5



In the apartment house I lived in as a student, nobody had a phone. I doubt whether some of us even had one measly eraser. All the same, out in front of the superintendent’s apartment we’d stationed a low table lifted from the nearby elementary school, and on that sat a pink pay phone, the one and only telephone in the entire apartment house. So no one gave the least thought to switch-panels or what have you. It was a peaceful world in peaceful times.

There was never anybody in the superintendent’s apartment, so whenever the phone rang, one of us residents would have to answer it, then run and call the person. Of course, when nobody felt like getting it (like at two in the morning, for instance), the phone would go unanswered. It would ring on and on (my highest count was thirty-two times), raging like an elephant that knew its time had come. Then it would die. Literally and truly, it would die. As the last ring trailed off down the hall into the night, a sudden hush would fall over the place. A disturbing, ominous hush. Everyone would be holding their breath under the covers of their futon thinking about the call that had died.

Phone calls in the dead of night never brought good news. Somebody would pick up the receiver, and would begin softly. “Can we not talk about this?... Can’t you see, it’s not like that.... So what, you say? That’s just how it’s gotta be, right? Guess I’m just tired. . . . Of course, I’m sorry and all that.... So you see... Like I get the picture, I get it, so just let me think it over a bit, okay?... I just can’t find the words over the phone...”

Everybody was up to here in troubles, it seemed. Trouble fell like rain from the heavens, and we just couldn’t get enough of it. We went around picking up the stuff and cramming our pockets full of it. Even now I can’t figure out why we persisted in doing that. Maybe we mistook it for something else.

Sometimes we’d even get telegrams. Four o’clock in the morning a bike would pull up to the entrance, followed by footsteps tramping down the hall. Then there’d come a knock on someone’s door. A pounding thud thud that always seemed to announce the arrival of the God of Death. Any number of people were cutting their lives short, going out of their heads, burying their hearts in the sludge of time, burning up their bodies with pointless thinking, making trouble for one another. Nineteen seventy was that kind of year. If indeed the human species was created to elevate itself dialectically, then that year had to have been some kind of object lesson.



* * *



I lived on the first floor next to the superintendent’s apartment, and this girl with long hair lived upstairs by the stairwell. She was the house champion at receiving phone calls, and it somehow fell to me to be perpetually running up and down those fifteen slippery steps. And let me tell you, did she ever get all kinds of phone calls. Polite voices, officious voices, touchingly sad voices, overbearing voices, and they’d all be asking for her by name. I have long since managed to drive that name out of mind; I only remember it was a pathetically ordinary name.

She would always talk into the receiver in a low, tired monotone. A bare whisper of a voice you could hardly make out. She was pretty enough, I suppose, yet there was something dark and moody about her face. We’d pass on the street sometimes, but she’d never say a thing. She’d be walking with such an intense expression she might have been trudging down a path though the deepest jungle astride a white elephant.



* * *



She lived in the apartment house maybe half a year. The half-year from the beginning of autumn to the end of winter.

I’d answer the phone, climb the stairs, knock on her door, and call out, “Telephone!” Then, after a slight pause would come “Thanks.” That’s all I ever heard her say, “Thanks.” But for that matter, I never said anything either except ‘‘Telephone.”

For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world.

The phone would ring. And I’d think, somebody’s got something to tell somebody else. I almost never got calls myself. There wasn’t anybody who’d have anything to say to me, at least not anybody I’d want to hear from.

Everyone had by then begun to live according to systems of their own making. If theirs were very different from mine, I’d get irritable; if they were too much alike, I’d get depressed. That’s pretty much how it went.



* * *



The last phone call I took for her was at the end of winter. A bright, clear Saturday morning, the beginning of March. By “morning,” I mean around ten o’clock, when the winter sun cast its clear light into every corner of my tiny room. I vaguely heard it ringing in my head as I lazed about, absently gazing down on the field of cabbages outside my bedside window. Patches of snow here and there on the dark black soil glistened like mirror-bright pockets of water. The last snow left by the last cold wave of the season.

Ten rings and no takers. The ringing stopped. Then not five minutes later it started again. Disgruntled, I threw on a cardigan over my pajamas, opened the door, and picked up the receiver.

“Miss ______, please,” came a male voice. A flat, unmodulated voice; an utterly featureless voice you couldn’t pin down if you tried. I improvised some reply, then slowly climbed the stairs to knock on her door.

“Telephone!”

“..... Thanks.”

I returned to my room, stretched out on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. I heard her come downstairs and start talking in her usual dry whisper. It was a short call as hers went. Maybe fifteen seconds. There was the sound of her hanging up, then silence. Not even any footsteps.

Finally, after a longish pause, I heard the slow approach of footsteps, followed by a knocking on my door. Two knocks, time for one deep breath, then twice again.

On opening the door, I found her standing there in a bulky white sweater and jeans. For a second I thought I’d given her someone else’s call, but she didn’t say a word. She just stood there, arms folded tightly across her chest, shivering. She gave me this look–she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

“Can I come in? I could catch my death of cold out here.”

Not knowing what to expect, I ushered her in and shut the door. She sat down in front of the heater, warming her hands as she gave the room the once-over.

“Awful empty room you’ve got here.”

I nodded. It was practically empty. Just a bed by the window. Too big for a single, too small for a semi-double. Whatever it was, the bed wasn’t something I’d bought for myself. A friend gave it to me. I really couldn’t imagine why he’d give me a bed; I wasn’t even that close to him. Hardly ever spoke to the guy. The son of a rich family from somewhere, he was beaten up in the school court-yard by louts from some other political faction, had his face kicked in with work boots, almost lost an eye, and withdrew from school. He was in convulsions the whole time I was walking him to the university infirmary, a real sorry sight. Some days later he said it was back home for him, and he gave me the bed.

“I bet you can’t even fix yourself anything hot to drink,” she said. I shook my head. I didn’t have a thing. No coffee, no tea, no bancha. I didn’t even have a kettle. Just one small saucepan I used every morning to heat water for shaving. She sighed and stood-up saying wait there, she’d be right back. She left the room, and five minutes later returned with a cardboard box under each arm. In the boxes were a half-year’s supply of teabags and green tea, two boxes of biscuits, granulated sugar, a thermos pot, and a complete set of dishes, plus two Snoopy tumblers to boot. She plunked the boxes down on the bed, and boiled water for the thermos.

“How on earth do you manage to survive? You’re practically Robinson Crusoe here!”

“No, it’s not as much fun as that.”

“I should think not.”

I shut up and drank my hot tea.

“I’m giving you all this.”

I choked on the tea. “You’re what?”

“You had to answer so many of my phone calls. This is thanks.”

“But what about you, don’t you need this stuff?”

She shook her head repeatedly. “I’m moving tomorrow, so I won’t be needing anything.”

I gave the situation a silent moment’s thought, but couldn’t imagine what had happened.

“Good news? Bad news?”

“None too good, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to quit school and return to the old homefront.”

The roomful of winter sunshine clouded over, then brightened again.

“But that’s nothing you want to hear about. I don’t even want to hear about it. Who’d want to use dishes from someone who left you with bad feelings, right?”



The next day, a cold rain fell from morning on. A fine rain, but it penetrated my raincoat and got my sweater wet all the same. The rain made everything dark and slick. The oversized trunk I carried, the suitcase she carried, her shoulder bag, everything. The taxi driver even growled, Would we be so kind as to not put the luggage on the seat?

The taxi was stuffy inside from the heater and cigarette smoke, and an old enka ballad crooned out of the car radio. A real oldie from the days of pop-up turn signals. Groves of leafless trees that might have just as well been undersea coral stretched out their damp branches from both sides of the road.

“You know, from the very first sight of it, I never did like the look of Tokyo,” she said.

“Really?”

“The soil’s too dark, the waterways are polluted, no mountains. How about you?”

“I never paid much attention to the scenery myself.”

She let out a sigh and laughed. “You, I just know you’re a survivor.”

Her luggage safely deposited on the station platform, this was the part where she got to tell me many thanks.

“I can manage it from here, thanks.”

“Where you heading?”

“Way up north.”

“Cold, I bet.”

“It’s okay, I’m used to it.”

As the train pulled away, she waved from the window. I raised my hand as far as my ear, but by that time the train had gone. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I buried the hand in the pocket of my raincoat.

The rain continued on into the night. I bought two bottles of beer at the neighborhood liquor store, and poured myself a drink in one of the glasses I got from her. I felt as if my body was going to freeze clean through to the core. On the glass was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock playing atop the doghouse, and over that, this caption:

HAPPINESS IS A WARM FRIENDSHIP

* * *



I woke up after the twins were sound asleep. Three AM. An unnaturally bright autumn moon shone through the window of the john. I sat down on the edge of the kitchen sink and drank two glasses of tapwater, then lit a cigarette on a burner of the stove. Out on the moonlit golf course, the autumnal droning of the insects overlapped in layers across the turf.

I picked up the switch-panel the twins had stood by the side of the sink, and looked it over. No matter how you turned the thing over, front or back, it was nothing but a meaningless piece of fiberboard. I gave up and put it back where I’d found it, brushed the dust off my hands, took a puff on my cigarette. Everything took on a blue cast in the moonlight. It made everything look worthless, meaningless. I couldn’t even be sure of the shadows. I crushed out my cigarette in the sink and immediately lit a second.

I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy consideration, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago.

I went back to bed and snuggled in between the twins. Their bodies, each tracing a gentle curve, their heads facing outward, breathing lightly, asleep. I pulled the blanket over me and stared up at the ceiling.



6



She closed the bathroom door behind her. Presently there was the sound of the shower.

The Rat sat up in bed, unable to collect his thoughts, put a cigarette to his mouth, and looked for his lighter. It wasn’t in the pocket of his trousers on the table. Couldn’t even find any matches. He rummaged through her purse, but no luck. He had no other choice but to turn on the room light and search through all the desk drawers, at last coming up with an old book of matches bearing the name of some restaurant somewhere.

Over the back of the rattan chair on which she’d laid her neatly folded stockings and underwear was draped a finely tailored dress of a mustard color.

And on the night table, alongside a lady’s wristwatch, was a Baggagerie shoulder bag, not new, but well cared for.

The Rat sat himself down in the rattan chair opposite and, cigarette still in his mouth, gazed absently out the window.

From his apartment up in the hills, he could take in the random scatter of human activity enveloped in darkness below. From time to time, the Rat would put his hands on his hips, like a golfer standing at the brink of a downhill course, and fix his attention on the scene for hours on end. The slope was dotted with patches of houselights, sweeping down in a slow descent that began from below his very feet. There were dark clumps of trees, small rises in the land, and here and there the white glare of mercury-vapor lamps gleaming off private pools. Where the slope leveled off, an expressway snaked through; a waistband of light cinched across the earth, and beyond that maybe a mile of flat urban sprawl stretched to the sea. The dark sea, so obscure you couldn’t make out the water from the sky. And out of the midst of that darkness would surface the orange glow of the beacon, only to vanish. Through all these distinct strata descended a single dark fairway.

A river.



* * *



The Rat met her for the first time at the beginning of September, when the sky still held a hint of summer’s brilliance.

He had been looking through the local newspaper’s weekly “White Elephant” corner in the classifieds. There among the toddler’s playpens and linguaphones and kiddy bikes, he found an electric typewriter. A woman answered the phone, her voice very businesslike, “Well, yes, it has been used for one year, but it still has a year left on the warranty. Monthly payments not acceptable. Could you come down and pick it up yourself?” The terms settled, the Rat got in his car and headed out to the woman’s apartment, paid the money, took the typewriter. The price was almost exactly what he’d earned working at odd jobs over the summer.

Slender and on the small side, the woman wore a pretty little sleeveless dress. A whole array of potted ornamentals of various shapes and colors lined the entryway. Neat, prim face, hair tied back in a bun. Her age? Doubtless he would have agreed with anything between twenty-two and twenty-eight.

Three days later he got a phone call, the woman saying she’d found half a dozen ribbons for the typewriter, if he’d care to have them. And when he went to pick them up, he’d invited her to J’s Bar and treated her to a couple of rounds of cocktails in return for the ribbons. He really didn’t get that far talking to her.

The third time they met was four days after that, at an indoor pool in town. The Rat drove her home and slept with her. The Rat really didn’t understand why things ended up like that. He couldn’t even remember who came on to whom. Maybe it was all in the way the air was flowing.

After a few days had passed, the relationship with her began to swell within him, making its presence known like a soft wedge driven into his daily life. Ever so slightly, something was starting to get to the Rat. Every time the image of her slender arms clinging round his body came to mind, he’d feel some long-forgotten tenderness spread through him.

He got a clear impression that she, in her own little world, was striving to build up a perfection of sorts. And the Rat knew that it was more than your ordinary effort. She always wore the most tasteful of dresses, which never attracted undue attention, and pretty underwear–nothing frilly, but smart. She put on eau de cologne with the scent of morning vineyards, carefully selected her words when she spoke, abstained from asking superfluous questions, smiled with that “practiced look” she learned from constant scrutiny in the mirror. And each of these things, in their own little way, made the Rat sad. After seeing her several times, the Rat had guessed her to be twenty-seven. And he was right on the nose.

Her breasts were small, her slender body free of excess flesh and beautifully tanned–though she’d deny having wanted to get a tan, really. High cheekbones and thin lips bespoke a good upbringing and an inner core of strength, yet behind all the shades of expression animating her face, what showed was an utterly defenseless naivete.

She’d graduated from the architecture department of an art school and was working in a planning office, that much she’d told him. Birthplace? Nowhere hereabouts. Came here after graduating. Once a week she’d swim at the pool, and on Sunday nights she took a train to her viola lessons.

Once a week, on Saturday nights, the two of them would get together. Then all day Sunday, the Rat would loll about while she played Mozart.



7



Down with a cold for three days, a backlog of work awaited me on my return to the office. My mouth was all raspy and dry; I felt as if someone had gone over my whole body with sandpaper. Pamphlets and papers and booklets and magazines had piled up around my desk like anthills. My partner came in, mumbled some inquiry after my health, then went back to his own room. The office girl brought in a cup of hot coffee and two rolls as usual, set them on the desk, and vanished. I found I’d forgotten to buy cigarettes, so I bummed a pack of Seven Stars off my partner, pinched the filter off one and lit the other end. The sky was overcast just to the point where you couldn’t tell where the air ended and the clouds began. Everything smelled as though someone had been trying to burn damp leaves. Or else it only seemed that way because of my fever.

I took a deep breath, and broke up the anthill closest at hand. Every item was stamped RUSH across the top and marked underneath with a deadline in red felt-tip pen. Luckily, that was the only RUSH anthill. And even luckier, there was still a couple of days left to go on them. The rest had deadlines from one to two weeks later, no problem if I farmed out half of it for rough translation. So one by one I started in on the booklets and brochures, restacking them in the order I finished them. A process that left an anthill of far less stable configuration than before. It looked like a newspaper graph by sex and age of constituent support for the cabinet. And it wasn’t just the shape that was strange, I might add; its contents were as thrilling as a cross-section of random topics.



1. Charles Rankin, Scientific Puzzle Box: Animals.

From p. 68, “Why Cats Wash Their Faces” to p. 89,

“How Bears Catch Fish.”

Finish by Oct. 12.



2. American Nursing Association, ed., Talking with

the Terminally Ill.

All 16 pp.

Finish by Oct. 19.



3. Frank de Seto, Jr., Tracing Authors’ Illnesses.

Chapter 3, “Authors and Hay Fever.” All 23 pp.

Finish by Oct. 23.



4. Rend Claire, Le Chapeau de Paille d’Italie,

English trans. scenario.

All 39 pp.

Finish by Oct. 26.



The real shame was that the clients’ names were never written anywhere. I could scarcely imagine who, for any reason, would want to get these things translated (and as RUSH jobs, no less). Perhaps some bear had stopped in its tracks before a stream in expectation of my translation. Or maybe a nurse was waiting wordlessly in her vigil over a terminally ill patient.

Photos of a cat washing its face with its paw lay before me on the desk as I drank my coffee and chewed one of the rolls to a pulp. It tasted like papier-mâché. My head had begun to clear a bit, but my extremities still tingled with fever. I took my camping knife out of the desk drawer, spent forever carefully sharpening six F pencils, then slowly got down to business.

I put on some old Stan Getz, and was at it until noon. The band was top notch–Stan Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Rainey, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. I whistled along with the tape through the whole Getz solo on “Jumping with Symphony Sid” and felt worlds better.

During lunch break I headed out to a crowded little eating spot five minutes down the hill from the office for some fried fish, then stood outside a hamburger stand while I drank two orange juices. Next I stopped by a pet shop, and played with some Abyssinians for maybe ten minutes, sticking my finger through a gap in the glass. Your regular lunch break.

Back at the office, I lazily glanced over the morning paper until the clock struck one. Then I sharpened my six pencils again for the afternoon, pinched the filters off the rest of the Seven Stars, and laid the cigarettes out on the desk. At which point, the office girl brought in a cup of hot green tea.

“How d’you feel?”

“Not bad.”

“And work?”

“Getting there.”

The sky was still relentlessly overcast. If anything, the gray had grown a shade deeper than in the morning. When I stuck my head out the window I got the distinct impression it was about to rain. Autumn birds were in flight across the sky, and everything hung heavy with that dull metropolitan drone (a combination of the rumble of the subway, the sizzle of hamburgers, the roar of traffic on the elevated expressways, car doors slammed shut or flung open, countless assorted noises like that).

I closed the window, put on a cassette of Charlie Parker playing “Just Friends,” and resumed translating from the section “When Do Migratory Birds Sleep?”

When four o’clock rolled around I wrapped things up, handed over my day’s worth of translations to the girl, and left the office. I decided to wear the lightweight raincoat I made a habit of keeping at the office so as not to carry around an umbrella. At the station I bought an evening paper, and was jostled about the better part of an hour in a crowded train. Even the inside of the train smelled like rain, but so far not a single drop had fallen.

It wasn’t until I’d finished shopping for dinner at the supermarket by the station that it finally began to rain. Little by little, misty fine droplets you could hardly see turned the pavement at my feet rain-gray. After checking the bus schedule, I dodged into a nearby coffee shop and ordered a coffee. The place was crowded, and everything smelled once and for all like real rain. The blouse the waitress was wearing, the coffee, everything.

As the streetlamps around the bus terminal began to flicker on in the twilight, buses slid back and forth between the lights like giant trout navigating a current. Each bus filled with commuter types and students and housewives; each disappeared into the gloom. A middle-aged woman dragged the dark shape of a German shepherd past the window. School kids went by bouncing a rubber ball. I put out my fifth cigarette, and took one last sip of cold coffee.

Then I took a good, hard look at my reflection in the glass. Maybe it was the fever, but my eyes looked shot. Well okay, we’ll disregard that. A five-thirty shadow darkened my face. What say we let that pass, too. The point is, it didn’t even look like my face. It was the face of any twenty-four-year-old guy who might have been sitting across the way on the commuter train. My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other’s self on the street– what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya! That’s about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

Maybe if I put gardenias in both ears, or wore flippers over both hands, somebody might take a second look. But that’d be it. They’d put it all behind them after three steps. Their eyes not looking at anything. Nor my eyes. I felt emptied out, a blank. Would I ever again have anything to give to anyone?



* * *



The twins were waiting for me.

I handed over the brown-paper supermarket bag to one or the other of them, then went and took a shower, a lit cigarette still in my mouth. I didn’t even soap up; I just let the stream of water beat down on me while I gazed absently at the tiles. Some flickering movement passed over the wall before my eyes, and was gone. The shadow of something I could neither touch nor bring back.

I stepped from the bathroom right into the bedroom and toweled myself dry before tumbling into bed. The sheets were freshly washed, coral blue, not a wrinkle on them. As I lay there looking up at the ceiling, the events of the day played back in my head. The whole while the twins were busy slicing vegetables, sauteing meat, and cooking rice.

“How about a beer?” one of them asked me.

“Guh.”

And the twin wearing the 208 sweatshirt brought a beer and a glass.

“Some music?”

“Would be nice.”

She pulled Handel’s Recorder Sonatas out of the record rack, put it on the player, and lowered the needle. A Valentine’s Day present from a girlfriend a good many years before. The sound of sauteing meat came through the recorder, violin, and cello like a continuous undertone. My girlfriend and I had often had sex to this record. Even after the record ended, what did we care that the needle was scratching on and on, revolution after revolution? We would still be going at it.

Outside the window, rain was falling noiselessly over the dark golf course. I finished my beer, and by the time Hans-Martin Linde played the last note of the Sonata in F Major, dinner was ready. The three of us were unusually quiet over the meal that night. By then the record had ended, so other than the patter of rain on the eaves, and the sound of three sets of jaws chewing meat, the room was silent. When we were through, the twins cleared the table, and the two of them stood around in the kitchen brewing coffee. Then the three of us drank our hot coffee. Brimming with the aroma of life, that coffee was. One of them got up to put on a record. It was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul.”

“Hey, I don’t remember buying that record,” I blurted out in surprise.

“We bought it.”

“Little by little we saved up the money you gave us.

I just shook my head.

“You don’t like the Beatles?”

Silence.

“What a shame. And we thought you’d be pleased.”

“Sorry.”

One of them got up, took the record off, and lovingly brushed off the least speck of dust before slipping it back into its jacket. All the while, none of us spoke a word. Then I let out a sigh.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I explained. “I’m just a little tired and irritable. Let’s give it another listen.”

The two of them looked at each other and broke into a chuckle.

“Don’t put yourself out now. It’s your house after all.”

“No, really, you don’t have to put up with it on our account.”

“Let’s give it another listen.”

So we ended up listening to both sides of “Rubber Soul” over coffee. And I managed to loosen up a bit. The twins seemed in particularly good spirits.

After we finished our coffee, the twins took my temperature. Back and forth, the two of them grimaced at the thermometer. One hundred one degrees. Up a degree since morning. I felt light-headed.

“Taking showers like that, worst thing for you.”

“You ought to get some sleep.”

They were perfectly right, of course. I got undressed and climbed into bed with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of cigarettes. The blanket somehow smelled of the sunny outdoors. Kant was as brilliant as ever, but the cigarettes tasted like damp newspaper lit from a gas burner. I closed the book, and was half-listening to the twins’ voices, with eyes closed, when the darkness dragged me under.



8



The cemetery occupied a good spread near the top of the hill. Narrow gravel walkways crisscrossed between the graves, and close-cropped azalea bushes stood about here and there like grazing sheep. A row or two of mercury-vapor lamps, peering down over the expanse, arched up like overgrown fiddleheads, casting an unnatural white light into every corner of the grounds.

The Rat stopped the car in the woods at the southeast corner of the cemetery and surveyed the night streets below, his arm around her shoulder. All those lights. The whole town looked to have been cast in a single sheet, still glowing warm in the mold. Either that, or a giant moth had just sprinkled its golden dust all over the place.

Dreamily she closed her eyes and pressed against the Rat. From his shoulder on down, the Rat felt the supple weight of her body. An odd sensation, that weight. This being that could love a man, bear children, grow old, and die; to think one whole existence was in this weight. The Rat took a cigarette from his pack and lit up. Every once in a while a sea breeze would sweep up the slope from below and rustle the pine trees. Maybe she had really fallen asleep. The Rat put his hand to her cheek, then touched a fingertip to her lips. He felt her breath, warm and humid.

Somehow the cemetery seemed more like an unfinished housing tract than a graveyard. Over half the plots were empty. That’s because the people slated for those places were still living. Occasionally, on Sunday afternoons, some people would drive up with their families to check out their future resting places. Gazing out over the grounds from the stone base already erected on the spot, Hmmm, nice view from here, flowers of the season, good fresh air, lawn looks well cared for, even got sprinklers. And no wild dogs to get at the offerings.

But above all, they’d be impressed by the bright, healthy atmosphere. Satisfied, they’d sit down on a bench to eat their box lunches, and then return home to the day-to-day bustle of their lives.

Mornings and evenings the caretaker would rake the gravel walkways. Then he’d chase away any kids who might have their eyes on the carp in the central pond. And as if that wasn’t enough, three times a day–at nine, twelve, and six–a music-box rendition of “Old Black Joe” would be piped from speakers around the grounds. The Rat could never figure out what possible meaning there could be in playing music, although he had to admit that “Old Black Joe” playing to a deserted graveyard at six o’clock in the waning light was definitely something to experience.

At six-thirty, the caretaker would return by bus to the realm below, and total silence would fall over the necropolis. Then the couples would begin arriving to make out in their cars. Come summer, the cars would be literally lined up through the woods.

The cemetery thus held a place of profound significance in the Rat’s adolescent years. Even in high school before he could drive, the Rat was ferrying girls up the incline by the stream on the back of a 250-cc bike. Always staring up at the same street lamps, he’d had himself a whole string of girls. Like so many scents briefly enjoyed before they wafted away. So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanished.

Turn around, and death had put down roots beneath each plot across the extensive grounds. Occasionally, the Rat would take these girls by the hand and wander about on the gravel paths of this pretentious cemetery. All those different names, dates, deaths, each backed with a past life, were like shrubs in an arboretum, spaced out equidistantly as far as the eye could see. No gently swaying breezes for them, no fragrances, no touch of a hand reaching through the darkness. They who seemed like trees lost to time. They to whom no thoughts occurred, nor would ever have words to get them across. They’d left all that to those who still had some living to do. He and his girl would head back to the woods, holding each other tight. And all around there’d be the sea breeze, the leafy scent of the trees, the sounds of crickets, everything of this world that went on living.



“Was I asleep long?” she asked.

“Nah,” said the Rat. “No time at all.”



9



It was another rerun of the same old day. One you almost had to dog-ear to keep from getting it mixed up with the rest.

All day long it smelled like autumn. I finished work at the usual time, but when I got home there was no sign of the twins. I tumbled onto the bed still wearing my socks, and lounged about smoking a cigarette. I tried thinking of different things, but nothing came to mind. I sighed, sat up in bed, and stared a while at the white blank of the opposite wall. I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do–I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.

That pretty well summed it up. The first chance to be alone in a long time, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with myself.

It’s so strange. For years and years I’d lived all by myself, and I’d managed well enough, hadn’t I? Why wouldn’t it all come back to me? You don’t forget twenty-four years just like that. I felt as if I was in the middle of looking for something, but had lost track of what it was I’d been trying to find.

What was it now? A bottle opener? An old letter, a receipt, something to clean my ears with?

On the verge of utter distraction, I reached for my bedside Kant, and what should fall out from between the pages but a note. Written in the twins’ script, it read, “Gone to the golf course.” That’s when I really started to worry. Hadn’t I warned them never to go onto the golf course without me?



***



A golf course can be a risky place in the early evening for those who aren’t aware of the dangers. Who knows when a golf ball might come flying out of nowhere?

I slipped on my tennis shoes, wrapped a sweatshirt around my shoulders on my way out of the apartment, and climbed over the chainlink fence onto the course. Over a gentle rise, past the twelfth hole, past the rest house, through some woods, I walked and walked. The setting sun spilled across the turf from between the trees along the western fringe. In a dumbbell-shaped sand trap I found an empty coffee-cream cookie box, obviously left there by the twins. I crumpled it up and crammed it into my pocket, taking the trouble to erase our three sets of footprints even though it meant falling further behind. Then I crossed a small wooden foot-bridge over a brook before finally encountering the twins on a nearby hill. They were sitting side-by-side midway up an outdoor escalator built into the slope on the far side of the hill, thoroughly absorbed in a game of backgammon.

“Didn’t I tell you two it was dangerous to come here on your own?”

“The sunset was so beautiful,” pleaded one of them.

We walked down the escalator, and stretched ourselves out on a knoll covered with susuki grass for a clear view of the sunset. The view was gorgeous.

“You shouldn’t leave trash in the sand traps, you know,” I scolded.

“Sorry,” the two of them apologized.

“A long time ago, I got hurt in a sandbox. Back when I was in elementary school.” I showed them the tip of my left index finger where you could still make out a tiny white thread of a scar a third of an inch long. “Somebody’d buried a broken pop bottle.”

The two of them nodded.

“Of course, no one gets cut on an empty cookie box. But still, you mustn’t leave things lying around in the sand. Sandy places are sacred and not to be defiled.”

“We understand,” said one of them.

“We’ll be more careful,” said the other. “Got any other scars?”

“Well, now that you ask...” And I proceeded to show the two of them every scar on my body. A regular catalog of scars. First, my left eye, where I got hit by the ball in a soccer match. To this day, I still have a small scar on my retina. Then there’s my nose, again thanks to soccer. I was going to head the ball, when I met up with another player’s teeth on the upswing. And seven stitches in my lower lip. A fall from a bicycle, trying to veer out of the way of a truck. Then there’s that chipped tooth...

There we lay, all three of us on the cool turf, listening to the rustling of the susuki tassels in the breeze.



The sun had completely disappeared before we made it back to the apartment for dinner. By the time I’d had myself a bath and a beer, three trout were cooked up and waiting, with some canned asparagus and gigantic sprigs of watercress alongside for color. The taste of trout brought back memories. It tasted like a mountain path on a summer’s day. We took our time polishing off those trout. The only things left on our plates were the white trout bones and pencil-thick watercress stalks. The twins immediately set about washing the dishes and brewing coffee.

“About that switch-panel,” I said. “Something’s really starting to bother me.”

They both nodded.

“Why do you suppose it’s on its last legs?”

“Probably’s sucked up something awful, don’t you think?”

“It’s gone flat.”

I considered the situation a while, a coffee cup in my left hand and a cigarette in my right.

“And what can be done about it?”

The two of them looked at each other and shook their heads. “Too late to do much of anything.”

“Back to the soil it goes.

“Ever see a cat with blood poisoning?”

“No,” I said.

“It starts getting hard as a rock from the outside in. Takes a long time. And the last thing to go is the heart. It just stops.”

I sighed. “But I don’t want mine to die on me.”

“We know how you feel,” said one. “But you know, the load’s too heavy for you.”

That was putting it mildly. As offhandedly as you’d say, might as well not go skiing this winter because there’s not enough snow. At least I could still drink my coffee.



10



Wednesday night the Rat nodded off at nine o’clock, only to wake up again at eleven, unable to get back to sleep. Something squeezed tight around his head, as if he had on a hat two sizes too small. A downright unpleasant feeling. Nothing to do but get up. The Rat walked into the kitchen in his pajamas, and gulped down a glass of ice water. Then he started to think about her. As he stood at the window watching the beacon light, his eyes drew back along the jetty until he was looking in the vicinity of her apartment. He thought of the waves pounding in the darkness, the sand peppering her window. But no matter how much he thought about it, he never made any headway–who was he kidding?

Ever since he’d met the woman, the Rat’s life had become an endless repetition, week after week. He couldn’t keep track of the date. What month was it?

October, probably. Or was it? Saturdays he’d see her, then for three days from Sunday to Tuesday he’d dwell on the memory. Thursdays, Fridays, half the day Saturday, he’d be making weekend plans. That left only Wednesdays up in the air, with nothing to do. No progress, no setbacks. These Wednesdays...

After a leisurely ten-minute smoke, he changed out of his pajamas, put on a windbreaker over his shirt, and went down to the underground parking garage. After twelve, there was hardly a soul out and about. Only the streetlamps shining on the darkened streets. The shutters on J’s Bar were already rolled down, but the Rat pushed them up half-way, ducked under, and headed on downstairs.

J sat alone behind the counter smoking a cigarette, some dozen towels he’d washed draped over the backs of chairs to dry.

“Just one beer, how about it?”

“Fine by me,” came J’s cheerful reply.

It was the first time the Rat had come to J’s Bar after hours. All the lights were out, save the ones over the counter, even the ventilation and air-conditioning were silent. Only the smell that had soaked into the floor and walls over the years lingered.

The Rat stepped behind the counter, took a beer from the refrigerator, and poured himself a glass.

The air hung in layers of murky darkness out beyond the bar, warm and dank.

“I really hadn’t planned on coming here tonight,” the Rat apologized, “but I woke up craving a beer. Be out of here before you know it.”

J folded up the newspaper, put it on the counter, and brushed some cigarette ash from his trousers.

“No need to drink and run. I’ll even cook something up for you if you’re hungry.”

“Nah, that’s okay. Don’t bother. Just beer’s fine.”

The beer was awfully good. He drank the glass in one go, then let out a satisfied sigh. Then he poured the remaining half a bottle into the glass, and fixed his gaze on the receding head of foam.

“Care to join me in a drink?” the Rat inquired.

To which J smiled uneasily. “Thanks, but I don’t touch the stuff. Not a drop.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.”

“It’s just my constitution. Can’t handle it.”

The Rat nodded a couple of times, then sipped his beer in silence. Once again it startled him how little he knew about the Chinese bartender. J was a terribly quiet man. He never volunteered a single thing about himself, and if anyone ever asked, he’d cautiously pull out a ready answer, smooth and innocuous, as if out of a drawer.

Everybody knew that J was a first-generation Chinese, which was not particularly rare as foreigners went in this town. In the Rat’s high school soccer club, one forward and one back had been Chinese. No one made much of it.

“Kinda lonesome without music, huh?” said J, throwing the Rat the keys to the jukebox.

The Rat chose five numbers, returned to the counter, and continued with his beer. An old Wayne Newton song flowed from the speakers.

“Don’tcha have to be getting back home?” the Rat asked.

“I don’t mind. It’s not like somebody’s waiting, ya know.”

“Live alone?”

“Uh-huh.”

The Rat pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, straightened it out, and lit up.

“There’s only a cat,” J said out of nowhere “An old cat, but a good friend to talk to.”

“You talk things over, do you?”

J nodded a few times. “Uh-huh. Been together a long time so we can read each other’s moods. I understand what makes the cat tick, the cat knows what makes me tick.”

The Rat let out a soft grunt from behind his cigarette. The jukebox whirred, and “MacArthur Park” clicked into position.

“So tell me then, what does a cat think about?”

“All sorts of things. Just like you and me.”

“Gee, that’s tough,” the Rat laughed.

J laughed too, then reflected a moment and ran his finger along the counter. “Crippled in one leg.”

“Crippled?” the Rat asked.

“The cat, it’s lame. Four winters ago, I think. It came home all covered with blood. The poor thing’s paw was all pulpy like marmalade.

The Rat set his glass down on the counter and looked J in the face. “What on earth happened to it?”

“Don’t know. I guess it got hit by a car. But y’know, it was somehow worse than that. Getting run over by a tire wouldn’t do that. I mean, it looked as if it’d been mangled in a vise. Flat as a pancake. I’d almost bet it was someone’s idea of a practical joke.”

“Come on,” the Rat said shaking his head in disbelief. “Who’d want to do that to a cat’s paw?”

J tamped one of his filterless cigarettes over and over again on the counter, then put it to his lips and lit up.

“You said it. Not a reason in the world to crush a cat’s paw. It’s a real well-behaved cat, never done anything wrong. Nothing anyone would have to gain by crushing its paw. It’s just senseless and cruel. But y’know, the world’s full of that kind of groundless ill will. I’ll never understand it, you’ll never understand it. But it exists all the same. You might even say it’s got us hemmed in.

The Rat nodded once more, his eyes fixed on his beer glass. “I just can’t understand why.”

“That’s all right. If you can let it go at not understanding, that’s the best anyone could expect.”

So saying, J blew cigarette smoke out into the dark emptiness beyond the bar. He followed the white smoke with his eyes until it completely vanished in the air.

A long silence passed between the two of them. The Rat gazing at his glass, lost in thought, J running his finger back and forth along the counter top as usual. The jukebox began to play the last record. A soul ballad in falsetto.

“Say J,” said the Rat, eyes still on the glass, “I’ve lived here for twenty-five years, and it seems to me I haven’t really learned a thing.”

J said nothing, but just stared at his fingers. Then he gave a little shrug. “Me, I’ve seen forty-five years, and I’ve only figured out one thing. That’s this: if a person would just make the effort, there’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they say there’s even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren’t for that, nobody’d survive.”

The Rat nodded, then finished off the last inch of beer in his glass. The record ended, the jukebox clicked off, and the premises fell quiet again.

“I think I see what you’re getting at, but” the Rat began, then swallowed the thought. But–the word was on his lips, there wasn’t anything more he could say. So he smiled and stood up, thanked J and said, “Can I give you a lift home?”

“Nah, it’s okay. My place is close by, and besides I like to walk.”

“Well, now, you get some shut-eye. Regards to your cat.”

“Thanks.”



Climbing the stairs, he stepped out into the crisp autumn air. The Rat made his way to the parking lot, tapping the trees along the roadside lightly with his fist as he walked. He came to a halt in front of the parking meter, stared at it for no reason at all, then got in the car. After a few wrong turns, he found himself cruising toward the ocean. He stopped the car along the shore road in view of her apartment building. Half the apartments were still lit. In a few, shadows moved behind the curtains.

The woman’s apartment was dark. Even her bedside lamp was out. Probably asleep. It was a terribly lonely feeling.

The sound of the waves seemed to be growing louder. Almost as if any minute now they would break over the seawall and wash the Rat–car and all–somewhere faraway. He switched on the car radio and let back the reclining seat, eyes closed, hands behind his head, half-listening to some deejay’s drivel. He was dead tired, thanks to which, whatever emotions he might have had, simply came and went without gaining a foothold. The Rat began to relax and lay down his empty head on the mingled sounds of the waves and the deejay until sleep crept over him.