.
"What difference
does that make? All I want is ten minutes of your time. Ten
minutes to come to an understanding." She cinches the
matter quick and neat.
"Come to an understanding?"
"Of our
feelings," says the woman succinctly.
I crane my neck back
through the door I've left open to peer into the kitchen. A
plume of white steam rising cheerfully from the spaghetti pot,
and Abbado is still
conducting his Gazza.
"If you don't
mind, I've got spaghetti on right now. It's almost done, and it'll be
ruined if I talk with you for ten minutes. So I’m going to hang
up, all right?"
"Spaghetti?"
the woman sputters in disbelief. "It's only ten-thirty in the morning.
What are you doing cooking spaghetti at ten-thirty in the
morning? Kind of strange, don't you think?"
"Strange or not,
what's it to you?" I say. 'I hardly had any breakfast, so I was getting
hungry right about now. And as long as I do the cooking, when
and what I eat is my own business, is it not?"
"Well, whatever
you say. Hang up, then," says the woman in a slow, sappy trickle of a
voice. A peculiar voice. The slightest emotional shift and her tone switches to
another
frequency. "I’ll call back later."
"Now, wait just
one minute," I stammer. "If you' re selling something, you can forget
right now about calling back. I’m unemployed at present and
can't afford to buy
anything."
'I know that, so
don't give it another thought," says the woman.
"You know that?
You know what?"
"That you' re
unemployed, of course. That much I knew. So cook your spaghetti and
let's get on with it, okay?"
"Hey, who the —
" I launch forth, when suddenly the phone goes dead. Cut me off.
Too abruptly to have set down the receiver; she must have
pressed the button with her
finger.
I’m left hanging. I
stare blankly at the receiver in my hand and only then remember
the spaghetti. I put down the receiver and return to the
kitchen. Turn off the gas, empty
the spaghetti into a colander, top it with tomato sauce I’ve
heated in a saucepan, then
eat. It's overcooked, thanks to that pointless telephone call.
No matter of life-and-death, nor am I in any mood to fuss over the subtleties
of cooking spaghetti — I’m too hungry. I
simply listen to the radio playing send-off music for two
hundred fifty grams of spaghetti as I eagerly dispatch every last strand to my
stomach.
I wash up plate and
pans while boiling a kettle of water, then pour a cup for a tea
bag. As I drink my tea, I think about that phone call.
So we could come to
an understanding?
What on earth did
that woman mean, calling me up like that? And who on earth was
she?
The whole thing is a
mystery. I can't recall any woman ever telephoning me before
without identifying herself, nor do I have the slightest clue
what she could have wanted
to talk about.
What the hell, I tell
myself, what do I care about understanding some strange
woman's feelings, anyway? What possible good could come of it?
What matters now is
that I find a job. Then I can settle into a new life cycle.
Yet even as I return
to the sofa to resume the Len Deighton novel I took out of the
library, the mere glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the
telephone sets my mind
going. Just what were those feelings that would take ten minutes
to come to an
understanding about? I mean, really, ten minutes to come to
an understanding of our
feelings?
Come to think of it,
the woman specified precisely ten minutes right from the start.
Seems she was quite certain about that exact amount of time. As
if nine minutes would have been too short, eleven minutes maybe too long. Just
like for spaghetti al dente.
What with these
thoughts running through my head, I lose track of the plot of the
novel. So I decide to do a few quick exercises, perhaps iron a
shirt or two. Whenever
things get in a muddle, I always iron shirts. A habit of long
standing with me.
I divide the
shirt-ironing process into twelve steps total: from (1) Collar <Front>,
to
(12) Cuff <Left Sleeve>. Absolutely no deviation from that
order. One by one, I count off the steps. The ironing doesn't go right if I
don't.
So there I am,
ironing my third shirt, enjoying the hiss of the steam iron and the
distinctive smell of hot cotton, checking for wrinkles before
hanging up each shirt in the wardrobe. I switch off the iron and put it away in
the closet with the ironing board.
I'm getting thirsty
by now and am heading to the kitchen for some water when once more the telephone
rings. Here we go again, I think. And for a moment I wonder
whether I shouldn't just ignore it and keep on going into the
kitchen. But you never
know, so I retrace my steps back to the living room and pick up
the receiver. If it's that
woman again, I'll say I'm in the middle of ironing and hang up.
The call, however, is
from my wife. By the clock atop the TV, it's eleven-thirty.
"How're
things?" she asks.
"Fine," I
answer, relieved.
"What've you
been up to?"
"Ironing."
"Is anything wrong?"
my wife asks. A slight tension invades her voice. She knows all about my ironing
when I'm unsettled.
"Nothing at all.
I just felt like ironing some shirts. No particular reason," I say,
switching the receiver from right hand to left as I sit down on
a chair. "So, is there
something you wanted to tell me about?"
"Yes, it's about
work. There's the possibility of a job."
"Uh-huh," I
say.
"Can you write
poetry?"
"Poetry?" I
shoot back in surprise. What's this about poetry?
"A magazine
company where someone I know works puts out this popular fiction
monthly for young girls and they're looking for someone to
select and brush up poetry
submissions. Then they want one leadoff poem each month for the
section. The work' s easy and the pay's not bad. Of course it's only part-time,
but if things go well they might string you on for editorial work and — "
"Easy?" I
say. "Now hold on just one minute. I've been looking for a position with a
law firm. Just where do you come up with this brushing up of
poetry?"
"Well, didn't
you say you used to do some writing in high school?"
"In a newspaper.
The high-school newspaper. Such-and-such team won the soccer meet; the physics
teacher fell down the stairs and had to go to the hospital. Dumb little
articles like that I wrote. Not poetry. I can't write
poetry."
"Not real
poetry, just the kind of poems high-school girls might read. They don't even
have to be that good. It's not like they're expecting you to write like Allen
Ginsberg. Just whatever you can make do."
'I absolutely cannot
write make-do poetry," I snap. The very idea.
"Hrnph,"
pouts my wife. "This talk of legal work, though. Nothing seems to be
materializing, does it?"
"Several
prospects have come my way already. The final word'll be in sometime this week.
If those fail through, maybe then I' 11 consider it."
"Oh? Have it
your way, then. But say, what day is it today?"
"Tuesday,"
I tell her after a moment's thought.
"Okay, then,
could you stop by the bank and pay the gas and phone bills?"
"Sure thing. I was going out to shop for
dinner soon, anyway. I can take care of it at
the same time."
"And what are we
having for dinner?"
"Hmm, let's
see," I say. "Haven't made up my mind yet. I thought I'd decide when
I
go shopping."
"You know,"
my wife starts in with a new tone of voice, "I've been thinking. Maybe
you don't really need to be looking for work."
"And why
not?" I spit out. Yet more surprises? Is every woman in the world out to
shake me up over the phone? "Why don't I have to be looking
for work? Another three months and my unemployment compensation is due to run
out. No time for idle hands."
"My salary's
gone up, and my side job is going well, not to mention we have plenty in
savings. So if we don't go overboard on luxuries, we should be able to keep
food on the table."
"And I'd do the
housework?"
"Is that so
bad?"
"I don't
know," I say in all honesty. I really don't know. "I'll have to think
it over."
"Do think it
over," reiterates my wife. "Oh, and by the way, has the cat come
back?"
"The cat?" I’m
caught off guard, then I realize I'd completely forgotten about the cat
all morning. "No, doesn't seem so."
"Could you scout
around the neighborhood a bit? He's been gone four days now."
I give some
spur-of-the-moment reply, switching the receiver back to my right hand.
"My guess is
that the cat's probably in the yard of that vacant house at the end of the
passage. The yard with the stone bird figurine. I’ve seen him there often
enough. You
know where I’m talking about?"
"No, I’m afraid
I don't," I say. "And since when have you been snooping around in the
passage on your own? Never once have you mentioned — "
"You'll have to
forgive me, but Fve got to hang up. Have to be getting back to work. Don't
forget about the cat, now."
And the telephone
cuts off.
I sit there looking
dumbly at the receiver a second before setting it down.
Now why would my wife
know so much about the passage? I can't figure it out. She'd have to climb over
a high cinder-block wall to get there from our yard, and what possible reason
was there to go to all that trouble to begin with?
I go to the kitchen
for that drink of water, turn on the FM radio, and trim my nails.
They're doing a feature on Robert Plant's new album. I listen to
two songs before my
ears start to hurt and I switch the thing off. I go out to the
porch to check the cat's food
dish; the dried fish I put in the previous night hasn't been
touched. Guess the cat really hasn't come back.
Standing there on the
porch, I look at the bright spring sun slicing down into our tiny yard. Hardly the
sort of yard that lingers fondly in the mind. The sun hits here only the
briefest part of the day, so the soil is always dark and damp.
Not much growing: just a
couple of unremarkable hydrangeas. And I' m not terribly crazy
about hydrangeas in the first place.
From a nearby stand
of trees comes the periodic scree-ee-eech of a bird, sharp as a tightening spring.
The "wind-up bird," we call it. My wife's name for it. I have no idea
what it's really called. Nor even what it looks like.
Nonetheless, this wind-up bird is there every morning in the trees of the neighborhood
to wind things up. Us, our quiet little
world, everything.
As I listen to the
wind-up bird, I' m thinking, Why on earth is it up to me to go
searching after that cat? And more to the point, even if I do
chance to find it, what am I
supposed to do then? Drag the cat home and lecture it? Plead
with it — Listen, you've
had everyone worried sick, so why don't you come home?
Great, I think. Just
great. What' s wrong with letting a cat go where it wants to go and do what it wants
to do? Here I am, thirty years old, and what am I doing? Washing
clothes, planning dinner menus, chasing after cats.
Not so long ago, I' m
thinking, I was your regular sort of guy. Fired up with ambition.
In high school, I read Clarence Darrow's autobiography and
decided to become a
lawyer. My grades weren't bad. And in my senior year I was voted
by my classmates
runner-up "Most Likely to Succeed." I even got
accepted into the law department of a
comparatively reputable university. So where had I screwed up?
I plant my elbows on
the kitchen table, prop up my chin, and think: When the hell did the compass needle
get out of whack and lead my life astray? It's more than I can
figure. There's nothing I can really put my finger on. No
setbacks from student politics,
no disillusionment with university, never really had much giri
trouble. As near as I can
tell, I’ve had a perfectly normal existence. Yet one day, when
it came time for me to be graduating, I suddenly realized I wasn't the same guy
I used to be.
Probably, the seed of
a schism had been there all along, however microscopic. But
in time the gap widened, eventually taking me out of sight of
who I was supposed to be. In terms of the solar system, if you will, I should
by now have reached somewhere
between Saturn and Uranus. A little bit farther and I ought to
be seeing Pluto. And
beyond that — let's see — was there anything after that?
At the beginning of
February, I quit my longtime job at the law firm. And for no
particular reason. It wasn't that I was fed up with the work.
Granted, it wasn't what you
could call an especially thrilling job, but the pay wasn't bad
and the atmosphere around
the office was friendly enough.
My role at the firm
was, in a word, that of full-time office boy.
Although I still
believe I did a good job of it, by my standards. Strange as it may
sound coming from my own mouth, I find I’m really very capable
when it comes to
carrying out immediate tasks around the office like that. I
catch on quickly, operate
methodically, think practically, don't complain. That's why,
when I told the senior partner I wanted to quit, the old man — the father half
of this " --- and Son, Attorneys at Law" — even offered to raise my
salary if I'd just stay on.
But stay on I didn't.
I don't exactly know why I up and quit. Didn't even have any clear goals or prospects
of what to do after quitting. The idea of holing up somewhere and
cramming for one more shot at the bar exam was too intimidating.
And besides, I didn't even especially want to become a lawyer at that point.
When I came out and
told my wife over dinner I was thinking of quitting my job, all
she said was "Fair enough." Just what that "Fair
enough" was supposed to mean, I
couldn't tell. But that was the extent of it; she didn't
volunteer a word more.
When I then said
nothing, she spoke up. "If you feel like quitting, why don't you quit?
It's your life, you should do with it as you like." She'd said her piece
and was
straightaway deboning the fish on her plate with her chopsticks.
My wife does office
work at a design school and really doesn't do badly, salarywise. Sometimes she
gets illustration assignments from editor friends, and not for
unreasonable pay, either. I, on my part, was eligible for six
months' unemployment
compensation. So if I stayed home and did the housework
regularly every day, we could even swing a few expenses like eating out and dry
cleaning, and our life-style wouldn't
change all that much from when I was working and getting a
salary.
So it was I quit my
job.
A twelve-thirty I go out shopping as usual, a large canvas
carryall slung over my
shoulder. First I stop by the bank to pay the gas and telephone
bills, then I shop for
dinner at the supermarket, then I have a cheeseburger and coffee
at McDonald's.
I return home and am putting the groceries
away in the refrigerator when the
telephone rings. It sounds positively irritated, the way it
rings. I leave a half-opened
plastic tub of tofu on the table, head into the living room, and
pick up the receiver.
"Finished with
your spaghetti?" It's that woman again.
"Yeah, I'm
done," I say. "But now I have to go out looking for the cat."
"Can't that wait
ten minutes? Looking for the cat!"
"Well, ten
minutes, maybe."
What the hell am I
doing?, I think. Why am I obliged to spend ten minutes passing
the time of day with some strange woman?
"Now, then,
perhaps we can come to an understanding," says the woman, nice and quiet.
From the sound of it, this woman — whoever she is — is settling back into a
chair there on the other end of the line, crossing her legs.
"Hmm, I don't
know about that," I say. "Some people, ten years together and they
still can't understand each other."
"Care to
try?" the woman teases.
I undo my wristwatch
and switch on the stopwatch mode, then press the timer's start button.
"Why me?" I
ask. "Why not ring up somebody else?"
"I have my
reasons," the woman enunciates slowly, as if measuredly masticating a
morsel of food. "I’ve heard all about you."
"When?
Where?"
"Sometime,
somewhere," the woman says. "But what does that matter? The
important thing is now. Right? What's more, talking about it
only loses us time. It's not
as if l had all the time in the world, you know."
"Give me some
proof, then. Proof that you know me."
"For
instance."
"How about my
age?"
"Thirty,"
the woman answers on the spot. "Thirty and two months. Good enough?"
That shuts me up. The
woman really does know me. Yet no matter how I rack my
brains, I can't place her voice. I simply couldn't have
forgotten or confused someone's
voice. Faces, names — maybe — but voices, never.
"Well, now, it's
your turn to see what you can tell about me," she says suggestively.
"What do you imagine from my voice? What kind of woman am
I? Can you picture me? This sort of thing's your forte, isn't it?"
"You got
me," I say.
"Go ahead,
try," the woman insists.
I glance at my watch.
Not quite a minute and a half so far. I heave a sigh of
resignation. Seems I’ve already taken her up, and once the
challenge is on, there's no
turning back. I used to have a knack for guessing games.
"Late twenties,
university graduate, native Tokyoite, upper-middle-class upbringing," I
fire away.
"Amazing,"
says the woman, flicking a cigarette lighter by the receiver. A Cartier, by
the sound of it. "Keep going."
"Fairly
good-looking. At least, you yourself think so. But you' ve got a complex.
You're too short or your breasts are too small or something like
that."
"Pretty
close," the woman giggles.
"You're married.
But all's not as smooth as it could be. There are problems. No
woman without her share of problems would call up a man and not
give her name. Yet I don't know you. At least I’ve never talked with you
before. This much imagined, I still
can't picture you."
"Oh,
really?" says the woman in a hush calculated to drive a soft wedge into my
skull. "How can you be so sure of yourself? Mightn't you
have a fatal blind spot
somewhere? If not, don't you think you' d have pulled yourself a
little more together by
now? Someone with your brains and talent."
"You put great
stock in me," I say. "I don't know who you are, but I should tell you
I' m not the wonderful human being you make me out to be. I
don't seem to be able to
get things done. All I do is head off down detour after
detour."
"Still, I used
to have a thing for you. A long time ago, that is."
"A long time
ago, you say," I prompt.
Two minutes
fifty-three seconds.
"Not so very
long ago. We're not talking history."
"Yes, we are
talking history," I say.
Blind spot, eh? Well,
perhaps the woman does have a point. Somewhere, in my
head, in my body, in my very existence, it's as if there were
some long-lost
subterranean element that's been skewing my life ever so
slightly off.
No, not even that.
Not slightly off — way off. Irretrievably.
"I' m in bed
right now," the woman says. "I just took a shower and have nothing
on."
That does it, I
think. Nothing on? A regular porno tape this is getting to be.
"Or would you
rather I put on panties? How about stockings? Do they turn you on?"
"Anything's fine.
Do what you like," I say. "But if you don't mind, I’m not that kind
of a guy, not for this sort of stuff over the telephone."
"Ten minutes,
that's all. A mere ten minutes. That's not such a fatal loss, is it? I’m not
asking for anything more. That much is plain goodwill. But whatever, just
answer the
question. Do you want me naked? Or should I put something on? I’ve
got all kinds of
things, you know. Garter belts and ..."
Garter belts?
I must be going crazy. What woman has garter belts in this day and
age? Models for Penthouse, maybe.
"Naked is fine.
And you don't have to move," I say.
Four minutes down.
"My pubic hair
is still wet," the woman says. 'I didn't towel it dry. So it's still wet.
Warm and oh so wet."
"Listen, if you
don't mind — "
"And down below
that, it's a whole lot warmer. Just like hot buttercream. Oh so very hot.
Honest. And what position do you think I' m in right now? I have my knee up and
my left leg spread out to the side. It'd be around 10:05 if I
were a clock."
I could tell from the
way she said it that she wasn't making this up. She really did
have her legs spread to 10:05, her vagina warm and moistened.
"Caress the
lips. Gently, slowly. Then open them. Slowly, like that. Now caress them gently
with the sides of your fingers. Oh, yes, slowly . . . slowly. Now let one hand
fondle my left breast, from underneath, lifting gently, tweaking the nipple
just so. Again and
again. Until I’m about to come — "
I hang up without a
word. Then I roll over on the sofa, smoke a cigarette, and gaze
up at the ceiling, stopwatch clicked at five minutes
twenty-three seconds.
I close my eyes and
darkness descends, a darkness painted blind with colors.
What is it? Why can't
everyone just leave me in peace?
Not ten minutes
later, the telephone rings again, but this time I don't pick up. Fifteen
rings and it stops. I let it die, and all gravity is displaced
by a profound silence. The
stone-chill silence of boulders frozen deep into a glacier fifty
thousand years ago.
Fifteen rings of the telephone have utterly transformed the
quality of the air around me.
A little before two o'clock, I climb from my backyard over the
cinder-block wall into the
passage. Actually, it's not the corridor you'd expect a passage
to be; that's only what we call it for lack of a better name. Strictly
speaking, it isn't a corridor at all. A corridor has
an entrance and an exit, forming a route from one place to
another.
But this passage has
neither entrance nor exit, and leads smack into a cinder-block wall at one end and
a chain link fence at the other. It's not even an alleyway. For
starters, an alley has to at least have an entrance. The
neighbors all call it "the
passage" for convenience sake.
The passage meanders
between everyone's backyards for about six hundred feet.
Three-foot-something in width for the most part, but what with
all the junk lying around
and the occasional hedge cropping in, there are places you can
barely squeeze through sideways.
From what I've heard
— this is from a kindly uncle of mine who rents us our house
ridiculously cheap — the passage used to have an entrance and an
exit, offering a shortcut across the block, street-to-street. But then, with
the postwar boom years, new
homes were built in any available space, hemming in the common
ground to a narrow
path. Which ushered in the none-too-inviting prospect of having
strangers walking
through backyards, practically under the eaves, so the residents
surreptitiously covered the entrance. At first an innocent little bush barely
disguised the opening, but eventually one resident expanded his yard and
extended his cinder-block wall to completely seal it
over. While the corresponding other aperture was screened off
with a chain link fence to keep the dogs out. It hadn't been the residents who
made use of the passage to begin
with, so no one complained about its being closed at both ends.
And anyway, closing it wouldn't hurt as a crime-prevention measure. Thus, the
path went neglected and
untrafficked, like some abandoned canal, merely serving as a
kind of buffer zone
between the houses, the ground overgrown with weeds, sticky spider
webs strung everywhere a bug could possibly alight.
Now, why should my
wife frequent such a place? It was beyond me. Me, I'd only set
foot in the passage one time before. And she can't even stand
spiders.
Yet when I try to
think, my head's filled to bursting with some gaseous substance. I
didn't sleep well last night, plus the weather's too hot for the
beginning of May, plus
there was that unnerving telephone call.
Oh, well, I think,
might as well look for that cat. Leave later developments for later.
Anyway, it's a damn sight better to be out and about than to be
cooped up indoors
waiting for the telephone to ring.
The spring sun cuts
clean and crisp through the ceiling of overhanging branches,
scattering patches of shadow across the ground. With no wind,
the shadows stay glued in place like fateful stains. Telltale stains sure to
eling to the earth as it goes around and around the sun for millennia to come.
Shadows flit over my
shirt as I pass under the branches, then return to the ground.
All is still. You can almost hear each blade of grass respiring
in the sunlight. A few small clouds float in the sky, vivid and well formed,
straight out of a medieval engraving. Everything stands out with such clarity that
I feel buoyant, as if somehow my body went on forever. That, and it's terribly
hot.
I'm in a T-shirt,
thin cotton slacks, and tennis shoes, but already, just walking around, my
armpits and the cleft of my chest are drenched with sweat. I'd only just this
morning pulled the T-shirt and slacks out of storage, so every time I take a
deep breath there's
this sharp mothball smell, as if some tiny bug had flown up my
nose.
I keep an eye peeled
to both sides and walk at a slow, even pace, stopping from
time to time to call the cat' s name in a stage whisper.
The homes that
sandwich the passage are of two distinct types and blend together
as well as liquids of two different specific gravities. First there
are the houses dating
from way back, with big backyards; then there are the
comparatively newer ones. None of the new houses has any yard to speak of; some
don't have a single speck of yard
space. Scarcely enough room between the eaves and the passage to
hang out two
lines of laundry. In some places, clothes actually hang out over
the passage, forcing me to inch past rows of still-dripping towels and shirts.
I'm so close I can hear
televisions playing and toilets flushing inside. I even smell
curry cooking in one kitchen.
The old homes, by
contrast, hardly betray a breath of life. Judiciously placed hedges of cypress
and other shrubbery guard against inquisitive eyes, although here and there you
catch a glimpse of a well-manicured spread. The houses themselves are of all
different architectural styles: traditional Japanese houses with
long hallways, tarnished
copper-roofed early Western villas, recently remodeled "modern"
homes. Common to
all, however, is the absence of any visible occupants. Not a
sound, not a hint of life. No noticeable laundry, either.
It's the first time
I've taken in the sights of the passage at leisure, so everything is
new to my eyes. Propped up in a corner of one backyard is a
lone, withered, brown Christmas tree. In another yard lies several childhoods'
worth of every plaything imaginable — a virtual scrap heap of tricycle parts, a
ringtoss set, plastic samurai swords, rubber
balls, a toy turtle, wooden trucks. One yard sports a basketball
hoop, another a fine set of garden chairs and a rattan table. By the look of
them, the chairs haven't been sat on
in months (maybe years), they're so covered with dirt; the
tabletop is rain-plastered with lavender magnolia petals.
One house presents a clear
view into its living room through large glass sliding
doors. There I see a kidney-shaped sofa with matching lounge
furniture, a sizable
television, a cellarette topped with a tank of tropical fish and
two trophies of some sort,
and a decorator floor lamp. It all looks as unreal as a set for
a TV sitcom.
In another yard,
there's a massive doghouse penned in with wire sereening. No dog
inside that I can see, though. Just a wide-open hole. I also
notice that the screening is
stretched shapeless, bulging out as if someone or something had
been leaning into it for months.
The vacant house my
wife told me about is only a little farther along, past the one
with the doghouse. Right away, I can see it's vacant. One look tells
you that this is not
your scant two- or three-months' absence. The place is a fairly
new two-story affair, yet
the tight shutters look positively weather-beaten and the rusted
railings around the
upstairs windows seem about ready to fail off. The smallish yard
hosts a stone figurine
of a bird with wings outstretched atop a chest-high pedestal surrounded
by a thicket of weeds, the taller stalks of goldenrod reaching clear to the
bird's feet. The
bird — beats me what kind — finds this encroachment most
distressing and flaps its
wings to take flight at any second.
Besides this stone
figurine, the yard has little in the way of decoration. Two beat-up
old vinyl chaises are parked neatly under the eaves, right next
to an azalea blazing with ethereally crimson blossoms. Otherwise, weeds are
about all that meets the eye.
I lean against the
chest-high chain link fence and make a brief survey of the yard.
Just the sort of yard a cat would love, but hope as I might,
nothing catty puts in an
appearance. On the rooftop TV aerial, a pigeon perches, its
monotone carrying
everywhere. The shadow of the stone bird falls across the tangle
of weeds, their blades cutting it into fragments of different shapes.
I take a cigarette
out of my pocket, light up, and smoke it, leaning against the fence the whole
while. The pigeon doesn't budge from the aerial as it goes on cooing nonstop.
Cigarette finished
and stamped out on the ground, I still don't move for the longest
time. Just how long, I don't know. Half asleep, I stare dumbly
at the shadow of the bird, hardly even thinking.
Or maybe I am
thinking, somewhere out of range of my conscious mind.
Phenomenologically speaking, however, I'm simply staring at the
shadow of the bird
falling over stalks of grass.
Gradually I become
aware of something — a voice? — filtering into the bird's
shadow. Whose voice? Someone seems to be calling me.
I turn around to look
behind me, and there, in the yard opposite, stands a girl of
maybe fifteen or sixteen. Petite, with short, straight hair,
she's wearing dark sunglasses with amber frames and a light-blue Adidas T-shirt
with the sleeves snipped off at the
shoulders. The slender arms protruding from the openings are
exceedingly well tanned
for only May. One hand in her shorts, the other on a low bamboo
gate, she props
herself up precariously.
"Hot, huh?"
the girl greets me.
"Hot all
right," I echo.
Here we go again, I
think — again. All day long it's going to be females striking up
conversations with me, is it?
"Say, you got a
cigarette?" the giri asks.
I pull a pack of Hope
regulars from my pocket and offer it to her. She withdraws her
hand from her shorts, extracts a cigarette, and examines it a
second before putting it to her mouth. Her mouth is small, with the slightest
hint of a curl to her upper lip. I strike a match and give her a light. She
leans forward, revealing an ear: a freshly formed,
soap-smooth, pretty ear, its delicate outline glistening with a
tracery of fine hairs.
She parts her lips in
the center with an accomplished air and lets out a satisfied puff of smoke,
then looks up at me as if she's suddenly remembered something. I see my
face split into two reflections in her sunglasses. The lenses
are so hideously dark, and
even mirror-coated, that there 's no way to make out her eyes.
"You from the
neighborhood?" the girl asks.
"Yeah," I
reply, and am about to point toward the house, only I can't tell if it's really
the right direction or not. What with all these odd turns
getting here. So — what's the
difference, anyway? — I simply point any which way.
"What you been
up to over there so long?"
"I’m looking for
a cat. It's been missing three or four days now," I explain, wiping a
sweaty palm on my slacks. "Someone said they saw the cat
around here."
"What kind of
cat?"
"A big tom.
Brown stripes, a slight kink at the end of its tail."
"Name?"
"Name ...?"
"The cat's. It
has a name, no?" she says, peering into my eyes from behind her
sunglasses — at least, I guess she is.
"Noboru," I
reply. "Noboru Watanabe."
"Fancy name for
a cat."
"It's my
brother-in-law's name. My wife's little joke. Says it somehow reminds her of
him"
"Like how?"
"The way it
moves. Its walk, the sleepy look in its eyes. Little things."
Only then does the
girl smile. And as she lets down her facade, I can see she 's
much more of a child than I thought on first impression. The
quirky curl of her upper lip
shoots out at a strange angle.
Caress, I can
swear I hear someone say. The voice of that telephone woman. Not
the girl's voice. I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of
my hand.
"A brown-striped
cat with a kink in the end of its tail, huh?" the girl reconfirms.
"Wearing a collar?"
"A blackflea
collar."
The girl gives it a
cool ten-, fifteen-second think, hand still resting on the gate.
Whereupon she flicks the stub of her cigarette to the ground by
my feet.
"Stamp that out
for me? I got bare feet."
I conscientiously
grind it out under the sole of my tennis shoe.
"That cat, I
think I just may have seen it," she phrases guardedly 'I didn't get as far
as noticing the tip of its tail, but yes, there was a brown tom
Big, probably wearing a
collar."
"When did you
see it?"
"Yeah, when was
that? I’m sure I must've seen it lots of times. I’m out here in the
yard nearly every day sunbathing, so one day just blends into
the rest. But anyway, it'd have to be within the last three or four days. The
yard's a cat shortcut, all kinds of cats
scooting through all the time. They come out of the Suzukis'
hedge there, cut across our yard, and head into the Miyawakis' yard."
So saying, she points
over at the vacant house. Same as ever, there's the stone bird with outspread wings,
goldenrod basking in the spring rays, pigeon cooing away on the TV aerial.
"Thanks for the
tip," I tell her.
"Hey, I’’ve got
it, why not come into the yard here and wait? All the cats pass this
way anyhow. And besides, if you keep snooping around over there,
somebody's going
to mistake you for a burglar and call the cops. Wouldn't be the
first time."
"But I can't
just hang around waiting for a cat in somebody else's yard."
"Sure you can,
like, it's no big deal. Nobody's home and it's dead boring without
someone to talk to. Why don't we just get some sun, the two of
us, until the cat shows
up? I’ve got sharp eyes, I'd be a real help."
I look at my watch.
Two thirty-six. All I’ve got left to do today is take in the laundry
and fix dinner.
"Well, okay, I’ll
stay until three o'clock," I say, still not really grasping the situation.
I open the gate and
step in, following the girl across the grass, and only then do I
notice that she's dragging her left leg slightly. Her tiny
shoulders sway with the periodic
rhythm of a crank grinding mechanically to the left. She stops a
few steps ahead of me and signals for me to walk alongside her.
"Had an accident
last month," the girl says simply "Was riding on the back of
someone's bike and got thrown off. No luck."
Two canvas deck
chairs are set out in the middle of the grass. A big blue towel is
draped over the back of one chair, and the other is occupied by
a red Marlboro box, an ashtray, and a lighter tossed together with a large
radio-cassette player and some
magazines. The volume is on low, but some unidentifiable
hard-rock group is playing.
She removes the
clutter to the grass and asks me to sit down, switching off the
music. No sooner am I seated than I get a clear view of the
passage and the vacant
house beyond. I can even see the white stone bird figurine and
the goldenrod and the
chain link fence. I bet she's been watching me from here the
whole time.
The yard is large and
unpretentious. The grass sweeps down a gentle slope, graced here and there with
plants. To the left of the deck chairs is a sizable concrete pond,
which obviously hasn't seen much use of late. Drained of water,
it presents a greenish, discolored bottom to the sun, like some overturned
aquatic creature. The elegant
beveled facade of an old Western-style house, neither particularly
large nor all that
luxurious, poses behind a stand of trees to the rear. Only the
yard is of any scale or
shows any real upkeep.
"Once, I used to
part-time for a lawn-mowing service," I say.
"Oh yeah?"
says the girl without much interest.
"Must be hard
work maintaining a yard this big," I comment, looking around me.
"Don't you have
a yard?"
"Just a little
yard. Two, three hydrangeas, that's about the size of it," I say.
"You
alone here all the time?"
"Yeah, you said
it. Daytime, I'm always alone. Mornings and evenings, a maid comes around, though
otherwise I' m alone. Say, how about a cold drink? There 's even beer."
"No, I'm fine."
"Really? Like,
it's no big deal."
"I’m not
thirsty," I say. "Don't you go to school?"
"Don't you go to
work?"
"No work to go
to," I admit.
"Unemployed?"
"Kind of. I
quit."
"What sort of
work were you doing?"
"Lawyer's
gofer," I equivocate, taking a slow, deep breath to cut the talk.
"Collecting papers from city-hall and government offices, filing
materials, checking case
precedents, taking care of court procedures, busywork like
that."
"But you
quit?"
"Correct."
"Your wife
work?"
"She does
," I say.
I take out a
cigarette and put it to my mouth, strike a match, and light up. The
wind-up bird screeches from a nearby tree. A good twelve or
thirteen turns of the watch spring, then it flits off to another tree.
"Cats are always
going past there," the giri remarks apropos of nothing, pointing over at
the edge of the grass in front. "See that incinerator behind the Suzukis'
hedge? Well, they come out from right next to it, run all the way across, duck
under the gate, and
make for the yard over there. Always the same route. Say, you
know Mr. Suzuki?
College professor, on TV half the time?"
"Mr.
Suzuki?"
She goes on in some
detail, but it turns out that I don't know our Mr. Suzuki.
"I hardly ever
watch TV," I say.
"Horrible
family," the girl sneers. "Stuck-up, the whole lot of them. TV people
are all a bunch of phonies."
"Oh?"
The girl picks up her
Marlboros, takes one out, and rolls it around unlit between her
fingers.
"Well, I suppose
there's decent folk among them, but they' re not my type. Now, the Miyawakis, they
were okay people. Mrs. Miyawaki was nice. And Mr. Miyawaki, he ran
two or three family restaurants."
"What happened
to them?"
"Don't
know," said the giri, flicking the end of her cigarette. "Probably
owed money.
There was a real commotion when they left. Been gone two years
now, I guess.
Dropped everything and just left. The cats just keep
multiplying, no consideration.
Mom's always complaining."
"Are there that many cats?"
She puts the
cigarette to her lips and lights up with her lighter. Then nods.
"All kinds of
cats. Some losing their fur, even a one-eyed cat ... big lump of flesh
where the eye was. Gross, huh?"
"Gross," I
concur.
'I’ve got a cousin
with six fingers. A girl. little older than me, has this baby pinkie right
beside her little finger. Always keeps it neatly folded under, so you can barely
tell. A real pretty girl."
"Hmm," I
say.
"You think stuff
like that's hereditary? Like, you know . . . runs in the blood?"
"I couldn't tell
you," I say.
The girl says nothing
for the moment. I smoke my cigarette and train my eyes on the cat path. Not a single
cat has shown the whole time.
"Hey, you sure
you won't drink something? I’m going to have a cola," says the girl.
"No
thanks," I tell her.
The girl gets up from
her deck chair and disappears into the shade, dragging her leg; meanwhile, I pick
up one of the magazines lying by my feet and flip through the pages. Contrary
to what I'd expected, it's a men's monthly. The center spread has a woman
sitting in anunnatural pose, legs wide apart, so that you can
see her genitals and pubic hair through a sheer body stocking. Never a dull moment,
I think, and put the magazine back where I found it, then redirect my gaze
toward the cat path, arms folded across my chest.
After what seems like
ages, the girl returns, glass of cola in hand. She's shed her
Adidas T-shirt for a bikini top with her shorts. It's a small
bra that shows off the full
shape of her breasts, with tie-strings in back.
For sure, it's one
hot afternoon. Just lying there in the sun on the deck chair, my gray T-shirt
is blotched dark with sweat.
"Tell me,"
the girl picks up where she left off, "suppose you found out the girl you
liked had a sixth finger, what would you do?"
"I’d sell her to
the circus," I say.
"Really?"
"Just
kidding," I come back, startled. 'I probably wouldn't mind."
"Even if there
's the possibility of passing it on to your kids?"
I give it some
thought.
"I don't think
I'd mind. One finger too many's no great harm."
"What about if
she had four breasts?"
I think it over a
while.
'I don't know,"
I say.
Four breasts?
This conversation's going nowhere fast, so I decide to change the
subject.
"How old are
you?"
"Sixteen,"
the girl answers. "Just turned sixteen. Freshman in high school."
"But you' re taking
time off from school."
"Can't walk too
much before my leg starts to hurt. Got a gash right by my eye, too.
It's a pretty straight school, no telling what kind of trouble
I'd be in if they found out I hurt myself falling off a bike ... which is why I'
m out sick. I can take a whole year off if I want. I' m in no big hurry to graduate
from high school."
"Hmm" is
all I can say.
"But anyway,
back to what we were talking about, you said you thought it was okay
to marry a girl with six fingers, but four breasts turned you
off."
"I didn't say it
turned me off, I just said I didn't know."
"Why don't you
know?"
"I can't quite
picture it."
"But you can
picture a sixth finger."
"Sort of."
"What's the
difference? Six fingers or four breasts?"
Once again, I give
the matter some thought, but can't begin to think of how to
explain.
"Tell me, do I
ask too many questions?" the girl asks, peering into my eyes from
behind her sunglasses.
"You been told
that?" I ask back.
"Sometimes."
"Nothing wrong
with asking questions. Makes the other person think."
"Most people,
though, don't give me much thought," she says, looking at the tips of
her toes. "Everyone just gives the usual nothing-doing
answers."
I shake my head vaguely and to realign my
gaze onto the cat path. What the hell am I doing here? There hasn 't been
one lousy cat come past here yet.
I shut my eyes for
twenty or thirty seconds, arms folded across my chest. Lying
there, eyes closed, I can feel the sweat bead up over different
parts of my body On my
forehead, under my nose, around my neck, the slightest
sensations, as if tiny moistened feathers had been floated into place here and there.
My T-shirt clings to my chest like a drooping flag on a doldrum day. The
sunlight has a curious weight as it seeps into me. I can hear the tinkling of ice
as the girl jiggles her glass.
"Go to sleep if
you want. I'll wake you if I see your cat," the girl whispers.
I nod silently with
eyes closed.
For the time being,
there isn't a sound. That pigeon and the wind-up bird must have gone off somewhere.
Not a breeze, not even a car starting. The whole while I’m thinking about that
voice on the telephone. What if l really did know the woman?
Yet I can't recall
any such woman. She' s just not there; she' s long departed from
my consciousness. Only her long, long shadow trailing across my
path, a vision from
Chirico. An endless ringing in my ears.
"Hey, you
asleep?" comes the girl' s voice, so faint it's almost no voice at all.
"No, I'm awake,"
I answer.
"Can I get
closer? It's easier for me to talk in a whisper."
"Go right
ahead," I say, eyes still closed.
I listen as the girl
slides her deck chair alongside mine, hear the dry clack of wooden frames touching.
Strange, I think, the
girl's voice with my eyes closed sounds completely different from her voice with
my eyes open. What's come over me? This has never happened to me
before.
"Can I talk
some?" the girl asks. "I’ll be real quiet. You don't have to answer,
you can even fall right asleep at any time."
"Sure," I
say.
"Death. People
dying. It's all so fascinating," the girl begins.
She's whispering
right by my ear, so the words enter my body in a warm, moist
stream of breath.
"How's that?"
I ask.
The girl places a
one-finger seal over my lips.
"No
questions," she says. "I don't want to be asked anything just now.
And don't
open your eyes, either. Got it?"
I give a nod as
indistinct as her voice.
She removes her
finger from my lips, and the same finger now travels to my wrist.
"I think about
what it would be like to cut the thing open with a scalpel. Not the
corpse. That lump of death itself. There's got to be something
like that in there
somewhere, I just know it. Duli like a softball — and pliable —
a paralyzed tangle of
nerves. I'd like to remove it from the dead body and cut it
open. I' m always thinking
about it. Imagining what it'd be like inside. It'd probably be
all gummy, like toothpaste
that cakes up inside the tube, don't you think? That' s okay,
you don't have to answer.
All gooey around the outside, getting tougher the further in.
That's why the first thing I'd do once I cut through the outer skin is scoop
out all the glop, and there inside where it
starts to firm up would be this teeny little core. Like a
superhard ball bearing, don't you
think?"
The girl gives a
couple of short coughs.
"Lately, it's
all I think about. Probably 'cause I've got so much free time every day.
But really, I do think so. If I've got nothing to do, my
thoughts just wander off far away. I get so far off in my thoughts, it's hard
to find my way back."
At this, the girl
takes her finger away from my wrist to drink the rest of her cola. I can tell
from the empty-glass sound of the ice.
"It's okay, I'm
keeping an eye out for the cat. Don't worry. As soon as I see Noboru Watanabe, I’ll
let you know. So you can keep your eyes closed. Noboru Watanabe's
bound to come walking through here any minute now. I mean, all
the cats take the same route, so he's got to show up. Let's just imagine while
we wait. Like, Noboru Watanabe's getting closer, closer. He's coming through
the grass, sneaking under a wall, stopping
and sniffing the flowers, getting closer every minute. Try and picture
him."
I play along and try
to see the cat in my mind's eye, but it's all I can do to conjure up even the blurriest
backlit snapshot of a cat. The bright sun burns through my eyelids,
dispersing any dark areas of the image; on top of which, no
matter how I try I just can't
recall the little fur face with any accuracy. My Noboru Watanabe
is a failed portrait,
somehow distorted and unnatural. Only the quirks are there; the
basics are missing. I
can't even remember how he walked.
The girl places her
finger on my wrist once more and this time draws a pattern. An
odd diagram of indeterminate configuration. While she diagrams
my wrist, as if in unison I feel a wholly other variety of darkness
infiltrating my mind. I must be falling asleep, I
think. Not that I'm particularly sleepy, but something tells me
I can't hold out against the inevitable. My body feels unseemingly heavy in the
soft canvas curve of the deck chair.
Amid the gathering
darkness, a clear image of Noboru Watanabe's four feet comes
into my head. Four quiet brown paws with rubbery pads on the
soles. Without a sound,
they go traipsing over the terrain.
What terrain?
Where?
I have no idea.
Mightn't you have
a fatal blind spot somewhere? says the woman softly.
I awake to find I’m alone. Gone is the girl from the deck chair
nestled next to mine. The
towel and cigarettes and magazines remain, but the cola and
radio-cassette player have disappeared.
The sun is slanting
westward and F m up to my ankles in the shade of the pine trees. The hands of my
watch point to 3:40. I shake my head a few times as if rattling an
empty can, get up from the chair, and take a look around.
Everything looks the same as when I first saw it. Big lawn, dried-up pond, hedge,
stone bird, goldenrod, TV aerial, no cat. No girl, either.
I plunk myself down
on a shady patch of grass and run my palm over the green turf, one eye on the cat
path, while I wait for the giri to return. Ten minutes later, there's still
no sign of cat or girl. Not even a whiff of anything moving
about. I’ m stumped for what
to do now. I feel like I must have aged something awful in my
sleep.
I stand up again and
glance over at the house. But there's no hint of anyone about. Only the western
sun glaring off the bay window. There's nothing to do but cut across
the grass into the
passage and beat a path home. So I didn't find the cat. Well, at least I tried.
Back home. I take in the dry laundry and throw together the
makings of a simple meal.
Then I collapse onto the living-room floor, my back against the
wall, to read the evening paper. At 5:30, the telephone rings twelve times, but
I don't pick up the receiver. After
the ringing has died away, a lingering hollowness hovers about
the dark room like
drifting dust. The clock atop the TV strikes an invisible panel
of space with its brittle
claws. A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day
the wind-up bird has to
come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun
house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even
as I sleep somewhere between Saturn
and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling
their appointed rounds.
I consider writing a
poem about the wind-up bird. But no first lines come. Besides, I
find it hard to believe that highschool girls would be terribly
thrilled to read a poem about the wind-up bird. They don't even know that any
such thing as a wind-up bird exists.
It’s seven thirty when my wife comes home.
"Sorry, I had to
work late," she apologizes. 'I had the darnedest time tracking down
one pupil 's tuition record. The part-time girl is so lame, it
all falls to me."
"Never
mind," I say. Then I step into the kitchen, panfry a piece of fish in
butter, and prepare a salad and miso soup. Meanwhile, my wife reads the evening
paper at the
kitchen table.
"Say, weren't
you home at five-thirty?" she asks. 'I tried calling to tell you I'd be a
little late."
"I ran out of
butter and went out to buy some," I lie.
"Did you
remember to go to the bank?"
"Natch," I
reply.
"How about the
cat?"
"Not a trace."
"Oh," says
my wife.
I emerge from an after-dinner bath to find my wife sitting all
alone in the darkened living room. I throw on a gray shirt and fumble through
the dark to reach where she's been
dumped like a piece of luggage. She looks so utterly forsaken.
If only they'd left her in
another spot, she might have seemed a little happier.
Drying my hair with a
bath towel, I take a seat on the sofa opposite her.
"What's the
matter?" I ask.
"The cat' s
dead, I just know it," my wife says.
"Oh c'mon,"
I protest. "He's just off exploring. Soon enough he'll get hungry and head
on back. The same thing happened once before, remember? That time when we were
still living in Koenji — "
"This time it's
different. I can feel it. The cat's dead and rotting away in the weeds.
Did you search the grass in the yard of the vacant house?"
"Hey now, stop
it. It may be a vacant house, but it's somebody else's house. I’m not about to
go trespassing."
"You killed
it!" my wife accuses.
I heave a sigh and
give my head another once-over with the towel.
"You killed it
with that look of yours!" she repeats from the darkness.
"How does that
follow?" I say. "The cat disappeared of its own doing. It's not my
fault. That much you've gotto see."
"You! You never
liked that cat, anyway!"
"Okay, maybe
so," I admit. "At least I wasn't as crazy about the cat as you were.
Still, I never mistreated it. I fed it every day. Just because I wasn't
enthralled with the little
bugger doesn't mean I killed it. Start saying things like that
and I end up having killed
half the people on earth."
"Well, that's
you all over," my wife delivers her verdict. "That's just so you.
Always,
always that way. You kill everything without ever playing a
hand."
I'm about to counter
when she bursts into tears. I can the speech and toss the towel
into the bathroom basket, go to the kitchen, take a beer out of
the refrigerator, and
chug. What an impossible day it's been! One impossible day, of
an impossible month, of an impossible year.
Noboru Watanabe,
where have you gone?, I think. Didn't the wind-up bird wind your spring?
A regular poem that
is:
Noboru Watanabe
Where have you gone?
Didn't the wind-up bird
Wind your spring?
I've not finished
half my beer when the telephone begins to ring.
"Get that, will
you?" I shout into the living-room darkness.
"No way! You get
it yourself," says my wife.
"I don't want to
get it," I say.
No one answers it,
and the telephone keeps on ringing. The ringing stirs up the loose dust
floating in the dark. Neither my wife nor I venture one word. Me drinking my
beer, my wife sobbing away. Twenty rings before I lose count and just let the
thing ring. You
can't keep counting forever.
2.SECOND BAKERY ATTAck
translated by Jay Rubin
I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife
about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right
and wrong. Which is to say that wrong
choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have
adopted the position
that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things
happen. Or not.
If you look at it
this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery
attack. I hadn't been planning to bring it up — I had forgotten
all about it — but it wasn't one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of
things, either.
What reminded me of
the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before
two o'clock in the morning. We had eaten a light supper at six,
crawled into bed at nine-
thirty, and gone to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at
exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force
of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs.
Our refrigerator
contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as
food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two
shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With
only two weeks of married life
behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal
understanding with regard to the
rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.
I had a job in a law
firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design
school. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine — why can' 1 1
remember the exact
year we married? — and she was two years and eight months
younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.
We both felt too
hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. On the other
hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out
of bed and drifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each
other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?
We took turns opening
the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many
times we looked inside, the contents never changed. Beer and
onions and butter and
dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute
the onions in the butter,
but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fiil
our empty stomachs.
Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the
kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.
"Would madame
care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?"
I expected her to
ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. "Let's get in the car and
look for an all-night restaurant," I said. "There must
be one on the highway."
She rejected that suggestion. "We
can't. You' re not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was
old-fashioned that way.
I breathed once and
said, "I guess not."
Whenever my wife
expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated
in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that's what
happens with
newlyweds, I don't know. But when she said this to me, I began
to think that this was a
special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere
expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.
A special kind of
hunger. And what might that be?
I can present it here
in the form of a cinematic image.
One, I am in a
little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water
I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three,
the peak seems
pretty close to the water 's surface, but just how close I
cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes
with the perception of distance.
This is a fairly
accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three
seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night
restaurant and I agreed with my "I guess not." Not
being Sigmund Freud, I was, of
course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image
signified, but I knew
intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why — the almost grotesque
intensity of my hunger notwithstanding — I all but automatically agreed with
her thesis (or declaration).
We did the only thing
we could do: opened the beer. It was a lot better than eating
those onions. She didn't like beer much, so we divided the cans,
two for her, four for
me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kitchen
shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up a package that
had four butter cookies in the
bottom. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate
two, savoring every
crumb.
It was no use. Upon
this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai
Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a trace.
Time oozed through
the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut. I read the print on the aluminum
beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned
the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape
together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop.
'I’ve never been this
hungry in my whole life," she said. "I wonder if it has anything to
do with being married."
"Maybe," I
said. "Or maybe not."
While she hunted for
more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the
peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all
around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had
opened somewhere
behind my solar plexus — a hermetically sealed cavern that had
neither entrance nor
exit. Something about this weird sense of absence — this sense
of the existential reality of non-existence — resembled the paralyzing fear you
might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This connection
between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me.
Which is when it
occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of
experience. My stomach had been just as empty then. . . . When?
. . . Oh, sure, that
was —
"The time of the
bakery attack," I heard myself saying.
"The bakery
attack? What are you talking about?"
And so it started.
"I once attacked a bakery. Long time ago. Not a big bakery.
Not famous. The bread was nothing special. Not bad, either. One of those
ordinary little neighborhood bakeries right in the middle of a block of shops.
Some old guy ran it who did everything himself. Baked in the morning, and when
he sold out, he closed up for the day."
"If you were
going to attack a bakery, why that one?"
"Well, there was
no point in attacking a big bakery. All we wanted was bread, not
money. We were attackers, not robbers."
"We? Who's we?"
"My best friend
back then. Ten years ago. We were so broke we couldn't buy
toothpaste. Never had enough food. We did some pretty awflil
things to get our hands
on food. The bakery attack was one."
"I don't get
it." She looked hard at me. Her eyes could have been searching for a
faded star in the morning sky "Why didn't you get a job?
You could have worked after
school. That would have been easier than attacking
bakeries."
"We didn't want
to work. We were absolutely clear on that."
"Well, you're
working now, aren't you?"
I nodded and sucked
some more beer. Then I rubbed my eyes. A kind of beery mud had oozed into my
brain and was struggling with my hunger pangs.
"Times change.
People change," I said. "Let's go back to bed. We've got to get up
early."
"I’m not sleepy.
I want you to tell me about the bakery attack."
"There's nothing
to tell. No action. No excitement."
"Was it a
success?"
I gave up on sleep
and ripped open another beer. Once she gets interested in a
story, she has to hear it all the way through. That' s just the
way she is.
"Well, it was
kind of a success. And kind of not. We got what we wanted. But as a
holdup, it didn't work. The baker gave us the bread before we
could take it from him."
"Free?"
"Not exactly,
no. That's the hard part." I shook my head. "The baker was a
classical-music freak, and when we got there, he was listening
to an album of Wagner
overtures. So he made us a deal. If we would listen to the
record all the way through,
we could take as much bread as we liked. I talked it over with
my buddy and we figured, Okay It wouldn't be work in the purest sense of the
word, and it wouldn't hurt anybody. So we put our knives back in our bag,
pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened to the
overtures to Tannhduser and The Flying Dutchman. "
"And after that,
you got your bread?"
"Right. Most of
what he had in the shop. Stuffed it in our bag and took it home. Kept us fed
for maybe four or five days." I took another sip. Like soundless waves
from an
undersea earthquake, my sleepiness gave my boat a long, slow
rocking.
"Of course, we
accomplished our mission. We got the bread. But you couldn't say we had committed
a crime. It was more of an exchange. We listened to Wagner with him,
and in return, we got our bread. Legally speaking, it was more
like a commercial
transaction."
"But listening
to Wagner is not work," she said.
"Oh, no,
absolutely not. If the baker had insisted that we wash his dishes or clean his
windows or something, we would have turned him down. But he didn't. All he
wanted
from us was to listen to his Wagner LP from beginning to end.
Nobody could have
anticipated that. I mean — Wagner? It was like the baker put a
curse on us. Now that I
think of it, we should have reflised. We should have threatened him
with our knives and taken the damn bread. Then there wouldn't have been any
problem."
"You had a problem?"
I rubbed my eyes
again.
"Sort of.
Nothing you could put your fmger on. But things started to change after that.
It was kind of a turning point. Like, I went back to the university, and I
graduated, and I
started working for the firm and studying for the bar exam, and
I met you and got
married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery
attacks."
"That' s
it?"
"Yup, that's all there was to it." I
drank the last of the beer. Now all six cans were
gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a
mermaid.
Of course, it wasn't
true that nothing had happened as a result of the bakery attack. There were plenty
of things that you could easily have put your fmger on, but I didn't
want to talk about them with her.
"So, this friend
of yours, what's he doing now?"
'I have no idea.
Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, and we stopped
hanging around together. I haven't seen him since. I don't know
what he's doing."
For a while, she
didn't speak. She probably sensed that I wasn't telling her the whole story.
But she wasn't ready to press me on it.
"Still,"
she said, "that's why you two broke up, isn't it? The bakery attack was
the
direct cause."
"Maybe so. I
guess it was more intense than either of us realized. We talked about
the relationship of bread to Wagner for days after that. We kept
asking ourselves if we
had made the right choice. We couldn't decide. Of course, if you
look at it sensibly, we
did make the right choice. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got what
he wanted. The baker — I still can't figure out why he did what he did — but anyway,
he succeeded with his
Wagner propaganda. And we succeeded in stuffing our faces with bread.
"But even so, we
had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And
somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting
a dark shadow on our lives. That's why I used the word 'curse.' It's true. It
was like a curse."
"Do you think
you still have it?"
I took the six
pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of
a bracelet.
"Who knows? I
don't know. I bet the world is full of curses. It's hard to tell which
curse makes any one thing go wrong."
"That's not
true." She looked right at me. "You can tell, if you think about it.
And
unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it'll stick
with you like a toothache. It'll
torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too."
"You?"
"Well, I’m your
best friend now, aren't I? Why do you think we're both so hungry? I
never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I
married you. Don't you think it's abnormal? Your curse is working on me,
too."
I nodded. Then I
broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them back in the ashtray. I
didn't know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto
something.
The feeling of
starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep
headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to
the core of my head
by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds
of complicated
machinery.
I took another look
at my undersea volcano. The water was even clearer than before — much clearer.
Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It
felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely
nothing to support it. I
could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was
reach out and touch
them.
"We've only been
living together for two weeks," she said, "but all this time I’ve
been feeling some kind of weird presence." She looked directly into my
eyes and brought
her hands together on the tabletop, her fingers interlocking.
"Of course, I didn't know it was a curse until now. This explains everything.
You' re under a curse."
"What kind of presence?"
"Like there's
this heavy, dusty curtain that hasn't been washed for years, hanging
down from the ceiling."
"Maybe it's not
a curse. Maybe it's just me," I said, and smiled.
She did not smile.
"No, it's not
you," she said.
"Okay, suppose
you' re right. Suppose it is a curse. What can I do about it?"
"Attack another
bakery. Right away. Now. It's the only way."
"Now?"
"Yes. Now. While
you' re still hungry. You have to finish what you left unfinished."
"But it's the
middle of the night. Would a bakery be open now?"
"We'll find one.
Tokyo's a big city. There must be at least one all-night bakery."
We got into my old Corolla and started drifting around the
streets of Tokyo at 2:30 a.m,
looking for a bakery. There we were, me clutching the steering
wheel, she in the
navigator 's seat, the two of us scanning the street like hungry
eagles in search of prey. Stretched out on the backseat, long and stiff as a
dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the
pocket of my wife's windbreaker. We had two
black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a
shotgun, I had no
idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't
explain and I didn't ask.
Married life is weird, I felt.
Impeccably equipped,
we were nevertheless unable to find an all-night bakery. I
drove through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to
Yotsuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya.
Late-night Tokyo had all kinds of people and shops, but no bakeries.
Twice we encountered
patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inconspicuous.
The other slowly overtookus and crept past, finally moving off into
the distance. Both times I grew damp under the arms, but my
wife's concentration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every
time she shifted the angle of her body,
the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in
an old-fashioned pillow.
"Let's forget
it," I said. "There aren't any bakeries open at this time of night.
You' ve
got to plan for this kind of thing or else — "
"Stop the
car!"
I slammed on the
brakes.
"This is the
place," she said.
The shops along the
street had their shutters rolled down, forming dark, silent walls
on either side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark like a
twisted, chilling glass eye.
There was a bright McDonald's hamburger sign some two hundred
yards ahead, but nothing else.
"I don't see any
bakery," I said.
Without a word, she
opened the glove compartment and pulled out a roli of cloth-
backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out
my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered
the numbers on the license plate.
Then she went around to the back and did the same. There was a
practiced efficiency
to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her.
"We're going to
take that McDonald's," she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what
we would have for dinner.
"McDonald's is
not a bakery," I pointed out to her.
"It's like a
bakery," she said. "Sometimes youhave to compromise. Let's go."
I drove to the
McDonald's and parked in the lot. She handed me the blanket-wrapped shotgun.
'I’ve never fired a
gun in my life," I protested.
"You don't have
to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as
soon as they say 'Welcome to McDonald's,' we slip on our masks.
Got that?"
"Sure,
but—"
"Then you shove
the gun in their faces and make all the workers and customers get
together. Fast. I’ll do the rest."
"But—"
"How many
hamburgers do you think we'll need? Thirty?"
'I guess so."
With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the blanket a little. The
thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night.
"Do we really
have to do this?" I asked, half to her and half to myself.
"Of course we
do."
Wearing a McDonald's
hat, the girl behind the counter flashed me a McDonald's
smile and said, "Welcome to McDonald's." I hadn't
thought that girls would work at
McDonald's late at night, so the sight of her confused me for a
second. But only for a
second. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. Confronted with
this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us.
Obviously, the
McDonald's hospitality manual said nothing about how to deal with a
situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that
comes after "Welcome
to McDonald's," but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the
words wouldn't come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dawn sky, the
hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips.
As quickly as I could
manage, I unwrapped the shotgun and aimed it in the direction of the tables, but
the only customers there were a young couple — students, probably — and they
were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two
strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde
sculpture.
They slept the sleep of the dead. They didn't look likely to obstruct
our operation, so I
swung my shotgun back toward the counter.
All together, there
were three McDonald's workers. The girl at the counter, the manager — a guy with
a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties — and a student type in
the kitchen — a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could
read as an expression. They stood together behind the register,
staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well.
No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had
to rest the barrel on top of the
cash register, my fmger on the trigger.
"I’ll give you
the money," said the manager, his voice hoarse. "They collected it at
eleven, so we don't have too much, but you can have everything.
We're insured."
"Lower the front
shutter and turn off the sign," said my wife.
"Wait a
minute," said the manager. 'T can't do that. FH be held responsible if I
close up without permission."
My wife repeated her
order, slowly. He seemed torn.
"You' d better
do what she says," I warned him.
He looked at the
muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun.
He finally resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned off the sign and hit a
switch on an electrical panel that lowered the shutter. I kept
my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently
McDonald's don't have burglar alarms.
Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attack one.
The front shutter
made a huge racket when it closed, like an empty bucket being
smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their
table was still out cold.
Talk about a sound sleep: I hadn't seen anything like that in
years.
"Thirty Big
Macs. For takeout," said my wife.
"Let me just
give you the money," pleaded the manager. "I’ll give you more than
you need. You can go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my
accounts and — "
"You' d better
do what she says," I said again.
The three of them
went into the kitchen area together and started making the thirty
Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them
in buns, and the girl
wrapped them up. Nobody said a word.
I leaned against a
big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat
patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots,
sizzling. The sweet smell of
grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm
of microscopic bugs,
dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest
corners, then massing together
inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink
walls.
A pile of
white-wrapped burgers was growing nearby. I wanted to grab and tear into
them, but I could not be certain that such an act would be
consistent with our objective. I had to wait. In the hot kitchen area, I
started sweating under my ski mask.
The McDonald's people
sneaked glances at the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little
finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when I’m nervous. Jabbing my
finger into an ear through the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and
down, which seemed to bother them. It couldn't have gone off accidentally,
because I had the safety on, but they didn't know that and I wasn't about to
tell them.
My wife counted the
finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping
bags, fifteen burgers to a bag.
"Why do you have
to do this?" the girl asked me. "Why don't you just take the money
and buy something you like? What's the good of eating thirty Big Macs?"
I shook my head.
My wife explained,
"We're sorry, really. But there weren't any bakeries open. If there had
been, we would have attacked a bakery."
That seemed to
satisfy them. At least they didn't ask any more questions. Then my
wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them.
"We're stealing
bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a complicated head
movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably
trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.
My wife then pulled a
ball of twine from her pocket — she came equipped — and tied the three to a post
as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord
hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a
word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and
out we went. The customers at the
table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What
would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?
We drove for a half
hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in.
There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs
down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs
in the back seat. Our hunger — that hunger that had felt as if it could go on
forever — vanished as the dawn was
breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building's filthy walls
purple and made a
giant sony beta ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the
whine of highway truck
tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed
Forces radio was playing
cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her
head on my shoulder.
"Still, was it
really necessary for us to do this?" I asked.
"Of course it was!" With one deep
sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft
and as light as a kitten.
Alone now, I leaned
over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano
was gone. The water's calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves
— like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze — lapped against the side of the
boat. There was nothing else.
I stretched out in
the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising
tide to carry me where I belonged.
3.The KANGAROO COMmuniQuE
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Say hey, how's tricks?
This morning, I paid
a call on the kangaroos at the local zoo. Not your biggest zoo,
but it's got the standard animals. Everything from gorillas to
elephants. Although if your
taste runs to llamas and anteaters, don't go out of your way.
There, you'll fmd neither
Ilama nor anteater. No impala or hyena, either. Not even a
leopard.
Instead, there are
four kangaroos.
One, an infant, born
just two months ago. And a male and two females. I can't for the life of me figure
out how they get along as a family.
Every time I set eyes
on a kangaroo, it all seems so improbable to me: I mean, what on earth would it
feel like to be a kangaroo? For what possible reason do they go
hopping around in such an ungodly place as Australia? Just to
get killed by some clunky stick of a boomerang?
I can't figure it
out.
Though, really,
that's neither here nor there. No major issue.
Anyway, looking at
these kangaroos, I got the urge to send you a letter.
Maybe that strikes
you as odd. You ask yourself, Why should looking at kangaroos make me want to
send you a letter? And just what is the connection between these
kangaroos and me? Well, you can stop thinking those thoughts
right now. Makes no
nevermind. Kangaroos are kangaroos, you are you.
In other words, it's
like this:
Thirty-six intricate
procedural steps, followed one by one in just the right order, led
me from the kangaroos to you — that's it. To attempt to explain
each and every one of
these steps would surely try your powers of comprehension, but
more than that, I doubt I can even remember them all.
There were thirty-six
of them, after all!
If but one of these
stages had gotten screwed up, I guess I wouldn't be sending you
this letter. Who knows? I might have ended up somewhere in the
Antarctic Ocean
careening about on the back of a sperm whale. Or maybe I'd have
torched the local
cigarette stand.
Yet somehow, guided
by this seemingly random convergence of thirty-six
coincidences, I fjnd myself communicating with you.
Strange, isn't it?
Okay, then, allow me to introduce myself.
I am twenty-six years old and work in the product-control section
of a department store. The job — as I' m sure you can easily imagine — is
terribly boring. First of all, I check
the merchandise that the purchasing section has decided to stock
and make sure that
there aren't any problems with the products. This is supposed to
prevent collusion
between the purchasing section and the suppliers, but actually,
it's a pretty loose
operation. A few tugs at shoe buckles while chatting, a nibble
or two at sample sweets — that's about it. So much for product control.
Then we come to
another ask, the real heart of our work, which is responding to
customer complaints. Say, for instance, two pairs of stockings
just purchased developed runs one after the other, or the wind-up bear fell off
the table and stopped working, or a bathrobe shrank by one fourth the first
time through the machine — those kind of
complaints.
Well, let me tell
you, the number of complaints — the sheer number — is enough to dampen anyone's
spirits. Enough to keep four staffers racing around like crazy, day in
and day out. These complaints include both clear-cut cases and
totally unreasonable
requests. Then there are those we have to puzzle over. For
convenience sake, we've
classified these into three categories: A, B, and C. And in the middle
of the office we've got three boxes, marked A, B, and C, respectively, where we
toss the letters. An
operation we call "Trilevel Rationality Evaluation."
In-house joke. Forget I mentioned it.
Anyway, to explain
these three categories, we have:
A.Reasonable complaints. Cases where we are obliged to assume
responsibility We
visit the customers'
homes bearing oxes of sweets and exchange the merchandise
in question.
B.Borderline cases. When in doubt, we play safe. Even where here
is no moral
obligation or business
precedent or legal iability, we offer some appropriate gesture
so as not to
compromise the image of the department store and to avoid unnecessary
trouble.
C.Customer negligence. When clearly the customer's fault, we offer
an explanation of
the situation and
leave it at that.
Now, as to your
complaint of a few days back, we gave the matter serious
consideration and ultimately arrived at the conclusion that your
complaint was of a
nature that could only be classified as belonging to category C.
The reasons for this
were — ready? listen carefully! — we cannot exchange (1) a
record once purchased (2) one whole week later (3) without a receipt. Nowhere
in the world can you do this.
Do you get what I’m
saying?
End of explanation of
the situation. Your complaint has been duly processed.
Nonetheless, professional viewpoint aside — and actually, I
leave it aside a lot — my
personal reaction to your plight — having mistakenly bought
Mahler, not Brahms — is
one of heartfelt sympathy. I kid you not. So it is I send you
not your run-of-the-mill form
letter but this in some sense more intimate message.
Actually, I started to write you a letter any number of times
last week. "We regret to
inform you that our policy prohibits the exchange of records,
although your letter did in
some small way move me to personally . . . blah, blah,
blah." A letter like that. Nothing I wrote, however, came out right. And
it's not as though Fm no good at writing letters. It's just that each time I
set my mind on writing you, I drew a blank, and the words that did
come were consistently off base. Strangest thing.
So I decided not to
respond at all. I mean, why send out a botched attempt at a
letter? Better to send nothing at all, right? At least, that's
what I think: A message
imperfectly communicated does about as much good as a screwed-up
timetable.
As fate would have
it, though, this morning, standing before the kangaroo cage, I hit upon the
exact permutation of those thirty-six coincidences and came up with this
inspiration. To wit, the principle we shall call the Nobility of
Imperfection. Now, what is
this Nobility of Imperfection?, you may ask — who wouldn't ask?
Well, simply put, the
Nobility of Imperfection might mean nothing so much as the
proposition that someone in effect forgives someone else. I forgive the
kangaroos, the kangaroos forgive you, you
forgive me — to cite but one example.
Uh-huh.
This cycle, however,
is not perpetual. At some point, the kangaroos might take it into their heads not
to forgive you. Please don't get angry at the kangaroos just because of
that, though. It's not the kangaroos' fault and it's not your
fault. Nor, for that matter, is it my fault. The kangaroos have their own
pressing circumstances. And I ask you, what
kind of person is it who can blame a kangaroo?
So we seize the
moment. That' s all we can do. Capture the moment in a snapshot. Front and center,
in a row left to right: you, the kangaroos, me.
Enough of trying to
write this all down. It's going nowhere. Say I write the word
"coincidence." What you read in the word
"coincidence" could be utterly different —
even opposite — from what the very same word means to me. This
is unfair, if I may
say so. Here I am, stripped to my underpants, while you' ve only
undone three buttons
of your blouse. An unfair turn of events if there ever was one.
Hence I bought myself
a cassette tape, having decided to directly record my letter to you.
[Whistling — eight bars of the "Colonel Bogey"
march]
Testing, can you hear me?
I don’t really know how you will take to receiving this letter —
that is, this tape — I really can't imagine. I suppose you might even get quite
upset by it all. Why? . . . Because it's highly unusual for a product-control
clerk of a department store to reply to a customer
complaint by cassette tape — with a personalized message, too,
mind you! You could
even, if you were so inclined, say the whole thing was downright
bizarre. And say, were you to get so upset that you sent this tape back to my
boss, my standing within the
organization would be placed in a terribly delicate balance
indeed.
But if that is what
you want to do, please do so.
If it comes to that,
I will not get mad or hold a grudge against you.
Clear enough? We are
on 100% equal terms: I have the right to send you a letter
and you have the right to threaten my livelihood.
Isn't that right?
We're even Stephen.
Just remember that.
Come to think of it, I forgot to mention that I' m calling this
letter The Kangaroo
Communique.
I mean, everything
needs a name, right?
Suppose, for
instance, you keep a diary. Instead of writing this long-drawn-out entry,
"Department-store product-control clerk's reply re complaint
arrives," you could simply
write "Kangaroo Communique arrives" and be done
with it. And such a catchy name,
too, don't you think? The Kangaroo Communique: Makes you
think of kangaroos
bounding off across the vast plains, pouches stuffed full of
mail, doesn't it?
[Thump, thump, thump (rapping on tabletop)]
Now for some knocking.
[Knock, knock, knock]
Stop me if you've heard this.
Don't open the door
if you don't feel like it. Either way is perfectly fine. If you don't
want to listen anymore, please stop the tape and throw it away.
I just wanted to sit down awhile by your front door talking to myself, that's
all. I have no idea whatsoever if you're listening or not, but since I don't know,
it's really all the same whether you do or you
don't, isn't it? Ha, ha, ha.
Okay, what the hell, let's give it a go.
Still and all, this imperfection business is pretty tough going.
Who'd have thought talking into a microphone without any script or plan would
be so hard? It's like standing in the
middle of the desert sprinkling water around with a cup. No
visible sign of anything, not one thing to cling to.
That's why all this
time I've been talking to the VU meters. You know, the VU
meters? Those gizmos with the needles that twiteh to the volume?
I don't know what the V or the U stand for, but whatever, they're the only
things showing any reaetion to my
ranting.
Hey, hey.
All the same, their
eriteria are really quite simple.
V and U, well,
they're like a vaudeville duo. There's no F without U and no U without V — a
nice little setup. As far as they're concerned, it really doesn't matter what I
babble on about. The only thing they're interested in is how much my voice
makes the air
vibrate. To them, the air vibrates, therefore I am.
Pretty swift, don't
you think?
Watching them, I get
to thinking it doesn't matter what I say so long as I keep talking.
Whoa!
Come to think of it,
not too long ago I saw a movie. It was about a comedian who just couldn't make
anyone laugh no matter what jokes he told. Got the picture? Not one soul would
laugh.
Well, talking into
this microphone, I' m reminded of that movie over and over again.
It's all very odd.
The very same lines
when spoken by one person will have you dying with laughter
but when spoken by another won't seem funny in the least.
Curious, don't you think?
And the more I think about it, that difference just seems to be
one of these things you're born with. See, it's like the curvature of the
semicireular canals of your ears having the
edge over somebody else's, or . . . you know.
Sometimes I find
myself thinking, If only I had such gifts, how happy I'd be. I’m
always doubling over laughing to myself when something strikes
me as funny, but try to tell someone else and it falls flat, a dud. It makes me
feel like the Egyptian Sandman.
Even more, it's ...
You know about the
Egyptian Sandman?
Hmm, well, you see,
the Egyptian Sandman was Prince of Egypt by birth. A long
time ago, back in the days of pyramids and sphinxes and all
that. But because he was
so ugly — I mean, truly ugly — the king had him sent off into
the deepest jungle to get rid of him. Well, it so happens that the kid ends up getting
raised by wolves, or monkeys, maybe. One of those stories, you know. And
somehow or other, he becomes a
Sandman. Now, this Sandman, everything he touches turns to sand.
Breezes turn into
sandstorms, babbling brooks turn into dunes, grassy plains turn
into deserts. So goes
the tale of the Sandman. Ever hear it before? Probably not, eh?
That's because I just
made it up. Ha, ha, ha.
Anyway, talking to
you like this, I get the feeling Fve become the Egyptian Sandman myself. And whatever
I touch, it's sand sand sand.
Once again, I see I’m talking about myself too much. But all
things considered, it's
unavoidable. I mean, I don't even know one solitary thing about
you. I’ve got your
address and your name, and that's it. Your age, income bracket,
the shape of your
nose, whether you' re slender or overweight, married or not — what
do I know? Not that any of that really matters. It's almost better this way. If
at all possible, I prefer to keep
things simple, very simple — on the metaphysical level, if you
will.
To wit, here I have
your letter.
This is all I need.
Just as the zoologist
collects shit samples in the jungle from which to deduce the
elephant's dietary habits and patterns of activity and weight
and sex life, so your one
letter gives me enough to go on. I can actually sense what kind
of person you are. Of
course, minus your looks, the kind of perfume you wear, details
like that. Nonetheless — your very essence.
Your letter was,
honestly, quite fascinating. Your choice of words, the handwriting,
punctuation, spacing between lines, rhetoric — everything was
perfect. Superlative it
was not. Butperfect, yes.
Every month, I read
over five hundred letters, and frankly, yours was the first letter
that ever moved me. I secretly took your letter home with me and
read it over and over again. Then I analyzed your letter thoroughly. Being such
a short letter, it was no trouble at all.
Many things came to
light through my analysis. First of all, the number of punctuation marks is overwhelming.
6.36 commas for every period. On the high side, don't you
think? And that's not all: The way you punctuate is markedly
irregular.
Listen, please don't
think I'm putting down your writing. I’m simply moved by it.
Enthralled.
And it's not just the
commas, either. Every part of your letter — down to each ink
smear — everything set me off, everything shook me.
Why?
Well, the long and
the short of it is that there's no you in the whole piece of writing.
Oh, there's a story to it, all right. A girl — a woman — makes a
mistake buying a record. She had the feeling the record had the wrong tunes,
but still, she went ahead and
bought it, and it's exactly one week before she realizes. The
salesgirl won't exchange it. So she writes a letter of complaint. That's the
story.
I had to reread your
letter three times before I grasped the story. The reason was,
your letter was completely different from all the other letters
of complaint that come our way. To put it bluntly, there wasn't even any
complaint in your letter. Let alone any
emotion. The only thing that was there . . . was the story.
Really and truly, you
had me wondering. Was the letter in fact intended as a
complaint or a confession or a proclamation, or was it perhaps
meant to put forth some
thesis? I had no idea. Your letter reminded me of a news photo
from the scene of a
massacre. With no commentary, no article, no nothing — just a
photo. A shot of dead
bodies littering some roadside in some country somewhere.
Bang, bang, bang . .
. there's your massacre.
No, wait, we can
simplify things a little. Simplify them a lot.
That is to say, your
letter excites me sexually.
There you have it.
Let us now address the topic of sex.
[Thud, thud, thud]
More knocking.
You know, if this
doesn't interest you, you can stop the tape. I’m just talking to
myself, blabbering away to the VU meters. Blah, blah, blah.
Okay?
Picture this: Short forearms with five fingers, but singularly
huge hind legs with four
toes, the fourth of which is immensely overdeveloped, while the
second and third are
extra tiny and fused together . . . that' s a description of the
feet of a kangaroo. Ha, ha,
ha.
Uh , moving on to the topic of sex.
Ever since I took your letter home with me, all I can seem to
think about is sleeping with you. That I’ll climb into bed to find you next to
me, wake up in the morning and there
you'd be. As I open my eyes you'll already be getting out of
bed, and I’ll hear you
zipping up your dress. There I'd be — and you know how delicate
the zipper on a dress can be — well, I'd just shut my eyes and pretend to be
asleep. I wouldn't even set eyes on you.
Once you cut across
the room and disappeared into the bathroom, only then would I open my eyes. Then
I'd get a bite to eat and head out to work.
In the pitch-black of
night — I’ll instali special blinds on my windows to make the
place extra pitch-black — of course, I wouldn't see your face.
I'd know nothing, not your age or weight. So I wouldn't lay a hand on you,
either.
But, well, that' s fine.
If you really want to
know, it makes no difference whatsoever if I have sex with you
or not. . . .
No, I take that back.
Let me think that one
over.
Okay, let's put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But
it's all right if I don't sleep
with you. What I’m saying is, I'd like to be as fair as
possible. I don't want to force
anything on anybody, any more than I'd want anything forced on
me. It's enough that I
feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.
You see, it's like this:
Sometimes, when I
think about entities — like in "separate entities" — it gets mighty
grim. I start thinking, and I nearly go to pieces. . . .
For instance, say
you're riding on the subway. And there are dozens of people in the car. Mere "passengers"
you'd have to call them, as a rule. "Passengers" being
conveyed from Aoyama One-chome to Akasakamitsuke. Sometimes,
though, it'll strike
you that each and every one of those passengers is a distinct
individual entity. Like,
what does this one do? Or why on earth do you suppose that one
's riding the Ginza
Line? Or whatever. By then it's too late. You let it get to you
and you're a goner.
Looks like that
businessman's hairline is receding, or the giri over there 's got such
hairy legs I bet she shaves at least once a week, or why is that
young guy sitting across the aisle wearing that awful tie? Little things like
that. Until finally you've got the shakes and you want to jump out of the car
then and there. Why, just the other day — I know
you're going to laugh, but — I was on the verge of pressing the
emergency-brake button by the door.
I admit it. But that
doesn't mean you should go thinking I’m hypersensitive or on
edge all the time. I'm really a regular sort of guy, your
everyday ordinary workaday type, gainfully employed in the product-control
section of a department store. And I've got
nothing against the subway.
Nor do I have any
problem sexually. There's a woman I’ m seeing — I guess you
could call her my girlfriend — been sleeping with her twice a
week for maybe a year
now. And she and I, we're both pretty satisfled. Only I try not
to take her too seriously. I have no intention of marrying her. If I thought about
getting married, I' m sure I'd begin
taking her seriously, and I'd lose all confidence that I could carry
on from that point. I
mean, that's how it is. You live with a giri and these things
start to get to you — her
teeth aren't exactly straight, the shape of her fingernails —
how can you expect to go on like that?
Let me say a little more about myself.
No knocking this
time.
If you've listened
this far, you might as well hear me out.
Just a second. I need
a smoke.
[Rattle, rattle]
Up to now, I've
hardly said a word about myself. Like, there's really not that much to say. And
even if I did, probably nobody would find it terribly interesting.
So why am I telling
you all this?
I think I already
told you, it's because now my sights are set on the Nobility of
Imperfection.
And what touched off
this Nobility of Imperfection idea?
Your letter and four
kangaroos.
Yes, kangaroos.
Kangaroos are such
fascinating creatures, I can look at them for hours on end. What can kangaroos possibly
have to think about? The whole lot of them, jumping around in
their cage all day long, digging holes now and again. And then
what do they do with
these holes? Nothing. They dig them and that's it. Ha, ha, ha.
Kangaroos give birth
to only one baby at a time. So as soon as one baby is born, the female gets pregnant
again. Otherwise the kangaroo population would never sustain
itself. This means the female kangaroo spends her entire life
either pregnant or nursing babies. If she's not pregnant, she's nursing babies;
if she's not nursing babies, she's
pregnant. You could say she exists just to ensure the continuance
of the species. The
kangaroo species wouldn't survive if there weren't any
kangaroos, and if their purpose
wasn't to go on existing, kangaroos wouldn't be around in the
first place.
Funny about that.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Excuse me.
To talk about myself, then.
Actually, I'm
extremely dissatisfied with being who I am. It's nothing to do with my
looks or abilities or status or any of that. It simply has to do
with being me. The situation strikes me as grossly unfair.
Still, that doesn't
mean you should write me off as someone with a lot of gripes. I
have not one complaint about the place where I work or about my
salary. The work is
undeniably boring, but then, most jobs are boring. Money is not
a major issue here.
Shall I put it on the
line?
I want to be able to
be in two places at once. That is my one and only wish. Other
than that, there's not a thing I desire.
Yet being who and
what I am, my singularity hampers this desire of mine. An
unhappy lot, don't you think? My wish, if anything, is rather
unassuming. I don't want to be ruler of the world, nor do I want to be an
artist of genius. I merely want to exist in two places simultaneously. Got it?
Not three, not four, only two. I want to be roller-skating
while I'm listening to an orchestra at a concert hall. I want to
be a McDonald's Quarter
Pounder and still be a clerk in the product-control section of
the department store. I
want to sleep with you and be sleeping with my girlfriend all
the while. I want to lead a
general existence and yet be a distinct, separate entity.
Allow me one more cigarette.
Whoa.
Getting a little
tired.
I'm not used to this,
speaking so frankly about myself.
There's just one
thing I'd like to get clear, though. Which is that I do not lust after you
sexually as a woman. Like I told you, I am angry at the fact that I am only
myself and
nothing else. Being a solitary entity is dreadfully depressing.
Hence I do not seek to
sleep with you, a solitary individual.
If, however, you were
to divide into two, and I split into two as well, and we four all
shared the same bed together, wouldn't that be something! Don't
you think?
Please send no reply. If you decide you want to write me a
letter, please send it care of
the company in the form of a complaint. If not a complaint, then
whatever you come up with.
That' s about it.
I listened to the tape this far on playback just now. To be
honest, I'm very dissatisfied
with it. I feel like an aquarium trainer who's let a seal die
out of negligence. It made me worry whether I should even send you this tape or
not, blowing this thing all out of
proportion even by my standards.
And now that I’ve
decided to send it, I’m still worried.
But what the hell,
I'm striving for imperfection, so I’ve got to live happily by my
choice. It was you and the four kangaroos who got me into this imperfection,
after all.
Signing off.
4.On Seeing The 100% Perfect
Girl One Beautiful April Morning
translated by Jay Rubin
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's
fashionable Harajuku
neighborhood, I walk past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth,
she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing
special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep.
She isn't young, either — must be near thirty, not even close to
a "girl," properly
speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the
100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest,
and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
Maybe you have your
own particular favorite type of girl — one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or
graceful fingers, or you' re drawn for no good reason to girls who take
their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of
course. Sometimes in a
restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the table
next to mine because I like the shape of her nose.
But no
one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived
type. Much as I like noses, I can' t recall the shape of hers —
or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great
beauty. It's weird.
"Yesterday on
the street I passed the 100% perfect girl," I tell someone.
"Yeah?" he
says. "Good-looking?"
"Not really."
"Your favorite
type, then?"
'I don't know. I
can't seem to remember anything about her — the shape of her eyes or the size
of her breasts."
"Strange."
"Yeah.
Strange."
"So
anyhow," he says, already bored, "what did you do? Talk to her?
Follow her?"
"Nah. Just
passed her on the street."
She's walking east to
west, and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning.
Wish I could talk to
her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself,
and — what I'd really like to do — explain to her the complexities of
fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in
Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be
crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the
world.
After talking, we'd
have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for
cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.
Potentiality knocks
on the door of my heart.
Now the distance
between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.
How can I approach
her? What should I say?
"Good morning,
miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little
conversation?"
Ridiculous. I'd sound
like an insurance salesman.
"Pardon me, but
would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the
neighborhood?"
No, this is just as
ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going
to buy a line like that?
Maybe the simple
truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me."
No, she wouldn't
believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me.
Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you,
but you' re not the 100%
perfect boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in
that situation, I'd probably
go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm thirty-two,
and that' s what growing
older is all about.
We pass in front of a
flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The
asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring
myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she
holds a crisp white envelope lacking
only a stamp. So: She's written somebody a letter, maybe spent
the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The
envelope could contain every secret
she's ever had.
I take a few more
strides and turn: She's lost in the crowd.
Now, of course , I know exactly what I should have said to her.
It would have been a
long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it
properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.
Oh, well. It would
have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't
you think?"
Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was
eighteen and the girl
sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially
beautiful. They
were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl,
like all the others. But they
believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world
there lived the 100%
perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them Yes, they believed
in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.
One day the two came
upon each other on the corner of a street.
"This is
amazing," he said. "I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may
not believe this, but you' re the 100% perfect girl for me."
"And you,"
she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured
you in every detail. It's like a dream."
They sat on a park
bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after
hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been
found by their 100%
perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found
by your 100% perfect
other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
As they sat and
talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it
really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily?
And so, when there
came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl,
"Let's test ourselves — just once. If we really are each other 's 100%
perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And
when that happens,
and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then
and there. What do
you think?"
"Yes," she
said, "that is exactly what we should do."
And so they parted,
she to the east, and he to the west.
The test they had
agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should
never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were
each other 's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met.
But it was impossible for them to
know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of
fate proceeded to toss
them unmercifully.
One winter, both the
boy and the girl came down with the season's terrible influenza, and after drifting
for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier
years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young
D. H. Lawrence's
piggy bank.
They were two bright,
determined young people, however, and through their
unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the
knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of
society. Heaven be praised, they
became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from
one subway line to
another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter
at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much
as 75% or even
85% love.
Time passed with
shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.
One beautiful April
morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking
from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter,
was walking from east to west, both along the same narrow street in the
Harajuku
neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center
of the street. The
faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest
moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest. And they knew:
She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
He is the 100%
perfect boy for me.
But the glow of their
memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had
the clarity of fourteen years earlier. Without a word, they
passed each other,
disappearing into the crowd. Forever.
A sad story, don't
you think?
Yes, that’’s it, that
is what I should have said to her.
5.Sleep
translated by Jay Rubin
This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.
I'm not talking about
insomnia. I know what insomnia is. I had something like it in
college — "something like it" because I'm not sure
that what I had then was exactly the same as what people refer to as insomnia.
I suppose a doctor could have told me. But I didn't see a doctor. I knew it wouldn't
do any good. Not that I had any reason to think so. Call it woman's intuition —
I just felt they couldn't help me. So I didn't see a doctor, and I didn't say
anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that that was exactly what
they would tell me to do.
Back then, my
"something like insomnia" went on for a month. I never really got to
sleep that entire time. I'd go to bed at night and say to
myself, "Ali right now, time for
some sleep." That was all it took to wake me up. It was
instantaneous — like a
conditioned reflex. The harder I worked at sleeping, the wider
awake I became. I tried
alcohol, I tried sleeping pills, but they had absolutely no effect.
Finally, as the sky
began to grow light in the morning, I'd feel that I might be drifting
off. But that wasn't sleep. My fingertips were just barely
brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was
wide awake. I would feel a hint of
drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other
side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the
feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring,
breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on
the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.
This incomplete
drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always
foggy. I couldn't get an accurate fix on the things around me —
their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular,
wavelike intervals: on the
subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would
slip away from my body.
The world would sway soundlessly I would drop things. My pencil
or my purse or my
fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself
down and sleep. But I
couldn't. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could
feel its chilling shadow.
It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the
drowsiness overtook me, I'm in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to
people inside my drowsiness. And the
strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds
that month, and no one
noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or
classmates, realized that I was
going through life asleep.
It was literally
true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling
than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world,
seemed like a
hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body
was about to be blown
to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard
of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell
myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.
And then, when night
came, the intense wakefulness would return. I was powerless
to resist it. I was locked in its core by an enormous force. All
I could do was stay awake until morning, eyes wide open in the dark. I couldn't
even think. As I lay there, listening
to the clock tick off the seconds, I did nothing but stare at
the darkness as it slowly
deepened and slowly diminished.
And then one day it
ended, without warning, without any external cause. I started to
lose consciousness at the breakfast table. I stood up without
saying anything. I may
have knocked something off the table. I think someone spoke to
me. But I can't be sure. I staggered to my room, crawled into bed in my
clothes, and fell fast asleep. I stayed
that way for twenty-seven hours. My mother became alarmed and
tried to shake me out of it. She actually slapped my cheeks. But I went on sleeping
for twenty-seven hours
without a break. And when I finally did awaken, I was my old
self again. Probably.
I have no idea why I
became an insomniac then or why the condition suddenly cured itself. It was like
a thick, black cloud brought from somewhere by the wind, a cloud
crammed full of ominous things I have no knowledge of. No one
knows where such a
thing comes from or where it goes. I can only be sure that it
did descend on me for a
time, and then departed.
In any case, what I have now is nothing like that insomnia,
nothing at all. I just can't
sleep. Not for one second. Aside from that simple fact, I’m perfectly
normal. I don't feel
sleepy, and my mind is as clear as ever. Clearer, if anything.
Physically, too, I'm normal: My appetite is fine; I’m not fatigued. In terms of
everyday reality, there's nothing wrong with me. I just can't sleep.
Neither my husband
nor my son has noticed that F m not sleeping. And I haven't
mentioned it to them. I don't want to be told to see a doctor. I
know it wouldn't do any
good. I just know. Like before. This is something I have to deal
with myself.
So they don't suspect
a thing. On the surface, our life flows on unchanged. Peaceful. Routine. After I
see my husband and son off in the morning, I take my car and go
marketing. My husband is a dentist. His office is a ten-minute
drive from our condo. He and a dental-school friend own it as partners. That
way, they can afford to hire a
technician and a receptionist. One partner can take the other's overflow.
Both of them
are good, so for an office that has been in operation for only
five years and that opened without any special connections, the place is doing
very well. Almost too well. "I didn't
want to work so hard," says my husband. "But I can't
complain."
And I always say,
"Really, you can't." It's true. We had to get an enormous bank loan
to open the place. A dental office requires a huge investment in equipment. And
the
competition is fierce. Patients don't start pouring in the
minute you open your doors.
Lots of dental clinics have failed for lack of patients.
Back then, we were
young and poor and we had a brand-new baby No one could
guarantee that we would survive in such a tough world. But we
have survived, one way or another. Five years. No, we really can't complain.
We' ve still got almost two thirds of our debt left to pay back, though.
"I know why
you've got so many patients," I always say to him. "It's because you'
re
such a good-looking guy."
This is our little
joke. He's not good-looking at all. Actually, he's kind of strange-
looking. Even now I sometimes wonder why I married such a
strange-looking man. I had other boyfriends who were far more handsome.
What makes his face
so strange? I can't really say. It's not a handsome face, but it's not ugly,
either. Nor is it the kind that people would say has "character."
Honestly,
"strange" is about all that fits. Or maybe it would be
more accurate to say that it has no distinguishing features. Still, there must
be some element that makes his face have no
distinguishing features, and if I could grasp whatever that is,
I might be able to
understand the strangeness of the whole. I once tried to draw
his picture, but I couldn't
do it. I couldn't remember what he looked like. I sat there
holding the pencil over the
paper and couldn't make a mark. I was flabbergasted. How can you
live with a man so
long and not be able to bring his face to mind? I knew how to
recognize him, of course. I would even get mental images of him now and then.
But when it came to drawing his
picture, I realized that I didn't remember anything about his
face. What could I do? It
was like running into an invisible wali. The one thing I could remember
was that his face looked strange.
The memory of that
often makes me nervous.
Still, he's one of
those men everybody likes. That's a big plus in his business,
obviously, but I think he would have been a success at just
about anything. People feel secure talking to him. I had never met anyone like
that before. Ali my women friends like him. And I' m fond of him, of course. I
think I even love him. But strictly speaking, I don't actually like him.
Anyhow, he smiles in
this natural, innocent way, just like a child. Not many grown-up men can do that.
And I guess you'd expect a dentist to have nice teeth, which he does.
"It's not my
fault I'm so good-looking," he always answers when we enjoy our little
joke. We're the only ones who understand what it means. It's a
recognition of reality — of the fact that we have managed in one way or another
to survive — and it's an
important ritual for us.
He drives his Sentra out of the condo parking garage every
morning at 8:15. Our son is
in the seat next to him. The elementary school is on the way to
the office. "Be careful," I say. "Don't worry," he answers.
Always the same little dialogue. I can't help myself. I
have to say it. "Be careful." And my husband has to
answer, "Don't worry." He starts the engine, puts a Haydn or a Mozart
tape into the car stereo, and hums along with the
music. My two "men" always wave to me on the way out.
Their hands move in exactly
the same way. It's almost uncanny. They lean their heads at
exactly the same angle and turn their palms toward me, moving them slightly
from side to side in exactly the same
way, as if they' d been trained by a choreographer.
I have my own car, a
used Honda Civic. A girlfriend sold it to me two years ago for
next to nothing. One bumper is smashed in, and the body style is
old-fashioned, with
rust spots showing up. The odometer has over 150,000 kilometers
on it. Sometimes — once or twice a month — the car is almost impossible to
start. The engine simply won't
catch. Still, it's not bad enough to have the thing fixed. If
you baby it and let it rest for ten minutes or so, the engine will start up
with a nice, solid vroom. Oh, well, everything —
everybody — gets out of whack once or twice a month. That's
life. My husband calls my car "your donkey." I don't care. It's mine.
I drive my Civic to
the supermarket. After marketing, I clean the house and do the
laundry. Then I fix lunch. I make a point of performing my
morning chores with brisk,
efficient movements. If possible, I like to finish my dinner
preparations in the morning,
too. Then the afternoon is all mine.
My husband comes home
for lunch. He doesn't like to eat out. He says the
restaurants are too crowded, the food is no good, and the smell
of tobacco smoke gets
into his clothes. He prefers eating at home, even with the extra
travel time involved. Still, I don't make anything fancy for lunch. I warm up leftovers
in the microwave or boil a pot of noodles. So the actual time involved is
minimal. And of course it's more fun to eat
with my husband than all alone with no one to talk to.
Before, when the clinic was just getting
started, there would often be no patient in the first afternoon slot, so the
two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the
loveliest times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft
afternoon sunshine would filter into the room. We were a lot younger then, and
happier.
We're still happy, of
course. I really do think so. No domestic troubles cast shadows on our home. I
love him and trust him. And I'm sure he feels the same about me. But
little by little, as the months and years go by, your life
changes. That's just how it is.
There's nothing you can do about it. Now all the afternoon slots
are taken. When we
finish eating, my husband brushes his teeth, hurries out to his car,
and goes back to the office. He's got all those sick teeth waiting for him. But
that's all right. We both know you can't have everything your own way.
After my husband goes
back to the ofifice, I take a bathing suit and towel and drive
to the neighborhood athletic club. I swim for half an hour. I
swim hard. I’m not that crazy about the swimming itself: I just want to keep
the flab off. I’ve always liked my own
figure. Actually, I've never liked my face. It's not bad, but I’ve
never really liked it. My
body is another matter. I like to stand naked in front of the
mirror. I like to study the soft outlines I see there, the balanced vitality. I’m
not sure what it is, but I get the feeling that something inside there is very
important to me. Whatever it is, I don't want to lose it.
I’m thirty. When you
reach thirty, you realize it's not the end of the world. I’m not
especially happy about getting older, but it does make some
things easier. It's a
question of attitude. One thing I know for sure, though: If a
thirty-year-old woman loves her body and is serious about keeping it looking
the way it should, she has to put in a
certain amount of effort. I learned that from my mother. She
used to be a slim, lovely
woman, but not anymore. I don't want the same thing to happen to
me.
After I've had my
swim, I use the rest of my afternoon in various ways. Sometimes
I'll wander over to the station plaza and window-shop. Sometimes
I'll go home, curl up
on the sofa, and read a book or listen to the FM station or just
rest. Eventually, my son
comes home from school. I help him change into his play clothes,
and give him a snack. When he's through eating, he goes out to play with his
friends. He's too young to go to
an afternoon cram school, and we aren't making him take piano lessons
or anything.
"Let him play," says my husband. "Let him grow up
naturally." When my son leaves the house, I have the same little dialogue
with him as I do with my husband. "Be careful," I
say, and he answers, "Don't worry."
As evening
approaches, I begin preparing dinner. My son is always back by six. He watches cartoons
on TV If no emergency patients show up, my husband is home before seven. He
doesn't drink a drop and he's not fond of pointless socializing. He almost
always comes straight home from work.
The three of us talk
during dinner, mostly about what we've done that day. My son
always has the most to say. Everything that happens in his life
is fresh and full of
mystery. He talks, and we offer our comments. After dinner, he
does what he likes —
watches television or reads or plays some kind of game with my
husband. When he has homework, he shuts himself up in his room and does it. He
goes to bed at 8:30. 1 tuck
him in and stroke his hair and say good night to him and turn
off the light.
Then it's husband and
wife together. He sits on the sofa, reading the newspaper and talking to me now
and then about his patients or something in the paper. Then he
listens to Haydn or Mozart. I don't mind listening to music, but
I can never seem to tell
the difference between those two composers. They sound the same
to me. When I say
that to my husband, he tells me it doesn't matter. "It's
all beautiful. That' s what counts."
"Just like
you," I say.
"Just like
me," he answers with a big smile. He seems genuinely pleased.
So that’s my life or my life before I stopped sleeping — each
day pretty much a
repetition of the one before. I used to keep a diary, but if I
forgot for two or three days,
I'd lose track of what had happened on which day. Yesterday
could have been the day
before yesterday, or vice versa. I'd sometimes wonder what kind
of life this was. Which
is not to say that I found it empty. I was — very simply —
amazed. At the lack of
demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of
such a life, a life that had
swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints
were being blown away
before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.
Whenever I felt like
that, I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror — just look
at it for fifteen minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I'd
stare at my face purely as a
physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest
of me, becoming just
some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself.
And a realization would
come to me: This is happening here and now. It's got nothing to
do with footprints.
Reality and I exist simultaneously at this present moment.
That's the most important
thing.
But now I can't sleep
anymore. When I stopped sleeping, I stopped keeping a diary.
I remember with perfect clarity that first night I lost the
ability to sleep. I was having a
repulsive dream — a dark, slimy dream. I don't remember what it
was about, but I do
remember how it felt: ominous and terrifying. I woke at the
climactic moment — came
fully awake with a start, as if something had dragged me back at
the last moment from a fatal turning point. Had I remained immersed in the
dream for another second, I would
have been lost forever. After I awoke, my breath came in painful
gasps for a time. My
arms and legs felt paralyzed. I lay there immobilized, listening
to my own labored
breathing, as if I were stretched out full-length on the floor
of a huge cavern.
"It was a
dream," I told myself, and I waited for my breathing to calm down. Lying
stiff on my back, I felt my heart working violently, my lungs hurrying the
blood to it with big,
slow, bellowslike contractions. I began to wonder what time it
could be. I wanted to look at the clock by my pillow, but I couldn't turn my
head far enough. Just then, I seemed to catch a glimpse of something at the
foot of the bed, something like a vague, black
shadow. I caught my breath. My heart, my lungs, everything inside
me, seemed to
freeze in that instant. I strained to see the black shadow.
The moment I tried to
focus on it, the shadow began to assume a definite shape, as
if it had been waiting for me to notice it. Its outline became
distinct, and began to be
filled with substance, and then with details. It was a gaunt old
man wearing a skintight
black shirt. His hair was gray and short, his cheeks sunken. He
stood at my feet, perfectly still. He said nothing, but his piercing eyes
stared at me. They were huge eyes, and I could see the red network of veins in
them. The old man's face wore no expression at
all. It told me nothing. It was like an opening in the darkness.
This was no longer
the dream, I knew. From that I had already awakened. And not
just by drifting awake, but by having my eyes ripped open. No,
this was no dream. This was reality. And in reality an old man I had never seen
before was standing at the foot
of my bed. I had to do something — turn on the light, wake my
husband, scream. I tried to move. I fought to make my limbs work, but it did no
good. I couldn't move a finger.
When it became clear to me that I would never be able to move, I
was filled with a
hopeless terror, a primal fear such as I had never experienced
before, like a chill that
rises silently from the bottomless well of memory. I tried to
scream, but I was incapable of producing a sound or even moving my tongue. All
I could do was look at the old man.
Now I saw that he was
holding something — a tali, narrow, rounded thing that shone white. As I stared
at this object, wondering what it could be, it began to take on a
definite shape, just as the shadow had earlier. It was a
pitcher, an old-fashioned
porcelain pitcher. After some time, the man raised the pitcher
and began pouring water
from it onto my feet. I could not feel the water. I could see it
and hear it splashing down onto my feet, but I couldn't feel a thing.
The old man went on
and on pouring water over my feet. Strange — no matter how much he poured, the
pitcher never ran dry I began to worry that my feet would
eventually rot and melt away. Yes, of course they would rot.
What else could they do
with so much water pouring over them? When it occurred to me
that my feet were going to rot and melt away, I couldn't take it any longer.
I closed my eyes and
let out a scream so loud it took every ounce of strength I had. But it never
left my body. It reverberated soundlessly inside, tearing through me,
shutting down my heart. Everything inside my head turned white for
a moment as the
scream penetrated my every cell. Something inside me died.
Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash
incinerated everything my
existence depended on.
When I opened my
eyes, the old man was gone. The pitcher was gone. The
bedspread was dry, and there was no indication that anything
near my feet had been
wet. My body, though, was soaked with sweat, a horrifying volume
of sweat, more
sweat than I ever imagined a human being could produce. And yet,
undeniably, it was
sweat that had come from me.
I moved one finger.
Then another, and another, and the rest. Next, I bent my arms
and then my legs. I rotated my feet and bent my knees. Nothing
moved quite as it
should have, but at least it did move. After carefully checking
to see that all my body
parts were working, I eased myself into a sitting position. In
the dim light filtering in from the streetlamp, I scanned the entire room from
corner to corner. The old man was
definitely not there.
The clock by my
pillow said 12:30. I had been sleeping for only an hour and a half.
My husband was sound asleep in his bed. Even his breathing was
inaudible. He always sleeps like that, as if all mental activity in him had
been obliterated. Almost nothing can wake him.
I got out of bed and
went into the bathroom. I threw my sweat- soaked nightgown
into the washing machine and took a shower. After putting on a
fresh pair of pajamas, I went to the living room, switched on the floor lamp
beside the sofa, and sat there
drinking a full glass of brandy. I almost never drink. Not that
I have a physical
incompatibility with alcohol, as my husband does. In fact, I used
to drink quite a lot, but after marrying him I simply stopped. Sometimes when I
had trouble sleeping I would
take a sip of brandy, but that night I felt I wanted a whole
glass to quiet my
overwrought nerves.
The only alcohol in
the house was a bottle of Remy Martin we kept in the sideboard. It had been a gift.
I don't even remember who gave it to us, it was so long ago. The
bottle wore a thin layer of dust. We had no real brandy glasses,
so I just poured it into a regular tumbler and sipped it slowly.
I must have been in a
trance, I thought. I had never experienced such a thing, but I
had heard about trances from a college friend who had been
through one. Everything
was incredibly clear, she had said. You can't believe it's a
dream. 'I didn't believe it was a dream when it was happening, and now I still
don't believe it was a dream." Which is
exactly how I felt. Of course it had to be a dream — a kind of
dream that doesn't feel like a dream.
Though the terror was
leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like the
circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight
quivering. The scream had done it. That scream that had never
found a voice was still
locked up in my body, making it tremble.
I closed my eyes and
swallowed another mouthflul of brandy. The warmth spread
from my throat to my stomach. The sensation felt tremendously real.
With a start, I thought
of my son. Again my heart began pounding. I hurried from the sofa to his room.
He was sound asleep, one hand across his mouth, the other thrust out to the
side, looking just as secure and peaceful in sleep as my husband. I
straightened his blanket. Whatever it was that had so violently shattered my
sleep, it had attacked
only me. Neither of them had felt a thing.
I returned to the
living room and wandered about there. I was not the least bit sleepy.
I considered drinking
another glass of brandy. In fact, I wanted to drink even more
alcohol than that. I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my
nerves down more, and
to feel that strong, penetrating bouquet in my mouth again.
After some hesitation, I
decided against it. I didn't want to start the new day drunk. I
put the brandy back in the
sideboard, brought the glass to the kitchen sink and washed it.
I found some
strawberries in the refrigerator and ate them.
I realized that the
trembling in my skin was almost gone.
What was that old man
in black? I asked myself. I had never seen him before in my
life. That black clothing of his was so strange, like a
tight-fitting sweat suit, and yet, at
the same time, old-fashioned. I had never seen anything like it.
And those eyes — bloodshot, and never blinking. Who was he? Why did he pour
water onto my feet? Why did
he have to do such a thing?
I had only questions,
no answers.
The time my friend
went into a trance, she was spending the night at her fiance's
house. As she lay in bed asleep, an angry-looking man in his
early fifties approached
and ordered her out of the house. While that was happening, she
couldn't move a
muscle. And, like me, she became soaked with sweat. She was
certain it must be the
ghost of her fiance's father, who was telling her to get out of
his house. But when she
asked to see a photograph of the father the next day, it turned
out to be an entirely
different man. 'T must have been feeling tense," she
concluded. "That' s what caused
it."
But I'm not
tense. And this is my own house. There shouldn't be anything here to
threaten me. Why did I have to go into a trance?
I shook my head. Stop
thinking, I told myself. It won't do any good. I had a realistic
dream, nothing more. I’ve probably been building up some kind of
fatigue. The tennis I played the day before yesterday must have done it. I met
a friend at the club after my
swim and she invited me to play tennis and I overdid it a
little, that' s all. Sure — my
arms and legs felt tired and heavy for a while afterward.
When I finished my
strawberries, I stretched out on the sofa and tried closing my
eyes.
I wasn't sleepy at
all. Oh, great, I thought. I really don't feel like sleeping.
I thought I'd read a
book until I got tired again. I went to the bedroom and picked a
novel from the bookcase. My husband didn't even twitch when I
turned on the light to
hunt for it. I chose Anna Karenina. I was in the mood for a long
Russian novel, and I had read Anna Karenina only once, long ago, probably in
high school. I remembered just a
few things about it: the first line, "All happy families
resemble one another; every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and the
heroine's throwing herself under a
train at the end. And that early on there was a hint of the
final suicide. Wasn't there a
scene at a racetrack? Or was that in another novel?
Whatever. I went back
to the sofa and opened the book. How many years had it
been since I'd sat down and relaxed like this with a book? True,
I often spent half an
hour or an hour of my private time in the afternoon with a book
open. But you couldn't
really call that reading. I'd always find myself thinking about
other things — my son, or
shopping, or the freezer's needing to be fixed, or my having to find
something to wear to a relative's wedding, or the stomach operation my father
had last month. That kind of
stuff would drift into my mind, and then it would grow and take
off in a million different
directions. After a while I'd notice that the only thing that
had gone by was the time, and I had hardly turned any pages.
Without noticing it,
I had become accustomed in this way to a life without books. How strange, now
that I think of it. Reading had been the center of my life when I was young. I
had read every book in the grade-school library, and almost my entire allowance
would go for books. I'd even scrimp on lunches to buy books I wanted to read.
And this went
on into junior high and high school. Nobody read as much as I
did. I was the third of five children, and both my parents worked, so nobody
paid much attention to me. I could
read alone as much as I liked. I'd always enter the essay
contests on books so that I
could win a gift certificate for more books. And I usually won.
In college, I majored in
English literature and got good grades. My graduation thesis on
Katherine Mansfield
won top honors, and my thesis adviser urged me to apply to
graduate school. I wanted
to go out into the world, though, and I knew that I was no
scholar. I just enjoyed reading books. And even if I had wanted to go on studying,
my family didn't have the financial
wherewithal to send me to graduate school. We weren't poor by
any means, but there
were two sisters coming along after me, so once I graduated from
college I simply had
to begin supporting myself.
When had I really
read a book last? And what had it been? I couldn't recall anything. Why did a person'
s life have to change so completely? Where had the old me gone, the one who
used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days — and that
almost abnormally intense passion — meant to me?
That night, I found myself capable of reading Anna Karenina
with unbroken
concentration. I went on turning pages without another thought
in mind. In one sitting, I
read as far as the scene where Anna and Vronsky flrst see each
other in the Moscow
train station. At that point, I stuck my bookmark in and poured
myself another glass of
brandy.
Though it hadn't
occurred to me before, I couldn't help thinking what an odd novel
this was. You don't see the heroine, Anna, until Chapter 18. I
wondered if it didn't seem unusual to readers in Tolstoy's day. What did they
do when the book went on and on
with a detailed description of the life of a minor character
named Oblonsky — just sit
there, waiting for the beautiful heroine to appear? Maybe that
was it. Maybe people in
those days had lots of time to kill — at least the part of
society that read novels.
Then I noticed how
late it was. Three in the morning! And still I wasn't sleepy.
What should I do? I
don't feel sleepy at all, I thought. I could just keep on reading. I'd love to
find out what happens in the story. But I have to sleep.
I remembered my
ordeal with insomnia and how I had gone through each day back
then, wrapped in a cloud. No, never again. I was still a student
in those days. It was still possible for me to get away with something like
that. But not now, I thought. Now I’m a wife. A mother. I have
responsibilities. I have to make my husband's lunches and take
care of my son.
But even if I get
into bed now, I know I won' t be able to sleep a wink.
I shook my head.
Let's face it, I'm just
not sleepy, I told myself And I want to read the rest of the book.
I sighed and stole a
glance at the big volume lying on the table. And that was that. I
plunged into Anna Karenina and kept reading until the sun came
up. Anna and Vronsky stared at each other at the ball and fell into their
doomed love. Anna went to pieces
when Vronsky's horse fell at the racetrack (so there was a
racetrack scene, after all!)
and confessed her infidelity to her husband. I was there with
Vronsky when he spurred his horse over the obstacles. I heard the crowd
cheering him on. And I was there in the stands watching his horse go down. When
the window brightened with the morning
light, I laid down the book and went to the kitchen for a cup of
coffee. My mind was filled with scenes from the novel and with a tremendous
hunger obliterating any other
thoughts. I cut two slices of bread, spread them with butter and
mustard, and had a
cheese sandwich. My hunger pangs were almost unbearable. It was
rare for me to feel
that hungry. I had trouble breathing, I was so hungry. One sandwich
did hardly anything for me, so I made another one and had another cup of coffee
with it.
To mu husband I said nothing about either my trance or my night
without sleep. Not that I was hiding them from him It just seemed to me that
there was no point in telling him.
What good would it have done? And besides, I had simply missed a
night' s sleep. That much happens to everyone now and then.
I made my husband his
usual cup of coffee and gave my son a glass of warm milk. My husband ate toast,
and my son ate a bowl of cornflakes. My husband skimmed the morning paper, and
my son hummed a new song he had learned in school. The two of
them got into the Sentra and left. "Be careful," I
said to my husband. "Don't worry," he
answered. The two of them waved. A typical morning.
After they were gone, I sat on the sofa and
thought about how to spend the rest of
the day. What should I do? What did I have to do? I went to the
kitchen to inspect the
contents of the refrigerator. I could get by without shopping.
We had bread, milk, and
eggs, and there was meat in the freezer. Plenty of vegetables,
too. Everything I'd need
through tomorrow's lunch.
I had business at the
bank, but it was nothing I absolutely had to take care of
immediately. Letting it go a day longer wouldn't hurt.
I went back to the
sofa and started reading the rest of Anna Karenina. Until that
reading, I hadn't realized how little I remembered of what goes
on in the book. I
recognized virtually nothing — the characters, the scenes,
nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new book. How strange. I must
have been deeply moved at the
time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my
noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away
and vanished.
What, then, of the
enormous fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that
meant?
I stopped reading and
thought about that for a while. None of it made sense to me,
though, and soon I even lost track of what I was thinking about.
I caught myself staring at the tree that stood outside the window. I shook my
head and went back to the book.
Just after the middle
of Volume 3, I found a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck
between the pages. I must have been eating chocolate as I read
the novel when I was
in high school. I used to like to eat and read. Come to think of
it, I hadn't touched
chocolate since my marriage. My husband doesn't like me to eat
sweets, and we almost never give them to our son. We don't usually keep that kind
of thing around the house.
As I looked at the
whitened flakes of chocolate from over a decade ago, I felt a
tremendous urge to have the real thing. I wanted to eat
chocolate while reading Anna
Karenina,
the way I did back then. I couldn't bear to be denied it for another moment.
Every cell in my body seemed to be panting with this hunger for
chocolate.
I slipped a cardigan
over my shoulders and took the elevator down. I walked straight to the neighborhood
candy shop and bought two of the sweetest-looking milk-chocolate bars they had.
As soon as I left the shop, I tore one open and started eating it while
walking home. The luscious taste of milk chocolate spread
through my mouth. I could
feel the sweetness being absorbed directly into every part of my
body I continued eating in the elevator, steeping myself in the wonderful aroma
that filled the tiny space.
Heading straight for
the sofa, I started roading Anna Karenina and eating my
chocolate. I wasn't the least bit sleepy. I felt no physical
fatigue, either. I could have
gone on reading forever. When I fmished the first chocolate bar,
I opened the second
and ate half of that. About two thirds of the way through Volume
3, 1 looked at my
watch. Eleven-forty.
Eleven-forty!
My husband would be
home soon. I closed the book and hurried to the kitchen. I put water in a pot and
turned on the gas. Then I minced some scallions and took out a
handful of buckwheat noodles for boiling. While the water was
heating, I soaked some
dried seaweed, cut it up, and topped it with a vinegar dressing.
I took a block of tofu
from the refrigerator and cut it into cubes. Finally, I went
into the bathroom and brushed my teeth to get rid of the chocolate smell.
At almost the exact
moment the water came to a boil, my husband walked in. He had finished work a
little earlier than usual, he said.
Together, we ate the
buckwheat noodles. My husband talked about a new piece of
dental equipment he was considering bringing into the office, a
machine that would
remove plaque from patients' teeth far more thoroughly than
anything he had used
before, and in less time. Like all such equipment, it was quite
expensive, but it would
pay for itself soon enough. More and more patients were coming
in just for a cleaning
these days.
"What do you
think?" he asked me.
I didn't want to
think about plaque on people's teeth, and I especially didn't want to
hear or think about it while I was eating. My mind was filled
with hazy images of Vronsky falling off his horse. But of course I couldn't
tell my husband that. He was deadly serious about the equipment. I asked him
the price and pretended to think about it. "Why not
buy it if you need it?" I said. "The money will work out
one way or another. You wouldn't be spending it for fun, after all."
"That's
true," he said. "I wouldn't be spending it for fun." Then he
continued eating
his noodles in silence.
Perched on a branch
of the tree outside the window, a pair of large birds was
chirping. I watched them half-consciously. I wasn't sleepy. I
wasn't the least bit sleepy. Why not?
While I cleared the
table, my husband sat on the sofa reading the paper. Anna
Karenina
lay there beside him, but he didn't seem to notice. He had no interest in
whether I read books.
After I finished
washing the dishes, my husband said, "I've got a nice surprise today. What
do you think it is?"
'I don't know,"
I said.
"My first
afternoon patient has canceled. I don't have to be back in the office until
one-thirty." He smiled.
I couldn't figure out
why this was supposed to be such a nice surprise. I wonder why I couldn't.
It was only after my
husband stood up and drew me toward the bedroom that I
realized what he had in mind. I wasn't in the mood for it at
all. I didn't understand why I
should have sex then. All I wanted was to get back to my book. I
wanted to stretch out
alone on the sofa and munch on chocolate while I turned the
pages of Anna Karenina.
All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had
been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his
characters so skillfully. He
described them with wonderful precision. But that very precision
somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally —
I closed my eyes and
pressed my fingertips to my temple.
"I’m sorry. I’ve
had a kind of headache all day. What awful timing."
I had often had some
truly terrible headaches, so he accepted my explanation
without a murmur.
"You'd better
lie down and get some rest," he said. "You've been working too
hard."
"It's really not
that bad," I said.
He relaxed on the
sofa until one o'clock, listening to music and reading the paper.
And he talked about dental equipment again. You bought the
latest high-tech stuff and it was obsolete in two or three years. . .. So then
you had to keep replacing everything. ... The only ones who made any money were
the equipment manufacturers — that kind of talk. I offered a few clucks, but I
was hardly listening.
After my husband went
back to the office, I folded the paper and pounded the sofa
cushions until they were puffed up again. Then I leaned on the
windowsill, surveying the room. I couldn't figure out what was happening. Why
wasn't I sleepy? In the old days, I had done all-nighters any number of times,
but I had never stayed awake this long.
Ordinarily, I would have been sound asleep after so many hours
or, if not asleep,
impossibly tired. But I wasn't the least bit sleepy. My mind was
perfectly clear.
I went into the
kitchen and warmed up some coffee. I thought, Now what should I
do? Of course, I wanted to read the rest of Anna Karenina,
but I also wanted to go to
the pool for my swim. I decided to go swimming. I don't know how
to explain this, but I
wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the
limit. Purge it — of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of
what?
I didn't know.
But this thing,
whatever it was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body
like a certain kind of potential. I wanted to give it a name,
but the word refused to come
to mind. I’m terrible at finding the right words for things. I’m
sure Tolstoy would have
been able to come up with exactly the right word.
Anyhow, I put my swimsuit in my bag and, as
always, drove my Civic to the athletic
club. There were only two other people in the pool — a young man
and a middle-aged woman — and I didn't know either of them. A bored-looking
lifeguard was on duty.
I changed into my
bathing suit, put on my goggles, and swam my usual thirty
minutes. But thirty minutes wasn't enough. I swam another
fifteen minutes, ending with a crawl at maximum speed for two full lengths. I
was out of breath, but I still felt nothing but energy welling up inside my
body. The others were staring at me when I left the
pool.
It was still a little
before three o'clock, so I drove to the bank and finished my
business there. I considered doing some shopping at the
supermarket, but I decided
instead to head straight for home. There, I picked up Anna
Karenina where I had left off, eating what was left of the chocolate. When my
son came home at four o'clock, I gave
him a glass of juice and some fruit gelatin that I had made. Then
I started on dinner. I
defrosted some meat from the freezer and cut up some vegetables
in preparation for
stir-frying. I made miso soup and cooked the rice. All of these
tasks I took care of with
tremendous mechanical efficiency.
I went back to Anna
Karenina.
I was not tired.
At ten o’clock, I got into my bed, pretending that I would be
sleeping there near my
husband. He fell asleep right away, practically the moment the
light went out, as if there were some cord connecting the lamp with his brain.
Amazing. People like
that are rare. There are far more people who have trouble
falling asleep. My father was one of those. He'd always complain
about how shallow his sleep was. Not only did he find it hard to get to sleep,
but the slightest sound or
movement would wake him up for the rest of the night.
Not my husband,
though. Once he was asleep, nothing could wake him until
morning. We were still newlyweds when it struck me how odd this
was. I even
experimented to see what it would take to wake him. I sprinkled
water on his face and
tickled his nose with a brush — that kind of thing. I never once
got him to wake up. If I
kept at it, I could get him to groan once, but that was all. And
he never dreamed. At
least he never remembered what his dreams were about. Needless
to say, he never
went into any paralytic trances. He slept. He slept like a
turtle buried in mud.
Amazing. But it
helped with what quickly became my nightly routine.
After ten minutes of
lying near him, I would get out of bed. I would go to the living
room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy.
Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and
letting the smooth liquid glide
over my tongue. Whenever I felt like it, I would eat a cookie or
a piece of chocolate that I had hidden in the sideboard. After a while, morning
would come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of
coffee. Then I would make a sandwich and eat it.
My days became just
as regulated.
I would hurry through
my housework and spend the rest of the morning reading. Just before noon, I would
put my book down and fix my husband's lunch. When he left,
before one, I'd drive to the club and have my swim I would swim
for a full hour. Once I
stopped sleeping, thirty minutes was never enough. While I was
in the water, I
concentrated my entire mind on swimming. I thought about nothing
but how to move my body most effectively, and I inhaled and exhaled with
perfect regularity. If I met
someone I knew, I hardly said a word — just the basic
civilities. I refused all invitations.
"Sorry," I'd say. "I'm going straight home today.
There's something I have to do." I didn't want to get involved with
anybody. I didn't want to have to waste time on endless
gossiping. When I was through swimming as hard as I could, all I
wanted was to hurry
home and read.
I went through the
motions — shopping, cooking, playing with my son, having sex
with my husband. It was easy once I got the hang of it. All I
had to do was break the
connection between my mind and my body. While my body went about
its business, my mind floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a
thought in my head,
feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband.
After I gave up
sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it
is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a
home. Like running a simple
machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of
repetition. You push this button
and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the
timer. The same thing,
over and over.
Of course, there were
variations now and then. My mother-in-law had dinner with us. On Sunday, the
three of us went to the zoo. My son had a terrible case of diarrhea.
But none of these events
had any effect on my being. They swept past me like a
silent breeze. I chatted with my mother-in-law, made dinner for
four, took a picture in
front of the bear cage, put a hot-water bottle on my son' s
stomach and gave him his
medicine.
No one noticed that I
had changed — that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my
time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years — and
hundreds of miles — from reality. No matter how mechanically I
worked, no matter how
little love or emotion I invested in my handling of reality, my
husband and my son and
my mother-in-law went on relating to me as they always had. If anything,
they seemed more at ease with me than before.
And so a week went
by.
Once my constant
wakefulness entered its second week, though, it started to worry me. It was simply
not normal. People are supposed to sleep. All people sleep. Once,
some years ago, I had read about a form of torture in which the
victim is prevented from sleeping. Something the Nazis did, I think. They' d
lock the person in a tiny room, fasten his eyelids open, and keep shining
lights in his face and making loud noises without a
break. Eventually, the person would go mad and die.
I couldn't recall how
long the article said it took for the madness to set in, but it
couldn't have been much more than three or four days. In my
case, a whole week had
gone by. This was simply too much. Still, my health was not
suffering. Far from it. I had more energy than ever.
One day, after
showering, I stood naked in front of the mirror. I was amazed to
discover that my body appeared to be almost bursting with
vitality. I studied every inch
of myself, head to toe, but I could fmd not the slightest hint
of excess flesh, not one
wrinkle. I no longer had the body of a young girl, of course,
but my skin had far more
glow, far more tautness, than it had before. I took a pinch of flesh
near my waist and
found it almost hard, with a wonderful elasticity.
It dawned on me that
I was prettier than I had realized. I looked so much younger
than before that it was almost shocking. I could probably pass
for twenty-four. My skin
was smooth. My eyes were bright, lips moist. The shadowed area
beneath my
protruding cheekbones (the one feature I really hated about
myself) was no longer
noticeable — at all. I sat down and looked at my face in the
mirror for a good thirty
minutes. I studied it from all angles, objectively. No, I had
not been mistaken: I was
really pretty.
What was happening to
me?
I thought about
seeing a doctor.
I had a doctor who
had been taking care of me since I was a child and to whom I felt close, but
the more I thought about how he might react to my story the less inclined I
felt to tell it to him Would he take me at my word? He'd probably think I was
crazy if I said I hadn't slept in a week. Or he might dismiss it as a kind of
neurotic insomnia. But if he
did believe I was telling the truth, he might send me to some
big research hospital for
testing.
And then what would
happen?
I'd be locked up and
sent from one lab to another to be experimented on. They' d do EEGs and EKGs
and urinalyses and blood tests and psychological screening and who
knows what else.
I couldn't take that.
I just wanted to stay by myself and quietly read my book. I
wanted to have my hour of swimming every day. I wanted my
freedom: That' s what I
wanted more than anything. I didn't want to go to any hospitals.
And, even if they did get me into a hospital, what would they find?
They'd do a mountain of tests and formulate a mountain of hypotheses, and that
would be the end of it. I didn't want to be locked up in a place like that.
One afternoon, I went
to the library and read some books on sleep. The few books
I could find didn't tell me much. In fact, they all had only one
thing to say: that sleep is
rest. Like turning off a car engine. If you keep a motor running
constantly, sooner or
later it will break down. A running engine must produce heat,
and the accumulated heat fatigues the machinery itself. Which is why you have
to let the engine rest. Cool down.
Turning off the engine — that, finally, is what sleep is. In a
human being, sleep provides rest for both the flesh and the spirit. When a
person lies down and rests her muscles,
she simultaneously closes her eyes and cuts off the thought
process. And excess
thoughts release an electrical discharge in the form of dreams.
One book did have a
fascinating point to make. The author maintained that human
beings, by their very nature, are incapable of escaping from
certain fixed idiosyncratic
tendencies, both in their thought processes and in their
physical movements. People
unconsciously fashion their own action- and thought-tendencies,
which under normal
circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in
the prison cells of their
own tendencies. What modulates these tendencies and keeps them
in check — so the organism doesn't wear down as the heel of a shoe does, at a
particular angle, as the
author puts it — is nothing other than sleep. Sleep
therapeutically counteracts the
tendencies. In sleep, people naturally relax muscles that have
been consistently used in only one direction; sleep both calms and provides a
discharge for thought circuits that
have likewise been used in only one direction. This is how
people are cooled down.
Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with karmic inevitability,
into the human
system, and no one can diverge from it. If a person were to diverge
from it, the person's very "ground of being" would be threatened.
"Tendencies?"
I asked myself.
The only
"tendency" of mine that I could think of was housework — those chores
I
perform day after day like an unfeeling machine. Cooking and
shopping and laundry
and mothering: What were they if not "tendencies"? I
could do them with my eyes
closed. Push the buttons. Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just
flows off and away.
The same physical movements over and over. Tendencies. They were
consuming me, wearing me down on one side like the heel of a shoe. I needed
sleep every day to
adjust them and cool me down.
Was that it?
I read the passage
once more, with intense concentration. And I nodded. Yes,
almost certainly, that was it.
So, then, what was
this life of mine? I was being consumed by my tendencies and
then sleeping to repair the damage. My life was nothing but a
repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere.
Sitting at the
library table, I shook my head.
I'm through with
sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my "ground of being"? I
will not be consumed by my "tendencies." If sleep is nothing more
than a periodic
repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don't
want it anymore. I don't
need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind
belongs to me. I’m
keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don't
want to be "repaired." I will not sleep.
I left the library
filled with a new determination.
Now my inability to sleep ceased to frighten me. What was there
to be afraid of? Think
of the advantages! Now the hours from ten at night to six in the
morning belonged to me alone. Until now, a third of every day had been used up
by sleep. But no more. No
more. Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else's, all mine. I
could use this time in any
way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands
on me. Yes,
that was it. I had expanded my life. I had increased it by a
third.
You are probably going
to tell me that this is biologically abnormal. And you may be
right. And maybe someday in the future I’ll have to pay back the
debt I’m building up by continuing to do this biologically abnormal thing.
Maybe life will try to collect on the
expanded part — this "advance" it is paying me now.
This is a groundless hypothesis,
but there is no ground for negating it, and it feels right to me
somehow. Which means
that in the end, the balance sheet of borrowed time will even
out.
Honestly, though, I
didn't give a damn, even if I had to die young. The best thing to
do with a hypothesis is to let it run any course it pleases.
Now, at least, I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful. My hands weren't
empty anymore. Here I was — alive,
and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn't being consumed any
longer. Or at least there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed,
and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life
without that feeling night go on forever, but it would have no meaning at all.
I saw that with absolute clarity now.
After checking to see
that my husband was asleep, I would go sit on the living-room sofa, drink brandy
by myself, and open my book. I read Anna Karenina three times.
Each time, I made new discoveries. This enormous novel was full
of revelations and
riddles. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained
smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds
made up a single universe, and
the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.
The old me had
been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it, but the
gaze of this new me
could penetrate to the core with perfect understanding. I knew
exactly what the great
Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted the reader to get from his
book; I could see how his message had organically crystallized as a novel, and
what in that novel had
surpassed the author himself.
No matter how hard I
concentrated, I never tired. After reading Anna Karenina as
many times as I could, I read Dostoyevski. I could read book
after book with utter
concentration and never tire. I could understand the most
difficult passages without
effort. And I responded with deep emotion.
I felt that I had
always been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had
expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important
thing. Living
without this power would be like opening one 's eyes without
seeing anything.
Eventually, my bottle
of brandy ran out. I had drunk almost all of it by myself. I went
to the gourmet department of a big store for another bottle of
Remy Martin. As long as I was there, I figured, I might as well buy a bottle of
red wine, too. And a fine crystal
brandy glass. And chocolate and cookies.
Sometimes while
reading I would become overexcited. When that happened, I would put my book down
and exercise — do calisthenics or just walk around the room.
Depending on my mood, I might go out for a nighttime drive. I'd
change clothes, get into my Civic, and drive aimlessly around the neighborhood.
Sometimes I'd drop into an
all-night fast-food place for a cup of coffee, but it was such a
bother to have to deal with other people that I'd usually stay in the car. I'd
stop in some safe-looking spot and just
let my mind wander. Or I'd go all the way to the harbor and
watch the boats.
One time, though, I
was questioned by a policeman. It was two-thirty in the morning, and I was parked
under a streetlamp near the pier, listening to the car stereo and
watching the lights of the ships passing by. He knocked on my
window. I lowered the
glass. He was young and handsome, and very polite. I explained
to him that I couldn't
sleep. He asked for my license and studied it for a while. "There
was a murder here last month," he said. "Three young men attacked a
couple. They killed the man and raped
the woman." I remembered having read about the incident. I
nodded. "If you don't have any business here, ma'am, you' d better not
hang around here at night." I thanked him
and said I would leave. He gave me my license back. I drove
away.
That was the only
time anyone talked to me. Usually, I would drift through the streets at night
for an hour or more and no one would bother me. Then I would park in our
underground garage. Right next to my husband's white Sentra; he
was upstairs sleeping soundly in the darkness. I'd listen to the crackle of the
hot engine cooling down, and
when the sound died I'd go upstairs.
The first thing I
would do when I got inside was check to make sure my husband was asleep. And he
always was. Then I'd check my son, who was always sound asleep, too. They
didn't know a thing. They believed that the world was as it had always been,
unchanging. But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they
could never guess.
Changing a lot. Changing fast. It would never be the same again.
One time, I stood and
stared at my sleeping husband's face. I had heard a thump in
the bedroom and rushed in. The alarm clock was on the floor. He
had probably knocked it down in his sleep. But he was sleeping as soundly as
ever, completely unaware of
what he had done. What would it take to wake this man? I picked
up the clock and put it back on the night table. Then I folded my arms and stared
at my husband. How long
had it been — years? — since the last time I had studied his
face as he slept?
I had done it a lot
when we were first married. That was all it took to relax me and put me in a peaceful
mood. I’ll be safe as long as he goes on sleeping peacefully like this,
I'd tell myself. Which is why I spent a lot of time watching him
in his sleep.
But, somewhere along
the way, I had given up the habit. When had that been? I tried to remember. It had
probably happened back when my mother-in-law and I were sort of quarrelling
over what name to give my son. She was big on some religious cult kind of
thing, and had asked her priest to "bestow" a name on
the baby I don't remember
exactly the name she was given, but I had no intention of
letting some priest "bestow" a name on my child. We had some pretty
violent arguments at the time, but my husband
couldn't say a thing to either of us. He stood by and tried to
calm us.
After that, I lost
the feeling that my husband was my protector. The one thing I
thought I wanted from him he had failed to give me. All he had
managed to do was
make me furious. This happened a long time ago, of course. My
mother-in-law and I
have long since made up. I gave my son the name I wanted to give
him. My husband
and I made up right away, too.
I' m pretty sure that
was the end, though, of my watching him in his sleep.
So there I stood,
looking at him sleeping as soundly as always. One bare foot stuck out from
under the covers at a strange angle — so strange that the foot could have
belonged to someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My
husband's mouth hung open,
the lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils
would twitch. There was a
mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking.
There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack,
covers made of faded
human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they
mean by "dead to the
world." How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly
face! It's just too gruesome, I
thought. He couldn't have been like this in the old days. I'm
sure he must have had a
better face when we were first married, one that was taut and
alert. Even sound asleep, he couldn't have been such a blob.
I tried to remember
what his sleeping face had looked like back then, but I couldn't
do it, though I tried hard enough. Ali I could be sure of was
that he couldn 't have had
such a terrible face. Or was I just deceiving myself? Maybe he
had always looked like
this in his sleep and I had been indulging in some kind of
emotional projection. I'm sure
that' s what my mother would say. That sort of thinking was a
specialty of hers. "Ali that
lovey-dovey stuff lasts two years — three years tops," she
always used to insist. "You
were a new bride," I'm sure she would tell me now. "Of
course, your little hubby looked
like a darling in his sleep."
I'm sure she would
say something like that, but I'm just as sure she'd be wrong. He
had grown ugly over the years. The firmness had gone out of his
face. That's what
growing old is all about. He was old now, and tired. Worn out.
He'd get even uglier in the years ahead, that much was certain. And I had no
choice but to go along with it, put up with it, resign myself to it.
I let out a sigh as I
stood there watching him. It was a deep sigh, a noisy one as
sighs go, but of course he didn't move a muscle. The loudest sigh
in the world would
never wake him up.
I left the bedroom
and went back to the living room. I poured myself a brandy and
started reading. But something wouldn't let me concentrate. I
put the book down and
went to my son's room. Opening the door, I stared at his face in
the light spilling in from the hallway. He was sleeping just as soundly as my
husband was. As he always did. I
watched him in his sleep, looked at his smooth, nearly featureless
face. It was very
different from my husband's: It was still a child's face, after
all. The skin still glowed; it
still had nothing vulgar about it.
And yet, something
about my son's face annoyed me. I had never felt anything like
this about him before. What could be making me feel this way? I
stood there, looking,
with my arms folded. Yes, of course I loved my son, loved him
tremendously. But still,
undeniably, that something was bothering me, getting on my
nerves.
I shook my head.
I closed my eyes and
kept them shut. Then I opened them and looked at my son's
face again. And then it hit me. What bothered me about my son's
sleeping face was that it looked exactly like my husband's. And exactly like my
mother-in-law's. Stubborn.
Self-satisfied. It was in their blood — a kind of arrogance I
hated in my husband's family. True, my husband is good to me. He's sweet and gentle
and he's carefiil to take my
feelings into account. He's never fooled around with other
women, and he works hard.
He's serious, and he's kind to everybody. My friends all tell me
how lucky I am to have
Him. And I can't fault him, either. Which is exactly what galls
me sometimes. His very
absence of faults makes for a strange rigidity that excludes
imagination. That's what
grates on me so.
And that was exactly
the kind of expression my son had on his face as he slept.
I shook my head again. This little boy is a
stranger to me, finally. Even after he grows up, he'll never be able to
understand me, just as my husband can hardly understand
what I feel now.
I love my son, no
question. But I sensed that someday I would no longer be able to
love this boy with the same intensity. Not a very maternal
thought. Most mothers never have thoughts like that. But as I stood there
looking at him asleep, I knew with absolute certainty that one day I would come
to despise him.
The thought made me
terribly sad. I closed his door and turned out the hall light. I
went to the living-room sofa, sat down, and opened my book.
After reading a few pages, I closed it again. I looked at the clock. A little
before three.
I wondered how many
days it had been since I stopped sleeping. The sleeplessness started the Tuesday
before last. Which made this the seventeenth day. Not one wink of sleep in
seventeen days. Seventeen days and seventeen nights. A long, long time. I
couldn't even recall what sleep was like.
I closed my eyes and
tried to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside
was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: What it called to mind was
death.
Was I about to die?
And if I died now,
what would my life have amounted to?
There was no way I
could answer that.
All right, then, what
was death?
Until now, I had
conceived of sleep as a kind of model for death. I had imagined
death as an extension of sleep. A far deeper sleep than ordinary
sleep. A sleep devoid of all consciousness. Eternal rest. A total blackout.
But now I wondered if
I had been wrong. Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike
sleep, something that belonged to a different category
altogether — like the deep,
endless, wakeful darkness I was seeing now.
No, that would be too
terrible. If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then
what was going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught
with exhaustion? Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever
truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what
death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe
death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can' t tell us
that. The only way to find out what death is is to die. Death
can be anything at all.
An intense terror
overwhelmed me at the thought. A stiffening chill ran down my
spine. My eyes were still shut tight. I had lost the power to
open them. I stared at the
thick darkness that stood planted in front of me, a darkness as
deep and hopeless as
the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep
concentration, and expanding.
If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths
of the universe. But I
decided not to look. It was too soon for that.
If death was like
this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the
darkness like this, what should I do?
At last, I managed to
open my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my
glass.
I’m taking off my pajamas and putting on jeans, a T-shirt, and a
windbreaker. I tie my
hair back in a tight ponytail, tuck it under the windbreaker,
and put on a baseball cap of my husband's. In the mirror, I look like a boy.
Good. I put on sneakers and go down to
the garage.
I slip in behind the
steering wheel, turn the key, and listen to the engine hum. It
sounds normal. Hands on the wheel, I take a few deep breaths.
Then I shift into gear
and drive out of the building. The car is running better than usual.
It seems to be gliding across a sheet of ice. I ease it into higher gear, move
out of the neighborhood, and
enter the highway to Yokohama.
It's only three in
the morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means
small. Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head
east. Those guys don't
sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for
greater efficiency.
What a waste. I could
work day and night. I don't have to sleep.
This is biologically
unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They
just infer it inductively. I'm beyond that. A priori. An
evolutionary leap. A woman who
never sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.
I have to smile. A
priori. An evolutionary leap.
Listening to the car
radio, I drive to the harbor. I want classical music, but I can't find a
station that broadcasts it at night. Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs
sweet
enough to rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to
those. They make me feel I'm in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.
I pull into one of
the white-outlined spaces in the big parking lot at the waterfront park and cut
my engine. This is the brightest area of the lot, under a lamp, and wide open
all around. Only one car is parked here — an old white two-door coupe of the
kind that
young people like to drive. Probably a couple in there now,
making love — no money for a hotel room. To avoid trouble, I pull my hat low, trying
not to look like a woman. I check to see that my doors are locked.
Half-consciously, I
let my eyes wander through the surrounding darkness, when all of a sudden I remember
a drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college
freshman. We parked and got into some heavy petting. He couldn't
stop, he said, and
he begged me to let him put it in. But I refused. Hands on the
steering wheel, listening
to the music, I try to bring back the scene, but I can't recall
his face. It seems to have
happened such an incredibly long time ago.
All the memories I
have from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating
speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep
every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then
are not really mine.
This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody
notices. Only I know what
happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn't understand.
They wouldn't believe
me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no
idea what I'm feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive
worldview.
I am changing,
though. Really changing.
How long have I been
sitting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into
the sleepless darkness.
Suddenly I'm aware of
a human presence, and I come to myself again. There's somebody out there. I
open my eyes and look around. Someone is outside the car. Trying to open the
door. But the doors are locked. Dark shadows on either side of the car, one at
each door. Can't see their faces. Can't make out their clothing. Just two dark
shadows, standing there.
Sandwiched between
them, my Civic feels tiny — like a little pastry box. It's being
rocked from side to side. A fist is pounding on the right-hand
window. I know it's not a
policeman. A policeman would never pound on the glass like this
and would never
shake my car. I hold my breath. What should I do? I can't think
straight. My underarms
are soaked. I’ve got to get out of here. The key. Turn the key.
I reach out for it and turn
it to the right. The starter grinds.
The engine doesn't
catch. My hand is shaking. I close my eyes and turn the key
again. No good. A sound like fingernails clawing a giant wall.
The motor turns and turns. The men — the dark shadows — keep shaking my car.
The swings get bigger and
bigger. They' re going to tip me over!
There's something
wrong. Just calm down and think, then everything will be okay.
Think. Just think. Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong.
Something is wrong.
But what? I can't
tell. My mind is crammed tull of thick darkness. It's not taking me
anywhere. My hands are shaking. I try pulling out the key and
putting it back in again.
But my shaking hand can't find the hole. I try again and drop
the key. I curl over and try
to pick it up. But I can't get hold of it. The car is rocking
back and forth. My forehead
slams against the steering wheel.
I’ll never get the
key. I fail back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m
crying. All I can do is cry The tears keep pouring out. Locked
inside this little box, I can't go anywhere. It's the middle of the night. The
men keep rocking the car back and forth. They're going to turn it over.
6.The faLL of The Roman eMPIRe, The 1881 INDIAN uPRISInG, hitlER'S
INvAsioN OF Poland, AnD The REALm Of RAGING WINDs
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
1.THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
I first noticed the wind had begun to blow in the afternoon on
Sunday. Or more
precisely, at seven past two in the afternoon.
At the time, just
like always — just like I always do on Sunday afternoons, that is — I was
sitting at the kitchen table, listening to some innocuous music while catching
up on a week's worth of entries in my diary I make a practice of jotting down
each day's events throughout the week, then writing them up on Sunday.
I'd just finished
with the three days up through Tuesday when I became aware of the strong winds droning
past my window. I canned the diary entries, capped my pen, and went out to the
veranda to take in the laundry. The things on the line were all aflutter,
whipping out loud, dry cracks, streaming their crazed comet
tails off into space.
When I least
suspected it, the wind seemed to have picked up out of nowhere.
Hanging out the laundry on the veranda in the morning — at
eighteen past ten in the
morning, to be exact — there hadn't been the slightest whisper
of a breeze. About that my memory is as airtight as the lid on a blast furnace.
Because for a second there I'd
even thought: No need for clothespins on such a calm day.
There honest to
goodness hadn 't been a puff of air moving anywhere.
Swiftly gathering up
the laundry, I then went around shutting all the windows in the
apartment. Once the windows were closed, I could hardly hear the
wind at all. Outside
in the absence of sound, the trees — Himalayan cedars and
chestnuts, mostly —
squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch. Swatches of
cloud cover slipped across
the sky and out of sight like shifty-eyed secret agents, while on
the veranda of an
apartment across the way several shirts had wrapped themselves
around a plastic
clothesline and were clinging frantically, like abandoned
orphans.
It's really
blowing up a gale, I thought.
Upon opening the
newspaper and checking out the weather map, however, I didn't
find any sign of a typhoon. The probability of rainfall was
listed at 0%. A peaceful
Sunday afternoon like the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was
supposed to have been.
I let out a slight,
maybe 30% sigh and folded up the newspaper, tidied the laundry
away in the chest of drawers, made coffee while listening to
more of the same
innocuous music, then carried on with my diary keeping over a
hot cup.
Thursday, I slept
with my girlfriend. She likes to wear a blindfold during sex. She
always carries around a piece of cloth in her airline overnight
bag just for that purpose.
Not my thing, really,
but she looks so cute blindfolded like that, I can't very well
object. We're all human, after all, and everybody's got
something a little off somewhere.
That's pretty much what I wrote for the Thursday entry in my
diary. Eighty percent facts, 20% short comments, that's my diary policy.
Friday, I ran into an
old friend in a Ginza bookstore. He was wearing a tie with the
most ungodly pattern. Telephone numbers, a whole slew of them,
on a striped
background — I'd gotten that far when the telephone rang.
2.THE 1881 INDIAN UPRISING
It was thirty-six past two by the clock when the telephone rang.
Probably her — my
girlfriend with the thing about blindfolds, that is — or so I
thought. She'd planned on
coming over on Sunday anyway, and she always makes a point of
ringing up
beforehand. It was her job to buy groceries for dinner. We'd decided
on oyster hot pot
for that evening.
Anyway, it was
two-thirty-six in the afternoon when the telephone rang. I have the
alarm clock sitting right next to the telephone. That way I
always see the clock when I
go for the telephone, so I recall that much perfectly.
Yet when I picked up
the receiver, all I could hear was this fierce wind blowing. A
rummmmmble full
of fury, like the Indians all rising on the warpath in 1881, right there in the
receiver. They were burning pioneer cabins, cutting telegraph lines, raping
Candice Bergen.
"Hello?" I
ventured, but my lone voice got sucked under the overwhelming tumult of
history.
"Hello?
Hello?" I shouted out loud, again to no avail.
Straining my ears, I
could just barely make out the faintest catches of what might
have been a woman's voice through the wind. Or then again, maybe
I was hearing
things. Whatever, the wind was too strong to be sure. And I
guess too many buffalo had already bitten the dust.
I couldn't say a
word. I just stood there with the receiver to my ear. Hard and fast, I
had the thing practically glued to my ear. I almost thought it
wasn't going to come off.
But then, after fifteen or twenty seconds like that, the
telephone cut off. It was as if a
lifeline had snapped in a seizure. After which a vast and empty
silence, warmthless as
overbleached underwear, was all that remained.
3.HITLER'S INVASION OF POLAND
That does it. I
let out another sigh. And I continued with my diary, thinking I'd better just
finish logging it in.
Saturday, Hitler's
armored divisions invaded Poland. Dive bombers over Warsaw —
No, that's not right.
That's not what happened. Hitler's invasion of Poland was on
September 1, 1939. Not yesterday. After dinner yesterday, I went
to the movies and
saw Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. Hitler's invasion of
Poland only figured in the film.
In the film, Meryl
Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman, but then in a commuter train she meets this
civil engineer played by Robert De Niro, and remarries. A pretty all-right
movie.
Sitting next to me
was a high-school couple, and they kept touching each other on
the tummy the whole time. Not bad at all, your high-school
student's tummy Even me,
time was I used to have a high-school student's tummy.
4.AND THE REALM OF RAGING WINDS
Once I’d squared away the previous week's worth in my diary, I
sat myself down in front of the record rack and picked out some music for a
windy Sunday afternoon's listening.
I settled on a Shostakovich cello concerto and a Sly and the
Family Stone album,
selections that seemed suitable enough for high winds, and I
listened to these two
records one after the other.
Every so often,
things would strafe past the window. A white sheet flying east to west like
some sorcerer brewing an elixir of roots and herbs. A long, flimsy tin sign
arching its sickly spine like an anal-sex enthusiast.
I was taking in the
scene outside to the strains of the Shostakovich cello concerto
when again the telephone rang. The alarm clock beside the
telephone read 3:48.
I picked up the
receiver fully expecting that Boeing 747 jet-engine roar, but this time
there was no wind to be heard.
"Hello,"
she said.
"Hello," I
said, too.
"I was just
thinking about heading over with the fixings for the oyster hot pot,
okay?" said my girlfriend. She’ll be on her way with groceries and a
blindfold.
"Fine by me, but — "
"You have a
casserole?"
"Yes, but,"
I say, "what gives? I don't hear that wind anymore."
"Yeah, the
wind's stopped. Here in Nakano it let up at three twenty-five. So I don't
imagine it'll be long before it lets up over there."
"Maybe so,"
I said as I hung up the telephone, then took down the casserole from
the above-closet storage compartment and washed it in the sink.
Just as she had
predicted, the winds stopped, at 4:05 on the dot. I opened the
windows and looked around outside. Directly below, a black dog
was intently sniffing
around at the ground. For fifteen or twenty minutes, the dog
kept at it tirelessly. I
couldn't imagine why the dog felt so compelled.
Other than that,
though, the appearances and workings of the world remained
unchanged from before the winds had started. The Himalayan
cedars and chestnuts
stood their open ground, aloof as if nothing had transpired.
Laundry hung limply from
plastic clotheslines. Atop the telephone poles, crows gave a
flap or two of their wings,
their beaks shiny as credit cards.
Meanwhile during all
of this, my girlfriend had shown up and began to prepare the
hot pot. She stood there in the kitchen cleaning the oysters,
briskly chopping Chinese
cabbage, arranging blocks of tofu just so, simmering broth.
I asked her whether
she hadn't tried telephoning at 2:36.
"I called, all
right," she answered while rinsing rice in a colander.
'I couldn't hear a
thing," I said.
"Yeah, right,
the wind was tremendous," she said matter-of-factly.
I got a beer out of
the refrigerator and sat down on the edge of the table to drink it.
"But, really,
why all of a sudden this fury of wind, then, again, just like that,
nothing?" I asked her.
"You got
me," she said, her back turned toward me as she shelled shrimps with her
fingernails. "There's lots we don't know about the wind.
Same as there's lots we don't
know about ancient history or cancer or the ocean floor or outer
space or sex."
"Hmm," I
said. That was no answer. Still, it didn't look like there was much chance of
furthering this line of conversation with her, so I just gave up and watched
the oyster hot pot' s progress.
"Say, can I
touch your tummy?" I asked her.
"Later,"
she said.
So until the hot pot
was ready, I decided to puli together a few brief notes on the
day's events so I could write them up in my diary next week.
This is what I jotted down:
• Fail of Roman
Empire
• 1881 Indian
Uprising
• Hitler's Invasion
of Poland
Just this, and even
next week I'd be able to reconstruct what went on today.
Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have
managed to keep a diary
for twenty-two years without missing a day. To every meaningful
act, its own system.
Whether the wind blows or not, that' s the way I live.
7.LederhOSEN
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Mother dumped my father, " a friend of my wife's was saying
one day, "all because of a pair of shorts."
I’ve got to ask.
"A pair of shorts?"
"I know it
sounds strange," she says, "because it is a strange story."
A large woman, her height and build are almost the same as mine.
She tutors electric
organ, but most of her free time she divides among swimming and
skiing and tennis, so she 's trim and always tanned. You might call her a
sports fanatic. On days off, she puts in a morning run before heading to the
local pool to do laps; then at two or three in the
afternoon it's tennis, followed by aerobics. Now, I like my sports,
but I’m nowhere near
her league.
I don't mean to suggest she's aggressive or obsessive about
things. Quite the contrary, she's really rather retiring; she 'd never dream of
putting emotional pressure on anyone. Only, she's driven; her body — and very
likely the spirit attached to that body — craves after vigorous activity,
relentless as a comet.
Which may have
something to do with why she's unmarried. Oh, she's had affairs — the woman may
be a little on the large side, but she is beautiful -- she's been proposed
to, even agreed to take the plunge. But inevitably, whenever
it's gotten to the wedding
stage, some problem has come up and everything falls through.
Like my wife says,
"She's just unlucky."
"Well, I
guess," I sympathize.
I’m not in total
agreement with my wife on this. True, luck may rule over parts of a
person's life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the
ground of our being, but
where there's a will — much less a strong will to swim thirty
laps or run twenty kilometers — there's a way to overcome most any trouble with
whatever stepladders you have
around. No, her heart was never set on marrying, is how I see
it. Marriage just doesn't
fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely.
And so she keeps on
tutoring electric organ, devoting every free moment to sports,
falling regularly in and out of unlucky love.
It's a rainy Sunday
afternoon and she's come two hours earlier than expected, while my wife is
still out shopping.
"Forgive
me," she apologizes. "I took a rain check on today's tennis, which
left me
two hours to spare. I'd have been bored out of my mind being
alone at home, so I just
thought . . . Am I interrupting anything?"
Not at all, I say. I
didn't feel quite in the mood to work and was just sitting around, cat on my
lap, watching a video. I show her in, go to the kitchen and make coffee. Two
cups, for watching the last twenty minutes of Jaws. Of course,
we've both seen the
movie before — probably more than once — so neither of us is
particularly riveted to the tube. But anyway, we're watching it because it's
there in front of our eyes.
It's The End. The
credits roll up. No sign of my wife. So we chat a bit. Sharks,
seaside, swimming . . . still no wife. We go on talking. Now, I
suppose I like the woman well enough, but after an hour of this our lack of
things in common becomes obvious. In a word, she's my wife's friend, not mine.
Short of what else to
do, I' m already thinking about popping in the next video when
she suddenly brings up the story of her parents' divorce. I
can't fathom the connection — at least to my mind, there's no link between
swimming and her folks splitting up —
but I guess a reason is where you find it.
“They weren’t really shorts,” she says. "They were
lederhosen."
"You mean those
hiking pants the Germans wear? The ones with the shoulder
straps?"
"You got it.
Father wanted a pair of lederhosen as a souvenir gift. Well, Father's
pretty tall for his generation. He might even look good in them,
which could be why he
wanted them. But can you picture a Japanese wearing lederhosen?
I guess it takes all
kinds."
I'm still not any
closer to the story. I have to ask, what were the circumstances
behind her father's request — and of whom? — for these souvenir
lederhosen?
"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm always telling
things out of order. Stop me if things don't make
sense," she says.
Okay, I say.
"Mother's sister
was living in Germany and she invited Mother for a visit. Something she'd
always been meaning to do. Of course, Mother can't speak German, she'd never
even been abroad, but having been an English teacher for so long she'd had that
overseas bee in her bonnet. It'd been ages since she'd seen my
aunt. So Mother
approached Father, How about taking ten days off and going to Germany,
the two of
us? Father's work couldn't allow it, and Mother ended up going
alone."
"That' s when your
father asked for the lederhosen, I take it?"
"Right,"
she says. "Mother asked what he wanted her to bring back, and Father said
lederhosen."
"Okay so
far."
Her parents were
reasonably close. They didn't argue until all hours of the night; her father
didn't storm out of the house and not come home for days on end. At least not
then, though apparently there had been rows more than once over
him and other
women.
"Not a bad man,
a hard worker, but kind of a skirt chaser," she tosses off
matter-of-factly. No relation of hers, the way she's talking.
For a second, I almost think
her father is deceased. But no, I'm told, he's alive and well.
"Father was
already up there in years, and by then those troubles were all behind
them. They seemed to be getting along just fine."
Things, however,
didn't go without incident. Her mother extended the ten days in
Germany to nearly a month and a half, with hardly a word back to
Tokyo, and when she finally did return to Japan, she stayed with another sister
of hers in Osaka. She never
did come back home.
Neither she — the
daughter — nor her father could understand what was going on. Until then, when there
'd been marital difficulties, her mother had always been the
patient one — so ploddingly patient, in fact, that she sometimes
wondered if the woman had no imagination; family always came first, and the
mother was selflessly devoted to her daughter. So when the mother didn't come
around, didn't even make the effort to
call, it was beyond their comprehension. They made phone calls
to the aunt's house in Osaka, repeatedly, but they could hardly get her to come
to the phone, much less admit what her intentions were.
In mid- September,
two months after returning to Japan, her mother made her
intentions known. One day, out of the blue, she called home and
told her husband, "You will be receiving the necessary papers for divorce.
Please sign, seal, and send back to me." Would she care to explain, her
husband asked, what was the reason? "I’ve lost all
love for you — in any way, shape, or form." Oh? said her husband.
Was there no room
for discussion? "Sorry, none, absolutely none."
Telephone
negotiations dragged on for the next two or three months, but her mother did
not back down an inch, and finally her father consented to the divorce. He was
in no position to force the issue, his own track record being what it was, and
anyway, he
always tended to give in.
"All this came
as a big shock," she tells me. "But it wasn't just the divorce. I'd
imagined my parents splitting up many times, so I was already
prepared for it
psychologically. If the two of them had just plain divorced
without all that funny
business, I wouldn't have gotten so upset. The problem wasn't
Mother dumping Father; Mother was dumping me, too. That' s what hurt."
I nod.
"Up to that
point, I'd always taken Mother 's side, and Mother would always stand by me.
And yet here was Mother throwing me out with Father, like so much garbage, and
not a word of explanation. It hit me so hard, I wasn't able to
forgive Mother for the
longest time. I wrote her who knows how many letters asking her
to set things straight,
but she never answered my questions, never even said she wanted
to see me."
It wasn't until three
years later that she actually saw her mother. At a family funeral,
of all places. By then, the daughter was living on her own — she
'd moved out in her
sophomore year, when her parents divorced — and now she had
graduated and was
tutoring electric organ. Meanwhile, her mother was teaching
English at a prep school.
Her mother confessed
that she hadn't been able to talk to her own daughter because she hadn't known
what to say. 'I myself couldn't tell where things were going," the
mother said, "but the whole thing started over that pair of
shorts."
"Shorts?"
She'd been as startled as I was. She'd never wanted to speak to her
mother ever again, but curiosity got the better of her. In their
mourning dress, mother
and daughter went into a nearby coffee shop and ordered iced
tea. She had to hear this — pardon the expression — this short story.
The shop that sold the lederhosen was in a small town an hour
away by train from
Hamburg. Her mother 's sister looked it up for her.
"All the Germans
I know say if you' re going to buy lederhosen, this is the place. The
craftsmanship is good, and the prices aren't so expensive," said her
sister.
So the mother boarded
a train to buy her husband his souvenir lederhosen. In her
train compartment sat a middle-aged German couple, who conversed
with her in halting English. 'I go now to buy lederhosen for souvenir,"
the mother said. "Vat shop you go
to?" the couple asked. The mother named the name of the shop,
and the middle-aged
German couple chimed in together, "Zat is ze place, jah. It
is ze best." Hearing this, the mother felt very confident.
It was a delightful
early-summer afternoon and a quaint old-fashioned town. Through the middle of the
town flowed a babbling brook, its banks lush and green. Cobblestone
streets led in all directions, and cats were everywhere. The
mother stepped into a cafe
for a bite of kasekuchen and coffee.
She was on her last
sip of coffee and playing with the shop cat when the owner
came over to ask what brought her to their little town. She said
lederhosen, whereupon
the owner pulled out a pad of paper and drew a map to the shop.
"Thank you very
much," the mother said.
How wonderful it was
to travel by oneself, she thought as she walked along the
cobblestones. In fact, this was the first time in her fifty-five
years that she had traveled
alone. During the whole trip, she had not once been lonely or
afraid or bored. Every
scene that met her eyes was fresh and new; everyone she met was
friendly. Each
experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her,
untouched and
unused. What she had held near and dear until then — husband and
home and
daughter — was on the other side of the earth. She felt no need
to trouble herself over
them.
She found the lederhosen
shop without problem. It was a tiny old guild shop. It didn't have a big sign
for tourists, but inside she could see scores of lederhosen. She opened the
door and walked in.
Two old men worked in
the shop. They spoke in a whisper as they took down
measurements and scribbled them into a notebook. Behind a
curtain divider was a
larger work space; the monotone of sewing machines could be
heard.
"Darf ich Ihnen
helfen, Madame? " the larger of the two old men addressed the
mother.
"I want to buy lederhosen,"
she responded in English.
"Ziss make
problem" The old man chose his words with care. "Ve do not make
article for customer who not exist."
"My husband
exist," the mother said with confidence.
"Jah, jah, your
husband exist, of course, of course," the old man responded hastily.
"Excuse my not good English. Vat I vant say, if your
husband not exist here, ve cannot
sell ze lederhosen."
"Why?" the
mother asked, perplexed.
"Is store policy. Ist unser Prinzip. Ve
must see ze lederhosen how it fit customer, ve alter very nice, only zen ve
sell. Over one hundred years ve are in business, ve build
reputation on ziss policy."
"But I spend
half day to come from Hamburg to buy your lederhosen."
"Very sorry,
madame," said the old man, looking very sorry indeed. "Ve make no
exception. Ziss vorld is very uncertain vorld. Trust is
difficult sink to earn but easy sink
to lose."
The mother sighed and
stood in the doorway. She racked her brain for some way to break the impasse.
The larger old man explained the situation to the smaller old man,
who nodded sadly, jah, jah. Despite their great difference in
size, the two old men wore
identical expressions.
"Well, perhaps,
can we do this?" the mother proposed. 'I find man just like my
husband and bring him here. That man puts on lederhosen, you
alter very nice, you sell lederhosen to me."
The first old man
looked her in the face, aghast.
"But, madame,
zat is against rule. Is not same man who tries ze lederhosen on, your husband.
And ve know ziss. Ve cannot do ziss."
"Pretend you do
not know. You sell lederhosen to that man and that man sell
lederhosen to me. That way, there is no shame to your policy.
Please, I beg you. I may never come back to Germany. If I do not buy lederhosen
now, I will never buy
lederhosen."
"Hmph," the
old man pouted. He thought for a few seconds, then turned to the other old man
and spoke a stream of German. They spoke back and forth several times.
Then, finally, the large man turned back to the mother and said,
"Very well, madame. As exception — very exception, you please understand —
ve vill know nossink of ziss
matter. Not so many come from Yapan to buy lederhosen, and ve
Germans not so slow in ze head. Please find man very like your husband. My
brother he says ziss."
"Thank
you," she said. Then she managed to thank the other brother in German:
"Das ist so nett von Ihnen."
The daughter who's telling me this story — folds her hands on
the table and sighs. I
drink the last of my coffee, long since cold. The rain keeps
corning down. Still no sign of my wife. Who'd have ever thought the
conversation would take this turn?
"So then?"
I interject, eager to hear the conclusion. "Did your mother end up finding
someone with the same build as your father?"
"Yes," she
says, utterly without expression. "Mother sat on a bench looking for
someone who matched Father's size. And along came a man who fit
the part. Without
asking his permission — it seems the man couldn't speak a word
of English — she
dragged him to the lederhosen shop."
"The hands-on
approach," I joke.
'I don't know. At
home, Mother was always a normal sensible-shoes woman," she
said with another sigh. "The shopkeepers explained the
situation to the man, and the
man gladly consented to stand in for Father. He puts the
lederhosen on, and they're
pulling here and tucking there, the three of them chortling away
in German. In thirty
minutes the job was done, during which time Mother made up her
mind to divorce
Father."
"Wait," I
say, 'I don't get it! Did something happen during those thirty minutes?"
"Nothing at all.
Only those three German men ha-ha-ha-ing like bellows."
"But what made
your mother do it?"
"That's
something even Mother herself didn't understand at the time. It made her
defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in
the lederhosen, she
felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward
Father. And she could not hold
it back. Mother's lederhosen man, apart from the color of his
skin, was exactly like
Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The
way he was so happy
trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a
little boy. As Mother stood
there looking at this man, so many things she 'd been uncertain
of about herself slowly
shifted together into something very clear. That's when she
realized she hated Father."
My wife gets home from shopping, and the two of them commence
their woman talk, but I'm still thinking about the lederhosen. The three of us
eat an early dinner and have a
few drinks; I keep turning the story over in my mind.
"So, you don't
hate your mother anymore?" I ask when my wife leaves the room.
"No, not really.
We're not close at all, but I don't hold anything against her."
"Because she
told you about the lederhosen?"
"I think so.
After she explained things to me, I couldn't go on hating her. I can't say
why it makes any difference, I certainly don't know how to
explain it, but it may have
something to do with us being women."
"Still, if you
leave the lederhosen out of it, supposing it was just the story of a woman
taking a trip and finding herself, would you have been able to forgive
her?"
"Of course
not," she says without hesitation. "The whole point is the
lederhosen,
right?"
A proxy pair of
lederhosen, I’m thinking, that her father never even received.
8.BARN BURNING
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
I met her at the wedding party of an acquaintance and we got
friendly. This was three
years ago. We were nearly a whole generation apart in age — she
twenty, myself
thirty-one — but that hardly got in the way. I had plenty of
other things to worry my head about at the time, and to be perfectly honest, I
didn't have a spare moment to think
about age difference. And our ages never bothered her from the
very beginning. I was married, but that didn't matter, either. She seemed to
consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order
as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one's fingernails. The sort of
thing that thinking about won't change one bit. And that much said, well, she had
a point.
She was working as an
advertising model to earn a living while studying pantomime under somebody-or-other,
a famous teacher, apparently. Though the work end of things was a drag and she was
always turning down jobs her agent lined up, so her money
situation was really rather precarious. But whatever she lacked
in take-home pay she
probably made up for on the goodwill of a number of boyfriends.
Naturally, I don't know
this for certain; it's just what I pieced together from snippets
of her conversation.
Still, I’m not
suggesting there was even a glimmer of a hint that she was sleeping
with guys for money. Though perhaps she did come close to that
on occasion. Yet even if she did, that was not an essential issue; the
essentials were surely far more simple.
And the long and short of it was, this guileless simplicity is
what attracted a particular
kind of person. The kind of men who had only to set eyes on this
simplicity of hers
before they'd be dressing it up with whatever feelings they held
inside. Not exactly the
best explanation, but even she 'd have to admit it was this
simplicity that supported her.
Of course, this sort
of thing couldn't go on forever. (If it could, we'd have to turn the
entire workings of the universe upside down.) The possibility
did exist, but only under
specific circumstances, for a specific period. Just like with
"peeling mandarin oranges."
"Peeling
mandarin oranges?" you say?
When we first met,
she told me she was studying pantomime.
Oh, really, I'd said,
not altogether surprised. Young women are all into something
these days. Plus, she didn't look like your die-cast
polish-your-skills-in-dead-earnest
type.
Then she "peeled
a mandarin orange." Literally, that's what she did: She had a glass bowl
of oranges to her left and another bowl for the peels to her right — so went
the
setup — in fact, there was nothing there. She proceeded to pick
up one imaginary
orange, then slowly peel it, pop pieces into her mouth, and spit
out the pulp one section at a time, finally disposing of the skin-wrapped
residue into the right- hand bowl when
she 'd eaten the entire fruit. She repeated this maneuver again
and again. In so many
words, it doesn't sound like much, but I swear, just watching
her do this for ten or twenty
minutes — she and I kept up a running conversation at the
counter of this bar, her
"peeling mandarin oranges" the whole while, almost
without a second thought — I felt
the reality of everything around me being siphoned away.
Unnerving, to say the least.
Back when Eichmann stood trial in Israel, there was talk that
the most fitting sentence
would be to lock him in a cell and gradually remove all the air.
I don't really know how he did meet his end, but that's what came to mind.
"Seems you' re
quite talented," I said.
"Oh, this is
nothing. Talent's not involved. It's not a question of making yourself
believe there is an orange there, you have to forget there isn't
one. That's all."
"Practically Zen."
That's when I took a
liking to her.
We generally didn't
see all that much of each other. Maybe once a month, twice at
the most. I'd ring her up and invite her out somewhere. We'd eat
out or go to a bar. We
talked intensely; she'd hear me out and I'd listen to whatever
she had to say. We hardly had any common topics between us, but so what? We
became, well, pals. Of course, I was the one who paid the bill for all the food
and drinks. Sometimes she'd call me,
typically when she was broke and needed a meal. And then it was unbelievable
the
amount of food she could put away.
When the two of us were together, I could
truly relax. I'd forget all about work I didn't want to do and trivial things
that' d never be settled anyway and the crazy mixed-up
ideas that crazy mixed-up people had taken into their heads. It
was some kind of power she had. Not that there was any great meaning to her
words. And if I did catch myself
interjecting polite nothings without really tuning in what she
was saying, there still was
something soothing to my ears about her voice, like watching clouds
drift across the far horizon.
I did my share of
talking, too. Everything from personal matters to sweeping
generalities, I told her my honest thoughts. I guess she also
let some of my verbiage go by, likewise with minimum comment. Which was fine by
me. It was a mood I was after,
not understanding or sympathy.
Then two years ago in
the spring, her father died of a heart ailment, and she came into a small sum of
money. At least, that's how she described it. With the money, she
said, she wanted to travel to North Africa. Why North Africa, I
didn't know, but I
happened to know someone working at the Algerian embassy, so I
introduced her. Thus she decided to go to Algeria. And as things took their course,
I ended up seeing her off at the airport. All she carried was a ratty old
Boston bag stuffed with a couple of
changes of clothes. By the look of her as she went through the
baggage check, you'd
almost think she was returning from North Africa, not going
there.
"You really
going to come back to Japan in one piece?" I joked.
"Sure thing. 'I
shall return,"' she mocked.
Three months later,
she did. Three kilos lighter than when she left and tanned about six shades darker.
With her was her new guy, whom she presented as someone she
met at a restaurant in Algiers. Japanese in Algeria were all too
few, so the two of them
easily fell in together and eventually became intimate. As far I
know, this guy was her
first real regular lover.
He was in his late
twenties, tall, with a decent build, and rather polite in his speech. A little
lean on looks, perhaps, though I suppose you could put him in the handsome
category. Anyway, he struck me as nice enough; he had big hands
and long fingers.
The reason I know so
much about the guy is that I went to meet her when she
arrived. A sudden telegram from Beirut had given a date and a
flight number. Nothing
else. Seemed she wanted me to come to the airport. When the
plane got in — actually,
it was four hours late due to bad weather, during which time I
read three magazines
cover to cover in a coffee lounge — the two of them came through
the gate arm in arm. They looked like a happy young married couple. When she
introduced us, he shook my hand, virtually in reflex. The healthy handshake of
those who've been living a long time
overseas. After that, we went into a restaurant. She was dying
to have a bowl of
tempura and rice, she said; meanwhile, he and I both had beer.
He told me he worked
in trading but didn't offer any more details. I couldn't tell
whether he simply didn't want to talk business or was
thoughtfully sparing me a boring
exposition. Nor, in truth, did I especially want to hear about
trading, so I didn't press him. With little else to discuss, the conversation
meandered between safety on the streets of Beirut and water supplies in Tunis.
He proved to be quite well informed about affairs
over the whole of North Africa and the Middle East.
By now she'd finished
her tempura and announced with a big yawn that she was
feeling sleepy. I half expected her to doze off on the spot. She
was precisely the type
who could fail asleep anywhere. The guy said he'd see her home
by taxi, and I said I'd
take the train as it was faster. Just why she had me come all
the way out to the airport
was beyond me.
"Glad I got to
meet you," he told me, as if to acknowledge the inconvenience.
"Same
here," I said.
Thereafter I met up with the guy a number of times. Whenever I
ran into her, he was
always by her side. I'd make a date with her, and he'd drive up
in a spotless silver-gray German sports car to let her off. I know next to
nothing about automobiles, but it
reminded me of those jaunty coupes you see in old black-and-white
Fellini films.
Definitely not the sort of car your ordinary salaryman owns.
"The guy's got to
be loaded," I ventured to comment to her once.
"Yeah," she
said without much interest, 'I guess."
"Can you really
make that much in trading?"
"Trading?"
"That' s what he
said. He works in trading."
"Okay, then, I
imagine so. . .. But hey, what do I know? He doesn't seem to do much work at
all, as far as I can see. He does his share of seeing people and talking on the
phone, I'll say that, though."
The young man and his
money remained a mystery.
Then one Sunday afternoon in October, she rang up. My wife had
gone off to see some relatives that morning and left me alone at home. A
pleasant day, bright and clear, it
found me idly gazing at the camphor tree outside and enjoying
the new autumn apples. I must have eaten a good seven of them that day — it was
either a pathological craving or some kind of premonition.
"Listen,"
she said right off, "just happened to be heading in your direction. Would
it
be all right if we popped over?"
"We?
" I threw back the question.
"Me and
him," came her self-evident reply.
"Sure," I
had to say, "by all means."
"Okay, we'll be
there in thirty minutes," she said, then hung up.
I lay there on the
sofa awhile longer before taking a shower and shaving. As I
toweled myself dry, I wondered whether to tidy up around the
house but canned the
idea. There wasn't time. And despite the piles of books and
magazines and letters and
records, the occasional pencil here or sweater there, the place
didn't seem particularly
dirty. I sat back down on the sofa, looked at the camphor tree,
and ate another apple.
They showed up a
little past two. I heard a car stop in front of the house, and went to the
front door to see her leaning out the window of the silver-gray coupe, waving.
I
directed them to the parking space around back.
"We're
here," she beamed, all smiles. She wore a sheer blouse that showed her
nipples, and an olive-green miniskirt. He sported a navy blazer,
but there was
something else slightly different about him; maybe it was the
two-day growth of beard.
Not at all slovenly looking, it even brought out his features a
shade. As he stepped from the car, he removed his sunglasses and shoved them
into his breast pocket.
"Terribly sorry
to be dropping in on you like this on your day off," he apologized.
"Not at all,
don't mind a bit. Every day might as well be a day off with me, and I was
getting kind of bored here on my own," I allowed.
"We brought some
food," she said, lifting a large white paper bag from the backseat of the
car.
"Food?"
"Nothing
extraordinary," he spoke up. "It's just that, a sudden visit on a
Sunday, I
thought, why not take along something to eat?"
"Very kind of
you. Especially since I haven't had anything but apples all morning."
We went inside and
set the groceries out on the table. It turned out to make quite a
spread: roast beef sandwiches, salad, smoked salmon, blueberry
ice cream — and
good quantities at that. While she transferred the food to
plates, I grabbed a bottle of
white wine from the refrigerator. It was like an impromptu
party.
"Well, let's dig
in. I'm starved," pronounced her usual ravenous self.
Midway through the
feast, having polished off the wine, we tapped into my stock of
beer. I can usually hold my own, but this guy could drink; no
matter how many beers he downed, his expression never altered in the slightest.
Together with her contribution of a couple of cans, we had in the space of a
little under an hour racked up a whole tableful of empties. Not bad. Meanwhile,
she was pulling records from my shelf and loading the player. The first
selection to come on was Miles Davis's "Airegin."
"A Garrard
autochanger like that's a rare find these days," he observed. Which
launched us into audiophilia, me going on about the various
components of my stereo system, him inserting appropriate comments, polite as
ever.
The conversation had reached a momentary
lull when the guy said, "I've got some
grass. Care to smoke?"
I hesitated, for no
other reason than I'd only just quit smoking the month before and I wasn't sure
what effect it would have. But in the end, I decided to take a toke or two.
Whereupon he fished a foil packet from the bottom of the paper
bag and rolled a joint.
He lit up and took a few puffs to get it started, then passed it
to me. It was prime stuff.
For the next few minutes we didn't say a word as we each took
hits in turn. Miles Davis had finished, and we were now into an album of
Strauss waltzes. Curious combination, but what the hell.
After one joint, she
was already beat, pleading grass on top of three beers and lack
of sleep. I ferried her upstairs and helped her onto the bed.
She asked to borrow a
T-shirt. No sooner had I handed it to her than she'd stripped to
her panties, pulled on
the T-shirt, and stretched flat out. By the time I got around to
asking if she was going to be warm enough, she had already snoozed off. I went downstairs,
shaking my head.
Back in the living
room, her guy was busy rolling another joint. Plays hard, this dude. Me, I
would have just as soon snuggled into bed next to her and conked right out. Fat
chance. We settled down to smoke the second joint, Strauss still
waltzing away.
Somehow, I was reminded of an elementary-school play. I had the
part of the old glove maker. A fox cub comes with money to buy gloves, but the glove
maker says it's not
enough for a pair.
'"Tain 't
gonna buy no gloves, " I say. Guess I'm something of a villain.
"But Mother
's so very c-c-cold. She '11 get chapped p-p-paws. P-p-please, " says
the fox cub.
"Uh-uh,
nothing doing. Save your money and come back. Otherwise — "
"Sometimes I
burn barns," the guy was saying.
"Excuse
me?" I asked. Had I misheard him?
"Sometimes I
burn barns," the guy repeated.
I looked at him. His
fingertips traced the pattern on his lighter. Then he took a deep
draw on the joint and held it in for a good ten seconds before
slowly exhaling. The
smoke came streaming out of his mouth and into the air like
ectoplasm. He passed me
the roach.
"Quality
product, eh?" he said.
I nodded.
"I brought it
from India. Top of the line, the best I could find. Smoke this and, it's
strange, I recall all kinds of things. Lights and smells and
like that. The quality of
memory . . ." He paused and snapped his fingers a few
times, as if searching for the
right words. "... completely changes. Don't you
think?"
That it did, I
concurred. I really was back in the school play, reexperiencing the
commotion on stage, the smell of the paint on the cardboard
backdrop.
"I’d like to
hear about this barn thing," I said.
He looked at me. His
face wore no more expression than ever.
"May I talk
about it?" he asked.
"Why not?" I
said.
"Pretty simple,
really. I pour gasoline and throw a lighted match. Flick, and that's it.
Doesn't take fifteen minutes for the whole thing to burn to the
ground."
"So tell
me," I began, then fell silent. I was having trouble finding the right
words, too. "Why is it you burn barns?"
"Is it so
strange?"
"Who knows? You
burn barns. I don't burn barns. There's this glaring difference, and to me,
rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I'd like to clear up just
what that difference is. Anyway, it was you who brought up this barn thing to
begin with."
"Got me
there," he admitted. "You tell it like it is. Say, would you have any
Ravi
Shankar records?"
No, I didn't, I told
him.
The guy spaced out
awhile. I could practically see his mind kneading like Silly Putty. Or maybe it
was my mind that was squirming around.
'I burn maybe one
barn every two months," he came back. Then he snapped his
fingers again. "Seems to me that's just about the right
pace. For me, that is."
I nodded vaguely.
Pace?
"Just out of
interest, is it your own barns you burn?" I thought to ask.
The guy looked at me
uncomprehendingly. "Why have I got to burn my own barns? What makes you think
l'd have this surplus of barns, myself?"
"Which
means," I continued, "you burn other people's barns, right?"
"Correct,"
he said. "Obviously. Other people's barns. Which makes it, as it were, a
criminal act. Same as you and me smoking this grass here right
now. A clear-cut
criminal act."
I shut up, elbows on
the arms of my chair.
"In other words,
I wantonly ignite barns that belong to other people. Naturally, I
choose ones that won't cause major fires. All I want to do is
simply burn barns."
I nodded and ground
out what was left of the roach. "But, if you get caught, you'll be
in trouble. Whatever, it's arson, and you might get
prison."
"Nobody's going
to get caught." He laughed at the very idea. "Pour the gas, light the
match, and run. Then I watch the whole thing from a distance through
binoculars, nice
and easy Nobody catches me. Really, burn one shitty little barn
and the cops hardly
even budge."
Come to think of it,
they probably wouldn't. On top of which, who'd suspect a
well-dressed young man driving a foreign car?
"And does she
know about this?" I asked, pointing upstairs.
"Not a thing.
Fact is, I've never told anyone else about this but you. I' m not the sort
to go spouting off to just anyone."
"So why me?"
The guy extended his
fingers of his left hand and stroked his cheek. The growth of
beard made a dry, rasping sound. Like a bug walking over a thin,
taut sheet of paper.
"You' re someone who writes novels, so I thought, Wouldn't
he be interested in patterns of human behavior and all that? And the way I see
it, with novelists, before even
passing judgment on something, aren't they the kind who are supposed
to appreciate its form? And even if they can't appreciate it, they
should at least accept it at face value,
no? That's why I told you. I wanted to tell you, from my
side."
I nodded. Just how
was I to accept this at face value? From my side, I honestly didn't
know.
"This might be a
strange way to put it," he took off again, spreading both hands, then bringing
them slowly together before his eyes. "But there's a lot of barns in this
world,
and I've got this feeling that they' re all just waiting to be
burned. Barns built way off by
the seaside, barns built in the middle of rice fields ... well,
anyway, all kinds of barns.
But nothing that fifteen minutes wouldn't burn down, nice and
neat. It's like that's why
they were put there from the very beginning. No grief to anyone.
They just... vanish. One, two, poof!"
"But you' re
judging that they' re not needed."
"I'm not judging
anything. They' re waiting to be burned. I’m simply obliging. You get
it? I’m just taking on what's there. Just like the rain. The
rain falls. Streams swell. Things get swept along. Does the rain judge
anything? Well, all right, does this make me
immoral? In my own way, I'd like to believe I've got my own
morals. And that's an
extremely important force in human existence. A person can't
exist without morals. I
wouldn't doubt if morals weren't the very balance to my simultaneity."
"Simultaneity?"
"Right, I’m
here, and I'm there. I'm in Tokyo, and at the same time I'm in Tunis. I’m
the one to blame, and I'm also the one to forgive. Just as a for
instance. It's that level of balance. Without such balance, I don't think we
could go on living. It's like the linchpin to everything. Lose it and we'd literally
go to pieces. But for the very reason that I've got it, simultaneity becomes
possible for me."
"So what you're
saying is, the act of burning barns is in keeping with these morals of
yours?"
"Not exactly.
It's an act by which to maintain those morals. But maybe we better just
forget the morality. It's not essential. What I want to say is,
the world is full of these
barns. Me, I got my barns, and you got your barns. It's the
truth. I've been almost everywhere in the world. Experienced everything. Came
close to dying more than once. Not
that I'm proud of it or anything. But okay, let's drop it. My
fault for being the quiet type all the time. I talk too much when I do
grass."
We fell silent,
burned out. I had no idea what to say or how. I was sitting tight in my mental passenger
seat, just watching one weird scene after the next slip past the car
window. My body was so loose I couldn't get a good grasp on what
the different parts
were doing. Yet I was still in touch with the idea of my bodily
existence. Simultaneity, if
ever there was such a thing: Here I had me thinking, and here I
had me observing
myself think. Time ticked on in impossibly minute polyrhythms.
"Care for a
beer?" I asked a little later.
"Thank you. I
would."
I went to the
kitchen, brought out four cans and some Camembert, and we helped
ourselves.
"When was the
last time you burned a barn?" I had to ask.
"Let's see,
now." He strained to remember, beer can in hand. "Summer, the end of
August."
"And the next
time, when' 11 that be?"
"Don't know.
It's not like I work out a schedule or mark dates in my calendar. When I get
the urge, I go burn one."
"But, say. When
you get this urge, some likely barn doesn't just happen to be lying
around, does it?"
"Of course
not," he said quietly. "That' s why I scout out ones ripe for burning
in
advance."
"To lay in
stock."
"Exactly."
"Can I ask you
one more question?"
"Sure."
"Have you
already decided on the next barn to burn?"
This caused him to
furrow up wrinkles between his eyes; then he inhaled audibly
through his nose. "Well, yes. As a matter of fact, I
have."
I sipped the last of
my beer and said nothing.
"A great barn.
The first barn really worth burning in ages. Fact is, I went and checked it out
only today."
"Which means, it
must be nearby."
"Very
near," he confirmed.
So ended our barn
talk.
At five o'clock, he
roused his girlfriend, and then apologized to me again for the
sudden visit. He was completely sober, despite the quantities of
beer I'd seen him drink. Then he fetched the sports car from around back.
"I’ll keep an
eye out for that barn," I told him
"You do
that," he answered. "Like I said, it's right near here."
"What's this
about a barn?" she broke in.
"Man talk,"
he said.
"Oh,
great," she fawned.
And at that, the two
of them were gone.
I returned to the
living room and lay down on the sofa. The table was littered with all manner of
debris. I picked up my duffle coat off the floor, pulled it over my head, and
conked out.
Bluish gloom and a
pungent marijuana odor covered everything. Oddly uneven, that darkness. Lying on
the sofa, I tried to remember what came next in the
elementary-school play, but it was long since irretrievable. Did
the fox cub ever get the
gloves?
I got up from the
sofa, opened a window to air the place, went to the kitchen, and
made myself some coffee.
The following day, I went to a bookstore and bought a map of the
area where I live.
Scaled 20,000:1 and detailed down to the smallest lanes. Then I
walked around with the map, penciling in X's wherever there was a barn or shed.
For the next three days, I
covered four kilometers in all four directions. Living toward
the outskirts of town, there
are still a good many farmers in the vicinity. So it came to a considerable
number of
barns — sixteen altogether.
I carefully checked
the condition of each of these, and from the sixteen I eliminated
all those where there were houses in the immediate proximity or
greenhouses
alongside. I also eliminated those in which there were farm
implements or chemicals or signs that they were still in active use. I didn't imagine
he'd want to burn tools or
fertilizer.
That left five barns.
Five barns worth burning. Or, rather, five barns unobjectionable if burned. The
kind of barn it'd take fifteen minutes to reduce to ashes, then no one would
miss it. Yet I couldn't decide which would be the one he'd be most likely to
toreh. The
rest was a matter of taste. I was beside myself for wanting to
know which of the five
barns he'd chosen.
I unfolded my map and
erased all but those five X's. I got myself a right angle and a French curve and
dividers, and tried to establish the shortest course leaving from my
house, going around the five barns, and coming back home again.
Which proved to be a laborious operation, what with the roads winding about
hills and streams. The result: a course of 7.2 kilometers. I measured it
several times, so I couldn't have been too far off.
The following morning
at six, I put on my training wear and jogging shoes and ran
the course. I run six kilometers every morning anyway, so adding
an extra kilometer
wouldn't kill me. There were two railroad crossings along the
way, but they rarely held
you up. And otherwise, the scenery wouldn't be bad.
First thing out of
the house, I did a quick circuit around the playing field of the local
college, then turned down an unpaved road that ran along a
stream for three kilometers. Passing the first barn midway, a path took me
through woods. A slight uphill grade, then another barn. A little beyond that were
racehorse stables. The Thoroughbreds would be alarmed to see flames — but that'
d be it. No real damage.
The third and fourth
barns resembled each other like ugly twins. Set not two hundred meters apart, both
were weather-beaten and dirty. You might as well toreh the both of
them together.
The last barn stood
beside a railroad crossing. Roughly the six-kilometer mark.
Utterly abandoned, the barn had a tin Pepsi-Cola billboard
nailed to the side facing the
tracks. The structure — if you could call it that — was such a
shambles, I could see it,
as he would say, just waiting to be burned.
I paused before this
last barn, took a few deep breaths, cut over the crossing, and
headed home. Running time: thirty-one minutes thirty seconds. I
showered, ate
breakfast, stretched out on the sofa to listen to one record,
then got down to work.
For one month, I ran
the same course each morning. But — no barns burned.
Sometimes, I could
swear he was trying to get me to burn a barn. That is, to plant in my head the image
of burning barns, so that it would swell up like a bicycle tire pumped with
air. I’ll grant you, there were times that, well, as long as I was waiting
around for
him to do the deed, I half considered striking the mateh myself.
It would have been a lot faster. And anyhow, they were only run-down old barns....
Although on second
thought, no, let's not get carried away. You won't see me torch
any barn. No matter how inflated the image of burning barns grew
in my head, I’m really not the type. Me, burn barns? Never. Then what about
him? He'd probably just switched prospects. Or else he was too busy and simply
hadn't found the time to burn a barn. In
any case, there was no word from her.
December came and
went, and the morning air pierced the skin. The barns stood
their ground, their roofs white with frost. Wintering birds sent
the echo of flapping wings through the frozen woods. The world kept in motion
unchanged.
The next time I met the guy was in the middle of December last
year. It was Christmas
carols everywhere you went. I had gone into town to buy presents
for different people,
and while walking around Nogizaka I spotted his car. No mistake,
his silver-gray sports car. Shinagawa license plate, small dent next to the
left headlight. It was parked in the
lot of a cafe, looking less sparkling than when I last saw it,
the silver-gray a hint duller.
Though maybe that was a mistaken impression on my part: I have
this convenient
tendeney to rework my memories. I dashed into the cafe without a
moment's hesitation.
The place was dark
and thick with the strong aroma of coffee. There weren't many
voices to be heard, only atmospheric baroque music. I recognized
him immediately. He was sitting alone by the window, drinking a cafe au lait.
And though it was warm enough in there to steam up my glasses, he was wearing a
black cashmere coat, with his
muffler still wrapped around his neck.
I hedged a second,
but then figured I might as well approach the guy. I decided not
to say I'd seen his car outside; I'd just happened to step in,
and by chance there he was.
"Mind if I sit
down?" I asked.
"Please, not at
all," he replied.
We talked a bit. It
wasn't a particularly lively conversation. Clearly, we didn't have
much in the way of common topics; moreover, his mind seemed to
be on something
else. Still, he didn't show any sign of being put out by my
presence. At one point, he
mentioned a seaport in Tunisia, then he started describing the
shrimp they caught there. He wasn't just talking for my sake: He really was serious
about these shrimp. All the
same, like water to the desert, the story didn't go anywhere
before it dissipated.
He signaled to the
waiter and ordered a second cafe au lait.
"Say, by the
way, how's your barn doing?" I braved the question.
The trace of a smile
came to his lips. "Oh, you still remember?" he said, removing a
handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his mouth. "Why, sure, I burned it.
Burned it nice
and clean. Just as promised."
"One right near
my house?"
"Yeah. Really,
right by there."
"When?"
"Last — when was
it? Maybe ten days after I visited your place."
I told him about how
I plotted the barns on my map and ran my daily circuit. "So
there's no way I could have not seen it," I insisted.
"Very
thorough," he gibed, obviously having his fun. "Thorough and logical.
All I can say is, you must have missed it. Does happen, you know. Things so
close up, they don't even register."
"It just doesn't
make sense."
He adjusted his tie,
then glanced at his watch. "So very, very close," he underscored.
"But if you'll excuse me, I've got to be going. Let's talk about it next
time, shall we? Can't keep a person waiting. Sorry."
I had no plausible
reason to detain the guy any further.
He stood up, pocketed
his cigarettes and lighter, and then remarked, "Oh, by the
way, have you seen her lately?"
"No, not at all.
Haven't you?"
"Me, neither.
I've been trying to get in touch, but she's never in her apartment and
she doesn't answer the phone and she hasn't been to her
pantomime class the whole
while."
"She must have
taken off somewhere. She's been known to do that."
The guy stared down
at the table, hands buried in his pockets. "With no money, for a month and
a half? As far as making her own way, she hardly has a clue."
He was snapping his fingers
in his coat pocket.
'I think I know that
giri pretty well, and she absolutely hasn't got yen one. No real
friends to speak of. An address book full of names, but that's
all they are. She hasn't got anyone she can depend on. No, I take that back,
she did trust you. And I' m not saying
this out of courtesy. I do believe you' re someone special to
her. Really, it's enough to
make me kind of jealous. And I' m someone who's never ever been
jealous at all." He
gave a little sigh, then eyed his watch again. "But I
really must go. Be seeing you."
Right, I nodded, but
no words came. The same as always, whenever I was thrown together with this guy,
I became altogether inarticulate.
I tried calling her
any number of times after that, but her line had apparently been
disconnected. Which somehow bothered me, so I went to her
apartment and
encountered a locked door, her mailbox stuffed with fliers. The
superintendent was nowhere to be found, so I had no way to know if she was even
living there anymore. I ripped a page from my appointment book, jotted down
"Please contact," wrote my name, and
shoved it into the mailbox.
Not a word.
The next time I
passed by, the apartment bore the nameplate of another resident. I
actually knocked, but no one was in. And like before, no
superintendent in sight.
At that, I gave up.
This was one year ago.
She 'd disappeared.
Every morning, I still run past those five barns. Not one of them
has yet burned down.
Nor do I hear of any barn fires. Come December, the birds strafe
overhead. And I keep getting older.
Although just now and
then, in the depths of the night, I’ll think about barns burning
to the ground.
9.The liTTLE GREEN moNSter
translated by Jay Rubin
My husband left for work as usual, and I couldn't think of
anything to do. I sat alone in
the chair by the window, staring out at the gar den through the
gap between the
curtains. Not that I had any reason to be looking at the garden:
There was nothing else
for me to do. And I thought that sooner or later, if I sat there
looking, I might think of
something. Of all the many things in the garden, the one I
looked at most was the oak
tree. It was my special favorite. I had planted it when I was a
little girl, and watched it
grow. I thought of it as my old friend. I talked to it all the
time in my head.
That day, too, I was
probably talking to the oak tree — I don't remember what about. And I don't know
how long I was sitting there. The time slips by when I’m looking at the garden.
It was dark before I knew it: I must have been there quite a while. Then, all
at
once, I heard a sound. It came from somewhere far away — a
funny, muffled sort of rubbing sort of sound. At first I thought it was coming from
a place deep inside me, that I
was hearing things — a warning from the dark cocoon my body was spinning
within. I
held my breath and listened. Yes. No doubt about it. Little by
little, the sound was
moving closer to me. What was it? I had no idea. But it made my
flesh creep.
The ground near the
base of the tree began to bulge upward as if some thick, heavy liquid were rising
to the surface. Again I caught my breath. Then the ground broke open and the
mounded earth crumbled away to reveal a set of sharp claws. My eyes locked
onto them, and my hands turned into clenched fists. Something's
going to happen, I
said to myself. It's starting now. The claws scraped hard at the
soil, and soon the break
in the earth was an open hole, from which there crawled a little
green monster.
Its body was covered
with shining green scales. As soon as it emerged from the
hole, it shook itself until the bits of soil clinging to it
dropped away. It had a long, funny
nose, the green of which gradually deepened toward the tip. The
very end was narrow
and pointed as a whip, but the beast's eyes were exactly like a
human's. The sight of
them sent a shiver through me. They showed feelings, just like
your eyes or mine.
Without hesitation,
but moving slowly and deliberately, the monster approached my
front door, on which it began to knock with the slender tip of
its nose. The dry, rapping
sound echoed through the house. I tiptoed to the back room,
hoping the beast would not realize I was there. I couldn't scream. Ours is the
only house in the area, and my
husband wouldn't be coming back from work until late at night. I
couldn't run out the
back door, either, since my house has only the one door, the
very one on which a
horrible green monster was now knocking. I breathed as quietly
as I could, pretending
not to be there, hoping the thing would give up and go away. But
it didn't give up. Its
nose went from knocking to groping at the lock. It seemed to
have no trouble at all
clicking the lock open, and then the door itself opened a crack.
Around the edge of the
door crept the nose, and then it stopped. For a long time it
stayed still, like a snake with its head raised, checking conditions in the
house. If I had known this was going to
happen, I could have stayed by the door and cut the nose off, I
told myself: The kitchen had plenty of sharp knives. No sooner had the thought
occurred to me than the creature moved past the edge of the door, smiling, as
if it had read my mind. Then it spoke, not with a stutter, but repeating
certain words as if it were still trying to learn them. It
wouldn't have done you any good, any good, the little green
monster said. My nose is
like a lizard's tail. It always grows back — stronger and
longer, stronger and longer.
You' d get just the opposite of what what you want want. Then it
spun its eyes for a long time, like two weird tops.
Oh, no, I thought to
myself. Can it read people's minds? I hate to have anyone know what I'm thinking
— especially when that someone is a horrid and inscrutable little
creature like this. I broke out in a cold sweat from head to
foot. What was this thing
going to do to me? Eat me? Take me down into the earth? Oh,
well, at least it wasn't so ugly that I couldn't stand looking at it. That was
good. It had slender, pink little arms and legs jutting out from its
green-scaled body and long claws at the ends of its hands and
feet. They were almost darling, the more I looked at them. And I
could see, too, that the
creature meant me no harm.
Of course not, it
said to me, cocking its head. Its scales clicked against one another when it
moved — like crammed-together coffee cups rattling on a table when you nudge
it. What a terrible thought, madam: Of course I wouldn't eat you. No no no. I
mean you
no harm, no harm, no harm. So I was right: It knew exactly what
I was thinking.
Madam madam madam,
don't you see? Don't you see? Fve come here to propose to you. From deep deep
deep down deep down deep. I had to crawl all the way up here up here up. Awful,
it was awful, I had to dig and dig and di g. Look at how it ruined my
claws! I could never have done this if I meant you any harm, any
harm, any harm. I love you. I love you so much I couldn't stand it anymore down
deep down deep. I crawled my way up to you, I had to, I had to. They all tried
to stop me, but I couldn't stand it
anymore. And think of the courage that it took, please, took.
What if you thought it was
rude and presumptuous, rude and presumptuous, for a creature
like me to propose to
you?
But it is rude
and presumptuous, I said in my mind. What a rude little creature you
are to come seeking my love!
A look of sadness
came over the monster 's face as soon as I thought this, and its
scales took on a purple tinge, as if to express what it was
feeling. Its entire body
seemed to shrink a little, too. I folded my arms to watch these
changes occurring.
Maybe something like this would happen whenever its feelings
altered. And maybe its
awful-looking exterior masked a heart that was as soft and
vulnerable as a brand-new
marshmallow. If so, I knew I could win. I decided to give it a
try You are an ugly little
monster, you know, I shouted in my mind's loudest voice — so
loud it made my heart
reverberate. You are an ugly little monster! The purple of the
scales grew deeper, and
the thing's eyes began to bulge as if they were sucking in all
the hatred I was sending
them. They protruded from the creature 's face like ripe green
figs, and tears like red
juice ran down from them, splattering on the floor.
I wasn't afraid of
the monster anymore. I painted pictures in my mind of all the cruel
things I wanted to do to it. I tied it down to a heavy chair
with thick wires, and with a
needle-nose pliers I began ripping out its scales at the roots,
one by one. I heated the
point of a sharp knife, and with it I cut deep grooves in the
soft pink flesh of its calves.
Over and over, I stabbed a hot soldering iron into the bulging
figs of its eyes. With each new torture I imagined for it, the monster would
lurch and writhe and wail in agony as if
those things were actually happening to it. It wept its colored
tears and oozed thick gobs of liquid onto the floor, emitting a gray vapor from
its ears that had the fragrance of
roses. Its eyes sent an unnerving glare of reproach at me.
Please, madam, oh please, I beg of you, don't think such terrible thoughts! it
cried. I have no evil thoughts for you. I
would never harm you. All I feel for you is love, is love. But I
refused to listen. In my
mind, I said, Don't be ridiculous! You crawled out of my garden.
You unlocked my door without permission. You came inside my house. I never
asked you here. I have the right to think anything I want to. And I continued
to do exactly that — thinking at the creature
increasingly terrible thoughts. I cut and tormented its flesh
with every machine and tool I could think of, overlooking no method that might
exist to torture a living being and make it writhe in pain. See, then, you little
monster, you have no idea what a woman is.
There's no end to the number of things I can think of to do to
you. But soon the
monster 's outlines began to fade, and even its strong green
nose shriveled up until it
was no bigger than a worm Writhing on the floor, the monster
tried to move its mouth
and speak to me, struggling to open its lips as if it wanted to
leave me some final
message, to convey some ancient wisdom, some crucial bit of
knowledge that it had
forgotten to impart to me. Before that could happen, the mouth
attained a painful
stillness, and soon it went out of focus and disappeared. The
monster now looked like
nothing more than a pale evening shadow. Ali that remained,
suspended in the air, were its mournful, bloated eyes. That won't do any good,
I thought to it. You can look all you want, but you can't say a thing. You
can't do a thing. Your existence is over, finished,
done. Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room
filled with the darkness of night.
10.FAMILY AFFaiR
translated by Jay Rubin
It probably happens all the time, but I disliked my kid sister's
fiance right from the start. And the less I liked him, the more doubts I had
about her. I was disappointed in her for
the choice she had made.
Maybe I’m just narrow-minded.
My sister certainly
seemed to think so. We didn't talk about my feelings, but she
knew I didn't like her fiance, and she let her annoyance show.
"You've got such
a narrow view of things," she said.
At the time, we were
talking about spaghetti. She was telling me that I had a narrow view of spaghetti.
This was not all she
had in mind, of course. Her fiance was lurking somewhere just
beyond the spaghetti, and she was really talking about him. We
were fighting over him
by proxy.
It all started one Sunday
afternoon when she suggested we go out for Italian food.
"Fine," I said, since I just happened to be in the
mood for that. We went to a cute little
spaghetti house that had recently opened up across from the
station. I ordered
spaghetti with eggplant and garlic, and she asked for pesto
sauce. While we waited, I
had a beer. So far, so good. It was May, a Sunday, and the weather
was beautiful.
The problem started
with the spaghetti itself, which was a disaster. The surface of
the pasta had an unpleasant, floury texture. The center was
still hard and uncooked.
Even a dog would have turned its nose up at the butter they had
used. I couldn't eat
more than half of what was on my plate, and I asked the waitress
to take the rest away.
My sister glanced at
me once or twice but didn't say anything at first. Instead, she
took her time, eating everything they had served her, down to
the last thread. I sat
there, looking out the window and drinking another beer.
"You didn't have
to make such a show of leaving your food," she said when the
waitress had taken her plate.
"Yuck."
"It wasn't that
bad. You could have forced yourself."
"Why should I?
It's my stomach, not yours."
"It's a
brand-new restaurant. The cooks probably not used to the kitchen. It wouldn't
have killed you to give him the benefit of the doubt," she said, and took
a sip of the thin, tasteless-looking coffee they had brought her.
"You may be
right," I said, "but it only makes sense for a discriminating
individual to
leave food he doesn't like."
"Well, excuse
me, Mr. Know-it-all."
"What's your
problem? That time of the month again?"
"Oh, shut up. I
deserve better than that from you."
"Take it
easy," I said. "You' re talking to a guy who knows exactly when your
periods started. You were so late, Mom took you to see a doctor."
"You' re going
to get my pocketbook right between the eyes ..."
She was turning
serious, so I shut up.
"The trouble
with you is, you're so narrow-minded about everything," she said as she
added cream to her coffee (meaning it was tasteless, after all). "You only
see the
negative things. You don't even try to look at the good points.
If something doesn't
measure up to your standards, you won't touch it. It's so
annoying."
"Maybe so. But
it's my life, not yours."
"And you don't
care how much you hurt people. You just let them clean up your
mess. Even when you masturbate."
"What the hell
are you talking about?"
"I remember when
you were in high school you used to do it in your sheets. The
women of the family had to clean up after you. The least you
could do is masturbate
without getting it all over your sheets."
"I’ll be more
careful from now on," I said. "Now, forgive me for repeating myself,
but it just so happens that I have my own life. I know what I like and I know
what I don't like.
It's as simple as that."
"Okay, but you don't have to hurt
people. Why don't you try a little harder? Why don't you look at the good side?
Why don't you at least show some restraint? Why don't you
grow up?"
Now she had touched a
sore spot. 'I am grown up. I can show restraint. And I can
look at the good side, too. I'm just not looking at the same
things you are."
"That's what I
mean. You're so arrogant. That's why you haven't got a steady
girlfriend. I mean, you're twenty-seven years old."
"Of course I
have a girlfriend."
"You mean a body
to sleep with. You know I’m right. Do you enjoy changing partners every year? How
about love and understanding and compassion? Without those, what's the point?
You might as well be masturbating."
'I don't change
partners every year, do I?"
"Pretty much.
You ought to think about your life more seriously, act more like a
grownup." That marked the end of our conversation. She just
tuned out.
Why had her attitude
toward me changed so much over the past year? Until then,
she had seemed to enjoy being partners with me in my resolutely
aimless life-style, and — if I’m not mistaken — she even looked up to me to
some extent. She had become
gradually more critical of me in the months since she had begun
seeing her fiance.
This, to me, seemed
tremendously unfair. She had been seeing him for a few
months, but she and I had been "seeing" each other for
twenty-three years. We had
always gotten along well, practically never had a fight. I
didn't know a brother and sister who could talk so honestly and openly with
each other, and not only about masturbation and periods: She knew when I first
bought condoms (I was seventeen), and I knew
when she first bought lace underwear (she was nineteen).
I had dated her
friends (but not slept with them, of course), and she had dated mine
(but not slept with them, of course — I think). That's just how
we were brought up. This excellent relationship of ours turned sour in less
than a year. The more I thought about
it, the angrier it made me.
She had to buy a pair
of shoes at the department store near the station, she said. I
left her outside the restaurant and went back to our apartment
alone. I gave my
girlfriend a call, but she wasn't in. Which wasn't surprising.
Two o'clock on a Sunday
afternoon was not the best time to ask a giri for a date. I flipped
the pages of my
address book and tried another girl — a student I had met at
some disco. She answered the phone.
"Like to go out
for a drink?"
"You're kidding.
It's two o'clock in the afternoon."
"So what? We'll
drink till the sun goes down I know the perfect bar for watching the
sunset. You can't get good seats if you're not there by three."
"Are you some
kind of connoisseur of sunsets?"
But still she
accepted, probably out of kindness. I picked her up, and we drove out
along the shore just beyond Yokohama to a bar with a view of the
ocean. I drank four
glasses of I. W. Harper on the rocks, and she had two banana
daiquiris (can you believe it?). And we watched the sun go down.
"Are you going
to be okay driving with that much to drink?" she asked.
"No problem.
Where alcohol is concerned, I'munder par."
'"Under
par'?"
"Four drinks are
just enough to bring me up to normal. You haven't got a thing to
worry about. Not a thing."
"If you say so
..."
We drove back to
Yokohama, ate, and enjoyed a few kisses in the car. I suggested we go to a
hotel, but she didn't want to.
"I' m wearing a
tampon."
"So take it
out."
"Yeah, right.
It's my second day."
And what a day it
was. At this rate, I should have just had a date with my girlfriend.
But no, this was going to be the day I spent a nice, leisurely
Sunday with my sister,
something we hadn't done for a long time. So much for that plan.
"Sorry,"
said the girl. "I'm telling you the truth."
"Never mind.
It's not your fault. I’m to blame."
"You're to blame
for my period?" she asked with an odd look.
"No, it's just
the way things worked out." What a stupid question.
I drove her to her
house in Setagaya. On the way, the clutch started making funny
rattling noises. I'd probably have to bring it into the garage
soon, I thought with a sigh. It was one of those classic days, when one thing
goes wrong and then everything goes
with it.
"Can I invite
you out again soon?" I asked.
"On a date? Or to
a hotel?"
"Both," I
said with a smile. "The two go together. You know. Like a toothbrush and
toothpaste."
"Maybe. I'll
think about it."
"You do that.
Thinking is good for you. It keeps you from getting senile."
"Where do you
live? Can I come and visit?"
"Sony. I live
with my sister. We've got rules. I don't bring women home, and she
doesn't bring men."
"Yeah, like
she's really your sister."
"It's true. Next
time I’ll bring a copy of our lease. Sunday okay?"
She laughed.
"Okay."
I watched her go in
through her gate. Then I started my engine and drove home,
listening for those clutch noises.
The apartment was
pitch-black. I turned on the light and called my sister 's name, but she wasn't
there. What the hell was she doing out at ten o'clock at night? I looked for
the evening paper but couldn't find it. Of course. It was
Sunday.
I got a beer from the
refrigerator and carried it and a glass into the living room. I
switched on the stereo and dropped a new Herbie Hancock record
on the turntable.
Waiting for the music to start, I took a long swallow of beer.
But nothing came from the
speakers. Then I remembered. The stereo had gone on the blink
three days earlier. The amp had power, but there was no sound.
This also made it
impossible to watch TV I have one of those monitors without any
sound circuitry of its own. You have to use it with the stereo.
I stared at my silent
TV screen and drank my beer. They were showing an old war
movie. Rommel's Afrika Korps tanks were fighting in the desert.
Their cannons shot
silent shells, their machine guns shot silent bullets, and
people died silently, one after
another.
I sighed for what
must have been the sixteenth time that day.
I had started living
with my sister five years earlier, in the spring, when I was
twenty-two and she was eighteen. I had just graduated from
college and taken my first
job, and she had just graduated from high school and entered
college. Our parents had allowed her to go to school in Tokyo on the condition
that she live with me, a condition we were both glad to accept. They found us a
nice, big two-bedroom apartment, and I
paid half the rent.
The thought of living
with my sister was an almost painless proposition. Not only did we get along well,
as I mentioned earlier, but our schedules matched well, too. Working for the PR
section of an appliance manufacturer, I would leave the house fairly late in
the morning and come back late at night. She used to go out
early and come home as
the sun was going down. In other words, she was usually gone
when I woke up and
asleep by the time I came back. And since my weekends were
mostly taken up with
dates, I didn't really talk to my sister more than once or twice
a week. We wouldn't have had time to fight even if we had wanted to, and we
didn't invade each other' s privacy.
I assumed she had her
own things going, but I felt it was not my place to say
anything. She was eighteen, after all. What business was it of
mine who she slept with?
One time, though, I
held her hand for a couple of hours — from one to three in the
morning, to be exact. I found her at the kitchen table, crying,
when I got home from
work. Narrow-minded and selfish as I am, I was smart enough to
realize that if she was crying at the kitchen table and not in her room she
wanted some comforting from me.
So I sat next to her
and held her hand — probably for the first time since elementary school, when we
went out hunting dragonflies. Her hand was much bigger and stronger than I
remembered. Obviously.
She cried for two
hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was
capable of producing such quantities of tears. Two minutes of
crying was all it took to
dry me out.
By the time 3:00 a.m
rolled around, though, I had had it. I couldn't keep my eyes
open. Now it was my turn, as the elder brother, to say
something, though giving advice was definitely not my line.
"I don't want to
interfere with the way you live your life," I began. "It's your life,
and
you should live it as you please."
She nodded.
"But I do want
to give you one word of advice. Don't carry condoms in your purse.
They'll think you' re a whore."
When she heard that,
she grabbed the telephone book that was sitting on the table
and heaved it at me with all her might.
"What are you
doing snooping in my bag!"
She always threw
things when she got mad. Which is why I didn't go on to tell her
that I had never looked in her bag.
In any case, it
worked. She stopped crying, and I was able to get some sleep.
Our life-style stayed
exactly the same, even after she graduated from college and
took a job with a travel agency. She worked a Standard
nine-to-five day, while my
schedule became, if anything, looser. I'd show up at the office
some time before noon,
read the newspaper at my desk, eat lunch, and finally get
serious about doing a little
something around two in the afternoon. Later, I'd make arrangements
with the guys
from the ad agency, and we'd go out drinking till after
midnight.
For her first summer
vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour
put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer
engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back
to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it's not
for me. First of all, I hate
package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody
you meet in a group
like that makes me sick.
After she started
seeing this computer engineer, though, my sister began to glow.
She paid a lot more attention to appearances, both the
apartment's and her own. Until
then, she had gone just about everywhere in a work shirt and
faded jeans and
sneakers. Thanks to her new interest in clothing, the front
closet filled up with her
shoes, and all the other closets were overflowing with wire
hangers from the cleaner's. She was constantly doing laundry and ironing
clothes (instead of leaving them to pile up in the bathroom like an Amazonian
ants' nest), always cooking and cleaning. These
were dangerous symptoms, I seemed to recall from my own
experience. When a
woman starts acting like this, a man has only one choice: to
clear out fast or marry her.
Then she showed me
his picture. She had never done anything like that before.
Another dangerous symptom.
Actually, she showed
me two pictures. One had been taken on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It
showed my sister and the computer engineer standing in front of a
swordfish and wearing big smiles on their faces.
"Nice
swordfish," I said.
"Stop joking.
I'm serious."
"So what should
I say?"
"Don't say
anything. This is him''
I took the photo
again and studied his face. If there was one single type of face in the world designed
to arouse instant dislike in me, this was it. Worse, something about him
reminded me of a particular upperclassman in a high-school club of mine, a guy I
hated — not a bad-looking type, but absolutely empty-headed and a real whiner.
He had a
memory like an elephant; once he had some picky thing on you,
he'd never let go. He
made up for lack of brains with this phenomenal memory.
"How many times
have you done it with him?" I asked.
"Don't be
stupid," she said, blushing. "You don't have to judge the whole world
by
your own standards. Not everybody i s like you, you know."
The second photo had
been taken after the trip. It showed the computer engineer by himself. He wore
a leather jacket and was leaning against a big motorcycle, his helmet perched
on the saddle. His face had exactly the same expression as in San Francisco.
Maybe he didn' 't have any other expressions.
"He likes
motorcycles," she said.
"No kidding. I
didn't think he put on the leather jacket just to have his picture taken."
Maybe it was another
example of my narrow-minded personality, but I could never
like motorcycle freaks — the way they swagger around, so pleased
with themselves. I
kept my mouth shut and handed the picture back.
"Well,
then," I said.
"Well, then,
what?"
"Well, then, what comes next?"
"I don't know.
We might get married."
"Has he
proposed?"
"Sort of. But I
haven't given him my answer."
"I see."
"Actually, I' m
not sure I want to get married. I've just started working, and I think I'd
like to take it easy, play around a little more. Not go crazy
like you, of course ..."
"That's probably
a healthy attitude," I offered.
"But I don't
know, he's really nice. Sometimes I think I'd like to marry him. It's
hard."
I picked up the photos again and looked at them I kept my sigh
to myself.
This conversation
happened before Christmas. One morning after New Year's, my
mother called me at nine o'clock. I was brushing my teeth to
Bruce Springsteen's "Born
in the U.S.A."
She asked if I knew
the man my sister was seeing.
I said I didn't.
She said she had
gotten a letter from my sister asking if she could bring him home
two weeks from Saturday.
'I suppose she wants
to marry him," I said.
"That's why I’m
trying to find out from you what kind of man he is. I'd like to learn something
about him before I actually meet him."
"Well, Fve never
met the guy. He's a year older than she is and he's a computer
engineer. Works at one of those three-letter places — IBM or NEC
or TNT, I don't know. I’ve seen his picture. A nothing kind of face. Not my
taste, but then I don't have to marry him."
"Where did he
graduate from? Does he have a house?"
"How should I
know?"
"Well, would you
please meet him and find out about these things?"
"No way. I'm
busy. Ask him yourself when you meet him in two weeks."
Finally, though, I
had no choice but to meet my sister's computer engineer. She was going to pay a
formal visit to his family's home the following Sunday, and she wanted
me to come with her. I put on a white shirt and a tie and my
most conservative suit.
They lived in an imposing house in the middle of a nice
residential neighborhood in
Meguro. The 500CC Honda I had seen in the photo was parked in
front of the garage.
"Nice
swordfish."
"Please, "
she said, "none of your stupid jokes. All I’m asking is that you restrain
yourself for one day."
"Yes,
ma'am."
His parents were fine
people, very proper — maybe a little too proper. The father
was an oil-company executive. Since my father owned a chain of
gas stations in Shizuoka, this was by no means an unthinkable match. The mother
served us tea on an
elegant tray.
I offered the father
my calling card, and he gave me his. Then I managed to dredge
up all the proper phrases to explain that I was here to
represent my parents, who were
unfortunately unable to attend, owing to a previous engagement;
we hoped that on
some future date acceptable to both parties they might be
allowed to pay their formal
respects.
He replied that his
son had told him much about my sister and that, meeting her now, he saw that she
was far lovelier than his son deserved. He knew we came from an
upstanding family, and as far as he and his wife were concerned
they had no objection
to the "present discussions." I imagined he must have
had our family background
thoroughly investigated, but he couldn't possibly have found out
that my sister had not
had her first period until she was sixteen and that she was
chronically constipated.
Once the formalities
ended without mishap, the father poured me a brandy — pretty decent stuff. As we
drank, we talked about jobs of various kinds. My sister poked me
now and then with the toe of her slipper, warning me not to
drink too much.
The computer
engineer, meanwhile, said nothing, but sat next to his father all the
while with a tense expression on his face. You could see right
away that he was under
his father 's thumb, at least while he remained in this house.
It figured. The sweater he was wearing had a strange pattern of a kind I had never
seen before, and its color
clashed with his shirt. Why couldn't she have found somebody a
little sharper?
The conversation
reached a lull around four o'clock, and we stood up to leave. The
computer engineer saw us as far as the station. "How about
a cup of tea?" he urged. I
didn't want tea and I certainly didn't want to sit at the same
table with a guy wearing
such a weird sweater, but it would have been awkward for me to
refuse, so the three of us went into a nearby coffeehouse.
They ordered coffee
and I ordered beer, but the place didn't serve beer so I ordered coffee, too.
"Thanks so much
for coming today," he said. "I appreciate your help."
"Just doing
what's expected of me," I said simply "No thanks necessary." I
had lost
the energy to make wisecracks.
"She's told me
so much about you — Brother."
Brother!?
I scratched an
earlobe with the handle of my coffee spoon and returned it to the
saucer. My sister gave me another healthy kick, but its meaning
seemed lost on the
computer engineer. Maybe he only got jokes in binary notation.
"I envy the two
of you being so close," he said.
"We kick each
other in the leg when we're happy," I said.
He took this with a
puzzled expression.
"It's supposed
to be a joke," grumbled my sister. "He likes to say things like
that."
"Just a j
oke," I concurred. "We share the housework. She does the laundry and
I do the jokes."
The computer engineer
— his name was Noboru Watanabe — gave a little laugh, as though this had solved
a problem for him
"You two are so bright and
cheery," he said. "That's the kind of household I want to
have. Bright and cheery is best."
"See?" I
said to my sister. "Bright and cheery is best. You're too uptight."
"Not if the
jokes are funny," she said.
"If possible,
we'd like to marry in the autumn," said Noboru Watanabe.
"Autumn is the
best time for a wedding," I said. "You can still invite the squirrels
and bears."
He laughed. She
didn't. She was starting to look seriously angry. I excused myself
and left.
Back at the
apartment, I phoned my mother and summed up the afternoon for her.
"He's not such a
bad guy," I said, scratching my ear.
"What do you
mean by that?" she asked.
"He's a serious
individual. At least, more serious than I am"
"But you' re not
serious at all."
"I’m glad to
hear that. Thanks," I said, looking at the ceiling.
"So, where did
he graduate from?"
"Graduate?"
"Where did he go
to college?"
"Ask him
yourself," I said, and hung up. I was sick of all this. I took a beer from
the
refrigerator and drank it alone.
The day after the spaghetti argument with my sister, I woke up
at eight-thirty. It was
another beautiful, cloudless day, just like yesterday. In fact,
it was like a continuation of yesterday, and my life seemed to be starting up
again, too, after a halftime break.
I threw my
sweat-dampened pajamas into the hamper, took a shower, and shaved. While
shaving, I thought about the giri I hadn't quite been able to get last night.
Ah, well, it just wasn't in the cards. I did my best. F 11 have plenty more opportunities.
Like next Sunday.
I toasted two slices
of bread and warmed up some coffee. I wanted to listen to an FM station but remembered
the stereo was broken. Instead, I read book reviews in the
paper and ate my toast. Not one of the books reviewed was
something I thought I'd
want to read: a novel on "the sex life of an old Jewish
man, mingling fantasy and reality,a historical study of treatments for
schizophrenia, a complete expose of the 1907 Ashio Copper Mine pollution
incident. It'd be a lot more fun to sleep with the captain of a girls' softball
team. The newspaper probably chose books like this just to annoy us.
Munching on my toast,
I laid the paper on the table; then I noticed a memo under the jam jar. In my sister's
tiny handwriting, it said that she had invited Noboru Watanabe for dinner this
Sunday and she expected me to be there.
I finished eating,
brushed the crumbs off my shirt, and put the dishes in the sink.
Then I called the travel agency. My sister took the phone and
said, "I can't talk right
now. I’ll call you back in ten minutes."
The call came twenty
minutes later. In the meantime, I had done forty-three
push-ups, trimmed all twenty fmger-and toenails, picked out my
shirt, necktie, jacket,
and pants for the day, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and
yawned twice.
"Did you see my
note?" she asked.
"Yup. Sorry, but
I’ve got a date this Sunday. Made it a long time ago. If I had known, I would
have left the day open. Too bad."
"You expect me
to believe that? I know what you' re going to do: go somewhere and do something
with some girl whose name you hardly know. Well, you can do that on
Saturday."
"Saturday I have
to be in the studio all day with an electric-blanket commercial.
We're busy these days."
"So cancel your
date."
"I can't. She’ll
charge me a cancellation fee. And things are at a pretty delicate stage with
her."
"Meaning things
are not so delicate in my case?"
"No, I don't
mean that at all," I said, holding the necktie I had chosen next to the
shirt hanging on a chairback. "But don't forget: We've got this rule not
to trespass on each
other's lives. You eat dinner with your fiance and I'll have a
date with my girlfriend.
What' s wrong with that?"
"You know what's
wrong with that. Look how long it's been since you've seen him.
You met him once, and that was four months ago. It's just not
right. Every time I arrange something, you run away. Don't you see how rude
you' re being? He's your sister's
fiance. It wouldn't kill you to have dinner with him once."
She had a point
there, so I kept quiet. In fact, I had been trying to avoid crossing
paths with him, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in
the world to do. We had
nothing in common to talk about, and it was exhausting to tell
jokes using my sister as a simultaneous interpreter.
"Will you please
just join us this once? If you'll do that much for me, I promise I won't
interfere with your sex life till the end of the summer."
"My sex life is
pretty feeble at the moment. It might not make it through the summer."
"You will be
home for dinner this Sunday, though, won't you?"
"How can I say
no?"
"He'll probably
fix the stereo for us. He's good at that."
"Good with his
hands, huh?"
"You and your
dirty mind," she said, and hung up.
I put on my necktie
and went to work.
The weather was clear
all that week. Each day was like a continuation of the
previous one. Wednesday night, I called my girlfriend to say we
couldn't get together on the weekend. She was understandably annoyed: We hadn't
seen each other for three
weeks. Receiver still in hand, I dialed the college girl I had
made a date with for Sunday, but she was out. She was out again on Thursday and
on Friday.
My sister woke me up
at eight o'clock on Sunday morning. "Get out of bed, will you? I have to wash
the sheets."
She stripped the
sheets and pillowcase and ordered me out of my pajamas. My only refuge was the bathroom,
where I showered and shaved. She was getting to be more
and more like our mother. Women are like salmon: In the end,
they all swim back to the same place.
After the shower, I
put on a pair of shorts and a faded T-shirt, and with long, long
yawns I drank a glass of orange juice. My veins still carried
some of last night's alcohol; opening the Sunday paper would have been too much
for me. I nibbled a few soda
crackers from the box on the kitchen table and decided that that
was all the breakfast I
needed.
My sister threw the
sheets into the washing machine and cleaned our two rooms.
Next, she put some soap and water in a bucket and washed down
the walls and floors
of the living room and kitchen. I sprawled on the sofa all this
time, looking at the nude
photos in a copy of Hustler that a friend of mine in the States
had gotten past the postal censors. Amazing, the variety in shape and size of
the female sex organ. They can be
as different as people's heights or IQs.
"Stop hanging
around and do some shopping for me, will you?" She handed me a list
crammed full of things to buy. "And please hide that magazine. He's very
proper."
I laid the magazine
down and studied the list. Lettuce, tomatoes, celery, French
dressing, smoked salmon, mustard, onions, soup stock, potatoes,
parsley, three steaks . . .
"Steaks? I just
had steak last night. Why don't you make croquettes?"
"Maybe we had
steak last night, but we didn't. Don't be so selfish. You can't serve
croquettes when you have a guest for dinner."
"If some girl
invited me to her house and fed me fresh-fried croquettes, I'd be deeply moved.
With a nice pile of julienned white cabbage, a bowl of miso clam soup . . .
that' s real life."
"Maybe so, but I
have decided on steak. Next time I'll feed you croquettes till you
drop, but today you'll have to make do with steak. Please."
"That'll be
fine," I told her reassuringly. I can be a pain in the neck, but finally
I'm a
kind, understanding human being.
I went to the
neighborhood supermarket and bought everything on the list. On the
way home, I stopped off at a liquor store and bought a 4,500-yen
bottle of Chablis — my gift to the young couple. Only a kind, understanding
human being would think of
something like that.
At home, I found a
blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a spotless pair of cotton pants
neatly folded on the bed.
"Change into
those," she said.
With another silent
sigh, I did as I was told. I couldn't have said anything to her that
would have brought me back my pleasantly messy, peaceful Sunday.
Noboru Watanabe came riding up at three. Astride his trusty
cycle, he arrived with the
gentle zephyrs of springtime. I caught the ominous put-put of
his 500CC Honda from a
quarter mile away. I stuck my head out over the edge of the
balcony to see him parking next to the entrance of our apartment house and
taking off his helmet. Fortunately, once he removed that white dome with its
STP sticker, his outfit today approached that of a
normal human being: overstarched button-down check shirt, baggy white
pants, and
brown loafers with tassels — though the color of the shoes and
belt didn't match.
"I think your
friend from Fisherman's Wharf is here," I said to my sister, who was
peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink.
"Keep him
company for a while, will you? I'll finish up here."
"Bad idea. I
don't know what to talk to him about. You talk to him — I’ll do this."
"Don't be silly.
It wouldn't look right for me to leave you in the kitchen. You talk to
him"
The bell rang, and I
opened the door to find Noboru Watanabe standing there. I
showed him into the living room and settled him onto the couch.
His gift for the evening was a selection of Baskin-Robbins's thirty-one
flavors, but cramming it into our tiny,
already-stuffed freezer took a major effort on my part. What a
pain. Of all the things he
could have brought, why did he have to pick ice cream?
"How about a
beer?"
"No thanks. I
think I’m allergic to alcohol. One glass is enough to make me sick."
"I once drank a
whole wash basin fill of beer on a bet with some college friends."
"What did it do
to you?"
"My pee stank
beer for two whole days. And I kept burping up this — "
"Why don't you
have Noboru look at the stereo set?" interjected my sister, who had
come along in the nick of time, as if she had smelled smoke,
with two glasses of orange juice.
"Good
idea," said Noboru.
"I hear you' re
good with your hands," I said.
"It's
true," he confessed unabashedly "I always used to enjoy making
plastic models and radio kits. Anytime something broke in the house, I'd fix it.
What' s wrong with the
stereo?"
"No sound,"
I said. I turned on the amp and put on a record to show him
He crouched down in
front of the stereo like a mongoose ready to spring. After
fiddling with all the switches, he announced, "It's definitely
in the amplifier system, but
it's not internal."
"How can you tell?"
"By the
inductive method."
Oh, sure, the
inductive method.
He pulled out the mini-preamp and the power
amplifier, removed all the cords
connecting them, and began to examine each one. While he was
busy with this, I took a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator and drank it
alone.
"It must be fun
to be able to drink alcohol," he said as he poked at a plug with a
mechanical pencil.
"I wonder,"
I said. "I’ve been doing it so long I wouldn't have anything to compare it
with."
"I've been
practicing a little."
"Practicing
drinking?"
"Yes. Is there
something odd about that?"
"No, not at all.
You should start with white wine. Put some in a big glass with ice, cut it with
Perrier and a squeeze of lemon juice. That' s what I drink instead of fruit
juice."
"I’ll give it a
try," he said. "Aha! I thought so!"
"What' s
that?"
"The connecting
cords between the preamp and the power amp. The connection's
been broken at the plugs on both channels. This kind of pin plug
can't take much
movement. In addition to which, they're cheaply made. I'll bet
somebody moved the
amplifier recently."
'I did the other day,
when I was cleaning," said my sister.
"That' s
it."
She looked at me.
"We got this thing from your company. It's their fault for using
such weak parts."
"Well, I didn't
make it," I muttered. 'I just do the commercials."
"Don't
worry," said Noboru Watanabe. "I can fix it right away if you' ve got
a soldering iron."
"A soldering
iron? Not in this house."
"Never mind. I'll
zip out and buy one. You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house.
They come in handy."
"Yeah, I bet.
But I don't know where there's a hardware store."
"I do. I passed
one on the way."
I stuck my head out
over the balcony again and watched Noboru Watanabe strap on his helmet, mount
his bike, and disappear around a corner.
"He's so
nice," sighed my sister.
"Yeah, a real
honey."
Noboru Watanabe finished repairing the pin plugs before five
o'clock. He asked to hear some easy-listening vocals, so my sister put on a
Julio Iglesias record. Since when did we have crap like that in the house?
Noboru asked me,
"What kind of music do you like?"
"Oh, I just love
stuff like this," I blurted out. "You know: Bruce Springsteen, Jeff
Beck, the Doors."
"Funny, I’ve
never heard of any of those. Are they like Julio?"
"Yeah, a lot
like Julio."
He talked about the
new computer system that his project team was currently
developing. It was designed to generate an instantaneous diagram
showing the most
effective method for returning trains to the depot after an
accident. In fact, it sounded
like a great idea, but the principle made about as much sense to
me as Finnish verb
conjugations. While he raved on and on, I nodded at appropriate times
and thought
about women — like who I should take where to drink what on my
next day off,
including where we would eat and the hotel we'd use. I must have
an inborn liking for
such things. Just as there are those who like to make plastic
models and draw train
diagrams, I like to get drunk with women and sleep with them. It
was a matter of
Destiny, something that surpassed all human understanding.
Around the time I was
finishing my fourth beer, dinner was ready: smoked salmon,
vichyssoise, steak, salad, and fried potatoes. As always, my
sister's cooking was pretty good. I opened the Chablis and drank it alone.
As he sliced his
tenderloin, Noboru Watanabe asked me, "Why did you take a job
with an appliance manufacturer? I gather you're not particularly
interested in electrical
devices."
My sister answered
for me. "He's not particularly interested in anything that's of
benefit to society. He would have taken a job anywhere. It just
so happened he had an
in with that particular company."
"I couldn't have
said it any better myself," I chimed in.
"All he thinks
about is having fun. It never occurs to him to concentrate on anything
seriously, to make himself a better person."
"Yours truly,
the summer grasshopper."
"He gets a kick
out of smirking at those who do choose to live seriously."
"Now, there
you're wrong," I interjected. "What I do has nothing to do with what
anybody else does. I just go along burning my own calories in
accordance with my own
ideas about things. What other people do doesn't concern me. I
don't smirk at them; I
don't even look at them. I may be a good-for-nothing, but at
least I don't get in the way
of other people."
"That's not
true!" cried Noboru Watanabe in something like a reflex action.
"You're
not a good-for-nothing!" He must have been brought up well.
"Thank
you," I said, raising my wineglass to him. "And by the way,
congrarulations
on your engagement. Sorry to be the only one drinking."
"We're planning to have the ceremony in
October," he said. "Probably too late to
invite the squirrels and bears."
"Not to
worry," I said. Incredible, he was making jokes!
"So, where will
you go on your honeymoon? I suppose you can get discount fares?"
"Hawaii," my sister answered curtly.
We talked for a while
about airplanes. Having just read several books on the crash in the Andes, I brought
up that topic.
"When they ate
human flesh, they would roast it in the sun on pieces of aluminum
from the airplane."
My sister stopped
eating and glared at me. "Why do you have to talk about such
awful things at the dinner table? Do you say things like that
when you're eating with girls you're trying to seduce?"
Like a guest invited
to dinner by a feuding married couple, Noboru Watanabe tried to come between us
by asking me, "Have you ever thought of marrying?"
"Never had the
chance," I said as I was about to put a chunk of fried potato in my
mouth. "I had to raise my little sister without any help,
and then came the long years of war ..."
"War? What war?"
"It's just
another one of his stupid jokes," said my sister, shaking the bottle of
salad
dressing.
"Just another
one of my stupid jokes," I added. "But the part about not having had
the chance is true. I’ve always been a narrow-minded guy, and I
never used to wash my socks, so I was never able to fmd a nice giri who wanted
to spend her life with me.
Unlike you."
"Was there
something wrong with your socks?" asked Noboru Watanabe.
"That's a joke,
too," my sister explained wearily. "I wash his socks, at least, every
day."
Noboru Watanabe
nodded and laughed for one and a half seconds. I was
determined to make him laugh for three seconds next time.
"But she's been
spending her life with you, hasn't she?" he said, gesturing toward my
sister.
"Well, after
all, she 's my sister."
"And we've
stayed together because you do anything you please and I don't say a
thing. But that's not a real life. In a real, grown-up, adult
life, people confront each other honestly I' m not saying the past five years
with you haven't been fun. It's been a free
and easy time for me. But lately, I’ve come to see that it's not
a real life. It hasn't got — oh, I don't know — the feel of what real life is
all about. All you think about is yourself,
and if somebody tries to have a serious conversation with you,
you make fun of them."
"Deep down, I'm really
a shy person."
"No, you' re
just plain arrogant."
"I'm shy and
arrogant," I explained to Noboru Watanabe as I poured myself more
wine. "I have this shy, arrogant way of returning trains to
the depot after an accident."
"I think I see
what you mean," he said, nodding. "But do you know what I think? I
think that after you' re alone — I mean, after she and I get
married — that you are going to start wanting to get married, too."
"You may be
right," I said.
"Really?"
my sister piped up. "If you're really thinking about getting married, I’ve
got a good friend, a nice giri, I'd be glad to introduce you."
"Sure. When the
time comes," I said. "Too dangerous now."
When dinner was over,
we moved to the living room for coffee. This time my sister
put on a Willie Nelson record — maybe one small step up from
Julio Iglesias.
My sister was in the
kitchen, cleaning up, when Noboru Watanabe said to me with an air of confidentiality,
"To tell you the truth, I wanted to stay single until I was closer to
thirty, like you. But when I met her, all I could think of was
getting married."
"She's a good
kid," I said. "She can be stubborn and a little constipated, but I
really
think you've made the right choice."
"Still, the idea
of getting married is kind of frightening, don't you think?"
"Well, if you
make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the
good things, there's nothing to be afraid of. If something bad
comes up, you can think
again at that point."
"You may be
right."
"I’m good at
giving advice to others."
I went to the kitchen
and told my sister I would be going out for a walk. "I won't come back before
ten o'clock, so the two of you can relax and enjoy yourselves. The sheets
are fresh."
"Is that all you
think about?" she said with an air of disgust, but she didn't try to stop
me from going out.
I went back to the
living room and told Noboru Watanabe that I had an errand to run and might be late
getting back.
"I'm glad we had
a chance to talk," he said. "Please be sure to visit us often after
we're married."
"Thanks," I
said, momentarily shutting down my imagination.
"Don't you dare
drive," my sister called out to me as I was leaving. "You've had too
much to drink."
"Don't worry. I’ll
walk."
It was a little
before eight when I entered a neighborhood bar. I sat at the counter,
drinking an I. W. Harper on the rocks. The TV behind the bar was
tuned to a
Giants-Swallows game. The sound was off, and instead they had a
Cyndi Lauper record going. The pitchers were Nishimoto and Obana, and the
Swallows were ahead, 3-2.
There was something to be said for watching TV with the sound
off.
I had three whiskeys
while I watched the ball game. It was the bottom of the seventh, score tied 3-3,
when the broadcast ended at nine o'clock and the set was switched off.
Two seats away from me was a girl around twenty I had seen there
a few times. She
had been watching the game, too, so I started talking to her
about baseball.
I’m a Giants
fan," she said. "Which team do you like?"
"They're all the
same to me. I just like to watch them play."
"What's the fun
of that? How can you get excited about the game?"
'I don't have to get
excited. I'm not playing. They are."
I had two more
whiskeys on the rocks and treated her to two daiquiris. She was a
major in commercial design at Tokyo University of the Arts, so
we talked about art in
advertising. At ten, we moved on to a bar with more comfortable
seats, where I had a
whiskey and she had a grasshopper. She was pretty drunk by this
time, and so was I. At eleven, I accompanied her to her apartment, where we had
sex as a matter of course,
the way they give you a cushion and a cup of tea at an inn.
"Put the light
out," she said, so I did. From her window you could see a big Nikon ad
tower. A TV next door was blasting the day's pro-baseball results. What with
the
darkness and my drunkenness, I hardly knew what I was doing. You
couldn't call it sex. I just moved my penis and discharged some semen.
As soon as the
moderately abbreviated act was finished, she went to sleep as if she couldn't
wait any longer to be unconscious. Without even bothering to wipe up properly,
I got dressed and left. The hardest thing was picking out my polo shirt and
underpants
from among her stuff in the dark.
Outside, my alcoholic
high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My
joints creaked like the Tin Woodman's in The Wizard of Oz. I
bought a can of juice from a vending machine to sober me up, but the second I
drank it down I vomited the entire
contents of my stomach onto the road — the corpses of my steak
and smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes.
How many years had it
been since I last vomited from drinking? What the hell was I doing these days?
The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than
the one before.
Then, with no
connection at all, I thought about Noboru Watanabe and the soldering
iron he had bought me. "You really ought to have a
soldering iron in the house. They
come in handy," he had said.
What a wholesome
idea, I said to him mentally as I wiped my lips with a
handkerchief. Now, thanks to you, my house is equipped with a
soldering iron. But
because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn't feel
like my house any longer.
That' s probably
because I have such a narrow personality.
It was after midnight by the time I got home. The motorcycle
was, of course, no longer
parked by the front entrance. I took the elevator to the fourth
floor, unlocked the
apartment door, and went in. Everything was pitch-black except
for a small fluorescent
light above the sink. My sister had probably gotten fed up and
gone to bed. I couldn't blame her.
I poured myself a
glass of orange juice and emptied it in one gulp. I used lots of soap in the
shower to wash the foul-smelling sweat from my body, and then I did a thorough
job of brushing my teeth. My face in the bathroom mirror was
enough to give me chills. I looked like one of those middle-aged men you see on
the last trains from downtown,
sprawling drunk on the seats and fouling themselves with their
own vomit. My skin was
rough, my eyes looked sunken, and my hair had lost its sheen.
I shook my head and
turned out the bathroom light. With nothing on but a towel
wrapped around my waist, I went to the kitchen and drank some
tap water. Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then
tomorrow I’ll do some thinking.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.
"You were so
late tonight," came my sister 's voice out of the gloom. She was sitting
on the living-room couch, drinking a beer alone.
'I was
drinking," I said.
"You drink too
much."
"I know."
I got a beer from the
refrigerator and sat down across from her.
For a while, neither
of us said anything. We sat there, occasionally tipping back our
beer cans. The leaves of the potted plants on the balcony
fluttered in the breeze, and
beyond them floated the misty semicircle of the moon.
"Just to let you
know, we didn't do it," she said.
"Do what?"
"Do anything. Something
got on my nerves. I just couldn't do it."
"Oh." I
seem to lose the power of speech on half-moon nights.
"Aren't you
going to ask what got on my nerves?"
"What got on
your nerves?"
"This room! This
place! I just couldn't do it here."
"Oh."
"Hey, is
something wrong with you? Are you feeling sick?"
"I’m tired. Even
I get tired sometimes."
She looked at me
without a word. I drained the last sip of my beer and rested my
head on the seat back, eyes closed.
"Was it our
fault? Did we make you tired?"
"No way," I
said with my eyes still closed.
"Are you too
tired to talk?" she asked in a tiny voice.
I straightened up and
looked at her. Then I shook my head.
"I’m worried.
Did I say something terrible to you today? Something about you
yourself, or about the way you live?"
"Not at
all," I said.
"Really?"
"Everything
you've said lately has been right on the mark. So don't worry. But what's
bothering you now, all of a sudden?"
"I don't know,
it just sort of popped into my mind after he left, while I was waiting for
you. I wondered if I hadn't gone too far."
I got two cans of
beer from the refrigerator, switched on the stereo, and put on the
Richie Beirach Trio at very low volume. It was the record I
listened to whenever I came home drunk in the middle of the night.
"I'm sure you're a little confused,"
I said. "These changes in life are like changes in
the barometric pressure. I'm kind of confused, too, in my own
way."
She nodded.
"Am I being hard
on you?" she asked.
"Everybody's
hard on somebody," I said. "But if I'm the one you chose to be hard
on, you made the right choice. So don't let it worry you."
"Sometimes, I
don't know, it scares me. The future."
"You have to
make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the
good things. Then you've got nothing to be afraid of. If
something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point." I gave her
the same speech I had given Noboru Watanabe.
"But what if
things don't work out the way you want them to?"
"If they don't
work out, that' s when you think again."
She gave a little
laugh. "You're as strange as ever."
"Say, can I ask
you one question?" I yanked open another can of beer.
"Sure."
"How many men
did you sleep with before him?"
She hesitated a
moment before holding up two fingers. "Two."
"And one was
your age, and the other was an older man?"
"How did you
know?"
"It's a
pattern." I took another swig of beer. "I haven't been fooling around
for nothing all these years. I’ve learned that much."
"So, typical."
"Let's just say
'healtby.' "
"How many girls
have you slept with?"
"Twenty-six. I
counted them up the other day. There were twenty-six I could
remember. There might be another ten or so I can't remember. I’m
not keeping a diary
or anything."
"Why do you
sleep with so many girls?"
"I don't
know," I answered honestly "I guess I’ll have to stop at some point,
but I can't seem to figure out how."
We remained silent
for a while, alone with our own thoughts. From the distance
came the sound of a motorcycle's exhaust, but it couldn't have
been Noboru
Watanabe's. Not at one o'clock in the morning.
"Tell me,"
she said, "what do you really think of him?"
"Noboru
Watanabe?"
"Uh-huh."
"He's not a bad
guy, I guess. Just not my type. Funny taste in clothes, for one thing." I
thought about it some more and said, "There's nothing wrong in having one
guy like
him in every family."
"That's what I
think. And then there's you: this person I call my brother. I'm very fond of
you, but if everybody were like you the world would probably be a terrible
place!"
"You may be
right."
We drank what was
left of the beer and withdrew to our separate rooms. My sheets were new and clean
and tight. I stretched out on top of them and looked through the
curtain at the moon. Where were we headed? I wondered. But I was
far too tired to think very deeply about such things. When I closed my eyes,
sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net.
11.A Window
translated by Jay Rubin
Greetings,
The winter cold
diminishes with each passing day, and now the sunlight hints at the
subtle scent of springtime. I trust that you are well.
Your recent letter
was a pleasure to read. The passage on the relationship between hamburger steak
and nutmeg was especially well written, I felt: so rich with the genuine sense
of daily living. How vividly it conveyed the warm aromas of the kitchen, the
lively
tapping of the knife against the cutting board as it sliced
through the onion!
In the course of my
reading, your letter filled me with such an irrepressible desire for hamburger steak
that I had to go to a nearby restaurant and have one that very night. In fact,
the particular neighborhood establishment in question offers eight different
varieties of hamburger steak; Texas-style, Hawaiian-style,
Japanese-style, and the like. Texas-style is big. Period. It would no doubt
come as a shock to any Texans who might find their way to this part of Tokyo.
Hawaiian-style is garnished with a slice of pineapple. California-style ... I
don't remember. Japanese-style is smothered with grated daikon.
The place is smartly decorated, and the waitresses are all
pretty, with extremely short
skirts.
Not that I had made
my way there for the express purpose of studying the
restaurant's interior decor or the waitresses' legs. I was there
for one reason only, and
that was to eat hamburger steak — not Texas-style or
California-style or any other style, but plain, simple hamburger steak.
Which is what I told
the waitress. "I'm sorry," she replied, "but such-and-such-style
hamburger steak is the only kind we have here."
I couldn't blame the
waitress, of course. She hadn't set the menu. She hadn't chosen to wear this uniform
that revealed so much thigh each time she cleared a dish from a
table. I smiled at her and ordered a Hawaiian-style hamburger
steak. As she pointed
out, I merely had to set the pineapple aside when I ate the
steak.
What a strange world we live in! All I want is
a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak,
and the only way I can have it at this particular point in time
is Hawaiian-style without
pineapple.
Your own hamburger
steak, I gather, is the normal kind. Thanks to your letter, what I wanted most of
all was an utterly normal hamburger steak made by you.
By contrast, the
passage on the National Railways' automatic ticket machines struck me as a bit superficial.
Your angle on the problem is a good one, to be sure, but the
reader can't vividly grasp the scene. Don't try so hard to be
the penetrating observer.
Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.
Your overall score on
this newest letter is 70. Your style is improving slowly but
surely. Don't be impatient. Just keep working as hard as you
have been all along. I look forward to your next letter. Won't it be nice when
spring really comes?
RS. Thank you for the
box of assorted cookies. They are delicious. The Society's
rules, however, strictly forbid personal contact beyond the
exchange of letters. I must
ask you to restrain your kindness in the future.
Nevertheless, thank
you once again.
I kept this part-time
job going for a year. I was twenty-two at the time.
I ground out thirty
or more letters like this every month at two thousand yen per letter for a
strange little company in the Iidabashi district that called itself "The
Pen Society."
"You, too, can
learn to write captivating letters," boasted the company's
advertisements. New "members" paid an initiation fee
and monthly dues, in return for
which they could write four letters a month to The Pen Society.
We "Pen Masters" would answer their letters with letters of our own,
such as the one quoted above, containing
corrections, comments, and guidance for future improvement. I had
gone for a job
interview after seeing an ad posted in the student office of the
literature department. At
the time, certain events had led me to delay my graduation for a
year, and my parents
had informed me that they would consequently be decreasing my
monthly support. For
the first time in my life, I was faced with having to make a
living. In addition to the
interview, I was asked to write several compositions, and a week
later I was hired. Then came a week of training in how to make corrections,
offer guidance, and other tricks of
the trade, none of which was very difficult.
All Society members
are assigned to Pen Masters of the opposite sex. I had a total of twenty-four members,
ranging in age from fourteen to fifty-three, the majority in the
twenty-five-to-thirty-five range. Which is to say, most of them
were older than I was. The first month, I panicked: The women were far better
writers than I was, and they had a lot more experience as correspondents. I had
hardly written a serious letter in my life, after all. I' m not quite sure how
I made it through that first month. I was in a constant cold
sweat, convinced that most of the members in my charge would
demand a new Pen
Master — a privilege touted in the Society' s rules.
The month went by,
and not one member raised a complaint about my writing. Far
from it. The owner said I was very popular. Two more months went
by, and it even
began to seem that my charges were improving thanks to my
"guidance." It was weird. These women looked up to me as their teacher
with complete trust. When I realized
this, it enabled me to dash off my critiques to them with far
less effort and anxiety.
I didn't realize it
at the time, but these women were lonely (as were the male
members of the Society). They wanted to write but they had no
one to write to. They
weren't the type to send fan letters to a deejay. They wanted
something more personal — even if it had to come in the form of corrections and
critiques.
And so it happened
that I spent a part of my early twenties like a crippled walrus in a warmish harem
of letters.
And what amazingly
varied letters they were! Boring letters, funny letters, sad letters.
Unfortunately, I couldn't keep any of them (the rules required
us to return all letters to
the company), and this happened so long ago that I can' t recall
them in detail, but I do
remember them as filled to overflowing with life in all its
aspects, from the largest of
questions to the tiniest of trivia. And the messages they were
sending seemed to me — to me, a twenty-two-year-old college student — strangely
divorced from reality, seemed at times to be utterly meaningless. Nor was this
due solely to my own lack of life
experience. I realize now that the reality of things is not
something you convey to people
but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning.
I didn't know it then, of
course, and neither did the women. This was surely one of the
reasons that everything
in their letters struck me as oddly two-dimensional.
When it came time for
me to leave the job, all the members in my care expressed
their regret. And though, quite frankly, I was beginning to feel
that I had had enough of
this endless job of letter writing, I felt sorry, too, in a way.
I knew that I would never
again have so many people opening themselves to me with such
simple honesty.
Hamburger steak. I
did actually have the opportunity to eat a hamburger steak made by the woman to
whom the earlier-quoted letter was addressed.
She was thirty-two,
no children, husband worked for a company that was generally
considered the fifth-best-known in the country. When I informed
her in my last letter that I would have to be leaving the job at the end of the
month, she invited me to lunch. "I’ll
fix you a perfectly normal hamburger steak," she wrote. In
spite of the Society's rules, I decided to take her up on it. The curiosity of
a young man of twenty-two was not to be
denied.
Her apartment faced
the tracks of the Odakyu Line. The rooms had an orderliness
befitting a childless couple. Neither the furniture nor the
lighting fixtures nor the woman's sweater was of an especially costly sort, but
they were nice enough. We began with
mutual surprise — mine at her youthful appearance, hers at my
actual age. She had
imagined me as older than herself. The Society did not reveal
the age s of its Pen
Masters.
Once we had finished
surprising each other, the usual tension of a first meeting was gone. We ate our
hamburger steak and drank coffee, feeling much like two would-be
passengers who had missed the same train. And speaking of trains,
from the window of her third-floor apartment one could see the electric train
line below. The weather was
lovely that day, and over the railings of the building's verandas
hung a colorful
assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and
then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the
sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance.
The hamburger steak
was perfect — the flavor exactly right, the outer surface grilled to a crisp dark
brown, the inside full of juice, the sauce ideal. Although I could not
honestly claim that I had never eaten such a delicious hamburger
in my life, it was
certainly the best I had had in a very long time. I told her so,
and she was pleased.
After the coffee, we
told each other our life stories while a Burt Bacharach record
played. Since I didn't really have a life story as yet, she did
most of the talking. In
college she had wanted to be a writer, she said. She talked
about Francoise Sagan, one of her favorites. She especially liked Aimez-vous
Brahms? I myself did not dislike
Sagan. At least, I didn't find her as cheap as everyone said. There's
no law requiring
everybody to write novels like Henry Miller or Jean Genet.
"I can't write,
though," she said.
"It's never too
late to start," I said.
"No, I know I
can't write. You were the one who informed me of that." She smiled.
"Writing letters to you, I fmally realized it. I just don't
have the talent."
I turned bright red.
It's something I almost never do now, but when I was twenty-two I blushed all the
time. "Really, though, your writing had something honest about it."
Instead of answering,
she smiled — a tiny smile.
"At least one
letter made me go out for a hamburger steak."
"You must have
been hungry at the time."
And indeed, maybe I
had been.
A train passed below
the window with a dry clatter.
When time clock
struck five, I said I would be leaving. "I’m sure you have to make
dinner for your husband."
"He comes home
very late," she said, her cheek against her hand. "He won't be back
before midnight."
"He must be a
very busy man."
"I suppose
so," she said, pausing momentarily. "I think I once wrote to you
about my problem. There are certain things I can't really talk with him about.
My feelings don't get through to him A lot of the time, I feel we're speaking
two different languages."
I didn't know what to
say to her. I couldn't understand how one could go on living
with someone to whom it was impossible to convey one' s
feelings.
"But it's all
right," she said softly, and she made it sound as if it really were all
right. "Thanks for writing letters to me all these months. I enjoyed them
Truly. And writing back to you was my salvation."
"I enjoyed your
letters, too," I said, though in fact I could hardly remember anything
she had written.
For a while, without
speaking, she looked at the clock on the wall. She seemed
almost to be examining the flow of time.
"What are you
going to do after graduation?" she asked.
I hadn't decided, I
told her. I had no idea what to do. When I said this, she smiled
again. "Maybe you ought to do some kind of work that
involves writing," she said. "Your critiques were beautifully written.
I used to look forward to them I really did. No flattery
intended. For all I know, you were just writing them to fulfill
a quota, but they had real
feeling. Fve kept them all. I take them out every once in a
while and reread them."
"Thank you,"
I said. "And thanks for the hamburger."
Ten years have gone
by, but whenever I pass her neighborhood on the Odakyu Line I think of her and
of her crisply grilled hamburger steak. I look out at the buildings
ranged along the tracks and ask myself which window could be
hers. I think about the
view from that window and try to figure out where it could have
been. But I can never
remember.
Perhaps she doesn't
live there anymore. But if she does, she is probably still
listening to that same Burt Bacharach record on the other side
of her window.
Should I have slept
with her?
That' s the central
question of this piece.
The answer is beyond
me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we
never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter
how much
experience we accumulate. All I can do is look up from the train
at the windows in the
buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her
window, it sometimes
seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could
be hers. There are
simply too many of them
12. TV PeopLE
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
It was Sunday evening when the TV People showed up.
The season, spring.
At least, I think it was spring. In any case, it wasn't particularly
hot as seasons go, not particularly chilly.
To be honest, the
season' s not so important. What matters is that it's a Sunday
evening.
I don't like Sunday
evenings. Or, rather, I don't like everything that goes with them — that
Sunday-evening state of affairs. Without fail, come Sunday evening my head
starts to ache. In varying intensity each time. Maybe a third to a half of an
inch into my
temples, the soft flesh throbs — as if invisible threads lead
out and someone far off is
yanking at the other ends. Not that it hurts so much. It ought
to hurt, but strangely, it
doesn't — it's like long needles probing anesthetized areas.
And I hear things.
Not sounds, but thick slabs of silence being dragged through the
dark. KRZSHAAAL KKRZSHAAAAAL KKKKRMMMS. Those are the initial
indications.
First, the aching. Then, a slight distortion of my vision. Tides
of confusion wash through, premonitions tugging at memories, memories tugging
at premonitions. A finely honed
razor moon floats white in the sky, roots of doubt burrow into
the earth. People walk
extra loud down the hall just to get me. KRRSPUMK DUWB
KRRSPUMKDUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB .
All the more reason
for the TV People to single out Sunday evening as the time to
come around. Like melancholy moods, or the secretive, quiet fail
of rain, they steal into
the gloom of that appointed time.
Let me explain how the TV People look.
The TV People are
slightly smaller than you or me. Not obviously smaller — slightly smaller.
About, say, 20 or 30%. Every part of their bodies is uniformly smaller. So
rather than "small," the more terminologically correct expression
might be "reduced."
In fact, if you see
TV People somewhere, you might not notice at first that they' re
small. But even if you don't, they'll probably strike you as
somehow strange. Unsettling, maybe. You' re sure to think something's odd, and
then you'll take another look.
There's nothing unnatural about them at first glance, but that's
what's so unnatural.
Their smallness is completely different from that of children and
dwarfs. When we see
children, we feel they' re small, but this sense of recognition
comes mostly from the
misproportioned awkwardness of their bodies. They are small,
granted, but not
uniformly so. The hands are small, but the head is big.
Typically, that is. No, the
smallness of TV People is something else entirely. TV People
look as if they were
reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated. Say
their height has been
reduced by a factor of 0.7, then their shoulder width is also in
0.7 reduction; ditto (0.7
reduction) for the feet, head, ears, and fmgers. Like plastic models,
only a little smaller
than the real thing.
Or like perspective
demos. Figures that look far away even close up. Something out of a trompe-l'oeil
painting where the surface warps and buckles. An illusion where the
hand fails to touch objects close by, yet brushes what is out of
reach.
That's TV People.
That'sTVPeople.
That'sTVPeople.
There were three of them altogether.
They don't knock or
ring the doorbell. Don't say hello. They just sneak right in. I don't even hear
a footstep. One opens the door, the other two carry in a TV. Not a very big
TV. Your ordinary Sony color TV. The door was locked, I think,
but I can't be certain.
Maybe I forgot to lock it. It really wasn't foremost in my
thoughts at the time, so who
knows? Still, I think the door was locked.
When they come in, I’m
lying on the sofa, gazing up at the ceiling. Nobody at home
but me. That afternoon, the wife has gone out with the girls —
some close friends from her high-school days — getting together to talk, then
eating dinner out. "Can you grab
your own supper?" the wife said before leaving.
"There's vegetables in the fridge and all sorts of frozen foods. That much
you can handle for yourself, can't you? And before the sun goes down, remember
to take in the laundry, okay?"
"Sure
thing," I said. Doesn't faze me a bit. Rice, right? Laundry, right?
Nothing to it.
Take care of it, simple as SLUPPP KRRRTZ!
"Did you say
something, dear?" she asked.
"No,
nothing," I said.
All afternoon I take
it easy and loll around on the sofa. I have nothing better to do. I
read a bit — that new novel by Garcia Marquez — and listen to
some music. I have
myself a beer. Still, I’m unable to give my mind to any of this.
I consider going back to
bed, but I can't even pull myself together enough to do that. So
I wind up lying on the
sofa, staring at the ceiling.
The way my Sunday
afternoons go, I end up doing a little bit of various things, none very well.
It's a struggle to concentrate on any one thing. This particular day,
everything seems to be going right. I think, Today I’ll read this book, listen
to these records, answer these letters. Today, for sure, I'll clean out my desk
drawers, run errands, wash the car
for once. But two o'clock rolls around, three o'clock rolls
around, gradually dusk comes on, and all my plans are blown. I haven't done a
thing; I’ve been lying around on the
sofa the whole day, same as always. The clock ticks in my ears. TRPP
Q SCHAOUS
TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The sound erodes everything around me, little by little, like
dripping rain. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. Little by
little, Sunday afternoon wears down, shrinking in scale. Just like the TV
People themselves.
The TV people ignore me from the very outset. All three of them
have this look that says the likes of me don't exist. They open the door and
carry in their TV The two put the set on the sideboard, the other one plugs it
in. There's a mantel clock and a stack of
magazines on the sideboard. The clock was a wedding gift, big
and heavy — big and
heavy as time itself- — with a loud sound, too. TRPP Q SCHAOUS
TRPP Q
SCHAOUS. All
through the house you can hear it. The TV People move it off the
sideboard, down onto the floor. The wife 's going to raise hell,
I think. She hates it when things get randomly shifted about. If everything
isn't in its proper place, she gets really
sore. What's worse, with the clock there on the floor, I' m
bound to trip over it in the
middle of the night. I'm forever getting up to go to the toilet
at two in the morning,
bleary-eyed and stumbling over something.
Next, the TV People
move the magazines to the table. All of them women's
magazines. (I hardly ever read magazines; I read books —
personally, I wouldn't mind if every last magazine in the world went out of
business.) Elle and Marie Claire and Home Ideas, magazines
of that ilk. Neatly stacked on the sideboard. The wife doesn't like me
touching her magazines — change the order of the stack, and I
never hear the end of it — so I don't go near them Never once flipped through
them But the TV People couldn't care less: They move them right out of the way,
they show no concern, they sweep the
whole lot off" the sideboard, they mix up the order. Marie
Claire is on top of Croissant;
Home Ideas is
underneath An-An. Unforgivable. And worse, they' re scattering the bookmarks
onto the floor. They've lost her place, pages with important information. I
have no idea what information or how important — might have been for work,
might have been
personal — but whatever, it was important to the wife, and
she'll let me know about it.
"What's the meaning of this? I go out for a nice time with friends,
and when I come
back, the house is a shambles!" I can just hear it, line
for line. Oh, great, I think, shaking my head.
Everything gets removed from the sideboard to make room for the
television. The TV
People plug it into a wall socket, then switch it on. Then there
is a tinkling noise, and the screen lights up. A moment later, the picture
floats into view. They change the channels by remote control. But all the
channels are blank — probably, I think, because they
haven't connected the set to an antenna. There has to be an
antenna outlet somewhere in the apartment. I seem to remember the
superintendent telling us where it was when we moved into this condominium Ali
you had to do was connect it. But I can' t remember where it is. We don't own a
television, so I’ve completely forgotten.
Yet somehow the TV
People don't seem bothered that they aren't picking up any
broadcast. They give no sign of looking for the antenna outlet.
Blank screen, no image — makes no difference to them. Having pushed the button
and had the power come on, they've completed what they came to do.
The TV is brand-new.
It's not in its box, but one look tells you it's new. The
instruction manual and guarantee are in a plastic bag taped to
the side; the power cable shines, sleek as a freshly caught fish.
All three TV People
look at the blank screen from here and there around the room.
One of them comes over next to me and verifies that you can see
the TV screen from
where I' m sitting. The TV is facing straight toward me, at an
optimum viewing distance. They seem satisfied. One operation down, says their
air of accomplishment. One of the TV People (the one who'd come over next to
me) places the remote control on the table.
The TV People speak
not a word. Their movements come off in perfect order, hence they don't need to
speak. Each of the three executes his prescribed function with
maximum efficiency A Professional job. Neat and clean. Their
work is done in no time.
As an afterthought, one of the TV People picks the clock up from
the floor and casts a
quick glance around the room to see if there isn't a more
appropriate place to put it, but he doesn't find any and sets it back down. TRPP
Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. It
goes on ticking weightily on the floor. Our apartment is rather
small, and a lot of floor
space tends to be taken up with my books and the wife's
reference materials. I am
bound to trip on that clock. I heave a sigh. No mistake, stub my
toes for sure. You can
bet on it.
All three TV People
wear dark-blue jackets. Of who-knows-what fabric, but slick.
Under them, they wear jeans and tennis shoes. Clothes and shoes
all proportionately
reduced in size. I watch their activities for the longest time,
until I start to think maybe it's my proportions that are off. Almost as if I
were riding backward on a roller coaster,
wearing strong prescription glasses. The view is dizzying, the
scale all screwed up. I'm
thrown off balance, my customary world is no longer absolute. That'
s the way the TV
People make you feel.
Up to the very last,
the TV People don't say a word. The three of them check the
screen one more time, confirm that there are no problems, then
switch it off by remote
control. The glow contracts to a point and flickers off with a
tinkling noise. The screen
returns to its expressionless, gray, natural state. The world
outside is getting dark. I
hear someone calling out to someone else. Anonymous footsteps pass
by down the
hall, intentionally loud as ever. KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB.
A Sunday
evening.
The TV People give
the room another whirlwind inspection, open the door, and
leave. Once again, they pay no attention to me whatsoever. They
act as if I don't exist.
From the time the TV People come into the apartment to the
moment they leave, I don't budge. Don't say a word. I remain motionless,
stretched out on the sofa, surveying the whole operation. I know what you're
going to say: That's unnatural. Total strangers —
not one but three — walk unannounced right into your apartment,
plunk down a TV set, and you just sit there staring at them, dumbfounded. Kind
of odd, don't you think?
I know, I know. But
for whatever reason, I don't speak up, I simply observe the
proceedings. Because they ignore me so totally. And if you were
in my position, I
imagine you' d do the same. Not to excuse myself, but you have
people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if
you don't doubt whether you
actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through
them I' m
devastated, powerless, in a trance. My body, my mind are
vanishing fast. I can't bring
myself to move. It's all I can do to watch the three TV People
deposit their television in my apartment and leave. I can't open my mouth for
fear of what my voice might sound
like.
The TV People exit
and leave me alone. My sense of reality comes back to me.
These hands are once again my hands. It's only then I notice
that the dusk has been
swallowed by darkness. I turn on the light. Then I close my
eyes. Yes, that's a TV set
sitting there. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking away the
minutes. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS.
Curiously, the wife makes no mention of the appearance of the
television set in the
apartment. No reaction at all. Zero. It's as if she doesn't even
see it. Creepy. Because,
as I said before, she's extremely fussy about the order and arrangement
of furniture and other things. If someone dares to move anything in the
apartment, even by a hair, she'll
jump on it in an instant. That's her ascendancy. She knits her brows,
then gets things
back the way they were.
Not me. If an issue
of Home Ideas gets put under an An-An, or a ballpoint pen finds
its way into the pencil stand, you don't see me go to pieces. I
don't even notice. This is
her problem; I'd wear myself out living like her. Sometimes she
flies into a rage. She
tells me she can't abide my carelessness. Yes, I say, and
sometimes I can't stand
carelessness about universal gravitation and n and E = mc 2 ,
either. I mean it. But
when I say things like this, she clams up, taking them as a
personal insult. I never mean
it that way; I just say what I feel.
That night, when she
comes home, first thing she does is look around the apartment. I've readied a full
explanation — how the TV People came and mixed everything up. It’ll be
difficult to convince her, but I intend to tell her the whole truth.
She doesn't say a
thing, just gives the place the once-over. There's a TV on the sideboard, the magazines
are out of order on the table, the mantel clock is on the floor, and the wife
doesn't even comment. There's nothing for me to explain.
"You get your
own supper okay?" she asks me, undressing.
"No, I didn't eat,"
I tell her.
"Why not?"
"I wasn't really
hungry," I say.
The wife pauses,
half-undressed, and thinks this over. She gives me a long look.
Should she press the subject or not? The clock breaks up the
protracted, ponderous
silence. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. I pretend not to
hear; I won't let it in my ears. But the sound is simply too heavy, too loud to
shut out. She, too, seems to be
listening to it. Then she shakes her head and says, "Shall
I whip up something quick?"
"Well,
maybe," I say. I don't really feel much like eating, but I won't turn down
the
offer.
The wife changes into
around-the-house wear and goes to the kitchen to fix zosui
and tamago-yaki while filling me in on her friends. Who'd done
what, who'd said what,
who'd changed her hairstyle and looked so much younger, who'd
broken up with her
boyfriend. I know most of her friends, so I pour myself a beer
and follow along, inserting attentive uh-huhs at proper intervals. Though, in
fact, I hardly hear a thing she says.
I’m thinking about the TV People. That, and why she didn't
remark on the sudden
appearance of the television. No way she couldn't have noticed.
Very odd. Weird, even.
Something is wrong here. But what to do about it?
The food is ready, so
I sit at the dining-room table and eat. Rice, egg, salt plum.
When I’ve finished, the wife clears away the dishes. I have
another beer, and she has a beer, too. I glance at the sideboard, and there's
the TV set, with the power off, the
remote-control unit sitting on the table. I get up from the
table, reach for the remote
control, and switch it on. The screen glows and I hear it tinkling.
Still no picture. Only the same blank tube. I press the button to raise the
volume, but all that does is increase the white-noise roar. I watch the
snowstorm for twenty, thirty seconds, then switch it off.
Light and sound vanish in an instant. Meanwhile, the wife has
seated herself on the
carpet and is flipping through Elle, oblivious of the
fact that the TV has just been turned on and off.
I replace the remote
control on the table and sit down on the sofa again, thinking I'll
go on reading that long Garcia Marquez novel. I always read
after dinner. I might set the book down after thirty minutes, or I might read
for two hours, but the thing is to read
every day. Today, though, I can't get myself to read more than a
page and a half. I can't concentrate; my thoughts keep returning to the TV set.
I look up and see it, right in front of me.
I wake at half past two in the morning to find the TV still
there. I get out of bed half
hoping the thing has disappeared. No such luck. I go to the toilet,
then plop down on the sofa and put my feet up on the table. I take the remote
control in hand and try turning on the TV. No new developments in that department,
either; only a rerun of the same glow and noise. Nothing else. I look at it
awhile, then switch it off.
I go back to bed and
try to sleep. I’m dead tired, but sleep isn't coming. I shut my
eyes and I see them. The TV People carrying the TV set, the TV
People moving the
clock out of the way, the TV People transferring magazines to
the table, the TV People plugging the power cable into the wall socket, the TV
People checking the screen, the
TV People opening the door and silently exiting. They've stayed
on in my head. They're in there walking around. I get back out of bed, go to
the kitchen, and pour a double
brandy into a coffee cup. I down the brandy and head over to the
sofa for another
session with Marquez. I open the pages, yet somehow the words
won't sink in. The
writing is opaque.
Very well, then, I
throw Garcia Marquez aside and pick up Elle. Reading Elle from
time to time can't hurt anyone. But there isn't anything 'm Elle
that catches my fancy.
New hairstyles and elegant white silk blouses and eateries that
serve good beef stew
and what to wear to the opera, articles like that. Do I care? I
throw Elle aside. Which
leaves me the television on the sideboard to look at.
I end up staying
awake until dawn, not doing a thing. At six o'clock, I make myself
some coffee. I don't have anything else to do, so I go ahead and
fix ham sandwiches
before the wife gets up.
"You're up awful
early," she says drowsily.
"Mmm," I
mumble.
After a nearly
wordless breakfast, we leave home together and go our separate ways to our respective
offices. The wife works at a small publishing house. Edits a
natural-food and lifestyle magazine. "Shiitake Mushrooms
Prevent Gout," "The Future of Organic Farming," you know the
kind of magazine. Never sells very well, but hardly
costs anything to produce; kept afloat by a handful of zealots.
Me, I work in the
advertising department of an electrical-appliance manufacturer.
I dream up ads for
toasters and washing machines and microwave ovens.
In my office building, I pass one of the TV People on the
stairs. If I’m not mistaken, it's
one of the three who brought the TV the day before — probably
the one who first
opened the door, who didn't actually carry the set. Their
singular lack of distinguishing
features makes it next to impossible to tell them apart, so I
can't swear to it, but I'd say
I'm eight to nine out of ten on the mark. He's wearing the same
blue jacket he had on
the previous day, and he's not carrying anything in his hands.
He's merely walking down the stairs. I’m walking up. I dislike elevators, so I
generally take the stairs. My office is
on the ninth floor, so this is no mean feat. When I’m in a rush,
I get all sweaty by the
time I reach the top. Even so, getting sweaty has got to be
better than taking the
elevator, as far as I' m concerned. Everyone jokes about it:
doesn't own a TV or a VCR, doesn't take elevators, must be a modern-day Luddite.
Maybe a childhood trauma
leading to arrested development. Let them think what they like. They're
the ones who
are screwed up, if you ask me.
In any case, there I
am, climbing the stairs as always; I’m the only one on the stairs — almost nobody
else uses them — when between the fourth and fifth floors I pass one of the TV
People coming down. It happens so suddenly I don't know what to do. Maybe I
should say something?
But I don't say
anything. I don't know what to say, and he's unapproachable. He
leaves no opening; he descends the stairs so functionally, at
one set tempo, with such
regulated precision. Plus, he utterly ignores my presence, same
as the day before. I
don't even enter his field of vision. He slips by before I can
think what to do. In that
instant, the field of gravity warps.
At work, the day is
solid with meetings from the morning on. Important meetings on
sales campaigns for a new product line. Several employees read
reports. Blackboards
fill with figures, bar graphs proliferate on computer screens.
Heated discussions. I
participate, although my contribution to the meetings is not
that critical because I' m not directly involved with the project. So between meetings
I keep puzzling things over. I
voice an opinion only once. Isn't much of an opinion, either — something
perfectly
obvious to any observer — but I couldn't very well go without
saying anything, after all. I may not be terribly ambitious when it comes to
work, but so long as I’m receiving a
salary I have to demonstrate responsibility. I summarize the
various opinions up to that point and even make a joke to lighten the
atmosphere. Half covering for my
daydreaming about the TV People. Several people laugh. After
that one utterance,
however, I only pretend to review the materials; I’m thinking about
the TV People. If they talk up a name for the new microwave oven, I certainly
am not aware of it. My mind is all TV People. What the hell was the meaning of
that TV set? And why haul the TV all the way to my apartment in the first
place? Why hasn't the wife remarked on its
appearance? Why have the TV People made inroads into my company?
The meetings are
endless. At noon, there's a short break for lunch. Too short to go
out and eat. Instead, everyone gets sandwiches and coffee. The
conference room is a
haze of cigarette smoke, so I eat at my own desk. While I' m
eating, the section chief
comes around. To be perfectly frank, I don't like the guy. For
no reason I can put my
finger on: There's nothing you can fault him on, no single target
for attack. He has an air of breeding. Moreover, he's not stupid. He has good
taste in neckties, he doesn't wave his own flag or lord it over his inferiors.
He even looks out for me, invites me out for the occasional meal. But there's
just something about the guy that doesn't sit well with me. Maybe it's his habit
of coming into body contact with people he's talking to. Men or
women, at some point in the course of the conversation he'll
reach out a hand and
touch. Not in any suggestive way, mind you. No, his manner is
brisk, his bearing
perfectly casual. I wouldn't be surprised if some people don't even
notice, it's so natural. Still — I don't know why — it does bother me. So
whenever I see him, almost
instinctively I brace myself. Call it petty, it gets to me.
He leans over,
placing a hand on my shoulder. "About your statement at the meeting just
now. Very nice," says the section chief warmly. "Very simply put,
very pivotal. I was impressed. Points well taken. The whole room buzzed at that
statement of yours. The
timing was perfect, too. Yessir, you keep 'em coming like
that."
And he glides off.
Probably to lunch. I thank him straight out, but the honest truth is
I'm taken aback. I mean, I don't remember a thing of what I said
at the meeting. Why
does the section chief have to come all the way over to my desk
to praise me for that?
There have to be more brilliant examples of Homo loquens
around here. Strange. I go
on eating my lunch, uncomprehending. Then I think about the wife.
Wonder what she's up to right now. Out to lunch? Maybe I ought to give her a
call, exchange a few words,
anything. I dial the first three digits, have second thoughts,
hang up. I have no reason to be calling her. My world may be crumbling, out of
balance, but is that a reason to ring
up her office? What can I say about all this, anyway? Besides, I
hate calling her at work. I set down the receiver, let out a sigh, and finish
off my coffee. Then I toss the
Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket.
At one of the afternoon meetings, I see TV People again. This
time, their number has
increased by two. Just as on the previous day, they come
traipsing across the
conference room, carrying a Sony color TV A model one size
bigger. Uh-oh. Sony's the rival camp. If, for whatever reason, any competitor's
product gets brought into our
offices, there's hell to pay, barring when other manufacturers'
products are brought in
for test comparisons, of course. But then we take pains to
remove the company logo — just to make sure no outside eyes happen upon it.
Little do the TV People care: The
Sony mark is emblazoned for all to see. They open the door and
march right into the
conference room, flashing it in our direction. Then they parade
the thing around the
room, scanning the place for somewhere to set it down, until at last,
not finding any
location, they carry it backward out the door. The others in the
room show no reaction to the TV People. And they can't have missed them. No,
they've definitely seen them. And
the proof is they even got out of the way, clearing a path for
the TV People to carry their television through. Still, that's as far as it
went: a reaction no more alarmed than when
the nearby coffee shop delivered. They' d made it a ground rule
not to acknowledge the presence of the TV People. The others all knew they were
there; they just acted as if
they weren't.
None of it makes any
sense. Does everybody know about the TV People? Am I
alone in the dark? Maybe the wife knew about the TV People all
along, too. Probably.
I'll bet that's why she wasn't surprised by the television and
why she didn't mention it.
That's the only possible explanation. Yet this confuses me even
more. Who or what,
then, are the TV People? And why are they always carrying around
TV sets?
One colleague leaves
his seat to go to the toilet, and I get up to follow. This is a guy who entered
the company around the same time I did. We're on good terms. Sometimes we go
out for a drink together after work. I don't do that with most people. I'm
standing
next to him at the urinals. He's the first to complain.
"Oh, joy! Looks like we're in for
more of the same, straight through to evening. I swear!
Meetings, meetings, meetings,
going to drag on forever."
"You can say
that again," I say. We wash our hands. He compliments me on the
morning meeting's statement. I thank him.
"Oh, by the way,
those guys who came in with the TV just now ..." I launch forth, then cut
off.
He doesn't say
anything. He turns off the faucet, pulls two paper towels from the
dispenser, and wipes his hands. He doesn't even shoot a glance
in my direction. How
long can he keep drying his hands? Eventually, he crumples up
his towels and throws
them away. Maybe he didn't hear me. Or maybe he's pretending not
to hear. I can' t tell. But from the sudden strain in the atmosphere, I know enough
not to ask. I shut up, wipe my hands, and walk down the corridor to the
conference room. The rest of the
afternoon's meetings, he avoids my eyes.
When I get home from work, the apartment is dark. Outside, dark
clouds have swept in. It's beginning to rain. The apartment smells like rain.
Night is coming on. No sign of the wife. I loosen my tie, smooth out the
wrinkles, and hang it up. I brush off my suit. I toss my shirt into the washing
machine. My hair smells like cigarette smoke, so I take a
shower and shave. Story of my life: I go to endless meetings, get
smoked to death, then the wife gets on my case about it. The very first thing
she did after we were married was make me stop smoking. Four years ago, that
was.
Out of the shower, I
sit on the sofa with a beer, drying my hair with a towel. The TV
People's television is still sitting on the sideboard. I pick up
the remote control from the
table and push the "on" switch. Again and again I
press, but nothing happens. The
screen stays dark. I check the plug; it's in the socket, all
right. I unplug it, then plug it
back in. Still no go. No matter how often I press the "on"
switch, the screen does not
glow. Just to be sure, I pry open the back cover of the
remote-control unit, remove the
batteries, and check them with my handy electrical-contact
tester. The batteries are fine. At this point, I give up, throw the remote
control aside, and slosh down more beer.
Why should it upset
me? Supposing the TV did come on, what then? It would glow
and crackle with white noise. Who cares, if that' s all that'd
come on?
I care. Last night it
worked. And I haven't laid a finger on it since. Doesn't make
sense.
I try the remote
control one more time. I press slowly with my finger. But the result is the
same. No response whatsoever. The screen is dead. Cold.
Dead cold.
I pull another beer
out of the fridge and eat some potato salad from a plastic tub. It's past six o'clock.
I read the whole evening paper. If anything, it's more boring than usual.
Almost no article worth reading, nothing but inconsequential news items. But I
keep
reading, for lack of anything better to do. Until I finish the
paper. What next? To avoid
pursuing that thought any further, I dally over the newspaper.
Hmm, how about
answering letters? A cousin of mine has sent us a wedding
invitation, which I have to
turn down. The day of the wedding, the wife and I are going to
be off on a trip. To
Okinawa. We' ve been planning it for ages; we're both taking
time off from work. We
can't very well go changing our plans now. God only knows when
we'll get the next
chance to spend a long holiday together. And to clinch it all,
I'm not even that close to
my cousin; haven't seen her in almost ten years. Still, I can't
leave replying to the last
minute. She has to know how many people are coming, how many
settings to plan for
the banquet. Oh, forget it. I can't bring myself to write, not
now. My heart isn't in it.
I pick up the
newspaper again and read the same articles over again. Maybe I ought to start preparing
dinner. But the wife might be working late and could come home
having eaten. Which would mean wasting one portion. And if I am
going to eat alone, I
can make do with leftovers; no reason to make something up
special. If she hasn't
eaten, we can go out and eat together.
Odd, though. Whenever
either of us knows he or she is going to be later than six, we always call in. That's
the rule. Leave a message on the answering machine if
necessary. That way, the other can coordinate: go ahead and eat
alone, or set
something out for the late arriver, or hit the sack. The nature of
my work sometimes
keeps me out late, and she often has meetings, or proofs to dispatch,
before coming
home. Neither of us has a regular nine-to-five job. When both of
us are busy, we can go three days without a word to each other. Those are the
breaks — just one of those
things that nobody planned. Hence we always keep certain rules,
so as not to place
unrealistic burdens on each other. If it looks as though we're
going to be late, we call in and let the other one know. I sometimes forget, but
she, never once.
Still, there's no
message on the answering machine.
I toss the newspaper, stretch out on the
sofa, and shut my eyes.
I dream about a meeting. I'm standing up, delivering a statement
I myself don't
understand. I open my mouth and talk. If I don't, I'm a dead
man. I have to keep talking. Have to keep coming out with endless
blah-blah-blah. Everyone around me is dead.
Dead and turned to stone. A roomful of stone statues. A wind is
blowing. The windows
are all broken; gusts of air are coming in. And the TV People
are here. Three of them.
Like the first time. They're carrying a Sony color TV And on the
screen are the TV
People. I'm running out of words; little by little I can feel my
fingertips growing stiffer.
Gradually turning to stone.
I open my eyes to find
the room aglow. The color of corridors at the Aquarium. The
television is on. Outside, everything is dark. The TV screen is
flickering in the gloom,
static crackling. I sit up on the sofa, and press my temples
with my fingertips. The flesh of my fingers is still soft; my mouth tastes like
beer. I swallow. I'm dried out; the saliva
catches in my throat. As always, the waking world pales after an
all-too-real dream. But no, this is real. Nobody's turned to stone. What time
is it getting to be? I look for the
clock on the floor. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. A
little before eight.
Yet, just as in the
dream, one of the TV People is on the television screen. The same guy I passed on
the stairs to the office. No mistake. The one who first opened the door
to the apartment. I'm 100% sure. He stands there — against a
bright, fluorescent white background, the tail end of a dream infiltrating my
conscious reality — staring at me. I
shut, then reopen my eyes, hoping he'll have slipped back to
never-never land. But he
doesn't disappear. Far from it. He gets bigger. His face fills
the whole screen, getting
closer and closer.
The next thing I
know, he's stepping through the screen. Hands gripping the frame,
lifting himself up and over, one foot after the other, like
climbing out of a window, leaving a white TV screen glowing behind him.
He rubs his left hand
in the palm of his right, slowly acclimating himself to the world
outside the television. On and on, reduced right-hand fingers
rubbing reduced left-hand fingers, no hurry. He has that
all-the-time-in-the-world nonchalance. Like a veteran
TV-show host. Then he looks me in the face.
"We're making an
airplane," says my TV People visitant. His voice has no
perspective to it. A curious, paper-thin voice.
He speaks, and the
screen is all machinery. Very professional fade-in. Just like on
the news. First, there's an opening shot of a large factory
interior, then it cuts to a
close-up of the work space, camera center. Two TV People are
hard at work on some
machine, tightening bolts with wrenches, adjusting gauges. The
picture of
concentration. The machine, however, is unlike anything I’ve
ever seen: an upright
cylinder except that it narrows toward the top, with streamlined
protrusions along its
surface. Looks more like some kind of gigantic orange juicer
than an airplane. No wings, no seats.
"Doesn't look
like an airplane," I say. Doesn't sound like my voice, either. Strangely
brittle, as if the nutrients had been strained out through a
thick filter. Have I grown so old all of a sudden?
"That's probably
because we haven't painted it yet," he says. "Tomorrow we'll have it
the right color. Then you’ll see it's an airplane."
"The color' s
not the problem. It's the shape. That's not an airplane."
"Well, if it's
not an airplane, what is it?" he asks me. If he doesn't know, and I don't
know, then what is it? "So, that's why it's got to be the
color." The TV People rep puts it
to me gently. "Paint it the right color, and it'll be an
airplane."
I don't feel like
arguing. What difference does it make? Orange juicer or airplane —
flying orange juicer? — what do I care? Still, where's the wife
while all this is
happening? Why doesn't she come home? I massage my temples
again. The clock
ticks on. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The remote
control lies on the table, and next to it the stack of women's magazines. The
telephone is silent, the room
illuminated by the dim glow of the television.
The two TV People on
the screen keep working away. The image is much clearer
than before. You can read the numbers on the dials, hear the
faint rumble of machinery. TAABZHRAYBGG TAABZHRAYBGG ARP ARRP TAABZHRAYBGG.
This bass line is punctuated periodically by a sharp, metallic grating. AREEEENBT
AREEEENBT. And
various other noises are interspersed through the remaining
aural space; I can' t hear
anything clearly over them. Still, the two TV People labor on
for all they're worth. That,
apparently, is the subject of this program. I go on watching the
two of them as they work on and on. Their colleague outside the TV set also
looks on in silence. At them. At that
thing — for the life of me, it does not look like an airplane —
that insane machine all
black and grimy, floating in a field of white light.
The TV People rep
speaks up. "Shame about your wife."
I look him in the
face. Maybe I didn't hear him right. Staring at him is like peering into the
glowing tube itself.
"Shame about
your wife," the TV People rep repeats in exactly the same absent
tone.
"How's that?"
I ask.
"How's that?
It's gone too far," says the TV People rep in a voice like a plastic-card
hotel key. Flat, uninflected, it slices into me as if it were
sliding through a thin slit. "It's gone too far: She's out there."
"It's gone
too far: She's out there, " I repeat in my head. Very plain, and
without
reality. I can't grasp the context. Cause has effect by the tail
and is about to swallow it
whole. I get up and go to the kitchen. I open the refrigerator,
take a deep breath, reach
for a can of beer, and go back to the sofa. The TV People rep
stands in place in front of the television, right elbow resting on the set, and
watches me extract the pull-tab. I don't really want to drink beer at this
moment; I just need to do something. I drink one sip, but the beer doesn't
taste good. I hold the can in my hand dumbly until it becomes so heavy I have
to set it down on the table.
Then I think about
the TV People rep's revelation, about the wife's failure to
materialize. He's saying she's gone. That she isn't coming home.
I can't bring myself to believe it's over. Sure, we're not the perfect couple.
In four years, we've had our spats; we have our little problems. But we always talk
them out. There are things we've
resolved and things we haven't. Most of what we couldn't resolve
we let ride. Okay, so we have our ups and downs as a couple. I admit it. But is
this cause for despair? C'mon, show me a couple who don't have problems.
Besides, it's only a little past eight. There must be some reason she can't get
to a phone. Any number of possible reasons. For
instance. . . I can't think of a single one. I’m hopelessly
confused.
I fall back deep into
the sofa.
How on earth is that
airplane — if it is an airplane — supposed to fly? What propels
it? Where are the windows? Which is the front, which is the
back?
I’m dead tired.
Exhausted. I still have to write that letter, though, to beg off from my
cousin's invitation. My work schedule does not afford me the
pleasure of attending.
Regrettable. Congratulations, all the same.
The two TV People in
the television continue building their airplane, oblivious of me. They toil away;
they don't stop for anything. They have an infmite amount of work to get
through before the machine is complete. No sooner have they finished one
operation
than they' re busy with another. They have no assembly
instructions, no plans, but they know precisely what to do and what comes next.
The camera ably follows their deft
motions. Clear-cut, easy-to-follow camera work. Highly credible,
convincing images. No doubt other TV People (Nos. 4 and 5?) are manning the
camera and control panel.
Strange as it may
sound, the more I watch the flawless form of the TV People as
they go about their work, the more the thing starts to look like
an airplane. At least, it'd
no longer surprise me if it actually flew. What does it matter
which is front or back? With all the exacting detail work they' re putting in,
it has to be an airplane. Even if it doesn't
appear so — to them, it's an airplane. Just as the little guy
said, "If it's not an airplane,
then what is it?"
The TV People rep
hasn't so much as twitched in all this time. Right elbow still
propped up on the TV set, he's watching me. Fm being watched.
The TV People factory crew keeps working. Busy, busy, busy. The clock ticks on.
TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The room has grown dark, stifling.
Someone's footsteps echo down the
hall.
Well, it suddenly
occurs to me, maybe so. Maybe the wife is out there. She's gone
somewhere far away. By whatever means of transport, she's gone
somewhere far out of my reach. Maybe our relationship has suffered irreversible
damage. Maybe it's a total
loss. Only I haven't noticed. All sorts of thoughts unravel
inside me, then the frayed
ends come together again. "Maybe so," I say out loud.
My voice echoes, hollow.
"Tomorrow, when
we paint it, you'll see better," he resumes. "All it needs is a touch
of color to make it an airplane."
I look at the palms
of my hands. They have shrunk slightly. Ever so slightly. Power of suggestion? Maybe
the light's playing tricks on me. Maybe my sense of perspective has been thrown
off. Yet, my palms really do look shriveled. Hey now, wait just a minute! Let
me speak. There's something I should say. I must say. I' 11 dry up and turn to
stone if I don't. Like the others.
"The phone will
ring soon," the TV People rep says. Then, after a measured pause,
he adds, "In another five minutes."
I look at the
telephone; I think about the telephone cord. Endless lengths of phone
cable linking one telephone to another. Maybe somewhere, at some
terminal of that
awesome megacircuit, is my wife. Far, far away, out of my reach.
I can feel her pulse.
Another five minutes, I tell myself. Which way is front, which
way is back? I stand up
and try to say something, but no sooner have I got to my feet
than the words slip away.
13. A SLOW BOAT TO
cHINA
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
When did I meet my first Chinese?
Just like that, my
archaeologist begins sifting through the tell of my own past.
Labeling all the artifacts, categorizing, analyzing.
And so, when was that
first encounter? As near as I can figure, it was 1959 or 1960. Whichever, whatever,
what's the difference? Precisely nothing. The years '59 and '60
stand there like gawky twins in matching nerd suits. Even if I
hopped a time machine
back to the period, I doubt I could tell the two apart.
In spite of which, I
persist with my labors. Doggedly expanding the dig, filling out the picture
with every least new find. Shards of memory.
Okay, I' m sure it
was the year Johansson and Patterson fought for the world
heavyweight title. Which means, all I have to do is go search
through the sports section in old copies of The Year in News. That would settle
everything.
In the morning, I’m
off on my bike to the local library Next to the main entrance, for
who knows what reason, there's a tiny henhouse, in which five
chickens are enjoying
what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It's a
bright, clear day, so before going
inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light
up a cigarette. I watch
the chickens pecking at their feedbox busily. Frenetically, in
fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreels with too few frames per
second.
After my cigarette,
something's changed in me. Again, who knows why? But for what it's worth, the
new me — five chickens and a smoke away from what I was — now poses myself two
questions:
First, Who could
possibly have any interest in the exact date when I met my first
Chinese?
And second, What exactly
is there to be gained by spreading out those Year In
Newses on a sunny reference-room desk?
Good questions. I
smoke another cigarette, then get back onto my bike and bid
farewell to fowl and file copies. If birds in flight go
unburdened by names, let my
memories be free of dates.
Granted, most of my
memories don't bear dates anyway. My recall is a damn sight
short of total. It's so unreliable that I sometimes think I' m
trying to prove something by
it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is
not exactly the sort of
thing you can prove with any accuracy.
Anyway — or rather,
that being the case — my memory can be impressively ifiy. I
get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact,
sometimes my own
eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else's. At which
point, can you even
call it memory anymore? Witness the sum of what I'm capable of
dredging up from
primary school (those pathetic six years of sunsets in the heyday
of postwar
democracy). Two events: this Chinese story, for one, and for
another, a baseball game one afternoon during summer vacation. In that game, I
was playing center field, and I
blacked out in the bottom of the third. I mean, I didn't just
collapse out of nowhere. The
reason I blacked out that day was that we were allowed only one
small corner of the
nearby high school 's athletic field, and so when I was running
full speed after a pop fly I smashed head-on into the post of the backboard of
the basketball court next to where
we were playing.
Whenicameto, I was
lying on a bench under an arbor, it was late in the day, and the
first things I noticed were the wet-and-dry smell of water that
had been sprinkled over
the baked earth and the musk of my brand-new leather glove,
which they' d put under
my head for a pillow. Then there was this duli pain in my
temple. I guess I must have
said something. I don't really remember. Only later did a buddy
of mine who'd been
looking after me get around to telling. That what I apparently
said was, That 's okay,
brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.
Now, where did that
come from? To this day, I have no idea. I guess I was dreaming, probably about
lunch. But two decades later the phrase is still there, kicking around in
my head.
That 's okay, brush off the dirt and you
can still eat it.
With these words, I
find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human
being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these
thoughts lead to but
one place — death. Imagining death is, at least for me, an
awfully hazy proposition. And death, for some reason, reminds me of the Chinese.
HERE WAS AN ELEMENTARY school for Chinese up the hill from the
harbor (forgive me, I’ve completely forgotten the name of the school, so I’ll
just call it "the Chinese
elementary school"), and I had to go there to take a
Standard aptitude test. Out of
several test locations, the Chinese elementary school was the farthest
away, and I was
the only one in my class assigned there. A clerical mix-up,
maybe? Everybody else was sent somewhere closer.
Chinese elementary
school?
I asked everyone I
knew if they knew anything about this Chinese elementary
school. No one knew a thing, except that it was half an hour
away by train. Now, back
then I didn't do much in the way of exploring, hardly ever rode
around to places by
myself, so for me this might as well have been the end of the
earth.
The Chinese
elementary school at the edge of the world.
MONDAY MORNING two weeks later found me in a dark funk as I
sharpened a dozen
pencils, then packed my lunch and classroom slippers into my
plastic schoolbag, as
prescribed. It was a sunny day, maybe a little too warm for
autumn, but my mother
made me wear a sweater anyway. I boarded the train all by myself
and stood by the
door the whole way, looking out the window. I didn't want to
miss the stop.
I spotted the Chinese
elementary school even without looking at the map printed on
the back of the registration form. All I had to do was follow a
flock of kids with slippers
and lunch boxes stuffed into their schoolbags. There were tens,
maybe hundreds, of
kids filing up the steep grade. A pretty remarkable sight. No
one was kicking a ball, no
one was pulling at a younger kid's cap; everyone was just
walking quietly. Like a
demonstration of indeterminate perpetual motion. Climbing the
hill, I started sweating
under my heavy sweater.
Contrary to whatever
vague expectations I may have had, the Chinese elementary
school did not look much different from my own school. In fact,
it was cleaner. The long, dark corridors, the musty air.... All the images that
had filled my head for two weeks
proved totally unfounded. Passing through the fancy iron gates,
I followed the gentle arc of a stone path between plantings to the main
entrance, where a clear pond sparkled in the 9:00 AM sun. Along the facade
stood a row of trees, each with a plaque identifying
the tree in Chinese. Some characters I could read, some I
couldn't. The entrance
opened onto an enclosed courtyard, in the corners of which were
a bronze bust of
somebody, a small white rain gage, and an exercise bar.
I removed my shoes at
the entrance as instructed, then went to the classroom
assigned to me. It was bright, with forty fold-top desks neatly
arranged in rows, each
place affixed with a registration tag. My seat was in the very
front row by the window; I
guess I had the lowest number.
The blackboard was a
pristine deep green; the teacher's place was set with a box of chalk and a vase
bearing a single white chrysanthemum Everything was spotless, a
flawless picture of order. There were no drawings or
compositions tacked up willy-nilly
on the bulletin board. Maybe they'd been taken down so as not to
distract us during the
test. I took my seat, set out my pencil case and writing pad,
propped up my chin, and
closed my eyes.
It was nearly fifteen
minutes later when the proctor of the test came in, carrying the
stack of exams under his arm. He didn't look anything over
forty, but he walked with a
cane and dragged his left foot in a slight limp. The cane was
made of cherry wood, sort of crudely, the kind of thing they sell as souvenirs
at the summit of a hiking trail. The
proctor 's limp was unaffected, so you noticed the cheap cane
more. Forty pairs of eyes focused on this guy, or, rather, on the exams, and
all was resounding silence.
The proctor mounted
the stand in front of the class, placed the exams on his desk,
then plunked his cane down on the side. He checked that all the
seats were filled,
coughed, and glanced at his watch. Then, damping both hands on
the edges of the
desk as if to hold himself down, he lifted his gaze straight to
a corner of the ceiling.
Silence.
Fifteen seconds and
not a sound. The kids all tensed and held their breath, staring at the stack of
exams; the lame-legged proctor stared at the ceiling. He was wearing a
light-gray suit with a white shirt and a tie of eminently forgettable color and
pattern. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, very
deliberately, and put them
back on.
'I shall be acting as
your test proctor," the man fInally spoke. Shall. "As soon as you
receive your exam booklet, place it facedown on your desk. Do
not turn it over. Keep
both hands flat on your lap. When I say 'Begin,' you may turn it
faceup and begin. When there are ten minutes remaining before the end of the
test period, I shall say to you,
'Ten minutes left.' At that time, check your work to see that
you have not made any
minor errors. When I say 'Stop,' that is the end of the test
period. Turn your examination booklet facedown and place your hands on your
lap. Is that understood?"
Silence.
He looked at his
watch again.
"Well, as I see
that we have ten minutes before the beginning of the test, I'd like to
have a little talk with you. Please relax."
Phew, phew. There
were several sighs.
"I am Chinese
and I teach at this school."
My FIRST CHINESE!
He didn't look
Chinese. But what did I expect? What was a Chinese supposed to
look like?
"In this
classroom," he continued, "Chinese students the same age as
yourselves all study as hard as you do. . .. Now, as you all know, China and
Japan are neighboring
countries. In order for everyone to enjoy happy lives, neighbors
must make friends. Isn't that right?"
Silence.
"Of course, some
things about our two countries are very similar and some things
are very different. Some things we understand about each other
and some things we do not. But isn't that the same with you and your friends?
Even if they are your friends,
some things they cannot understand. But if you make an effort,
you can still become
close. That is what I believe. But in order to do that, we must
begin with respect for each other. . . . That is the first step."
Silence.
"For instance.
Suppose many, many Chinese children went to your school to take a
test. Just as you yourselves are doing now, sitting at Chinese
children' s desks. Think
about this, please."
Hmm.
"Suppose that on
Monday morning, all of you go back to your school. You go to your desks. And what
do you see? You see that there are doodles and marks all over your
desks, chewing gum stuck under the seat, one of your classroom
slippers is missing.
How would you feel?"
Silence.
"For instance,
you," he said, turning to point right at me, me with the lowest
registration number, "would you be happy?"
Everyone looked at
me.
I blushed bright red
and shook my head.
"So you
see," he said, turning back to the class again, as everyone's eyes shifted
back to the front of the room, "you must not mark up the
desks or stick gum under the
seats or go fooling around with what' s inside the desks. Is
that understood?"
Silence.
"Chinese
children speakup louder when they answer."
Yes, came forty
replies. Or, rather, thirty-nine. My mouth wouldn't open.
"Well, then,
heads up, chests out."
We looked up and swelled to attention.
"And be
proud."
000
SOME TWENTY YEARS ON, I’ve completely forgotten the results of
the test. All I
remember is the school kids walking quietly up the hill and the
Chinese teacher. That,
and how to hold my head up with pride.
3.
THE TOWN WHERE I WENT to high school was a port town, so there
were quite a few Chinese around. Not that they seemed any different from the
rest of us. Nor did they
have any special traits. They were as different from each other
as could be, and in that way they were the same as us. When I think about it, the
curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond
any category or generalization in the book.
There were several
Chinese kids in my class. Some got good grades, others didn't.
There was the cheerful type and the dead-quiet character. One
who lived in an almost
palatial spread, another in a sunless one-room-kitchenette
walk-up. Really, all sorts.
Though I never did get especially close to any of them I wasn't
your let's-make-friends
sort of guy. Japanese or Chinese or anything else, made no
difference.
I did, however, meet
up with one of them ten years later, though I probably shouldn't get into that just
yet.
Meanwhile, the scene
shifts to Tokyo.
MY NEXT CHINESE — that is, not counting those high-school
Chinese classmates
whom I didn't especially speak to — was a shy girl I got to know
at a part-time job during the spring of my sophomore year. She was nineteen,
like me, and petite, and pretty. We worked together for three weeks during the
break.
She was exceedingly
diligent about work. I did my part, working as hard as I could, I suppose, but whenever
I peeked over at her plugging away it was pretty obvious that
her idea and my idea of applying oneself weren't the same
animal. I mean, compared to my "If you're going to do something, it's
worth doing it well," her inner drive cut closer to the root of humanity.
Not that it's much of an explanation, but this drive of hers had the
disturbing urgency of someone whose whole worldly existence was
barely held together by that one thread. Most people couldn't possibly keep up
with the pace she maintained; sooner or later they would throw up their hands
in frustration. The only one who
managed to stick it out to the very end working with her was me.
Even so, we hardly
spoke a word at first. I tried a couple of times to strike up a
conversation, but she didn't seem particularly interested in
speaking, so I backed off.
The first time we actually sat down and talked was two weeks
after we started working
together. That morning, for half an hour, she 'd been thrown
into something of a panic. It was unprecedented for her. The cause of it all
was a slight oversight, one small
operation out of order. Sure, it was her fault, her
responsibility, if it came to that, but
from where I stood it seemed like a common enough mishap. A
momentary lapse and
— glitch! Could have happened to anyone. But not to her. A tiny
crack in her head
widened into a fissure, eventually becoming a gaping chasm She
wouldn't, she couldn't, take another step. At a total loss for words, she froze
in place. She was a sorry sight, a ship sinking slowly in the night sea.
I cut short what I
was doing, sat her down in a chair, pried loose her clenched fingers one by
one, made her drink some hot coffee. Then I told her, It's all right, there's
nothing to worry about, no thing's too late to remedy, you just redo that part
again from the
beginning and you won't be so far behind in your work. And even
if you are a little
behind, it won't kill you. Her eyes were glazed, but she nodded
silently. With some
coffee in her, she began to calm down.
"I’m
sorry," she whispered.
That lunch break, we
talked about this and that. And that was when she told me she was Chinese. Where
we worked was a tiny, dark, small-time publisher's warehouse in
Bunkyo Ward, downtown Tokyo.
A dirty little open
sewer of a stream ran right beside it. The work was easy, boring,
busy. I got order slips, which told us how many copies of what
books to haul out to the
entrance. She would bind these up with cord and check them off
against the inventory
record. That was the whole job. There was no heating in the
place, so we had to hustle our buns off to keep from freezing to death.
Sometimes it was so cold I thought we
wouldn't be any better off shoveling snow at the airport in
Anchorage.
At lunchtime, we'd
head out for something hot to eat, warming ourselves for the hour until our break
was up. More than anything, the main objective was to thaw out. But
from the time she had her panic, little by little we found
ourselves on speaking terms.
Her words came in bits and pieces, but after a while I got the
picture. Her father ran a
small import business in Yokohama, most of the merchandise he
handled being bargain clothing from Hong Kong. Although Chinese, she herself
was Japanese-born and had
never once been to China or Hong Kong or Taiwan. Plus, she'd
gone to Japanese
schools, not Chinese. Hardly spoke a word of Chinese, but was
strong in English. She was attending a private women's university in the city
and hoped to become an
interpreter. Meanwhile, she was sharing her brother's apartment
in Komagome, or, to
borrow her turn of phrase, she'd fallen in with him. Seemed she
didn't get along well
with her father. And that's the sum total of what I found out
about her.
Those two weeks in
March passed along with the sleet of the season. On the
evening of our last day of work, after picking up my pay from
accounting and after some hesitation, I decided to ask my Chinese co-worker out
to a discotheque in Shinjuku. Not that I had any intention of making a pass at her.
I already had a steady girlfriend since
high school, though if the truth be told we were beginning to go
our separate ways.
The Chinese girl
thought it over a few seconds, then said, "But I’ve never been
dancing."
"There's nothing
to it," I said. "It's not ballroom dancing. All you have to do is
move to the beat. Anyone can do it."
First, we went and
had some beer and pizza. No more work. No more freezing
warehouse. What a liberating feeling! I was more jovial than may
have been usual; she
laughed more, too. Then we went to the disco and danced for two
whole hours. The
place was nice and warm, swimming with mirror balls and incense.
A Filipino band was pounding out Santana covers. We'd workup a sweat dancing, then
go sit out a number
over a beer, then, when the sweat subsided, we'd get up and
dance again. In the
colored strobe lights, she looked like a different person from
the shy warehouse stock
girl I knew. And once she got the hang of dancing, she actually
seemed to enjoy it.
When we'd finally
danced ourselves out, we left the club. The March night was brisk, but there was
a hint of spring in the air. We were overheated from all that exercise, so
we just walked, aimlessly, hands in our pockets. We stopped into
an arcade, got a cup
of coffee, kept walking. We still had half the school break
ahead of us. We were
nineteen. If someone had told us to, we would have walked clear
out to the Tama River.
At ten-twenty, she
said she had to go. 'T have to be home by eleven." She was
almost apologetic.
"That's pretty
strict," I said.
"My brother
thinks he's my guardian protector. But I guess I can't complain, since
he's giving me a roof over my head." From the way she
spoke, I could tell she really
liked her brother.
"Just don't
forget your slipper," I said with a wink.
"My
slipper?" Five, six steps later, she burst out laughing. "Oh, you
mean like
Cinderella? Don't worry, I won't forget."
We climbed the steps
in Shinjuku Station and sat down on a platform bench.
"You know,"
I said, "do you think I could have your phone number? Maybe we can
go out and have some fun again sometime."
She bit her lip,
nodded, then gave me her number. I scribbled it down on a
matchbook from the disco. The train came in and I put her on
board and said good
night. Thanks, it was fun, see you. The doors closed, the train
pulled out, and I crossed over to the next track to wait for my train bound for
Ikebukuro. Leaning back on a
column, I lit up a cigarette and thought about the evening. From
the restaurant to the
disco to the walk. Not bad. It'd been ages since I'd been out on
a date. I'd had a good
time and I knew she had a good time, too. We could be friends.
Maybe she was a little
shy, maybe she had her nervous side. Still, I liked her.
I put my cigarette
out under my heel and lit another one. The sounds of the city
blurred lazily into the dark. I shut my eyes and took a deep
breath. Nothing was amiss, but I couldn't shake this nagging feeling. Something
wasn't right. What was it? What had I done?
Then it hit me, right
when I got off the train at Mejiro. I'd put her on the Yamanote
Loop Line going the wrong way.
My dormitory was in
Mejiro, four stops before hers. So she could have taken the
same train as me. It would have been all so simple. Why had I
taken it upon myself to
see that she got on a train going the opposite way around? Did I
have that much to
drink? Was I thinking too much, or only, about myself? The
station clock read 10:45.
She'd never make her curfew. I hoped she'd realized my mistake
and switched to a train going the right way. But I doubted she would have. She
wasn't that type. No, she was
the type to keep riding the train the wrong way around. But
shouldn't she have known
about this mistake from the start? She had to know she was being
put on the wrong
train. Great, I thought. Just great.
It was ten after eleven when she finally got off at Komagome
Station. When she saw me standing by the stairs, she stopped in her tracks with
this expression, like she didn't
know whether to laugh or fume. It was all I could do to take her
by the arm and sit her
down on a bench. She put her bag in her lap and clutched the
strap with both hands.
She placed her feet straight out in front of her and stared at
the toes of her white
pumps.
I apologized to her.
I told her I didn't know why I'd made that stupid mistake. My mind must have been
elsewhere.
"You honestly
made a mistake?" she asked.
"Of course. If
not, why would I have done such a thing?"
"I thought you did it on purpose."
"On
purpose?"
"Because I
thought you were angry."
"Angry?"
What was she talking about?
"Yeah."
"What makes you
think I'd be angry?"
"I don't
know," she said in a shrinking voice.
Two tears spilled
from her eyes and fell audibly onto her bag.
What was I to do? I
just sat there, not saying a word. Trains pulled in, discharged
passengers, and pulled out. People disappeared down the stairs,
and it was quiet again.
"Please. Just leave
me alone." She smiled, parting her bangs to the side. "At first, I
thought it was a mistake, too. So I thought, Why not just go on
riding the opposite way? But by the time I passed Tokyo Station, I thought
otherwise. Everything was wrong. I
don't ever want to be in a position like that again."
I wanted to say
something, but the words wouldn't come. Wind blew stray pieces of
newspaper to the far end of the platform.
"It's
okay." She smiled weakly. "This was never any place I was meant to
be. This
isn't a place for me."
This place Japan?
This lump of stone spinning around in the blackness of space?
Silently I took her hand and placed it on my lap, resting my
hand lightly on hers. Her
palm was wet.
I forced words out:
"There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone.
There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell
what I think about things or
what I’m after. I don't know what my strengths are or what I' m
supposed to do about
them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much
detail, the whole thing gets
scary. And if I get scared, I can only think about myself. I become
really self-centered,
and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I' m not such a
wonderful human being."
I didn't know what
else to say. And she said no thing. She seemed to wait for me to
continue. She kept staring at the toe of her shoes. Far away,
there was an ambulance
siren. A station attendant was sweeping the platform. He didn't
even look at us. It was
getting late, so the trains were few.
'I enjoyed myself
with you," I said. "It's true, really. I don't know how to put this,
but
you strike me as a real person. I don't know why. Just being
with you and talking, you
know."
She looked up and
stared at me.
'I didn't put you on
the wrong train on purpose," I said. "I just wasn't thinking." She
nodded.
"I’ll call you
tomorrow," I said. "We can go somewhere and talk."
She wiped away the
traces of her tears and slipped her hands in her pockets. "Thankyou. I’m
sorry for everything."
"You shouldn't
apologize. It was my mistake."
We parted. I stayed
on the bench and smoked my last cigarette, then threw the
empty pack in the trash. It was close to midnight.
Nine hours later, I
realized my second error of the evening. A fatal miss. I’m so
stupid. Together with the cigarette pack, I'd thrown away the
disco matches with her
phone number on them. I checked everywhere. I went to the
warehouse, but they didn't have her number. I tried the telephone directory. I
even tried the student union at her
school. No luck.
I never saw her
again, my second Chinese.
Now THE STORY of my third Chinese.
An acquaintance from
high school, whom I mentioned earlier. A friend of a friend,
whom I'd spoken to maybe a few times.
This happened when
I'd just turned twenty-eight. Six years after I got married. Six
years during which time I'd laid three cats to rest. Burned how
many aspirations,
bundled up how much suffering in thick sweaters, and buried them
in the ground. Ali in
this fathomlessly huge city Tokyo.
It was a chilly
December afternoon. There was no wind; the air was so cold that what little
light filtered through the clouds did nothing to clear away the gray of the
city. I was heading home from the bank and stepped into a glass-fronted cafe on
Aoyama
Boulevard for a cup of coffee. I was flipping through the novel
I'd just bought, looking up now and then, watching the passing cars.
Then I noticed the
guy standing in front of me. He was addressing me by name.
"That is you,
isn't it?" he was saying.
I was taken aback. I
answered in the affirmative, but I couldn't place the guy. He
seemed to be about my age, and wore a well-tailored navy blazer
and a suitably colored rep tie. Something about the guy made him seem a little
worn down. His clothes weren't old, and he didn't look exhausted. Nothing like
that. It had more to do with his face.
Which, although presentable, gave me the feeling that his every
expression had been
thrown together on the spur of the moment. Like mismatched
dishes set out in make-do fashion on a party table.
"Mind if I sit
down?" he said, taking the seat opposite me. He fished a pack of
cigarettes and a gold lighter from his pocket. He didn't light
up, though; he merely put
them on the table. "Well, remember me?"
"Afraid
not," I confessed. "I’m sorry, I’ m terrible about these things. I’m
terrible with
people's faces."
"Or maybe you' d
just rather forget the past. Subliminally, that is."
"Maybe so,"
I said. What if I did?
The waitress brought
over a glass of water for him, and he ordered an American
coffee. Water it down, please, he told her.
'I got a bad stomach.
I really ought to quit smoking, too," he said, fiddling with his
cigarettes. He had that look that people with stomach troubles
get when they talk about their stomach. "Anyway, like I was saying myself,
for the same reason as you, I
remember absolutely every last detail about the old days. It's
weird, I tell you. Because believe me, some things I'd like to forget. But the
more I try to wipe them away, the
more they pop into my mind. You know what it's like when you' re
trying to fail asleep
and it only makes you more wide awake? It's the same thing. I
can't figure it out. I
remember things I couldn't possibly have known. Sometimes it
worries me,
remembering the past in so much detail — how am I supposed to
have room for what's
to come? My memory's so sharp, it's a nuisance."
I set my book
facedown on the table and sipped my coffee.
"Everything is vivid. The weather that
day, the temperature, the smells. Just like now. It gets confusing, like where
am I? Makes me wonder if things are only memories. Ever get that feeling?"
I shook my head
absently.
"I remember you
very well. I was walking by and saw you through the glass and I
knew you right away. Did I bother you coming in here like
this?"
"No," I
said. "Still, you have to forgive me. I really don't remember you."
"Nothing to
forgive. F m the one who barged in on you. If the time comes to
remember, you'll remember. That's how it goes. Memory works in
different ways for
everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too.
Sometimes memory helps you
think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn't mean it's good or bad.
Probably means it's no big deal."
"Do you suppose
you could tell me your name? It's simply not coming to me, and if I don't remember
it's going to drive me crazy," I said.
"What's a name,
really?" he answered. "So if it comes, okay; if it doesn't, that's
okay, too. Either way, no big deal, like I said. But if not remembering my name
bugs you that much, pretend we've just met for the first time. No mental block
that way."
His coffee arrived
and he drank it slowly. I couldn't get a handle at all on anything he was
saying.
"A lot of water
has gone under the bridge. That phrase was in our high-school
English textbook. Remember?"
High school? Did I
know this guy in high school?
"I’m sure that's
how it went. The other day, I was standing on a bridge looking down, and
suddenly that English phrase popped into my head. Clear as a beli. Like, sure,
here' s how time passes."
He folded his arms
and sat back deep in his chair, looking inscrutable. If that
expression was meant to convey a particular meaning, it was lost
on me. The guy's
expression-forming genes must have worn through in places.
"Are you
married?" he asked, out of nowhere.
I nodded.
"Kids?"
"No."
"I’ve got a
son," he said. "He's four now and goes to nursery school."
End of conversation
about children. We sat there, silent. I put a cigarette to my lips
and he offered his lighter. A natural gesture. I generally don't
like other people lighting
my cigarettes or pouring my drinks, but this time I hardly paid
any mind. In fact, it was a while before I even realized he'd lit my cigarette.
"What line of
work you in?"
"Business,"
I said.
His mouth fell open
and the word formed a second or two later. "Business?"
"Yeah. Nothing
much to speak of." I let it slide.
He nodded and left it
at that. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk about work. I just didn't feel
like starting in on what promised to be another escapade. I was tired, and I
didn't
even know the guy's name.
"That surprises
me. You in business. I wouldn't have figured you for a businessman."
I smiled.
"Used to be that
all you did was read books," he went on, with a bit of mystery.
"Well, I still
read a lot." I forced a laugh.
"Encyclopedias?"
"Encyclopedias?
"
"Sure, you got
an encyclopedia?"
"No." I
shook my head, not comprehending.
"You don't read
encyclopedias?"
"Maybe if
there's one around," I said. Of course, in the place I was living there
wouldn't be any room to have one around.
"Actually, I
sell encyclopedias," he said.
Oh, boy, an
encyclopedia salesman. Half my curiosity about the guy immediately
drained away. I took a sip of my now-lukewarm cofTee and quietly
set the cup back on
its saucer.
"You know, I
wouldn't mind having a set," I said, "but unfortunately, I don't have
the money. No money at all. I'm only just now beginning to pay off my
loans."
"Whoa
there!" he said, shaking his head. "F m not trying to sell you any
encyclopedia or anything. Me, I may be broke, but I'm not that hard up. And
anyway, the truth is, I
don't have to try to sell to Japanese. It's part of the deal I
have."
"Don't have to
sell to Japanese?"
"Right, I
specialize in Chinese. I only sell encyclopedias to Chinese. I go through the
Tokyo directory picking out Chinese names. I make a list, then go through the
list one
by one. I don't know who dreamed this scam up, but why not?
Seems to work, sales
wise. I ring the doorbell, I say, Ni hao, I hand them my card.
After that, I'm in."
Suddenly there was a
click in my head. This guy was that Chinese boy I'd known in
high school.
"Strange, huh,
how someone ends up walking around selling encyclopedias to
Chinese? I don't understand it," the guy said, seeming to
distance himself from the
whole thing. "Sure, I can remember each of the little
circumstances leading up to it, but
the big picture, you know, how it all comes together moving in
this one direction,
escapes me. I just looked up one day and here I was."
This guy and I had
never been in the same class, nor, as I said, had we been on
such close personal terms. But as near as I could place him, he
hadn't been your
encyclopedia- salesman type, either. He seemed well bred, got
better grades than I did. Girls liked him.
"Things happen,
eh? It's a long, dark, dumb story. Nothing you' d want to hear," he
said.
The line didn't seem
to demand a response, so I let it drop.
"It's not all my
doing," he picked up. "All sorts of things just piled on. But in the
end,
it's nobody's fault but mine."
I was thinking back
to high school with this guy, but all I came up with was vague
scenes. I seemed to recall sitting around a table at someone 's
house, drinking beer and talking about music. Probably on a summer afternoon,
but more like in a dream.
"Wonder what
made me want to say hello?" he asked, half to me, twirling the lighter
around on the table. "Guess I kind of bothered you. Sorry about
that."
"No bother at
all," I said. Honestly, it wasn't.
We both fell silent
for a minute. Neither of us had anything to say. I finished my
cigarette, he finished his coffee.
"Well, guess I’ll
be going," he said, pocketing his cigarettes and lighter. Then he slid
back his chair a bit. "Can't be spending the whole day talking. Not when
there's things to sell, eh?"
"You have a
pamphlet?" I asked.
"A
pamphlet?"
"About the
encyclopedia."
"Oh,
right," he mumbled. "Not on me. You want to see one?"
"Sure, just out
of curiosity."
"I’ll send you
one. Give me your address."
I tore out a page of
my Filofax, wrote down my address, and handed it to him He
looked it over, folded it in quarters, and slipped it into his
business-card case.
"It's a good
encyclopedia, you know. Fm not just saying that because I sell them
Really, it's well done. Lots of color photos. Very handy.
Sometimes F 11 thumb through the thing myself, and I never get bored."
"Someday, when
my ship comes in, maybe I’ll buy one."
"That'd be
nice," he said, an election-poster smile returning to his face. "But
by then, I’ll probably have done my time with encyclopedias. I mean, there's
only so many
Chinese families to visit. Maybe I'll have moved on to insurance
for Chinese. Or funeral plots. What's it really matter?"
I wanted to say
something. I would never see this guy again in my life. I wanted to
say something to him about the Chinese, but what? Nothing came.
So we parted with
your usual good-byes.
Even now, I still
can't think of anything to say.
SUPPOSING I FOUND myself chasing another fly ball and ran
head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under
an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this
man of thirty-odd years bring himself
to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.
This occurs to me
while I’m riding the Yamanote Line. I’m standing by the door,
holding on to my ticket so I won't lose it, gazing out the
window at the buildings we pass. Our city, these streets, I don't know why it
makes me so depressed. That old familiar
gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates,
cloudy as mental Jell-O. The
dirty facades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the
packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square
centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and
excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite
possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try
to scoop it all up in our
hands, and what we get is a handfiil of zero. That's the city.
That's when I remember
what that Chinese girl said.
This was never any
place I was meant to be.
I look at tokyo and I
think China.
That's how I’ve met
my share of Chinese. I’ve read dozens of books on China,
everything from the Annals to Red Star over China. I’ve wanted
to find out as much
about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any
China I can read
about. It's the China that sends messages just to me. It's not
the big yellow expanse on the globe, it's another China. Another hypothesis,
another supposition. In a sense, it's a part of myself that's been cut off by
the word China.
I wander through
China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo
subways, in the backseat of a taxi. My adventures take me to the
waiting room of the nearby dentist, to the bankteller's window.
I can go everywhere and I don't go anywhere.
Tokyo — one day, as I
ride the Yamanote Loop, all of a sudden this city will start to
go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. And F 11 be holding
my ticket, watching it all. Over the Tokyo streets will fail my China, like
ash, leaching into everything it touches.
Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place
for me. That is how we will lose our speech, how our dreams will turn to mist. The
way our adolescence, so tedious we worried it would last forever, evaporated.
Misdiagnosis, as a
psychiatrist might say, as it was with that Chinese girl. Maybe, in
the end, our hopes were the wrong way around. But what am I,
what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?
Even so, I have
packed into a trunk my faithful little outfielder's pride. I sit on the
stone steps by the harbor, and I wait for that slow boat to
China. It is due to appear on
the blank horizon. I am thinking about China, the shining roofs,
the verdant fields.
Let loss and
destruction come my way. They are nothing to me. I am not afraid. Any more than
the clean-up barter fears the inside fastball, any more than the committed
revolutionary fears the garrote. If only, if only . . .
Oh, friends, my
friends, China is so far away.
14.The dancing dwARF
translated by Jay Rubin
A DWARF CAME INTO my dream and asked me to dance.
I knew this was a
dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So,
very politely, I declined. The dwarf was not offended but danced alone instead.
He set a portable
record player on the ground and danced to the music. Records
were spread all around the player. I picked up a few from
different spots in the pile.
They comprised a genuine musical miscellany, as if the dwarf had
chosen them with his eyes closed, grabbing whatever his hand happened to touch.
And none of the records
was in the right jacket. The dwarf would take half-played records
off the turntable, throw them onto the pile without returning them to their
jackets, lose track of which went with which, and afterward put records in
jackets at random. There would be a Rolling Stones record in a Glenn Miller
jacket, a recording of the Mi teh Miller chorus in the jacket for
Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.
But none of this
confusion seemed to matter to the dwarf. As long as he could dance to whatever was
playing, he was satisfied. At the moment, he was dancing to a Charlie Parker
record that had been in a jacket labeled Great Selections for the Classical
Guitar. His body whirled like a tornado, sucking up the wild
flurry of notes that poured
from Charlie Parker 's saxophone. Eating grapes, I watched him
dance.
The sweat poured out
of him. Each swing of his head sent drops of sweat flying from his face; each wave
of an arm shot streams of sweat from his fingertips. But nothing
could stop him. When a record ended, I would set my bowl of
grapes down and put on a new one. And on he would go.
"You're a great
dancer," I cried out to him. "You're music itself."
"Thank
you," he answered with a hint of affectation.
"Do you always
go at it like this?"
"Pretty
much," he said.
Then the dwarf did a
beautiful twirl on tiptoe, his soft, wavy hair flowing in the wind. I
applauded. I had never seen such accomplished dancing in my life. The dwarf
gave a
respectful bow as the song ended. He stopped dancing and toweled
himself down. The needle was clicking in the inner groove of the record. I
lifted the tonearm and turned the player off. I put the record into the first
empty jacket that came to hand.
'I guess you haven't
got time to hear my story," said the dwarf, glancing at me. "It's a
long one."
Unsure how to answer,
I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I
wasn't that eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And
besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate at any moment.
Rather than wait for
me to answer, the dwarf snapped his fingers and started to
speak. "I’m from the north country," he said. "Up
north, they don't dance. Nobody knows how. They don't even realize that it's
something you can do. But I wanted to dance. I
wanted to stamp my feet and wave my arms, shake my head and spin
around. Like
this."
The dwarf stamped his
feet, waved his arms, shook his head, and spun around.
Each movement was simple enough in itself, but in combination
the four produced an
almost incredible beauty of motion, erupting from the dwarf s
body all at once, as when a globe of light bursts open.
'I wanted to dance
like this. And so I came south. I danced in the taverns. I became
famous, and danced in the presence of the king. That was before
the revolution, of
course. Once the revolution broke out, the king passed away, as
you know, and I was
banished from the town to live in the forest."
The dwarf went to the
middle of the clearing and began to dance again. I put a
record on. It was an old Frank Sinatra record. The dwarf danced,
singing "Night and
Day" along with Sinatra. I pictured him dancing before the
throne. Glittering chandeliers and beautiful ladies-in-waiting, exotic fruits
and the long spears of the royal guard, portly eunuchs, the young king in
jewel-bedecked robes, the dwarf drenched in sweat but
dancing with unbroken concentration: As I imagined the gorgeous
scene, I felt that at
any moment the roar of the revolution's cannon would echo from
the distance.
The dwarf went on
dancing, and I ate my grapes. The sun set, covering the earth in
the shadows of the forest. A huge black butterfly the size of a
bird cut across the
clearing and vanished into the depths of the forest. I felt the
chill of the evening air. It
was time for my dream to melt away, I knew.
'I guess I have to go
now," I said to the dwarf.
He stopped dancing
and nodded in silence.
'I enjoyed watching
you dance," I said. "Thanks a lot."
"Anytime,"
said the dwarf.
"We may never
meet again," I said. "Take care of yourself."
"Don't
worry," said the dwarf. "We will meet again."
"Are you
sure?"
"Oh, yes. You’ll
be coming back here," he said with a snap of his fingers. "You’ll
live
in the forest. And every day you'll dance with me. You’ll become
a really good dancer
yourself before long."
"How do you
know?" I asked, taken aback.
"It's been
decided," he answered. "No one has the power to change what has been
decided. I know that you and I will meet again soon
enough."
The dwarf looked
right up at me as he spoke. The deepening darkness had turned
him the deep blue of water at night.
"Well,
then," he said. "Be seeing you."
He turned his back to
me and began dancing again, alone.
I woke up alone.
Facedown in bed, I was drenched in sweat. There was a bird
outside my window. It seemed different from the bird I was used
to seeing there.
I washed my face with
great care, shaved, put some bread in the toaster, and boiled water for coffee.
I fed the cat, changed its litter, put on a necktie, and tied my shoes.
Then I took a bus to the elephant factory.
Needless to say, the
manufacture of elephants is no easy matter. They're big, first of all, and very
complex. It's not like making hairpins or colored pencils. The factory covers a
huge area, and it consists of several buildings. Each building is big, too, and
the
sections are color-coded. Assigned to the ear section that
month, I worked in the
building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My helmet and pants
were also yellow. All I
did there was make ears. The month before, I had been assigned
to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made heads. We
moved from section to
section each month, like Gypsies. It was company policy. That
way, we could all form a complete picture of what an elephant looked like. No
one was permitted to spend his
whole life making just ears, say, or just toenails. The
executives put together the chart
that controlled our movements, and we followed the chart.
Making elephant heads
is tremendously rewarding work. It requires enormous
attention to detail, and at the end of the day you're so tired
you don't want to talk to
anybody. I’ve lost as much as six pounds working there for a
month, but it does give me a great sense of accomplishment. By comparison,
making ears is a breeze. You just
make these big, flat, thin things, put a few wrinkles in them,
and you're done. We call
working in the ear section "taking an ear break."
After a month long year break, I go to
the trunk section, where the work is again very demanding. A
trunk has to be flexible,
and its nostrils must be unobstructed for its entire length.
Otherwise, the finished
elephant will go on a rampage. Which is why making the trunk is
nerve-racking work
from beginning to end.
We don't make
elephants from nothing, of course. Properly speaking, we reconstitute them.
First we saw a single elephant into six distinct parts: ears, trunk, head,
abdomen, legs, and tail. These we then recombine to make five elephants, which
means that each new elephant is in fact only one-fifth genuine and four-fifths
imitation. This is not obvious to the naked eye, nor is the elephant itself
aware of it. We're that good.
Why must we
artificially manufacture — or, should I say, reconstitute — elephants? It is
because we are far less patient than they are. Left to their own devices,
elephants
would give birth to no more than one baby in four or five years.
And because we love
elephants, of course, it makes us terribly impatient to see this
custom — or habitual
behavior — of theirs. This is what led us to begin reconstituting
them ourselves.
To protect the newly
reconstituted elephants against improper use, they are initially
purchased by the Elephant Supply Corporation, a publicly owned
monopoly, which keeps them for two weeks and subjects them to a battery of
highly exacting tests, after which
the sole of one foot is stamped with the corporation's logo
before the elephant is
released into the jungle. We make fifteen elephants in a normal
week. Though in the
pre-Christmas season we can increase that to as many as
twenty-five by running the
machinery at fUll speed, I think that fifteen is just about
right.
As I mentioned
earlier, the ear section is the easiest single phase in the
elephant-manufacturing process. It demands little physical
exertion on the part of
workers, it requires no close concentration, and it employs no
complex machinery. The number of actual operations involved is limited, as
well. Workers can either work at a
relaxed pace all day or exert themselves to meet their quota in
the morning so as to
have the afternoon free.
My partner and I in
the ear shop liked the second approach. We'd finish up in the
morning and spend the afternoon talking or reading or amusing
ourselves separately.
The afternoon following my dream of the dancing dwarf, all we
had to do was hang ten
freshly wrinkled ears on the wall, after which we sat on the
floor enjoying the sunshine.
I told my partner
about the dwarf. I remembered the dream in vivid detail and
described everything about it to him, no matter how trivial.
Where description was
difficult, I demonstrated by shaking my head or swinging my arms
or stamping my feet. He listened with frequent grunts of interest, sipping his
tea. He was five years my
senior, a strongly built fellow with a dark beard and a penchant
for silence. He had this
habit of thinking with his arms folded. Judging by the
expression on his face, you
would guess that he was a serious thinker, looking at things
from all angles, but usually he'd just come up straight after a while and say,
"That' s a tough one." Nothing more.
He sat there thinking
for a long time after I told him about my dream — so long that I started polishing
the control panel of the electric bellows to kill time. Finally, he came up
straight, as always, and said, "That's a tough one. Hmmm. A dancing dwarf.
That's a
tough one."
This came as no great
disappointment to me. I hadn't been expecting him to say any more than he usually
did. I had just wanted to tell someone about it. I put the electric
bellows back and drank my now-lukewarm tea.
He went on thinking,
though, for a much longer time than he normally devoted to
such matters. "What gives?" I asked.
"I’m pretty sure
I once heard about that dwarf."
This caught me off
guard.
"I just can't
remember who told me."
"Please
try," I urged him.
"Sure," he
said, and gave it another go.
He finally managed to
recall what he knew about the dwarf three hours later, as the
sun was going down near quitting time.
"That's
it!" he exclaimed. "The old guy in Stage Six! You know, the one who
plants
hairs. C'mon, you know: long white hair down to his shoulders,
hardly any teeth. Been
working here since before the revolution."
"Oh," I
said. "Him" I had seen him in the tavern any number of times.
"Yeah. He told
me about the dwarf way back when. Said it was a good dancer. I
didn't pay much attention to him, figured he was senile. But now
I don't know. Maybe he wasn't crazy after all."
"So, what did he
tell you?"
"Gee, Fm not so
sure. It was a long time ago." He folded his arms and fell to thinking
again. But it was hopeless. After a while, he straightened up and said,
"Can't remember. Go ask him yourself."
As soon as the beli rang at quitting time, I went to the Stage 6
area, but there was no
sign of the old man. I found only two young girls sweeping the
floor. The thin girl told me he had probably gone to the tavern, "the
older one." Which is exactly where I found him, sitting very erect at the
bar, drinking, with his lunch box beside him.
The tavern was an
old, old place. It had been there since long before I was born,
before the revolution. For generations now, the elephant
craftsmen had been coming
here to drink, play cards, and sing. The walls were lined with
photographs of the old
days at the elephant factory. There was a picture of the first
president of the company
inspecting a tusk, a photo of an old-time movie queen visiting
the factory, shots taken at summer dances, that kind of thing. The
revolutionary guards had burned all pictures of
the king and the royal family and anything else that was deemed
to be royalist. There
were pictures of the revolution, of course: the revolutionary
guards occupying the
factory and the revolutionary guards stringing up the plant
superintendent.
I found the old
fellow drinking Mecatol beneath an old, discolored photo labeled THREE FACTORY
BOYS POLISHING tusks. When I took the stool next to him, the old man pointed to
the photo and said, "This one is me."
I squinted hard at
the photo. The young boy on the right, maybe twelve or thirteen
years old, did appear to be this old man in his youth. You would
never notice the
resemblance on your own, but once it had been pointed out to you,
you could see that
both had the same sharp nose and flat lips.
Apparently, the old
guy always sat here, and whenever he noticed an unfamiliar
customer come in he'd say, "This one is me."
"Looks like a
real old picture," I said, hoping to draw him out.
'"Fore the
revolution," he said matter-of-factly. "Even an old guy like me was
still a
kid back then. We all get old, though. You'll looklike me before
too long. Justyou wait,
sonny boy!"
He let out a great
cackle, spraying spit from a wide-open mouth missing half its
teeth.
Then he launched into
stories about the revolution. Obviously, he hated both the king and the revolutionary
guards. I let him talk all he wanted, bought him another glass of
Mecatol, and when the time was right asked him if, by any
chance, he happened to
know about a dancing dwarf.
"Dancing
dwarf?" he said. "You wanna hear about the dancing dwarf?"
"I'd like
to."
His eyes glared into
mine. "What the hell for?" he asked.
"I don't
know," I lied. "Somebody told me about him. Sounded
interesting."
He continued to look
hard at me until his eyes reverted to the special mushy look
that drunks have. "Awright," he said. "Why not?
Ya bought me a drink. But just one
thing," he said, holding a finger in my face, "don't
tell anybody. The revolution was a hell of a long time ago, but you' re still
not supposed to talk about the dancing dwarf. So,
whatever I tell you, keep it to yourself. And don't mention my
name. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Now, order me
another drink and let' s go to a booth."
I ordered two
Mecatols and brought them to the booth, away from the bartender. The table had
a green lamp in the shape of an elephant.
"It was before
the revolution," said the old man. "The dwarf came from the north
country. What a great dancer he was! Nah, he wasn't just great
at dancing. He was
dancing. Nob'dy could touch 'im. Wind and light and fragrance
and shadow: It was all
there bursting inside him. That dwarf could do that, y'know. It
was somethin' to see."
He clicked his glass
against his few remaining teeth.
"Did you
actually see him dance?" I asked.
"Did I see him?"
The old fellow stared at me, spreading the fmgers of both hands out atop the table.
"Of course I saw him. Every day. Right here."
"Here?"
"You heard me.
Right here. He used to dance here every day. Before the revolution."
THE OLD MAN WENT ON to tell me how the dwarf had arrived from
the north country without a penny in his pocket. He holed up in this tavern,
where the elephant- factory
workers gathered, doing odd jobs until the manager realized what
a good dancer he
was and hired him to dance full-time. At first, the workers
grumbled because they
wanted to have a dancing giri, but that didn't last long. With
their drinks in their hands,
they were practically hypnotized watching him dance. And he
danced like nobody else. He could draw feelings out of his audience, feelings
they hardly ever used or didn't even
know they had. He'd bare these feelings to the light of day the
way you'd puli out a fish's guts.
The dwarf danced at
this tavern for close to half a year. The place overflowed with
customers who wanted to see him dance. And as they watched him,
they would steep
themselves in boundless happiness or be overcome with boundless
grief. Soon, the
dwarf had the power to manipulate people's emotions with a mere
choice of dance step.
Talk of the dancing
dwarf eventually reached the ears of the chief of the council of
nobles, a man who had deep ties with the elephant factory and
whose fief lay nearby.
From this nobleman — who, as it turned out, would be captured by
the revolutionary
guard and flung, still living, into a boiling pot of glue — word
of the dwarf reached the
young king. A lover of music, the king was determined to see the
dwarf dance. He
dispatched the vertical-induction ship with the royal crest to
the tavern, and the royal
guards carried the dwarf to the palace with the utmost respect.
The owner of the tavern was compensated for his loss, almost too generously.
The customers grumbled over
their loss, but they knew better than to grumble to the king.
Resigned, they drank their
beer and Mecatol and went back to watching the dances of young
girls.
Meanwhile, the dwarf was given a room in
the palace, where the ladies-in-waiting
washed him and dressed him in silk and taught him the proper
etiquette for appearing
before the king. The next night, he was taken to the great hall,
where the king's
orchestra, upon cue, performed a polka that the king had
composed. The dwarf danced to the polka, sedately at first, as if allowing his
body to absorb the music, then gradually increasing the speed of his dance
until he was whirling with the force of a tornado.
People watched him, breathless. No one could speak. Several of
the noble ladies
fainted to the floor, and from the king's own hand fell a
crystal goblet containing
gold-dust wine, but not a single person noticed the sound of it
shattering.
At this point in his story, the old man set his glass on the
table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then reached out for the
elephant- shaped lamp and began to
fiddle with it. I waited for him to continue, but he remained
silent for several minutes. I
called to the bartender and ordered more beer and Mecatol. The
tavern was slowly
filling up, and onstage a young woman singer was tuning her guitar.
"Then what
happened?" I asked.
"Then?" he
said. "Then the revolution started. The king was killed, and the dwarf ran
away."
I set my elbows on
the table and, cradling my mug, took a long swallow of beer. I
looked at the old man and asked, "You mean the revolution
occurred just after the dwarf entered the palace?"
"Not long after.
'Bout a year, I'd say." The old man let out a huge burp.
'I don't get
it," I said. "Before, you said that you weren't supposed to talk
about the
dwarf. Why is that? Is there some connection between the dwarf
and the revolution?"
"Ya got me
there. One thing's sure, though. The revolutionary guard wanted to bring that
dwarf in somethin' terrible. Still do. The revolution's an old story already,
but they' re still lookin' for the dancing dwarf. Even so, I don't know what
the connection is between
the dwarf and the revolution. Ali youhear is rumors."
"What kind of
rumors?"
I could see that he
was having trouble deciding whether to tell me any more.
"Rumors are just rumors," he said finally "You
never know what's true. But some folks
say the dwarf used a kind of evil power on the palace, and
that's what caused the
revolution. Anyhow, that's all I know about the dwarf. Nothin'
else."
The old man let out
one long hiss of a sigh, and then he drained his glass in a single gulp. The
pink liquid oozed out at the corners of his mouth, dripping down into the
sagging collar of his undershirt.
I didnt dream about
the dwarf again. I went to the elephant factory every day as
usual and continued making ears, first softening an ear with
steam, then flattening it
with a press hammer, cutting out five ear shapes, adding the
ingredients to make five
full-size ears, drying them, and finally, adding wrinkles. At
noon, my partner and I would break to eat our pack lunches and talk about the
new giri in Stage 8.
There were lots of
girls working at the elephant factory, most of them assigned to
splicing nervous systems or machine stitching or cleanup. We'd
talk about them
whenever we had free time. And whenever they had free time,
they'd talk about us.
"Great-looking
giri," my partner said. "Ali the guys've got their eye on her. But
nobody's nailed her yet."
"Can she really
be that good-looking?" I asked. I had my doubts. Any number of
times I had made a point of going to see the latest
"knockout," who turned out to be
nothing much. This was one kind of rumor you could never trust.
"No lie,"
he said. "Check her out yourself. If you don't think she's a beauty, go to
Stage Six and get a new pair of eyes. Wish I didn't have a wife.
I'd get her. Or die tryin'."
Lunch break was
almost over, but as usual my section had almost no work left for
the afternoon so I cooked up an excuse to go to Stage 8. To get
there, you had to go
through a long underground tunnel. There was a guard at the
tunnel entrance, but he
knew me from way back, so I had no trouble getting in.
The far end of the
tunnel opened on a riverbank, and the Stage 8 building was a little ways downstream
Boththe roof and the smokestack were pink. Stage 8 made elephant
legs. Having worked there just four months earlier, I knew the
layout well. The young
guard at the entrance was a newcomer I had never seen before,
though.
"What's your
business?" he demanded. In his crisp uniform, he looked like a typical
new-broom type, determined to enforce the rules.
"We ran out of
nerve cable," I said, clearing my throat. "I'm here to borrow
some."
"That's
weird," he said, glaring at my uniform. "You' re in the ear section.
Cable from the ear and leg sections shouldn't be interchangeable."
"Well, let me
try to make a long story short. I was originally planning to borrow cable
from the trunk section, but they didn't have any extra. And they
were out of leg cable, so they said if I could get them a reel of that, they'd
let me have a reel of the fine stuff.
When I called here, they said they have extra leg cable, so
that's why I'm here."
The guard flipped
through the pages of his clipboard. 'I haven't heard anything about this,"
he said. "These things are supposed to be arranged beforehand."
"That's strange.
It has been. Somebody goofed. IT1 tell the guys inside to straighten it
out."
The guard just stood
there whining. I warned him that he was slowing down
production and that I would hold him responsible if somebody
from upstairs got on my
back. Finally, still grumbling, he let me in.
Stage 8 — the leg
shop — was housed in a low-set, spacious building, a long,
narrow place with a partially sunken sandy floor. Inside, your
eyes were at ground level, and narrow glass windows were the only source of
illumination. Suspended from the
ceiling were movable rails from which hung dozens of elephant
legs. If you squinted up at them, it looked as if a huge herd of elephants was winging
down from the sky.
The whole shop had no
more than thirty workers altogether, both men and women.
Everybody had on hats and masks and goggles, so in the gloom it
was impossible to tell which one was the new giri. I recognized one guy I used
to work with and asked him
where I could find her.
"She's the girl
at Bench Fifteen attaching toenails," he said. "But if you' re
planning to put the make on her, forget it. She's hard as nails. You haven't
got a chance."
"Thanks for the
advice," I said.
The girl at Bench 15
was a slim little thing. She looked like a boy in a medieval
painting.
"Excuse
me," I said. She looked at me, at my uniform, at my shoes, and then up
again. Then she took her hat off, and her goggles. She was
incredibly beautiful. Her
hair was long and curly; her eyes were as deep as the ocean.
"Yes?"
"I was wondering
if you' d like to go out dancing with me tomorrow night. Saturday. If you're
free."
"Well, I am free
tomorrow night, and I am going to go dancing, but not with you."
"Have you got a
date with someone else?"
"Not at
all," she said. Then she put her goggles and hat back on, picked up an
elephant toenail from her bench, and held it against a foot,
checking the fit. The nail was just a little too wide, so she filed it down
with a few quick strokes.
"C'mon," I
said. "If you haven't got a date, go with me. It's more fun than going
alone. And I know a good restaurant we could go to."
"That's all
right. I want to dance by myself. If you want to dance, too, there's nothing
stopping you from coming."
"I will” I said.
"It's up to you," she said.
Ignoring me, she
continued to work. Now she pressed the filed nail into the hollow at the front
of the foot. This time, it fit perfectly.
"Pretty good for
a beginner," I said.
She didn't answer me.
That night, the dwarf
came into my dream again, and again I knew it was a dream.
He was sitting on a log in the middle of the clearing in the
forest, smoking a cigarette.
This time he had neither record player nor records. There were
signs of weariness in his face that made him look a little more advanced in
years than he had when I first saw
him — though in no way could he be taken for someone who had
been born before the
revolution. He looked perhaps two or three years older than me,
but it was hard to tell.
That's the way it is with dwarfs.
For lack of anything
better to do, I strolled around the dwarf, looked up at the sky,
and finally sat down beside him. The sky was gray and overcast,
and black clouds were drifting westward. It might have begun to rain at any
time. The dwarf had probably put away the records and player to keep them from
being rained on.
"Hi," I
said to the dwarf.
"Hi," he
answered.
"Not dancing
today?" I asked.
"No, not
today," he said.
When he wasn't
dancing, the dwarf was a feeble, sad-looking creature. You would
never guess that he had once been a proud figure of authority in
the royal palace.
"You look a
little sick," I said.
'I am," he
replied. "It can be very cold in the forest. When you live alone for a
long
time, different things start to affect your health."
"That' s
terrible," I said.
'I need energy. I
need a new source of energy flowing in my veins — energy that will enable me to
dance and dance, to get wet in the rain without catching cold, to run
through the fields and hills. That's what I need."
"Gosh," I
said.
We sat on the log for
a long time, saying nothing. From far overhead, I heard the
wind in the branches. Flitting among the trunks of the trees, a
huge butterfly would
appear and disappear.
"Anyhow,"
he said, "you wanted me to do something for you."
"I did?" I
had no idea what he was talking about.
The dwarf picked up a
branch and drew a star on the ground. "The girl," he said.
"You want the girl, don't you?"
He meant the pretty
new girl in Stage 8. 1 was amazed that he knew so much. Of
course, this was a dream, so anything could happen.
"Sure, I want
her. But I can't ask you to help me get her. I'll have to do it myself."
"You
can't."
"What makes you
so sure?"
"I know,"
he said. "Go ahead and get angry, but the fact is you can't do it
yourself."
He might be right, I
thought. I was so ordinary. I had nothing to be proud of — no
money, no good looks, no special way with words, even — nothing
special at all. True, I wasn't a bad guy, and I worked hard. The people at the
factory liked me. I was strong
and healthy. But I wasn't the type that girls go crazy over at
first sight. How could a guy
like me ever hope to get his hands on a beauty like that?
"You know,"
the dwarf whispered, "if you let me help you, it just might work
out."
"Help me? How?" He had aroused my curiosity.
"By dancing. She
likes dancing. Show her you' re a good dancer and she's yours.
Then you just stand beneath the tree and wait for the fruit to
fail into your hands."
"You mean you'll
teach me to dance?"
"I don't mind,"
he said. "But a day or two of practice won't do you any good. It takes
six months at least, and then only if you work at it all day,
every day. That's what it takes to capture someone's heart by dancing."
I shook my head.
"It's no use, then," I said. "If I have to wait six months, some
other guy will get her for sure."
"When do you go
dancing?"
"Tomorrow night.
Saturday. She'll be going to the dance hall, and I will, too. I’ll ask
her to dance with me."
The dwarf used the
branch to draw a number of vertical lines in the dirt. Then he
bridged them with a horizontal line to make a strange diagram.
Silent, I followed the
movement of his hand. The dwarf spit the butt of his cigarette
on the ground and
crushed it with his foot.
"There's a way
to do it — if you really want her," he said. "You want her, don't
you?"
"Sure I
do."
"Want me to tell
you how it can be done?"
"Please. I'd
like to know."
"It's simple,
really. I just get inside you. I use your body to dance. You' re healthy and
strong: You should be able to manage a little dancing."
'I am in good shape.
Nobody better," I said. "But can you really do such a thing —
get inside me and dance?"
"Absolutely. And
then she's yours. I guarantee it. And not just her. You can have any girl."
I licked my lips. It
sounded too good to be true. If I let the dwarf get inside me, he
might never come out. My body could be taken over by this dwarf.
As much as I wanted the girl, I was not willing to let that happen.
"You' re scared," he said, as if
reading my mind. "You think I'll take possession of
your body."
"I've heard
things about you," I said.
"Bad things, I
suppose."
"Yes, bad
things."
He gave me a sly
smile. "Don't worry. I may have power, but I can't just take over a
person's body once and for all. An agreement is required for
that. I can't do it unless
both parties agree. You don't want your body permanently taken
over, do you?"
"No, of course
not," I said with a shiver.
"And I don't
want to help you get your girl without any kind of compensation." The
dwarf raised a fmger. "But I'll do it on one condition.
It's not such a difficult condition, but it is a condition nonetheless."
"What is
it?"
'I get into your
body. We go to the dance hall. You ask her to join you and you
captivate her with your dancing. Then you take her. But you' re
not allowed to say a
word from beginning to end. You can't make a sound until you've
gone all the way with her. That's the one condition."
"How am I
supposed to seduce her if I can't say a word to her?" I protested.
"Don't
worry," said the dwarf, shaking his head. "As long as you have me
dancing for you, you can get any woman without opening your mouth. So, from the
time you set foot in the dance hall to the moment you make her yours, you are
absolutely forbidden to
use your voice."
"And if I
do?"
"Then your body
is mine," he said, as if stating the obvious.
"And if I do the
whole thing without making a sound?"
"Then the giri
is yours, and I leave your body and go back to the forest."
I released a deep,
deep sigh. What was I to do? While I wrestled with the question,
the dwarf scratched another strange diagram into the earth. A
butterfly came and rested on it, exactly in the center. I confess I was afraid.
I could not say for certain that I would be able to keep silent from beginning
to end. But I knew it was the only way for me to
hold that gorgeous giri in my arms. I pictured her in Stage 8,
filing the elephant toenail. I had to have her.
"Ali
right," I said. 'I’ll do it."
"That's
it," said the dwarf. "We've got our agreement."
THE DANCE HALL STOOD by the main factory gate, its floor always
packed on a
Saturday night with the young men and women who worked at the
elephant factory.
Virtually all of us unattached workers, both male and female,
would come here every
week to dance and drink and talk with our friends. Couples would
eventually slip out to make love in the woods.
How I've missed this!
the dwarf sighed within me. This is what dancing is all about — the crowd, the
drinks, the lights, the smell of sweat, the girls ' perfume. Oh, it takes me
back!
I cut through the
crowd, searching for her. Friends who noticed me would clap me on the shoulder and
call out to me. I responded to each with a big, friendly smile but said
nothing. Before long, the band started playing, but still there
was no sign of her.
Take it slow, said
the dwarf. The night is young. You 've got plenty to look forward to.
The dance floor was a
large, motorized circle that rotated very slowly. Chairs and
tables were set in rows around its outer edge. Over it, a large
chandelier hung from the high ceiling, the immaculately polished wood of the
floor reflecting its brilliance like a
sheet of ice. Beyond the circle rose the bandstand, like
bleachers in an arena. On it
were arranged two fill orchestras that would alternate playing
every thirty minutes,
providing lush dance music all evening without a break. The one
on the right featured
two complete drum sets, and all the musicians wore the same red
elephant logo on their
blazers. The main attraction of the left-hand orchestra was a
ten-member trombone
section, and this troupe wore green elephant masks.
I found a seat and
ordered a beer, loosening my tie and lighting a cigarette. The
dance-hall girls, who danced for a fee, would approach my table
now and then and
invite me to dance, but I ignored them. Chin in hand, and taking
an occasional sip of
beer, I waited for the giri to come.
An hour went by, and
still she failed to show. A parade of songs crossed the dance
floor — waltzes, fox-trots, a battle of the drummers, high
trumpet solos — all wasted. I
began to feel that she might have been toying with me, that she
had never intended to
come here to dance.
Don 't worry,
whispered the dwarf. She 'U be here. Just relax.
The hands of the
clock had moved past nine before she showed herself in the
dance-hall door. She wore a tight, shimmering one-piece dress
and blackhigh heels.
The entire dance hall seemed ready to vanish in a white blur,
she was so sparkling and sexy. First one man, then another and another, spotted
her and approached to offer himself as an escort, but a single wave of the hand
sent each of them back into the crowd.
I followed her
movements as I sipped my beer. She sat at a table directly across the dance
floor from me, ordered a red-colored cocktail, and lit a long cigarette. She
hardly
touched the drink, and when she finished the cigarette she
crushed it out without
lighting another. Then she stood and proceeded toward the dance
floor, slowly, with the readiness of a diver approaching the high platform.
She danced alone. The
orchestra played a tango. She moved to the music with
mesmerizing grace. Whenever she bent low, her long, black, curly
hair swept past the
floor like the wind, and her slender fingers stroked the strings
of an invisible harp that
floated in the air. Utterly unrestrained, she danced by herself,
for herself. I couldn't take my eyes off her. It felt like the continuation of
my dream. I grew confused. If I was using one dream to create another, where
was the real me in all this?
She 's a great
dancer, said the dwarf. It 's worth doing it with somebody like her.
Let 's go.
Hardly conscious of
my movements, I stood and left my table for the dance floor.
Shoving my way past a number of men, I came up beside her and
clicked my heels to
signal to the others that I intended to dance. She cast a glance
at me as she whirled,
and I flashed her a smile to which she did not respond. Instead,
she went on dancing
alone.
I started dancing,
slowly at first, but gradually faster and faster until I was dancing
like a whirlwind. My body no longer belonged to me. My arms, my
legs, my head, all
moved wildly over the dance floor unconnected to my thoughts. I
gave myself to the
dance, and all the while I could hear distinctly the transit of
the stars, the shifting of the
tides, the racing of the wind. This was truly what it meant to
dance. I stamped my feet,
swung my arms, tossed my head, and whirled. A globe of white light
burst open inside my head as I spun round and round.
Again she glanced at
me, and then she was whirling and stamping with me. The light was exploding inside
her, too, I knew. I was happy. I had never been so happy. This is a lot more
fun than working in some elephant factory, isn't it? said the dwarf. I said
nothing in return. My mouth was so dry, I couldn't have spoken if I had tried
to. We went on
dancing, hour after hour. I led, she followed. Time seemed to
have given way to
eternity. Eventually, she stopped dancing, looking utterly
drained. She took my arm, and I — or, should I say, the dwarf — stopped
dancing, too. Standing in the very center of
the dance floor, we gazed into each other's eyes. She bent over
to remove her high
heels, and with them dangling from her hand, she looked at me
again.
We LEFT THE DANCE HALL and walked along the river. I had no car,
so we just kept walking and walking. Soon the road began its gradual climb into
the hills. The air
became filled with the perfume of white night-blooming flowers.
I turned to see the dark shapes of the factory spread out below. From the dance
hall, yellow light spilled out
onto its immediate surroundings like so much pollen, and one of
the orchestras was
playing a jump tune. The wind was soft, and the moonlight seemed
to drench her hair.
Neither of us spoke.
After such dancing, there was no need to say anything. She
clung to my arm like a blind person being led along the road.
Topping the hill, the
road led into an open field surrounded by pine woods. The
broad expanse looked like a calm lake. Evenly covered in
waist-high grass, the field
seemed to dance in the night wind. Here and there a shining
flower poked its head into
the moonlight, calling out to insects.
Putting my arm around
her shoulders, I led her to the middle of the grassy field,
where, without a word, I lowered her to the ground. "You're
not much of a talker," she
said with a smile. She tossed her shoes away and wrapped her
arms around my neck. I kissed her on the lips and drew back from her, looking at
her face once again. She was beautiful, as beautiful as a dream. I still could
not believe I had her in my arms like this. She closed her eyes, waiting for me
to kiss her again.
That was when her
face began to change. A fleshy white thing crept out of one
nostril. It was a maggot, an enormous maggot, larger than any I
had ever seen before.
Then came another and another, emerging from both her nostrils,
and suddenly the
stench of death was all around us. Maggots were falling from her
mouth to her throat,
crawling across her eyes and burrowing into her hair. The skin
of her nose slipped
away, the flesh beneath melting until only two dark holes were
left. From these, still
more maggots struggled to emerge, their pale white bodies
smeared with the rotting
flesh that surrounded them.
Pus began to pour
from her eyes, the sheer force of it causing her eyeballs to twitch, then fail
and dangle to either side of her face. In the gaping cavern behind the sockets,
a clot of maggots like a ball of white string swarmed in her rotting brain. Her
tongue
dangled from her mouth like a huge slug, then festered and fell
away. Her gums
dissolved, the white teeth dropping out one by one, and soon the
mouth itself was gone. Blood spurted from the roots of her hair, and then each
hair fell out. From beneath the
slimy scalp, more maggots ate their way through to the surface.
Arms locked around
me, the giri never loosened her grip. I struggled vainly to free
myself, to avert my face,
to close my eyes. A hardened lump in my stomach rose to my
throat, but I could not
disgorge it. I felt as if the skin of my body had turned inside
out. By my ear resounded
the laughter of the dwarf.
The girl's face
continued to melt until suddenly the jaw popped open, as if from a
sudden twisting of the muscles, and clots of liquefied flesh and
pus and maggots sprang in all directions.
I sucked my breath in
to let out a scream. I wanted someone — anyone — to drag
me away from this unbearable hell. In the end, however, I did
not scream This can't be
happening, I said to myself. This can't be real, I knew almost
intuitively The dwarf is
doing this. He's trying to trick me. He's trying to make me use
my voice. One sound, and my body will be his forever. That is exactly what he
wants.
Now I knew what I had
to do. I closed my eyes — this time without the least
resistance — and I could hear the wind moving across the grassy
field. The girl's fingers were digging into my back. Now I wrapped my arms
around her and drew her to me with all my strength, planting a kiss upon the suppurating
flesh where it seemed to me her
mouth had once been. Against my face I could feel the slippery
flesh and the maggoty
lumps; my nostrils filled with a putrid smell. But this lasted
only a moment. When I
opened my eyes, I found myself kissing the beautiful giri I had
come here with. Her pink cheeks glowed in the soft moonlight. And I knew that I
had defeated the dwarf. I had
done it all without making a sound.
You win, said the
dwarf in a voice drained of energy. She 's yours. I 'm leaving your
body now. And he did.
"But you haven't
seen the last of me," he went on. "You can win as often as you like.
But you can only lose once. Then it's the end for you. And you will lose. The
day is
bound to come. I’ll be waiting, no matter how long it
takes."
"Why does it
have to be me?" I shouted back. "Why can't it be someone else?"
But the dwarf said
nothing. He only laughed. The sound of his laughter floated in the air until
the wind swept it away.
In the end, the dwarf
was right. Every policeman in the country is out looking for me now. Someone
who saw me dancing — maybe the old man — reported to the
authorities that the dwarf had danced in my body The police
started watching me, and
everyone who knew me was called in for questioning. My partner
testified that I had
once told him about the dancing dwarf. A warrant went out for my
arrest. The police
surrounded the factory The beautiful girl from Stage 8 came
secretly to warn me. I ran
from the shop and dove into the pool where the finished
elephants are stockpiled.
Clinging to the back of one, I fled into the forest, crushing
several policemen on the way.
For almost a month
now, I’ve been running from forest to forest, mountain to
mountain, eating berries and bugs, drinking water from the river
to keep myself alive.
But there are too many policemen. They're bound to catch me
sooner or later. And
when they do, they'll strap me to the winch and tear me to
pieces. Or so I’m told.
The dwarf comes into
my dreams every night and orders me to let him inside me.
"At least that
way, you won't be arrested and dismembered by the police," he says.
"No, but then F 11
have to dance in the forest forever."
"True,"
says the dwarf, "but you' re the one who has to make that choice."
He chuckles when he
says this, but I can't make the choice.
I hear the dogs
howling now. They're almost here.
15. The LAST LAWN OF The AFTErnoON
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
I must have been eighteen or nineteen when I mowed lawns, a good
fourteen or fifteen years ago. Ancient history.
Sometimes, though,
fourteen or fifteen years doesn't seem so long ago. I'll think,
that's when Jim Morrison was singing "Light My Fire,"
or Paul McCartney "The Long and Winding Road" — maybe I’m scrambling
my years a bit, but anyway, about that time —
it somehow never quite hits that it was really all that long
ago. I mean, I don't think I
myself have changed so much since those days.
No, I take that back.
F m sure I must have changed a lot. There'd be too many things I couldn't explain
if I hadn't.
Okay, I’ve changed.
And these things happened all of fourteen, fifteen years back.
In my neighborhood —
I'd just recently moved there — we had a public junior high
school, and whenever I went out to run shopping errands or take
a walk I'd pass right by it. So I'd find myself looking at the junior-high kids
exercising or drawing pictures or just goofing off. Not that I especially enjoyed
looking at them; there wasn't anything else to
look at. I could just as well have looked at the line of cherry
trees off to the right, but the junior-high kids were more interesting.
So as things went,
looking at these junior-high- school kids every day, one day it
struck me. They were all just fourteen or fifteen years old. It
was a minor discovery for
me, something of a shock. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, they
weren't even born; or if
they were, they were little more than semiconscious blobs of
pink flesh. And here they
were now, already wearing brassieres, masturbating, sending
stupid little postcards to
disc jockeys, smoking out in back of the gym, writing fuck on
somebody's fence with red spray paint, reading — maybe — War and Peace. Phew,
glad that's done with.
I really meant it.
Phew.
Me, back fourteen or
fifteen years ago, I was mowing lawns.
MEMORY IS LIKE FICTION; or else it's fiction that's like memory.
This really came
home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a
kind of fiction, or vice
versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything
neatly into shape, the
context wanders this way and that, until finally the context
isn't even there anymore. You' re left with this pile of kittens lolling all
over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly
unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items,
you call them finished
products — at times it's downright embarrassing just to think of
it. Honestly, it can make me blush. And if my face turns that shade, you canbe
sure everyone's blushing.
Still, you grasp
human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on
relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right and wrong pretty
much drop
out of the picture. That's where memory takes over and fiction
is born. From that point
on, it's a perpetual-motion machine no one can stop. Tottering
its way throughout the
world, trailing a single unbroken thread over the ground.
Here goes nothing.
Hope all goes well, you say. But it never has. Never will. It just
doesn't go that way.
So where does that
leave you? What do you do?
What is there to do?
I just go back to gathering kittens and piling them up again.
Exhausted kittens, all limp and played out. But even if they
woke to discover themselves stacked like kindling for a campfire, what would
the kittens think? Well, it might scarcely raise a "Hey, what gives?"
out of them. In which case — if there was nothing to
particularly get upset about — it would make my work a little
easier. That's the way I see it.
AT EIGHTEEN OR NINETEEN I mowed lawns, so we're talking ancient
history. Around that time I had a girlfriend the same age, but a simple turn of
events had taken her to
live in a town way out of the way. Out of a whole year we could
get together maybe two weeks total. In that short time we'd have sex, go to the
movies, wine and dine at some
pretty fancy places, tell each other things nonstop, one thing
after the next. And in the
end we'd always cap it off with one hell of a fight, then make
up, and have sex again. In other words, we'd be doing what most any couple
does, only in a condensed version,
like a short feature.
At this point in
time, I don't actually know if I really and truly loved her or not. Oh, I
can bring her to mind, all right, but I just don't know. These
things, they happen. I liked
eating out with her, liked watching her take off her clothes one
piece at a time, liked how soft it felt inside her vagina. And after sex, I
liked just looking at her with her head on my chest, talking softly until she'd
fail asleep. But that's all. Beyond that, I'mnot sure of one single thing.
Save for that
two-week period I was seeing her, my life was excruciatingly
monotonous. I'd go to the university whenever I had classes and
got more or less
average marks. Maybe go to the movies alone, or stroll the
streets for no special
reason, or take some giri I got along with out on a date — no sex.
Never much for loud
get-togethers, I was always said to be on the quiet side. When I
was by myself, I'd listen to rock 'n' roli, nothing else. Happy enough, I
guess, though probably not so very happy. But at the time, that was about what
you'd expect.
One summer morning,
the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend,
and in it she'd written that she wanted to break up with me. Fve
always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I' m sure that
from here on I'll continue to . . . et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was
wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new
boyfriend. I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside
and drank a can of
beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took
three HB pencils I had
on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn't that I was angry,
really. I just didn't
know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed
off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was
commenting on my suddenly
"outgoing disposition." What is it about life?
That year I had a
part-time job for a lawn-care service near Kyodo Station on the
Odakyu Line, doing a fairly good business. Most people, when
they built houses in the
area, put in lawns. That, or they kept dogs. The two things
seemed mirror alternatives.
(Although there were folks who did both.) Each had its own
advantages: A green lawn is a thing of beauty; a dog is cute. But half a year
passes, and things start to drag on everyone. The lawn needs mowing, and you
have to walk the dog. Not quite what they
bargained for.
Well, as it ended up,
we mowed lawns for these people. The summer before, I'd
found the job through the student union at the university.
Besides me, a whole slew of
others had come in at the same time, but they all quit soon
thereafter; only I stayed on.
It was demeaning work, but the pay wasn't bad. What's more, you
could get by pretty
much without talking to anyone. Just made for me. Since joining
on there, I'd managed
to save up a tidy little sum. Enough for my girlfriend and me to
take a trip somewhere
that summer. But now that she'd called the whole thing off, what
difference did it make? For a week or so after I got her good-bye letter, I
tried thinking up all sorts of ways to
use the money. Or rather, I didn't have anything better to think
about than how to spend the money. A lost week it was. My penis looked like any
other guy's penis. But
somebody — a somebody I didn't know — was nibbling at her little
nipples. Strange
sensation. What was wrong with me?
I was hard-pressed to
come up with some way of spending the money. There was a deal to buy someone's
used car — a lOOOcc Subaru — not bad condition and the right price, but somehow
I just didn't feel like it. I also thought of buying new speakers, but in my
tiny apartment with its wood-and-plasterboard walls, what would have been the
point? I guess I could have moved, but I didn't really have any
reason to. And even if I
did up and move out of my apartment, there wouldn't have been enough
money left over to buy the speakers.
There just wasn't any
way to spend the money. I bought myself a polo shirt and a
few records, and the whole rest of the lump remained. So then I bought
a really good
Sony transistor radio — big speakers, clear FM reception, the
works.
The whole week went
past before it struck me. The fact of the matter was that if I
bad no way of spending the money, there was no point in my
earning it.
So one morning I
broached the matter to the head of the lawn-mowing company, told him I'd like
to quit. It was getting on time when I had to begin studying for exams, and
before that I'd been thinking about taking a trip. I wasn't
about to say that I didn't want
the money anymore.
"Well, now,
sorry to hear that," said the head exec (I guess you'd call him that,
although he seemed more like your neighborhood gardening man).
Then he let out a
sigh and sat down in his chair to take a puflf of his cigarette.
He looked up at the ceiling and craned his neck stiffly from side to side.
"You really and truly do fine work. You're
the heart of the operation, the best of my part-timers. Got a
good reputation with the
customers, too. What can I say? You've done a tremendous job for
someone so young."
Thanks, I told him.
Actually, I did have a good reputation. That's because I did
meticulous work. Most part-timers give the grass a thorough
once-over with a big
electric lawn mower and do only a mediocre job on the remaining
areas. That way, they get done quickly without wearing themselves out. My
method was exactly the opposite.
I'd rough in with the mower, then put time into the hand trimming.
So naturally, the
finished product looked nice. The only thing was that the take
was small, seeing as the pay was calculated at so much per job. The price went
by the approximate area of the
yard. And what with all that bending and stooping, my back would
get plenty sore. It's
the sort of thing you have to be in the business to really
understand. So much so that
until you get used to it, you have trouble going up and down
stairs.
Now, I didn't do such
meticulous work especially to build a reputation. You probably won't believe
me, but I simply enjoy mowing lawns. Every morning, I'd hone the grass
clippers, head out to the customers in a minivan loaded with a
lawn mower, and cut the grass. There's all kinds of yards, all kinds of turf,
all kinds of housewives. Quiet,
thoughtful housewives and ones who shoot off their mouths. There
were even your
housewives who'd crouch down right in front of me in loose
T-shirts and no bra so that I could see all the way to their nipples.
No matter, I kept on
mowing the lawn. Generally, the grass in the yard would be
pretty high. Overgrown like a thicket. The taller the grass, the
more rewarding I'd find
the job. When the job was finished, the yard would yield an
entirely different impression. Gives you a really great feeling. It's as if a
thick bank of clouds has suddenly lifted,
letting in the sun all around.
One time and one time
only — after I'd done my work — did I ever sleep with one of
these housewives. Thirty-one, maybe thirty-two she was, petite,
with small, firm breasts. She closed all the shutters, turned out the lights,
and we made it in the pitch-blackness. Even so, she kept on her dress, merely
slipping off her underwear. She got on top of
me, but wouldn't let me touch her anywhere below her breasts.
And her body was
incredibly cold; only her vagina was warm She hardly spoke a word.
I, too, kept silent.
There was just the rustling of her dress, now slower, now
faster. The telephone rang
midway. The ringing went on for a while, then stopped.
Later, I wondered if
my girlfriend and I breaking up mightn't have been on account of that
interlude. Not that there was any particular reason to think so. It somehow
just
occurred to me. Probably because of the phone call that went
unanswered. Well,
whatever, it's all over and done with.
"This really
leaves me in a fix, you know," said my boss. "If you pull out now, I
won't be able to stir up business. And it's peak season, too."
The rainy season
really made lawns grow like crazy.
"What do you
say? How about one more week? Give me a week. I'll be able to find
some new hands, and everything'll be okay. If you'd just do that
for me, I'll give you a
bonus."
Fine, I told him. I
didn't especially have any other plans for the time being, and above all, I had
no objections to the work itself. All the same, I couldn't help thinking what
an
odd turn of events this was: The minute I decide I don't need
money, the dough starts
pouring in.
Clear weather three
days in a row, then one day of rain, then three more days of
clear weather. So went my last week on the job. It was summer,
though nothing special as summers go. Clouds drifted across the sky like
distant memories. The sun broiled my skin. My back peeled three times, and by then
I was tanned dark all over. Even behind my ears.
The morning of my
last day of work found me in my usual gear — T-shirt and shorts, tennis shoes, sunglasses
— only now as I climbed into the minivan, I was heading out
for what would be my last lawn. The car radio was on the blink,
so I brought along my
transistor radio from home for some driving music. Creedence,
Grand Funk, your
regular AM rock. Everything revolved around the summer sun. I
whistled along with
snatches of the music, and smoked when not whistling. An FEN newscaster
was
stumbling over a rapid-fire list of the most
impossible-to-pronounce Vietnamese
place-names.
My last job was near
Yomiuri Land Amusement Park. Fine by me. Don't ask why
someone living over the line in Kanagawa Prefecture felt
compelled to call a Setagaya Ward lawn-mowing service. I had no right to
complain, though. I mean, I myself chose
that job. Go into the office first thing in the morning, and all
the day's jobs would be
written up on a blackboard; each person then signed up for the
places he wanted to
work. Most of the crew generally chose places nearby. Less time
back and forth, so
they could squeeze in more jobs. Me, on the other hand, I chose
jobs as far away as I
could. Always. And that always puzzled everyone. But like I said
before, I was the lead guy among the part-timers, so I got first choice of any
jobs I wanted.
No reason for
choosing what I did, really. I just liked mowing lawns farther away. I
enjoyed the time on the road, enjoyed a longer look at the
scenery on the way. I wasn't about to tell anyone that — who would' ve
understood?
I drove with all the
windows open. The wind grew brisk as I headed out of the city,
the surroundings greener. The simmering heat of the lawns and
the smell of dry dirt
came on stronger; the clouds were outlined sharp against the
sky. Fantastic weather.
Perfect for taking a little summer day trip with a giri
somewhere. I thought about the cool sea and the hot sands. And then I thought
of a cozy air-conditioned room with crisp blue sheets on the bed. That's all.
Aside from that, I didn't think about a thing. My head was
all beach and blue sheets.
I went on thinking
about these very things while getting the tank filled at a gas
station. I stretched out on a nearby patch of grass and casually
watched the attendant
check the oil and wipe the windows. Putting my ear to the ground,
I could hear all kinds of things. I could even hear what sounded like distant
waves, though of course it wasn't. Only the rumble of all the different sounds
the earth sucked in. Right in front of my eyes, a bug was inching along a blade
of grass. A tiny green bug with wings. The bug paused when it reached the end
of the grass blade, thought things over awhile, then decided to go back the
same way it came. Didn't look all that particularly upset.
Wonder if the heat
gets to bugs, too?
Who knows?
In ten minutes, the
tank was full, and the attendant honked the horn to let me know.
My destination
address turned out to be up in the hills. Gentle, stately hills, rolling
down to rows of zelkova trees on either flank. In one yard, two
small boys in their
birthday suits showering each other with a hose. The spray made
a strange little
two-foot rainbow in the air. From an open window came the sound
of someone
practicing the piano. Quite beautiflilly, too; you could almost
mistake it for a record.
I pulled the van to a
stop in front of the appointed house, got out, and rang the
doorbell. No answer. Everything was dead quiet. Not a soul in
sight, kind of like siesta
time in a Latin country. I rang the doorbell one more time. Then
I just kept on waiting.
It seemed a nice
enough little house: cream-colored plaster walls with a square
chimney of the same color sticking up from right in the middle
of the roof. White curtains hung in the windows, which were framed in gray,
though both were sun-bleached
beyond belief. It was an old house, a house all the more
becoming for its age. The sort of house you often find at summer resorts,
occupied half the year and left empty the
other half. You know the type. There was a lived-in air to the
house that gave it its
charm.
The yard was enclosed
by a waist-high French-brick wall topped by a rosebush
hedge. The roses had completely fallen off, leaving only the
green leaves to take in the glaring summer sun. I hadn't really taken a look at
the lawn yet, but the yard seemed
fairly large, and there was a big camphor tree that cast a cool
shadow over the
cream-colored house.
It took a third ring
before the front door slowly opened and a middle-aged woman
emerged. A huge woman. Now, F m not so small myself, but she
must have been a
good inch and a half taller than me. And broad at the shoulders,
too. She looked like
she was plenty angry at something. She was around fifty, I'd
say. No beauty certainly,
but a presentable face. Although, of course, by
"presentable" I don't mean to suggest
that hers was the most likable face. Rather thick eyebrows and a
squarish jaw attested
to a stubborn, never-go-back-on-your-word temperament.
Through sleep-dulled
eyes she gave me the most bothered look. A slightly graying
shock of stiff frizzy hair rippled across the crown of her head;
her two thick arms
drooped out of the shoulders of a frumpy brown cotton dress. Her
limbs were utterly
pale. "What is it?" she said.
"I’ve come to mow the lawn," I
said, taking off my sunglasses.
"The lawn?"
She twisted her neck. "You mow lawns?"
"That's right,
and since you called — "
"Oh, I guess I
did. The lawn. What's the date today?"
"The
fourteenth."
To which she yawned,
"The fourteenth, eh?" Then she yawned again. "Say, you
wouldn't have a cigarette, would you?"
Taking a pack of Hope
regulars out of my pocket, I offered her one and lit it with a
match. Whereupon she exhaled a long, leisurely puff of smoke up
into the open air.
"Of all the
..." she began. "What's it gonna take?"
"Timewise?"
She thrust out her
jaw and nodded.
"Depends on the
size and how much work it needs. May I take a look?"
"Go ahead.
Seeing's how you gotta size it up first."
There were some
hydrangea bushes and that camphor tree and the rest was lawn.
Two empty birdcages were set out beneath a window. The yard
looked well tended,
the grass was fairly short — hardly in need of mowing. I was
kind of disappointed.
"This here's
still okay for another two weeks. No reasonto mow now."
"That' s for me
to decide, am I right?"
I gave her a quick
look. Well, she did have me there.
'I want it shorter.
That' s what I'm paying you money for. Fair enough?"
I nodded. "FH be
done in four hours."
"Awful slow,
don't you think?"
"I like to work
slow."
"Well, suit yourself."
I went to the van,
took out the electric lawn mower, grass clippers, rake, garbage
bag, my thermos of iced coffee, and my transistor radio, and
brought them into the yard. The sun was climbing steadily toward the center of
the sky. The temperature was also
rising steadily. Meanwhile, as I was hauling out my equipment,
the woman had lined up ten pairs of shoes by the front door and began dusting
them with a rag. All of them
women's shoes, but of two different sizes, small and
extra-large.
"Would it be all
right if I put on some music while I work?" I asked.
The woman looked up
from where she crouched. "Fine by me. I like music myself."
Immediately I set
about picking up whatever stones lay around the yard, and only
then started up the lawn mower. Stones can really damage the
blades. The mower was fitted with a plastic receptacle to collect all the
clippings. I'd remove this receptacle whenever it got too full and empty the
clippings into the garbage bag. With two thousand
square feet to mow, even a short growth can amount to a lot of
clippings. The sun kept broiling down on me. I stripped off my sweat-soaked
T-shirt and kept working. In my
shorts, I must have looked dressed down for some barbecue. I was
all sweat. At this
rate, I could have kept drinking water and drinking water and
still not pissed a drop.
After about an hour
of mowing, I took a break and sat myself down under the
camphor tree to drink some iced coffee. I could feel my entire
body just drinking up the
sugar. Cicadas were droning overhead. I turned on the radio and
poked around the dial for a decent disc jockey. I stopped when I came to a
station playing Three Dog Night's
"Mama Told Me Not to Come," lay down on my back, and
just looked up through my
shades at the sun filtering between the branches.
The woman came and
planted herself by my head. Viewed from below, she
resembled the camphor tree. Her right hand held a glass, and in
it whiskey and ice were aswirl in the summer light.
"Hot, eh?"
she said.
"You said
it," I replied.
"So what's a guy
like you do for lunch?"
I looked at my watch.
It was 11:20.
"When noon rolls
around, I’ll go get myself something to eat somewhere. I think
there's a hamburger stand nearby."
"No need to go
out of your way. I’ll fix you a sandwich or something."
"Really, it's
all right. I always go off to get a bite."
She raised the glass
of whiskey to her mouth and downed half of it in one swallow.
Then she pursed her lips and let out a sigh. "No bother to
me. I was going to make
something for myself anyway. C'mon, let me get you
something."
"Well, then, all
right. Much obliged."
"That's
okay," she said, and trudged back into the house, slowly swaying at the
shoulders.
I worked with the
grass clippers until twelve. First, I went over the uneven spots in
my mowing job; then, after raking up the clippings, I proceeded
to trim where the mower hadn't reached. Real time-consuming work. If I'd wanted
to do just an adequate job, I
could have done only so much and no more; if I wanted to do it
right, I could do it right. But just because I'd get down to details didn't necessarily
mean my labors were always appreciated. Some folks would call it tedious
nit-picking. Still, as I said before, I’m one
for doing my best. It's just my nature. And even more, it's a
matter of pride.
A noon whistle went
off somewhere, and the woman took me into the kitchen for
sandwiches. The kitchen wasn't big, but it was clean and tidy.
And except for the
humming of the huge refrigerator, all was quiet. The plates and
silverware were
practically antiques. She offered me a beer, which I declined,
seeing as I was "still on
the job." So she
served me some orange juice instead. She herself, however, had a
beer. A half-empty bottle of White Horse stood prominently on
the table, and the sink
was filled with all kinds of empty bottles.
I enjoyed the
sandwich. Ham, lettuce, and cucumber, with a tang of mustard. Excellent
sandwich, I told her. Sandwiches were the only things she was good at, she
said.
She didn't eat a bite, though — just nibbled at a pickle, and
devoted the rest of her
attention to her beer. She wasn't especially talkative, nor did
I have anything worth
bringing up.
At twelve-thirty, I returned to the lawn. My
last afternoon lawn.
I listened to rock
music on FEN while I gave one last touch-up trim, then raked the
lawn repeatedly and checked from several angles for any
overlooked places, just like
barbers do. By one-thirty, I was two-thirds done. Time and
again, sweat would get into my eyes, and I would go douse my face at the outdoor
faucet. A couple of times I got a hard-on, then it would go away. Pretty
ridiculous, getting a hard-on just mowing a lawn.
I finished working by
two-twenty. I turned off the radio, took off my shoes, and
walked all over the lawn in my bare feet: nothing left
untrimmed, no uneven patches.
Smooth as a carpet.
"Even now, I
still like you," she had written in her last letter. "You're kind,
and one of
the finest people I know. But somehow, that just wasn't enough.
I don't know why I feel
that way, I just do. It's a terrible thing to say, I know, and
it probably won't amount to
much of an explanation. Nineteen is an awful age to be. Maybe in
a few years I'll be
able to explain things better, but after a few years it probably
won't matter anymore, will it?"
I washed my face at
the faucet, then loaded my equipment back into the van and
changed into a new T-shirt. Having done that, I went to the
front door of the house to
announce that I'd finished.
"How about a
beer?" the woman asked.
"Don't mind if I
do," I said. What could be the harm of one beer, after all?
Standing side by side
at the edge of the yard, we surveyed the lawn, I with my beer, she with a long vodka
tonic, no lemon. Her tali glass was the kind they give away at
liquor stores. The cicadas were still chirping the whole while.
The woman didn't look a
bit drunk; only her breathing seemed a little unnatural, drawn
slow between her teeth
with a slight wheeze.
"You do good
work," she said. "I’ve called in a lot of lawn-maintenance people
before, but you're the first to do this good a job."
"You're very kind,"
I said.
"My late husband
was fussy about the lawn, you know. Always did a crack job
himself. Very much like the way you work."
I took out my
cigarettes and offered her one. As we stood there smoking, I noticed
how big her hands were compared to mine. Big enough to dwarf
both the glass in her
right hand and the Hope regular in her left. Her fingers were
stubby — no rings — and
several of the nails had strong vertical lines running through
them.
"Whenever my
husband got any time off, he'd always be mowing the lawn. But mind you, he was nooddball."
I tried to conjure up
an image of the woman's husband, but I couldn't quite picture
the guy. Any more than I could imagine a camphor-tree husband
and wife.
The woman wheezed
again. "Ever since my husband passed away," she said, "I’ve
had to call in professionals. I can't stand too much sun, you
know, and my daughter, she doesn't like getting tanned. Other than to get a
tan, no real reason for a young girl to be mowing lawns anyway, right?"
I nodded.
"My, but I do
like the way you work, though. That' s the way lawns ought to be
mowed." I looked the lawn over one more time. The woman
belched. "Come again next month, okay?" "Next month' s no
good," I said. "How 's that?" she said.
"This job here
today's my last," I said. "If I don't get myself back on the ball
with my
studies, my grade point average is going to be in real
trouble."
The woman looked me
hard in the face, then glanced at my feet, then looked back at my face.
"A student,
eh?"
"Yeah," I
said.
"What
school?"
The name of the
university made no visible impression on her. It wasn't a very
impressive university. She just scratched behind her ear with
her index finger.
"So you're
giving up this line of work, then?"
"Yeah, for this
summer at least," I said. No more mowing lawns for me this summer. Nor
next summer, nor the next.
The woman filled her
cheeks with vodka tonic as if she were going to gargle, then
gulped down her precious mouthwash half a swallow at a time. Her
whole forehead
beaded up with sweat, like it was crawling with tiny bugs.
"Come
inside," the woman said. "It's too hot outdoors."
I looked at my watch.
Two thirty-five. Getting late? Still early? I couldn't make up my mind. I'd already
finished with all my work. From tomorrow, I wouldn't have to mow another inch
of grass. I had really mixed feelings.
"You in a
hurry?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"So why don't
you just come in and have something cool to drink before you get on
your way? Won't take much time. And besides, I've got something
I want you to see."
Something she wants
me to see?
Still, there was no
hesitating, one way or another. She had already started to shuffle off ahead of
me. She didn't even bother to look back in my direction. I had no choice but to
follow her. I felt kind of light-headed from the heat.
The interior of the
house was just as deathly quiet as before. Ducking in from the
flood of summer afternoon light so suddenly, I felt my eyes
tingle from deep behind
my pupils. Darkness — in a dim, somehow dilute solution — washed
through the place, a darkness that seemed to have settled in decades ago. The
air was chilly, but not with
the chill of air-conditioning. It was the fluid chill of air in
motion: Somewhere a breeze
was getting in, somewhere it was leaking out.
"This way,"
the woman said, traipsing off down a long, straight hallway. There were
several windows along the passage, but the stone wali of a
neighboring house and an
overgrowth of zelkova trees still managed to block out the
light. All sorts of smells drifted the length of the hallway, each recalling
something different. Time-worn smells, built up over time, only to dissipate in
time. The smell of old clothes and old furniture, old books, old lives. At the
end of the hallway was a staircase. The woman turned around to make sure I was
following, then headed up the stairs. The old boards creaked with every step.
At the top of the
stairs, some light finally shone into the house. The window on the
landing had no curtain, and the summer sun pooled on the floor.
There were only two
rooms upstairs, one a storage room, the other a regular bedroom.
The smoky-green
door had a small frosted-glass portal. The green paint had begun
to chip slightly, and
the brass doorknob was patinaed white on the handgrip.
The woman pursed her
lips and blew out a slow stream of air, set her empty
vodka-tonic glass on the windowsill, fished a key ring out of
her dress pocket, and
noisily unlocked the door.
"Go on m,"
she said. We stepped into the room Inside, it was pitch-black and stuffy,
fill of hot, still air. Only the thinnest silver-foil sheets of
light sliced into the room from the cracks between the tightly closed shutters.
I couldn't make out a thing, just flickering
specks of airborne dust. The woman drew back the curtains,
opened the windows, and slid back shutters that rattled in their tracks. Instantly,
the room was swept with brilliant
sunlight and a cool southerly breeze.
The bedroom was your
typical teenage girl's room. Study desk by the window, small wood-framed bed
over on the other side of the room. The bed was dressed in coral-blue sheets —
not a wrinkle on them — and pillowcases of the same color. There was also a
blanket folded at the foot of the bed. Next to the bed stood a wardrobe and a
dresser on which were arranged a few toiletries. A hairbrush and a small pair
of scissors, a lipstick, a compact, and whatnot. She didn't seem all that much
of a makeup enthusiast.
Stacked on the desk were notebooks and two
dictionaries, French and English. Both looked well used. Literally so; not
ill-treated but handled with some care. An assortment of pens and pencils were neatly
laid out in a small tray, along with an eraser worn round on one side only.
Then there was an alarm clock, a desk lamp, and a glass
paperweight. All quite plain. On the wood-paneled wall hung five
full-color bird pictures and a calendar with only dates. A finger run over the
desktop became white with dust, a whole month's worth. The calendar still read
June.
Overall, though, I
had to say the room was refreshingly uncluttered for a girl these
days. No stuffed toys, no photos of rock stars. No frilly
decorations or flower-print wastepaper bin. Just a built-in bookcase lined with
anthologies, volumes of poetry, movie
magazines, painting-exhibition catalogs. There were even some
English paperbacks. I
tried to form an image of the girl whose room this was, but the
only face that came to
mind was that of my ex-girlfriend.
The woman sat her
middle-aged bulk down on the bed and looked at me. She had
been following my line of vision all along but seemed to be
thinking of something
entirely different. Her eyes were turned in my direction, all
right, yet she wasn't actually seeing anything. I plunked myself down in the chair
by the desk and gazed at the
plaster wali behind the woman. Nothing hung there; it was a
blank wall. Stare at it long
enough, though, and the top began to tilt in toward me. It
seemed sure to topple over onto her head any minute. But of course, it
wouldn't; the light just made it look that way.
"Won't you have
something to drink?" she asked. I told her no.
"Really now,
don't stand on ceremony. It's not like you're going to kick yourself
afterward for having something."
So I said okay, I'd
have the same, pointing to her vodka tonic, only watered down a
bit, please. Five minutes later, she returned with two vodka
tonics and an ashtray. I took a sip of my vodka tonic. It wasn't watered at
all. I decided to smoke a cigarette and wait for the ice to melt.
"You've got a
healthy body," she said. "You won't get drunk."
I nodded vaguely. My
father was that way, too. Still, there hasn't been a human
being yet won out in a match against alcohol. The only stories
you hear are about
people who never catch on to things until they've sunk past
their noses. My father died when I was sixteen. A real fine-line case, his was.
So fine I can hardly recall if he'd even been alive or not.
The woman remained
silent all this time. The only sound she made was the tinkling
of ice in her glass each time she took a sip. Every so often a
cool breeze would blow in
through the open window from another hill across the way to the
south. A tranquil
summer afternoon that seemed destined to put me to sleep.
Somewhere, far off, a
phone was ringing.
"Have a look
inside the wardrobe," the woman prompted. I walked over to the
wardrobe and opened the double doors, as I was told. The inside
was absolutely
packed with hangers and hangers of clothes. Half dresses, the
other half skirts and
blouses and jackets, all of them summer clothes. Some things
looked pretty old, others as if they'd scarcely even been tried on. All the
skirts were minis. Everything was nice
enough, I suppose. The taste, the material, nothing that would
catch your eye, but not
bad.
With this many
clothes, a girl could wear a different outfit each date for an entire
summer. I looked at the rack of clothes awhile longer, then shut
the door.
"Nice
stuff," I said.
"Have a look in
the drawers," the woman said. I was hesitant, but what could I do? I gave
in and pulled open the drawers in the bottom of the wardrobe one by one. Going
into a girl's room in her absence and turning it inside out — even with her
mother's
permission — wasn't my idea of the decent thing to do, but it
would have been equally
bothersome to refuse. Far be it from me to figure out what goes
on in the mind of
someone who starts hitting the bottle at eleven in the morning.
In the first big drawer on top were sweaters, polo shirts, and T-shirts, washed
and neatly folded without a wrinkle.
In the second drawer were handbags, belts, handkerchiefs,
bracelets, plus a few fabric hats. In the third drawer, underwear, socks, and
stockings. Everything was clean and
neat. Somehow, it made me just a little sad, as if something
were weighing down on my chest. I shut the last drawer.
The woman was still
sitting on the bed, staring out the window at the scenery. The
vodka tonic in her right hand was almost empty.
I returned to the
chair and lit up a brand-new cigarette. The window looked out on a gentle slope
that ran down to where another slope picked up. Greenery as far as the
eye could see, hill and dale, with tract-house streets pasted on
as an afterthought. Each house having its own yard, each yard its lawn.
"What d'you
think?" asked the woman, eyes still fixed on the window. "You know,
about the girl?”
"How can I say
without ever having met her?" I said.
"Most women, you
look at their clothes, you know what they're like," she said.
I thought about my
girlfriend. Then I tried to remember the sort of clothes she wore. I drew a blank.
What I could recall of her was all too vague. No sooner had I begun to
see her skirt than I lost sight of her blouse; I'd managed to
bring her hat to mind when
the face changed into some other girl's. I couldn't remember a
single thing fromjust half a year before. When it came right down to it, what
had I known about her?
"How can I
say?" I repeated.
"General
impressions are good enough. Whatever comes to mind. Anything you'd
care to say, any little bit at all."
I took a sip of my
vodka tonic to gain myself some time. The ice had almost all
melted, making the tonic water taste like lemonade. The vodka
still packed a punch
going down, creating a warm glow in my stomach. A breeze burst
through the window
and sent white cigarette ash flying all over the desk.
"Seems she's
nice — very nice — keeps everything in order," I said. "Not too
pushy, though not without character, either. Grades in the upper mid-range of
her class. Goes
to a women's college or junior college, doesn't have so many
friends, but close ones . . . Am I on target?"
"Keep
going."
I swirled the glass
around in my hand a couple of times, then set it down on the
desk. "I don't know what more to say. In the first place, I
don't even know if what I’ve
said so far was anywhere close."
"You're pretty
much on target," she said blankly, "pretty much on target."
Little by little, I
was beginning to get a feel for the girl; her presence hovered over
everything in the room like a hazy white shadow. No face, no
hands, nothing. Just a
barely perceptible disturbance in a sea of light. I took another
sip of my vodka tonic.
"She's got a
boyfriend," I continued, "or two. I don't know. I can't tell how
close they
are. But that's neither here nor there. What matters is . . .
she hasn't really taken to
anything. Her own body, the things she thinks about, what she' s
looking for, what
others seek in her ... the whole works."
"Uh-huh,"
the woman said after a moment's pause. "I see what you're saying."
I didn't. Oh, I knew
what the words meant, but to whom were they directed? And
from whose point of view? I was exhausted, wanted just to sleep.
If only I could get
some sleep, a lot of things would surely become clearer. Ali the
same, I couldn't believe that getting things clearer would make them any
easier.
At that the woman
fell silent for a long time. I also held my tongue. Ten, flfteen
minutes like that. Nothing better to do with my hands, I ended
up drinking half the vodka tonic. The breeze picked up a bit, and the round
leaves of the camphor tree began to
sway.
"Sorry, I
shouldn't have kept you here," the woman said sometime later. "You
did
such a beautiful job on the lawn, I was just so pleased."
"Thanks," I
said.
"Let me pay
you," she said, thrusting her big white hand into her dress pocket.
"How much is it?"
"They'll be
sending you a regular bill later. You can pay by bank transfer," I said.
"Oh," said
the woman.
We went back down the same staircase, through the
same hallway, out to the front
door. The hallway and entry way were just as chilly as when we
came in, chilly and
dark. I felt I'd returned to my childhood, back in the summers
when I used to wade up
this shallow creek and would pass under a big iron bridge. It
was exactly the same
sensation. Darkness, and suddenly the temperature of the water
would drop. And the
pebbles would have this funny slime. When I got to the front
door and put on my tennis shoes, was I ever relieved! Sunlight all around me,
the leaf-scented breeze, a few bees
buzzing sleepily about the hedge.
"Really
beautifully mowed," said the woman, once again viewing the lawn.
I gave the lawn
another look, too. A really beautiful job, to be sure.
The woman reached
into her pocket, and started pulling out all kinds of stuff — truly all kinds
of junk — from which she picked out a crumpled ten-thousand-yen note. The
bill wasn't even that old, just all crumpled up. It could have
passed for fourteen, fifteen
years old. After a moment's hesitation, I decided I'd better not
refuse.
"Thank
you," I said.
The woman seemed to
have still left something unsaid. As if she didn't quite know
how to put it. She stared down at the glass in her right hand,
kind of lost. The glass was empty. Then she looked back up at me.
"You decide to
start mowing lawns again, be sure to give me a call. Anytime at all."
"Right," I
said. "Will do. And say, thanks for the sandwich and the drink."
The woman hemmed and
hawed, then promptly turned an about-face and walked
back to the front door. I started the engine on the van and
turned on the radio. Getting
on three o'clock, it was.
I pulled into a
drive-in for a little pick-me-up and ordered a Coca-Cola and spaghetti. The spaghetti
was so utterly disgusting I could finish only half of it. But if you really
want to know, I wasn't hungry anyway. A sickly-looking waitress cleared the
table, and I
dozed off right there, seated on the vinyl-covered chair. The
place was empty, after all, and the air-conditioning just right. It was only a
short nap — no dreams. If anything, the nap itself seemed like a dream Although
when I opened my eyes, the sun's rays weren't as intense as they had been. I
drank another Coke, then paid the bill with the
ten-thousand-yen note I'd just received.
I went out to the
parking lot, got in the van, put the keys on the dashboard, and
smoked a cigarette. Loads of minuscule aches came over my weary
muscles all at
once. All things considered, I was worn out. I put aside any
notion of driving and just
sank into the seat. I smoked another cigarette. Everything seemed
so far off, like
looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. "I'm
sure you must want many
things from me," my girlfriend had written, "but I
myself just can't conceive that there's
anything in me you'd want."
All I wanted, it came
to me, was to mow a good lawn. To give it a once-over with the lawn mower, rake
up the clippings, and then trim it nice and even with clippers — that's all.
And that, I can do. Because that's the way I feel it ought to be done.
Isn't that right? I
spoke out loud.
No answer.
Ten minutes later,
the manager of the drive-in came out and crouched by the van to
inquire if everything was all right.
'I felt a little
faint," I said.
"Yes, it's been
a scorcher. Shall I bring you some water?"
"Thankyou. But
really, Fmfme."
I pulled out of the
parking lot and started east. On both sides of the road were
different homes, different yards, different people all leading
different lives. My hands on the wheel, I took in the whole passing panorama,
the lawn mower rattling all the while in the compartment behind.
Not once since then
have I mowed a lawn. Someday, though, should I come to live
in a house with a lawn, I'll probably be mowing again. That’ll
be a good while yet, I
figure. But when that time comes, I'm sure to do the job just
right.
16. SILENCE
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Soiturned to Ozawa and asked him, had he ever punched out a guy
in an argument?
"What makes you
want to ask something like that?" Ozawa squinted his eyes at me. The look seemed
out of character on him. As if there'd been a sudden flash of light only he had
witnessed. A flare that just as quickly subsided, returning himto his normal
passive expression.
No real reason, I
told him, only a passing thought. Hadn't meant anything by it, just
asked out of curiosity. Totally uncalled-for, probably.
I proceeded to change
the subject, but Ozawa didn't exactly rally to it. He seemed to be somewhere else
in his thoughts, holding back or wavering. I gave up trying to
engage him in conversation and gazed instead out the window at
the rows of silver jets.
I don't know how the
subject came up. We'd been killing time waiting for our plane,
and he started talking about how he'd been going to a boxing gym
ever since he was in
junior high school. More than once, he'd been chosen to
represent his university in
boxing matches. Even today, at age thirty-one, he still went to
the gym every week.
I could hardly
picture it. Here was this guy I'd done business with a lot; no way did he
strike me as your rough-and-tumble boxer of close to twenty years. The guy was
a
singularly quiet fellow; he hardly ever spoke. Yet you couldn't
ask for anyone more
clear-cut in his work habits. Faultlessly sincere. Never pushed
people too far, never
talked about others behind their back, never complained. No
matter how overworked he was, he never raised his voice or even arched his
brows. In a word, he was the sort of
guy you couldn't help but like. Warm, easygoing, a far cry from
anything you could
call aggressive. Where was the connection between this man and
boxing? Why had he
taken up the sport in the first place? So I asked that question.
We were drinking
coffee in the airport restaurant, waiting for our flight to Niigata. This was
the beginning of November; the sky was heavy with clouds. Niigata was snowed
in, and planes were running late. The airport was full of people milling about,
looking more depressed with each announcement of flight delays. In the
restaurant, the heat was too high, and I kept having to wipe off the sweat with
my handkerchief.
"Basically,
no," Ozawa suddenly spoke up after a lengthy silence. "From the time
I
started boxing, I never hit anyone. They pound that into you
from the moment you start boxing. Anyone who boxes must absolutely never,
without gloves, hit anyone outside
the ring. An ordinary person could get into trouble if he hit
someone and landed a punch in the wrong place. But if a boxer did it, it'd be intentional
assault with a deadly weapon."
I nodded.
"To be honest, I
did hit someone. Once," Ozawa said. 'I was in eighth grade. It was
right around the time I was starting to learn how to box. No
excuse, but this was before I learned a single boxing technique. I was still on
the basic bodybuilding menu. Jumping
rope and stretching and running, stuff like that. And the thing
is, I didn't even mean to
throw the punch. I just got mad, and my hand flew out ahead of
me. I couldn't stop it.
And before I knew it, I'd decked him. I hit the guy, and still
my whole body was trembling with rage."
Ozawa had taken up
boxing because his uncle ran a boxing gym. This wasn't just
the local sweat roorrr, this was a major establishment that had
launched a two-time East Asia welterweight champion. In fact, it'd been Ozawa's
parents who suggested he go to the gym to begin with. They were worried about
their son, the bookworm, always holed up in his room. At first, the boy wasn't
keen on the idea, but he liked his uncle well
enough, and, he told himself, if he didn't like the sport, he
could always quit. So all very casually, he got in the habit of commuting
regularly to his uncle 's gym, an hour away
by train.
After the first few
months, Ozawa's interest in boxing surprised even himself. The biggest reason was
that, fundamentally, boxing is a loner's sport, an extremely solitary
pursuit. It was something of a discovery for him, a new world.
And that world excited
him The sweat flying off the bodies of the older men, the hard,
squeaky feel of the gloves, the intense concentration of men with their muscles
tuned to lightning-fast efficiency — little by little, it all took hold of his
imagination. Spending Saturdays and Sundays at
the gymbecame one of his few indulgences.
"One of the
things I like about boxing is the depth. That's what grabbed me.
Compared to that, hitting and getting hit is no big deal. That's
only the outcome. The
same with winning or losing. If you could get to the bottom of
the depth, losing doesn't
matter — nothing can hurt you. And anyway, nobody can win at
everything; somebody's got to lose. The important thing is to get deep down
into it. That — at least to me — is
boxing. When F m in a match, I feel like I' m at the bottom of a
deep, deep hole. So far
inside I can't see anyone else and no one can see me. Way down
there in the darkness, doing battle. All alone. But not sad alone," said
Ozawa. "There's all different kinds of
loneliness. There's the tragic loneliness that tears at your
nerves with pain. And then
there's the loneliness that isn't like that at all — though in
order to reach that point,
you've got to pare your body down. If you make the effort, you
get back what you put in. That' s what I learned from boxing."
Ozawa paused a
moment.
"Actually, I'd
just as soon not talk about it," he said. 'T even wish I could wipe the
story out of my mind entirely. But of course, you never can. Why
is it you can't forget
what you really want to forget?" Ozawa broke into a smile.
Then he glanced at his
watch. We still had plenty of time. He began his deliberation.
The guy Ozawa hit was
a classmate. Aoki was his name. Ozawa hated the guy from the very beginning.
Why, he couldn't really say. All he knew was that he hated his guts
from the moment he set eyes on him. It was the first time in his
life he despised anyone.
"But it does
happen, right?" he said. "Maybe once, but everyone has that experience.
You loathe someone for no reason whatsoever. I' m not the type to have blind
hate, but I swear there are people who just set you off. It's not a rational
thing. But the problem is, in most cases, the other guy feels the same way
toward you.
"This kid Aoki was a model student. He
got good grades, sat at the head of the class, teacher's pet, all that. And he
was pretty popular, too. Granted, we were an all-boys'
school, but everyone liked him. Everyone except me. I couldn't
stand him. I couldn't
stand his smarts, his calculating ways. Okay, if you asked me
what exactly bugged me about him I wouldn't be able to say. The only thing I can
tell you is that I knew what he
was all about. And his pride, that headstrong stink of ego he
gave off, I couldn't stand it. Purely physiological, like how someone 's body
odor will turn you off. But Aoki was a
clever guy and knew how to cover his scent. So most of the kids
in the class thought he
was clean and kind and considerate. Every time I heard how great
people thought he
was — of course, I wasn't about to go against everyone — it
burned me up.
"In almost every
way, Aoki and I were polar opposites. I was a quiet kid and didn't
stand out in class. I was happy to be left alone. Sure, I had
friends, but no real friends
for life. In a sense, maybe I was too mature too soon. Instead
of hanging around with
my classmates, I kept to myself. I read books or listened to my
father's classical records or went to the gym to hear the older guys talk. I
wasn't much to look at. My grades
weren't so bad, but they weren't so hot. Teachers would forget
my name. So, you know, I was the type you never got to know. That's how I was,
never quite surfacing. I never
told anybody about the boxing gym or books or records.
"With Aoki,
though, whatever the guy did he was like a white swan in a sea of mud.
The star of the class, his opinions valued, always on top of
things. Even I had to admit
that. He was amazingly quick-witted. He could pick up on what
others were thinking,
and he could redirect his responses to match in no time
whatsoever. He had a
well-tuned head on his shoulders. No wonder everyone was impressed
with Aoki. Everyone but me.
"I figure Aoki
had to be aware of what I thought of him. He wasn't dumb. I could tell
he wasn't too crazy about me. After all, I wasn't stupid,
either. I mean, I read more than anybody else. But you know, when you're young
you gotta show it, so I’m sure I came
off stuck-up, even condescending. Plus, the way I kept to myself
probably didn't help.
"Then once, at
the end of the term, I got the highest marks on an English exam It
was a first for me, scoring the highest. But it wasn't an
accident. There was something I really wanted — I can't even remember what it
was anymore — and I made this deal
with my folks that if I got the best grade in the class they' d
buy it for me. So of course I studied like mad. I studied anything that could
possibly be covered in the exam. If I had a spare moment, I went over verb
conjugations. I practically memorized the whole
textbook. So when I aced the test, it was no surprise. It was
even predictable.
"But everyone
else was caught off guard. The teacher, too. And Aoki, I mean, he
was shocked. He had always been the best student in English. The
teacher even kidded Aoki about it when he announced the test grades. Aoki
turned red. Probably thought
people were laughing at him.
"A few days
later, someone told me Aoki was spreading a rumor about me. That I'd
cheated on the exam, how else could I have scored so high? When
I heard that, I got
really pissed off. What I should have done was laugh and let it
go. But a
junior-high-school kid doesn't have that kind of cool.
"One noon
recess, I confronted Aoki. I said I wanted to talk to him alone, away from
everybody else. I said I'd heard this rumor, and what was the meaning of it?
But Aoki
could only show his contempt. Like, why was I getting all bent
out of shape? Like, if by
some fluke I happened to get the best score, why was I being so
defensive, and what
right did I have to act so uppity, anyway? After all, everyone
knew what really
happened, right? Then he tried to brush me aside, probably
thinking that since he was
in good shape and taller than me he had to be stronger, too.
That's when I hauled off
and punched the jerk in the face. It was pure reflex action. I
didn't realize I'd slugged
him square on the left cheek until a second later when Aoki fell
back sideways and hit
his head on a wali. With a hard conk. Blood was running out of
his nose and onto his
white shirt. He lay there, dazed, not knowing what had happened.
"On my part, I
regretted hitting him the instant my fist connected with his cheekbone. I
shouldn't have done it. I felt miserable. It was a totally useless thing to
have done. Like I said, my body was still trembling with rage, but I knew I'd
done something stupid.
"I considered
apologizing to Aoki. But I didn't. If it had been anybody else but Aoki, I
probably would have apologized. I simply couldn't bring myself to apologize to
the
creep. I was sorry I hit Aoki, but not sorry enough to say I was
sorry. I didn't feel one iota of remorse toward the guy. Jerks like him
deserved to get punched out. He was a worm, and worms get stepped on. Still, /
shouldn't have hit him. A truth I knew deep down, only too late. I'd already
slugged him. I left Aoki there and walked off.
"That afternoon,
Aoki didn't show up in class. Probably went straight home, I thought. But for
the rest of the day, a horrible feeling ate at me. It didn't give me a moment's
rest. I couldn't listen to music, couldn't read, I couldn't enjoy a thing. I
felt this murky
substance coagulating in my gut, and it wouldn't let me
concentrate. It was like I'd
swallowed something slimy. I lay in bed staring at my fist. And
it dawned on me, how
lonely I was. I hated Aoki even more for making me realize this.
"From the next
day on, Aoki ignored me. He acted like I didn't exist. He went on
scoring the highest on exams. Me, I never again poured my heart
and soul into studying for a test. I couldn't imagine what difference it would
make. The idea of competing
seriously with anyone bored me. I did enough schoolwork to keep
my head above water and did what I wanted to the rest of the time. I kept on
going to my uncle's gym. I was
getting heavy into my training. For a junior-high student, I was
beginning to show results. I could feel my body changing. Shoulders broadening,
chest thickening. My arms got
firm, my cheeks taut. I thought, This is what it's like to
become an adult. I felt great.
Every night, I stood naked in front of the big mirror in the
bathroom, I was so fascinated with my body.
"The following
school year, Aoki and I were in different classes. I was glad not to
have to see him every day, and F m sure the feeling was mutual.
So I thought the whole affair would fade away like some bad memory. But it
wasn't so simple. Seems Aoki was lying in wait to get his revenge. Waiting for
the right moment to cut everything out
fromunder me. The bastard was full of spite.
"Aoki and I
advanced together grade by grade. It was the same private junior high
and senior high, but every year we were in different classes.
Until the very last year —
boy, did it feel ugly when we came face-to-face in that
classroom The way he looked at me, it pried open my gut. I could feel that same
slime come oozing out again."
Ozawa pursed his lips
and stared down at his coffee cup. Then he glanced up at me with a slight smile.
Fromoutside the plate-glass windows came the roar of jet engines. A 737 shot
straight off like a wedge into the clouds and vanished from sight.
"The first
semester passed pretty uneventfully Aoki hadn't changed a bit since the
eighth grade. Some people don't grow, and they don't degenerate;
they keep on exactly as they always were. Aoki was still at the top of the
class; he was still Mr. Popular.
Though to me, he was still a disgusting creep. We did our best
not to look at each other. Let me tell you, it's no fun having your own
personal demon in the same classroom. But it couldn't be helped. Half the blame
was mine, anyway.
"Then summer
vacation came around. My last summer vacation as a high-school
student. My grades were okay, okay enough to get me into an
average university, so I
didn't really eram for the entrance exams. My folks
didn't raise a fuss, so I just studied
as I always did. Saturdays and Sundays, I went to the gym. The
rest of the time I read
and listened to records.
"Meanwhile,
everyone else was going bug-eyed. Our whole school, junior high up
through senior high, was a typical eram faetory. Who got into
what university, what
ranking by how many matriculations into where — the teachers
couldn't talk about
anything else. The same with the students. By senior year,
everyone was hot under the collar, and the atmosphere in class was tense. It
stank. I didn't like it when I first started school there, and I didn't like it
six years later. Plus, to the very end, I didn't make one
honest friend. If I hadn't taken up boxing, if I hadn't gone to
my uncle's gym, I would
have been pretty damn lonely.
"Anyway, during
summer vacation a terrible thing happened. One of my classmates, a kid named Matsumoto,
committed suicide. He wasn't a particularly outstanding
student. To be frank, he made almost no impression at all. When
I heard that he died, I could hardly remember what he looked like. He'd been in
my class, but I doubt if we
ever talked more than two or three times. Kind of gangly, poor
complexion — that's
about all I could say about him Matsumoto died a little before
August fifteenth, I
remember, because his funeral was on Armistice Day. It was a
real scorcher. There was
this phone call saying that the boy had died and that everyone
had to attend the funeral. The whole class. Matsumoto had leapt in front of a
subway, for unknown reasons. He
left a suicide note, but all it said was that he didn't want to
go to school anymore.
Nothing else. At least, that's how the story went.
"Naturally, this
suicide had the whole school administration scrambling. After the
funeral, the seniors were called back to the school and lectured
by the headmaster
about how we were supposed to mourn Matsumoto's death, how we
all had to bear the weight of his death, how we had to work extra hard to
overcome our grief. The usual
stock sentiments. Then we were asked if we knew anything about
the reason
Matsumoto committed suicide; if we did, we had to come right out
and set the record
straight. Nobody said a word.
'I felt sorry for my
dead classmate, but somehow it seemed pretty absurd. I mean,
did he have to jump? If you don't like school, don't go to
school. It was only half a year
before you wouldn't have to go to that miserable school, anyway.
Why kill yourself? It
didn't make sense. The guy was probably neurotic, I figured,
driven to the brink by all
this cramming for entrance exams day and night. Not so surprising,
if you think about it. One nut's bound to crack.
"After summer
vacation ended and school started up again, I noticed something
strange in the air. My classmates seemed to be keeping their
distance. I'd ask
somebody about something and only get these cold, curt replies.
At first I thought it was nerves, since everyone was on edge, right? I didn't think
too much about it. But then five days later, out of nowhere, I was told to
report to the headmaster. Was it true, he asked me, that I was training at a
boxing gym? Yes, I was, but I wasn't breaking any school
rules doing it. How long had I been going there? Since the
eighth grade. Was it true I
struck Aoki with a clenched fist in junior high school? Yes, it
was; I wasn't about to lie.
And was that before or after I took up boxing? After, but it was
before I was even
allowed to put on the gloves, I explained. The headmaster wasn't
listening. Very well, he cleared his throat, had I ever hit Matsumoto? I was
stunned. I mean, like I was saying, I hardly ever spoke to this Matsumoto — why
would I have hit him? Which is what I told
the headmaster.
"Matsumoto was
always getting beaten up at school, the headmaster informed me.
He often went home covered with bruises. His mother complained
that someone at
school, at this school, was rolling him for his pocket money.
But Matsumoto never gave his mother any names. He probably thought he'd get
beaten up worse if he squealed.
And with all this bearing on him, the boy committed suicide.
Pitiful, didn't I think, he
couldn't turn to anyone. He'd been worked over pretty badly So
the school was looking
into the situation. If there was anything I had on my mind, I
was to own up. In which
case, matters would be settled quietly. If not, the police would
take over the
investigation. Did I understand?
"Immediately, I
knew Aoki was behind this. It was his touch, this using something like
Matsumoto's death to his own advantage. I bet he didn't even lie. He didn't
need to. He
found out that I went to a boxing gym — who knows how? — then
when he heard about someone beating up on Matsumoto, the rest was easy Just put
one and one together.
Report how I went to a gym and how I'd hit him. It didn't take
much more. Oh, I' m sure he added in a few trimmings, like, say, how he was
scared of me, so he never told
anyone about this before, or how I really bled him. Nothing that
could easily be exposed as a lie. He was carefiil that way. Coloring plain
facts just enough, shaping this
undeniable atmosphere of implication. It was a skill he
practiced.
"The headmaster
glared at me: guilty as charged. For him, anyone who went to a
boxing gym was already suspected of delinquency. Nor was I
exactly the type of student teachers took to. Three days later, the police
called me in for questioning. Needless to
say, I was in shock.
"They put me
through a simple police interrogation. I said how I'd hardly ever spoken to Matsumoto.
It was true that I had hit a fellow student named Aoki three years before, but
that was a perfectly ordinary, stupid argument, and I hadn't caused any trouble
since. That was it. There is a rumor that you were hitting this
Matsumoto, said the officer on duty. That's all it is, I told him, a rumor.
Someone who has it in for me is spreading it around. There is no truth, no
proof, no case.
"Word got around
school that the police had questioned me. And the atmosphere in class grew even
colder. A police summons was like a verdict — like, they didn't haul
people in for no reason, right? Everyone believed I'd been
beating up on Matsumoto. I
don't know what nonsense Aoki was peddling, but everyone bought
it. I didn't even want to know what the story was; I knew it was dirt. No one
in the entire school would speak
to me. As if by consensus — it had to be — I got the silent treatment.
Even urgent
requests from me got a deaf ear. I was avoided like the plague.
My existence was wiped from their field of vision.
"Even the
teachers did their best not to look in my direction. They' d say my name
when they took roll, but they never called on me in class. Phys.
Ed. was the worst. When the class split into teams, I wouldn't end up on either
side. No one would pair up with me, and the gym teacher would pretend it wasn't
happening. I went to school in silence, attended classes in silence, went home
in silence. Day after day, a vacuum. After two or three weeks of this, I lost
my appetite. I lost weight. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd lie there, all
worked up, my head filled with this endless succession of ugly images. And when
I
was awake, my mind was in a fog. I wasn't sure if I was awake or
asleep.
"I even laid off
boxing practice. My folks got worried and asked me what was wrong. What was I supposed
to say? Nothing, F m just tired. What good would it do to tell
them? After school I hid out in my room There was nothing else
for me to do. I'd see
these things play out on the ceiling. I imagined all kinds of
scenarios. Most often, I saw myself punching Aoki out. I'd catch him alone and
I'd pummel him, over and over again. I'd tell him what I thought of him — a
piece of trasli — and I'd knock the crap out of him. He could scream and cry
all he wanted — forgive me, forgive me — but I'd just keep
hitting him, beating his face to a pulp. Only after a while,
punching away, I'd start to get sick. It was fine at first, it was great, it
served the bastard right. Then, slowly, this
nausea would creep up in me. But I still wouldn't be able to
stop beating Aoki up. I'd
look up at the ceiling and Aoki's face would be there and I'd be
hitting him. And I
wouldn't be able to stop. Before long, he was a bloody mess and
I felt like puking.
'I thought about
getting up in front of everyone and declaring outright that I was
innocent, that I hadn't done anything. But who was going to
believe me? And why was it up to me to apologize to that bunch of turkeys who
'd maw down anything Aoki said to
begin with?
"So I was stuck.
I couldn't give Aoki the beating he had coming, and I couldn't
explain myself. I had to put up and shut up. It was only another
half year. After this
semester, school would be finished and I wouldn't have to answer
to anyone. One half
year more, sparring with the silence. But could I hold out that
long? I doubted I could go one month. At home, I ticked off each day on my
calendar — one more day down, one more day down. I was getting crushed.
Thinking back on it now, I can't believe how
close I got to the danger zone.
"My first hint
of a reprieve came a month later. By accident, on my way to school, I
found myself face-to-face with Aoki on the train. As usual, it
was so packed you couldn't move. And there was Aoki, two or three people away,
over someone's shoulder, facing me. I must have looked terrible, short on
sleep, a neurotic wreck. At first, he gave me
this smirk. Like, so how's it going now, eh? Aoki had to know
that I knew that he was
behind everything. Our eyes locked. We glared at each other. But
as I was staring the
guy in the eye, a strange emotion came over me. Sure, I was
furious at Aoki. I hated the guy; I wanted to kill him. But suddenly, at the
same time, there in the train, I felt
something like pity. I mean, was this really the best this joker
could do? Was this all it
took to give him such airs of superiority? Could he actually be
so satisfied, so happy
with himself, for this? It was pathetic. I was practically moved
to grief. To think that this
fool would be eternally incapable of knowing true happiness,
true pride. That there
existed creatures so lacking in human depth. Not that I’m such a
deep guy, but at least I know a real human being when I see one. But his kind,
no. His life was as flat as a
piece of slate. It was all surface, no matter what he did. He
was nothing.
'I kept looking him
in the face as these emotions went through me, and I didn't feel
like punching him out anymore. I couldn't have cared less about
him. Honest, I was
surprised how little I cared. And then I knew I could put up
with another five months of
the silence. I still had my pride. I wasn't going to let some
slime like Aoki drag me down with him.
"That was the
look I gave Aoki. He must have thought it was a stare-down, which he wasn't
about to lose, and when the train reached the station we didn't break our gaze.
But in the end, it was Aoki who wavered. Just the slightest
tremble of his pupils, but I
picked up on it. Right away. The look of a boxer whose legs are
giving out on him. He's working them, only they're not moving. And the stiff doesn't
get it; he thinks they're still
pacing. But his legs are dead. They've died in their tracks and now
his shoulders won't
dance. Which means the power's gone out of his punch. It was
that look. Something's
wrong, but he can't tell what.
"After that, I
was home free. I slept soundly, ate square meals, went to the gym. I
wasn't going to be defeated. It wasn't like I had triumphed over
Aoki, either. It was a
matter of my not losing out on life. It's too easy to let
yourself get ground down by those who give you shit. So I held out for five
more months. No one said word one to me. I’m not wrong, I kept telling myself,
everybody else is. I held my chest up every day I went
to school. And after graduating, I went to a university in
Kyushu. Far from any of that
high-school lot."
At that, Ozawa let
out a big sigh. Then he asked if I wanted another cup of coffee.
No thanks, I said, I'd already had three.
"People who go
through a heavy experience like that are changed men, like it or
not," he said. "They change for the better and they
change for the worse. On the good
side, they become unshakable. Next to that half year, the rest
of the suffering I’ve
experienced doesn't even count. I can put up with almost
anything. And I also am a lot more sensitive to the pain of people around me.
That's on the plus side. It made me
capable of making some real friends. But there's also the minus
side. I mean, it's
impossible, in my own mind, to believe in people. I don't hate
people, and I haven't lost my faith in humanity. I’ve got a wife and kids.
We've made a home and we protect each other. Those things you can't do without
trust. It's just that, sure, we're living a good life
right now, but if something were to happen, if something really
were to come along and yank up everything by the roots, even surrounded by a
happy family and good friends, I don't know what I'd do. What would happen if
one day, for no reason, no one believes a word you say? It happens, you know.
Suddenly, one day, out of the blue. I’m always
thinking about it. Last time, it was only six months, but the
next time? No one can say;
there's no guarantee. I don't have confidence in how long I can
hold out the next time. When I think of these things, I really get shaken up. I’ll
dream about it and wake up in
the middle of the night. It happens a little too often, in fact.
And when it happens, I wake my wife up and I hold on to her and cry. Sometimes
for a whole hour, Fm so scared."
He broke off and
looked out the window to the clouds. They'd barely moved. A heavy lid, bearing down
from the heavens. Absorbing all color from the control tower and
airplanes and ground-transport vehicles and tarmac and men in
uniform.
"People like
Aoki don't scare me. They're all over the place, but I don't trouble myself
with them anymore. When I run into them, I don't get involved. I see them
coming and I head the other way. I can spot them in an instant. But at the same
time, I’ve got to
admire the Aokis of this world. Their ability to lay low until
the right moment, their knack for latching on to opportunities, their skill in fucking
with people 's minds — that's no
ordinary talent. I hate their kind so much it makes me want to
puke, but it is a talent.
"No, what really
scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the
crap that slime like Aoki deal out. How these Aoki types produce
nothing themselves,
don't have an idea in the world, and talk so nice, how this
slime can sway gullible types
to any opinion and get them to perform on cue, as a group. And
this group never
entertains even a sliver of doubt that they could be wrong. They
think nothing of hurting someone, senselessly, permanently. They don't take any
responsibility for their actions. Them. They 're the real monsters. They 're
the ones I have nightmares about. In those
dreams, there's only the silence. And these faceless people.
Their silence seeps into
everything like ice water. And then it all goes murky. And Fm
dissolving and I’m
screaming, but no one hears."
Ozawajust shook his
head.
I waited for him to
continue, but he was quiet. He folded his hands and lay them on
the table. "We still have time — how about a beer?" he
said after a while. Yeah, let's, I
said. We probably both could use one.
17. The ELEPHANT VANISHEs
translated by Jay Rubin
When the elephant disappeared from our town's elephant house, I
read about it in the
newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at 6: 13.
1 went to the
kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the
paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. F m one of
those people who read the paper
from beginning to end, in order, so it took me awhile to get to
the article about the
vanishing elephant. The front page was filled with stories of
SDI and the trade friction
with America, after which I plowed through the national news,
international politics,
economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads,
sports reports, and
finally, the regional news.
The elephant article
was the lead story in the regional section. The unusually large
headline caught my eye: ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO SUBURB, and,
beneath
that, in type one size smaller, C ITIZENS' FEARS MOUNT. SOME CALL
FOR PROBE. There was a photo of policemen inspecting the empty elephant house.
Without the
elephant, something about the place seemed wrong. It looked
bigger than it needed to
be, blank and empty like some huge, dehydrated beast from which
the innards had
been plucked.
Brushing away my
toast crumbs, I studied every line of the article. The elephant's
absence had first been noticed at two o 'clock on the afternoon
of May 18 — the day
before — when men from the school-lunch company delivered their
usual truckload of
food (the elephant mostly ate leftovers from the lunches of
children in the local
elementary school). On the ground, still locked, lay the steel
shackle that had been
fastened to the elephant's hind leg, as though the elephant had
slipped out of it. Nor
was the elephant the only one missing. Also gone was its keeper,
the man who had
been in charge of the elephant's care and feeding from the
start.
According to the
article, the elephant and keeper had last been seen sometime after five o
'clock the previous day (May 17) by a few pupils from the elementary school,
who were visiting the elephant house, making crayon sketches. These pupils must
have
been the last to see the elephant, said the paper, since the
keeper always closed the
gate to the elephant enclosure when the six-o' clock siren blew.
There had been
nothing unusual about either the elephant or its keeper at the time,
according to the unanimous testimony of the pupils. The elephant
had been standing
where it always stood, in the middle of the enclosure,
occasionally wagging its trunk
from side to side or squinting its wrinkly eyes. It was such an
awfully old elephant that
its every move seemed a tremendous effort — so much so that
people seeing it for the
first time feared it might collapse at any moment and draw its
final breath.
The elephant's age
had led to its adoption by our town a year earlier. When financial problems caused
the little private zoo on the edge of town to close its doors, a wildlife
dealer found places for the other animals in zoos throughout the
country. But all the
zoos had plenty of elephants, apparently, and not one of them
was willing to take in a
feeble old thing that looked as if it might die of a heart attack
at any moment. And so,
after its companions were gone, the elephant stayed alone in the
decaying zoo for
nearly four months with nothing to do — not that it had had
anything to do before.
This caused a lot of
difficulty, both for the zoo and for the town. The zoo had sold its
land to a developer, who was planning to put up a high-rise
condo building, and the
town had already issued him a permit. The longer the elephant
problem remained
unresolved, the more interest the developer had to pay for
nothing. Still, simply killing
the thing would have been out of the question. If it had been a
spider monkey or a bat,
they might have been able to get away with it, but the killing
of an elephant would have been too hard to cover up, and if it ever came out
afterward, the repercussions would
have been tremendous. And so the various parties had met to deliberate
on the matter, and they formulated an agreement on the disposition of the old
elephant:
1. The town would
take ownership of the elephant at no cost.
2. The developer
would, without compensation, provide land for housing the
elephant.
3. The zoo's former
owners would be responsible for paying the keeper's wages.
I had had my own
private interest in the elephant problem from the very outset, and I kept a scrapbook
with every clipping I could fmd on it. I had even gone to hear the town
council's debates on the matter, which is why I am able to give such a full and
accurate account of the course of events. And while my account may prove
somewhat lengthy, I have chosen to set it down here in case the handling of the
elephant problem should
bear directly upon the elephant' s disappearance.
When the mayor finished
negotiating the agreement — with its provision that the
town would take charge of the elephant — a movement opposing the
measure boiled up from within the ranks of the opposition party (whose very
existence I had never
imagined until then). "Why must the town take ownership of
the elephant?" they
demanded of the mayor, and they raised the following points
(sorry for all these lists, but I use them to make things easier to understand):
1.The elephant
problem was a question for private enterprise — the zoo and the
developer; there was no reason for the town to become involved.
2.Care and feeding
costs would be too high.
3.What did the mayor
intend to do about the security problem?
4.What merit would
there be in the town' s having its own elephant?
"The town has
any number of responsibilities it should be taking care of before it gets into
the business of keeping an elephant — sewer repair, the purchase of a new fire
engine, etcetera," the opposition group declared, and while
they did not say it in so
many words, they hinted at the possibility of some secret deal
between the mayor and
the developer.
In response, the
mayor had this to say:
1.If the town
permitted the construction of high-rise condos, its tax revenues would
increase so dramatically that the cost of keeping an elephant
would be insignificant by
comparison; thus it made sense for the town to take on the care
of this elephant.
2.The elephant was so
old that it neither ate very much nor was likely to pose a
danger to anyone.
3.When the elephant
died, the town would take full possession of the land donated
by the developer.
4.The elephant could
become the town' s symbol.
The long debate
reached the conclusion that the town would take charge of the
elephant after all. As an old, well-established residential
suburb, the town boasted a
relatively affluent citizenry, and its financial footing was
sound. The adoption of a
homeless elephant was a move that people could look upon
favorably. People like old
elephants better than sewers and fire engines.
I myself was all in
favor of having the town care for the elephant. True, I was getting sick of
high-rise condos, but I liked the idea of my town' s owning an elephant.
A wooded area was cleared, and the elementary
school's aging gym was moved
there as an elephant house. The man who had served as the
elephant's keeper for
many years would come to live in the house with the elephant.
The children's lunch
scraps would serve as the elephant's feed. Finally, the elephant
itself was carted in a
trailer to its new home, there to live out its remaining years.
I joined the crowd at
the elephant- house dedication ceremonies. Standing before
the elephant, the mayor delivered a speech (on the town's
development and the
enrichment of its cultural facilities); one elementary-school
pupil, representing the
student body, stood up to read a composition ("Please live
a long and healthy life, Mr.
Elephant"); there was a sketch contest (sketching the
elephant thereafter became an
integral component of the pupils' artistic education); and each
of two young women in
swaying dresses (neither of whom was especially good-looking)
fed the elephant a
bunch of bananas. The elephant endured these virtually
meaningless (for the elephant, entirely meaningless) formalities with hardly a
twitch, and it chomped on the bananas
with a vacant stare. When it finished eating the bananas,
everyone applauded.
On its right rear
leg, the elephant wore a solid, heavy-looking steel cuff from which
there stretched a thick chain perhaps thirty feet long, and this
in turn was securely
fastened to a concrete slab. Anyone could see what a sturdy
anchor held the beast in
place: The elephant could have struggled with all its might for
a hundred years and
never broken the thing.
I couldn't tell if
the elephant was bothered by its shackle. On the surface, at least, it
seemed all but unconscious of the enormous chunk of metal
wrapped around its leg. It
kept its blank gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in space,
its ears and a few white hairs on its body waving gently in the breeze.
The elephant's keeper
was a small, bony old man. It was hard to guess his age; he
could have been in his early sixties or late seventies. He was
one of those people
whose appearance is no longer influenced by their age after they
pass a certain point in life. His skin had the same darkly ruddy, sunburned
look both summer and winter, his
hair was stiff and short, his eyes were small. His face had no
distinguishing
characteristics, but his almost perfectly circular ears stuck
out on either side with
disturbing prominence.
He was not an
unfriendly man. If someone spoke to him, he would reply, and he
expressed himself clearly If he wanted to he could be almost
charming — though you
always knew he was somewhat ill at ease. Generally, he remained
a reticent,
lonely-looking old man. He seemed to like the children who
visited the elephant house, and he worked at being nice to them, but the
children never really warmed to him.
The only one who did
that was the elephant. The keeper lived in a small prefab room attached to the
elephant house, and all day long he stayed with the elephant, attending
to its needs. They had been together for more than ten years,
and you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look. Whenever the
elephant was standing there blankly and the keeper wanted it to move, all he
had to do was stand next to the elephant, tap it on a front leg, and whisper
something in its ear. Then, swaying its huge bulk, the
elephant would go exactly where the keeper had indicated, take
up its new position, and continue staring at a point in space.
On weekends, I would
drop by the elephant house and study these operations, but I could never figure
out the principle on which the keeper-elephant communication was
based. Maybe the elephant understood a few simple words (it had
certainly been living
long enough), or perhaps it received its information through
variations in the taps on its
leg. Or possibly it had some special power resembling mental
telepathy and could read
the keeper 's mind. I once asked the keeper how he gave his
orders to the elephant, but the old man just smiled and said, "We've been
together a long time."
And so a year went by. Then, without warning, the elephant
vanished. One day it was
there, and the next it had ceased to be.
I poured myself a
second cup of coffee and read the story again from beginning to
end. Actually, it was a pretty strange article — the kind that
might excite Sherlock
Holmes. "Look at this, Watson," he'd say, tapping his
pipe. "A very interesting article.
Very interesting indeed."
What gave the article
its air of strangeness was the obvious confusion and
bewilderment of the reporter. And this confusion and
bewilderment clearly came from
the absurdity of the situation itself. You could see how the
reporter had struggled to find clever ways around the absurdity in order to write
a "normal" article. But the struggle
had only driven his confusion and bewilderment to a hopeless
extreme.
For example, the
article used such expressions as "the elephant escaped," but if you
looked at the entire piece it became obvious that the elephant had in no way
"escaped." It had vanished into thin air. The reporter revealed his
own conflicted state of mind by
saying that a few "details" remained "unclear,"
but this was not a phenomenon that
could be disposed of by using such ordinary terminology as
"details" or "unclear," I felt.
First, there was the
problem of the steel cuff that had been fastened to the elephant's leg. This
had been found still locked. The most reasonable explanation for this would be
that the keeper had unlocked the ring, removed it from the elephant's leg,
locked the
ring again, and run off with the elephant — a hypothesis to
which the paper clung with
desperate tenacity despite the fact that the keeper had no key!
Only two keys existed,
and they, for security's sake, were kept in locked safes, one in
police headquarters and
the other in the flrehouse, both beyond the reach of the keeper
— or of anyone else
who might attempt to steal them. And even if someone had
succeeded in stealing a key,
there was no need whatever for that person to make a point of
returning the key after
using it. Yet the following morning both keys were found in
their respective safes at the police and fire stations. Which brings us to the
conclusion that the elephant pulled its leg out of that solid steel ring
without the aid of a key — an absolute impossibility unless
someone had sawed the foot off.
The second problem
was the route of escape. The elephant house and grounds
were surrounded by a massive fence nearly ten feet high. The
question of security had been hotly debated in the town council, and the town
had settled upon a system that
might be considered somewhat excessive for keeping one old
elephant. Heavy iron bars had been anchored in a thick concrete foundation (the
cost of the fence was borne by
the real-estate company), and there was only a single entrance,
which was found
locked from the inside. There was no way the elephant could have
escaped from this
fortresslike enclosure.
The third problem was
elephant tracks. Directly behind the elephant enclosure was a steep hill, which
the animal could not possibly have climbed, so even if we suppose that the
elephant had somehow managed to puli its leg out of the steel ring and leap
over
the ten-foot-high fence, it would still have had to escape down
the path to the front of
the enclosure, and there was not a single mark anywhere in the
soft earth of that path
that could be seen as an elephant's footprint.
Riddled as it was
with such perplexities and labored circumlocutions, the newspaper article as a whole
left but one possible conclusion: The elephant had not escaped. It
had vanished.
Needless to say,
however, neither the newspaper nor the police nor the mayor was willing to
admit — openly, at least — that the elephant had vanished. The police were
continuing to investigate, their spokesman saying only that the
elephant either "was
taken or was allowed to escape in a clever, deliberately
calculated move. Because of
the difficulty involved in hiding an elephant, it is only a matter
of time till we solve the
case." To this optimistic assessment he added that they
were planning to search the
woods in the area with the aid of local hunters' clubs and
sharpshooters from the
national Self-Defense Force.
The mayor had held a
news conference, in which he apologized for the inadequacy
of the town's police resources. At the same time, he declared,
"Our elephant-security
system is in no way inferior to similar facilities in any zoo in
the country. Indeed, it is far stronger and far more fail-safe than the Standard
cage." He also observed, "This is a
dangerous and senseless antisocial act of the most malicious
kind, and we cannot allow it to go unpunished."
As they had the year
before, the opposition-party members of the town council made accusations. "We
intend to look into the political responsibility of the mayor; he has
colluded with private enterprise in order to sell the
townspeople a bill of goods on the
solution of the elephant problem."
One
"worried-looking" mother, thirty-seven, was interviewed by the paper.
"Now I’m afraid to let my children out to play," she said.
The coverage included
a detailed summary of the steps leading to the town's
decision to adopt the elephant, an aerial sketch of the elephant
house and grounds, and brief histories of both the elephant and the keeper who had
vanished with it. The man,
Noboru Watanabe, sixty-three, was from Tateyama, in Chiba
Prefecture. He had
worked for many years as a keeper in the mammalian section of
the zoo, and "had the
complete trust of the zoo authorities, both for his abundant knowledge
of these animals and for his warm sincere personality." The elephant had
been sent from East Africa
twenty-two years earlier, but little was known about its exact
age or its "personality."
The report concluded with a request from the police for citizens
of the town to come
forward with any information they might have regarding the
elephant.
I thought about this
request for a while as I drank my second cup of coffee, but I
decided not to call the police — both because I preferred not to
come into contact with
them if I could help it and because I felt the police would not
believe what I had to tell
them. What good would it do to talk to people like that, who
would not even consider the possibility that the elephant had simply vanished?
I took my scrapbook
down from the shelf, cut out the elephant article, and pasted it
in. Then I washed the dishes and left for the office.
I watched the search
on the seven-o'clock news. There were hunters carrying
large-bore rifles loaded with tranquilizer darts, Self-Defense
Force troops, policemen,
and firemen combing every square inch of the woods and hills in
the immediate area as helicopters hovered overhead. Of course, we're talking
about the kind of "woods" and
"hills" you fmd in the suburbs outside Tokyo, so they didn't
have an enormous area to
cover. With that many people involved, a day should have been
more than enough to do the job. And they weren't searching for some tiny
homicidal maniac: They were after a
huge African elephant. There was a limit to the number of places
a thing like that could hide. But still they had not managed to find it. The
chief of police appeared on the
screen, saying, "We intend to continue the search."
And the anchorman concluded the
report, "Who released the elephant, and how? Where have
they hidden it? What was
their motive? Everything remains shrouded in mystery."
The search went on
for several days, but the authorities were unable to discover a
single clue to the elephant's whereabouts. I studied the
newspaper reports, clipped
them all, and pasted them in my scrapbook — including editorial
cartoons on the
subject. The album filled up quickly, and I had to buy another.
Despite their enormous
volume, the clippings contained not one fact of the kind that I
was looking for. The
reports were either pointless or off the mark: ELEPHANT STILL
MISSING, GLOOM
THICK IN SEARCH HQ, MOB BEHIND DISAPPEARANCE? And even articles
like this became noticeably scarcer after a week had gone by, until there was
virtually nothing. A few of the weekly magazines carried sensational stories —
one even hired a psychic — but they had nothing to substantiate their wild
headlines. It seemed that people were
beginning to shove the elephant case into the large category of
"unsolvable mysteries." The disappearance of one old elephant and one
old elephant keeper would have no
impact on the course of society. The earth would continue its
monotonous rotations,
politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations,
people would continue
yawning on their way to the office, children would continue
studying for their
college-entrance exams. Amid the endless surge and ebb of
everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever. And so a
number of unremarkable months went
by, like a tired army marching past a window.
Whenever I had a
spare moment, I would visit the house where the elephant no
longer lived. A thick chain had been wrapped round and round the
bars of the yard's
iron gate, to keep people out. Peering inside, I could see that
the elephant-house door
had also been chained and locked, as though the police were
trying to make up for
having failed to fmd the elephant by multiplying the layers of security
on the now-empty elephant house. The area was deserted, the previous crowds
having been replaced by a flock of pigeons resting on the roof. No one took
care of the grounds any longer, and
thick green summer grass had sprung up there as if it had been
waiting for this
opportunity. The chain coiled around the door of the elephant
house reminded me of a
huge snake set to guard a ruined palace in a thick forest. A few
short months without its elephant had given the place an air of doom and desolation
that hung there like a huge, oppressive rain cloud.
I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that
day from morning to night — the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often
falls at that time of year, washing
away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth.
Coursing down the
gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers,
to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.
We noticed each other
at the party my company threw to launch its new advertising
campaign. I work for the PR section of a major manufacturer of
electrical appliances,
and at the time I was in charge of publicity for a coordinated
line of kitchen equipment, which was scheduled to go on the market in time for
the autumn-wedding and
winter-bonus seasons. My job was to negotiate with several
women's magazines for
tie-in articles — not the kind of work that takes a great deal
of intelligence, but I had to
see to it that the articles they wrote didn't smack of
advertising. When magazines gave us publicity, we rewarded them by placing ads
in their pages. They scratched our backs, we scratched theirs.
As an editor of a
magazine for young housewives, she had come to the party for
material for one of these "articles." I happened to be
in charge of showing her around,
pointing out the features of the colorfiil refrigerators and
coffeemakers and microwave
ovens and juicers that a famous Italian designer had done for
us.
"The most
important point is unity," I explained. "Even the most beautifully
designed
item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings. Unity
of design, unity of color, unity of function: This is what today's kit-chin
needs above all else. Research tells us that a
housewife spends the largest part of her day in the kit-chin.
The kit-chin is her
workplace, her study, her living room. Which is why she does all
she can to make the
kit-chin a
pleasant place to be. It has nothing to do with size. Whether it's large or
small, one fundamental principle governs every successful kit-chin, and
that principle is unity. This is the concept underlying the design of our new
series. Look at this cooktop, for
example...."
She nodded and
scribbled things in a small notebook, but it was obvious that she
had little interest in the material, nor did I have any personal
stake in our new cooktop. Both of us were doing our jobs.
"You know a lot
about kitchens," she said when I finished. She used the Japanese
word, without picking up on "kit-chin. "
"That's what I
do for a living," I answered with a professional smile. "Aside from
that, though, I do like to cook. Nothing fancy, but I cook for myself every
day."
"Still, I wonder
if unity is all that necessary for a kitchen."
"We say 'kit-chin,
'" I advised her. "No big deal, but the company wants us to use
the English."
"Oh. Sorry. But
still, I wonder. Is unity so important for a kit-chin? What do you
think?"
"My personal
opinion? That doesn't come out until I take my necktie off," I said with a
grin. "But today I’ll make an exception. A kitchen probably does need a
few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you
can't sell. And in this
pragmatic world of ours, things you can't sell don't count for
much."
"Is the world
such a pragmatic place?"
I took out a
cigarette and lit it with my lighter.
"I don't know —
the word just popped out," I said. "But it explains a lot. It makes
work easier, too. You can play games with it, make up neat expressions:
'essentially
pragmatic,' or 'pragmatic in essence. ' If you look at things
that way, you avoid all kinds of complicated problems."
"What an
interesting view!"
"Not really.
It's what everybody thinks. Oh, by the way, we've got some pretty good
champagne. Care to have some?"
"Thanks. I'd love
to."
As we chatted over
champagne, we realized we had several mutual acquaintances. Since our part of
the business world was not a very big pond, if you tossed in a few
pebbles, one or two were bound to hit a mutual acquaintance. In
addition, she and my
kid sister happened to have graduated from the same university.
With markers like this
to follow, our conversation went along smoothly.
She was unmarried,
and so was I. She was twenty-six, and I was thirty-one. She
wore contact lenses, and I wore glasses. She praised my necktie,
and I praised her
jacket. We compared rents and complained about our jobs and
salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other. She was an
attractive woman, and not at all
pushy. I stood there talking with her for a full twenty minutes,
unable to discover a single reason not to think well of her.
As the party was
breaking up, I invited her to join me in the hotel 's cocktail lounge,
where we settled in to continue our conversation. A soundless
rain went on falling
outside the lounge 's panoramic window, the lights of the city
sending blurry messages
through the mist. A damp hush held sway over the nearly empty
cocktail lounge. She
ordered a frozen daiquiri and I had a scotch on the rocks.
Sipping our drinks,
we carried on the kind of conversation that a man and woman
have in a bar when they have just met and are beginning to like
each other. We talked
about our college days, our tastes in music, sports, our daily
routines.
Then I told her about
the elephant. Exactly how this happened, I can't recall. Maybe we were talking
about something having to do with animals, and that was the
connection. Or maybe, unconsciously, I had been looking for
someone — a good
listener — to whom I could present my own, unique view on the
elephant's
disappearance. Or, then again, it might have been the liquor
that got me talking.
In any case, the
second the words left my mouth, I knew that I had brought up one of the least suitable
topics I could have found for this occasion. No, I should never have
mentioned the elephant. The topic was — what? — too complete,
too closed.
I tried to hurry on
to something else, but as luck would have it she was more
interested than most in the case of the vanishing elephant, and
once I admitted that I
had seen the elephant many times she showered me with questions
— what kind of
elephant was it, how did I think it had escaped, what did it
eat, wasn't it a danger to the community, and so forth.
I told her nothing
more than what everybody knew from the news, but she seemed to sense constraint
in my tone of voice. I had never been good at telling lies.
As if she had not
noticed anything strange about my behavior, she sipped her
second daiquiri and asked, "Weren't you shocked when the
elephant disappeared? It's
not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted."
"No, probably
not," I said. I took a pretzel from the mound in the glass dish on our
table, snapped it in two, and ate half. The waiter replaced our
ashtray with an empty
one.
She looked at me
expectantly. I took out another cigarette and lit it. I had quit
smoking three years earlier but had begun again when the
elephant disappeared.
"Why 'probably
not'? You mean you could have predicted it?"
"No, of course I
couldn't have predicted it," I said with a smile. "For an elephant to
disappear all of a sudden one day — there's no precedent, no
need, for such a thing to happen. It doesn't make any logical sense."
"But still, your
answer was very strange. When I said, 'It's not the kind of thing that
somebody could have predicted,' you said, 'No, probably not'
Most people would have
said, 'You' re right,' or 'Yeah, it's weird,' or something. See
what I mean?"
I sent a vague nod in
her direction and raised my hand to call the waiter. A kind of
tentative silence took hold as I waited for him to bring me my
next scotch.
"I’m finding
this a little hard to grasp," she said softly. "You were carrying on
a
perfectly normal conversation with me until a couple of minutes
ago — at least until the subject of the elephant came up. Then something funny
happened. I can't understand
you anymore. Something's wrong. Is it the elephant? Or are my
ears playing tricks on
me?"
"There's nothing
wrong with your ears," I said.
"So then it's
you. The problem' s with you."
I stuck my finger in
my glass and stirred the ice. I like the sound of ice in a whiskey
glass.
"I wouldn't call
it a 'problem,' exactly. It's not that big a deal. I’m not hiding anything.
I’m just not sure I can talk about it very well, so I’m trying
not to say anything at all. But
you' re right — it's very strange."
"What do you
mean?"
It was no use: I'd have to tell her the
story. I took one gulp of whiskey and started.
"The thing is, I
was probably the last one to see the elephant before it disappeared. I saw it
after seven o'clock on the evening of May seventeenth, and they noticed it was
gone on the afternoon of the eighteenth. Nobody saw it in
between because they lock
the elephant house at six."
"I don't get it.
If they closed the house at six, how did you see it after seven?"
"There's a kind
of cliff behind the elephant house. A steep hill on private property,
with no real roads. There's one spot, on the back of the hill,
where you can see into the elephant house. I'm probably the only one who knows
about it."
I had found the spot
purely by chance. Strolling through the area one Sunday
afternoon, I had lost my way and come out at the top of the cliff.
I found a little flat open patch, just big enough for a person to stretch out
in, and when I looked down through
the bushes, there was the elephant-house roof. Below the edge of
the roof was a fairly
large vent opening, and through it I had a clear view of the inside
of the elephant house.
I made it a habit
after that to visit the place every now and then to look at the
elephant when it was inside the house. If anyone had asked me
why I bothered doing
such a thing, I wouldn't have had a decent answer. I simply
enjoyed watching the
elephant during its private time. There was nothing more to it
than that. I couldn't see
the elephant when the house was dark inside, of course, but in
the early hours of the
evening the keeper would have the lights on the whole time he
was taking care of the
elephant, which enabled me to study the scene in detail.
What struck me
immediately when I saw the elephant and keeper alone together
was the obvious liking they had for each other — something they
never displayed when they were out before the public. Their affection was
evident in every gesture. It almost
seemed as if they stored away their emotions during the day,
taking care not to let
anyone notice them, and took them out at night when they could
be alone. Which is not to say that they did anything different when they were
by themselves inside. The
elephant just stood there, as blank as ever, and the keeper
would perform those tasks
one would normally expect him to do as a keeper: scrubbing down
the elephant with a
deck broom, picking up the elephant's enormous droppings,
cleaning up after the
elephant ate. But there was no way to mistake the special
warmth, the sense of trust,
between them. While the keeper swept the floor, the elephant
would wave its trunk and pat the keeper' s back. I liked to watch the elephant
doing that.
"Have you always
been fond of elephants?" she asked. 'T mean, not just that
particular elephant?"
"Hmm ... come to
think of it, I do like elephants," I said. "There's something about
them that excites me. I guess I've always liked them I wonder
why."
"And that day,
too, after the sun went down, I suppose you were up on the hill by
yourself, looking at the elephant. May — what day was it?"
"The
seventeenth. May seventeenth at seven p m. The days were already very long by
then, and the sky had a reddish glow, but the lights were on in the elephant
house."
"And was there
anything unusual about the elephant or the keeper?"
"Well, there was
and there wasn't. I can't say exactly. It's not as if they were standing right
in front of me. I'm probably not the most reliable witness."
"What did
happen, exactly?"
I took a swallow of
my now somewhat watery scotch. The rain outside the windows was still coming
down, no stronger or weaker than before, a static element in a
landscape that would never change.
"Nothing
happened, really. The elephant and the keeper were doing what they
always did — cleaning, eating, playing around with each other in
that friendly way of
theirs. It wasn't what they did that was different. It's the way
they looked. Something
about the balance between them."
"The
balance?"
"In size. Of
their bodies. The elephant's and the keeper 's. The balance seemed to
have changed somewhat. I had the feeling that to some extent the
difference between
them had shrunk."
She kept her gaze
fixed on her daiquiri glass for a time. I could see that the ice had melted and
that the water was working its way through the cocktail like a tiny ocean
current.
"Meaning that
the elephant had gotten smaller?"
"Or the keeper
had gotten bigger. Or both simultaneously."
"And you didn't
tell this to the police?"
"No, of course
not," I said. "I’m sure they wouldn't have believed me. And if I had
told them I was watching the elephant from the cliff at a time like that, I'd
have ended up as
their number one suspect."
"Still, are you
certain that the balance between them had changed?"
"Probably. I can
only say 'probably' I don't have any proof, and as I keep saying, I
was looking at them through the air vent. But I had looked at
them like that I don't know how many times before, so it's hard for me to
believe that I could make a mistake about something as basic as the relation of
their sizes."
In fact, I had
wondered at the time whether my eyes were playing tricks on me. I had tried
closing and opening them and shaking my head, but the elephant's size remained
the same. It definitely looked as if it had shrunk — so much so
that at first I thought the
town might have got hold of a new, smaller elephant. But I
hadn't heard anything to that effect, and I would never have missed any news
reports about elephants. If this was not a new elephant, the only possible
conclusion was that the old elephant had, for one
reason or another, shrunk. As I watched, it became obvious to me
that this smaller
elephant had all the same gestures as the old one. It would
stamp happily on the
ground with its right foot while it was being washed, and with
its now somewhat
narrower trunk it would pat the keeper on the back.
It was a mysterious
sight. Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling
kind of time was flowing through the elephant house — but nowhere else. And it
seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving
themselves
over to this new order that was trying to envelop them — or that
had already partially
succeeded in enveloping them.
Altogether, I was
probably watching the scene in the elephant house for less than a half hour.
The lights went out at seven-thirty — much earlier than usual — and from that
point on, everything was wrapped in darkness. I waited in my spot, hoping that
the lights would go on again, but they never did. That was the last I saw of
the elephant.
"So, then, you
believe that the elephant kept shrinking until it was small enough to
escape through the bars, or else that it simply dissolved into
nothingness. Is that it?"
"I don't
know," I said. "Ali I' m trying to do is recall what I saw with my
own eyes, as
accurately as possible. I’m hardly thinking about what happened
after that. The visual
image I have is so strong that, to be honest, it's practically
impossible for me to go
beyond it."
That was all I could
say about the elephant's disappearance. And just as I had
feared, the story of the elephant was too particular, too
complete in itself, to work as a
topic of conversation between a young man and woman who had just
met. A silence
descended upon us after I had finished my tale. What subject
could either of us bring up after a story about an elephant that had vanished —
a story that offered virtually no
openings for further discussion? She ran her finger around the
edge of her cocktail
glass, and I sat there reading and rereading the words stamped
on my coaster. I never should have told her about the elephant. It was not the
kind of story you could tell freely to anyone.
"When I was a
little girl, our cat disappeared," she offered after a long silence.
"But
still, for a cat to disappear and for an elephant to disappear —
those are two different
stories."
"Yeah, really.
There' s no comparison. Think of the size difference."
Thirty minutes later,
we were saying good-bye outside the hotel. She suddenly
remembered that she had left her umbrella in the cocktail
lounge, so I went up in the
elevator and brought it down to her. It was a brick-red umbrella
with a large handle.
"Thanks,"
she said.
"Good
night," I said.
That was the last
time I saw her. We talked once on the phone after that, about
some details in her tie-in article. While we spoke, I thought
seriously about inviting her
out for dinner, but I ended up not doing it. It just didn't seem
to matter one way or the
other.
I felt like this a lot after my experience
with the vanishing elephant. I would begin to
think I wanted to do something, but then I would become
incapable of distinguishing
between the probable results of doing it and of not doing it. I
often get the feeling that
things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could
be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me
has broken down since the
elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to
strike my eye in a
strange way. It's probably something in me.
I continue to sell
refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee-makers in the pragmatic world, based
on afterimages of memories I retain from that world. The more pragmatic I try
to become, the more successfully I sell — our campaign has succeeded beyond our
most optimistic forecasts — and the more people I succeed in selling myself to.
That's
probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this
kit-chin we know as the
world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function.
The papers print
almost nothing about the elephant anymore. People seem to have
forgotten that their town once owned an elephant. The grass that
took over the elephant enclosure has withered now, and the area has the feel of
winter.
The elephant and
keeper have vanished completely. They will never be coming
back.
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