I cannot say a thing. I look down at my shoes.
“When the beasts die, the Gatekeeper cuts off their heads,” my shadow goes on, unrelenting. “By then, their skulls are indelibly etched with self. These skulls are scraped and buried for a full year in the ground to leech away their energy, then taken to the Library stacks, where they sit until the Dreamreader’s hands release the last glimmers of mind into the air. That’s what ‘old dreams’ are. Dreamreading is a task for newcomers to the Town—people whose shadows have not yet died. The Dreamreader reads each spark of self into the air, where it diffuses and dissipates. You are a lightning rod; your task is to ground. Do you see?”
“I believe I do.”
“When the Dreamreader’s shadow dies, he ceases to be Dreamreader and becomes one with the Town. This is how it’s possible for the Town to maintain its perfection. All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious. Is that the way it should be? Did you ever think to look at things from the viewpoint of the beasts and shadows and Woodsfolk?”
I have been staring at the candle flame for so long, my head hurts. I remove my black glasses and rub my watering eyes.
“I will be here tomorrow at three,” I vow. “All is as you say. This is no place for me.”
33
Rainy-Day Laundry, Car Rental, Bob Dylan
ON a rainy Sunday, the four driers at the laundromat were bound to be occupied. So it came as no surprise to find four different-colored plastic shopping bags hanging on the door handles. There were three women in the place: one, a late-thirtyish housewife; the other two, coeds from the nearby girls’ dorm. The housewife was sitting in a folding chair, staring blankly at her clothes going around and around. It could have been a TV. The coeds were poring over a copy of JJ. All three of them glanced up at me the moment I entered, but quickly found their wash and their magazine more interesting.
I took a seat to wait my turn, Lufthansa bag on my knee. It looked like I was next in line. Great. A guy can only watch somebody else’s clothes revolve for so long. Especially on his last day.
I sprawled out in the chair and gazed off into space. The laundromat had that particular detergent and clothes-drying smell. Contrary to my expectations, none of the driers opened up. There are unwritten rules about laundromats and “The watched drier never stops” is one of them. From where I sat, the clothes looked perfectly dry, but the drums didn’t know when to quit.
I longed to close my eyes and sleep, but I didn’t want to miss my turn. I wished I’d brought something to read. It would keep me awake and make the time go faster. But then again, did I really want to make the time go faster? Better I should make the time go slow—but in a laundromat?
Thinking about time was torment. Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can’t even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.
But what to do after leaving the laundromat? First, buy some clothes. Proper clothes. No time for alterations, so forget the tweed suit. Make do with chinos, a blazer, shirt, and tie. Add a light coat. Perfectly acceptable attire for any restaurant. That’s an hour and a half. Which put me at three o’clock. I’d have three hours until I was supposed to pick her up.
Hmm. What to do for three hours? Mind impeded by sleepiness and fatigue, mind blocked.
The drier on the right ground to a halt. The housewife and college girls glanced at the machine, but none made a move. The drier was mine. In keeping with the unwritten rules of laundromats, I removed the warm mass of clothes and stuffed them into the bag hanging on the handle. After which I dumped in my Lufthansa bagful of wet clothes, fed the machine some coins, and returned to my chair. Twelve-fifty by the clock.
The housewife and college girls stared at me. Then they stared at the laundry in the drier. Then they stared at me again. So I stared at the laundry in the drier myself. That was when I noticed my small load dancing in plain view for all to see—all of it the girl’s things, all of it pink. Better get out of here, find something else to do for twenty minutes.
The fine rain of the morning didn’t let up, a subtle message to the world. I opened my umbrella and walked. Through the quiet residential area to a street lined with shops. Barber, bakery, surf shop—a surf shop in Setagaya?—tobacconist, patisserie, video shop, cleaners. Which had a sign outside, “All Clothes 10% Off on Rainy Days.” Interesting logic. Inside the shop the bald, dour-looking proprietor was pressing a shirt. Electrical cables dangled from the ceiling, a thick growth of vines running to the presses and irons. An honest-to-goodness, neighborhood cleaners, where all work was done on premises. Good to know about. I bet they didn’t staple number tags—which I hate—to your shirttails. I never send my shirts to the cleaners for that very reason.
On the front stoop of the cleaners sat a few potted plants. I knew I knew what they were, but I couldn’t identify a single one. Rain dripped from the eaves into the dark potting soil on which a lonely snail rolled along single-mindedly. I felt useless. I’d lived thirty-five years in this world and couldn’t come up with the name of one lousy ornamental. There was a lot I could learn from a local cleaners.
I returned to the tobacconists and bought a pack of Lark Extra Longs. I’d quit smoking five years before, but one pack of cigarettes on the last day of my life wasn’t going to kill me. I lit up. The cigarette felt foreign. I slowly drew in the smoke and slowly exhaled.
I moved on to the patisserie, where I bought four gateaux. They had such difficult French names that once they were in the box, I forgot what I’d selected. I’d taken French in university, but apparently it had gone down the tubes. The girl behind the counter was prim, but bad at tying ribbons. Inexcusable.
The video shop next door was one I’d patronized a few times. Something called Hard Times was on the twenty-seven-inch monitor at the entrance. Charles Bronson was a bare-knuckle boxer, James Coburn his manager. I stepped inside and asked to see the fight scene again.
The woman behind the counter looked bored. I offered her one of the gateaux while Bronson battered a bald-headed opponent. The ringside crowd expected the brute to win, but they didn’t know that Bronson never loses. I got up to leave.
“Why don’t you stick around and watch the whole thing?” invited Mrs. Video Shop.
I’d really have liked to, I told her, if it weren’t for the things I had in the drier. I cast an eye at my watch. One-twenty-five. The drier had already stopped.
She made one last pitch. “Three classic Hitchcock pictures coming in next week.”
I retraced my steps to the laundromat. Which, I was pleased to find, was empty. Just the wash awaiting my return at the bottom of the drier. I stuffed the wash into my bag and headed home.
The chubby girl didn’t hear me come in and was fast asleep on the bed. I placed her clothes by the pillow and the cake box on the night stand. The thought of crawling into bed was appealing, but it was not to be.
I went into the kitchen. Faucet, gas water heater, ventilator fan, gas oven, various assorted pots and pans, refrigerator and toaster and cupboard and knife rack, a big Brooke Bond tea canister, rice cooker, and everything else that goes into the single word “kitchen.” Such order composed this world.
I was married when I first moved in to the apartment. Eight years ago, but even then I often sat at this table alone, reading in the middle of the night. My wife was such a sound sleeper, I sometimes worried if she was still alive. And in my own imperfect way, I loved her.
That meant I’d lived for eight years in this dump. Three of us had moved in together: me and my wife and the cat. My wife was the first to move out, next was the cat. Now it was my turn. I grabbed a saucer for an ashtray and lit a cigarette. I drank a glass of water. Eight years. I could hardly believe it.
Well, it didn’t matter. Everything would be over soon enough. Eternal life would set in. Immortality.
I was bound for the world of immortality. That’s
what the Professor said. The End of the World was not death but a transposition. I would be myself. I would be reunited with what I had already lost and was now losing.
Well, maybe so. No, probably so. The old man had to know what he was talking about. If he said it was an undying world, then undying it was. Yet, none of the Professor’s words had the ring of reality. They were abstractions, vague shadows of contingency. I mean, I already was myself, wasn’t I? And how would someone who’s immortal perceive his immortality? What was this about unicorns and a high wall? The Wizard of Oz had to be more plausible.
So what had I lost? I’d lost many things. Maybe a whole college chapbook full, all noted down in tiny script. Things that hadn’t seemed so important when I let go of them. Things that brought me sorrow later, although the opposite was also true. People and places and feelings kept slipping away from me.
Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn’t be any other self but my self. Could I?
Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I’d move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I’d meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically—whether actually more realistic or not—I’d tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.
Was that so depressing?
Who knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoyevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me.
A world of immortality? I might actually create a new self. I could become happy, or at least less miserable. And dare I say it, I could become a better person. But that had nothing to do with me now. That would be another self. For now, I was an immutable, historical fact.
All the same, I had little choice but to proceed on the hypothesis of my life ending in another twenty-two hours. So I was going to die—I told myself for convenience sake. That was more like me, if I did say so myself. Which, I supposed, was some comfort.
I put out my cigarette and went to the bedroom. I looked at the chubby girl’s sleeping face. I went through my pockets to check that I had everything I needed for this farewell scene. What did I really need? Almost nothing anymore. Wallet and credit cards and … was there anything else? The apartment key was of no use, neither were my car keys, nor my Calcutec ID. Didn’t need my address book, didn’t need a knife. Not even for laughs.
I took the subway to Ginza and bought a new set of clothes at Paul Stuart, paying the bill with American Express. I looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad. The combination of the navy blazer with burnt orange shirt did smack of yuppie ad exec, but better that than troglodyte.
It was still raining, but I was tired of looking at clothes, so I passed on the coat and instead went to a beer hall. It was almost empty. They were playing a Bruckner symphony. I couldn’t tell which number, but who can? I ordered a draft and some oysters on the half shell.
I squeezed lemon over the oysters and ate them in clockwise order, the Bruckner romantic in the background. The giant wall-clock read five before three, the dial supporting two lions which spun around the mainspring. Bruckner came to an end, and the music shifted into Ravel’s Bolero.
I ordered a second draft, when I was hit by the long overdue urge to relieve myself. And piss I did. How could one bladder hold so much? I was in no particular hurry, so I kept going for a whole two minutes—with Bolero building to its enormous crescendo. It made me feel as if I could piss forever.
Afterwards I could have sworn I’d been reborn.
I washed my hands, looked at my face in the warped mirror, then returned to my beer at the table and lit up a cigarette.
Time seemed to stand still, although in fact the lions had gone around one hundred eighty degrees and it was now ten after three. I leaned one elbow on the table and considered the clock. Watching the hands of a clock advance is a meaningless way to spend time, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
The hands of the clock reached half past three, so I paid up and left. The rain had virtually stopped during this beer interlude, so I left my umbrella behind too. Things weren’t looking so bad. The weather had brightened up, so why not me?
With the umbrella gone, I felt lighter. I felt like moving on. Preferably to somewhere with a lot of people. I went to the Sony Building, where I jostled with Arab tourists ogling the lineup of state-of-the-art TV monitors, then went underground to the Marunouchi Line and headed for Shinjuku. I apparently fell asleep the instant I took a seat, because the next thing I knew I was there.
Exiting through the wicket, I suddenly remembered the skull and shuffled data I’d stashed at the station baggage-check a couple days before. The skull made no difference now and I didn’t have my claim stub, but I had nothing better to do, so I found myself at the counter, pleading with the clerk to let me have my bag.
“Did you look for your ticket carefully?” asked the clerk.
I had, I told him.
“What’s your bag look like?”
“A blue Nike sports bag,” I said.
“What’s the Nike trademark look like?”
I asked for a piece of paper and a pencil, drew a squashed boomerang and wrote Nike above it. The clerk looked at it dubiously and wandered off down the aisles of shelves. Presently he returned with my bag.
“This it?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Got any ID?”
My prize retrieved, it suddenly struck me, you don’t go out to dinner lugging gym gear. Instead of carrying it around, I decided to rent a car and throw the bag nonchalantly in the back seat. Make that a smart European car. Not that I was such a fan of European cars, but it seemed to me that this very important day of my life merited riding around in a nice car.
I checked the yellow pages and jotted down the numbers of four car-rental dealerships in the Shinjuku area. None had any European cars. Sundays were high-demand days and they never had foreign cars to begin with. The last dealership had a Toyota Carina 1800 GT Twin-Cam Turbo and a Toyota Mark II. Both new, both with car stereos. I said I’d take the Carina. I didn’t have a crease of an idea what either car looked like.
Having done that, I went to a record shop and bought a few cassettes. Johnny Mathis’s Greatest Hits, Zubin Mehta conducting Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Kenny Burrell’s Stormy Sunday, Popular Ellington, Trevor Pinnock on the harpsichord playing the Brandenburg Concertos, and a Bob Dylan tape with Like A Rolling Stone. Mix’n’match. I wanted to cover the bases—how was I to know what kind of music would go with a Carina 1800 GT Twin-Cam Turbo?
I bagged the tapes and headed for the car rental lot. The driver’s seat of the Carina 1800 GT seemed like the cabin of a space shuttle compared to my regular tin toy. I popped the Bob Dylan tape in the deck, and Watching the River Flow came on while I tested each switch on the dashboard control panel.
The nice lady who’d served me came out of the office and came over to the car to ask if anything was wrong. She smiled a clean, fresh TV-commercial smile.
No problems, I told her, I was just checking everything before hitting the road.
“Very good,” she said. Her smile reminded me of a girl I’d known in high school. Neat and clear-headed, she married a Kakumaru radical, had two children, then disappeared. Who would have guessed a sweet seventeen-year-old, J. D. Salinger- and George Harrison-fan of a girl would go through such changes.
“I only wish all drivers were as careful as you. It would make our job a lot easier,” she said. “These computerized panels in the latest models are pretty complicated.”
“Which button do I push to find the square root of 185?” I asked.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the next model,” she laughed. “Say, isn’t that Bob Dylan you have on?”
“Right,” I said. Positively 4th Street.
“I can tell Bob Dylan in an instant,” she said.
“Because his harmonica’s worse than Stevie Wonder?”
She laughed again. Nice to know I could still make someone laugh.
“No, I really like his voice,” she said. “It’s like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”
After all the volumes that have been written about Dylan, I had yet to come across such a perfect description. She blushed when I told her that.
“Oh, I don’t know. That’s just what he sounds like to me.”
“I never expected someone as young as you to know Bob Dylan.”
“I like old music. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix—you know.”
“We should get together sometime,” I told her.
She smiled, cocking her head slightly. Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men. I thanked her and started the car. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. I felt better for having met her.
The digital dashboard clock read four-forty-two. The sunless city sky was edging toward dusk as I headed home, crawling through the congested streets. This was not your usual rainy Sunday congestion; a green sports compact had slammed into an eight-ton truck carrying a load of concrete blocks. Traffic was at a standstill. The sportscar looked like a cardboard box someone sat on. Several raincoated cops stood around as the wrecker crew cleaned up the debris.
It took forever to get by the accident site, but there was still plenty of time before the appointed hour, so I smoked and kept listening to Dylan. Like A Rolling Stone. I began to hum along.