One season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. You might run to the open door and call out, Wait, there’s something I forgot to tell you! But no one is there. When you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. If you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? I might pass the message along if I get the chance. No, that’s all right, you say. It’s no big deal. The sound of wind fills the room. No big deal. Just another season dead and gone.
The rich university dropout and the solitary Chinese bartender sat shoulder to shoulder, like an old married couple, as autumn once again gave way to the chill of winter.
Autumn was always a real downer. The few friends who had returned to town during summer vacation had already said their quick goodbyes and headed back to their distant new homes without waiting for September’s arrival. As if crossing an invisible watershed, the summer light began its imperceptible change and the brilliant aura that had filled the Rat’s world during that brief span vanished. Like a creek flowing onto autumn’s sandy soil, the remnants of his warm summer dreams were sucked away without a trace.
Autumn was no fun for J either. When mid-September came, the number of his customers plummeted. It was like that every year, but this time around the drop-off was shocking. Neither J nor the Rat could understand what was behind the change. All they could know was that the bucket of potatoes J had peeled for frying was still half full when closing time came.
“Just wait,” the Rat consoled him. “Pretty soon you’ll be bitching about how busy it is.”
“I wonder,” J said, looking unconvinced. He sat down on the stool behind the counter and started chipping burned butterfat off the toaster oven with an ice pick.
No one knew what might be waiting around the corner.
While the Rat leafed through a book, J ran a dry cloth over the bottles on the shelves, pausing to drag on the unfiltered cigarette clamped between his callused fingers.
The Rat’s sense of time had begun to go haywire three years earlier. The same spring that he quit the university.
There were, of course, a number of reasons why he had left school. These were all entangled with each other, and when they heated up, the fuse blew with a bang. Some things were left unchanged, some were blown away to parts unknown, some died.
The Rat did not try to explain why he had quit. A proper explanation could have taken a good five hours. Besides, if he explained himself to one person, soon everyone else he knew might demand to hear his story. From there it was a small step to having to explain himself to the whole world. Just imagining that made the Rat sick to his stomach.
“I didn’t like the way they cut the grass in the school quad,” he would say when pressed.
One girl actually went to the quad to check. “Didn’t look that bad to me,” she said. “Though there was some trash strewn around…”
“It’s a matter of taste,” the Rat replied.
When the Rat was in a better mood, he let on a bit more. “We just didn’t get along,” he would say, “me and school.” Then he would clam up.
This was three years ago.
But everything had passed with the flow of time. At an almost unbelievable pace. What had once been a violent, panting flood of emotion had suddenly withdrawn, leaving behind a heap of what felt like meaningless old dreams.
—
The Rat had left home the year he entered university and moved into an apartment his father had once used as a study. His parents voiced no objections to the move. They had planned to give the place to their son at some point anyway, and figured it wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to experience the hardship of living on his own for a while.
Whatever way one looked at it, though, his life there could hardly be seen as difficult. No more than a melon could be mistaken for a vegetable. The apartment was beautifully designed and boasted three comfortable rooms, an air conditioner and a phone, a seventeen-inch color television set, a bath and a shower, a Mercedes Triumph in the underground parking lot, and, to top it all off, a fancy balcony perfect for sunbathing. The southeast-facing window of the penthouse afforded a panoramic view of town and ocean. When the Rat opened both windows, the chirping of birds and the heady fragrance of trees wafted in on the wind.
The Rat spent many tranquil afternoons settled in his rattan chair. When he began to drift off, he could feel time pass through his body like gently flowing water. As he sat, hours, days, weeks went by.
Occasionally, ripples of emotion would lap against his heart as if to remind him of something. When that happened, he closed his eyes, clamped his heart shut, and waited for the emotions to recede. It was only a brief sensation, like the shadows that signal the coming of night. Once the ripples had passed, the quiet calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.
3
Unless you count people peddling newspaper subscriptions, no one ever knocks at my door. So it stays shut, and I never have to answer to anyone.
That Sunday morning, though, whoever it was knocked thirty-five times. What could I do? With my eyes half closed, I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled to the door. A man of about forty in a gray workman’s uniform was standing there in the hall, cradling his helmet like a small puppy.
“I’m from the phone company,” he said. “I’ve come to replace your switch panel.”
I nodded, leaning against the door frame. The guy’s face was black with stubble, the kind of beard you could shave over and over without ever getting rid of it all. He even had hair growing under his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but I was zonked out. The twins and I had been playing backgammon until four in the morning.
“Can’t we make it this afternoon?”
“No, I’m afraid it has to be now.”
“Why?”
The man fumbled in the outside pocket of his work pants before extracting a black notebook. “Look,” he said, showing it to me. “This is my schedule for today. After I finish here, I have to head to another part of the city. See?”
I looked at the notebook from where I stood. It was upside down, but I was able to see that, sure enough, my apartment was his last call in this neighborhood.
“What do you have to do?”
“It’s simple. I pull out the old switch panel, cut the wires, and hook up the new one. That’s all. The whole thing takes about ten minutes.”
I thought for a moment before shaking my head no.
“I’m happy with the one I’ve got,” I said.
“But it’s an old model.”
“The old model’s fine with me.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s like this,” he said at last. “This isn’t just about you. It affects everyone.”
“How so?”
“The switch panels are all hooked up to the central computer at headquarters. So if yours is sending out a different signal than the rest, we’ve got a big problem. Got it?”
“Yes, I get it. You’re talking about matching up hardware and software.”
“Then can’t you see your way to letting me in?”
What could I do? I opened the door and ushered him inside.
“But why would my apartment have the switch panel?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it go in the super’s apartment, or someplace like that?”
“Normally,” he said, scanning the walls of my kitchen. “But switch panels are just big nuisances to most people. They take up a lot of space, after all, and they’re hardly ever used.”
I nodded. Now the guy had climbed up on one of my kitchen chairs in his socks and was checking the ceiling. Nothing there, either.
“It’s like a treasure hunt. People cram switch panels into the weirdest places. It’s a real pity. Then they decorate their apartments with bulky doll cases and monster pianos. Go figure.”
I agreed. Giving up on the kitchen, he opened the bedroom door, still shaking his head.
“Let me tell you about a switch panel I c
ame across the other day. Where do you think they tossed the poor thing? Couldn’t believe my eyes…”
He caught his breath. With the covers pulled to their chins, the twins lay side by side—with space for me in the middle—in a huge bed in a corner of the room. For fifteen seconds the repairman stood there dumbfounded. The twins were silent too. I had no choice but to break the ice.
“Uh, this gentleman is here with the phone company.”
“Hi,” said the one on the right.
“Welcome,” said the one on the left.
“How…how do you do,” said the repairman.
“He’s come to replace the switch panel,” I said.
“The switch panel?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a machine to control the circuits.”
Neither of them understood. So I stepped back and let the repairman take over.
“Hmm…You see, it’s where all the telephone circuits gather together. Kind of like a mother dog with lots of puppies. Get it?”
“?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, so let’s say this mother dog is raising her puppies…But if she dies, then her puppies will all die too. So when her time comes, we go around replacing her with a new mother.”
“Cool.”
“Amazing.”
I had to hand it to him.
“So that’s why I’m here. Awful sorry to come at such a bad time.”
“No problem.”
“I want to watch.”
The relieved repairman mopped his brow with his handkerchief.
“Now if I can find the panel,” he said, scanning the room.
“No need to search,” said the one on the right.
“It’s in the closet,” said the one on the left. “Just remove the boards.”
I was blown away. “How come you guys know? Even I didn’t know that.”
“It’s the switch panel, right?”
“It’s famous.”
“I’m floored,” said the repairman.
The job took ten minutes, and the whole time the twins had their heads together, giggling about something. As a result, the repairman kept botching the hookup. When he finally finished, the twins wriggled into their jeans and sweatshirts under the sheets and bounced into the kitchen to make coffee for everyone.
I offered the repairman a leftover Danish to go with his coffee. He jumped at the chance.
“Thanks so much. I missed breakfast.”
“Don’t you have a wife?” asked 208.
“Sure I do. But she sleeps in on Sundays.”
“Poor guy,” said 209.
“It’s not like I choose to work Sundays, either.”
I felt sorry for him. “How about a boiled egg?” I asked.
“That would be an imposition.”
“No problem,” I said. “We’re all having some.”
“Well, in that case. Not too runny, though…”
“I’ve been making house calls for twenty-one years,” the repairman said as he peeled his egg, “but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Anything like what?” I asked.
“Well, uh…you’re sleeping with twins, right? Doesn’t that wear you out?”
“No,” I said, sipping my coffee.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“He’s something else,” said 208.
“Yeah,” said 209. “A real animal.”
“I’m floored,” said the man.
I think he really was floored. The giveaway was that he forgot to take the old switch panel when he departed. Or maybe he left it behind to thank us for the breakfast. At any rate, the twins played with it all day, one acting as the mother dog, the other as the puppies. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were talking about.
So I put them out of my mind and spent the afternoon focused on the translation I had brought home. The student part-timers who did the rough drafts were taking their exams, so my work had piled up. I was flying along until about three o’clock, when my battery began to run down and my pace slowed; by four the battery was dead. I couldn’t write another line.
I planted my elbows on the glass desktop, lit up a cigarette, and gazed at the ceiling. The smoke looked like ectoplasm as it wandered through the quiet afternoon light. September 1973—it felt like a dream. Did 1973 really exist? I had never thought about it before. Somehow the idea struck me as hilarious.
“Are you okay?” asked 208.
“Just tired. Feel like some coffee?”
They trooped off to the kitchen, where one ground the beans and the other boiled the water and warmed the cups. Then we plopped down in a row on the floor next to the window and drank our coffee.
“Not going so great?” asked 209.
“I’ve had better days,” I answered.
“It’s in bad shape,” said 208.
“What is?”
“The switch panel.”
“The mother dog.”
I let out a very deep sigh. “You think so?”
They both nodded.
“It’s dying.”
“For real.”
“So what should we do?”
“We don’t know,” they said, shaking their heads.
I puffed on my cigarette. “How about if we take a stroll around the golf course?” I said a little while later. “It’s Sunday, so there could be tons of lost balls.”
After about an hour of backgammon, we scaled the chain-link fence and walked the deserted course in the twilight. I whistled the tune to Mildred Bailey’s “It’s So Peaceful in the Country” twice. The twins said they liked the song a lot. But we didn’t find a single golf ball. Sometimes it’s like that. Every low-handicap golfer in Tokyo must have played there that day. Or maybe they had brought in a specially trained beagle to retrieve lost balls. Feeling low, we trudged back to the apartment.
4
The unmanned beacon sat alone at the end of a long, meandering pier. It was not particularly big, a little less than ten feet tall. Fishing boats had relied on its light in the days before pollution drove the fish from the coast. There was nothing resembling a harbor in the area. Instead, the fishermen had rigged a set of wooden tracks with a winch and a rope to pull their boats up from the beach. Three of their huts had stood nearby; in the mornings you would have seen wooden boxes of small fish drying inside the breakwater. At a certain point, however, the fishermen had left, driven away by a combination of three factors: the disappearance of the fish, the commuters’ irrational aversion to having a fishing village near their town, and the township’s declaration that the huts along the beach were illegal. That was 1962. Where the fishermen had gone was anyone’s guess. The three houses were summarily demolished, while the rotting boats, with no further function and no place to be discarded, were left high and dry among the trees along the shore, where they served as a playground for children.
Once the fishing boats were gone, private yachts wandering the coast and freighters moored outside the port seeking shelter from typhoons and heavy fogs were the only vessels left that might have found the beacon helpful. But most likely it no longer served a purpose.
The beacon was a squat black thing shaped like a bell set down on its rim or a man hunched in thought seen from the back. When the sun began to set and the evening glow became tinged with blue, an orange light glowed from its top—the handle of the bell—and it slowly began to revolve. In that instant, when day turned to night, it came to life: whether evening brought a beautiful sunset or a cloak of mist, the beam began to rotate at the precise moment when the balance between light and dark shifted, and darkness reigned supreme.
As a child, the Rat had often gone down to the beach in the evenings just to witness that sudden flash in the dark. If the waves were not too high he would walk to the end of the twisting pier, counting its worn flagstones as he went. In the early fall he could see schools of tiny fish darting about in the surprisingly clear water. They w
ould swim circles along the sides of the pier, as if searching for something, before heading out to sea.
When at last he reached the beacon, the Rat sat down on the end of the pier and studied the sky. It was dark blue as far as the eye could see, with streaks of cloud that looked painted by an artist’s brush. The blue seemed bottomless; its depth made the Rat’s legs tremble in awe. Everything was so vivid, the smell of the ocean, the color of the wind. Taking his time, the Rat drank in the scene that lay before him, then turned around. Now he was looking at his own world, so separate from the deep sea. The white beach and the breakwater, the flattened row of green pines, and, behind them, ranged against the sky, the sharp outline of the bluish-black mountains.
Far to his left was the great port, with its cranes, floating docks, boxlike warehouses, freighters, and tall buildings. To his right, facing the ocean and running along the curved coastline, were the quiet residential district, the yacht harbor, some old sake warehouses, and, a suitable distance beyond, the industrial zone’s row of spherical tanks and towering smokestacks, which covered the sky with a white haze. That marked the end of the world as the ten-year-old Rat knew it.
Throughout his childhood, from spring to early autumn, the Rat paid regular visits to the beacon. When the waves were high, the spray washed his feet, the wind howled, and he slipped time and again on the mossy flagstones. Yet the path to the beacon was dearer to him than anywhere else. He would sit there at the end of the pier listening to the waves, gazing at the clouds, the sky, and the schools of small fish, and tossing the pebbles he carried in his pocket into the water.
When the sky darkened he would take the same path back to his own world. This return, though, was always accompanied by an ineffable sadness. The world awaiting him out there was just too big, too powerful; there seemed to be no place where he could burrow into it.
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