“I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. Within the next three days anyway. I’m all packed.”
“It’s really sudden.”
“I know. Sorry to have been such a pain in the ass.”
“Hey, a lot of things have gone down.” J nodded several times as he dusted the rows of glasses on the sideboard with a dry cloth. “But when it’s over, it all seems like a dream.”
“I guess you’re right. But you know it’ll probably take me a hell of a long time to really feel that way.”
J paused for a moment.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “I know. I forget sometimes there’s twenty years between us.”
The Rat poured what remained of his beer into his glass and sipped it. He had never drunk a beer so slowly before.
“Want another?”
The Rat shook his head slowly. “No, I’m good. I planned this as my last beer. The last one here, I mean.”
“So you’re not coming again?”
“No, that’s part of the plan. It’d be too rough.”
J laughed. “We’ll meet again.”
“Next time you may not recognize me.”
“I’ll recognize your smell.”
The Rat took a long last look at his trimmed fingernails, stuffed the uneaten peanuts into his pocket, wiped his mouth with the napkin, and left the bar.
The wind flowed soundlessly, as if sliding through an invisible rift in the darkness. It rustled the tree branches overhead, dislodging their leaves, which made a faint, dry sound as they hit the car roof. After dancing about, they skated down the windshield to pile on the fenders.
The Rat sat alone in his car among the cemetery trees, staring through the windshield. Language had deserted him. A few meters ahead the land fell away. Beyond was dark sky and ocean; below, the lights of the town. He was slouching forward, both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on a single point in the sky. Though his body was motionless, the tip of the unlit cigarette in his fingers described complex yet meaningless patterns in the air.
Breaking the news to J had left him with an unbearable empty feeling. It seemed as if, all of a sudden, the various rivulets that formed his consciousness, barely holding him together, had headed off in different directions. Could they find each other again? The Rat had no idea. Those dark streams would eventually reach the boundless sea. With luck, they might meet there, but…had his twenty-five years been lived for this? He couldn’t answer his own question. It was a good question, though. The good ones never had answers.
The wind was growing stronger. It caught the faint warmth rising from humanity and carried it far away, leaving behind only the cold darkness and the countless glittering stars. The Rat removed his hands from the steering wheel. He played with the cigarette between his lips for a while; then, as if remembering, he lit it.
His head throbbed. It was a strange sensation, not so much pain, more like cold fingertips pressing on his temples. He shook his head to drive his thoughts away. Whatever, he concluded. It’s all over now.
He pulled his road atlas from the glove compartment and leafed through it. He tried reciting some of the place names in order. Most were small towns wholly unfamiliar to him. They followed the roadways in an interminable line. After reading a few pages, he felt the fatigue that had built up over the past few days crash down on him like a towering wave. A lukewarm sludge oozed through his veins.
He longed to sleep.
Sleep would wash everything away. If he could just sleep…
When he closed his eyes he could hear the winter surf striking the seawall and threading its way between the concrete blocks of the breakwater back to the open sea.
At least I don’t have to explain myself to anyone anymore, thought the Rat. How much more warm and peaceful and quiet the bottom of the sea might be than any of those towns. But enough thinking. Enough.
25
The hum of pinball machines had vanished from my life. Ditto the thoughts with no place to go. There would be no Knights of the Round Table–like grand finale, of course. That was still far away. From now on, I vowed, when my horse was exhausted, my sword broken, and my armor rusty, I would lay myself down in a meadow of green foxtail and listen to the wind. I would follow the path I should follow wherever it took me, whether that be the bottom of a reservoir or a chicken plant’s refrigerated warehouse.
I know the following brief epilogue will seem trivial, of no greater consequence than a clothesline in the rain.
But here goes.
One day the twins came home from the supermarket with a box of cotton swabs. Three hundred swabs packed in one carton. After that they took to cleaning my ears when I finished my bath, one on each side. They were very good at it. I would close my eyes and drink beer and listen to the swabs whisper in my ears. One night, however, I happened to sneeze halfway through. And in that second, I lost almost all my hearing.
“Can you hear me?” asked the one on the right.
“Only a little,” I said. My voice seemed to be coming from behind my nose.
“How about me?” said the one on the left.
“Same thing.”
“It’s your fault for sneezing,” said one.
“Yeah,” said the other. “That was dumb.”
I sighed. It was as if I had bowled a seven-ten split, and both pins were nattering at me.
“Will drinking water help?” asked one.
“Fat chance,” I shouted angrily.
Nevertheless, they forced me to drink a whole bucket of water. All that did was make my stomach ache. But my ears didn’t hurt, which I took to mean that the force of the sneeze had driven the earwax farther inside. That was the only theory that made sense. I located two flashlights in the closet and had them check. Like two spelunkers in a cave, they beamed their lights in my ears for several minutes.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Clean as a whistle on this side.”
“Then why the hell can’t I hear?” I shouted again.
“Your ears have given up the ghost.”
“You’re deaf.”
Ignoring them, I found the ear, nose, and throat clinic nearest to us in the telephone book and gave them a call. Talking on the phone was no easy matter in my condition, but the nurse sounded sympathetic. Come right away, she said. We’ll leave the front door open. The three of us threw on our clothes, raced out the door, and followed the bus route to the clinic on foot.
The doctor was a woman in her fifties with hair like tangled barbed wire, but she struck me as a nice person. Opening the waiting-room door herself, she stopped the twins’ chattering with a clap of her hands, sat me down in a chair, and listened to my story with a bored look on her face.
I get the picture, so for goodness’ sake stop shouting, she said when I finished. Then she took a huge syringe, filled it with an amber liquid, and handed me something like a tin megaphone to place beneath my ear. She inserted the syringe and pushed the plunger, whereupon the amber liquid went galloping merrily into my ear like a herd of zebras before overflowing into the megaphone. This was repeated three times, after which she probed the ear with a slender cotton swab. When she had treated both ears in this manner I could hear as well as before.
“I can hear!” I said.
“Earwax,” she responded tersely. It sounded like that children’s word game where you turn the last syllable of one word into the first syllable of the next.
“But we couldn’t see it.”
“Because of the curve.”
“The curve?”
“Your ear canals are a lot more curved than other people’s.”
She sketched my inner ear for me on the back of a matchbox. It was bent at a right angle, like a bookshelf bracket.
“So you see, if earwax goes around that bend, you can call it all day and it will never come back.”
“So what can I do?” I groaned.
“Do? Just be careful cleaning your ears. Careful.”
�
�Are there further consequences if your ear canals are especially bent?”
“Further consequences?”
“Like for example…psychological ones?”
“None,” she said.
—
We added an extra fifteen minutes to our walk home by cutting across the golf course. The dogleg on the eleventh hole reminded me of my inner ear, the flag of a cotton swab. And that wasn’t the end of it. The clouds crossing the moon became a squadron of B- 52s, the thick stand of trees in the west a fish-shaped paperweight, the stars moldy parsley flakes…you get the idea. Anyway, my ears were now attuned to the sounds of this world to a splendid degree. It was as if a veil had been stripped away. I could hear things taking place miles away: the cries of night birds, people shutting their windows, other people talking of love.
“What a relief,” said one twin.
“Thank goodness,” said the other.
Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.”
Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous “perhaps.” All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us.
That was pretty much what I was thinking when I said goodbye to the twins for good. I was silent the whole way across the golf course, as we went to catch the bus two stops down the road. It was a Sunday morning and the sky was a piercing blue. The grass beneath our feet was filled with the premonition of its approaching death until the next spring. Before long it would turn white with frost, and then disappear beneath a blanket of snow. The snow would glitter in the crystal-clear morning sunlight. The pale grass crunched beneath our feet as we walked along.
“What are you thinking?” one of the twins asked me.
“Nothing,” I said.
The twins were wearing the sweaters I had given them and carrying their sweatshirts and a change of clothing in paper bags under their arms.
“Where will you go?” I asked them.
“Back where we came from.”
“Yeah, we’re just going back.”
We passed the sand trap and the eighth hole’s straight-as-an-arrow fairway, and walked down the outdoor escalator. A big flock of small birds was sitting on the grass and the chain-link fence, watching us go by.
“I can’t say this very well,” I said. “But I’m really going to miss you both.”
“We’re going to miss you too.”
“We’ll be lonely.”
“But you’re going, right?”
They nodded.
“And you’re sure you have someplace to go?”
“Of course,” said one.
“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t go back,” said the other.
We climbed over the fence, cut through the trees, and there was the bus stop. We sat on the bench to wait for the bus. On a sunny Sunday morning, the stop was quiet and peaceful. We sat there in the light and played the children’s word game together. Five minutes later the bus arrived, and I gave them money for their fares.
“See you around,” I said.
“See you around,” said one.
“See you around,” said the other.
The phrase echoed in my heart for a long while.
The bus doors closed with a bang, and then they were waving to me from the window. Everything repeats itself…
I retraced the path we had taken back to my apartment, put the Rubber Soul record they had left me on the turntable, made some coffee, and sat there in the autumn light, watching the rest of that Sunday pass by outside my window. A November Sunday so tranquil it seemed that everything would soon be crystal clear.
1969–1973
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.
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