He nodded as if he’d expected as much. “Extraordinary people have extraordinarily hard times.”
He went on, “I’ve wondered for so long . . . I know now that my imagination is a feeble mechanism. You’re so different from what I imagined—” She glanced at him. “So much better,” he quickly added.
She began to relax. “You haven’t told me about your research. I have a right to a debriefing, I think.”
“Simply put, we found a way to quantify a person’s ability to love. Their potential. It turns out that not all people are capable of loving to the same capacity. The idea was revolutionary.” He leaned forward, touched her hand. “Imagine being married to a person whose ability to love—whose lovingcapacity—is far below your own.”
As he spoke the word lovingcapacity, he tapped out the syllables with two fingers on the place her wedding ring had recently been.
“From their perspective, a person may be loving to their fullest extent,” Shinji continued. “However, this isn’t good enough for the partner with the higher LC. It will never be good enough. This causes the lower-capacity partner to feel inadequate, unappreciated, and their partner feels the same because, to their mind, everyone should love as they do.”
“Can’t people be made to understand, to accept their differences?”
“Perhaps. But it is very hard for people to truly understand. We have, it turns out, a tremendous blind spot when it comes to being loved.”
“And people can’t improve?”
“Our research generally showed lovingcapacity to be a fixed and immovable trait, much like eye color or IQ. Of course, when it comes to the mind, one can never be sure.”
“I can’t believe I did so well,” she said, and just then the waiter arrived, balancing two large lunch boxes and a platter of drinks. As he set Aya’s box in front her, a glass of cola slid from his tray and crashed onto the table, splashing Aya and dousing her pork cutlet.
The waiter fumbled, apologizing, and promised to bring a new lunch. Aya grimaced at the idea of wasting so much food.
“There’s no need,” she said, dabbing at her shirt with her napkin. “I’ll eat it as it is.”
“Please, ma’am—”
“Really. Maybe you could discount the bill a bit instead.”
The waiter bowed, his face as red as “Shhh,” and hurried away.
Aya took a bite of her cola-flavored cutlet; she was starving and the vodka had unloosed her appetite. Not bad, she thought. When she looked up, Shinji was looking her, his face shining. His food was untouched.
“Amazing,” he said.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, secretly pleased. “So tell me, what became of your findings?”
“In the autumn of 1970, we lost our funding. The government classified our work as ‘unscientific and possibly dangerous.’”
“Dangerous!”
“Some people felt we were meddling in a place science ought not to meddle. A real shame, since long-term research is by far the most robust in fields like this.” He made a small motion with his hand, and a minute later two more drinks appeared.
“Well, I’ve prattled on long enough,” he said, raising his glass. “Let’s hear about you. From the beginning. What did you study at Keio?”
She clinked her glass to his and took a long sip of her vodka. Aya Kawaguchi was a woman who could hold her liquor. “Literature,” she said. “My first love was Soseki.”
“Kokoro,” he replied, naming the author’s first novel. As he said it, he placed his hand over his heart. “Maybe that is why your kokoro is so big.”
“Or maybe my big heart is what drew me to Soseki.” She was feeling more and more comfortable, as if lying about her identity had rolled out the red carpet for other untruths to follow.
He sighed and sat back in his chair, smiling. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around a Keio girl. Don’t you miss city life?”
He focused on her completely as she spoke, his eyes wide, like a child watching a fireworks display. She felt—interesting. Extraordinary. “Well, college was a wild time,” she said, as if admitting something. “I didn’t always make it to class, let’s just say that.”
“Well now, do tell!”
“Oh, no. Well, for one thing there was the band—”
“The marching band?”
“No, a rock band. Punk, really. I was the singer.”
“Ah—I played clarinet, myself.”
She nodded, slipping inside this invented life like a pair of old pajamas. “We were called Shards of Black, and we wore only white, to be ironic.”
While he was laughing, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. Hisao had left a voicemail, a habit he’d acquired recently.
She returned his call, explained to him the significance of the toaster oven sitting on the kitchen counter, what each knob did, and how long to leave the bread inside. He didn’t mention her quartet practice, which she found annoying, but when he asked whether she would be home for dinner, his voice stirred pity in her. She imagined him eating burnt toast—plain because he did not know where to locate the butter and jam—and she could not say no.
Upon her return she found Hisao sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by a mess of bottles, boxes, and cans.
“What are you doing?”
“Rearranging,” he said, examining a box of fish stock.
“Why?”
He looked up, irritated. “For greater efficiency.”
“You don’t even cook.”
He shrugged. She stepped over him and picked up the whiskey.
“Since when do you drink?”
“Since now. Why do you seem to think life is over, that it’s too late to try new things?”
He motioned at the mess around him. “I am trying new things.”
A letter from Shinji arrived two days later. He must have mailed it while I was on the train ride back, Aya thought. In the letter he thanked her for coming to Tokyo and expressed his excitement for their next meeting, the next Sunday in Ueno Park. He closed with a line from Kokoro, the Soseki novel they had discussed:
Words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those expressing thoughts rationally conceived. . . .
She reread his letters each morning and began the day feeling like a plant just watered.
Autumn had set the trees in the park aflame, and Aya felt she’d never experienced such richness of color, even in the rural forests of her hometown.
He had bowed to her upon their meeting, a good sign, she thought, since a hug would have meant something she was not quite ready for. His face searched hers in a way it had not upon their first encounter, like a connoisseur reevaluating a painting that’s been placed in new light. She thought it might be her lipstick: after locking up her viola, she’d applied “Shhh” without blotting it afterward.
His unsure manner disappeared quickly, and Aya wrote it off to nerves. Her suspicion was confirmed when, after just a few minutes of walking, he grabbed her hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.
He led her out of the park, through a shopping area, and into a quiet neighborhood of old houses and narrow lanes. “This is my house,” he said, and they stopped in the street. “Don’t worry,” he said, seeing her expression, “I’m not indecent. After all, we hardly know each other!”
She followed him down a narrow path behind the house. He kept glancing back, as if to make sure she was still there. A tiny shed stood in the yard, and when they reached it, he began unlocking it. There were four locks in all.
“Here we are,” he said, pushing open the door.
Aya stepped inside the dim little room, which smelled of wet wood and plastic. A large table, which held a device resembling a seismograph, took upmost of the space. It was not a room built for company.
“This,” he said, throwing out his arm like a magician, “is the amorometer.”
The central component of the contraption was a metal case painted red. Inside the case
, a needle hung poised over a thick roll of paper. Two leather cuffs, one large, like a belt, and one smaller, the size of a blood-pressure cuff, dangled from the left side of the box. Rising behind the box like a crown was a clothes hanger—also painted red—that had been forced into an awkward heart shape. It looked like something Ryo would have built with scraps from the neighbor’s trash.
“I was hoping you’d be willing to, well, provide some new data. A longitudinal study, if you will!” He set his hand lightly on her arm.
“Ah!” She imagined herself cuffed to the device, the evidence of her fakery pouring forth, and shuddered. She sat down.
“Are you all right? Is there something you need?”
“I’m just not—”
“You see,” he said, opening and closing a clamp full of tiny metal teeth, “this way I can be sure . . . we can be sure . . .”
She thought of her lipstick, and touched a finger to her mouth, as if testing a wall she had regretfully painted.
“I think I should go,” she said.
Her train wasn’t due for over an hour. She wandered the fluorescent underground corridors of the station, passing shops advertising souvenirs for places elsewhere—blackened eggs from Hakone, tiny limes from Shikoku, habu liquor from Okinawa. She wondered how many of the gifts she’d received over the years had come from places like this. Was everything so false?
She heard the music long before she saw the players; it came from nearly the same place as the first time, next to the ticket machine for the Hibiya subway line, which, she’d learned from Shinji, was the deepest subway in the world. If you stood at the bottom of the Hibiya escalator, it was said, you could feel the heat of hell and see the light from heaven.
She looked at the spot the quartet-minus-one had been a week before but found it empty. She followed the melody with her ear. It was coming, she realized, from beyond the ticket gates, rising up the escalator.
She made her decision at once; or rather, she reflected later, her heart had made it for her—a luxury she had not allowed herself in many years. Inside the stall of a nearby bathroom, Aya flipped the latches on her viola case. She lifted the instrument from its bed and, drawing the ancient bow across the strings, began to play.
The strings were old; the A and G were frayed along the bowline and she worked the tuning pegs, cradling the wooden body to her chest. Shoes clattered on the disinfected floors, doors slammed, and hands were washed, and for once in her life, Aya did not care who observed her. These women were strangers, yet they shared this city; maybe some had been students at Keio University, maybe the other Aya Kawaguchi was in the stall next to her, pants down. The thought made her laugh, and without realizing what she was doing, she began playing the solo she’d performed her last year of high school, the first movement of Shubert’s Arpeggione. Heady, she watched her fingers land on the strings, and though the B was falling out of tune already, her rhythm was dead on.
It wasn’t perfect, but she felt it was good, and if she practiced, it could be marvelous, better than it had been in school because everything she had lived through would go into the music. She was no longer a girl. Her fears and desires were known and did not bind her. She hit the final notes with this in mind, standing alone in the corner stall of the women’s bathroom near the Hibiya Line in Tokyo Station, and when she was finished, a small clap echoed against the tile walls, and a second later more applause joined it. Aya lifted her head. She bowed to no one, then started from the beginning, thinking how the beady-eyed judge had nodded, even smiled, and said: “That was good, but let’s hear it again.”
MAX APPLE
The Yogurt of Vasarin Kefirovsky
Max Apple is a satirist who is probably best known for the movie The Air Up There, for which he wrote the screenplay. He has a PhD from the University of Michigan and taught creative writing at Rice University for twenty-nine years. Apple has written two novels, two memoirs, and three collections of stories. The Washington Post has said of him, “[Apple] is an amiable, good-hearted, sweet-tempered writer whose short pieces occupy an agreeable territory somewhere between fact and fiction.” He lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky” parodies the mad-scientist motif common in science fiction and in parodies of science fiction.
Vasirin Kefirovsky stands six feet four and uses an extra-long rubber-tipped pointer. He is fond of spinning a globe with this pointier while his feet rest on the patio table. He dislikes gossip but revels in small talk. His wife, Emily, spends many of her mornings watching the yogurt incubate beneath blankets in her stainless-steel kitchen. Dr. Kefirovsky spins his globe and thinks from eight to eleven forty-five, then he drinks his yogurt and works all afternoon on Earth Story.
Today his morning schedule is interrupted by an interviewer from Time magazine, Robert Williams, assistant science editor.
Mrs. Kefirovsky sits with the two men at the patio table, keeping her eye on the weather. She sips a cocktail of Mogen David wine and club soda.
“I am what I am,” says Professor Kefirovsky. “When I was a boy, I ate wide noodles brushed with cheeses. In middle age, no meat was too gamy. I ate your turtles, your rabbits, your unfit leghorns. I knew the earth before I knew my own belly.”
“Your husband is a great man,” the reporter tells Emily. “If I the deep space probes bear out his ideas as well as Mariner II did, he’ll be on the cover of Time someday. He’ll be taught in the schools.”
Kefirovsky puts down his pointer and uses a long forefinger for emphasis. “Eating has nothing to do with thinking,” he tells the reporter. “I always thought clearly, but I thought too much about food. Now I think about nothing to eat. What is yogurt? It’s milk and time and heat. What is the earth? It’s rocks and time and bodies.”
The reporter takes notes slowly. “But tell me this, Professor, have you resented being an outsider all these years? I mean, has the fact that the scientific community considers you something of a charlatan embittered your career?”
Kefirovsky spins the earth with his pointer. “Name me a big one who was not an outsider. Galileo, Copernicus, Paracelsus, Hans Fricht . . . Galen maybe was an insider, he gave back rubs to the Emperor. He was a chiropractor. If you’re an insider you make Vicks cough drops or you work for the Ford Foundation.”
“Well, Einstein, for one, was accepted by his contemporaries. He was not an outsider.”
Kefirovsky stands and edges the pointer close to Williams’s nose. “And Einstein made cough drops too. Only if you write this everyone will say how ungrateful Kefirovsky is. Now that people pay attention to him, he fills the magazines with dreck about Einstein. Not long ago I saw Einstein’s brain. It’s in Connecticut at a health institute. They take care of it like it’s a member of the family in an iron lung. I knew Einstein and I knew his brother Victor, who sold Red Ball shoes in Brooklyn.”
“Don’t worry, Professor, Time isn’t a gossip magazine. I won’t write anything about Einstein.”
“I don’t worry and I don’t think about eating food.” Using his pointer as a walking stick, Kefirovsky strides into his garden bordered by petunias, roses, and white azaleas. The reporter follows.
“I came from Russia in a dressing gown. At Ellis Island I cut it below the pockets with a scissors, hemmed the bottom, and wore it for years as a satin smoking jacket. I had my teeth capped during World War II. I married in 1926 and have four sons all of whom served in the United States Army and were honorably discharged, except Gerald.”
“And what does Gerald do now?”
“He makes cough drops.”
Mrs. Kefirovsky returns to the kitchen with her candy thermometer to check the yogurt’s temperature. “I’ll call you, Vasi, when it’s a hundred and twelve.”
Dr. Kefirovsky is neither tired nor angry. He suffers the reporter but his mind is elsewhere. His four sons are all organic chemists. They used to come together every year at Easter time and eat big meals of l
ake trout, poultry, beef, and Russian side dishes like stuffed cabbage, boiled potatoes, and fried smelt. Kefirovsky himself used to make two hundred gallons of wine a year. During the Christmas season neighbors and delivery men drank it from Pepsi-Cola quarts.
There are two ovens in his stainless-steel kitchen and a natural-gas pit-barbecue in his backyard. But Kefirovsky no longer cooks, barbecues, or makes wine. His sons and their families are refusing to come for another Easter. The mailman and the paperboy turn down the quarts of Christmas yogurt. The books he wrote thirty years ago about the collisions of the planets are selling now, but his new thesis is scorned by people like Adelle Davis and Dr. Atkins. He has no publisher for Earth Story.
Williams asks, “When did you first begin to realize that cosmic accidents are recorded in human history?”
“I knew this as early as 1929.”
“But what made you think of it?”
“I opened my eyes. I looked around. I talked to people. I read books. I wondered why a rinky-dinky town like Troy should be such a front-page story for a thousand years. I wondered why the Red Sea opened and how come the Chinamen knew about Noah’s flood. I kept my eyes on the heavens. I read spectrograms. I made educated guesses. That’s what science is.
“One day I came to Hans Fricht and I said, ‘Hans, either I’m crazy or I know about history.’ I showed him my data. ‘You’re not crazy,’ he said. He called Einstein, who was then a nobody, a refugee in baggy trousers who thanked God when you talked to him in German and had hay fever in New Jersey.
“‘Er veiss vas er zagt?’ Einstein asked Fricht. He followed the mathematics but he missed the point. He didn’t give a damn about history. Before he died he was a pen pal with Albert Schweitzer. I sent Schweitzer a copy of Worlds in Confusion but never heard from him. Fricht was going to write the introduction but he said Einstein needed the money, so Einstein wrote it in German and Hans translated it. Einstein had lots of bad gram mar. Listen, I liked the man. I am not jealous of his success. He was right about many things. If he ate less, he would be alive today.”
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 32
