Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

The first thing I did was walk the stairs from the twenty-sixth floor down to the twenty-fourth and back a total of three times. The first time, I walked at a normal pace, the next two times much more slowly, carefully observing everything around me. I focused so as not to miss any detail. I concentrated so hard I barely blinked. Every event leaves traces behind, and my job was to tease these out. The problem was that the staircase had been thoroughly scrubbed. There wasn’t a scrap of litter to be found. Not a single stain or dent, no butts in the ashtray. Nothing.

  Going up and down the steps without a break had tired me out, so I rested for a minute on the sofa. It was covered in vinyl, and was not what you’d call high quality. But you had to admire the building management for having had the foresight to put a sofa there, where probably few people were likely ever to use it. Across from the sofa was the mirror. Its surface was spotless, and it was set at the perfect angle for the light shining in the window. I sat there for a time, gazing at my own reflection. Maybe on that Sunday that woman’s husband, the stockbroker, had taken a break here, too, and looked at his own reflection. At his own unshaven face.

  I had shaved, of course, but my hair was getting a bit long. The hair behind my ears curled up like the fur of a long-haired hunting dog that had just paddled his way across a river. I made a mental note to go to a barber. I noticed that the color of my trousers didn’t match my shoes. I’d had no luck in coming up with a pair of socks that matched my outfit, either. Nobody would think it strange if I finally got my act together and did a little laundry. Otherwise, though, my reflection was just that—the same old me. A forty-five-year-old bachelor who couldn’t care less about stocks or Buddhism.

  Come to think of it, Paul Gauguin had been a stockbroker, too. But he wanted to devote himself to painting, so one day he left his wife and kids for Tahiti. Wait a sec…I thought for a minute. No, Gauguin couldn’t have left his wallet behind, and if they’d had American Express cards back then I bet he would have taken one along. He was going all the way to Tahiti, after all. I can’t picture him saying to his wife, “Hey, honey, I’ll be back in a minute—make sure the pancakes are ready,” before he vanished. If you’re planning to disappear, you have to go about it in a systematic way.

  I stood up from the sofa, and as I made my way up the stairs again I started to mull over the notion of freshly made pancakes. I concentrated as fiercely as I could and tried to picture the scene: you’re a forty-year-old stockbroker, it’s Sunday morning, raining hard outside, and you’re on your way home to a stack of piping hot pancakes. The more I thought about it, the more it whetted my appetite. I’d had only one small apple since morning.

  Maybe I should zip over to Denny’s and dig into some pancakes, I thought. I’d passed a sign for Denny’s on the drive here. It was probably even close enough to walk. Not that Denny’s made great pancakes—the butter and the syrup weren’t up to my standards—but they would do. Truth be told, I’m a huge pancake fan. Saliva began to well up in my mouth. But I shook my head and tried to banish all pancake thoughts for the time being. I blew away all the clouds of illusion. Save the pancakes for later, I cautioned myself. You’ve still got work to do.

  “I should have asked her if her husband had any hobbies,” I said to myself. “Maybe he actually was into painting.”

  But that didn’t make sense—any guy who was so into painting he’d abandon his family wouldn’t be the type to play golf every Sunday. Can you imagine Gauguin or van Gogh or Picasso decked out in golf shoes, kneeling down on the tenth green, trying to read the putt? I couldn’t.

  I sat down on the sofa again and looked at my watch. It was one thirty-two. I shut my eyes and focused on a spot in my head. My mind a total blank, I gave myself up to the sands of time and let the flow take me wherever it wanted. Then I opened my eyes and looked at my watch. It was one fifty-seven. Twenty-five minutes had vanished somewhere. Not bad, I told myself. A pointless way of whittling away time. Not bad at all.

  I looked at the mirror again and saw my usual self there. I raised my right hand, and my reflection raised its left. I raised my left hand and it raised its right. I made as if to lower my right hand, then quickly lowered the left; my reflection made as if to lower its left hand, then quickly lowered its right. The way it should be. I got up from the sofa and walked the twenty-five flights down to the lobby.

  I visited the staircase every day around eleven a.m. The building super and I got pretty friendly (the boxes of chocolates I brought him didn’t hurt), and I was allowed to wander the building at will. All told, I made about two hundred round-trips between the twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth floors. When I got tired, I took a rest on the sofa, gazed out the window at the sky, checked my reflection in the mirror. I’d gone to the barber and got a good trim, done all my laundry, and was able to wear trousers and socks that actually matched, vastly reducing the chances that people would be whispering about me behind my back.

  No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a single clue, but I wasn’t discouraged. Locating a key clue was a lot like training an uncooperative animal. It requires patience and focus. Not to mention intuition.

  As I went to the apartment building every day, I discovered that there were other people who used the staircase. I’d find candy wrappers on the floor, a Marlboro butt in the ashtray, a discarded newspaper.

  One Sunday afternoon, I passed a man who was running up the stairs. A short guy in his thirties, with a serious look, in a green jogging outfit and Asics running shoes. He was wearing a large Casio watch.

  “Hi there,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” the man said, and pushed a button on his watch. He took a couple of deep breaths. His Nike tank top was sweaty at the chest.

  “Do you always run up and down these stairs?” I asked.

  “I do. Up to the thirty-second floor. Going down, though, I take the elevator. It’s dangerous to run down stairs.”

  “You do this every day?”

  “No, work keeps me too busy. I do a few round-trips on the weekends. If I get off work early, I sometimes run during the week.”

  “You live in this building?”

  “Sure,” the runner said. “On the seventeenth floor.”

  “I was wondering if you know Mr. Kurumizawa, who lives on the twenty-sixth floor?”

  “Mr. Kurumizawa?”

  “He’s a stockbroker, wears metal-framed Armani glasses, and always uses the stairs. Five feet eight, forty years old.”

  The runner gave it some thought. “Yeah, I do know that guy. I talked with him once. I pass him on the staircase sometimes when I’m running. I’ve seen him sitting on the sofa. He’s one of those guys who use the stairs because they hate the elevator, right?”

  “That’s the guy,” I replied. “Besides him, are there a lot of people who use the stairs every day?”

  “Yeah, there are,” he said. “Not that many, maybe, but there are a few you might call regulars. People who don’t like to take elevators. And there are two other people I’ve seen who run up the stairs like me. There’s no good jogging course around here, so we use the stairs. There’re also a few people who walk up the stairs for exercise. I think more people use these stairs than in most apartment buildings—they’re so well lit, spacious, and clean.”

  “Do you happen to know any of these people’s names?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” the runner said. “I just know their faces. We say hi as we pass each other, but I don’t know their names. This is a huge building.”

  “I see. Well, thanks for your time,” I said. “Sorry to keep you. And good luck with the jogging.”

  The man pressed the button on his stopwatch and resumed his jog.

  On Tuesday, as I was sitting on the sofa, an old man came down the stairs. Midseventies, I’d say, with gray hair and glasses. He was wearing sandals, gray slacks, and a long-sleeved shirt. His clothes were spotless and neatly ironed. The old man was tall and had good posture. He looked to me like a recently
retired elementary-school principal.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “Do you mind if I smoke here?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

  The old man sat down beside me and pulled a pack of Seven Stars from a trouser pocket. He struck a match, lit his cigarette, then blew out the match and placed it in the ashtray.

  “I live on the twenty-sixth floor,” he said, slowly exhaling smoke. “With my son and his wife. They say the place gets all smoky, so I always come here when I want to have a cigarette. Do you smoke?”

  “I quit twelve years ago,” I told him.

  “I should quit, too,” the old man said. “I smoke only a couple of cigarettes a day, so it shouldn’t be too hard. But, you know, going to the store to buy cigarettes, coming down here for a smoke—it helps pass the time. Gets me up and moving and keeps me from thinking too much.”

  “You keep smoking for your health is what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Exactly,” the old man said with a serious look.

  “You said you live on the twenty-sixth floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know Mr. Kurumizawa in 2609?”

  “I do. He wears glasses and works at Salomon Brothers, I believe?”

  “Merrill Lynch,” I corrected him.

  “That’s right—Merrill Lynch,” the old man said. “I’ve talked with him here. He uses this sofa sometimes.”

  “What does he do here?”

  “I don’t really know. He sort of just sits here, staring off into space. I don’t believe he smokes.”

  “He looks like he’s thinking about something?”

  “I’m not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We’re usually thinking all the time, aren’t we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn’t true, either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally actually have the opposite effect. At any rate, it’s a difficult question.”

  The old man took a deep drag on his cigarette.

  “Did Mr. Kurumizawa ever mention any problems at work or at home?” I asked.

  The old man shook his head and dropped his cigarette into the ashtray. “As I’m sure you know, water always picks the shortest route to flow down. Sometimes, though, the shortest route is actually formed by the water. The human thought process is a lot like that. At least, that’s my impression. But I haven’t answered your question. Mr. Kurumizawa and I never once talked about such deep things. We just chatted—about the weather, the apartment association’s regulations, things of that nature.”

  “I understand. Sorry to have taken up your time,” I said.

  “Sometimes we don’t need words,” the old man said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don’t you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s sort of like a Zen koan.”

  “That’s right,” the old man said, nodding, and stood up to go back to his apartment. “Take care now,” he said.

  “Goodbye,” I replied.

  After two the following Friday afternoon, as I made my way to the landing between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors, I found a little girl sitting on the sofa, gazing at herself in the mirror as she sang a song. She looked just old enough to have started elementary school. She was wearing a pink T-shirt and denim shorts, with a green daypack on her back and a hat in her lap.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said, and stopped singing.

  I wanted to sit down on the sofa beside her, but if anybody passed by and saw us they might think something strange was going on, so instead I leaned against the windowsill, keeping a distance between us.

  “Is school over?” I asked.

  “Don’t want to talk ’bout school,” she said in no uncertain terms.

  “Well, then, we won’t,” I said. “Do you live in this building?”

  “Yes,” she said. “On the twenty-seventh floor.”

  “You don’t walk all the way up, do you?”

  “The elevator’s stinky,” the girl said. “The elevator’s stinky, so I’m walking up to the twenty-seventh floor.” She looked at herself in the mirror and gave a big nod. “Not always, but sometimes.”

  “Don’t you get tired?”

  She didn’t answer. “You know something? Of all the mirrors in the staircase, this one reflects the best. It’s not at all like the mirrors in our apartment.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Take a look yourself,” the little girl said.

  I took a step forward, faced the mirror, and looked for a while at my reflection. And, sure enough, the image of me reflected in the mirror was a few degrees removed from what I was used to seeing. The me in the mirror looked plumper and happier. As if I’d just polished off a stack of hot pancakes.

  “Do you have a dog?” the little girl asked.

  “No, I don’t. I do have some tropical fish.”

  “Hmm,” she said. Her interest in tropical fish seemed nonexistent.

  “Do you like dogs?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond, but asked a different question. “Do you have any children?”

  “No, I don’t,” I answered.

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Mom says never talk to men who don’t have children. Mom says there’s a likely-hood they’re weird.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said, “though I do agree with your mom that you have to be careful when you talk to men you don’t know.”

  “But I don’t think you’re weird.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You’re not going to show me your weenie, are you?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t collect little girls’ underpants?”

  “No way.”

  “Do you collect anything?’

  I had to think about it. I did collect first editions of modern poetry, but bringing that up here wouldn’t get us anywhere. “No, I don’t really collect anything. How about you?”

  The girl gave it some thought, and shook her head a couple of times. “I don’t collect anything, either.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Hey, at Mister Donut which doughnut do you like the best?”

  “Old-fashioned,” I said right away.

  “I don’t know that one,” the girl said. “You know which ones I like? I like full moons and bunny whips.”

  “I’ve never heard of those.”

  “They’re the ones with fruit or sweet bean paste inside. They’re great. But Mom says if you eat sweets all the time you end up dumb, so she doesn’t buy them for me much.”

  “They sound delicious,” I said.

  “What are you doing here? I saw you yesterday,” the girl said.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “I imagine it’s like a door.”

  “A door?” the little girl repeated. “What kind of door? There are all shapes and colors of doors.”

  I thought about this. What sort of shape and color? Come to think of it, I’d never once thought about the shape and color of doors. “I don’t know. I wonder what shape and color it might be. Maybe it isn’t even a door.”

  “You mean maybe it’s an umbrella or something?”

  “An umbrella?” I said. “Hmm. No reason it can’t be an umbrella, I suppose.”

  “But umbrellas and doors are different shapes and sizes, and what they do is different.”

  “That’s right. But I’m sure I’ll recognize it when I see it. Like, ‘Hey! This is it!’ Whether it’s an umbrella, a door, or even a doughnut.”

  “Hmm,” the little girl said. “Ha
ve you been looking for a long time?”

  “For a long time. Since before you were born.”

  “Is that right?” the little girl said, staring at her palm for a while. “How ’bout I help you find it?”

  “I’d really like that,” I said.

  “So I should look for something, I don’t know what it is but it might be a door or an umbrella or a doughnut or an elephant?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But when you see it you’ll know that’s it.”

  “Sounds like fun,” she said. “But I have to go home now. I have a ballet lesson.”

  “See you later,” I said. “Thanks for talking with me.”

  “Tell me again the name of the doughnut you like?”

  “Old-fashioned.”

  Frowning, the girl repeated the words “old-fashioned” over and over. Then she stood and vanished up the stairs, singing all the while. I closed my eyes, gave myself up once more to the flow, letting time be pointlessly whittled away.

  One Saturday morning I got a call from my client.

  “My husband’s been found,” she began, skipping a greeting. “I was contacted by the police around noon yesterday. They found him sleeping on a bench in a waiting room in Sendai Station. He didn’t have any money on him, or ID, but after a while he remembered his name, address, and phone number. I flew to Sendai right away. It’s my husband, all right.”

  “But why would he be in Sendai?” I asked her.

  “He has no idea how he got there. He just woke up on a bench in Sendai Station with a railroad employee shaking his shoulder. How he got all the way to Sendai without any money, how he ate the last twenty days—he doesn’t remember a thing.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “He had on the same clothes as when he left our apartment. He had a beard and he’d lost more than twenty pounds. He’d also lost his glasses somewhere. I’m calling from a hospital in Sendai right now. They’re running some tests. CAT scan, X-rays, neurological exams. But his mind seems entirely fine, and nothing is physically wrong with him. But his memory’s gone. He remembers leaving his mother’s place and walking up the stairs, but, after that, nothing. Anyway, we should be able to come back to Tokyo tomorrow.”