A Wild Sheep Chase

Before the Strange Man

There are various reasons why an individual might habitually consume large quantities of alcohol, but they all effectively boil down to the same thing.

Five years ago, my business partner was a happy drunk. Three years later, he had become a moody drunk. And by last summer, he was fumbling at the knob of the door to alcoholism. As with most habitual drinkers, he was a nice-enough, regular-if-not-exactly-sharp kind of guy when sober. Everyone thought of him as a nice-enough, regular-if-not-exactly-sharp kind of guy. He thought so too. That’s why he drank. Because it seemed that with alcohol in his system, he could more fully embody this idea of being that kind of guy.

Things were fine at first. But as time went on and the quantity of alcohol increased, subtle changes occurred, and these subtle changes gradually wore into a deep rut. His regularity and nice-enoughness got ahead of him, excessively so. A typical case. Typically, however, people don’t think of themselves as typical cases. And not-exactly-sharp types even less so. The attempt to regain sight of what he’d lost sent him wandering in an even thicker alcoholic fog.

Still, at least for the time being, he was a regular guy until the sun went down. And since for years now I had made a conscious effort not to meet up with him after sunset, as far as I was concerned he was regular enough. Even so, I knew full well that after sunset he became not quite regular, and he himself knew it too. As neither of us would ever broach the subject, we got along the same as always. We just weren’t the friends we had once been.

While I can’t say I understood him one hundred percent (even seventy percent would have been doing well), for what it was worth, he had been my only friend in college, and it wasn’t easy watching him deteriorate from close up. Ultimately, I guess, that’s what age does.

By the time I’d get to the office he’d already had one shot of whiskey. As long as it was one shot, he could be mister regular, but there was no telling when he’d up his regular to two. When that happened, I knew we’d have to go our separate ways.

I was standing in the gust of the air conditioner, letting my sweat dry as I sipped a cool glass of barley tea. I wasn’t saying anything. He wasn’t saying anything. The harsh afternoon sun spilled across the linoleum floor in hallucinatory sprays. Below, on the park’s expanse of greenery, people lay on the grass sunning themselves. My partner tapped at the palm of his right hand with the tip of a ballpoint pen.

“I hear you got divorced,” he started.

“That was news two weeks ago,” I said, still staring out the window. I took off my sunglasses, and my eyes hurt.

“So why’d you get divorced?”

“Personal reasons.”

“I know that,” he said. “Never heard of a divorce for other than personal reasons.”

I said nothing. Didn’t we have a long-standing unspoken agreement never to touch upon each other’s private affairs?

“I don’t mean to pry,” he said, “but she was a friend of mine too. It came as a shock. I thought you two were always so close.”

“We always were close. It’s not like we parted on bad terms.”

My partner smirked, continuing to tap the palm of his hand with the pen. He was wearing a deep-blue shirt with a black tie, hair neatly combed, cologne. While I was in a T-shirt with Snoopy carrying a surfboard, old Levi’s that had been washed colorless, and dirty tennis shoes. To anyone else, he clearly was the regular one.

“You remember when she and the two of us worked together?”

“I remember very well,” I said.

“Those were happy times,” my partner said.

I moved away from the air conditioner, walked over to the center of the room, and dropped myself down on the plush sky-blue Swedish sofa. I extracted a filter-tip Pall Mall from the special visitors’ cigarette case and lit up with the heavy tabletop lighter.

“So?” I said.

“So what I’m saying is maybe we’ve overextended ourselves.”

“You talking about the ads and magazine work?”

My partner nodded, though it must have been hard for him to admit it. I weighed the lighter in my hand, turned the screw to adjust the flame, and felt sorry for him.

“Okay, I know what you’re trying to say,” I said, returning the lighter to the table, “but remember, I wasn’t the one who brought in the business, and it wasn’t my idea to do this work. You walked in with it. You’re the one who wanted to give it a go.”

“There were pressing circumstances. We had nothing …”

“It made money.”

“Sure it made money. Let us move to a larger office and take on more staff. I got a new car, bought a condo, sent two kids to an expensive private school. Not bad for thirty years old, I suppose.”

“You earned it. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who’s ashamed?” said my partner, retrieving the ballpoint pen that had flown across his desk and taking another few pokes at the middle of his palm. “But you know, it doesn’t seem real. There we were, the two of us with nothing but debts, trying to scrounge up translation work, passing out handbills down by the station.”

“What’s to stop us from passing out handbills now if we wanted?”

My partner looked up at me. “Hey, I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I.”

A silence fell between us.

“A lot of things have changed,” my partner said. “The pace of our lives, our thinking. Above all, we don’t even know ourselves how much we really make. A tax accountant comes in and does all that awful paperwork, with exemptions and depreciations and write-offs and what not.”

“The same as everywhere else.”

“I know, I know. That’s what we’ve got to do and that’s what we’re doing. But it was more fun in the old days.”

“For lo the shadows of a gaol untold, Do grow about our days now many fold.” Lines from a poem suddenly popped out of my mouth.

“How’s that again?”

“Nothing, sorry. You were saying?”

“I just feel like we’re engaged in some kind of exploitation.”

“Exploitation?” I looked up in surprise.

There were two yards between us, and with the different heights of our seats his head rose ten inches above mine. A lithograph hung behind him. A new lithograph I’d not seen before, of a fish with wings. The fish didn’t look too happy about its wings. Probably wasn’t sure how to use them either.

“Exploitation?” I muttered to myself.

“Exploitation.”

“And who, pray tell, is doing the exploiting?”

“Different interests, little by little.”

I crossed my legs on the sky-blue sofa and fixed my gaze at the drama of his hand and ballpoint pen, now exactly at eye level.

“In any case, don’t you think we’ve changed?” asked my partner.

“We’re still the same. Not anyone or anything has changed.”

“You really think so?”

“I really do. Exploitation doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale. Even you don’t believe that Salvation Army trumpets can actually save the world, do you? I think you think too much.”

“Well all right, maybe I do think too much,” my partner said. “Last week you—I mean we—wrote the copy for that magazine ad. And it wasn’t bad copy. It went over real well. But tell me, have you eaten margarine even once in the past couple years?”

“No, I hate margarine.”

“Same here. That’s what I mean. At the very least, in the old days we did work we believed in, and we took pride in it. There’s none of that now. We’re just tossing out fluff.”

“Margarine is good for you. It’s vegetable fat, low in cholesterol. It guards against heart problems, and lately it doesn’t taste bad. It’s cheap and keeps well too.”

“So eat the stuff.”

I sank back into the sofa, stretching out my arms and legs.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s the same whether we eat margarine or don’t. Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it’s basically the same. Sure we’re tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C’mon now, there’s no honest work anywhere. Just like there’s no honest breathing or honest pissing.”

“You were more innocent in the old days.”

“Maybe so,” I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. “And no doubt there’s an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want.”

The room was treated to an extended pen-on-desktop staccato solo.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”

“That’s okay,” said my partner. “I certainly can’t deny it.”

The air conditioner thermostat made a funny noise. This was a terribly quiet afternoon.

“Have some confidence in yourself,” I said. “Haven’t we made it this far on our own? With just the two of us. The only thing that separates us from all those precious success stories is they have backers and titles.”

“And to think we used to be friends,” said my partner.

“We’re still friends,” I said. “We’ve come all this way together.”

“I didn’t want to see you get divorced.”

“I know,” I said. “But what do you say we start talking about sheep?”

He nodded. He placed the ballpoint pen back in its tray and rubbed his eyes.

“It was eleven o’clock this morning when the man came,” my partner began.

Now the Strange Man

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when the man came. Now there are two types of eleven-in-the-mornings for a small-scale company like ours. That is, either absolutely busy or absolutely unbusy. Nothing in between. So at eleven A.M. we are either mindlessly working up a flurry or we are mindlessly daydreaming. In-between tasks, should there be such an animal, we set aside for the afternoon.

It was the latter sort of eleven A.M. when the man came. And a monumentally unbusy one at that. The first half of September had been insane, and then work fell flat off. Three of us took a month-delayed summer vacation, but even so the rest of the crew had been consigned to an agenda of pencil sharpening and other exciting tasks. My partner himself had stepped out to the bank to get a money draft, while someone else had repaired to the neighboring audio-equipment showroom to listen to new record releases. The secretary was left to answer the telephone as she thumbed through the “Autumn Hairstyles” pages of a women’s magazine.

The man opened the door to the office without a sound, and he closed it without a sound. Not that he made any conscious effort to move quietly. It was second nature to him. So much so the secretary had no awareness whatsoever of him. The man was all the way to her desk and peering down at her before she noticed him.

“There is a matter I would like to take up with your employer,” said the man. He spoke as if running a white-gloved hand over a tabletop.

What could have happened to bring him here? She looked up at the man. His eyes were too piercing for a business client, his attire too fastidious for a tax inspector, his air too intellectual for a policeman. Yet she could think of nothing else he could be. This man, a refined piece of bad news now hovering over her, had materialized out of nowhere.

“I’m afraid he’s stepped out at the moment,” she said, slapping her magazine shut. “He said he’d be back in another thirty minutes.”

“I’ll wait,” pronounced the man without a moment’s hesitation. A foregone conclusion, it seemed.

She wondered whether to ask his name. She decided against it and simply conducted him to the reception area. The man took a seat on the sky-blue sofa, crossed his legs, peered up at the electric wall clock directly before him, and froze in position. He moved not an iota. When she brought him a glass of barley tea a bit later, he was in the exact same pose.

“Right where you’re sitting now,” my partner said. “He sat there staring at the clock in the same position for a full thirty minutes.”

I looked at the sofa where I was sitting, then looked up at the wall clock, then I looked back at my partner.

Despite the unusually hot late-September weather outside, the man was rather formally dressed. Impeccably. His white shirt cuffs protruded precisely two-thirds of an inch from the sleeves of his well-tailored gray suit. His subtly toned striped tie, accented with a hint of asymmetry, was positioned with the utmost care. His black shoes were buffed to a fine gloss.

Mid-thirties to forty in age, five foot ten plus in height, trimmed of every last ounce of fat, slender hands without telltale wrinkles. His long fingers suggested nothing so much as a troop of animals that had retained deep primal memories despite long years of training and control. His fingernails were meticulously manicured, a clean, perfect arc at the end of each fingertip. Truly beautiful hands, if somehow unsettling. They bespoke a high degree of specialization in some rarefied field—but what that field might be was anyone’s guess.

His face was even harder to figure. It was a straightforward face, but expressionless, a blank slate. His nose and eyes were angular, as if scored with a paper knife in afterthought, his lips bloodless and thin. He was lightly tanned, though clearly not from the pleasures of the beach or the tennis court. That tan could only have been the result of some unknown sun shining in some unknown sky.

The thirty minutes passed very slowly. Coldly, solidly, rigidly. By the time my partner returned from the bank, the atmosphere in the room had grown noticeably heavy. You might even say everything in the room seemed practically nailed down to the floor.

“Of course, it only seemed that way,” said my partner.

“Of course,” said I.

The lone secretary was worn out from nervousness. Bewildered, my partner went over to the reception area and introduced himself as the manager. Only then did the man unfreeze, whereupon he pulled a thin cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and with a pained expression blew out a puff of smoke. The atmosphere lightened ever so slightly.

“We don’t have much time, so let’s keep this short,” said the man in a hush. Out of his wallet he flicked a name card sharp enough to cut your fingers with and placed it on the table. The name card was hermetically laminated, unnaturally white, and printed with tiny, intensely black type. No title or affiliation, no address, no telephone number. Only the name. It was enough to hurt your eyes just looking at it. My partner turned it over, saw that the back was entirely blank, glanced at the front side again, then looked back at the man.

“You are familiar with the party’s name, I trust?” said the man.

“I am.”

The man advanced his chin a few hundredths of an inch and nodded curtly. His line of vision did not shift in the least. “Burn it, please.”

“Burn it?” My partner stared dumbfounded at the man.

“That name card. Burn it. Now,” the man spoke sharply.

My partner hurriedly picked up the tabletop lighter and set fire to a corner of the name card. He held it by its edge until half of it had burned, then laid it in the large crystal ashtray. The two of them watched it as it burned. By the time the name card was white ash, the room was shrouded in a ponderous silence such as follows a massacre.

“I come here bearing the total authority of that party,” said the man, breaking the silence at length. “Which is to say that everything I say from this point on represents that party’s total volition and wishes.”

“Wishes …,” mouthed my partner.

“‘To wish,’ an elegant word to express a basic position toward a specified objective. Of course,” said the man, “there are other methods of expressing the same thing. You understand, do you not?”

My partner did a quick mental translation. “I understand.”

“Notwithstanding, this is neither a conceptual issue nor a political deal; this is strictly a business proposition.” Bizness, the man enunciated, which marked him as a foreign-born Japanese; most Japanese Japanese will say bijiness.

“You are a biznessman and I am a biznessman,” he went on. “Realistically, there should be nothing between us to discuss but bizness. Let us leave discussions regarding the unrealistic to others. Are we agreed?”

“Certainly,” said my partner.

“It is rather our role to take what unrealistic factors that exist and to work them into a more sophisticated form that might be grounded in the grand scheme of reality. The doings of men run to unrealities. Why is that?” the man asked, rhetorically. He fingered the green stone ring on the middle finger of his left hand. “Because it appears simpler. Added to which, there are circumstances whereby unreality contrives to create an impression that overwhelms reality. Nevertheless, business has no place in the world of unreality. In other words,” the man said, continuing to finger his ring, “we are a breed whose very existence consists in the rechanneling of difficulties. Therefore, should anything I say from this point forward demand difficult labors or decisions of you, I ask your forbearance. Such is the nature of things.”

My partner was utterly lost now, but he nodded anyway.

“Very well then, I shall state the wishes of the party concerned. Number one, it is wished that you cease publication of the public relations bulletin you produce for the ‘P’ Life Insurance Company.”

“But—”

“Number two,” the man interrupted, “it is wished that an interview be arranged with the person actually responsible for the production of this page.”

Pulling a white envelope from his pocket, the man extracted a sheet of paper neatly folded in quarters and handed it to my partner. My partner unfolded the sheet of paper. Sure enough, it was a copy of a photograph for a P.R. bulletin that our office had done. An ordinary photograph of an idyllic Hokkaido landscape—clouds and mountains and grassy pastures and sheep, superimposed with lines of an undistinguished pastoral verse. That was all.

“While our wishes are herewith two, as regards the first of these, it is less a wish than a fait accompli. To be more precise, a decision has already been reached in accordance with our wishes. Should you have any doubts, please call the public relations head of the life insurance company.”

“I see,” said my partner.

“Nonetheless, we can easily imagine that for a company the size of yours, damages incurred by inconvenience such as this could be sizable. Fortunately, we are in a position—as you are no doubt aware—to wield no small degree of influence in this arena. Therefore, upon compliance with our second wish, granted that the person responsible gives us a report complete to our satisfaction, we are prepared to recompense you fully for your loss. Probably more than recompense, I would think.”

Silence prevailed.

“If you should fail to comply with our wishes,” said the man, “you will have no occupation in this or any other field, and henceforth, the world will hold no place for you, ever.”

Again silence.

“Have you any questions?”

“So, uh, it’s the photo that’s the problem?” my partner stammered.

“Yes,” said the man, choosing his words carefully, as if sorting through options on an outstretched palm. “Such is indeed the case. However, I am not at liberty to discuss the matter any further with you. I have not that authority.”

“I will phone the man you want to see. He should be here by three o’clock,” said my partner.

“Excellent,” said the man, glancing at his wristwatch. “I shall send a car here for him at four o’clock. Now this is important: you must speak of this to absolutely no one. Is that understood?”

Whereupon the two of them parted in a most biznesslike manner.

“The Boss”

“That’s the size of it,” said my partner.

“I can’t make head or tail of it,” said I, an unlit cigarette at my lips. “First of all, I have no idea who the person on the name card is. Second, I can’t imagine why he would get so upset about a photo of sheep. And last, I don’t understand how he could put a stop to a publication of ours.”

“The person on the name card is a major right-wing figure. His name and face are almost never publicized, so he’s not widely known, but you’re probably the only one in our line of work who doesn’t know who he is.”

“Dumb to the world, that’s me,” was my feeble excuse.

“He’s right wing, but not the so-called right wing. Or you could say, not even right wing.”

“You’re losing me.”

“The truth of the matter is no one knows what he thinks. He has no writings to his name, doesn’t make speeches in public. He never gives interviews, is never photographed. It’s not even certain he’s alive. Five years back, a magazine reporter got a scoop implicating him in some shady investment deals, but the story never saw the light of day.”

“Been doing your homework, I see.”

“I knew the reporter personally.”

I picked up the lighter and lit my cigarette. “What’s the reporter doing nowadays?”

“Got transferred to administration. Files forms morning to night. Mass media is a surprising small world, and he made a fine example. Like a skull posted at the entrance to an African village.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

“But we do know something of the man’s prewar background. He was born in Hokkaido in 1913, came to Tokyo after graduating from normal school, changed jobs repeatedly, and drifted to the right. He was imprisoned once, I believe. Upon his release, he went to Manchuria, where he fell in with the upper echelons of the Kanto Army and became party to some plot. Not much is known about the organization behind it, but he suddenly becomes a mysterious figure around this time. Rumor has it he was dealing in drugs, which may well have been true. He plundered his way all over the Chinese mainland only to board a destroyer two weeks before the Soviet troops arrived, beating a quick retreat back to Japan. In his booty—a huge, nearly inexhaustible stash of gold and silver.”

“He had, you might say, uncanny timing,” I threw in.

“For a fact. Our man had a real knack for seizing the moment. He’d learned instinctively when to go on the attack and when to withdraw. Plus his eyes were always trained on the right thing. Even when he was incarcerated by the Occupation forces as a Class A war criminal, his trial was cut short midway and never reconvened. For reasons of health, ostensibly, but the facts get a little fuzzy here. More likely, a deal was worked out with the Americans, what with MacArthur looking toward the Chinese mainland.”

My partner pulled another ballpoint pen out of the pencil tray and twirled it between his fingers.

“When he was released from Sugamo Prison, he took half his stash and put an entire faction of the conservative party on his payroll. The other half went to buying up the advertising industry. Note that this was back when advertising wasn’t anything but cheap handbills.”

“The gift of foresight. But weren’t there claims about concealment of funds?”

“Nothing of the kind. Remember he’d bought out an entire faction of the conservatives.”

“Ah.”

“In any case, he used his money to corner the market on both politics and advertising, setting up a power base that thrives to this day. He never surfaces because he doesn’t need to. So long as he keeps a grip on certain centers of political authority and on the core sectors of the public relations industry, there’s nothing he can’t do. Do you have any idea what it means to hold down advertising?”

“I guess not.”

“To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcasting industries under your thumb. There’s not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn’t depend in some way on advertising. It’d be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.”

“There’s something I still don’t understand,” I said. “I follow you as far as our man having the information industries in the palm of his hand, but how does that extend to his putting the clamps on a life insurance company’s P.R. bulletin? That didn’t even pass through the hands of any major rep. That was a direct contract.”

My partner coughed, then drank down the last of his now-lukewarm barley tea. “Stocks. They’re his principal source of revenue. Manipulating the market, forcing hands, takeovers, the works. His newsboys gather all the necessary information, and he picks and chooses according to his fancy. Only a minuscule slice of what really goes on ever hits the wires. All the other news is set aside for the Boss. No overt pressuring, of course, but things do get awfully close to blackmail at times. And if blackmail doesn’t work, he sends word around to his politicos to go prime a few pumps.”

“Every company’s got to have a weak point or two.”

“Every company’s got a secret it doesn’t want exploded right in the middle of the annual shareholders’ meeting. In most cases, they’ll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services, and the stock market. So as you can probably surmise, it’s as easy for him to rub out one P.R. bulletin and put us out of business as it is to shell a hardboiled egg.”

“Hmm, then tell me why should such a major fixture get so heated up over one landscape photo of Hokkaido?”

“A very good question,” said my partner. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

I could only shrug.

“So tell me, how did you know all this had to do with sheep?” my partner asked. “Is something funny going on behind my back?”

“Nameless elves out in the woods have been busy at the spinning wheel.”

“Care to run that by me again?”

“Sixth sense.”

“Give me a break,” my partner sighed. “Well anyway, let me fill you in on the latest two developments. Just to snoop around a bit, I phoned that ex-reporter at the monthly. Word has it that the Boss is down for the count with a brain hemorrhage, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. The other piece of news concerns the man who came in here. He turns out to be the Boss’s personal secretary, his number two, the guy he entrusts with actually running the organization. Japanese-American, Stanford graduate, been working for the Boss for twelve years. He’s something of a mystery man himself. Undoubtedly got a head on his shoulders. That’s about all I could find out.”

“Thanks,” I said, meaning it.

“You’re welcome,” said my partner without even glancing my way.

Any way you looked at it, when my partner wasn’t drinking he was far more of a regular guy than I was. He was more innocent and more considerate and more organized in his thinking. But sooner or later he’d get himself drunk. Not a comforting thought: that my betters could fall to pieces before me.

As soon as my partner left the room, I pulled the whiskey bottle out of his drawer and had myself a drink.

Counting Sheep

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What’s done is done, what’s yet to be is clearly yet to be, and so on. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the “everything” that is behind us and the “zero” beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.

In actual practice, however, distinctions between the two interpretations amount to precious little. A state of affairs (as with most face-offs between interpretations) not unlike calling the same food by two different names.

So much for metaphors.

My placing a photo of sheep in the life insurance company’s P.R. bulletin can be seen from one perspective, (a) as coincidence, but from another perspective, (b) as no coincidence at all.

(a) I was looking for a suitable photo for the P.R. bulletin. By coincidence, I happened to have a photo of sheep in my drawer. I decided to use that photograph. An innocent photograph in an innocent world.

(b) The photo of the sheep in my desk drawer had been waiting for me all this time. If not for use in that bulletin, then for something else at some later date.

Come to think of it, these formulas apply across the board to everything I’ve experienced thus far in life. With a little practice, I’m sure I’d be able to conduct, (a) a life with my right hand and, (b) a life with my left. Not that it matters much. It’s like doughnut holes. Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

Sitting on the sofa drinking whiskey, blown on softly by the air conditioner like a dandelion seed wafted along on a pleasant breeze, I stared at the electric wall clock. As long as I stared at the clock, at least the world remained in motion. Not a very consequential world, but in motion nonetheless. And as long as I knew the world was still in motion, I knew I existed. Not a very consequential existence, but an existence nonetheless. It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock. There had to be a more cognitive means of confirmation. But try as I might, nothing less facile came to mind.

I gave up and had another sip of whiskey. A burning sensation passed through my throat, traveled down the wall of my esophagus and into the pit of my stomach. Outside the window, a bright blue summer sky and billowing white clouds. A beautiful if secondhand sky showing telltale signs of wear. I took another sip of whiskey to toast the brand-new sky it once was. Not bad Scotch. Not a bad sky either, once you got used to it. A jumbo jet traversed the sky from left to right like some gleaming beetle.

I had polished off my second whiskey when it came to me: what the hell was I doing here?

What the hell was I thinking about?

Sheep.

I got up from the sofa, picked up the copy of the photo from my partner’s desk, and returned to the sofa. For twenty seconds, I stared at it, sucking on the whiskey-tinged ice cubes, racking my brain to figure out what was going on in it.

The photo showed a flock of sheep on a grassy meadow. On one edge, the meadow adjoined a birch wood. Huge birch trees of the kind you find up in Hokkaido, not the puny stunted variety that flank the entrance to your neighborhood dentist’s office. These were birches that four bears could have sharpened their claws on simultaneously. Given the foliage, the season was probably spring. Snow lingered on the mountain peaks in the background, in the folds of the mountainside as well. April or May. When the ground is slushy with melting snow. The sky was blue (or rather what I took for blue from the monochrome photo-gray—it could have been salmon pink for all I knew), with light white clouds drawn across the mountaintops. All things considered, the flock of sheep could only be taken for a flock of sheep, the birch wood only for a birch wood, the white clouds only for white clouds. Simply that and nothing more.

I tossed the photograph on the table, smoked a cigarette, and yawned. Then picking the photo up again, I tried counting the sheep. The meadow was so vast, the sheep scattered in patches like picnickers, that it was hard to tell whether those white specks off in the distance were sheep or just white specks. And the closer I looked, the harder it was to tell whether the white specks were actually white specks or my eyes playing tricks with me, until finally I could be sure of nothing. I took a ballpoint pen in hand and marked everything I could be sure was a sheep. The count came to thirty-two. Thirty-two sheep. A perfectly straightforward photograph. Nothing unusual about the composition, nothing particular in the way of style.

Yet there was something there. Something funny. I suppose I sensed it the first time I saw the photo three months before, and I had been feeling it ever since.

I rolled over on the sofa and, holding the photo above my head, I went through the count once more.

Thirty-three.

Thirty-three?

I shut my eyes and shook my head. My mind was a blank. I tried counting sheep one last time, then drifted into a deep two-whiskey-afternoon sleep. The last thing I remember thinking about was my girlfriend’s ears.

The Limo and Its Driver

The car came at four, as promised. Exactly on the dot, like a cuckoo clock. The secretary shook me awake from my deep slumber. Whereupon I went to the washroom and splashed water on my face. My drowsiness wasn’t budging in the least. I yawned three times in the elevator on the way down. Yawns you could have built a lawsuit on. But who was there to do the suing? Who was there to be sued but myself?

Looming there in front of the entrance to our building was a giant submarine of a limousine. An impoverished family could have lived under the hood of that car, it was so big. The windows were opaque blue, reflective glass so you couldn’t see in. The body was an awesome black, with not a smudge, not on the bumper, not on the hubcaps.

Standing alertly by the limo was a middle-aged chauffeur wearing a spotless white shirt and orange tie. A real chauffeur. I had but to approach him, and without a word he opened the car door. His eyes followed me until I was properly seated, then he closed the door. He climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door after himself. All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I’d bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

The car interior was fitted out to the hilt. You might expect this in a limousine, as the taste of most so-called luxury accessories is questionable, and this one was no exception. Still, I couldn’t help being impressed. In the middle of my sofa-like seat was a chic push-button telephone, next to which were arranged a silver cigarette case, a lighter, an ashtray. Molded into the back of the driver’s seat was a small folding desk. The air conditioning was unobtrusive and natural, the carpeting sumptuous.

Before I knew it, the limo was in motion, like a washtub gliding over a sea of mercury. The sum of money sunk into this baby must have been staggering.

“Shall I put on some music?” asked the chauffeur.

“Something relaxing, maybe.”

“Very good, sir.”

The chauffeur reached down below his seat, selected a cassette tape, and touched a switch in the dashboard. A peaceful cello sonata seemed to flow out of nowhere. An unobjectionable score, unobjectionable fidelity.

“They always send you to meet people in this car?” I asked.

“That is correct,” answered the chauffeur cautiously. “Lately, that is all I do.”

“I see.”

“Originally this limousine was reserved exclusively for the Boss,” said the chauffeur shortly after, his previous reserve wearing off. “However, his condition being what it is this spring, he does not venture out much. Yet what point could there be to letting this car sit there? As I am sure you realize, an automobile must be driven regularly or its performance drops off.”

“Of course,” I said. Apparently, then, it was no organizational secret that the Boss was in ill health. I took a cigarette out of the cigarette case, examined it, held it up to my nose. A specially made plain-cut cigarette without a brand, an aroma akin to that of Russian tobacco. I debated whether to smoke it or slip it into my pocket, but in the end merely put it back. Engraved in the center of the lighter and cigarette case was an intricately patterned emblem. A sheep emblem.

A sheep?

I shook my head and closed my eyes. All this was beyond me. It seemed that ever since the ear photo came into my life, things had begun to escape me.

“How much longer till we get there?” I asked.

“Thirty or forty minutes, depending on the traffic.”

“Then maybe you could turn down the air conditioning a bit? I’d like to catch the end of an afternoon nap.”

“Most certainly, sir.”

The chauffeur adjusted the air conditioning, then flicked a switch on the dashboard. A thick panel of glass slid up, sealing the passenger compartment off from the driver’s seat. I was enveloped in near total silence, save for the quiet strains of Bach, but by this point, hardly anything surprised me. I buried my cheek in the backseat and dozed off.

I dreamed about a dairy cow. Rather nice and small this cow, the type that looked like she’d been through a lot. We passed each other on a big bridge. It was a pleasant spring afternoon. The cow was carrying an old electric fan in one hoof, and she asked whether I wouldn’t buy it from her cheap.

“I don’t have much money,” I said. Really, I didn’t.

“Well then,” said the cow, “I might trade it to you for a pair of pliers.”

Not a bad deal. So the cow and I went home together, and I turned the house upside down looking for the pliers. But they were nowhere to be found.

“Odd,” I said, “they were here just yesterday.”

I had just brought a chair over so I could get up and look on top of the cabinet when the chauffeur tapped me on the shoulder. “We’re here,” he said succinctly.

The car door opened and the waning light of a summer afternoon fell across my face. Thousands of cicadas were singing at a high pitch like the winding of a clockspring. There was the rich smell of earth.

I got out of the limo, stretched, and took a deep breath. I prayed that there wasn’t some kind of symbolism to the dream.

Wherefore the Worm Universe

There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

Yet the fact that the cow chose me to obtain her pliers changes everything. This plunges me into a whole universe of alternative considerations. And in this universe of alternative considerations, the major problem is that everything becomes protracted and complex. I ask the cow, “Why do you want pliers?” And the cow answers, “I’m really hungry.” So I ask, “Why do you need pliers if you’re hungry?” The cow answers, “To attach them to branches of the peach tree.” I ask, “Why a peach tree?” To which the cow replies, “Well, that’s why I traded away my fan, isn’t it?” And so on and so forth. The thing is never resolved, I begin to resent the cow, and the cow begins to resent me. That’s a worm’s eye view of its universe. The only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.

The place where that enormous four-wheeled vehicle transported me this September afternoon was surely the epicenter of the worm universe. In other words, my prayer had been denied.

I took a look around me and held my breath. Here was the stuff of breath taking.

The limo was parked on a high hill. Behind us was the gravel road which we’d come on, trailing away in an all-too-picturesque course of twists and turns to the front gate off in the distance. Probably, at a leisurely pace, a solid fifteen minutes’ walk away. Lining either side of the road stood cedars and mercury-vapor lights, stationed like pencil holders at equal intervals. Clinging to each cedar trunk were innumerable cicadas screeching feverishly, as if the end of the world were at hand.

Each row of cedars bordered on neatly mowed turf, which sloped down in banks dotted with azaleas and hydrangeas and other plants beyond my powers of identification. A flock of starlings rushed, en masse, left and right across the lawn, like the aimless migration of a sand dune.

Stone steps led down both sides of the hill: the steps to the left descended to a Japanese garden with a stone lantern and a pond, the steps to the right opened onto a small golf course. At the edge of the golf course was a gazebo the color of rum raisin, and across from it stood a classical Greek statue in stone. Beyond was an enormous garage where a different chauffeur was hosing down a different limousine. I couldn’t tell the make, but it wasn’t a used Volkswagen.

I folded my arms and took another look around me. An impeccable garden vista, to be sure, but oh, what a sight.

“And where is the mailbox?” I asked impertinently. I mean somebody had to go to fetch the paper every morning and evening.

“The mailbox is by the back gate,” said the chauffeur. A sudden revelation. Of course there had to be a back gate.

Having concluded my viewing of the grounds, I turned straight ahead and found myself facing a massive, towering structure.

It was—how shall I put it?—a painfully solitary building. Let me explain. Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life-form that had evolved blindly, toward who knows what end.

In its first incarnation, it seems to have been a Meiji-era Western-style manor. A high-ceilinged portico offered entrance to a two-story cream-colored house. The windows tall and double-hung in the true old style, the paint redone time and again. The roof was, as expected, copper-shingled, and the rain gutters as solid as a Roman aqueduct. A fine house in itself, exuding a period charm.

But then some joker of an architect came along to attach another wing of the same style and color scheme onto the right side of the original structure. The intention wasn’t bad, but the effect was unpalatable. Like serving sherbet and broccoli on the same silver platter.

This unhappy combination stood untouched for several decades until someone added a stone tower off to one side. At the pinnacle of this tower was affixed a decorative lightning rod. A mistake. Lightning was meant to strike the building and burn it down.

Now a walkway covered by a solemn roof linked the tower directly to yet another wing. This wing was a separate entity once again, though it at least carried through a unified theme. The “mutual opposition of ideologies,” shall we call it. It bespoke a certain pathos, rather like the mule who, placed between two identical buckets of fodder, dies of starvation trying to decide which to eat first.

To the left of the original structure, no less antithetical to the multiple elements already there, sprawled a traditional one-story Japanese-style villa. With marvelous hallways planked straight out like bowling lanes, surrounded with hedges and well-trained pines.

This triple-feature-plus-coming-attractions mélange of a house perched atop the hill was not a common sight. Had it been someone’s grand scheme constructed over many years in an effort to shake off a stupor or chase away sleep, then it was an admirable success. Needless to say, an unlikely supposition. The monstrosity stood simply for money, piles of it, to which a long line of second-rate talents, era after era, had availed themselves.

I must have been staring at this apparition a while before I noticed the chauffeur next to me, looking at his watch. A pose he looked somehow accustomed to. He’d probably stood in that same spot with any number of persons he’d driven there. All of whom had gawked at the surroundings in exactly the same way.

“View all you care to, sir. Please do take your time,” he said. “We still have eight minutes free.”

“It sure is big,” I said, for want of anything less inappropriate to say.

“Ninety-six thousand six hundred seventy-one square feet,” said the chauffeur.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if you had an active volcano in the place,” I laughed, trying to inject some levity. But the joke didn’t register. No one joked here.

Thus passed eight minutes.

I was conducted through the entryway to a large Western-style room on the immediate right. The ceiling, framed with elaborately carved moldings, was extraordinarily high. There was a handsome antique sofa and tea table, and on the wall a still life, the epitome of realism. Apples and a flower vase and a paper knife. Maybe the idea was to crack open the apples with the vase, then peel them with the paper knife. Seeds and cores could go in the vase.

The windows were appointed with thick curtains over lace curtains, pulled to the side with sashes of the same material. Through the opening between the curtains, a relatively sedate section of the gardens could be seen. The oak flooring was polished to a fine luster. A carpet, with a full pile despite its faded colors, covered half the floor.

Not a bad room. Not a bad room at all.

An elderly maid in kimono entered the room, set down a glass of grape juice, and left without a word. The door closed with a click. Then everything was dead quiet.

On the tea table were a silver cigarette case and lighter and ashtray identical to what was in the limo. Engraved with the same sheep emblem. I pulled one of my own filter tips out of my pocket, lit it with the silver lighter, and blew a puff of smoke up at the high ceiling. Then I took a sip of grape juice.

Ten minutes later, the door opened and in walked a tall man in a black suit. The man offered no “Welcome” or “Sorry to keep you waiting.” I didn’t say anything either. He took a seat opposite me, cocked his head slightly, and looked me over.

Time was surely passing.