Once more I take her hand in mine. The scales are shaking, and just a tiny weight would send them tipping to one side or the other. I have to think. I have to decide. I have to take a step forward. "Miss Saeki, would you sleep with me?" I ask.
"You mean even if I were your mother in that theory of yours?"
"It's like everything around me's in flux—like it all has a doubled meaning."
She ponders this. "That might not be true for me, though. For me, things might not be so nuanced. It might be more like all or nothing."
"And you know which it is."
She nods.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"About what?"
"Where did you come up with those two chords?"
"Chords?"
"The ones in the bridge in 'Kafka on the Shore.'"
She looks at me. "You like them?"
I nod.
"I found those chords in an old room, very far away. The door to the room was open then," she says quietly. "A room that was far, far away." She closes her eyes and sinks back into memories. "Kafka, close the door when you leave," she says.
And that's exactly what I do.
After we close up the library for the night, Oshima drives me to a seafood restaurant a little way away. Through a large window in the restaurant we can see the night sea, and I think about all the creatures living under the water.
"Sometimes you've got to get out and eat some decent food," he tells me. "Relax.
I don't think the cops have staked the place out. We both needed a change of scenery."
We eat a huge salad, and split an order of paella.
"I'd love to go to Spain someday," Oshima says.
"Why Spain?"
"To fight in the Spanish Civil War."
"But that ended a long time ago."
"I know that. Lorca died, and Hemingway survived," Oshima says. "But I still have the right to go to Spain and be a part of the Spanish Civil War."
"Metaphorically."
"Exactly," he says, giving me a wry look. "A hemophiliac of undetermined sex who's hardly ever set foot outside Shikoku isn't about to actually go off to fight in Spain, I would think."
We attack the mound of paella, washing it down with Perrier.
"Have there been any developments in my father's case?" I ask.
"Nothing to report, really. Except for a typical smug memorial piece in the arts section, there hasn't been much in the papers. The investigation must be stuck. The sad fact is the arrest rate's been going down steadily these days—just like the stock market. I mean, the police can't even track down the son who's disappeared."
"The fifteen-year-old youth."
"Fifteen, with a history of violent behavior," Oshima adds. "The obsessed young runaway."
"How about that incident with things falling from the sky?"
Oshima shakes his head. "They're taking a break on that one. Nothing else weird has fallen from the sky—unless you count that award-winning lightning we had two days ago."
"So things have settled down?"
"It seems like it. Or maybe we're just in the eye of the storm."
I nod, pick up a clam, yank out the meat with a fork, then put the shell on a plate full of empty shells.
"Are you still in love?" Oshima asks me.
I nod. "How about you?"
"Am I in love, do you mean?"
I nod again.
"In other words, you're daring to get personal and ask about the antisocial romance that colors my warped, homosexual, Gender-Identity-Disordered life?"
I nod, and he follows suit.
"I have a partner, yes," he admits. He makes a serious face and eats a clam. "It's not the kind of passionate, stormy love you find in a Puccini opera or anything. We keep a careful distance from each other. We don't get together that often, but we do understand each other at a deep, basic level."
"Understand each other?"
"Whenever Haydn composed, he always made sure to dress formally, even to wearing a powdered wig."
I look at him in surprise. "What's Haydn got to do with anything?"
"He couldn't compose well unless he did that."
"How come?"
"I have no idea. That's between Haydn and his wig. Nobody else would understand. Inexplicable, I imagine."
I nod. "Tell me, when you're alone do you sometimes think about your partner and feel sad?"
"Of course," he says. "It happens sometimes. When the moon turns blue, when birds fly south, when—"
"Why of course?" I ask.
"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's just a natural feeling. You're not the person who discovered that feeling, so don't go trying to patent it, okay?"
I lay my fork down and look up.
"A fond, old, faraway room?"
"Exactly," Oshima says. He holds his fork straight up for emphasis. "Just a metaphor, of course."
Miss Saeki comes to my room after nine that night. I'm sitting at the desk reading a book when I hear her Golf pull into the parking lot. The door slams shut. Rubber-soled shoes slowly crunch across the parking lot. And finally there's a knock at my door. I open the door, and there she is. This time she's wide awake. She has on a pinstriped silk blouse, thin blue jeans, white deck shoes. I've never seen her in pants before.
"I haven't seen this room in a long time," she says. She stands by the wall and looks at the painting. "Or this picture, either."
"Is the place in the painting around here?" I ask.
"Do you like it?"
I nod. "Who painted it?"
"A young artist who boarded that summer with the Komuras," she says. "He wasn't very famous, at least at the time. I've forgotten his name. He was a very friendly person, though, and I think he did a good job with the painting. There's something, I don't know—powerful about it. I sat beside him the whole time and watched him work. I made all kinds of half-joking suggestions as he painted. We got along well. It was a summer a long time ago. I was twelve then. The boy in the painting was twelve, too."
"It looks like the sea around here."
"Let's go for a walk," she says. "I'll take you there."
I walk with her to the shore. We cut through a pine forest and walk down the sandy beach. The clouds are breaking up and a half moon shines down on the waves.
Small waves that barely reach the shore, barely break. She sits down at a spot on the sand, and I sit down next to her. The sand's still faintly warm.
Like she's checking the angle, she points to a spot on the shoreline. "It was right over there," she says. "He painted that spot from here. He put the deck chair over there, had the boy pose in it, and set up his easel right around here. I remember it well. Do you notice how the position of the island is the same as in the painting?"
I follow where she's pointing, and sure enough it's the same. No matter how long I gaze at it, though, it doesn't look like the place in the painting. I tell her that.
"It's changed completely," Miss Saeki replies. "That was forty years ago, after all. Things change. A lot of things affect the shoreline—waves, wind, typhoons. Sand gets washed away, they truck more in. But this is definitely the spot. I remember what occurred there very well. That was the summer I had my first period, too."
We sit there looking at the scenery. The clouds shift and the moonlight dapples the sea. Wind blows through the pine forest, sounding like a crowd of people sweeping the ground at the same time. I scoop up some sand and let it slowly spill out between my fingers. It falls to the beach and, like lost time, becomes part of what's already there. I do this over and over.
"What are you thinking about?" Miss Saeki asks me.
"About going to Spain," I reply.
"What are you going to do there?"
"Eat some delicious paella."
"That's all?"
"And fight in the Spanish Civil War."
"That ended over sixty years ago."
"I know," I tell her. "Lorca died, and Hemingway survived."
"But you want to be a part of it."
I nod. "Yup. Blow up bridges and stuff."
"And fall in love with Ingrid Bergman."
"But in reality I'm here in Takamatsu. And I'm love with you."
"Tough luck."
I put my arm around her.
You put your arm around her.
She leans against you. And a long spell of time passes.
"Did you know that I did this exact same thing a long time ago? Right in this same spot?"
"I know," you tell her.
"How do you know that?' Miss Saeki asks, and looks you in the eyes.
"I was there then."
"Blowing up bridges?"
"Yes, I was there, blowing up bridges."
"Metaphorically."
"Of course."
You hold her in your arms, draw her close, kiss her. You can feel the strength deserting her body.
"We're all dreaming, aren't we?" she says.
All of us are dreaming.
"Why did you have to die?"
"I couldn't help it," you reply.
Together you walk along the beach back to the library. You turn off the light in your room, draw the curtains, and without another word climb into bed and make love.
Pretty much the same sort of lovemaking as the night before. But with two differences.
After sex, she starts to cry. That's one. She buries her face in the pillow and silently weeps. You don't know what to do. You gently lay a hand on her bare shoulder. You know you should say something, but don't have any idea what. Words have all died in the hollow of time, piling up soundlessly at the dark bottom of a volcanic lake. And this time as she leaves you can hear the engine of her car. That's number two. She starts the engine, turns it off for a time, like she's thinking about something, then turns the key again and drives out of the parking lot. That blank, silent interval between leaves you sad, so terribly sad. Like fog from the sea, that blankness wends its way into your heart and remains there for a long, long time. Finally it's a part of you.
She leaves behind a damp pillow, wet with her tears. You touch the warmth with your hand and watch the sky outside gradually lighten. Far away a crow caws. The Earth slowly keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams.
And everyone's living in them.
Chapter 32
When Nakata woke up at five a. m. he saw the big stone right next to his pillow.
Hoshino was still sound asleep on the futon next to his, mouth half open, hair sticking every which way, Chunichi Dragons cap tossed beside him. His sleeping face had a determined no-matter-what-don't-dare-wake-me-up look to it.
Nakata wasn't particularly surprised to find the stone there. His mind adapted immediately to the new reality, accepted it, didn't question why it happened to be there.
Figuring out cause and effect was never his strong suit.
He sat down formally beside his bed, legs tucked neatly under him, and spent some quality time with the stone, gazing intently at it. Finally he reached out and, like he was stroking a large, sleeping cat, touched it. At first gingerly, with only his fingertips, and when that seemed safe he ran his entire hand carefully over the whole surface. All the while he rubbed it, he was thinking—or at least had the pensive look of someone thinking. As if reading a map, he ran his hand over every part of the stone, memorizing every bump and cranny, getting a solid sense of it. Then he suddenly reached up and rubbed his short hair, searching, perhaps, for the correlation between the stone and his own head.
Finally he gave what might have been a sigh, stood up, opened the window, and stuck his face out. All that was visible was the rear of the building next door. A shabby, miserable sort of building. The kind where shabby people spend one shabby day after another doing their shabby work. The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing. The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set afloat in the sky. Regardless, it was going to rain soon.
Nakata looked down and spied a skinny black cat, tail alert, patrolling the top of a narrow wall between the two buildings. "There's going to be lightning today," he called out. But the cat didn't appear to hear him, didn't even turn around, just continued its languid walk and disappeared in the shadows of the building.
Nakata set off down the hall, plastic bag with toilet kit inside in hand, to the communal sinks. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and shaved with a safety razor.
Each operation took time. He carefully washed his face, taking his time, carefully brushed his teeth, taking his time, carefully shaved, taking his time. He trimmed his nose hairs with a pair of scissors, straightened up his eyebrows, cleaned out his ears. He was the type who took his time no matter what he did, but this morning he took everything at an even slower pace than usual. No one else was up washing his face at this early hour, and it was still a while before breakfast was ready. Hoshino didn't look like he'd be getting up anytime soon. With the whole place to himself, Nakata looked in the mirror, leisurely preparing for the day, and pictured the faces of all the cats he'd seen in the book in the library two days before. Unable to read, he didn't know the names of the cats, but a clear picture of each and every cat's face was etched in his memory.
"There really are a lot of cats in the world, that's for sure," he said as he cleaned out his ears with a Q-tip. His first-ever visit to a library had made him painfully aware of how little he knew. The amount of things he didn't know about the world was infinite.
The infinite, by definition, has no limits, and thinking about it gave him a mild migraine.
He gave up and turned his thoughts back to Cats of the World. How nice it would be, he thought, to be able to talk with each and every cat in there. There must be all kinds of cats in the world, all with different ways of thinking and talking. Would foreign cats speak in foreign languages? he wondered. But this was another difficult subject, and again his head began to throb.
After washing up, he went to the toilet and took care of business as usual. This didn't take as long as his other ablutions. Finished, he took his plastic bag with the toilet kit inside back to the room. Hoshino was sound asleep, exactly as he'd left him. Nakata picked up the discarded aloha shirt and jeans, folding them up neatly. He set them down on top of each other next to Hoshino's futon, adding the Chunichi Dragons baseball cap on top like a summary title given to a motley collection of ideas. He took off his yukata robe and put on his usual trousers and shirt, then rubbed his hands together and took a deep breath.
He sat down again in front of the stone, gazing at it for a while before hesitantly reaching out to touch it. "There's going to be thunder today," he pronounced to no one in particular. He may have been addressing the stone. He punctuated this with a couple of nods.
Nakata was over next to the window, running through an exercise routine, when Hoshino finally woke up. Humming the radio exercise music quietly to himself, Nakata moved in time to the tune.
Hoshino squinted at his watch. It was just after eight. He craned his neck to make sure the stone was where he'd put it. In the light the stone looked much bigger and rougher than he'd remembered. "So I wasn't dreaming after all," he said.
"I'm sorry—what did you say?" Nakata asked.
"The stone," Hoshino said. "The stone's right there. It wasn't a dream."
"We have the stone," Nakata said simply, still in the midst of his exercises, making it sound like some central proposition of nineteenth-century German philosophy.
"It's a long story, though, Gramps, about how the stone got to be there."
"Yes, Nakata thought that might be the
case."
"Anyway," Hoshino said, sitting up in bed and sighing deeply. "It doesn't matter.
The important thing is it's here. To make a long story short."
"We have the stone," Nakata repeated. "That's what matters."
Hoshino was about to respond but suddenly noticed how famished he was. "Hey, what d'ya say we grab some breakfast?"
"Nakata's quite hungry."
After breakfast, as he was drinking tea, Hoshino said, "So what are you going to do with the stone?"
"What should Nakata do with it?"
"Gimme a break," Hoshino said, shaking his head. "You said you had to find that stone, so that's why I managed to come up with it last night. Don't hit me now with this Gee whiz, what should I do with it stuff. Okay?"
"Yes, you are right. But to tell the truth, I don't know yet what I'm supposed to do with it."
"That's a problem."
"A problem indeed," Nakata replied, though you'd never know it from his expression.
"So if you spend some time thinking about it, you'll figure out what to do?"
"I think so. It takes Nakata much longer to do things than other people."
"Okay, but listen here, Mr. Nakata."
"Yes, Mr. Hoshino?"
"I don't know who gave it that name, but since it's called the entrance stone I'm guessing it's gotta be the entrance to something a long time ago, don't you think? There must be some legend or explanation about it."
"Yes, that must be the case."
"But you have no idea what kind of entrance we're talking about here?"