The Wind (1) and Up Bird Chronicle (2)

  I swear with my hand on this room’s most sacred book, the alphabetized telephone directory, to speak the honest truth. Namely, that human existence is a hollow sham. And that, yes, salvation is possible. In the very beginning our hollowness was incomplete. It is we who completed it through unstinting effort, piling one struggle on top of another until every last shred of meaning was worn away. I have no intention of using my writing to detail each painstaking step in this erosion. That would be a waste of my time. Those of you who want to read about that should turn to Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. It is all written there.

  Hartfield’s staunch admiration for Jean-Christophe was based on two things: first, that it provided a strict chronological and detailed record of the life of a single man, from birth to death; and second, on top of that, that it was dreadfully long. In Hartfield’s cherished opinion, literature should be understood as information, quantifiable through graphs, chronological charts, and the like; its accuracy was therefore proportionate to its volume.

  Hartfield was always critical of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Its length, he wrote, could hardly be faulted. Yet its failure to incorporate what he termed Cosmic Ideas gave him an impression of incoherence. We can take “Cosmic Ideas” to mean “sterility.”

  Hartfield’s favorite book was A Dog of Flanders. “Can you believe,” he is quoted as saying, “that a dog would really give up its life for a painting?”

  —

  Hartfield was asked the following in a newspaper interview.

  “In your most recent novel, your hero, Waldo, dies twice on Mars and then once again on Venus. Isn’t that contradictory?”

  “Are you familiar,” Hartfield replied, “with how time flows in cosmic space?”

  “No,” the reporter answered. “But then no one else is, either.”

  “What would be the point of writing a novel about things everyone already knows?”

  *

  The short story “The Martian Wells” stands apart from Hartfield’s other works, setting the stage for the emergence of Ray Bradbury. I read it a long time ago, so many of the details escape me, but here is a rough summary:

  “The Martian Wells” tells the story of a young man who explores the many bottomless wells of the planet Mars. Although it is known that the wells were dug tens of thousands of years ago, strangely, the Martians took care to ensure that none had any contact with water. What, then, was their purpose? No one knows. The wells were all the Martians left behind—nothing else remains. No written language, no dwellings, no eating implements, no metal, no graves, no rockets, no cities, no vending machines, not even a seashell. Only the wells. Earthling scientists debate whether or not the Martians possessed anything that could be termed a civilization; yet their wells were so finely constructed that even after tens of thousands of years, they remain in perfect shape, not a brick out of place. Adventurers and scientific explorers attempt to investigate these wells. Yet those who use ropes retreat when they find the wells too deep and their side passages too extensive, while those who venture down without ropes never make it back to the surface.That is, until the young man appears. A cosmic wanderer, he has wearied of the vastness of outer space and desires only to die an anonymous death. As he descends into one of the wells, however, his state of mind improves, and a curious power takes hold of his body. About half a mile down, he finds a promising tunnel and decides to follow its twisting path to wherever it may lead. On his way, he loses track of time. His watch has stopped. He may have been walking for two hours or two days. Yet, embraced by the strange power, he feels neither hunger nor fatigue.

  Then, all of a sudden, he feels the light of the sun. His tunnel has intersected with another well. He scrambles to the surface. Sitting on the well’s rim, he gazes out over an unbroken wilderness, then up at the sun. Something has changed. The smell of the wind, the sun…the sun is above his head, yet it looks as if it were setting, a huge orange lump suspended in the sky.

  “In another 250,000 years the sun will explode,” a voice whispers. “Click…OFF! 250,000 years. Not so far away, you know.”

  It is the voice of the wind.

  “Don’t mind me. I’m just the wind. You can call me Martian if you wish. The word has a nice ring to it. Not that words mean anything to me.”

  “But you’re speaking.”

  “Me? No, the words are yours. I’m just sending hints to your mind.”

  “But what has happened to the sun?”

  “It got old. It’s dying. There’s nothing either of us can do about it.”

  “But it’s so sudden…”

  “Sudden? Hardly. One and a half billion years passed while you were down the well. As you earthlings say, time flies. The tunnels you passed through run along a time warp—that’s why we dug them as we did. They allow us to wander across time. From the creation of the universe to its final demise. We exist in a realm outside life and death. We are the wind.”

  “May I ask one question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What have you learned?”

  The air around him shook as the wind laughed. Then eternal silence descended once more to the Martian plain. The young man took a revolver from his pocket, placed it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger.

  33

  The telephone rang.

  “I’m back,” she said.

  “Can I see you?”

  “Are you free right now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then make it five o’clock, in front of the YWCA.”

  “What’re you doing at the YWCA?”

  “French class.”

  “French?”

  “Oui!”

  I hung up, took a shower, and had a beer. I was polishing it off when it began to pour outside.

  The rain had stopped by the time I reached the YWCA, yet the girls leaving the front gate regarded the sky with deep suspicion, opening and closing their umbrellas as they emerged. I pulled up across the street, cut the engine, and lit a cigarette. The gate’s rain-drenched columns loomed like a pair of black gravestones in a wasteland. An office building had been thrown up next to the dingy YWCA; its newness made it appear even cheaper, and an enormous sign advertising refrigerators was perched on its roof. It showed a thirtyish, apron-clad, anemic-looking woman stooping to open the door of her fridge with what appeared to be great delight, providing a view of its contents.

  The freezer compartment contained an ice tray, a quart of vanilla ice cream, and a package of frozen shrimp; the next section down held a carton of eggs, a box of butter, Camembert cheese, and a boneless ham; the level below that contained fish and chicken legs; the plastic crisper at the very bottom was stocked with tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus, lettuce, and grapefruit, while arranged on the inside of the door were three bottles each of cola and beer, and a carton of milk.

  I sat there leaning on the steering wheel, imagining the best order in which to polish off all that food. I was thwarted by the ice cream, far more than I could possibly manage, and the fatal absence of salad dressing.

  She came out of the gate just after five. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt, a white cotton miniskirt, and glasses. She looked as if she had aged three years in a week. Maybe it was the new hairstyle and the glasses.

  “Darn that rain!” she said, sliding into the passenger’s seat and nervously straightening her skirt.

  “You get wet?”

  “A little.”

  I grabbed the beach towel that had lain untouched on the backseat since my last trip to the swimming pool and handed it to her. She wiped the sweat from her face and patted her wet hair a number of times before handing it back to me.

  “I was having coffee just around the corner when the rain started. It was a real downpour.”

  “At least it cooled things off.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, sticking her arm out the window to test the temperature. There was a new awkwardness between us.

>   “Have a good trip?” I asked.

  “There was no trip. I lied to you.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  34

  I do tell lies on occasion. The last time was a year ago.

  Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues.

  All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value.

  Last year, my girlfriend and I were snuggling together in bed. We were famished.

  “Is there anything to eat?” I asked her.

  “Let me check.”

  She walked naked to the fridge, found some sausage, lettuce, and stale bread, and threw together two sandwiches, which she brought back to bed with two cups of instant coffee. It was a chilly night for October; by the time she slipped back under the covers she was as cold as a can of salmon.

  “No mustard, I’m afraid.”

  “Fine by me.”

  We curled up together and watched an old movie on TV as we munched on the sandwiches.

  It was The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  She was moved by the scene at the end, where they blow up the bridge.

  “Then why did they work so hard to build it?” she sighed, pointing at Alec Guinness, who was standing transfixed by the sight.

  “Out of pride.”

  “Mmph,” she responded, her cheeks stuffed with bread, as she contemplated the nature of human pride. Then, as always, I had no idea at all what was going on inside her head.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Enough to marry me?”

  “Right away?”

  “Someday. In the future.”

  “Sure I want to marry you.”

  “But you never said anything until I asked.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “How many kids do you want?”

  “Three.”

  “Boys? Girls?”

  “Two girls and a boy.”

  She took a swallow of coffee to wash down the rest of the bread, and looked me square in the eye.

  “LIAR!” she said.

  But she was wrong. I had lied only once.

  35

  The girl with nine fingers and I went to a small restaurant near the port for a simple meal, followed by a Bloody Mary and a bourbon.

  “Do you want to know what actually happened?” she asked.

  “You know, last year we dissected a cow.”

  “For real?”

  “When we cut open its abdomen all it contained was a single cud. So I put the cud in a plastic bag, took it home, and set it on my desk. Since then, whenever things get rough, I look at that lump of half-digested grass and wonder, why would a cow take such pains to regurgitate and chew such an unappetizing, pathetic thing over and over again?”

  She pursed her lips in a half smile and studied my face for a moment.

  “I get it,” she said. “I won’t say another word about it.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why do people die?”

  “Because of evolution. An individual organism can’t sustain the amount of energy that evolution requires; evolution has to work its way through generations. That’s just one theory, of course.”

  “So are we still evolving?”

  “Bit by bit.”

  “Why is that necessary?”

  “Opinions are divided on that, too. The only thing we know for sure is that the universe itself is evolving. We can’t tell if it’s heading in any particular direction, or if some greater force is intervening, but we do know that evolution is for real, and that we are only a part of the process.” I set my bourbon down and lit a cigarette.

  “No one knows where that energy comes from,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She stirred the ice in her drink with her finger and studied the white tablecloth.

  “I guess a hundred years after my death no one will remember I ever existed.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  —

  We left the restaurant and strolled along the quiet street past the row of warehouses. It was twilight, and everything was strangely vivid. As I walked beside her, I caught the faint fragrance of her shampoo. The wind that shook the leaves of the willow trees had a trace of the end of summer. We had not been walking long when she reached down and took my hand in hers. It was the hand with five fingers.

  “When are you going back to Tokyo?”

  “Next week. I’ve got to take a test.”

  She remained silent.

  “I’ll be back in the winter. Before Christmas. My birthday’s on December 24th.”

  She nodded. She seemed to have something else on her mind.

  “So you’re a Capricorn?” she said.

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “The same. January 10th.”

  “Not the best sign to be born under, huh? Like Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s true,” she said, adjusting her grip on my hand. “I think I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

  “We’ll meet again for sure.”

  She said nothing.

  The warehouses we passed looked quite old, the cracks between the bricks slick with green moss, the darkened windows high above covered by sturdy iron grating. A sign with the name of the trading company was attached to each of the rusted doors. Where the line of warehouses broke off, the full aroma of the ocean hit us and the row of willows abruptly ended, as if teeth had been knocked from their sockets. We continued across the overgrown tracks of the harbor line and onto the deserted pier, where we sat on the stone steps of one of the warehouses facing the ocean.

  The lights of the shipyard dock were straight ahead, illuminating a Greek freighter whose cargo had already been unloaded, judging from the high waterline. The freighter looked abandoned; its white-painted deck was rusted red by the salt wind, and its flanks were caked with barnacles, like a sick man’s scabs.

  We sat there for a very long time, just looking at the ocean, the evening sky, and the ship while the sea breeze blew through the trembling grass. As the dusk softened to night, a handful of stars began to twinkle above the dock.

  She was the one who broke the silence, pounding her left fist into her right hand again and again until the palm was quite red. She stared at it with dull eyes, as if she’d lost all interest all of a sudden.

  “I hate everybody.” The words hung in isolation.

  “Even me?”

  “Sorry.” Blushing, she returned her hands to her knees, as if trying to pull herself together. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Not so much anyway, right?”

  She nodded and gave me a faint smile. When she lit her cigarette I could see her hands tremble. The smoke rode the ocean wind past her hair and vanished in the darkness.

  “When I’m sitting alone, all these voices start speaking to me,” she said. “All sorts of people—ones I know, ones I don’t know, my father, my mother, my teachers.”

  I nodded.

  “Most of what they say is awful. They tell me to drop dead, or say really filthy things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I can’t repeat them.”

  She crushed the cigarette she had just lit with her leather sandal, and gently pressed her eyes with her fingertips.

  “Do you think I’m sick?”

  “It’s hard to say.” I shook my head to show her that I really had no idea. “If you’re worried you should go see a doctor.”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll be okay.”

  She lit a second cigarette and tried to laugh, but couldn’t pull it off.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told about this.”

&n
bsp; I took her hand in mine. It was quivering, and a clammy sweat oozed from between her fingers.

  “I really didn’t want to lie to you.”

  “I know.”

  We fell quiet again, listening to the soft sound of the waves lapping against the pier. Time went by, more time than I can recall.

  Before I knew it she was crying. I traced the line of her tear-soaked cheek with my finger and wrapped my arm around her shoulder.

  —

  It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.

  But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

  36

  It took us half an hour to walk to her apartment. The night was perfect, and crying had left her in a surprisingly good mood. We stopped at several shops on the way and bought a whole bunch of useless stuff—strawberry-flavored toothpaste, a gaudy beach towel, jigsaw puzzles made in Denmark, a six-color ballpoint pen, and so on—all of which we toted up the slope, pausing every so often to look back at the harbor.

  “Is it okay to leave your car back there?”

  “I’ll get it later.”

  “Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “No problem,” I said. We continued our stroll up the flag-stone path.

  “I really don’t want to be alone tonight,” she said to the flagstones.

  I nodded.

  “But you won’t be able to polish your father’s shoes.”

  “He can polish them himself every once in a while.”

  “But will he?”

  “Sure. After all, he’s a man of principle.”

  —

  It was a quiet night.

  She rolled over to face me, her nose touching my shoulder.

  “I’m cold.”