"And right now the entrance happens to be open," the tall one explains. "Before long, though, it'll close up. If you want to come in, now's the time. It doesn't open up all that often."
"We'll lead the way," the brawny one says. "The path's hard to follow, so you need someone to guide you in."
"If you don't come in, then go back where you came from," the tall one says. "It's not all that hard to find your way back, so don't worry about it. You'll do fine. Then you'll return to the world you came from, to the life you've been living. The choice is entirely up to you. Nobody's going to force you to do one or the other. But once you're in, it isn't easy to turn back."
"Take me inside," I answer without a moment's hesitation.
"Are you sure?" the brawny one asks.
"Somebody's inside I have to see," I say. "At least I think so...."
Slowly, silently, the two of them get up off the rock and shoulder their rifles.
They exchange a glance and walk on ahead of me.
"You must think it's strange we still lug around these heavy lumps of steel," the tall one says, turning around. "They're worthless. Never had any bullets anyway."
"But they're a kind of sign," the brawny one says, not looking back at me. "A sign of what we left behind."
"Symbols are important," the tall one adds. "We happen to have these rifles and soldiers' uniforms, so we play the part of sentries. That's our role. Symbols guide us to the roles we play."
"Do you have anything like that with you?" the brawny one asks. "Something that can be a sign?"
I shake my head. "No, I don't have anything. Just memories."
"Hmm...," the brawny one says. "Memories, huh?"
"That's okay. Doesn't matter," the tall one says. "Memories can be a great symbol too. Course I don't have any idea how well memories will stand up, how long they'll last."
"Something that has a form or a shape is best, if you can manage it," the brawny one says. "It's easier to understand."
"Like a rifle," the tall one says. "By the way, what's your name?"
"Kafka Tamura," I answer.
"Kafka Tamura," they both repeat.
"Weird name," the tall one says.
"You got that right," the brawny one adds.
After this we walk in silence down the path.
Chapter 44
They took the three files to a riverbed along the highway and burned them. Hoshino had bought lighter fluid at a convenience store, and doused the files before setting them ablaze. Then he and Nakata stood by silently as they watched each page become engulfed in flames. There was barely a hint of wind, and the smoke rose straight up, getting lost among the low-hanging gray clouds.
"So we can't read any of these papers?" Hoshino asked.
"No, we're not supposed to," Nakata replied. "I promised Miss Saeki we wouldn't, and my job is to keep that promise."
"Yeah, keeping promises is important," Hoshino said, wiping away sweat from his forehead. "It would be nice if we had a shredder, though. That would sure make it a lot easier. Copy shops have big shredders you can rent pretty cheap. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. It's just kind of hot to make a bonfire at this time of year. If it were winter, that'd be another story."
"I'm sorry, but I promised Miss Saeki I'd burn it all up. So that's what Nakata has to do."
"Okay, then. I'm in no rush. A little heat's not going to kill me. It was just a, what do you call it—a suggestion."
A cat sauntering along stopped to watch, a skinny, brown-striped cat whose tail was slightly bent at the tip. A personable cat, by the looks of it. Nakata badly wanted to talk with it but decided he'd better not, since Hoshino was with him. The cat wouldn't be able to relax unless they were alone. Besides, Nakata wasn't at all confident he could speak with cats like he used to. The last thing he wanted was to blurt out something weird and frighten the poor animal. Before long, the cat grew bored of watching the bonfire, stood up, and padded away.
A long while later, after the files were completely burned, Hoshino stomped the ashes into dust. The next strong wind would scatter all the remains. The sun was nearly setting by then, and crows were flying back to their nests.
"Nobody's gonna read it now," Hoshino said. "I don't know what was written in it, but it's all gone. A bit of shape and form has disappeared from the world, increasing the amount of nothingness."
"Mr. Hoshino?"
"What's up?"
"I have a question I'd like to ask."
"Fire away."
"Can nothingness increase?"
Hoshino puzzled this one over for a while. "That's a tough one," he admitted. "If something returns to nothing it becomes zero, but even if you add zero to zero, it's still zero."
"I don't understand."
"I don't get it either. Thinking about those kinds of things always gives me a headache."
"So maybe we should stop thinking about it."
"Fine with me," Hoshino said. "Anyhow, the manuscript's all burned up. All the words in it have disappeared. It's gone back to nothing—that's what I wanted to say."
"That's a load off my mind."
"So this pretty much wraps up what we need to do here, right?" Hoshino asked.
"Yes, we've almost finished what we need to do," Nakata said. "All that's left is to close up the entrance again."
"That's pretty important, huh?"
"It is. What's opened has to be shut."
"Well, let's get to it. Strike while the iron is hot and all that."
"Mr. Hoshino?"
"Yeah?"
"We can't do it now."
"Why not?"
"It's not time yet," Nakata said. "We have to wait for the right time to shut the entrance. Before that, I have to get some sleep. Nakata's so sleepy."
Hoshino looked at the old man. "Wait a sec—you're not going to sack out for days on end again, are you?"
"I can't say, but it may turn out like that."
"Can't we take care of business before you zonk out? Look—once you shift into sleep mode things kind of come to a halt."
"Mr. Hoshino?"
"What's up?"
"I wish we could shut the entrance first. That would be wonderful. But I have to get some sleep first. I can't keep my eyes open anymore."
"Like your batteries have fizzled out or something?"
"I suppose. It took longer than I thought to do what we needed to do. All my energy's gone. Would you take me back to where Nakata can get some sleep?"
"No problem. We'll grab a cab and head back to the apartment. Then you can sleep like a log if you want."
Once they'd settled into the cab Nakata started to nod out.
"You can sleep as much as you want once we're back in the apartment," Hoshino said. "But hang in there until we get home, okay?"
"Mr. Hoshino?"
"Yup?"
"I'm sorry to have put you to so much trouble," Nakata murmured vaguely.
"Yeah, I guess you have," Hoshino admitted. "But nobody asked me to come—I tagged along of my own free will. Like volunteering to shovel snow. So don't worry about it."
"If you hadn't helped me, Nakata wouldn't have known what to do. I wouldn't have finished even half of what I had to do."
"Well, if you put it that way, I guess it was worth the effort."
"I'm very grateful to you."
"But you know what?" Hoshino said.
"What?"
"I have a lot to thank you for too, Mr. Nakata."
"Is that right?"
"It's been about ten days since all this began," Hoshino said. "I've skipped out on work the whole time. The first couple of days I got in touch with them and asked for some time off, but right now I'm sort of AWOL. I probably won't get my old job back.
Maybe, if I get down on my knees and apologize, they might forgive me. But it's no big deal. Not to brag or anything, but finding another job won't be hard—I'm a great driver and a good worker. So I'm not worried about that, and neither should you be. What
I'm trying to say is that I don't have any regrets about being with you. These past ten days there's been a lot of bizarre stuff going on. Leeches falling from the sky, Colonel Sanders popping up out of thin air, hot sex with this drop-dead-gorgeous philosophy major, swiping the entrance stone from that shrine.... A lifetime of weird stuff packed into ten days. Like we've been doing test runs on a roller coaster or something."
Hoshino stopped here, thinking how to go on. "But you know what, Gramps?"
"Yes?"
"The most amazing thing of all has been you, Mr. Nakata. You changed my life. These past ten days, I don't know—things look different to me now. Stuff I never would've given a second glance before seems different. Like music, for instance—music I used to think was boring really gets to me now. I feel like I've gotta tell somebody about this or bust, somebody who'll understand what I've gone through. Nothing like this ever happened to me before. And it's all because of you. I've started to see the world through your eyes. Not everything, mind you. I like how you look at life, so that's why it happened. That's why I've stayed with you through thick and thin, why I couldn't leave you. It's been one of the most meaningful times I've ever had in my life. So there's no need for you to be thanking me—not that I mind it. I should be thanking you. All I'm trying to say is you've done me a lot of good, Mr. Nakata. Do you know what I'm saying?"
But Nakata wasn't listening anymore. His eyes were shut, his breathing regular as he slept.
"What a happy-go-lucky guy," Hoshino said, and sighed.
Hoshino carried the old man in his arms up to the apartment and put him to bed.
He took off Nakata's shoes but left his clothes on, and covered him with a light comforter. Nakata squirmed a bit, then settled down as usual, on his back facing the ceiling. His breathing was quiet and he was still.
Bet we're in for another three-day sleep marathon, Hoshino thought to himself.
But that's not how things turned out. Before noon the next day, Wednesday, Mr. Nakata was dead. He died peacefully in his sleep. His face was as calm as always, and he looked like he was just sleeping—only not breathing. Hoshino shook the old man's shoulders and called out his name, but there was no mistaking it—he was dead. Hoshino checked his pulse—nothing—and even put a hand mirror near his mouth, but it didn't cloud up. He'd stopped breathing completely. In this world, at least, he was never going to wake up again.
Alone in the room with the corpse, Hoshino noticed how, very gradually, all sounds disappeared. How the real sounds around him steadily lost their reality.
Meaningful sounds all ended up as silence. And the silence grew, deeper and deeper, like silt on the bottom of the sea. It accumulated at his feet, reached up to his waist, then up to his chest. He watched as the layers of silence rose up higher and higher. He sat down on the sofa and gazed at Nakata's face, trying to accept the fact that he was really gone. It took him a long time to accept it. As he sat there the air began to feel strangely heavy and he could no longer tell if his thoughts and feelings were really his. But there were a few things he started to understand.
Maybe death would take Nakata back to the way he used to be. When he was alive, he was always good old Nakata, a not-so-bright, cat-talking old man. Maybe death was the only road back to being the "normal Nakata" he'd always talked about.
"Hey, Gramps," Hoshino said. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but if you gotta die, this isn't such a bad way to go."
Nakata had passed away calmly in his sleep, most likely not thinking of anything.
His face was peaceful, with no signs of suffering, regret, or confusion. Very Nakata-like, Hoshino concluded. But what his life had really meant, Hoshino had no idea. Not that anybody's life had more clear-cut meaning to it. What's really important for people, what really has dignity, is how they die. Compared to that, he thought, how you lived doesn't amount to much. Still, how you live determines how you die. These thoughts ran through his head as he stared at the face of the dead old man.
But one critical thing remained. Someone had to close up the entrance stone.
Nakata had finished everything he'd set out to do except that. The stone was right there, at Hoshino's feet, and he knew that when the time came he had to roll it over and shut up the entrance. But Nakata had warned him that if you mishandled it, the stone could be very dangerous. There had to be a right way of turning the stone over—but also a wrong way. If you just powered it over, that could screw up the entire world.
"I can't do anything about your having died, Gramps, but you've left me in a real bind here," Hoshino said, addressing the corpse, which of course didn't respond.
There was also the question of what to do with the body. The normal response would be to ring up the police or the hospital and have them take it. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world would have done exactly that, and Hoshino wanted to. But the police were hunting for Nakata in connection with that murder case, and getting in touch with the authorities at this point would definitely put Hoshino in a precarious position.
The police would haul him off and grill him for hours. Explaining everything that had happened was the last thing he wanted to do, plus there was the fact that he was no fan of law enforcement. If he could avoid having anything to do with cops, so much the better.
And how the hell do I explain this apartment? he wondered.
An old man dressed up like Colonel Sanders lent us the place. Said he'd prepared it specially for us and that we could use it as long as we liked. Would the police really buy that? Colonel Sanders? Is he with the U.S. army? No, you know—the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy. You must've seen their billboards, right, detective? Yeah, that's the guy—glasses, white goatee.... He was a pimp working the back alleys of Takamatsu. He got a girl for me. Explain stuff like that and the cops would call him an idiot and give him a swift punch to the head. Cops, Hoshino concluded, not for the first time in his life, are just gangsters who get paid by the state.
He let out a deep sigh.
What I've got to do, he thought, is get out of here right now, as far away as I can.
I can make an anonymous call to the cops from a pay phone at the station. Give them the address here, say that somebody's died. Then hop a train back to Nagoya. They'll never connect me to the case. The old man died a natural death, so the cops won't launch some investigation. They'll hand over the body to his relatives and there'll be a simple funeral, end of story. Then I'll go to my company, bow and scrape in front of the president: It'll never happen again, I swear. I'll work hard from now on. Whatever it takes to get my old job back.
He started packing, cramming a change of clothes in his bag. He put on his Chunichi Dragons cap, pulling his ponytail through the opening in back, and his dark green sunglasses. Thirsty, he got a Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator. As he leaned back against the fridge and drank, he noticed the round stone next to the sofa. He went into the bedroom and looked at Nakata's corpse one more time. He still didn't look like he was dead. He looked like he was quietly breathing, and Hoshino half expected him to suddenly sit up and say, Mr. Hoshino, it's all a mistake. Nakata's not really dead! But he didn't. Nakata was most definitely deceased. There weren't going to be any miracles.
The old man had already crossed the great divide.
Pepsi in hand, Hoshino stood there, shaking his head. I can't just go off and leave the stone behind, he thought. If I did, Mr. Nakata won't be able to truly rest in peace. He was such a conscientious type, always making sure things were done just right. And he would've finished this final task, if his batteries hadn't run out. Hoshino crushed the empty aluminum can and tossed it in the trash. Still thirsty, he went back into the kitchen and popped open another Pepsi.
Mr. Nakata told me how he wanted, if only one time, to be able to read, Hoshino remembered. He said he wanted to go to a library and be able to choose any book and read it. But he died before he could make that dream come true. Maybe now that he's dead he's gone on to another world, where he's become a normal Nakata,
and can read.
As long as he was in this world, though, he never could. In fact, his final act on earth was quite the opposite—burning up writing. Sending all those words on the pages off into the void. Kind of ironic, when you think about it. That being the case, though, Hoshino thought, I need to fulfill his final wish. I've got to close the entrance. I wasn't able to take him to the movies, or the aquarium—so it's the least I can do for him, now that he's gone.
He drained his second can of Pepsi, went over to the sofa, crouched down, and tried lifting the stone. It wasn't so heavy. Not exactly light, either, but it didn't take all that much to lift it up. About as heavy as when he and Colonel Sanders had stolen it from the shrine. About as heavy as the kind of stones used to weigh down pickles as they ferment. That means right now it's just a stone, Hoshino thought. When the stone's acting as an entrance, it's so heavy you have to kill yourself to pick it up. But when it's light like this, it's just an ordinary stone. Something extraordinary has to happen first, for the stone to become as heavy as it did and change into the entrance stone. Like lightning striking all over town or something...
Hoshino went to the window, opened the curtain, and gazed up at the sky from the veranda. The sky was the same as the day before, a mass of drab gray clouds. But it didn't look like it was going to rain, much less thunder. He perked up his ears and sniffed the air, but everything seemed the same as yesterday. Steady as she goes seemed to be today's theme for the world.
"Hey, Gramps," he said aloud to the dead man. "Guess I just have to wait here with you for something out of the ordinary to happen. What the heck that could be, I have no idea. Or even when it might take place. Plus it's June, and your body's gonna decay and start to stink pretty soon. I know you don't want to hear this, but that's nature for you. And the more time that passes, and the later I get in touch with the cops, the worse it'll get for me. I mean, I'll do whatever I can, but I just wanted you to know the situation, okay?"
There was no reply, of course.
Hoshino wandered around the room. That's it! Colonel Sanders might get in touch!