“You won’t go back to college?”
“I’m done. There’s no way I can go back.”
From behind his sunglasses, the Rat’s eyes followed the girl who was still swimming.
“Why’d you quit?”
“I don’t know, ‘cause I was bored? Still, in my own way, I tried my best. More than even I could believe. I thought about other people just as much as myself, and thanks to that I got punched by a policeman. But, when the time comes, everybody goes back to their own routine. I just had nowhere to go back to. Like a game of musical chairs.”
“So what are you going to do?”
He wiped his legs with a towel as he thought this over.
“I’m thinking of writing novels. What do you think?”
“Of course I think it’s a great idea.”
He nodded.
“What kind of novels?”
“Good ones. By my standards, anyway. Me, I don’t think I have talent or anything. At least, I think that my writing has got to be the result of some epiphany or it won’t have any meaning. Don’t you think?”
“I agree.”
“I’ve got to write for myself…or maybe for the cicadas.”
“Cicadas?”
“Yep.”
The Rat fiddled around for a moment with the Kennedy half-dollar hung around his neck as a pendant.
“Some years back, me and this girl went to Nara. It was a terribly hot summer afternoon, and we’d been walking on these mountain trails for three whole hours. During that time, to give you an idea, we had for company: the shrieking of wild birds shooting out of the trees, these monster cicadas buzzing across the paths between the rice fields, and the like. ‘Cause it was hot as hell, you know.
“After walking for a bit, we sat on a hillside covered thick with summer grass, and there was a nice breeze blowing the sweat off our bodies. There was a deep moat stretching out below the hill, and on the other side was this mound, covered with trees, looking like an island. It was a burial mound. For some Emperor from a long time ago. You ever seen one?”
I nodded.
“Looking at that, I started thinking, ‘why did they make such a huge tomb for him?’ Of course, every grave has meaning. Like they say, everybody dies sometime. They teach you that.
“Still, this was just too big. Bigness, sometimes it changes the very essence of something into something else entirely. Speaking practically, it was like this didn’t even look like a tomb. A mountain. The surface of the moat was covered with frogs and water plants, and the whole edge of it was covered with cobwebs.
“I stared at it in silence, the wind from the water clearing my ears. What I felt at that time, I really can’t even put into words. No, wait, it wasn’t really a feeling. It was its own completely-packaged sensation. In other words, the cicadas and frogs and spiders, they were all one thing flowing into space.”
Saying this, the Rat drank the last sip of his already-flat cola.
“When I’m writing, I’m reminded of that summer afternoon and that overgrown burial mound. Then I think this: the cicadas and frogs and spiders, the summer grass and the wind, if I could write for them, it would be a wonderful thing.”
Finishing his story, the Rat folded both his arms behind his head and stared quietly up at the sky.
“So…have you tried writing anything?”
“Nope, I can’t write a single line. I can’t write anything.”
“Really?”
“‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’”
“What?”
“‘But if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’”
So said the Rat.
When the evening sun started to dim, we left the pool and went into the hotel’s small bar, which was filled with Mantovani’s Italian mood music, and drank cold beer. Through the large windows, we could clearly make out the lights of the harbor.
“What happened with the girl?” I’d made up my mind to ask.
The Rat wiped the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand, then gazed at the ceiling as if suddenly remembering something.
“I’ll come right out and say it, I wasn’t going to say anything to you about that. Because it was stupid.”
“But you tried once, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. But I thought it over all night and gave up on the idea. There are some things in the world you just can’t do anything about.”
“For example?”
“Cavities, for example. One day your tooth just starts hurting. Someone comforting you isn’t going to make it stop hurting. When that happens, you just start to get mad at yourself. Then you start to get really pissed off at the people who aren’t pissed off. Know what I mean?”
“Kind of,” I said, “still, think about this. Everyone’s built the same. It’s like we’re all riding together on a broken airplane. Of course there are lucky people, there are also unlucky people. There’re tough people, and weak people, rich people, and poor people. However, not a single person’s broken the mold with his toughness. We’re all the same. Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they’ll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll want to get stronger. Even if you’re just pretending. Don’t you think?
There aren’t any real strong people anywhere. Only people who can put on a good show of being strong.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
I nodded.
“You really believe all that?”
“Yeah.”
The Rat was silent for a moment, fixing his gaze on his beer glass.
“You sure you’re not bullshitting me?” the Rat said earnestly.
After I drove the Rat back to his house, I dropped by J’s Bar.
“You talk to him?”
“I did.”
“That’s good.”
Saying that, J set a plate of French fries in front of me.
32
In spite of Derek Hartfield’s large volume of work, when it came to the subjects of life, dreams, love, and the like, he was an extremely rare writer. Comparatively serious (‘serious’ meaning stories without appearances by spacemen and monsters) was his 1937 semi-autobiographical book Halfway ‘Round the Rainbow, in which, through all the irony, jokes, insults, and paradoxes, he revealed just a little bit of his true feelings.
“My most sacred books are in this room, and by that I mean the stack of alphabetized phonebooks on which I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but. The truth is this: life is empty. However, help is available. If you know that from the outset, it’s almost as if life’s not really meaningless at all. We’ve really worked tirelessly to build it all up, and then tried with all our might to wear it down, and now it’s empty. No matter how hard you work, or how hard your try to bring it down, none of that’ll be written here. ‘Cause it’s a real pain in the ass. For those of you who really want to know, you can read about it in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe. It’s all there, written out for you.”
The reason Hartfield was so terribly enamored with Jean-Christophe is, quite simply, because it diligently outlined the life of one person from birth until death and, moreover, it was a terribly long novel. In his opinion, a novel could present information even better than graphs, chronologies, and the like, and he thought the accuracy was comparable as well.
He was always critical of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
‘Of course, I have no problem with the length of it,’
he noted. ‘It’s that it lacks a clear conceptualization of outer space, and the author has given the reader a mishmash of impressions.’ The phrase
‘conceptualization of space,’ the way he uses it, usually meant ‘sterility.’
The novel he liked the most was A Dog of Flanders.
‘Hey, you. Can you believe a dog died just for a picture?’
During an interview, a newspaper reporter once asked Hartfield this:
“Your book’s protagonist, Waldo, has died twice on Mars, and once on Venus. Isn’t this some kind of contradiction?”
Hartfield’s reply was this:
“Do you know how time flows in the void of space?”
“No,” he responded, “but nobody knows that.”
“If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”
* * *
Out of all of Hartfield’s works, one story, The Wells of Mars stands out, almost suggesting a hint of Ray Bradbury’s future appearance on the writing scene. It was a long time ago when I read it, and I forget most of the details, so I’m only going to give you the most important points.
This story is about the countless bottomless wells dug into the surface of Mars and the young man who climbed down into one. These wells were dug by the Martians tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s well-known, but the strange thing is that all of them, and I mean all of them, were dug so they wouldn’t strike water. So the question of why the hell they bothered to dig them is something nobody knew. As for the Martians themselves, aside from these wells, there wasn’t a trace of them left. Their written language, their dwellings, their plates and bowls, metallic infrastructure, their graves, their rockets, their vending machines, even their shells, there was absolutely nothing left. Just those wells. And the Earthlings had a hell of a time deciding whether or not you could even call that civilization, but those wells were definitely really well made, and all those tens of thousands of years later there wasn’t even so much as a single brick of a ruin.
To be sure, a few adventurers and explorers went down into those wells. They descended with their ropes in hand, but due to the depth of the wells and length of the caves, they had to turn back for the surface, and of those without ropes, not a single soul ever returned.
One day, there was this young guy wandering around in outer space, and he went into one of the wells. He was sick of the utter hugeness of space, and he wanted to die alone, without anybody around. As he descended, the well started to feel like a more and more relaxing and pleasant place, and this uncanny, familiar power started to envelop his body. After going down an entire kilometer, he found a real cave and climbed into it, and he continued to walk along, following its winding paths along intently. He had no idea how long he was walking along. This is because his watch stopped. It could have been two hours, but it just as easily could have been two days. It was like he couldn’t feel hunger or exhaustion, and the previously-mentioned strange power continuing to encase his body just as before. And then, all of a sudden, he felt sunlight. Turns out the cave was connected to a different well. He clambered up out of the well, and once again he was above ground. He sat on the edge of the well and stared at wasteland ahead of him free of any obstacles, and then he gazed at the sun. Something about it was different. The smell of the wind, the sun…the sun was in the middle of the sky, an orange twilight sun that had become an enormous orange blob.
“In 250,000 years, the sun is going to explode.
*Click*…OFF. 250,000 years. Not such a long time,”
the wind whispered to him.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m just the wind. If you want to call me that, or call me a Martian, that’s okay, too. I’m not an evil echo. But then, words don’t mean anything to me.”
“But, you’re speaking.”
“Me? You’re the one talking. I’m just giving your spirit a little hint, a little prodding.”
“What the hell happened to the sun?”
“It’s old. It’s dying. Me, you, there’s nothing either of us can do.”
“How’d it happen so quickly…?”
“Not quickly at all. In the time it took you to get out of that well, fifteen hundred million years have passed. As your people say, time flies. That well you came from was built along a distortion in spacetime. To put it another way, we wander around through time. From the birth of the universe ‘til its death. And so we never live, and we never die. We’re the wind.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Ask away.”
“What have you learned?”
The atmosphere shook a little, and the wind laughed. And then, the stillness of eternity once again covered the surface of Mars. The young man pulled a revolver out of his pocket, put the muzzle to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
33
The phone rang.
“I’m back,” she said.
“Let’s meet up.”
“Are you free now?”
“Of course.”
“Pick me up in front of the YWCA at five.”
“What do you do at the YWCA?”
“French lessons.”
“French?”
“Oui.”
After I hung up the phone, I took a shower and drank a beer. When I finished it, the evening rain started in like a waterfall.
When I made it to the YWCA the rain had almost completely lifted, but the girls coming out of the gate looked distrustfully up at the sky as they opened and closed their umbrellas. I parked on the side of the road facing the gate, cut the engine, and lit a cigarette. Soaked by the rain, the gateposts looked like two tombstones in a wasteland. Next to the dirty, gloomy YWCA building were newer buildings, but they were just cheap rentals, and stuck to the rooftop was a giant billboard showing a refrigerator. A thirty year-old seemingly telling the word that she was, indeed, anemic, was slouching, but still looking as if she were having a good time opening the refrigerator door, and thanks to her, I could take a peek at the contents inside.
In the freezer, there were ice cubes, a liter of vanilla ice cream, and a package of frozen shrimp. On the second shelf was a carton of eggs, some butter, camembert cheese, and boneless ham. The third shelf held packs of fish and chicken, and in the plastic case at the very bottom were tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus and grapefruit. In the door, there were large bottles of cola and beer, three of each, and a carton of milk.
While I waited for her, leaning on the steering wheel, I thought about the order in which I would eat the food in the refrigerator, but, at any rate, one liter was way too much ice cream, and the lack of salad dressing for the lettuce was lethal.
It was a little after five when she came through the gate. She was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt and a miniskirt with white stripes. She had her hair up, and she was wearing glasses. In just one week, she had aged almost three years. It was probably due to the hair and the glasses.