“Why don’t you eat something? You must be hungry.” He answered with a slight nod. As Midori had done, I cranked his bed up and started feeding him, alternating spoonfuls of vegetable jelly and boiled fish. It took an incredibly long time to get through half his food, at which point he gave his head a little shake to signal that he had had enough. The movement was almost imperceptible; it apparently hurt him to make larger movements.
“What about the fruit?” I asked him.
, he said. I wiped the corners of his mouth with a towel and made the bed level again before putting the dishes out in the corridor.
“Was that good?” I asked him.
, he answered.
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “It looked pretty bad.” Midori’s father could not seem to decide whether to open his eyes further or close them as he lay there silently, staring at me. I wondered if he knew who I was. He seemed more relaxed when alone with me than when Midori was present. He might have been mistaking me for someone else. Or at least that was how I preferred to think of it.
“Beautiful day out there,” I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. “It’s autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It’s exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays—wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don’t mind ironing at all. There’s a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I’m pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn’t do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day.
“That’s O.K., though. I’ll wake up early and take care of it tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’ve got nothing else to do on a Sunday.
“After I do my laundry tomorrow morning and hang it out to dry, I’ll go to my ten o’clock class. It’s the one I’m in with Midori, History of Drama. I’m working on Euripides. Are you familiar with Euripides? He was an ancient Greek—one of the ‘Big Three’ of Greek tragedy along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. He supposedly died when a dog bit him in Macedonia, but not everybody buys this. Anyhow, that’s Euripides. I like Sophocles better, but I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I really can’t say which is better.
“What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple—a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him.
“But think about it—what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that? Anyhow, that’s History of Drama. This is more or less the kind of stuff we study at the university.”
Midori’s father said nothing, but he kept his vacant eyes on me the whole time I was talking. Of course, I couldn’t tell from those eyes whether he understood anything at all I was saying.
“Peace,” I said.
After all that talk, I felt starved. I had had next to nothing for breakfast and had eaten only half my lunch. Now I was sorry I hadn’t done a better job on lunch, but feeling sorry wasn’t going to do me any good. I looked in a cabinet for something to eat, but found only a can of nori, some Vicks cough drops, and soy sauce. The paper bag was still there with cucumbers and grapefruit.
“I’m going to eat some cucumbers if you don’t mind,” I said to Midori’s father. He didn’t answer. I washed three cucumbers in the sink and dribbled a little soy sauce into a dish. Then I wrapped a cucumber in nori, dipped it in soy sauce, and gobbled it down.
“Mmm, great!” I said to Midori’s father. “Fresh, simple, smells like life. Really good cucumbers. A far more sensible food than kiwifruit.”
I polished off one cucumber and attacked the next. The sickroom echoed with the lilt of cucumbers crunching. Only after finishing the second whole cucumber was I ready to take a break. I boiled some water on the gas burner in the hall and made myself some tea.
“Would you like something to drink? Water? Juice?” I asked Midori’s father.
, he said.
“Great,” I said with a smile. “With nori?”
He gave a little nod. I cranked the bed up again. Then I cut a bite-size piece of cucumber, wrapped it with a strip of nori, stabbed the combination with a toothpick, dipped it into soy sauce, and delivered it to the patient’s waiting mouth. With almost no change of expression, Midori’s father crunched down on the piece again and again and finally swallowed it.
“How was that? Good, huh?”
, he said
“It’s good when food tastes good,” I said. “It’s kind of like proof you’re alive.”
He ended up eating the entire cucumber. When he had finished it, he wanted water, so I gave him a drink from the bottle. A few minutes later, he said he needed to pee, so I took the urine jar from under the bed and held it by the tip of his penis. Afterward I emptied the jar into the toilet and washed it out. Then I went back to the sickroom and finished my tea.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
, he said.
“Hurts?”
, he said with a slight frown.
“Well, no wonder, you’ve just had an operation. Of course, I’ve never had one, so I don’t know what it’s like.”
, he said.
“Ticket? What ticket?”
, he said. ,.
I had no idea what he was talking about, and just kept quiet. He stayed silent for a time, too. Then he seemed to say He opened his eyes wide and looked at me hard. I guessed that he was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was.
, he said. ,.
“Ueno Station?”
He gave a little nod.
I tried to summarize what he was getting at: “Ticket, Midori, please, Ueno Station,” but I had no idea what it meant. I assumed his mind was muddled, but compared with before his eyes now had a terrible clarity. He raised the arm that was free of the intravenous contraption and stretched it toward me. This must have been a major effort for him, the way the hand trembled in midair. I stood and grasped his frail, wrinkled hand. He returned my grasp with what little strength he could muster and said again, ,.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of the ticket and Midori, too.” He let his hand drop back on the bed and closed his eyes. Then, with a loud rush of breath, he fell asleep. I checked to make sure he was still alive, then went out to boil more water for tea. As I was sipping the hot liquid, I realized that I had developed a kind of liking for this little man on the verge of death.
THE WIFE OF THE OTHER PATIENT came back a few minutes later and asked if everything was O.K. I assured her it was. Her husband, too, was sound asleep, breathing deeply.
Midori came back after three.
“I was in the park, spacing out,” she said. “I did what you told me, didn’t talk to anybody, just let my head go empty.”
“How was it?”
“Thanks, I feel much better. I still have that draggy, tired fe
eling, but my body feels way lighter than before. I guess I was way more tired than I realized.”
With her father sound asleep, there was nothing for us to do, so we bought coffee from a vending machine and drank it in the TV room. I reported to Midori on what had happened in her absence—that her father had had a good sleep, then woke up and ate some of what was left of his lunch, then saw me eating a cucumber and asked for one himself, ate the whole thing, and peed.
“Watanabe, you’re amazing,” said Midori. “We’re all going crazy trying to get him to eat anything, and you got him to eat a whole cucumber! Incredible!”
“I don’t know, I think he just saw me enjoying my own cucumber.”
“Or maybe you just have this knack for relaxing people.”
“No way,” I said with a laugh. “A lot of people will tell you just the opposite about me.”
“What do you think about my father?”
“I like him. Not that we had all that much to say to each other. But, I don’t know, he seems nice.”
“Was he quiet?”
“Very.”
“You should have seen him a week ago. He was awful,” Midori said, shaking her head. “Kind of lost his marbles and went wild. Threw a glass at me and yelled terrible stuff—‘I hope you die, you stupid bitch!’ This sickness can do that to people. They don’t know why, but it can make people get really mean all of a sudden. It was the same with my mother. What do you think she said to me? ‘You’re not my daughter! I hate your guts!’ The whole world turned black for me for a second when she said that. But that kind of thing is one of the features of this particular sickness. Something presses on a part of the brain and makes people say all kinds of nasty things. You know it’s just part of the sickness, but still, it hurts. What do you expect? Here I am, working my fingers to the bone for them, and they’re saying all this terrible stuff to me.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. Then I remembered the strange fragments that Midori’s father had mumbled to me.
“Ticket? Ueno Station?” Midori said. “I wonder what that’s all about?”
“And then he said, ‘Please,’ and ‘Midori.’”
“‘Please take care of Midori?’”
“Or maybe he wants you to go to Ueno and buy a ticket. The order of the four words is such a mess, who knows what he means? Does Ueno Station mean anything special to you?”
“Hmm, Ueno Station.” Midori thought about it for a while. “The only thing I can think of is the two times I ran away. In the third grade and in the fifth grade. Both times I took a train from Ueno to Fukushima. Bought the tickets with money I took from the cash register. Somebody at home made me really mad, and I did it to get even. I had an aunt in Fukushima, I kind of liked her, so I went to her house. My father was the one who brought me home. Came all the way to Fukushima to get me—a hundred miles! We ate boxed lunches on the train to Ueno. My father told me all kinds of stuff while we were riding, just little bits and pieces with long spaces in between. Like about the big earthquake of nineteen twenty-three or about the war or about the time I was born, stuff he didn’t usually talk about. Come to think of it, those were the only times my father and I had something like a good, long talk, just the two of us. Say, can you believe this?—my father was smack dab in the middle of Tokyo during one of the biggest earthquakes in history and he didn’t even notice it!”
“No way!”
“It’s true! He was riding through Koishikawa with a cart attached to his bike, and he didn’t feel a thing. When he got home, all the tiles had fallen off the roofs in the neighborhood, and everybody in the family was hugging pillars and quaking in their boots. He still didn’t get it and, the way he tells it, he asked, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ That’s my father’s ‘fond recollection’ of the Great Kanto Earthquake!” Midori laughed. “All his stories of the old days are like that. No drama whatsoever. They’re all just a little bit off center. I don’t know, when he tells those stories, you kinda get the feeling like nothing important has happened in Japan for the past fifty or sixty years. The young officers’ uprising of nineteen thirty-six, the Pacific War, they’re all kinda ‘Oh yeah, now that you mention it, I guess something like that once happened’ kinda things. It’s so funny!
“So, anyway, on the train, he’d tell me these stories in bits and pieces while we were riding from Fukushima to Ueno. And at the end, he’d always say, ‘So that goes to show you, Midori, it’s the same wherever you go.’ I was young enough to be impressed by stuff like that.”
“So is that your ‘fond recollection’ of Ueno Station?” I asked.
“It sure is,” said Midori. “Did you ever run away from home, Watanabe?”
“Never did.”
“Why not?”
“Lack of imagination. It never occurred to me to run away.”
“You are so weird!” Midori said, cocking her head as though truly impressed.
“I wonder,” I said.
“Well, anyhow, I think my father was trying to say he wanted you to look after me.”
“Really?”
“Really! I understand things like that. Intuitively. So tell me, what was your answer to him?”
“Well, I didn’t understand what he was saying, so I just said O.K., don’t worry. I’d take care of both you and the ticket.”
“You promised my father that? You said you’d take care of me?” She looked me straight in the eye with a dead-serious expression on her face.
“Not like that,” I hastened to correct her. “I really didn’t know what he was saying, and—”
“Don’t worry. I’m just kidding,” she said with a smile. “I love that about you.”
Midori and I finished our coffee and went back to the room. Her father was still sound asleep. If you leaned close you could hear his steady breathing. As the afternoon deepened, the light outside the hospital window changed to the soft, gentle color of autumn. A flock of birds perched on the electric wire outside, then flew on. Midori and I sat in a corner of the room, talking quietly the whole time. She read my palm and predicted that I would live to a hundred and five, marry three times, and die in a traffic accident. Not a bad life, I said.
When her father woke just after four o’clock, Midori went to sit by his pillow, wiped the sweat from his brow, gave him water, and asked him about the pain in his head. A nurse came and took his temperature, recorded the number of his urinations, and checked the intravenous equipment. I went to the TV room and watched a little soccer.
At five I told Midori I would be leaving. To her father I explained, “I have to go to work now. I sell records in Shinjuku from six to ten-thirty.”
He turned his eyes to me and gave a little nod.
“Hey, Watanabe, I don’t know how to put this, but I really want to thank you for today,” Midori said to me when she saw me to the front lobby.
“I didn’t do that much,” I said. “But if I can be of any help, I’ll come next week, too. I’d like to see your father again.”
“Really?”
“Well, there’s not that much for me to do in the dorm, and if I come here I get to eat cucumbers.”
Midori folded her arms and tapped the linoleum with the heel of her shoe.
“I’d like to go drinking with you again,” she said, cocking her head slightly.
“How about the porno flicks?”
“We’ll do that first and then go drinking. And we’ll talk about all the usual disgusting things.”
“I’m not the one who talks about disgusting things,” I protested. “It’s you.”
“Anyhow, we’ll talk about things like that and get plastered and go to bed.”
“And you know what happens next,” I said with a sigh. “I try to do it, and you don’t let me. Right?”
She laughed through her nose.
“Anyhow,” I said, “pick me up again next Sunday morning. We’ll come here together.”
“With me in a little longer skirt?”
“Def
initely,” I said.
I DIDN’T GO TO THE HOSPITAL that next Sunday, though. Midori’s father died on Friday morning.
She called at six-thirty in the morning to tell me that. The buzzer letting me know I had a phone call went off, and I ran down to the lobby with a cardigan thrown over my pajamas. A cold rain was falling silently. “My father died a few minutes ago,” Midori said in a small, quiet voice. I asked her if there was anything I could do.
“Thanks,” she said. “There’s really nothing. We’re used to funerals. I just wanted to let you know.”
A kind of sigh escaped her lips.
“Don’t come to the funeral, O.K.? I hate stuff like that. I don’t want to see you there.”
“I get it,” I said.
“Will you really take me to a porno movie?”
“Of course I will.”
“A really disgusting one.”
“I’ll research the matter thoroughly.”
“Good. I’ll call you,” Midori said, and hung up.
———
A WEEK WENT BY, though, without a word from Midori. No calls, no sign of her in the classroom. I kept hoping for a message from her whenever I went back to the dorm, but there were never any. One night, I tried to keep my promise by thinking of her when I masturbated, but it didn’t work. I tried switching over to Naoko, but not even Naoko’s image was any help that time. It seemed so ridiculous, I gave up. Instead, I took a swig of whiskey, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.
I WROTE A LETTER to Naoko on Sunday morning. One thing I told her about was Midori’s father. “I went to the hospital to visit the father of a girl in one of my classes and ate some cucumbers in his room. When he heard me crunching on them, he wanted some, too, and he ate his with the same crunching sound. Five days later, though, he died. I still have a vivid memory of the tiny crunching he made when he chewed his pieces of cucumber. People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.” My letter went on:
I think of you and Reiko and the birdhouse while I lie in bed after waking up in the morning. I think about the peacock and pigeons and parrots and turkeys—and about the rabbits. I remember the yellow rain capes that you and Reiko wore with the hoods up that rainy morning. It feels good to think about you when I’m warm in bed. I feel as if you’re curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.