“We know how you feel,” one of them replied. “But it’s been too hard on you.”
There was nothing sentimental in their words—they could have been telling me there wasn’t enough snow, so forget about skiing this winter. I gave up and drank my coffee.
10
On Wednesday, the Rat went to bed at 9 p.m. but woke at 11. He couldn’t go back to sleep. Something was squeezing his head, as if he were wearing a hat two sizes too small. An awful sensation. Giving up, he went to the kitchen in his pajamas and gulped a glass of ice water. The woman was on his mind. He stood at his window and looked down at the flashing beacon, tracing the black pier back to where her apartment stood. He remembered the pounding of the waves in the darkness, and the sound of sand whipping against her window. He was fed up with himself, and his failure to make the slightest progress, no matter how hard he tried to think things through.
Since they had begun seeing each other, the Rat’s life had turned into an endless repetition—each week was identical to the last. He had lost his sense of time. What was the date? The month? October, perhaps? He had no idea…He and the woman got together every Saturday, and he passed the next three days, from Sunday through Tuesday, mooning over that meeting. Thursday, Friday, and half of Saturday were devoted to planning their upcoming weekend. Only Wednesday didn’t fit in; it was lost in space. Unable to move forward or backward. Wednesday…
Ten minutes and a cigarette later, the Rat stripped off his pajamas, put on a shirt, flung a windbreaker over it, and headed down to the parking garage. It was past midnight and the town was virtually deserted, the road pitch black except for an occasional streetlight. J’s Bar was already closed, but the Rat pulled the shutters up halfway, slipped underneath, and made his way down the stairs.
J had just finished hanging a dozen washed towels over the chairs to dry, and was sitting by himself at the bar, smoking a cigarette.
“Mind if I grab a beer?”
“Go ahead,” J said. He sounded in a good mood.
This was the first time the Rat had visited J’s Bar after hours. All the lights were off except those above the bar, and the fan and air conditioner were silent. The odor absorbed by the walls and floor hovered over the dark room.
The Rat cracked open a can of beer from the fridge behind the counter and poured half in a glass. The air felt stagnant, as if divided into several distinct layers. It was tepid and moist.
“Sorry,” the Rat apologized. “I didn’t plan to come tonight. But I woke up all of a sudden and really felt like a beer. I’ll just drink it and split.”
“Take your time,” J said, folding his newspaper and brushing cigarette ash from his trousers. “If you’re hungry, I’ll fix you something.”
“No thanks, don’t bother. Beer is fine.”
The beer really hit the spot. The Rat drained the glass in a single gulp and sighed. Then he poured the rest, watching the bubbles until they settled down.
“Care to join me?”
“Thanks, but I can’t drink,” J said, with a somewhat embarrassed smile.
“I didn’t know that.”
“My body can’t handle alcohol. That’s the way I’m built.”
The Rat nodded several times, then turned his attention to his beer. It always amazed him how little he knew about this Chinese bartender. But then, J was a mystery to everyone. He never talked about himself, and when someone asked he gave only the most noncommittal answers, as if cautiously opening a desk drawer.
Everybody knew that J was a Chinese national who had been born in China, hardly unusual in a town with so many foreigners. The Rat’s high school soccer team had two Chinese students on the starting squad, one forward and one defenseman. No one gave a damn.
“Some music will cheer things up,” J said, tossing him the key to the jukebox. The Rat chose five tunes and came back to the counter and his beer. An old Wayne Newton song filled the room.
“Sure I’m not keeping you?” the Rat asked.
“No problem. It’s not like anyone’s waiting for me.”
“You live alone?”
“Yeah.”
The Rat pulled a smoke from his pocket, smoothed the wrinkles, and lit it.
“I do have a cat, though,” J added. “She’s getting on, but she’s still someone to talk to.”
“You talk to it?”
J nodded several times. “Yeah, we’ve been together so long we know each other pretty well. I can tell what she’s feeling, and she’s the same with me.”
Cigarette between his lips, the Rat grunted, impressed. The jukebox clicked, and Wayne Newton gave way to “MacArthur Park.”
“Hey, what do cats think about, anyway?”
“Lots of stuff. Just like you and me.”
“Poor things,” the Rat said, laughing.
J laughed too. “She’s one-armed,” J added after a long pause, rubbing the countertop with his fingertips.
“One-armed?” the Rat asked.
“The cat. She’s a cripple. Four winters ago she came back one day all covered in blood. Her paw was smashed so bad it looked like strawberry jam.”
The Rat set his beer down on the counter and looked square at J. “What happened?”
“Beats me. I thought maybe she’d been run over. But it was worse than that. A car tire can’t do that to a paw. It looked as if it had been crushed with a vise. Flat as a pancake. Must have been a prank.”
“No way!” The Rat shook his head several times. “Who in hell would do that to a cat?”
J tapped his unfiltered cigarette on the counter and lit it.
“You’re right,” he said. “No point smashing a cat’s paw like that. She’s a sweet cat, too, no trouble to anyone. So what’s to be gained from mangling her paw? It was a senseless, evil thing to do. Still, evil like that is everywhere in this world, mountains of it. I can’t understand it, you can’t understand it. But it’s there, no question. You could say we’re surrounded by it.”
With his eyes on his beer glass, the Rat shook his head one more time. “Well, it doesn’t make sense to me.”
“That’s the best way to handle it. Admit that you don’t understand and leave it at that.”
J blew a cloud of white smoke into the empty room. He watched it swirl until it disappeared.
The two were quiet for a long time. The Rat studied his glass and thought his muddled thoughts, while J went on rubbing the countertop with his fingers. The last song came on the jukebox. A soul ballad, sung in falsetto.
“You know, J,” the Rat said, still looking at his glass, “I’ve lived twenty-five years, and I don’t feel like I’ve learned a damn thing.”
J studied his fingertips for a minute. “I’ve been around for forty-five,” he said, “and all I know is this. We can learn from anything if we put in the effort. Right down to the most everyday, commonplace thing. I read somewhere that how we shave in the morning has its own philosophy, too. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive.”
The Rat nodded and drained the final inch of beer from his glass. The jukebox clicked off as the last record came to an end, returning the room to silence.
“I think I get what you mean,” said the Rat. He was about to say, “But,” then swallowed the word. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. The Rat smiled and stood up. “Thanks for the beer,” he said. “Can I give you a lift home?”
“No, that’s okay. I live nearby, and anyway, I like walking.”
“Well, good night, then. Give my best to your cat.”
“Thanks.”
—
The Rat walked up the steps. The fragrance of cold autumn air greeted him. He tapped each of the trees lining the street with his fist as he made his way to the parking lot, where he stared for a while at the meter before getting into the car. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned the car toward the ocean, stopping at a spot on the seaside road that gave him a view of the building where the woman lived. Lights were still burning in half of the apartments. He could see shadows
moving behind some of the curtains.
The woman’s windows were dark. Not even her bedside light was on. She must have fallen asleep already. A terrible loneliness assailed the Rat.
The sound of the waves seemed to be growing stronger. He felt as though they might overwhelm the breakwater at any moment and sweep him away, car and all, to some faraway place. He switched on the radio, clasped his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, and listened to the disc jockey’s chatter. His body was so tired that those unnameable feelings had left him, having found no place to take hold. Relieved, the Rat rolled his now empty head to the side and half-listened to the waves and the DJ’s voice as sleep slowly overtook him.
11
The twins woke me up on Thursday morning. Fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but what the heck. I shaved, drank my coffee, and pored over the morning paper, so fresh from the press that its ink looked ready to smear my hands.
“We have a favor to ask,” said one of the twins.
“Think you can borrow a car on Sunday?” said the other.
“I guess so,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“The reservoir.”
“The reservoir?”
They nodded.
“What are you planning to do at the reservoir?”
“Hold a funeral.”
“Who for?”
“The switch panel, of course.”
“I see,” I said. And went back to my paper.
—
Unfortunately, a fine rain was falling Sunday morning. Not that I knew what sort of weather befitted a switch panel’s funeral. The twins never mentioned the rain, so neither did I.
I had borrowed my business partner’s sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle. “Got a girl now, huh?” he asked. “Mm,” I answered. His son had smeared milk chocolate or something all over the backseat, leaving what looked like bloodstains from a gunfight. Not a single one of his cassette tapes was any good, so we spent the entire hour-and-a-half trip in silence. The rain grew stronger, then weaker, then stronger, then weaker again, at regular intervals. A yawn-inducing sort of rain. The only constant was the steady whoosh of oncoming traffic speeding by on the paved road.
One twin sat in the front passenger seat, the other in the backseat, her arms around a thermos bottle and the shopping bag that held the switch panel. Their faces were grave, appropriate for a funeral. I matched my mood to theirs. We maintained that solemnity even when we stopped to eat roasted corn. All that broke the silence was the sound of kernels popping off the cob. We gnawed the cobs bare, tossed them away, and resumed our drive.
The area turned out to be populated by hordes of dogs, who milled around in the rain like a school of yellowtail in an aquarium. As a result, I spent a lot of time leaning on the horn. The dogs showed no interest whatsoever in either the rain or our car. In fact, they looked downright pissed off by my honking, although they scampered out of the way. It was impossible, of course, for them to avoid the rain. They were all soaked right down to their butt holes—some resembled the otter in Balzac’s story, others reminded me of meditating Buddhist priests.
One of the twins inserted a cigarette between my lips and lit it. Then she placed her little hand on the inner thigh of my cotton trousers and moved it up and down a few times. It seemed less a caress than an attempt to verify something.
The rain looked as if it would continue forever. October rains are like that—they just go on and on until every last thing is soaked. The ground was a swamp. It was a chilly, unforgiving world: the trees, the highway, the fields, the cars, the houses, and the dogs, all were drenched.
We climbed a stretch of mountain road, drove through a thick stand of trees, and there was the reservoir. Because of the rain there wasn’t a soul around. Raindrops rippled the water’s surface as far as the eye could see. The sight of the reservoir in the rain moved me in a way I hadn’t expected. We pulled up next to the water and sat there in the car, drinking coffee from the thermos and munching the cookies the twins had bought. There were three kinds—buttercream, coffee cream, and maple—that we divided up into equal groups to give everyone a fair share.
All the while the rain continued to fall on the reservoir. It made very little noise. About as much as if you dropped shredded newspaper on a thick carpet. The kind of rain you find in a Claude Lelouch film.
We ate the cookies, drank two cups of coffee each, and brushed the crumbs off our laps at exactly the same moment. No one spoke.
“Shall we?” one of the twins said at last.
The other nodded.
I put out my cigarette.
Leaving our umbrellas behind, we picked up the switch panel and marched to the end of the dead-end bridge that jutted out into the water. The reservoir had been created by damming a river: its banks followed an unnatural curve, the water lapping halfway up the mountainside. The color of the water suggested an eerie depth. Falling drops made fine ripples on the surface.
One of the twins took the switch panel from the paper bag and handed it to me. In the rain it looked even more pathetic than usual.
“Now say a prayer,” one of the twins said.
“A prayer?” I cried in surprise.
“It’s a funeral. There’s got to be a prayer.”
“But I’m not ready,” I said. “I don’t know any prayers by heart.”
“Any old prayer is all right,” one said.
“It’s just a formality,” added the other.
I stood there, soaked from head to toenails, searching for something appropriate to say. The twins’ eyes traveled back and forth between the switch panel and me. They were obviously worried.
“The obligation of philosophy,” I began, quoting Kant, “is to dispel all illusions borne of misunderstanding…Rest in peace, ye switch panel, at the bottom of this reservoir.”
“Now throw it in.”
“Huh?”
“The switch panel!”
I drew my right arm all the way back and hurled the switch panel at a forty-five-degree angle into the air as hard as I could. It described a perfect arc as it flew through the rain, landing with a splash on the water’s surface. The ripples spread slowly until they reached our feet.
“What a beautiful prayer!”
“Did you make it up yourself?”
“You bet,” I said.
The three of us huddled together like dripping dogs, looking out over the reservoir.
“How deep is it?” one asked.
“Really, really deep,” I answered.
“Do you think there are fish?” asked the other.
“Ponds always have fish.”
Seen from a distance, the three of us must have looked like an elegant memorial.
12
That Thursday morning, I wore my first sweater of the fall. It was your everyday gray Shetland fraying under the arms, but it felt great. I shaved with more care than usual and put on thick cotton pants and a pair of scuffed desert boots from my shoe cabinet. On my feet, the boots looked like a couple of trained puppies sitting at attention. The twins scoured the apartment to gather my cigarettes, my lighter, my wallet, and my commuter pass.
At the office, I sat at my desk drinking the coffee the girl had brought and sharpening my six pencils. The room was filled with the smell of wool and pencil shavings.
I ate lunch out, and then went back to the pet shop to play with the Abyssinian cats. There were two now—when I stuck the tip of my little finger through the tiny crack in the window they competed with each other to jump up and bite it.
This time, the guy running the shop let me hold them. Their fur was as soft as the finest cashmere, and the tips of their noses against my lips were cold.
“They really like people,” the clerk explained.
Returning the cats to their cage, I thanked him and purchased a useless box of cat food, which he wrapped for me. As I left the shop, cat food in hand, the two cats stared at me, as if I were a fragment from their dreams.
Back at the o
ffice, the girl picked the hair off my sweater.
“I was playing with cats,” I explained. I felt some sort of excuse was called for.
“Your sweater’s coming apart under the arm.”
“I know. It happened last year. I was holding up an armored car and caught it on the rearview mirror.”
“Take it off,” she said, not amused.
I took it off, and she began to mend the armpit with black yarn, her long legs crossed over the side of the chair. In the meantime I returned to my desk, sharpened that afternoon’s quota of pencils, and set back to work. When all was said and done, at least no one could fault my work. I was the kind of guy who finished a set amount in a set amount of time, in as conscientious a way as possible. I bet they would have loved me at Auschwitz. The problem, as I saw it, was that the places I fit in were all out of date. Not much I could do about that, though. I mean, it wasn’t necessary to go back as far as Auschwitz and twin-seater torpedo planes. When was the last time you heard a Jan and Dean song, or saw a miniskirt? Or a woman in garters and a girdle, for that matter?
When the hands on the clock pointed to three, the girl reappeared and set my regular hot tea and three cookies on my desk. She had done a fabulous job darning my sweater.
“I’d like to ask your advice about something, if you have time.”
“Sure,” I said, biting into a cookie.
“It’s about our trip in November,” she said. “What do you think of Hokkaido?”
From the beginning, the three of us had set November as the month for our annual office trip.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Then it’s decided. Do you think there’ll be bears?”
“Bears?” I said. “No, I think they’re hibernating by then.”
She seemed relieved. “By the way, are you free for dinner? I know a great lobster restaurant near here.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
—
The restaurant was on a quiet residential street a five-minute cab ride away. No sooner had we taken our seats than a black-garbed waiter glided across the palm mat carpet to lay menus the size of paddleboards on our table. We ordered two beers to start.