The Tokyo-Montana Express (28 page)

I may have gotten up to get a drink of cold
pop because I thought I had enough time to buy one and get back into the
theater before the final sexual scene or it may have been something different
that drew me out of the theater.

Perhaps I had to go to the toilet or maybe
I had to give somebody a very important letter and we had agreed to meet in the
lobby of the theater and I had no idea when the movie started that it was going
to reveal the most fantastic sexual scene of all time.

Anyway, I did what I was supposed to do in
the lobby, whatever that was, and rushed back into the theater to see the
curtain close on the end of the movie that was a long shot of a castle at
sunset with crows circling it.

The lights went on for the intermission and
the theater was filled with unconscious men. Some of them were lying in the
aisles. All the men had expressions of bliss on their faces as if the Angel of
Pleasure had touched them while I was doing whatever I was doing.

It was the last showing of the movie that
night, but fortunately the film would be shown for one more day. I went home in
a state of frustrated hell on earth. The night passed like ice-cold water
dripping a drop at a time on a burning erection that lasted all through my
sleep, trapping me in a state of considerable pain.

The program said that the first showing of
Castle
of the Snow Bride
was at 12:01 p.m. The morning passed like a monkey trying
to dance in a block of ice.

When I went to the theater at a quarter of
twelve, it had disappeared. There was no trace of it. In its place was a small
park with children playing and old people sitting on benches reading.

I tried to ask people about the theater but
nobody spoke English. When I finally found somebody who could speak English, he
told me apologetically that he was just a tourist from Osaka, visiting Tokyo
for the first time and he knew nothing about the theater, but the park was beautiful.
He liked the way it looked because it had so many trees.

Later I met some people who had a good
knowledge of Japanese movies. I asked them about
Castle of the Snow Bride
.
They had never heard of it and was I certain that was the right title?

Yes, I was certain. There could only be one
Castle of the Snow Bride
. They were sorry that they could not help me.
So there you have it: Everything is here except that which is missing.

Here are just a few quick words
from Montana before going into town because somebody has to go to town today.
If everybody stayed home, the town would be empty. There would be no traffic
and the streets would be abandoned and all the stores would be haunted by an
absence of people on a holidayless Wednesday. It might be on the 6 o’clock
national news. It would be presented as a joke for everyone to laugh at:

“Today in Livingston, Montana, population
7000, all the folks decided to stay home, so the town became a ghost town for
24 hours. No official reason has yet been given for this unique event. The
mayor had no comment when contacted by ABC News late this afternoon, so we can
go on safely assuming that Montana is still the last frontier.”

The anchorman would finish the joke with a
big anchor smile on his face like the anchor of the Titanic settling to the
bottom.

Nobody out here wants that to happen, so I
have to go to town and make myself highly visible. I hope that everyone will
follow my example. I don’t want my absence to contribute to an instant ghost
town.

Sitting down at a table at the same
sidewalk cafe in Tokyo, I smelled something dead. I looked around but I couldn’t
see anything dead and then the smell went away, so I ordered some coffee.

Before the coffee arrived, the smell of
something dead came back but vanished in just a few seconds. Then I was drinking
coffee. The next time the smell of something dead came, I of course paid
attention to it, but I didn’t let it bother me.

The wind was blowing and I thought maybe it
came on the wind, so I let it be, and very carefully watched people coming and
going in the street. I love to watch people and Japan is a good place for it. I
sat there for hours watching people and after I finished with the coffee, I
drank a little wine.

The smell came and went a hundred times and
after a while it didn’t bother me because I knew that it would go away. It
smelled like vinegar turning to sugar and sugar turning to vinegar. What I
smelled was the middle point of their passage. In other words, the smell of
death was on the wind or so I thought until I discovered that it was not the
wind that brought the smell, but it was I who brought it. Every time I lowered
my head toward my chest the smell came. Then I realized that it was coming from
my own heart.

There was something dead in my heart.

I tried to figure out what it was by the
strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using
logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse.

I had a dead mouse in my heart.

What was I to do?

I was trying to figure that out when a
beautiful Japanese woman sat down at the table next to me. Her table was very
close and she was wearing a delicate but dominating perfume, like death in
another direction, and the smell of her perfume made it possible for me not to
smell the dead mouse in my heart any more.

She is sitting next to me right now. I wish
I could tell her what I just told you about the mouse and her perfume, but I
don’t think she would understand.

As long as she sits here, everything will
be all right.

I have to figure out what to do next.

An electric sign in a snowstorm town
is flashing HOUSE OF CARPETS on and off; HOUSE OF CARPETS off and on. It’s a
November night in Montana and the streets are abandoned. Everybody wants to get
away from the snowstorm. There is only a very occasional car, rare like an old
postage stamp. The snow swirls about the sign that wants people to buy carpets
from a closed store.

The carpets are inside but the door is
locked and the carpet people have gone home.

I cannot figure out why they have a
flashing sign on at night when there’s nobody there to sell carpets. If you
were walking along and saw the sign, say at midnight, and it excited you enough
to want to buy a carpet, you couldn’t buy one because the HOUSE OE CARPETS is
closed.

On a snowy, damned-cold night like this
one, seeing that sign, you might want to buy a carpet to roll up in and keep
warm.

But forget about it.

Last night the temperature went down
to 12 degrees. It was our coldest night of the autumn. I kept checking the temperature
while watching television: situation comedies, etc.

I followed the
temperature
faithfully like an ice-cube shepherd hour after hour going down from
30 to 12 degrees. I would watch some television and then go outside on the back
porch and check the
temperature
.

This is a hard thing to say about American
popular culture and I’m weighing any words very carefully but the temperature
was much more interesting than television.

Too bad the temperature couldn’t have been
a program. Then I wouldn’t have had to get up and go outside to check it. I
could have just sat there and the 9 o’clock program would have been 16 degrees
Fahrenheit.

—like a kitchen window steaming up on
a very cold morning and it’s hard to see out of, then the steam slowly disappears
and you can see the snow-covered mountains, 10,000 feet high, out the window,
and then the window gradually steams up again, coffee on the stove and the mountains
gone like a dream.

…that’s how I feel this morning.