Killing Commendatore: A novel (60 page)

Again no answer.

I could no longer hear Donna Anna and Komi. I sensed they were gone. All that remained was a deep silence.

The tunnel continued to shrink, making it even harder for me to advance. Panic was setting in. My limbs felt paralyzed—just drawing a breath was growing difficult. A voice whispered in my ear.
You are trapped
, it said.
This is your coffin. You cannot move forward. You cannot move backward. You will lie buried here forever. Forsaken by humanity, in this dark and narrow tomb
.

I sensed something approaching from behind. A flattish thing, crawling toward me through the dark. It wasn't Donna Anna, nor was it Komi. In fact, it wasn't human. I could hear the scraping of its many feet and its ragged breathing. It stopped when it reached me. There followed a few moments of silence. It seemed to be holding its breath, planning its next move. Then something cold and slimy touched my bare ankle. The end of a long tentacle, it seemed. Sheer terror coursed up my back.

Could this be a Double Metaphor? That which stemmed from the darkness within me?

I know where you were and what you were doing.

I couldn't recall a thing. Not the black cat, not the Peugeot 205, not the Commendatore—everything was gone. My memory had been wiped clean a second time.

I squirmed and twisted, frantically trying to escape the tentacle. The tunnel had contracted even farther—I could barely move. I was trying to force myself into a space smaller than my body. That was a clear contravention of basic principles. It didn't take a genius to figure out it was physically impossible.

Nevertheless, I kept on thrusting, pushing myself forward. As Donna Anna had said, this was the path I had chosen, and it was too late to choose another. The Commendatore had died to make my quest possible. I had stabbed him with my own hands. His body had sunk in a pool of blood. I couldn't allow him to die for nothing. And the owner of that clammy tentacle was trying to get me in its grips.

Rallying my spirits, I pressed on. I could feel my sweater unravel as it caught and tore on the rock. I awkwardly squirmed ahead, loosening my joints like an escape artist slipping his bonds. My pace was no faster than that of a caterpillar. The narrow tunnel was squeezing me like a giant vise. My bones and muscles screamed. The slimy tentacle slithered farther up my ankle. Soon it would cover me, as I lay there in the impenetrable dark, unable to move. I would no longer be the person I was.

Jettisoning all reason, I mustered what strength I had left and forced myself into the ever-narrowing space. Every part of my body shrieked in pain. Yet I had to push forward, whatever the consequences. Even if I had to dislocate every joint. However agonizing that would be. For everything around me was the product of connectivity. Nothing was absolute. Pain was a metaphor. The tentacle clutching my leg was a metaphor. All was relative. Light was shadow, shadow was light. I had no choice but to believe. What else could I do?

The tunnel ended without warning, spitting me out like a clump of grass from a clogged drainpipe. I flew through the air, utterly defenseless. There was no time to think. I must have fallen at least six feet before I hit the ground. Luckily, it wasn't solid rock, but relatively soft earth. I curled and rolled as I fell, tucking in my head to protect it from the impact. A judo move, done without thinking. I whacked my shoulder and hip on landing, but I barely felt it.

Darkness surrounded me. And my flashlight was gone. I seemed to have dropped it when I tumbled out. I remained on all fours, not moving. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't think anything. I was only aware, and barely at that, of a growing pain in my joints. Every tendon, every bone wailed in protest at what it had been put through during my escape.

Yes—I had escaped that dreadful tunnel! The realization hit me at last. I could still feel the eerie tentacle sliding over my ankle. I was grateful to have eluded that thing, whatever it was.

But then, where was I now?

There was no breeze. But there was smell. The odor I had caught a whiff of in the tunnel was everywhere. I couldn't recall where I had encountered it before. Nevertheless, this place was dead quiet. Not a sound anywhere.

I needed to find my flashlight. I carefully searched the ground where I had fallen. On all fours, in a widening circle. The earth was moist. I was scared that I might touch something creepy in the dark, but there was nothing, not even a pebble. Just ground so perfectly flat it must have been leveled by human hands.

After a long search, I finally found the flashlight lying about three feet from where I had landed. The moment my hand touched its plastic casing was one of the happiest of my life.

But I didn't switch it on right away. Instead, I closed my eyes and took a number of deep breaths. As if I were patiently unraveling a stubborn knot. My breathing slowed. My heartbeat did, too, and my muscles began to return to normal. I slowly exhaled the last deep breath and switched on the flashlight. Its yellow light raced through the darkness. But I couldn't look yet. My eyes had grown too used to the dark—the tiniest light made my head split with pain.

I shielded my eyes with one hand until I could open my fingers enough to peer through the cracks. From what I could see, I had landed on the floor of a circular-shaped room. A room of modest size, with walls of stone. I shone the flashlight above my head. The room had a ceiling. No, not exactly that. Something more like a lid. No light seeped through.

I realized where I was: in the pit in the woods, behind the little shrine. I had crawled into the tunnel in Donna Anna's cave and tumbled out onto the floor of this stone chamber. I was in a real pit in the real world. I had no idea how that could have happened. But it had. I was back at the beginning, so to speak. But why was there no light? The lid was made of wooden boards. There were cracks between those boards, through which some light should enter. Yet none did.

I was stumped.

At least I knew where I was. The smell was a dead giveaway. Why had it taken me so long to figure out? I carefully examined my surroundings with my flashlight. The metal ladder that should have been standing there was gone. Someone must have pulled it out and carted it off. Which meant there was no means of escape.

What I found strange—it should have been strange, I guess—was that I could find no trace of the opening, no matter how hard I looked. I had exited the narrow tunnel and fallen onto the floor of this pit. Like a newborn baby pushed out in midair. Yet I couldn't find the aperture. It was as if it had closed after it spit me out.

Eventually, the flashlight's beam illuminated an object on the ground. Something I recognized. It was the old bell the Commendatore had rung—hearing it had led me to discover the pit. Everything had begun with this bell. I had left it on the shelf in the studio—then at some point it had vanished. I picked it up and examined it under the flashlight. It had an old wooden handle. There could be no doubt—it was
that bell
.

I stared at it for some time, trying to understand. Had someone brought it back? Had it returned under its own power? The Commendatore had told me the bell belonged to the pit. What did that mean—belonged to the pit? But I was too tired to figure out the principles that might explain what was taking place. And there was no pillar of logic I could lean on.

I sat down, back against the stone wall, and switched off the flashlight. I had to figure out how to escape from this pit. I didn't need light for that. And it was important to conserve the batteries.

So what should I do now?

A number of things made no sense. Most troubling of all was the total absence of light. Someone had sealed the pit's opening. But who would do such a thing, and why?

I prayed that someone (whoever it was) hadn't piled boulders on top of the lid, returning it to how it had been in the beginning. That would mean my chances of getting out were practically zero.

A thought struck me—I clicked on the flashlight and checked my watch. It read 4:32. The second hand was circling the face, doing its job. Time was passing, no doubt about it. At least I was back where time flowed at a set pace, and in a single direction.

Yet what was time, when you got right down to it? We measured its passage with the hands of a clock for convenience's sake. But was that appropriate? Did time really flow in such a steady and linear way? Couldn't this be a mistaken way of thinking, an error of major proportions?

I clicked off the flashlight and, with a long sigh, returned to absolute darkness. Enough pondering time. Enough pondering space. Thinking about stuff like that led nowhere. It only added to my stress. I had to think about things that were concrete, things I could see and touch.

So I thought about Yuzu. She was certainly something I could see with my eyes and touch with my hands (if I was ever given that opportunity again). Now she was pregnant. This coming January, the child—not my child, but that of some other man—would be born. That situation continued without my involvement, in a place far removed from me. A new life with which I had no connection would enter this world. Yuzu had asked nothing of me. So why was she refusing to marry the father? I couldn't figure it out. If she planned to be a single mother, odds were she'd have to quit her job at the architectural firm. I doubted that a small business like that could extend a lengthy maternity leave to a new mother.

I could find no convincing answers to these questions, though I tried. I was stumped. And the darkness made me feel even more powerless.

If I ever got out of this pit, I would put aside my hesitations and go see Yuzu. No question about it, I was hurt when she left me for someone else. It angered me, too (although it took me a very long time to realize that). But why carry around my resentments for the rest of my life? I would go meet her and we could talk things out. I needed to know, from Yuzu herself, what she was thinking, and what she wanted. Before it was too late. Once I made that decision, I felt a little easier. If she wanted to be friends, well, maybe I could give it a shot. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, at least. Perhaps we could resolve things that way. If I managed to get out of the pit, that is.

After this I fell asleep. I had shed my leather jacket before entering the tunnel (what fate lay in store for that jacket of mine?), and the cold was starting to get to me. The thin sweater I had on over my T-shirt had been so shredded by the walls of the tunnel that it was a sweater in name only. Moreover, I had returned to the real world from the Land of Metaphor. In other words, I was back where time and temperature played their proper roles. Yet my need for sleep won out. I drifted off, sitting there on the ground, leaning against the hard stone wall. It was a pure sleep, free of dream or deception. A solitary sleep beyond anyone's reach, like the Spanish gold resting on the floor of the Irish Sea.

It was still pitch black when I woke up. I couldn't see my finger when I waved it in front of my face. The darkness blotted out the line between sleep and wakefulness as well. Where did one end and the other begin, and which side was I on? I dragged out my bag of memories and began flipping through them, as if counting a stack of gold coins: the black cat that had been our pet; my old Peugeot 205; Menshiki's white mansion; the record
Der Rosenkavalier;
the plastic penguin. I was able to call up memories of each, in great detail. My mind was working okay—the Double Metaphor hadn't devoured it. It's just that I had been in total darkness for so long that I was having trouble drawing a line between the world of sleep and the waking world.

I switched on the flashlight, covered it with my hand, and read my watch in the light leaking between my fingers: 1:18. Last time I looked, it was 4:32. Could I have been sleeping in such an uncomfortable position for nine hours? That was hard to believe. If that were true, I should be a lot stiffer. It seemed more reasonable to assume that, unbeknownst to me, time had traveled backward three hours. But I couldn't be certain either way. Being immersed in the dark for so long had obliterated my sense of time.

In any case, the cold had grown more penetrating. And I had to pee. Badly. Resigning myself, I shuffled to the other side of the pit and let it all out. It was a long pee that the ground quickly absorbed. A faint smell of ammonia lingered, but only for a moment. Once the need to pee had been taken care of, hunger stepped in to take its place. By slow and steady degrees, it seemed, my body was readapting to the real world. Perhaps the effects of the water I had drunk from the River of Metaphor were wearing off.

I had to get out of the pit as soon as possible. I felt that more urgently now. If I didn't, it wouldn't take long to starve to death. Human beings can only sustain life if provided with food and water—that was a basic rule of the real world. And my present location had neither. All I had was air (though the lid was closed, air seemed to be leaking in from somewhere). Air, love, and ideals were important, no argument there, but you couldn't survive on them alone.

I pulled myself off the ground and attempted to scale the pit's smooth stone wall. I tried from a number of spots, but, as I expected, it was a waste of energy. The wall was less than nine feet high, but it was straight up and down, with nothing at all to grab onto. It would take superhuman ability to climb, and even if I reached the top, there was still that heavy lid to deal with. I would need a solid foothold to push that aside.

I sat back down, resigned. Only one option presented itself. I could ring the bell. As the Commendatore had done. But there was one big difference between the Commendatore and me. He was an Idea, while I was a flesh-and-blood human being. An Idea never felt hunger, while I did. An Idea wouldn't starve to death, whereas I would, relatively quickly. The Commendatore could ring the bell for a hundred years (though the concept of time was foreign to him) and not get tired, while my limit without food and water was probably three or four days. After that, I wouldn't have the strength, though the bell was light.

So I began ringing the bell there in the dark. There was nothing else to do. Of course I could call out for help. But the pit was in the middle of a deserted woods. Since the woods was the private property of the Amada family, under normal circumstances there would be no one around. To make matters worse, the cover of the pit had been sealed tight. I could shout at the top of my lungs and no one would hear. My voice would just grow hoarse, and I would become even thirstier. At least shaking the bell was better than nothing.

Moreover, there was something out of the ordinary about the bell's ring. It seemed to have some special power. In physical terms, it wasn't very loud. Yet I had heard it from my distant bed in the middle of the night. The autumn insects had fallen silent the moment they heard that ringing. As if commanded to stop their racket.

So I sat there at the bottom of the pit, my back against the stone wall, and rang the bell. I shook my wrist from side to side and emptied my mind as best I could. When I got tired, I took a break and then started again. As the Commendatore had done before me. It wasn't hard to clear my mind. When I listened to the bell I felt, quite naturally, that I didn't have to think about anything else. The ringing sounded different in the dark than in the light. I'm pretty sure that difference was real. I was stuck in a black hole with no way out, but as long as I was shaking the bell, I felt neither fear nor anxiety. I could forget cold and hunger, as well. For the most part, I could even set aside my need to analyze what was taking place. This was a welcome change, as you can imagine.

When I tired of ringing the bell, I dozed off leaning against the stone wall. When I awoke, I switched on the flashlight and checked my watch. Time, I discovered, was behaving in a very haphazard manner. Of course, this may have had more to do with me than the watch. No question there. But that haphazardness was fine with me. I just went on mindlessly ringing the bell, then falling asleep, then waking up to ring the bell again. An endless repetition. With the repetition, my consciousness grew ever more thin and rarified.

Not a single sound made its way into the pit. I couldn't hear the birds, or the wind. What could explain that? This was supposed to be the real world. I was back in a place where people felt hunger, and the need to pee. The real world ought to be filled with all kinds of noises.

I had no idea how much time had passed. I had given up checking my watch. The passing of days made even less sense than the passage of minutes and hours. How could it be otherwise in a place that lacked day and night? Not just time, either—I was losing contact with my own self. My body had become a stranger to me. I was finding it harder and harder to understand what my physical existence meant. Or perhaps I didn't care to understand. All I could do was keep ringing that bell. Until my wrist was almost numb.

After what felt like an eternity (or after time had surged and ebbed like waves pounding the shore), and my hunger became unbearable, finally I heard something above my head. It sounded as if someone had grabbed hold of a corner of the world and was trying to peel back its skin. But the sound didn't strike my ear as real. I mean, how could anyone do that? And if they succeeded, what would follow? A fresh new world, or an endless nothing? In truth, though, I didn't care one way or the other. The final result would probably be more or less the same.

There in the dark, I closed my eyes and waited for the peeling of the world to conclude. But the world wasn't to be peeled so easily, it seemed, and the din only mounted. Maybe it was real, after all. An actual object undergoing a process that produced an actual physical sound. Steeling myself, I opened my eyes and looked up. I trained the beam of my flashlight on the ceiling. Someone was up there making an awful racket. I didn't know why, but it was an ear-splitting grinding noise.

I couldn't tell if the sound threatened me, or was being made
on my behalf
. Whichever the case, I just sat there at the bottom of the pit shaking my bell, waiting to see how things would turn out. At last, a thin sheet of light shot through a crack between the boards and into the pit. Like the broad, sharp blade of a guillotine gliding through a mass of gelatin, it swept down through the darkness to land on my ankle. I dropped the bell and covered my face to protect my eyes.

Next, one of the boards was moved to the side and even more sunlight flooded in. Though my eyes were closed and my palms were pressed against them, I could feel the darkness turn to light. Then new air flowed in from above. It was fresh and cold, and filled with the fragrance of early winter. I loved that smell. I remembered how I had felt as a child wrapping a scarf around my neck on the first cold morning of the year. The softness of the wool against my skin.

Someone was calling my name from the top of the pit. At least, it seemed to be my name. I had forgotten I had one. Names possessed no meaning in the world where I had been for so long.

It took me a while to connect the
someone
calling my name with Wataru Menshiki. I shouted back. But no words emerged. All I could produce was a sort of growl, a signal that I was still alive. I wasn't sure my voice was strong enough to reach him, but at least I could hear it. The strange, harsh call of some imaginary beast.

“Are you all right?” Menshiki called down.

“Menshiki?”

“Yes, it's me,” Menshiki said. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I'm all right,” I said. My voice had returned. “I think,” I added.

“How long have you been down there?”

“I don't know. It just happened.”

“Can you climb the ladder if I lower it to you?”

“I think so,” I said. Probably.

“Wait just a minute. I'll go get it.”

My eyes began to adjust to the sunlight as I waited. I still couldn't open them all the way, but at least I didn't have to cover them with my hands. As luck would have it, it wasn't that bright. I could tell it was daytime, but the sky was probably blanketed with clouds. Or else dusk was approaching. At last, I heard the metal ladder being lowered.

“Please give me a little more time,” I said. “My eyes aren't used to the light, so I have to be careful.”

“Of course, take all the time you want,” said Menshiki.

“Why was the pit so dark? There was no light at all.”

“I covered it two days ago. It looked like someone had been monkeying with the lid, so I brought a heavy tarp from my house and tied it down with metal pegs and twine so it wouldn't budge. I didn't want a child to slip and fall in. I checked first to be sure no one was inside. It was empty then, I'm sure of it.”

It made perfect sense. Menshiki had covered the lid. That's why it had been so dark.

“There were no signs that anyone had tampered with the tarp. It was just as I left it. So how did you get in? I don't understand,” Menshiki said.

“I don't understand either,” I said. “It just happened.”

There was nothing more I could tell him. And I had no intention of trying to explain, either.

“Shall I come down?” Menshiki asked.

“No, please stay where you are. I'll come up.”

I could keep my eyes half open now. Mysterious images were churning behind them, but at least my mind was functioning. I lined up the ladder against the wall, put my foot on the lowest rung, and tried to push myself up. But my legs were weak. They didn't feel like my legs at all. Still, I was able to gingerly climb up the ladder, one rung at a time. The air grew fresher the closer I got to the surface. I could hear birds chirping.