The Blind Willow, and the Sleeping Woman

by Murakami Haruki

trans. by Eric Han

Translator's note: This work was originally published in the December 1983 issue of Bungakkai, and is thus one of Murakami's earlier published works. It was originally about 80 sheets of 400-character paper [genk? y?shi], but since he found it to be a little too long, he reworked it into a 45 sheet 'diet version' in 1995. The version I'm using was published in 1996, in the short stories collection, The Ghosts of Lexington, and is 36 pages in print. In the foreword he mentions that though there is no direct connection between this story and his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood, it was one of the short stories on which he drew to compose that later work.

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When I closed my eyes, I smelled the fragrance of the wind. It was a May wind, swollen like a fruit. It had the pitted peel of a fruit, its slimy pulp, and its powdery seeds too. When the pulp disintegrated in the sky, the seeds became buckshot and dove into my naked breast. All that remained afterwards was a faint ache.

"Um, what time is it?" my cousin asked me. Because of the 20 centimeter difference in our height, he was always peering up at my face to speak to me.

I glanced at my wristwatch. "10:12."

"Is your watch on time?" he asked.

"I think so."

My cousin yanked at my wrist and took a look at the watch. His fingers were slim and smooth, but more powerful than they appeared. "Was it expensive?"

"No. It was really cheap," I said while scanning the watch face one more time.

There was no response.

When I looked toward my cousin, he was looking up at me with this troubled expression on his face. His white teeth peeking out between his lips, seemed like degenerated bone. "It was really cheap," gazing at his face, I repeated in clear, precise syllables. "But, it keeps fairly good time."

He nodded silently.

My cousin has a bad right ear. Soon after he entered elementary school his ear was struck by a baseball, and since then it often caused him difficulty in hearing. But even so, in most cases, it didn't prove to be an obstacle in his daily life. He continued to go to school as usual and otherwise live his life as before. Only, in class he would face his left ear toward the teacher, and always sat on the right side in the very first row. His grades weren't bad either, though there were times when he couldn't hear external sounds well, and times when he could. These came to him alternately, like high and low tide. And then there were extreme cases, coming perhaps once every six months, when he couldn't hear anything from either ear. It was almost as if the silence in his right ear had deepened until it bore down and crushed all sound on the left side as well. When that happened he naturally was unable to function normally, and had to take some time off from school. The doctors were unable to explain the reason for these occurrences because there were no other cases like it. Of course, they were also unable to treat the condition.

"Well, just because a watch is expensive doesn't mean its accurate," my cousin said, as if trying to persuade himself of that fact. "The watch I used to wear was pretty expensive, and it was always messed up. I had my parents buy it for me when I started middle school. But I lost it within one year, and ever since then I've made do without wearing a watch . . . because they wouldn't buy me another one."

"It must be inconvenient not to have a watch," I remarked.

"Eh?" responded my cousin.

"Isn't it inconvenient, not having a watch?" I rephrased myself while looking directly into his face.

"Not really," he replied, shaking his head. "It's not as if I were living up in the mountains by myself. . . and I can always ask someone the time."

"Well that's true," I said.

And with that, we again lapsed into silence.

I understood very well that I needed to be gentle with him, and make some conversation; I had to at least slacken his nervousness a little bit before we reached the hospital. But it'd been five years since we last met, and in that span of time, my cousin had gone from nine to fourteen, and I from twenty to twenty-five. That blank space of time had erected a translucent partition between us which we had difficulty penetrating. Even when I tried to make absolutely necessary conversation, the right words just wouldn't come to mind. And when my words faltered, or got stuck in my throat, he would always gaze up at me with a perplexed look on his face, his left ear slightly tilted toward me.

"What time is it now?" my cousin inquired.

"10:29," I answered.

It was 10:32 by the time the bus arrived.

Compared to when I rode it back and forth from high school, the form of the bus had vastly modernized. The windshield in front of the driver's seat was much wider; the bus now looked like a large bomber with its wings wrenched off. Moreover, it was unexpectedly crowded. Although there weren't any passengers left standing in the aisles, it was too crowded to afford us seats side by side. We decided not to sit down and instead occupied the standing room in front of the rear exit; it wouldn't be a long ride anyway. Nonetheless, I couldn't figure out why there were so many passengers on the bus at this time of day. The bus route departs from a private rail station, circles around some hilly residential districts, and then returns back to the same station; there were no famous sites or facilities worthy of mention along the route. The bus was of course crowded during the school commute hours, since there were a number of schools along the way, but normally it should be utterly deserted at noon.

My cousin and I stood, clinging to a strap and a bar with one hand each. The bus gleamed like it had just been built and delivered from the factory. It's untarnished metal was so free of blemishes that you could see yourself clearly reflected in it, and the shag on the seats was taut and neat. An air of pride and optimism, so characteristic of new machines, exuded from the bus down to its each and every bolt.

The new form of the bus, and the unexpectedly large number of riders threw me into confusion. Maybe, completely unbeknownst to me, the route's circumstances had been completely transformed. I carefully surveyed the interior of the bus around me, then inspected the view out the window. But all I saw were the silent suburbs that had not changed in the slightest for as long as I could remember.

"Sure this is the right bus?" my cousin asked anxiously. He was probably worried by the puzzled look I had been wearing on my face ever since we boarded.

"It's fine," I said, half to persuade myself. "There can't be a mistake. There just aren't any other bus routes running through here."

"You used to take this bus back and forth from high school, right?" inquired my cousin.

"That's right."

"Did you like your school?"

"No, not really," I said in all honesty. "But I got to see my friends there, and I didn't find going all that painful."

He thought about what I said.

"Do you still see those friends?"

"No, it's been a long time since I last saw any of them." I selected my words carefully before answering.

"Why? Why don't you see them anymore?"

"Well, it's because we now live far away from each other." It wasn't really the truth, but there was no other way to explain it.

Near me sat an assembled group of senior citizens. All together, there were probably about fifteen of them. Actually, they were the reason why the bus was so crowded. Each and every one of them was well tanned; they were all uniformly bronzed down to the backs of their necks. Without exception, they were all also exceptionally thin. The men mostly wore heavy shirts, fit for mountain climbing, and the women austere blouses devoid of any decoration. The group was all holding what looked like small backpacks for light-mountaineering on their laps. They were all eerily similar in appearance, as if they were identical articles pulled from the same sample drawer. But still, they made an odd story. There just weren't any mountain climbing trails along this bus route. Just where were they going? Hanging from the strap, I gave it some thought, but couldn't come up with any viable explanations.

"I wonder if the therapy this time is going to hurt," my cousin asked me.

"Well, I don't know," I replied. "I haven't heard any of the specifics."

"Have you ever had a doctor check out your ear before?"

I shook my head. Come to think of it, I'd never had a doctor look at my ear in my whole life.

"Was the therapy up to now very painful?" I inquired.

"No, not all that much," my cousin replied with a sour look on his face. "Of course, it's not like it didn't hurt at all. At times, it hurt some, but I wouldn't say it was extremely painful."

"Then I guess this time will probably be about the same as before. From what your mom told me, it doesn't seem like they're going to do anything vastly different from before."

"But, if they don't do anything different, then I won't get any better this time either."

"Now we don't know that. There's always that chance it'll work, you know."

"Suddenly, like a cork popping out?" my cousin said. I glanced at his face, but it didn't seem like he was being intentionally ironic.

"Changing doctors can change the entire feeling of the situation, and what's more, small differences in procedure can make a great difference. We shouldn't just give up like that."

"I didn't say I was giving up," my cousin replied.

"But, you're getting fed up with it?"

"I guess so," he said and sighed. "The worst part about it is being afraid. It's scary imagining the pain that's on its way. I hate it worse than the actual pain itself. Can you understand that?"

"I think so," I answered.

Quite a lot happened during the spring of that year. Due to certain circumstances, I quit my job that I had held for two years at a small advertising agency in Tokyo. Around that time, I also broke up with a girl I had been seeing since college. The following month, my grandmother died from intestinal cancer; to attend her funeral, I packed one small bag and returned to this town for the first time in five years. At my house, my room was exactly as I had left it. The books I read were still on the shelves; the bed I slept in, the desk I used, and the records I listened to, they were all still there. But, everything in the room was desiccated and stale, and had long since lost its color and odor. It was only time itself that had ground to a marvelously rigid halt.

After my grandmother's funeral, I had planned to rest at home for maybe two or three days, and then head back to Tokyo. It wasn't as if I had no job leads there, and I fully intended to give them a shot. I also wanted to move out of my apartment, to make a fresh start.

But, as time went on, it became more and more troublesome to get up and go. Or rather, to express it more precisely, I had already become unable to leave even had I wanted to. I cloistered myself in my room, listening to old records, and re-reading books from my past, and at times plucked at the grass in the yard. I didn't speak to anyone besides my family.

It was on one such day, that my aunt came by and told me that my cousin would now be going to a different hospital, and asked whether I would be so kind as to accompany him there. Really she ought to go herself, she said, but had an important matter to deal with on that day. I had no reason to turn her down; I certainly had the time, and since it was near my old school, I knew exactly where the hospital was. My aunt, telling me to have a decent meal together with him, handed me an envelope with some money in it.

The reason my cousin was to switch hospitals had much to do with the fact that his treatment at the previous hospital had been largely ineffective. On the contrary, his deafness cycle started coming at even shorter intervals than ever. When my aunt vented her grievances at the doctor, he responded by declaring that the problem was not the result of external, medical factors, but instead due to his home environment; it turned into quite a row. So in all honesty, no one actually expected that changing hospitals would quickly put him on the path toward recovering his hearing. They would not say it out loud of course, but most of the people around him had already half given up on him and his ears.

Though our homes were rather close by, my cousin and I weren't really that familiar, mainly because of an age gap of over ten years. We only saw each other when my relatives dropped by and took me to go off somewhere, or let us play together. Imperceptibly however, we somehow became joined together and seen as a pair. Basically, they assumed that he had become especially attached to me, and that I had singularly taken him under my wing. For the longest time, I couldn't understand the reasons behind that. Looking at him now, seeing his posture with his head slightly inclined and directing his left ear toward me though, I strangely couldn't help being struck with affection for him. Like the sound of the rain I'd heard long ago, I had taken a liking to something about his awkward little movements. I felt that I now understood a little better why all my relatives had connected the two of us.

As the bus passed the seventh or eighth stop, my cousin again looked up at me with an anxious expression on his face.

"It's still ahead?"

"It's still ahead. It's a really large hospital, so there's no way we could have missed it."

I absentmindedly watched the senior citizens' hat cords and scarves fluttering in the wind blowing from the windows. Just who were they anyway? And where were they going?

"Hey, are you going to work for my father's company?" my cousin asked me.

Surprised, I looked back at his face. My cousin's father, in other words my uncle, operated a major publishing firm in Kobe. But, I had neither thought of that possibility, nor caught a whiff of it from anyone else.

"That's the first I've heard of that . . ." I replied. "But, why this all of a sudden?"

My cousin reddened in the face. "I just thought that, maybe, you were," he answered. "But, wouldn't it be great if you did? Then you'd be able to stay here. Everyone'd be so happy to have you around."

A recording announced the upcoming bus stop, though no one had pressed the stop button. There was no indication of anyone waiting at the stop either.

"But, there are things I need to do back in Tokyo," I told him. He nodded in silence.

There isn't a single thing that I needed to do, anywhere. But, this is the one place where I absolutely cannot be.

As the bus ascended a slope, the residential homes began to thin out, and the thick foliage on the tree branches started throwing deep shadows on the surface of the road. The variously colored foreign residences, surrounded by low fences, also came into view. The wind turned imperceptibly chillier. As the bus navigated the curves in the road, the sea by turns emerged and withdrew from sight. My cousin and I contemplated the scene together until the bus arrived at the hospital.

My cousin told me he wanted me to wait outside since the treatment would take some time, and he would be fine by himself. I gave the doctor in charge a terse greeting, exited the examination room and made my way to the cafeteria. I was famished, a result of having skipped breakfast that morning, but nothing at all on the menu seemed appetizing. Ultimately, I only ordered a coffee.

Being a weekday morning, there was only one group of family visitors in the cafeteria besides me. The man in his mid-forties whom I made out to be the father, wore navy blue striped pajamas, and vinyl slippers. The mother, and the two identical female twins were evidently visiting him. The twins wore matching white, one piece jumpers, and were both slumped over the table, drinking orange juice with solemn expressions on their faces. The father's condition, whether illness or injury, did not appear particularly acute, and parents and children all wore bored looks on their faces.

Outside of the window stretched a grassy yard. The sprinklers there clattered about as they revolved, and scattered splashes of white light above the emerald grass. Two birds with long tails cried piercingly as they sliced straight across the tableaux, and quickly vanished from sight. Before the lawn were a number of tennis courts, but their nets had been stripped off, and no one was about. Beyond the courts stood a row of zelkova trees, and I saw the sea peeking through the interstices between their branches. The minute waves here and there reflected the early summer's brilliant sun. A breeze rustled the young zelkova leaves, and gently disturbed the vector of the mist projecting from the sprinklers.

I was struck by the sensation that I had witnessed this exact scene somewhere, long long ago. Broad grassy yard, twin girls drinking orange juice, long-tailed birds flying off, and beyond the tennis courts bereft of nets, the blue sea . . . But that was merely a mirage. It had a certain verisimilitude, and an intensity to it, but I understood perfectly well that it was a mirage. This was, after all, my first visit to this hospital.

I rested both feet on the chair in front of me, inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. In the utter darkness, a white lump came into view. Like a microorganism under a microscope, it distended and contracted noiselessly. It morphed, spread out, splintered apart, and then solidified again into one mass.

It'd been eight years since I went to that hospital. It was a small one by the shore. Outside its cafeteria windows, all you could see were oleander shrubs. And because of its age, it always gave off that rainy day smell. My friend's girlfriend had undergone chest surgery there, so my friend and I had gone to pay her a visit. It was the middle of our junior year summer break.

For surgery, it wasn't a particularly difficult operation; they said they were only straightening a misaligned bone in her chest that she had been born with. It wasn't a condition that demanded urgent attention, but since it would have to be taken care of some time or other, they decided to do it then. The operation itself was finished in a flash, but bed rest after the procedure was crucial, so she remained in the hospital an additional ten days. We rode tandem on my friend's 125cc Yamaha motorbike to get there. He drove on the way there, and I drove on the way home. It was he who asked me to go with him. "I really don't want to go to a hospital by myself," he had told me.

My friend had first stopped first at a confectioner's in front of the train station and purchased a box of chocolates. So, while we were riding, I gripped his belt with one hand while clenching the chocolates in the other. It was a scorchingly hot day, and our shirts were drenched in sweat then blown dry by the wind, over and over. While he was driving the bike, he sang some unidentifiable tune in a hideous, off-pitch voice. Even now, I can still remember the smell of his sweat. It wasn't long afterwards that he died.

His girlfriend was wearing blue pajamas with something like a thin, knee-length gown flung over it. The three of us sat at the cafeteria table, smoking Short Hopes, drinking cola, and eating ice cream. She was starved beyond belief, and proceeded to also devour two thickly powdered sugar donuts, over a mug of cocoa, heavily laden with cream. Even so, she still didn't seem satisfied.

"You'll be one huge pig by the time you leave this hospital," my friend exclaimed in amazement.

"Fine by me. This is my recuperation period." she retorted, while wiping her oily fingers on a paper napkin.

While the two of them were conversing like that, I was gazing out the window at the stand of oleander bushes. They were so large that together they almost constituted a forest. I also heard the sound of waves; the metal railing on the window sill had almost completely been corroded by the salt air. A fan, looking more an antique than anything else, hung from the ceiling and churned the humid air about the room. The hospital's smell completely permeated the cafeteria. The food, the drink, as if by previous agreement, also conveyed that same hospital odor. I noticed that her pajamas had two breast pockets, and in one she had inserted a gold ball point pen. When she stooped forward, I could see, through the V shaped neckline, the flat, white skin of her chest, which had not been touched by the sun.

At that, my reflections suddenly came to a stand-still. "Just what happened after that?" I mused. I took a sip of cola, gazed out at the oleander, caught sight of her chest, and then what? I shifted in the plastic chair, and with my chin resting on my hands, tried excavating one stratum deeper into my memory. Like prying off a cork with the tip of a slender knife.

. . . I defocused my eyes, and tried imagining the doctors slitting open the flesh of her chest, inserting their latex covered fingers and resituating her bone. But, I found the image too unrealistic, too fanciful. Akin to some sort of parable.

That's right, after that we talked about sex. It was my friend who did the talking. And what was he going on about? It was probably about something that I had done; like how I came on to some girl, and got turned down. It must have been something along those lines. And even though the original event was not especially noteworthy, he related it with such exaggeration, wit, and absurdity, that his girlfriend burst into laughter. Even I couldn't help laughing. He really was an excellent story teller.

"No, don't make me laugh," she managed to gasp out. "My chest really hurts when I laugh."

"Where does it hurt?" my friend inquired.

She pressed a finger on her chest through her pajamas, above her heart, a little in from her left breast. He then proceeded to make some joke relating to that, and she laughed again.

I looked at my watch. It was 11:45, and my cousin still had not returned. Lunch-time was drawing near, and the cafeteria was beginning to fill up. Various sounds and bits of conversation were mixing together, enveloping the room like cigarette smoke.

Returning once more to the realm of memory. Thinking of that gold ball-point pen in her breast pocket.

. . . right. She was drawing on the back of a paper napkin with that ball-point pen.

She was drawing a picture. The napkin was too fragile, and her pen point kept catching, but she persisted in sketching out a hill. On top of the hill was a small house. Inside the house, a woman was sleeping. Blind willows grew thickly around the house. The blind willows that were forcing her into a deep slumber.

"What the hell is a blind willow?" demanded my friend.

"It's the name of a plant."

"Well, I've never heard of it."

"That's because I made it up," she replied with a grin. "You see, the blind willow has this really potent pollen; it gets carried by tiny flies into her ears, and that's what makes her fall asleep."

She took a new napkin and sketched the blind willow. It was about the same size as an azalea bush. Though its flowers were in bloom, they were completely enveloped by fat green leaves, which rather resembled thick bundles of lizards' tails. The blind willow bore not the slightest resemblance to a normal willow.

"Got any cigarettes?" my friend asked me. I tossed a lighter and a sweat dampened carton of Short Hopes to him across the table.

"The blind willow may appear small, but it has incredibly deep roots," explained his girlfriend. "In actuality, after it reaches a certain age, the blind willow stops growing upward, and instead extends down, down, deeper into the earth. Almost as if it were drawing nourishment from the darkness."

"And so basically, the flies carry its pollen, burrow into her ear, and cause her to sleep," my friend reiterated, while struggling to light one of the soggy cigarettes. "And then . . . what are the flies doing?"

"They're eating her flesh of course, deep inside her body," she said.

"Munch, munch," my friend added.

That's right. That summer she had composed a long poem about the blind willow, and related to us the outline of its plot. It was her sole homework assignment for summer vacation. She had thought up a story to go with a dream she had one night, and spent the following week in bed writing it down. My friend wanted to read it, but she demurred, saying that she still hadn't fleshed out the details. In lieu of that, she offered to explain the plot through illustrations.

There was a young man ascending the hill to rescue the woman who had been put to sleep by the blind willows.

"The young man's me, definitely," my friend burst in.

His girlfriend shook her head. "No, the young man's not you."

"And you would know?" asked my friend.

"Yes, I would," she replied with a serious look on her face. "I don't know how, but that's the way it is. Are you hurt?"

"Of course," my friend said frowning, and only half-jokingly.

The youth slowly ascended the hill, all the while slashing his way through the blind willows that grew profuse, and impenetrable. Actually, the hill was so overgrown with blind willows that he was the first person to even attempt to climb it. The visor of his hat pulled low over his eyes, he advanced step by step, all the while swatting away the swarming flies. To meet the sleeping girl face to face. To wake her from her profound, endless slumber.

"But in the end, on top of the hill he finds that the girl's already been eaten hollow by the flies, right?" my friend interjected.

"In a sense, yes," she replied.

"So, if she was, in a sense, completely devoured by the flies, then couldn't you say, in a sense, that it's a depressing story?" my friend announced.

"Well, I guess so," she said after a thoughtful pause. "What do you think?" she asked me.

"It sounds like a depressing story to me," I answered.

It was 12:20 by the time my cousin came out. He wore an unfocused expression on his face, and was dangling a bag of medicine from his fingers. From the moment he appeared at the entrance of the cafeteria, it took some time for him to find my table. He was walking a little unsteadily, as if he were having some difficulty balancing himself. He plopped down in the seat opposite mine, and swallowed an enormous breath, as if he had been so occupied that he had forgotten to breathe until that moment.

"How was it?" I inquired.

"Hmm," he said. I waited a while for him to say something more, but time passed and he still didn't continue.

"You hungry?" I asked him.

My cousin nodded silently.

"Do you want to eat here, or get on the bus and eat somewhere in town? Which would you prefer?"

He glanced suspiciously about the room, and then told me that here would be fine. I bought some meal tickets, and ordered two lunches. Until the food arrived, my cousin silently gazed at the scene out the window ?V the sea, the stand of zelkova trees, the sprinklers ?V the same scene I had so recently been scrutinizing.

At the neighboring table, a tidily dressed middle aged couple was eating sandwiches and discussing a friend who had been hospitalized for lung cancer. They went on about how he had stopped smoking five years ago, but it had been too late, and how one morning he woke up coughing a stream of blood. The wife asked the questions, and the husband answered them. Cancer can, in a sense, be seen as the crystallization of one's lifestyle and inclinations, explained the husband.

Lunch consisted of hamburg steaks and fried whitefish. Salad and rolls were also included. We silently sat across from each other, and ate our meal. All the while, the couple at the next table continued their absorbing conversation on cancer's origins. About why cancer cases have risen so sharply of late, and why they haven't been able to develop a wonder drug, and so forth.

"No matter where you go, it's all about the same," my cousin told me in a deflated voice, looking down at his hands. "Everyone just asks the same sort of questions, and then examines my ears the same way."

We were seated on a bench at the entrance of the hospital. From time to time, the wind rustled the green foliage above our heads.

"Sometimes, you just altogether lose your sense of hearing?" I asked.

"Yeah," he replied. "I completely lose my hearing."

"How does that feel?"

My cousin tilted his head slightly and gave it some thought. "By the time it dawns on me, I already can't hear anything. But you know, it takes some time for me to figure it out. So when I've realized what's happening, I'm already completely deaf. Like I'm wearing ear plugs, on the bottom of the sea. And then, it continues for a while. While it's happening of course, I can't hear anything, but it's not just about my ears. Not being able to hear is just one part of it."

"Is it an unpleasant feeling?"

He gave his head a sharp, abbreviated shake. "I don't understand why, but I don't find it unpleasant. But, it's inconvenient in a lot of ways. Because I can't hear anything, you know."

I considered what he said, but somehow the image just didn't come through very well.

"Have you every seen John Ford's ??Fort Apache'?" he inquired.

"A long long time ago," I said.

"It was just on TV. Isn't it a great movie?"

"Yeah," I concurred.

"It kicks off with this new colonel arriving to take command over a fort in the West. This veteran lieutenant comes out to meet the colonel, and that's John Wayne. The colonel still doesn't know much about the circumstances out in the West, but the Indians around the fort are raising a revolt."

My cousin pulled a folded white handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his lips.

"When they arrive at the fort, the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, ??On my way here, I saw quite a few Indians.' To which John Wayne coolly responds, ??It's alright. The fact that your Excellency has seen Indians means that there are no Indians there.' I've forgotten the exact dialogue, but that's basically how it goes I think. Do you understand what he meant by that?"

I couldn't recall whether or not there really was a line like that in ??Fort Apache'. For a John Ford movie, the line struck me as just a little too cryptic. Still, it had been a long time since I saw the movie.

"Like maybe, things that just anyone can see, really aren't that important? . . . I'm not sure I get it."

My cousin furrowed his brow, "I don't really understand it either, but whenever people sympathize with me over my ears, somehow that line comes to mind. ??The fact that you've seen Indians means that there are no Indians there.'"

I laughed.

"Is that funny?" my cousin inquired.

"Yeah, it is," I told him, and he also laughed. It'd been a while since he last laughed.

After a long pause, my cousin asked me in a confessional tone, "Hey, would you mind taking a peek into my ear?"

"Peek into your ear?" I said, a little surprised.

"You know, just looking in from the outside would be fine."

"No problem, but why?"

"Well, it's just that . . ." he stated, blushing, "I thought maybe you could tell me how it looks."

"Sure," I told him, "let's have a look."

My cousin reseated himself facing backwards, and directing his right ear toward me. Seeing it afresh in this way, it really was a well shaped ear. Though diminutive in construction, the flesh of his earlobe was full and plump, much like a fresh baked madeleine sponge cake. It was the first time that I had ever gazed so fixedly at anyone's ear. Inspecting an ear this way makes you realize that morphologically speaking, the ear is somewhat of an enigma compared to the other organs of the human body. Of its various parts, some are immoderately winding and twisted, while others rise or drop precipitously. Perhaps, in the process of evolving toward optimal sound collection and self-protection, the ear had quite naturally taken on this mysterious configuration. Surrounded by contorted walls, the ear's single orifice gapes darkly, like the entrance to a secret cavern.

I thought of the miniature flies nesting and feeding inside of her ears. With sweet flower pollen clinging to their six legs, they dive into her tepid darkness, nibble on her peach colored flesh, slurp up her nectar, and deposit their tiny eggs in her brain. But even so, I couldn't see their bodies. I couldn't hear the sound of their wings.

"Ok, that's good enough," I told him.

He spun around and resituated himself on the bench, facing front again. "How was it? Anything out of the ordinary?"

"Well, not as far as I could tell. Looking from the outside like this, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary."

"Even like, a sense of something amiss . . . nothing like that?"

"It's a perfectly normal looking ear."

My cousin appeared disappointed. Perhaps I had said the wrong thing.

"Did the treatment hurt?" I asked.

"Not really. It was just like all the previous times. They root around in the same places, in the exact same way; I feel like my ear's been rubbed raw. You know, sometimes it doesn't even feel like my own ear anymore."

"Number twenty-eight," my cousin faced me and announced, a short while later. "We want the number twenty-eight bus, right?"

I had been ruminating on something else the entire time. Hearing him, I raised my head just in time to glimpse the approaching bus decelerating as it negotiated an uphill curve. It wasn't the modern bus we had so recently ridden, but a familiar one from the past. Affixed to its front was the number {28}. I made to stand up from the bench. But I didn't make it. Just as if I had been cast into the center of a raging torrent, I had lost command of my limbs.

At that moment, I had been thinking of the box of get-well chocolates that we had brought with us that summer afternoon. As she so happily lifted the lid off the box, we saw that the dozen little chocolates had melted into an unrecognizable liquid mass and adhered to the paper, the box, everything. On the way to the hospital, my friend and I had taken a break at the seashore. There, we had flopped down on the dunes and chatted about all sorts of things. The two of us had left the box of chocolates out in the fierce August sunlight all the while. And so, because of our carelessness and impertinence, the chocolates were ruined, melted to nothing, and lost forever. We should have felt something about this. One of us, it doesn't matter who, should have had something meaningful to say about this. But on that summer afternoon, we felt nothing, cracked some lame joke about it, and departed. And thus we abandoned that hill, left it overgrown with blind willows.

My cousin forcefully grabbed hold of my right arm.

"Are you alright?" he inquired.

I pulled my consciousness back to reality, and stood up from the bench. This time, I made it. I once again felt on my skin the memory-laden May wind that was blowing past. For a matter of moments, I was standing in a curious, twilit place. A place in which all that I could perceive with my eyes did not exist, and only that which I could not, did. But just as suddenly, the very real number twenty-eight bus came to a stop before my eyes, and the door to reality opened before me. I got in, and began moving toward some other place.

I placed my hand on my cousin's shoulder. "Everything's fine," I said.



rev. 7.27.02