31



The Bat V a n i s h e s

*

THE THIEVING MAGPIE Returns



Wearing a sweater and my pea coat, wool hat pulled down low almost to my eyes, I
scaled the back wall and lowered myself into the alley. The sun would not be up for a
while, and people were still asleep. I padded my way do wn the alley to the Residence.
Inside, the house was just as I had left it six days earlier, complete with dirty dishes in
the sink. I found no written messages and nothing on the answering machine. The
computer screen in Cinnamon's room was is cold and dead as before. The heat pump was
keeping the place at nor mal room temperature. I took off my coat and gloves, then boiled
water and made myself some tea. I had a few crackers and cheese for breakfast, washed
the dishes in the sink, and put them away. Nine o'clock came again, with no sign of
Cinnamon.



I went out to the yard, took the cover off the well, and leaned over to look inside.
There was the same dense darkness. I knew the well now as if it were an extension of my
own body: its darkness, its smell, and its quiet were part of me. In a sense, I knew the
well better than I knew Kumiko. Her memory was still fresh, of course. If I closed my
eyes, I could bring back the details of her voice, her face, her body, the way she moved. I
had lived in the same house with her for six years, after all. But still, I felt there were
things about her that I could not bring back so clearly. Or perhaps I simply could not be
sure that what I was remembering was correct- just as I could not recall precisely the
curve in t he tail of the cat when he came back.
I sat on the well curb, thrust my hands into my coat pockets, and sur veyed my
surroundings once again. It felt as if a cold rain or snow might begin falling at any time.
There was no wind, but the air had a deep chill to it. A flock of little birds raced back and
forth across the sky in a complex pattern as if painting a coded hieroglyph up there, and
then, with a rush, they were gone. Soon I heard the low rumble of a jet, but the plane
stayed invisible above the thick layer of clouds. On such a dark, overcast day, I could go
into the well without worrying that the sunlight would hurt my eyes when I came out.
Still, I went on sitting there for some time, doing nothing. I was in no hurry. The day
had hardly begun. Noon would not be here for a while. I gave myself up to thoughts that
came to me without order as I sat on the well curb. Where had they taken the bird

sculpture that used to be in this yard? Was it decorating another yard now, still urged on
by an endless, pointless impulse to soar into the sky? Or had it been discarded as trash
when the Miyawakis' house was demolished last summer? I recalled the piece fondly.
Without the sculpture of the bird, I felt, the yard had lost a certain subtle balance.
When I ran out of thoughts, after eleven, I climbed down the steel ladder into the
well. I set foot on the well bottom and took a few deep breaths, as always, checking the
air. It was the same as ever, smelling somewhat of mold but breathable. I felt for the bat
where I had left it propped against the wall. It was not there. It was not anywhere. It had
disappeared. Completely. Without a trace.



I lowered myself to the well floor and sat leaning against the wall, sighing.
Who could have taken the bat? C innamon was the only possibility. He was the only
one who knew of its existence, and he was probably the only one who would think to
climb down into the well. But what reason could he possibly have had for taking the bat
away? This was something I could not comprehend- one of the many things I could not
comprehend.
I had no choice today but to go ahead without the bat. That would be all right too. The
bat was, finally, just a kind of protective talisman. Not having it with me would be no
problem. I had managed to get into that room all right without it, hadn't I? Once I had
presented myself with these arguments, I pulled on the rope that closed the lid of the well.
I folded my hands on my knees and closed my eyes in the darkness.
As had happened last time, I was unable to achieve the mental concentration I
wanted. All kinds of thoughts came crowding in, blocking the way. To get rid of them, I
tried thinking about the pool- the twenty- five - meter indoor ward pool where I usually
went for exercise. I imagined myself doing the crawl there, doing laps. I'm not trying for
speed, just using a quiet, steady stroke, over and over. I bring my elbows out smoothly
with a minimum of noise and splashing, then stroke gently, fin gers first. I take water into
my mouth and let it out slowly, as if breathing underwater. After a while, I feel my body
flowing naturally through the water, as if it's riding on a soft wind. The only sound
reaching my ears is that of my own regular breathing. I'm floating on the wind like a bird
in the sky, looking down at the earth below. I see distant towns and tiny people and
flowing rivers. A sense of calm envelops me, a feeling close to rapture. Swimming is one
of the best things in my life. It has never solved any problems, but it has done no harm,
and nothing has ever ruined it for me. Swimming.
Just then I heard something.
I realized I was hearing a low, monotonous hum in the dark, some thing like the
droning of insect wings. But the sound was too artificial, too mechanical, to be that of
insect wings. It had subtle variations in frequency, like tuning changes in a shortwave
broadcast. I held my breath and listened, trying to catch its direction. It seemed to be
coming from one fixed point in the darkness and, at the same time, from inside my o wn
head. The border between the two was almost impossible to deter mine in the deep
darkness.
While concentrating all my attention on the sound, I fell asleep. I had no awareness of
feeling sleepy before that happened. All of a sudden, I was asleep, as if I had been

walking down a corridor with nothing partic ular on my mind when, without warning, I
was dragged into an unknown room. How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I
had no idea. It couldn't have been very long. It might have been a moment. But when
some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another
darkness. The air was different, the temperature was different, the quality and depth of
the darkness was different. This darkness was tainted with some kind of faint, opaque
light. And a familiar sharp smell of pollen struck my nostrils. I was in that strange hotel
room.
I raised my face, scanned my surroundings, held my breath.
I had come through the wall.
I was sitting on a carpeted floor, my back leaning against a c loth- covered wall. My
hands were still folded atop my knees. As fearfully deep as my sleep had been just a
moment before, my wakefulness now was complete and lucid. The contrast was so
extreme that it took a moment for my wakefulness to sink in. The quick contractions of
my heart were plainly audible. There was no doubt about it. I was here. I had finally
made it all the way into the room.



In the fine - grained, multiveiled darkness, the room looked exactly as I remembered it.
As my eyes became used to the darkness, though, I began to pick out slight differences.
First, the telephone was in a different place. It had moved from the night table to the top
of a pillow, in which it was now all but buried. Then I saw that the amount of whiskey in
the bottle had gone down. There was just a little left in the bottom now. All the ice in the
bucket had melted and was now nothing but old, cloudy water. The glass was dry inside,
and when I touched it I realized it was coated with white dust. I approached the bed,
lifted the phone, and put the receiver to my ear. The line was dead. The room looked as if
it had been abandoned, forgotten for a very long time. There was no sense of a human
presence there. Only the flowers in the vase preserved their strange vividness.
The re were signs that someone had been lying in the bed: the sheets and covers and
pillows were in slight disarray. I pulled back the covers and checked for warmth, but
there was none. No smell of cosmetics remained, either. Much time seemed to have gone
by since the person had left the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, scanned the room again,
and listened for sounds. But I heard nothing. The place was like an ancient tomb after
grave robbers had carried off the body.



All of a sudden, the phone began to ring. My heart froze like a frightened cat. The
air's sharp reverberations woke the floating grains of pollen, and the flower petals raised
their faces in the darkness. How could the phone have been ringing? Only a few moments
before, it had been as dead as a rock in the earth. I steadied my breathing, calmed the
beating of my heart, and checked to make sure I was still there, in the room. I stretched
out my hand, touched my fingers to the receiver, and hesitated a moment before lifting it
from its cradle. By then, the phone had rung three or perhaps four times altogether.
"Hello." The phone went dead as I lifted the receiver. The irreversible heaviness of

death weighed in my hand like a sandbag. "Hello," I said again, but my own dry voice
came back to me unaltered, as if rebounding from a thick wall. I set the receiver down,
then picked it up again and listened. There was no sound. I sat on the edge of the bed,
trying to control my breathing as I waited for the phone to ring again. It did not ring. I
watched the grains in the air return to unconsciousness and sink into the darkness. I
replayed the sound of the telephone in my mind. I was no longer entirely certain that it
had actually rung. But if I let doubts like that creep in, there would have been no end to
them. I had to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise, my very existence in this place would
have been open to question. The phone had rung; there could be no mistake. And in the
next instant, it had gone dead. I cleared my throat, but that sound, too, died instantly in
the air.
I stood up and made a circuit of the room. I studied the floor, stared up at the ceiling,
sat on the table, leaned against the wall, gave the door knob a quick twist, turned the
switch of the floor lamp on and off. The doorknob didn't budge, of course, and the lamp
was dead. The window was blocked from the outside. I listened for any sounds I could
make out, but the silence was like a smooth, high wall. Still, I felt the presence of
something here that was trying to deceive me, as if the others were hold ing their breath,
pressing themselves flat against the wall, obliterating their skin color to keep me from
knowing they were there. So I pretended not to notice. We were very good at fooling
each other. I cleared my throat again and touched my fingers to my lips.
I decided to inspect the room once more. I tried the floor lamp again, but it produced
no light. I opened the whiskey bottle and sniffed what was left inside. The smell was
unchanged. Cutty Sark. I replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the table. I brought
the receiver to my ear one more time, but the phone could not have been any deader than
it was. I took a few slow steps to get a feel of the carpet against my shoes. I pressed my
ear against the wall and concentrated all my attention in an attempt to hear any sounds
that might have been coming through it, but there was, of course, nothing. I stepped to the
door and, knowing that to do so was pointless, gave the knob a twist. It turned easily to
the right. For a moment, I could not absorb this fact as a fact. Before, the knob had been
so solid it could have been set in cement. I went back to square one and tried again,
taking my hand from the knob, reaching out for it again, and turning it back and forth. It
turned smoothly in my hand. This gave me the strangest feeling, as if my tongue were
swelling inside my mouth.
The door was open.
I pulled the knob until the door swung in just enough for a blinding light to come
streaming into the room. The bat. If only I had the bat, I would have felt more confident.
Oh, forget the bat! I swung the door wide open. Checking left, then right, to be sure no
one was there, I stepped outside. It was a long, carpeted corridor. A short way down the
corridor, I could see a large vase filled with flowers. It was the vase I had hidden behind
while the whistling waiter was knocking on this door. In my memory, the corridor was a
long one, with many turns and branches along the way. I had managed to get here by
coming across the waiter whistling his way down the corridor and following after him.
The number plate on the door had identified this as Room 208.
Stepp ing carefully, I walked toward the vase. I hoped I could find my way to the
lobby, where Noboru Wataya had been appearing on television. Many people had been in
the lobby, moving to and fro. I might be able to find some clue there. But wandering

through the hotel was like venturing into a vast desert without a compass. If I couldn't
find the lobby and then was unable to find my way back to Room 208,1 might be sealed
up inside this labyrinthine place, unable to return to the real world.
But now was no time for hesitation. It was probably my last chance. I had waited
every day in the bottom of the well for six months, and now, at last, the door had opened
before me. Besides, the well was going to be taken from me soon. If I failed now, all my
time and effort would have been for nothing.
I turned several corners. My filthy tennis shoes moved soundlessly over the carpet. I
couldn't hear a thing- no voices, no music, no TV, not even a ventilator fan or an elevator.
The hotel was silent, like a ruin forgotten by time. I turned many corners and passed
many doors. The corridor forked again and again, and I had always gone right, on the
assumption that if I chose to go back, I should be able to find the room by taking only
lefts. By now, though, my sense of direction was gone. I felt no nearer to anything in
particular. The numbers on the doors had no order, and they went by endlessly, so they
were no help at all. They trickled away from my consciousness almost before they had
registered in my memory. Now and then I felt I had passed some of them before. I came
to a stop in the middle of the corridor and caught my breath. Was I circling back over and
over the same territory, the way one does when lost in the woods?



As I stood there wondering what to do, I heard a familiar sound in the distance. It was
the whistling waiter. He was in perfect tune. There was no one who could match him. As
before, he was whistling the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie-not an easy tune
to whistle, but it seemed to give him no trouble. I proceeded down the corridor in the di-
rection of the whistling, which grew louder and clearer. He appeared to be heading in my
direction. I found a good- sized pillar and hid behind it.
The waiter carried a silver tray again, with the usual bottle of Cutty Sark and an ice
bucket and two glasses. He hurried past me, facing straight ahead, with an expression on
his face that suggested he was entranced by the sound of his own whistling. He never
looked in my direction; he was in such a hurry that he couldn't spare a moment's wasted
motion. Everything is the same as before, I thought. It seemed my flesh was being carried
back in time.
As soon as the waiter passed me, I followed him. His silver tray bobbed pleasantly in
time with the tune he was whistling, now and then catching the glare of a ceiling light. He
repeated the melody of The Thieving Magpie over and over like a magic spell. What kind
of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous
melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in
the house when I was a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini. Compared with Claudio
Abbado's youthful, fluid, contempo rary performance, Toscanini's had had a blood-
stirring intensity to it, like the slow strangulation of a powerful foe who has been downed
after a violent battle. But was The Thieving Magpie really the story of a magpie that
engaged in thievery? If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and
look it up in an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the
opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these
questions by then.

The whistling waiter continued walking straight ahead, with all the mechanical
regularity of a robot, and I followed him at a fixed distance. I knew where he was going
without even having to think about it. He was delivering the fresh bottle of Cutty Sark
and the ice and glasses to Room 208. And indeed, he came to a stop in front of Room
208. He shifted the tray to his left hand, checked the room number, drew himself up, and
gave the door a perfunctory knock. Three knocks, then another three.
I couldn't tell whether there was any answer from within. I was hid ing behind the
vase, watching the waiter. Time passed, but the waiter went on standing at attention, as
though planning to challenge the lim its of endurance. He did not knock again but waited
for the door to open. Eventually, as if in answer to a prayer, the door began to open
inward.