Asleep

  Shiori was staring straight up through the moonlight. The whites of her eyes seemed to shine faintly, and it occurred to me that this was how she was feeling inside, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to say it. But I was sure it was true. I wanted to cry, I was so sure it was true.

  Already the summer was half over. Somehow it seemed wrong for my boyfriend to be wearing short sleeves, and I was shocked to see his bare arms when he arrived at the shop where we met. I guess I just always imagined him dressed in a sweater and coat, maybe because we'd met in winter. I'd always feel like we were out walking in a north wind when we got together. I thought I'd gone crazy. We'd be inside some shop with the air conditioner on full blast, it would be a stiflingly hot tropical night outdoors, yet deep down I'd still feel just the same.

  “Shall we go?” he said, staring at me, evidently puzzled by the fact that I'd simply followed him with my eyes until he was right in front of me. But I still sat there gazing up into his eyes, my mind completely blank.

  “Right, okay,” I said, and stood up.

  For some reason my mind always went blank the instant we met.

  “So what did you do today?” he asked vaguely, as he always did.

  “I was at home. . . . Oh, I ran into an old friend today.”

  “A guy? Maybe you had a date?” he said, grinning.

  So I replied, grinning back, “Yeah, it was a young guy.”

  “Was it really?” He sulked a little. There was only six years’ difference between us, but that gap bothered him strangely. I have a feeling that this was because my appearance was unusually childish, so much so that when I went out without makeup I'd sometimes be mistaken for a high school student. It was as if I hadn't aged at all since I left college. No doubt this had something to do with the way I lived.

  “You're free tonight?” I asked.

  He looked sadly into my eyes. “Actually I've got to go see some relatives,” he said, sounding very apologetic. “We'll just have dinner, okay?”

  “Relatives? Some of yours?”

  “No. My in-laws.”

  He no longer even tried to hide it from me. Maybe he'd realized that my instincts were just too good, that I could tell? My boyfriend had a wife.

  An unconscious wife, a wife who lay quietly asleep in the hospital.

  Winter was at its very coldest the first time he and I arranged to meet. We drove to the beach. It was the Sunday after I'd quit my job, and Mr. Iwanaga—he'd been one of my bosses at work—had asked me out on a date. I was more or less aware that he was married. It was a long, long day.

  Thinking back over everything now, I can see that some kind of major change was taking place inside me even then. Somewhere within the borders of that day I left behind the healthy young woman I'd been, and came on without her. Nothing had changed, not really, and yet before the day was over we found ourselves being dragged into the flow of some gigantic, dark, irresistible fate: the two of us together. And I'm not just talking about the sexual energy people feel when they fall in love. It was something much bigger than that, and it was something incredibly sad. A current so strong even our combined strength was powerless against it.

  But to tell the truth I was still feeling cheery then, I was bursting with energy, and we hadn't even kissed, and I adored him more than anyone else in the world. He was at the wheel, and we kept driving on and on along the road that traced the shore, and the ocean was beautiful, and as the waves rolled in the sunlight I felt this overwhelming energy surge up shimmering within me. I was as happy as I could be.

  We went down to the beach and walked a bit. The insides of my shoes quickly became filled with sand. But even so the breeze blowing in off the ocean felt good, the sunlight was soft. It was so cold that we couldn't stay out very long, and knowing this made the sound of the waves even more precious. Suddenly I remembered something. I bent my head back and gazed up into his face.

  “So what's your wife like, Mr. Iwanaga?” I asked teasingly.

  My boyfriend smiled wryly. “She's a vegetable.”

  This makes me sound completely unrepentant, I know, but whenever I think of that question of mine and his response I just burst out laughing.

  So what's your wife like? She's a vegetable.

  Of course at the time I couldn't laugh. I just opened my eyes very wide and said, “Huh?”

  “She got in a car accident and she's been in the hospital ever since. I guess it's been about a year. That's why I can go around on dates like this, you know, take a gal out on a Sunday.”

  He spoke brightly, pleasantly. He had one of his hands stuffed deep down in his pocket. I took hold of it and pulled it out. It felt very hot.

  “That can't be true,” I said, startled.

  “There's not much point in telling a lie like that, is there?”

  “No, I guess not.” I wrapped both his hands in mine. “Do you go visit her and take care of her and stuff? Is it very hard?”

  “Let's talk about something else,” he said, averting his eyes. “When a married man's having an affair you can be pretty sure he's showing up at dates with about a ton of stuff weighing down on him. That much is true even if his wife isn't a vegetable.”

  “Another tasteless joke,” I said.

  I raised one of his hands to my cheek, and the sound of the wind disappeared. The scent of winter rose to my nostrils. Off in the distance clouds glimmered over the ocean. They were melting into the sky, turning purple. The crash of the waves echoed faintly through his palm.

  “Let's go,” I said. “It's cold out here. Let's go get some tea.”

  I started to draw my hand away, perfectly naturally, but he squeezed it tightly in his, ever so tightly, just for a moment. I was surprised, and glanced up, and then I saw the color in his eyes—eyes that were deeper than the ocean, that could have been staring right into infinity—and it felt as if all kinds of things had become clear to me.

  For an instant I saw what was there between us in all its complexity, for an instant I understood: I knew everything about him, I saw the fantastic love that was growing up between us. And that's when I really started to love him. All at once the halfhearted attraction I'd felt for him changed—at that instant, as we stood with the ocean before us—into full-fledged, total love.

  I was the one who kept worrying about the time while we ate.

  “Shouldn't you be going?” I asked, then asked again about three more times. It occurred to me that not many relatives would come to pay a visit after eight o'clock at night.

  “Listen, if I say I have time, I have time,” he said, spinning the round Chinese-style lazy Susan farther than he needed to, smiling. “Eat! Eat! You might as well just stop worrying.”

  “I can't eat if you're spinning it.”

  The sight of all that food whirling by under my eyes, circling with such energy that it almost could have been a merry-go-round, made me giggle. A waiter standing some distance away glowered at us.

  “But really, it's okay. I'm driving there myself, and I'll be spending the night . . . besides, I've already told them that I'll be late because I have work. And they're also wonderful people. Really wonderful.”

  “That's what's so terrific about marriage,” I said. “All these wonderful people used to be strangers, and now they're your relatives. It's great.”

  “You're not being ironic, are you?” he said, looking uneasy.

  “Not at all,” I replied.

  And I wasn't. It's just that it was all so distant from me that I couldn't feel connected to it.

  “Is . . . I mean . . . was your wife a wonderful person, too?”

  Evidently there was no longer any possibility that she would wake up. According to my boyfriend, it was just a matter of talking things through now, of coming to grips with the situation.

  “Yes, she was a wonderful person. She was very well brought up, she had a nice crisp air about her, you know, and the smallest things moved her to tears. And she was always in a hurry, and she was a terrible
driver, and that's why she got into an accident. Is that enough? Do you think we could stop talking about her now?”

  “Okay.”

  This whole business with his wife didn't disturb me that much, and I'd told him that, but my boyfriend still hated talking about her—hated it with startling vehemence and consistency. I was drinking a sweet liqueur that tasted of apricot. I was starting to get drunk, but for some reason I wasn't at all sleepy. I was coming to see my boyfriend with increasing clarity as he sat there across the table from me. And I understood. None of us are born between the branches of trees. My boyfriend had parents, and his wife had parents, and I was sure that hers must be immersed in their grief. I thought of all the many hard facts that one has to deal with when one is drawn into sudden misfortune—the hospitals and the attendants, the expenses, the divorce, the family register, the decision to let the person die. . . . All this really exists.

  Sometimes I felt like bursting out and telling him that I understood all that. I wanted so badly to say it. Because I knew that he'd be shocked if I did, and that it would make him reconsider certain things. . . .

  So you want to be totally involved in all that stuff, right? You want to be there for your wife right up until the very end, and you want everyone to feel like they can rely on you. But you know you're not helping anyone. It's just that you'd never be able to forgive yourself if you left. You're a pretty cool guy, right, and you're going to keep doing whatever it takes so that you can go on thinking you're cool, and at the same time work things out so that your love for your wife fits in with all that. And then there's me. You know very well that I'm here watching you, and that even though none of this is any of my business I can still see how really cool you're being, and to tell the truth I can't accept that this is none of my business because I'm too nice, because it does hurt me—but of course you know that, too. The truth is that you're an extremely cold person. But even so—you can tell, right? That I just love this, the way you're dealing with things. . . . That I'm so crazy about it I can hardly stand it. Come to think of it, I guess maybe I've gotten swept up in all of this somehow, at some point, without noticing. Yeah, I guess I have.

  But every time my thoughts reached this point, every time, my desire to speak would vanish. And so we remained precisely as we were, making no waves, at a standstill. He and the others passed their nights and days talking through issues of life and death, lending support to one another, and I passed my days in silence, as if I were his mistress, and his wife went on sleeping.

  And all along, right from the first, a certain phrase had been spinning back and forth through my head. This love of ours isn't real. The feeling that these words evoked in me was like a premonition of something awful. The more exhausted my boyfriend became, the more he tried to keep me at a distance from reality. He never actually came out and said anything about this, so I'm sure that it was just an unconscious desire, but he tried his best to keep me from working, and he preferred it when I stayed in my apartment and lived life in silence, and when we met in town our meetings were like the shadow of a dream. He dressed me in beautiful clothes, and he liked it when I laughed and cried just a little, very softly. But then . . . no, I can't say that it was just him. I'd absorbed the darkness of his exhaustion—I liked acting that way. There was something lonely between us, and we protected that ever so carefully in the way we loved each other. And so things were fine as they were. For the time being this was fine.

  * * *

  “Shall I drive you home?” he said.

  We'd left the restaurant and were heading for the parking lot.

  “I love it when you say stuff like that. Sort of extra polite,” I replied.

  “No doubt you do, Mademoiselle.” He laughed.

  “I don't think you got quite the right nuance that time.” I laughed too. “Anyway, it's still early, I can just walk home. It'll help me sober up.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  His voice sounded a little glum. In the darkness his face looked terribly thin. The long lines of cars were bathed in a silence so profound it was awful. It felt as if the parking lot were at the very edge of the world. Things always felt a little like this when we parted.

  “God, you really look old right now,” I teased.

  He answered as he climbed into his car, looking very earnest. “I'm so worn out I really don't know what's what anymore, you know? But I guess it's just a matter of time now. That's a really rude thing to say, and it'd be just as rude no matter who I was saying it to. But at the moment I can't even think about what's coming, I just can't.”

  He said this almost as if he were talking to himself.

  “Right, I understand. It's okay.” I said this very quickly and then shut the car door. I didn't want to hear any more. I started walking down the dark night road, and he steered his car up alongside me and then drove on, tapping the horn. I laughed and waved, but suddenly I started feeling like the Cheshire cat, as if there were nothing left of me now but my grinning face, hanging there in the darkness.

  I've always liked getting drunk and walking the streets at night, whether there's a lover walking at my side or not. Moonlight fills the entire town, the shadows of buildings stretch on forever. The rhythm of my footsteps and the distant rumble of the cars merge. At midnight the sky over the city is strangely bright, and you feel a little uneasy, but at the same time perfectly safe.

  Though my feet were taking me back toward home, I was dimly aware that my true self wasn't at all inclined to go back. No, I knew what I wanted. I was heading for Shiori's apartment. On nights like this I always stopped by her apartment. Not the one she used for her work, but the one she lived in. I don't know if it's because I was drunk or because I'd been sleeping too much, but I could sense that the line separating recollection from reality was starting to become dangerously thin. There was something a little odd about me lately. Even now I couldn't help feeling that if I just stepped into the elevator in her building and went up to her apartment I'd be certain to find her at home.

  Yes, often after my boyfriend and I had been out on one of these vaguely lonely, listless dates, I'd go see Shiori.

  * * *

  Come to think of it, being with him always made me feel incredibly lonely. I don't know why, but for some reason I'd always end up having these vaguely melancholy thoughts circling through my head—the kind of thoughts that you have when you're gazing up at the moon, full of longing, watching as it sinks deeper and deeper into the blue depths of night, as it shimmers way off in the distance. The sort of thoughts that make you feel like you've been dyed completely blue, all the way to the tips of your toenails.

  Being with him turned me into a woman who didn't speak.

  I tried to explain this to Shiori, but no matter how valiantly I tried I just couldn't convince her that someone as talkative as I am could ever be quiet. But it was true. Whenever we got together I would listen to him talk, and then I'd nod, and that was it. The rhythm of my nods and the rhythm of his talking would become so exquisitely well synchronized that it almost became a sort of art. And that's when I started getting the feeling that what I was doing was a lot like Shiori's job, like lying next to people as they slept.

  I tried to tell her about this once. “I don't know why, but for some reason it always feels like the middle of winter when we're in bed together.”

  “Oh, I know. I know!” Shiori said.

  “What do you mean you know? How can you know when you haven't even heard what I'm saying?” I said, getting angry.

  “Hey, I'm a pro,” Shiori said, narrowing her eyes. “You see, people like him think everything that's not formally declared is basically nil.”

  “Nil?”

  “That's why he's so nervous. As soon as he starts thinking of the two of you as a unit, his situation becomes extremely dangerous, you see? So for the time being you're nil, you're being held in reserve, the pause button is pressed down, you're stacked in the stockroom, you're life's special bonus.”

&n
bsp; “I . . . I think I know what you mean, but . . . what's this ‘nil'? What kind of a place does he put me in, you know? Inside him?”

  “Somewhere completely dark,” Shiori said.

  And then she laughed.

  I really did want to see Shiori. And so, though there was obviously no way we could meet, I kept plodding aimlessly along, taking a long way home. Somehow this made me feel like I was getting closer to her. The numbers of people on the street gradually decreased. The night seemed to thicken.

  The last time I went to Shiori's apartment was about two weeks before she died, and that ended up being the last time I ever saw her. It was another one of these occasions where I'd started feeling a little down and had just dropped by, without any warning, in the middle of the night. Shiori was there, and she welcomed me very cheerfully, very brightly.

  But what I saw when I walked in caught me by surprise. There was an enormous hammock hanging in the very center of the living room.

  “What's that for?” I asked, pointing up at it from where I was standing in the entryway. “Do you keep stuff in there or something?”

  “No, it's just that I lie in that really fluffy bed when I'm working, you know? Except that I've got to stay awake, right?” Her voice was the same as always—high and soft and fragile. “So now the second I get into any sort of bed my eyes pop wide open. I thought I might be able to sleep in this thing, you know, since there's no way to get comfortable in it. . . .”

  It made sense once she'd explained it. And so, thinking that every job has its own problems, I walked in and sat down on the sofa.