The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

  “Maybe so,” I said. What if I did?

  The waitress brought over a glass of water for him, and he ordered an American coffee. Water it down, please, he told her.

  “I got a bad stomach. I really ought to quit smoking, too,” he said, fiddling with his cigarettes. He had that look that people with stomach troubles get when they talk about their stomach. “Anyway, like I was saying myself, for the same reason as you, I remember absolutely every last detail about the old days. It’s weird, I tell you. Because believe me, some things I’d like to forget. But the more I try to wipe them away, the more they pop into my mind. You know what it’s like when you’re trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake? It’s the same thing. I can’t figure it out. I remember things I couldn’t possibly have known. Sometimes it worries me, remembering the past in so much detail—how am I supposed to have room for what’s to come? My memory’s so sharp, it’s a nuisance.”

  I set my book facedown on the table and sipped my coffee.

  “Everything is vivid. The weather that day, the temperature, the smells. Just like now. It gets confusing, like where am I? Makes me wonder if things are only memories. Ever get that feeling?”

  I shook my head absently.

  “I remember you very well. I was walking by and saw you through the glass and I knew you right away. Did I bother you coming in here like this?”

  “No,” I said. “Still, you have to forgive me. I really don’t remember you.”

  “Nothing to forgive. I’m the one who barged in on you. If the time comes to remember, you’ll remember. That’s how it goes. Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.”

  “Do you suppose you could tell me your name? It’s simply not coming to me, and if I don’t remember it’s going to drive me crazy,” I said.

  “What’s a name, really?” he answered. “So if it comes, okay; if it doesn’t, that’s okay, too. Either way, no big deal, like I said. But if not remembering my name bugs you that much, pretend we’ve just met for the first time. No mental block that way.”

  His coffee arrived and he drank it slowly. I couldn’t get a handle at all on anything he was saying.

  “A lot of water has gone under the bridge. That phrase was in our high-school English textbook. Remember?”

  High school? Did I know this guy in high school?

  “I’m sure that’s how it went. The other day, I was standing on a bridge looking down, and suddenly that English phrase popped into my head. Clear as a bell. Like, sure, here’s how time passes.”

  He folded his arms and sat back deep in his chair, looking inscrutable. If that expression was meant to convey a particular meaning, it was lost on me. The guy’s expression-forming genes must have worn through in places.

  “Are you married?” he asked, out of nowhere.

  I nodded.

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got a son,” he said. “He’s four now and goes to nursery school.”

  End of conversation about children. We sat there, silent. I put a cigarette to my lips and he offered his lighter. A natural gesture. I generally don’t like other people lighting my cigarettes or pouring my drinks, but this time I hardly paid any mind. In fact, it was a while before I even realized he’d lit my cigarette.

  “What line of work you in?”

  “Business,” I said.

  His mouth fell open and the word formed a second or two later. “Business?”

  “Yeah. Nothing much to speak of.” I let it slide.

  He nodded and left it at that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about work. I just didn’t feel like starting in on what promised to be another escapade. I was tired, and I didn’t even know the guy’s name.

  “That surprises me. You in business. I wouldn’t have figured you for a businessman.”

  I smiled.

  “Used to be that all you did was read books,” he went on, with a bit of mystery.

  “Well, I still read a lot.” I forced a laugh.

  “Encyclopedias?”

  “Encyclopedias?”

  “Sure, you got an encyclopedia?”

  “No.” I shook my head, not comprehending.

  “You don’t read encyclopedias?”

  “Maybe if there’s one around,” I said. Of course, in the place I was living there wouldn’t be any room to have one around.

  “Actually, I sell encyclopedias,” he said.

  Oh, boy, an encyclopedia salesman. Half my curiosity about the guy immediately drained away. I took a sip of my now-lukewarm coffee and quietly set the cup back on its saucer.

  “You know, I wouldn’t mind having a set,” I said, “but unfortunately, I don’t have the money. No money at all. I’m only just now beginning to pay off my loans.”

  “Whoa there!” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not trying to sell you any encyclopedia or anything. Me, I may be broke, but I’m not that hard up. And anyway, the truth is, I don’t have to try to sell to Japanese. It’s part of the deal I have.”

  “Don’t have to sell to Japanese?”

  “Right, I specialize in Chinese. I only sell encyclopedias to Chinese. I go through the Tokyo directory picking out Chinese names. I make a list, then go through the list one by one. I don’t know who dreamed this scam up, but why not? Seems to work, saleswise. I ring the doorbell, I say, Ni hao, I hand them my card. After that, I’m in.”

  Suddenly there was a click in my head. This guy was that Chinese boy I’d known in high school.

  “Strange, huh, how someone ends up walking around selling encyclopedias to Chinese? I don’t understand it,” the guy said, seeming to distance himself from the whole thing. “Sure, I can remember each of the little circumstances leading up to it, but the big picture, you know, how it all comes together moving in this one direction, escapes me. I just looked up one day and here I was.”

  This guy and I had never been in the same class, nor, as I said, had we been on such close personal terms. But as near as I could place him, he hadn’t been your encyclopedia-salesman type, either. He seemed well bred, got better grades than I did. Girls liked him.

  “Things happen, eh? It’s a long, dark, dumb story. Nothing you’d want to hear,” he said.

  The line didn’t seem to demand a response, so I let it drop.

  “It’s not all my doing,” he picked up. “All sorts of things just piled on. But in the end, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

  I was thinking back to high school with this guy, but all I came up with was vague scenes. I seemed to recall sitting around a table at someone’s house, drinking beer and talking about music. Probably on a summer afternoon, but more like in a dream.

  “Wonder what made me want to say hello?” he asked, half to me, twirling the lighter around on the table. “Guess I kind of bothered you. Sorry about that.”

  “No bother at all,” I said. Honestly, it wasn’t.

  We both fell silent for a minute. Neither of us had anything to say. I finished my cigarette, he finished his coffee.

  “Well, guess I’ll be going,” he said, pocketing his cigarettes and lighter. Then he slid back his chair a bit. “Can’t be spending the whole day talking. Not when there’s things to sell, eh?”

  “You have a pamphlet?” I asked.

  “A pamphlet?”

  “About the encyclopedia.”

  “Oh, right,” he mumbled. “Not on me. You want to see one?”

  “Sure, just out of curiosity.”

  “I’ll send you one. Give me your address.”

  I tore out a page of my Filofax, wrote down my address, and handed it to him. He looked it over, folded it in quarters, and slipped it into his business-card case.

  “It’s a good encyclopedia, you know. I’m not just saying that because I sell them. Really, it’s well done. Lots of co
lor photos. Very handy. Sometimes I’ll thumb through the thing myself, and I never get bored.”

  “Someday, when my ship comes in, maybe I’ll buy one.”

  “That’d be nice,” he said, an election-poster smile returning to his face. “But by then, I’ll probably have done my time with encyclopedias. I mean, there’s only so many Chinese families to visit. Maybe I’ll have moved on to insurance for Chinese. Or funeral plots. What’s it really matter?”

  I wanted to say something. I would never see this guy again in my life. I wanted to say something to him about the Chinese, but what? Nothing came. So we parted with your usual good-byes.

  Even now, I still can’t think of anything to say.

  5.

  SSUPPOSING I FOUND myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.

  This occurs to me while I’m riding the Yamanote Line. I’m standing by the door, holding on to my ticket so I won’t lose it, gazing out the window at the buildings we pass. Our city, these streets, I don’t know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty façades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city. That’s when I remember what that Chinese girl said.

  This was never any place I was meant to be.

  I LOOK AT TOKYO and I think China.

  That’s how I’ve met my share of Chinese. I’ve read dozens of books on China, everything from the Annals to Red Star over China. I’ve wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It’s the China that sends messages just to me. It’s not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it’s another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it’s a part of myself that’s been cut off by the word China.

  I wander through China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi. My adventures take me to the waiting room of the nearby dentist, to the bank teller’s window. I can go everywhere and I don’t go anywhere.

  Tokyo—one day, as I ride the Yamanote Loop, all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. And I’ll be holding my ticket, watching it all. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn’t a place for me. That is how we will lose our speech, how our dreams will turn to mist. The way our adolescence, so tedious we worried it would last forever, evaporated.

  Misdiagnosis, as a psychiatrist might say, as it was with that Chinese girl. Maybe, in the end, our hopes were the wrong way around. But what am I, what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?

  Even so, I have packed into a trunk my faithful little outfielder’s pride. I sit on the stone steps by the harbor, and I wait for that slow boat to China. It is due to appear on the blank horizon. I am thinking about China, the shining roofs, the verdant fields.

  Let loss and destruction come my way. They are nothing to me. I am not afraid. Any more than the clean-up batter fears the inside fastball, any more than the committed revolutionary fears the garrote. If only, if only …

  Oh, friends, my friends, China is so far away.

  —translated by Alfred Birnbaum

  A DWARF CAME INTO my dream and asked me to dance.

  I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined. The dwarf was not offended but danced alone instead.

  He set a portable record player on the ground and danced to the music. Records were spread all around the player. I picked up a few from different spots in the pile. They comprised a genuine musical miscellany, as if the dwarf had chosen them with his eyes closed, grabbing whatever his hand happened to touch. And none of the records was in the right jacket. The dwarf would take half-played records off the turntable, throw them onto the pile without returning them to their jackets, lose track of which went with which, and afterward put records in jackets at random. There would be a Rolling Stones record in a Glenn Miller jacket, a recording of the Mitch Miller chorus in the jacket for Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé.

  But none of this confusion seemed to matter to the dwarf. As long as he could dance to whatever was playing, he was satisfied. At the moment, he was dancing to a Charlie Parker record that had been in a jacket labeled Great Selections for the Classical Guitar. His body whirled like a tornado, sucking up the wild flurry of notes that poured from Charlie Parker’s saxophone. Eating grapes, I watched him dance.

  The sweat poured out of him. Each swing of his head sent drops of sweat flying from his face; each wave of an arm shot streams of sweat from his fingertips. But nothing could stop him. When a record ended, I would set my bowl of grapes down and put on a new one. And on he would go.

  “You’re a great dancer,” I cried out to him. “You’re music itself.”

  “Thank you,” he answered with a hint of affectation.

  “Do you always go at it like this?”

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  Then the dwarf did a beautiful twirl on tiptoe, his soft, wavy hair flowing in the wind. I applauded. I had never seen such accomplished dancing in my life. The dwarf gave a respectful bow as the song ended. He stopped dancing and toweled himself down. The needle was clicking in the inner groove of the record. I lifted the tonearm and turned the player off. I put the record into the first empty jacket that came to hand.

  “I guess you haven’t got time to hear my story,” said the dwarf, glancing at me. “It’s a long one.”

  Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn’t that eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate at any moment.

  Rather than wait for me to answer, the dwarf snapped his fingers and started to speak. “I’m from the north country,” he said. “Up north, they don’t dance. Nobody knows how. They don’t even realize that it’s something you can do. But I wanted to dance. I wanted to stamp my feet and wave my arms, shake my head and spin around. Like this.”

  The dwarf stamped his feet, waved his arms, shook his head, and spun around. Each movement was simple enough in itself, but in combination the four produced an almost incredible beauty of motion, erupting from the dwarf’s body all at once, as when a globe of light bursts open.

  “I wanted to dance like this. And so I came south. I danced in the taverns. I became famous, and danced in the presence of the king. That was before the revolution, of course. Once the revolution broke out, the king passed away, as you know, and I was banished from the town to live in the forest.”

  The dwarf went to the middle of the clearing and began to dance again. I put a record on. It was an old Frank Sinatra record. The dwarf danced, singing “Night and Day” along with Sinatra. I pictured him dancing before the throne. Glittering chandeliers and beautiful ladies-in-waiting, exotic fruits and the long spears of the royal guard, portly eunuchs, the young king in jewel-bedecked robes, the dwarf drenched in sweat but dancing with unbroken concentration: As I imagined the gorgeous scene, I felt that at any moment the roar of the revolution’s cannon would echo from the distance.

  The dwarf went on dancing, and I ate my grapes. The sun set, covering the earth in the shadows of the forest. A huge black butterfly the size of a bird cut across the clearing and vanished into the depths of the forest. I felt the chill of the eveni
ng air. It was time for my dream to melt away, I knew.

  “I guess I have to go now,” I said to the dwarf.

  He stopped dancing and nodded in silence.

  “I enjoyed watching you dance,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime,” said the dwarf.

  “We may never meet again,” I said. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the dwarf. “We will meet again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ll be coming back here,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “You’ll live in the forest. And every day you’ll dance with me. You’ll become a really good dancer yourself before long.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, taken aback.

  “It’s been decided,” he answered. “No one has the power to change what has been decided. I know that you and I will meet again soon enough.”

  The dwarf looked right up at me as he spoke. The deepening darkness had turned him the deep blue of water at night.

  “Well, then,” he said. “Be seeing you.”

  He turned his back to me and began dancing again, alone.

  I WOKE UP ALONE. Facedown in bed, I was drenched in sweat. There was a bird outside my window. It seemed different from the bird I was used to seeing there.

  I washed my face with great care, shaved, put some bread in the toaster, and boiled water for coffee. I fed the cat, changed its litter, put on a necktie, and tied my shoes. Then I took a bus to the elephant factory.

  Needless to say, the manufacture of elephants is no easy matter. They’re big, first of all, and very complex. It’s not like making hairpins or colored pencils. The factory covers a huge area, and it consists of several buildings. Each building is big, too, and the sections are color-coded. Assigned to the ear section that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My helmet and pants were also yellow. All I did there was make ears. The month before, I had been assigned to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made heads. We moved from section to section each month, like Gypsies. It was company policy. That way, we could all form a complete picture of what an elephant looked like. No one was permitted to spend his whole life making just ears, say, or just toenails. The executives put together the chart that controlled our movements, and we followed the chart.