“What a downpour,” she said as she got into the passenger seat, nervously fixing the hem of her skirt.
“You get wet?”
“A little.”
From the backseat, I pulled out a beach towel I’d had there from my trip to the pool and I handed it to her. She used it to wipe the sweat off her face, then patted her hair with it a few times before she gave it back.
“When it started pouring, I was having coffee near here. It was like a flood.”
“Still, it really cooled things off.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded, then put her arm out the window to check the temperature outside. Between us, I sensed a different vibe than the last time we’d met, something in the atmosphere was a little off.
“Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked.
“I didn’t really go on a trip. I lied to you about that.”
“Why’d you lie to me?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
34
Sometimes I tell lies.
The last time I told a lie was last year. Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society, you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence.
However, if we were constantly talking year-round, and telling only the truth, truth would probably lose some of its value.
* * *
Last autumn, my girlfriend and I were naked, having climbed into bed together. And then we got really hungry.
“Don’t you have anything to eat?” I asked her.
“I’ll go and check.”
She rose from the bed, naked, opened the refrigerator and took out some old bread she’d found, made some simple sandwiches with lettuce and sausage, then brought them back to bed with some instant coffee. Being October, it was a really cold night, and when she crawled back into bed her body was completely chilled, like canned salmon.
“There wasn’t any mustard.”
“Mmm…delicious.”
Wrapped up in blankets in her futon, we munched on sandwiches as we watched an old movie on television.
It was The Bridge on the River Kwai.
In the end, when the bridge was bombed, she groaned for a little while.
“Why’d you go through all that just to build a bridge?” she said with her finger pointed to the dumbfounded, petrified Alec Guinness.
“So they could keep their pride.”
“Hmph,” she said with her mouth stuffed full of bread, as she thought for a moment on the subject of human pride. It was always this way, but I had no idea what the hell was going on inside her head.
“Hey, do you love me?”
“Sure.”
“You wanna get married?”
“Now? Right away?”
“Sometime…someday.”
“Of course I’d like to marry you.”
“But until I asked you about it, you’ve never breathed a word about it.”
“I forgot to tell you.”
“Hmm…how many kids do you want?”
“Three.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Two girls and a boy.”
She washed down the bread in her mouth with some coffee and then fixed her eyes upon my face.
“LIAR!”
She said.
However, she was mistaken. I only lied once.
35
We went into a small restaurant near the harbor, finished a simple meal, and ordered a Bloody Mary and a bourbon.
“You wanna know the truth?” she asked.
“Last year, I dissected a cow.”
“Yeah?”
“When I ripped open its stomach, there was only a handful of grass inside. I put that grass in a plastic bag and took it home,
then set it on top of my desk. When I’m feeling bad about something, I stare at that lump of grass and think about this: why do cows take this unappetizing, miserable-looking food and reverently eat it, chewing their cud?”
She laughed a little, pursing her lips, then gazed at my face.
“I understand. I won’t say a word.”
I nodded.
“There’s something I want to ask you. Can I?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do people die?”
“Because we’re evolving. One individual can’t withstand all the energy of evolution, so we go through the alternation of generations. Of course, that’s just one theory.”
“Even now, we’re evolving?”
“Little by little.”
“What’s the point of evolving?”
“There are many opinions about that. One thing that’s for sure is that the universe itself is evolving. Putting aside the question of whether or not it’s some kind of trend or willful intervention, the universe is evolving, and in the end, we’re merely a small part of that.” I pushed away my glass of whiskey and lit a cigarette.
“Where that energy comes from, nobody knows.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Spinning the ice around in her glass with her fingertip, she stared at the white tablecloth.
“Hey, after I die, a hundred years later, nobody’ll remember I even existed.”
“Looks that way.”
Leaving the restaurant, in the midst of a strangely vivid twilight, we walked slowly along the quiet lane of warehouses. Walking together, I could sense the smell of her hair conditioner. The wind, shaking the leaves of the willow trees, made me think just a little bit about the end of the summer. After walking for a while, she grabbed my hand with her five-fingered hand.
“When are you going back to Tokyo?”
“Next week. I’ve got a test.”
She was silent.
“I’ll be back in the winter. It’s just until around Christmas. My birthday’s on December 24th.”
She nodded, but she seemed to be thinking about something else.
“You’re a Capricorn?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Me too. January 10th.”
“Feels like an unlucky star to be born under. Same as Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” saying that, she grabbed my hand again.
“I’m feeling like I’ll get lonely once you’re gone.”
“We’ll definitely see each other again.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
One by one, the warehouses were really starting to look old, a deep greenish, smooth moss clinging there in the spaces between the bricks. There were sturdylooking iron bars set into the high, dark windows, on each heavily-rusted door hung the nameplate bearing the name of the trading company. The distinct smell of the ocean could be felt throughout the vicinity, interrupted by the row of warehouses, and then ended like a row of willow trees, or a pulled-out tooth. We crossed the overgrown harbor railroad tracks, sat on the steps of a warehouse storing concrete water-breakers that had fallen into disuse, and stared out at the ocean.
There were lights on at the dock in front of the shipbuilding company, next to that a Greek freighter unloading cargo with its waterline rising, floating there like it was abandoned. The white paint of the deck was red with rust, the sides of it encrusted with shells and resembling an injured person’s scabs. For a really long time, we stared in silence at the ocean and the sky and the ships. The evening wind crossed the ocean, and while it shook the grass, the darkness slowly replaced the faint night, and a few stars started to twinkle above the dock.
After the long silence, she made left hand into a fist, and nervously tapped her right palm over and over. She kept tapping it until her palm was red, and then she stared at as if she were disappointed.
“I hate everybody,” she spat out.
“You hate me too?”
“Sorry ‘bout that,” she said, blushing, and then as if pulling herself together, she set her hands back atop her knees.
“You’re not such a bad person.”
“That’s it?”
As if smiling slightly, she nodded, and making a series of small, shaking movements, lit a cigarette. The smoke flew on the ocean breeze, slipped through the sides of her hair, and then disappeared into the darkness.
“Keeping myself all alone, I could hear lots of people coming along and talking to me…people I know, people I don’t know, my father, my mother, my high school teachers, lots of people.”
I nodded.
“Usually, they say nothing but terrible things.
‘Fuck off,’ and other filthy things…”
“Like?”
“I don’t wanna say.”
She took just two drags of her cigarette before stamping it out under her leather sandal, then gently rubbed her eye with her fingertip.
“Do you think I’m sick?”
“Hard to say,” I said, inflecting it the way I’d say ‘I don’t know,’ and shook my head.
“If you’re worried, you should go see a doctor.”
“I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”
She lit her second cigarette, then tried to laugh but couldn’t quite pull it off.
“You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this.”
I grasped her hand. Her hand was forever shaking slightly, her fingers and the spaces between oozing cold sweat.
“I really didn’t want to lie to you.”
“I know.”
We once again descended into silence, and as we listened to the small waves crashing against the breakers, we didn’t speak. It was a long time, longer than I can remember.
When I finally regained my senses, she was crying. I ran my finger along her tear-soaked cheek and then put my arms around her shoulders.
It’d been a long time since I’d felt the scent of summer. The smell of the ocean, the distant steam whistle, feeling the skin of a girl’s hand, the lemon scent of her conditioner, the evening wind, faint hopes, summer dreams…
However, like a piece of tracing paper slipping away, everything had, little by little, become irreparably different than it had been in the past.
36
It took us a half hour to walk back to her apartment.
It was a pleasant-feeling night, and after she finished crying, she was frighteningly cheerful. On the way home, we popped into a few stores and shopped intently for things we didn’t really need. Things like strawberry-scented toothpaste and gaudy beach towels, some kind of puzzle made in Denmark, six ballpoint pens, clutching these things we walked uphill, occasionally pausing to look back towards the harbor.
“Hey, your car’s still parked over there, yeah?”
“I’ll go back and get it later.”
“Would you mind waiting until tomorrow?”
“I don’t mind.”
And then we took our time walking the rest of the way.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
She was looking at the pavement on the street below as she said this.
I nodded.
“But you won’t be able to shine your dad’s shoes…”
“He should shine them himself once in a while.”
“Think he’ll do it, himself?”
“Yeah, he’s a man of integrity.”
It was a quiet night.
She turned over slowly in her sleep, pushing her nose against my right shoulder.
“I’m cold.”
“You’re cold? It’s eighty-six degrees!”
“I don’t know, but I’m cold.”
I grabbed the blanket that had been kicked down past our feet and pulled it up to our necks and then held her. Her body was rattling a little as she shook ever so slightly.
“Are you feeling well?”
She shook her head a little.
“I’m scared.”
“Of?”
“Everything. You’re not scared?”
“Not particularly.”
She was silent. It was a silence as if she were taking my answer by its hand to confirm its existence.
“You want to have sex with me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t today.”
Still embracing her, I nodded, saying nothing.
“I just had the operation.”
“A baby?”
“Yes.”
She lessened the pressure with which she was moving her hand around on my back, using her fingers to make small circles behind my shoulders over and over again.
“It’s strange, I don’t remember a thing.”
“Yeah?”
“The man. I’ve completely forgotten him. I can’t even remember his face.”
I patted her hair with my palm.
“I felt like I could really fall for him. For just a short instant…you ever fall in love with someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you remember her face?”
I tried to imagine the faces of the three girls from before, but it was strange, I couldn’t bring even one of them clearly into mind.
“Nope,” I said.
“Strange. Why do you think that is?”
“Probably because that would be too easy.”
With the side of her face pressed to my chest, she nodded silently a few times.
“You know, if you really want to do it, we can probably do something else…”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
She once again increased the pressure behind the hand she was moving around on my back. I could feel her breasts on the center of my stomach. I really wanted to drink a beer.
“Starting quite a few years back, I’ve failed at lots of things.”
“How many years, do you think?”
“Twelve, thirteen…the year my father got sick. I don’t remember a single thing before that. Just a bunch of bad stuff. There’s always an unlucky wind blowing above my head.”
“The winds can change direction.”
“You really think so?”
“It’s gotta happen sometime.”
She was quiet for a moment. In the midst of the dryness of that desert-like silence, she took a second to soak up my words, leaving only bitterness in her mouth.
“I’ve tried many times to believe that, but it’s never worked out. I’ve tried to get close to people, tried to be more patient, but…”
Without saying another word, we put our arms around each other. She put her head on my chest, her lips nestled lightly on my nipple and was still for a lone time, as if asleep.
For a long time, a really long time, she was silent. Half-dozing, I gazed up at the dark ceiling.
“Mom…” she murmured softly, as if in a dream. She was sleeping.
37
Hey, how’s it going? This is Radio NEB’s Pop Music Requests. Saturday night has come around once again. For the next two hours, we’ve got lots of great music for you to listen to. By the way, summer is drawing to a close. How was it? Did you have a good summer?
Today, before I start playing records, I’d like to tell you about this letter I received. I’d like to read it for you. Here’s the letter:
How are you?
I enjoy listening to your program every week. Time goes by quickly; this fall will mark my third year of living in this hospital.