“Cold? It’s ninety degrees!”
“I don’t care. I’m still cold.”
I drew the terry-cloth blanket we had tossed near our feet over our shoulders and embraced her. She was shaking like a leaf.
“Are you feeling sick?”
She shook her head.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of everything. Aren’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
She fell quiet. She seemed to be weighing my answer in the palm of her hand.
“Do you want to have sex with me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can’t tonight. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, my arms still around her.
“I just had an operation.”
“An abortion?”
“Yes.”
Her arms slackened around my body, and her fingertips began to describe circles on my shoulder.
“It’s weird. I can’t remember a thing.”
“About what?”
“About him. The father. Can’t even remember what he looked like.”
I ran my palm over her hair.
“I thought I loved him. For a moment, anyway.” She paused. “Have you ever been in love?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you remember what she looked like?”
I tried to call to mind the faces of the three girls I had slept with, but, strange to say, I couldn’t form a clear picture of a single one.
“No,” I said.
“Weird, huh? Why is it like this?”
“Probably because it makes it easier.”
She nodded several times, her face lying sideways, in profile, on my bare chest.
“You know, if you’re too horny we can find another way to…”
“No. I’m okay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Her arms tightened again around my back. I could feel her breasts pressing against the pit of my stomach. I was dying for a beer.
“For years now, a lot of things haven’t gone right for me.”
“How many years?”
“Twelve, thirteen…since my dad got sick. I can’t remember a single thing before that. Everything is screwed up. It’s like I’m caught in an ill wind.”
“Winds change direction.”
“You really think so?”
“If you wait long enough, yes.”
She said nothing. Her silence was as dry as a desert; it swallowed my words, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.
“I tried to believe that,” she said. “But it never worked. I tried to fall in love, and I tried to hang on and be patient. But still…”
We didn’t attempt to talk after that, just held on to each other. She lay there motionless, as if fast asleep, her head on my chest, her lips grazing my nipple.
Her silence lasted a long time. A very long time. I lay there in a half-conscious state, gazing at the dark ceiling.
—
“Mama,” she murmured, as if in a dream. She was fast asleep, no question about it.
37
Hey, all you out there. How’re you feeling tonight? It’s Saturday evening again, time for your Greatest Hits Request Show, right here on NEB Radio. For the next two hours we’re going to play all your favorite tunes. But first, the end of summer is right around the corner. How about it, guys—was your summer a good one?
I’m gonna shake things up a little tonight, read you a letter I just received from one of our listeners before we start the music. So here goes.
How are you?
I love your program and look forward to it every week. Everything moves so fast—this fall marks my third year here in the hospital. How quickly time passes! Of course, the change of seasons doesn’t mean very much for someone like me, who lives in an air-conditioned room and can barely glimpse what lies outside her window, but all the same it fills me with delight to imagine the season passing and a new one coming to take its place.
I am seventeen years old, and for the past three years I have been unable to read a book or watch TV or go out for a walk…or get out of bed or roll over, for that matter. In fact, I am dictating this letter to my older sister, who has been with me all this time. She dropped out of university to look after me. Of course I am very grateful to her. What lying here in bed for the past three years has taught me is that, however miserable your situation, there is always something to learn, and that helps me go on living one day at a time.
I am told my illness is a neurological disease affecting the spinal cord. It’s a real downer, but of course there is hope for a cure. Still, the odds are low, just three percent…According to my doctor (a really cool guy), that is the figure one gets looking at the recovery rate of others with the same disease. He says this means my chances are better than a rookie pitching a no-hitter against the Tokyo Giants, but not as good as him shutting them out.
It terrifies me to think what might await me. So much so that sometimes I feel like screaming. To lie like a rock in this bed staring at the ceiling for decades—never reading books or walking in the wind, never being loved by anybody—and then to die alone, an old woman. It is just too sad. Sometimes, when I wake at three in the morning, I think I can hear my spine melting away bit by bit. It may not be my imagination, either.
No more unpleasantness. As my sister reminds me hundreds of times a day, I must try to think only positive thoughts. That and sleep well at night. Night is when the bad thoughts tend to visit.
The harbor is visible from my window. Every morning I picture how great it would be to get out of bed, walk down to the waterfront, and fill my lungs with ocean air. If I could do that even once, perhaps then I could begin to understand why the world is as it is. That’s the way I feel. And if I could gain even a shred of that understanding, maybe I could bear the idea of dying in this bed.
All the best.
She didn’t sign her name.
I received this letter a little after three o’clock yesterday afternoon, and read it while having my coffee in our studio lounge. In the evening, I walked down to the harbor after work and looked up at the mountains. Listen, my young friend, you say the harbor is visible from your window, so I should be able to see your window from the harbor too. So many lights were shining up there on the mountainside. I couldn’t tell which one of them was yours, of course. Some lights shone from poor people’s houses, some from the mansions of the wealthy. There were the lights of hotels, of schools, of companies. So many people, so many ways of life. I had never thought about it like that before. It brought tears to my eyes. I hadn’t cried in a dog’s age. But don’t get me wrong, my young friend. I wasn’t crying out of sympathy for you. No, it was for another reason. Listen, all of you, I’m only going to tell you once. This is it:
I love all you kids out there!
If you remember anything about this program in ten years—the songs I played for you, perhaps, or maybe even yours truly—then please remember that.
So here’s her request. Elvis Presley’s “Good Luck Charm.” When this song is over, I’ll go back for the next one hour and fifty minutes to being your canine stand-up comedian, as always.
Thanks for tuning in.
38
The evening I left for Tokyo, I stopped by J’s Bar, suitcase in hand. It was before opening time, but J let me in and gave me a beer.
“I’m taking the night bus,” I told him. He nodded several times as he peeled the potatoes for that evening.
“It’s going to be lonely around here with you gone. You and the Rat made quite a team,” he said, pointing at the print above the counter. “He’ll miss you too.”
“Yeah.”
“You like Tokyo?”
“One place or another—it’s all the same to me.”
“I guess so. I haven’t left this town once since the Tokyo Olympics.”
“You like it here?”
“As you said. It’s all the same.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d love to go back to China in a few years’ time, though. Not that I’ve ever been there, of course. Crosses my mind every time I go down to the harbor and see the ships.”
“My uncle died in China.”
“I see. All kinds of people died there. Still, we’re all brothers.”
—
J treated me to a few more rounds. Then to top it off, he gave me a plastic bag of fries fresh from the fryer to take with me.
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure. You guys grew up so fast. First time I saw you, you were in high school.”
I smiled and nodded.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Take care,” J said.
—
The daily proverb for August 26 on the calendar in J’s Bar read, “He who gives freely shall receive in kind.”
I bought my ticket for the night bus and sat down on a bench in the waiting area where I could see the town’s lights. As the night deepened, the lights went out one by one until at last only the streetlights and neon signs were left. A distant foghorn brought with it a faint sea breeze.
—
The bus door was flanked by two workers checking tickets and seat numbers. When I handed one my ticket, he announced, “Row 21, China.”
“China?” I asked.
“That means 21C. We go by the first letter. America is ‘A,’ Brazil is ‘B,’ China is ‘C,’ and Denmark is ‘D.’ If my partner doesn’t catch what I’m saying,” he said, pointing to the other guy who was ticking off the numbers, “then we’ve got a problem.”
Nodding, I boarded the bus, found my seat, and settled back to enjoy my still-warm fries.
—
All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything.
In that way, we live our lives.
39
This is the end of my story. Of course there is a sequel.
—
I’ve already turned twenty-nine, the Rat thirty. Getting up there. J’s Bar was renovated when they widened his street, turning it into a thoroughly chic café. Nevertheless, J still peels a bucket of potatoes every day and passes his time sipping beer and grumbling about how much better the customers were back in the old days.
I got married, and we live in Tokyo.
My wife and I are big Sam Peckinpah fans; we go see his films when they come out and then drink two beers each and feed popcorn to the pigeons in Hibiya Park on the way home. My favorite is Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, hers is Convoy. Of the films not by Peckinpah, I like Ashes and Diamonds, while she likes Mother Joan of the Angels, both Polish films. I guess your tastes come to resemble each other’s when you’ve been living together a long time.
If someone asked me if I was happy, I guess I would have to say yes. Dreams are like that in the end.
The Rat is still writing novels. He sends me photocopies each Christmas. Last year it was the story of a cook working at a mental hospital; the year before, it was about a comic band that modeled themselves on the Brothers Karamazov. As always, there is no sex, and none of the characters dies.
On the first page he always writes:
“Happy Birthday
and
White Christmas”
That’s because my birthday is December 24th.
—
I never saw the girl with four fingers on her left hand again. When I returned to the town that winter, she had quit the record shop and vacated her apartment. She vanished without a trace, swept away by the flow of time and its flood of people.
When I go back to the town in summer, I walk the same streets we did and sit on the stone steps of the same warehouse and look at the ocean. Sometimes I want to cry, but the tears don’t come. It’s that kind of a thing.
—
“California Girls” still sits in the corner of my record shelf. When summer comes I dust it off and play it over and over again. I sit back, have a beer, and think about California.
Adjacent to my record collection is my desk, above which hangs a dried hunk of mummified grass. The cud I took from that cow’s stomach.
My photograph of the French literature major who died got lost in the shuffle when I moved.
The Beach Boys came out with a new album, their first in a long time.
I wish they all could be
California girls…
40
To wrap up, let me talk a little more about Derek Hartfield.
Hartfield was born (in 1909) and raised in a small Ohio town. His father was a quiet man who worked as a telegraph opera- tor, his mother a plump woman who loved astrology and baked delicious cookies. Hartfield himself was a gloomy, friendless child who spent his free time absorbed in reading comic books and pulp magazines, and eating his mother’s cookies. After graduating from high school, he tried working at the post office in his hometown, but quickly gave that up to concentrate on what he had come to realize was the only path for him, his true vocation—writing novels.
He sold the fifth story he wrote to Weird Tales for the sum of twenty dollars in 1930. During the subsequent year he wrote at a clip of 70,000 words per month, a pace he raised to 100,000 words the following year and to 150,000 by the year before his death. Legend has it that he had to buy a new Remington typewriter every six months.
Almost everything Hartfield wrote was either an adventure or a horror story; his biggest hit, the series Waldo, Boy Adventurer, an inspired mixture of the two, totaled forty-two volumes. In the course of the series, Waldo died 3 times, killed 5,000 enemies, and made love to a total of 375 women, including one Martian. A number of the Waldo stories can be read in Japanese translation.
Hartfield detested so many things: post offices, high schools, publishing houses, carrots, women, dogs—the list is endless. There were only three things that he liked, namely, guns, cats, and his mother’s cookies. Apart from Paramount Pictures and the FBI testing center, he seems to have owned the most extensive gun collection in the United States. The only firearms he didn’t collect were anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. His most prized piece was a .38 revolver with a pearl-studded handle. He kept just a single bullet in its chamber, and liked to boast, “I’ll use this baby to revolve myself someday.”
Yet when his mother died in 1938, he traveled all the way to New York to jump off the Empire State Building, flattening himself like a frog on the pavement below.
—
Following his wishes, this quote from Nietzsche was carved on his gravestone:
How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?
MAY 1979
PINBALL, 1973
I enjoyed listening to stories about faraway places so much that it became a kind of sickness.
Back then, a good ten years ago now, I went around asking everyone to tell me about where they were born and raised. In those days there must have been a real shortage of good listeners, because everyone I approached talked to me with great enthusiasm. When rumor got out about what I was doing, people I’d never laid eyes on started showing up just to tell me their stories.
They rambled on and on about anything and everything, as if tossing stones into a dry well, then left feeling satisfied. Some told their stories in high spirits, others in anger. There were stories that felt clear and direct, and other stories that seemed pointless from start to finish. There were boring stories, sob stories, and tongue-in-cheek, off-the-wall stories. Always, though, I listened to what they had to say as attentively as I could.
For whatever reason, they all seemed compelled to get their story out—if not to a specific person, then to the world at large. It made me think of a cardboard box packed with monkeys. I would extract one monkey after another, carefully dust it off, slap it on the bum, and release it into the fields. I had no idea what happened to the monkeys after that. Probably they spent their lives gnawing on acorns somewhere, then died off. Such was their fate.
Truth be told, it was a laborious task,
with little reward. Had a contest been held that year to determine the World’s Best Listener, I would have won hands down. My prize? Probably a box of kitchen matches.
One of the people who talked to me came from Saturn, while another was from Venus. Their stories were especially memorable. I’ll quote the guy from Saturn first.
“It’s f-freezing cold…up there,” he groaned. “Just thinking about it drives me n-nuts.”
He belonged to the radical group occupying Building Nine on our campus. Their motto was “Action determines ideology, not vice versa.” What determined action was never made clear to me, though I asked. Building Nine was equipped with a water cooler, a telephone, a hot-water heater, and, on the second floor, a really cool music room with two thousand records and Altec A5 speakers. Compared to other occupied buildings on campus (like Building Eight, which stank like a bicycle racetrack toilet), it was paradise. The group shaved with hot water every morning, made all the long-distance phone calls they wanted in the afternoon, and gathered to listen to records in the evening. By the time autumn came around they were all classical music aficionados.
Is it true that they were blissing out to Vivaldi’s “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione” at full blast when the riot police’s third division came crashing into Building Nine that perfect cloudless November day? Whether fact or fiction, it endures as one of the more heartwarming legends revolving around the year that was 1969.
It was thus to the accompaniment of the distant strains of Haydn’s Piano Sonata in G minor that I picked my way under and through the tottering pile of benches that served as a barricade for Building Nine. For some reason it felt nostalgic, as if I were making my way up a camellia-covered slope to visit my girlfriend’s home in one of the nicer parts of the city. The guy from Saturn pushed their most comfortable chair in my direction, handed me a beaker filched from the science labs, and filled it with lukewarm beer.
“Gravity is a lot stronger up there,” he said, continuing his story. “I know a guy whose foot got crushed when he spat out a wad of chewing gum. It’s h-hell!”