Hardboiled & Hard Luck (8 page)

Waves of feeling began surging out, one after another, from the place where they had been dammed up.

Death isn’t sad. What hurts is being drowned by these emotions.

I want to run away, I thought—to escape this distant autumn sky.

“What have you done to me, Sakai? I can’t stop crying.”

“It’s not my fault,” he said, taking my hand in his as I continued to cry.

The warmth of his palm made me even more emotional.

“Today is your crying day. Go ahead and cry.”

“Were you in love with my sister, Sakai?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I only visited her to get closer to you.

I laughed. “Too bad I’m going to Italy, huh.”

“It is too bad.”

Sakai didn’t look like he felt bad, so I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“You did know Kuni, though, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Sure, I knew her.”

“Tell me something about her.”

“OK.” He agreed right away. “Once, my brother went to a party with a lot of students from other colleges, and he asked a girl there for her phone number. He stuck the slip of paper he wrote it on in his notepad. When he got back to his apartment Kuni was there, and the paper dropped out and fluttered down to the floor, and Kuni kind of sensed what it was, so she tore the whole notepad to pieces right in front of his eyes.”

“What kind of story is that?”

“I was staying with him that night, so I saw it happen. I felt this heavy cloud of anger gathering, and I figured they would probably get into an argument later that night, so I put in my earplugs and went to bed early. But it turned out that Kuni was really good at putting things behind her. The two of them went right back to normal after that. Kuni’s behavior wasn’t forced, and she didn’t try to act as if nothing had happened—she just did what she always did. I realized then, for the first time, what a beautiful individual she was. Until then, I had always thought she was just an ordinary woman, and that she was bound to have a pretty frightening temper. Kuni and my brother had this cute conversation after that. What should we have for breakfast? We should get something really good, since your brother is here. Why don’t I go get some bread at the bakery that just opened over by the park? Even better, let’s go eat there, all three of us! God, it’s great to be on vacation, isn’t it? Yeah really. Things like that. They kept their voices down so as not to wake me, of course.”

“I know what you mean. That’s so like Kuni,” I said, as tears began to trickle from my eyes again. “God, why am I crying so much today?”

“It’s not because you’re sad, you know—it’s the shock. The sense of shock you felt at the beginning is coming back for an encore now that the end is approaching. It takes time, and I doubt you’re going to get used to it, either.”

“How come you know all this stuff?”

“Because I understand you,” said Sakai.

“Thanks, even if you are just saying that.”

If only we could have talked at some other time, I thought, in other circumstances. Right now, I need time and I need space. But something in his easygoing ways made me feel so comfortable that I couldn’t be bothered about those needs.

We walked into the café. It was empty.

We sat down at a table by the window and sipped our coffee. Everything was very natural, except for the existence of my sister. She had penetrated my world like a dream silently raining down into my life. And the worst thing was that it didn’t bother me at all. I wouldn’t have minded if things stayed like this forever. Life was better this way, since the only alternative was a world without her.

“Who can say that Kuni is unhappy, just because she’s in that state?” Sakai said. “It’s her life and only she can decide. No one else should try. I feel like thinking about that only makes her weaker.”

“I agree. I’ve always been happy because Kuni and I were such good friends. And I’m sure things will never be harder than they are now. My mother doesn’t really have a cold, you know—she’s just feeling really down. But I know that sometime in the future, a day will come when my family will start to feel differently. The world out there, this landscape we’re looking at now, through this window, will start to seem good to us, and different from the way it is now—so different that we aren’t even allowed to imagine it yet. It’s just that I’m tired of waiting. Because in the early days, I was always waiting for a miracle.”

Sakai nodded. “It’s natural for you to be tired. Everyone is still stunned by what happened. Even me, as removed from it all as I am. Even the tangerines. We’re all stunned that Kuni isn’t here anymore.”

“Who would have imagined that something like this could happen? And yet right now, even as we speak, similar things are happening all around the world. There are plenty of stories like this in the hospital. I’ve talked with people about all sorts of problems. They’ve told me about all kinds of hard choices they’ve had to make. But until recently, I never even suspected that this world existed.”

“That’s right. And I’m sure all those people are looking out the window, just like you. But if you turn to face in a different direction, you can get by without having to consider the fact that people like them even exist. Of course, those tragedies and all sorts of other tragedies keep happening whether or not the ones who don’t look out the window are aware of their existence.”

“Which direction do you face?”

“I think hard about whatever comes before me,” he said.

For the first time since all this happened, I really laughed.

Laughing made me forget about everything.

There was a shopping arcade outside, and the strange music that was playing over its loudspeakers drowned out the Mozart playing in the café.

There could be no more affection or hope or miracles now that my sister was getting ready to leave our world behind. Unconscious, her body warm, she gave us time to think. Steeped in that time, I smiled a small smile. There was eternity there, and beauty, and my sister was still with us, the way she was meant to be. Did anyone ever imagine, back in the old days, that eventually a day would come when people and their brains would each die a separate death?

None of this mattered to my sister, who was dying. This was a sacred time set aside for us survivors to think about issues we didn’t usually consider.

To focus on the unbearable only marred what was sacred.

And it struck me that if anything was a miracle, it was this: the lovely moments we experienced during the small, almost imperceptible periods of relief. The instant the unbearable pain and the tears faded away, and I saw with my own eyes how vast the workings of the universe were, I would feel my sister’s soul.

Sakai understands all that, I thought, and the fondness I felt for him deepened a little more. For me, love is always accompanied by a feeling of surprise. I like people who are always doing things that would never have occured to me at that moment. As crushed and dispirited as I was, that part of me didn’t change.

“It’s a perfect November evening—you can smell the end of autumn in the air,” said Sakai, looking out the window. “I guess we just have to try and keep our spirits up.”

“Keep our spirits up, yes, but not by forcing ourselves to be cheerful.”

“Your mom said this morning that if we give ourselves over completely to our grief, Kuni will only move farther away.”

“I’m impressed that she can say something like that so soon.”

I had a good view of the branches of the trees that lined the street. Young men and women were looking through the clothes at a used-clothing shop; they were having fun, making lots of noise. There was a greengrocer next door with a whole array of different colored vegetables set out under the lights, all of them looking really lovely. Orange persimmon. The brown of burdock root, the orange of carrots. Colors the gods made, so gorgeous one never tires of looking at them.

A month earlier, I never would have believed that I would be feeling so calm again so soon, admiring vegetables while I sat drinking a cup of coffee. One never knows what the future may hold. In our hearts, we were all peacefully saying goodbye, to my sister’s life. Or rather, we were moving in that direction, because we had no choice. That was the unbending path down which we were headed, as quietly as the deepening of autumn and the onset of winter.

2

Stars

Late one afternoon, I went to the office where Kuni used to work. Total strangers kept coming up to me with tears streaming from their eyes to say one thing or another. After a while it started getting on my nerves, though I felt their pain.

The woman at the next desk began crying when I went through the things in Kuni’s desk; she said she couldn’t believe how much my hands looked like my sister’s. I told her we looked the same naked, too, but she was in no condition to laugh at my joke; she left the office early, still crying.

Everyone wanted to touch me, the way people do at funerals, which made me feel very ill at ease. But I could sympathize with that, too. I learned that Kuni had been a cheerful and dedicated worker, and that she was great with computers. She had been so neat that there was hardly anything for me to get rid of.

I found lots of things in her locker that seemed out of place at the office: a pair of outlandish ski boots, for instance, and all sorts of snowboarding equipment, which she had just gotten into recently.

When the time came to save Kuni’s e-mail on a disk and erase all the personal information from her computer’s hard drive, even I started to cry. The man who was helping out, one of her coworkers, cried with me. This stranger and I sat in the secretary’s office where Kuni had worked, passing tissues back and forth. All these chores made me even sadder than the sight of Kuni hooked up to the respirator, eyes staring into space. I mentioned that to Kuni’s coworker, and he said through his tears that he understood. Being with you is agonizing, he said, because it feels like I’m with Kuni. The way you talk, your gestures—it forces me to admit that she’s gone, he said. You make me remember her.

I didn’t really know much about Kuni’s day-to-day life. Just that she worked as a secretary for one of the company’s directors.

But there at the office, I realized that the loss of one ordinary worker is enough to send emotions rippling through the entire staff of a company. And the traces of that emotion would never disappear. I understood then that I couldn’t just give up on the world. It would have been easier if I were the kind of person who could simply blame the company for Kuni’s death, but I knew that she and her own bad luck were the real culprits, so I couldn’t try to put the blame anywhere else. And so I was left with nothing but an inward glow, a trace of the tiny, respectful, adorable light she had given off. No doubt she had worked herself so hard, both mentally and physically, because she didn’t want to cause problems for the people she loved. No one was to blame. Life in a company is hard: when you’re working frantically to prepare things for your successor, no one tells you to go home and take it easy, because if you don’t you might have a cerebral hemorrhage.

Kuni’s coworker and I both had red eyes by the time we finished what we’d been doing. Around then, my dad arrived. He went in to greet my sister’s boss and the company president.

After my dad and I said goodbye to everyone, a big crowd of people helped us carry my sister’s things down to the underground garage. All these nice men and women in their suits, people I’d never meet again. Somehow we managed to pack everything into the car, and I waved goodbye. It was the first time I had met most of these people, and yet for some reason I had the illusion that I was the one who had been working there, and I was quitting my job to get married, and the things we were taking with us were my own.

“Why did you come in the small car, Dad?” I said after the car started moving. “Didn’t I ask you to bring the station wagon?”

“Your mother took the wagon to the hospital,” said my dad. “She’s so worn out that she can’t think straight anymore. I suppose it didn’t even occur to her that she didn’t need the big car; she just got in the wagon and drove off. So when I went out to the lot to get the car, this was the only one there. What was I supposed to do?”

There were so many of my sister’s things in the car that I ended up sitting in a very peculiar position, scrunched up in the passenger seat. 

The streetlights seemed strangely close from this angle, and they were very pretty. And I could see lots of stars. I felt sick to my stomach, but I thought I could put up with the discomfort if it was just for a short time, because it made the world seem kind of new.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me from down there,” said my dad.

“I can’t help it, can I? Can I lay my head on your lap?”

“Sure.”

“I feel like a kid again,” I said. My dad’s thighs felt just as hard as they had when I was little. “Yes, a young, beautiful woman is resting her head on your lap, it’s true, but I don’t want you getting excited and having an erection, OK?”

“Why would you make such a vulgar joke about your own father?” asked my dad.

The stars were beautiful. The streets kept whizzing by.

“Apparently they’re going to take your sister off the respirator soon.”

There was no difference between my dad’s tone when he said this and when he’d said “Pooch is dead” when the dog we had had for so long and who had liked my father best passed away. That’s how deep his sorrow was.

“God, how this could have happened?” said my dad. “It’s like a bad dream.”

Like a bad dream.

“It really is a bad dream,” I said.

We lapsed into silence. I inhaled the scent of my father’s pants.

Unfortunately the car also smelled of my sister’s perfume, the scent of which hovered over all her possessions.

Maybe I’ll switch to this perfume, I thought. Because it made me feel as if my sister were riding in the backseat, and I really did feel like a child again.

Back in the days when our family went on drives.

The Guerlain perfume my precocious sister had used even in her teens.

“Are you going out with that guy?” my dad asked.