A Wild Sheep Chase

The Rat’s First Letter (Postmarked December 21st, One Year Ago)

So how’s everything?

Seems like an awful long time since I saw you last. How many years is it now? What year was it?

I think I’ve gradually lost my sense of time. It’s like there’s this impossible flat blackbird flapping about over my head and I can’t count above three. You’ll have to excuse me, but why don’t you do the counting?

I skipped town without telling anybody and maybe you had your share of troubles because of it. Or maybe you were upset at me for leaving without a word to you. You know, I meant to set things straight with you any number of times, but I just couldn’t. I wrote a lot of letters and tore them all up. It should’ve been obvious, but there was no way I could explain to others what I couldn’t even explain to myself.

I guess.

I’ve never been good at writing letters. Everything comes out backwards. I use exactly the wrong words. If that isn’t bad enough, writing letters makes me more confused. And because I have no sense of humor, I get all discouraged with myself.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They’ve got plenty of life to lead inside their own context. This, of course, is only my opinion. Maybe it’s impossible to live out a life in context.

It’s terribly cold now and my hands are numb. It’s like they aren’t my own hands. My brains, they aren’t like my own brains either. Right now it’s snowing. Snow like flakes of someone else’s brains. And it’ll pile up deeper and deeper like someone else’s brains too. (What is this bullshit all about anyway?)

Other than the cold, though, I’m doing fine. How about you? I won’t tell you my address, but don’t take it personally. It’s not like I’m trying to hide anything from you. I want you to know that. This is, you see, a delicate question for me. It’s just this feeling I’ve got that, if I told you my address, in that instant something inside me would change. I can’t put it very well.

It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can’t say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well. It’s got to be an inborn fault.

Naturally everyone’s got faults.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It’s like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I’ve got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that’s not the question, is it?

In any case, I’ve decided I’m not giving you my address. I’m sure things’ll be better that way. For me and for you.

Probably we’d have been better off born in nineteenth-century Russia. I’d have been Prince So-and-so and you Count Such-and-such. We’d go hunting together, fight, be rivals in love, have our metaphysical complaints, drink beer watching the sunset from the shores of the Black Sea. In our later years, the two of us would be implicated in the Something-or-other Rebellion and exiled to Siberia, where we’d die. Brilliant, don’t you think? Me, if I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I’m sure I could have written better novels. Maybe not your Dostoyevsky, but a known second-rate novelist. And what would you have been doing? Maybe you’d only have been Count Such-and-such straight through. That wouldn’t be so bad, just being Count Such-and-such. That’d be nice and nineteenth century.

But well, enough of this. To return to the twentieth century.

Let me tell you about the towns I’ve seen.

Not the town where I was born, but different other towns.

There really are a lot of different other towns in the world. Each with its own specific features, incomprehensible things that attract me. Which is why I’ve passed through my share of towns these past few years.

Wherever I end up, I just get off at, and there’s a small rotary where a map of the town is posted and a street of shops. That much is the same everywhere. Even the dogs look the same. First thing I do is a quick once-around the place before heading to a real estate agent to see about cheap room and board. Sure I’m an outsider and nobody in a small town will trust me right off, but as you know I can be decent enough if I put half a mind to it. Give me fifteen minutes, and I can generally get on good terms with most people. That much accomplished, I’ve found out where I can fit in and all sorts of information about the town.

Next, I look for work. This also begins with getting on good terms with a lot of different people. I’m sure this’d be a comedown for someone like you (and believe me, I’ve seen enough comedowns to last me) because you know you’re only going to stick around for four months anyway. But there’s nothing hard about getting on good terms with people. You find the local watering hole where all the kids hang out (every town has one—it’s like the town navel), you become a regular customer, meet people, get an introduction for some work. Of course, you come up with some likely name and life story. So that by now I’ve got a string of names and identities like you wouldn’t believe. At times I forget what I was like originally.

In the work department, I’ve done all kinds of jobs. Most have been boring, but still I enjoy the work. Most often it’s been at a gasoline station. Next is tending some rinky-dink bar. I’ve minded shop at bookstores, even worked at a radio station. I’ve hired out as a day laborer. Been a cosmetics salesman. I had quite a reputation as a salesman, let me tell you. And I’ve slept with my share of women. Sleeping with women each time with a different name and identity isn’t half bad.

You get the picture, in all its variations.

So now I’m twenty-nine, turning thirty in another nine months.

I still don’t know whether I’m cut out for this kind of life or not. I don’t know if there’s something universal about wanting to be a drifter. But as somebody once wrote somewhere, you need one of three things for a long life of wandering—a religious temperament, or an artistic temperament, or a psychic temperament. If you have one but only on the short side, an extended drifter’s existence is out of the question. In my case, I can’t see myself with any of them. In a pinch, I might say … no, better not.

Otherwise, I might end up opening the wrong door some day, only to find I can’t back out. Whatever, if the door’s been opened, I better make a go of it. I mean I can’t keep buying my kicks for the rest of my life, can I?

That’s about the size of it.

Like I said at the beginning (or did I?), when I think of you, I get a little uneasy. Because you remind me of when I was a comparatively regular guy.

Your friend,

The Rat

P.S.: I enclose a novel I wrote. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, so do whatever you want with it. I’m sending this special delivery to make sure it reaches you by December 24. Hope it gets there on time.

Anyway, Happy Birthday.

And by the way, Merry Christmas.

The Rat’s package was shoved all crumpled up into my apartment mailbox on December 29. Attached was a forwarding slip. It had been sent to my previous address. There’d been no way to tell him I’d moved.

Four pages of pale-green stationery packed solid with writing. I read the letter through three times before I brought out the envelope to check the blurred postmark. It was a place I’d never heard of. I got the atlas down from my bookshelf and looked the place up.

The Rat’s words had reached me from a small town on the northern tip of Honshu, smack in the middle of Aomori Prefecture. According to my book of train schedules, about an hour from the city of Aomori. Five trains stopped every day, two in the morning, one at noon, two in the evening.

I’d been to Aomori several times in December. Frigid. The traffic signals freeze.

I showed the letter to my wife, wife at the time, that is. All she could say was “poor guy.” What she probably meant was you poor guys. Hell, it makes no difference now.

I tossed the novel, around two hundred pages, into my desk drawer without bothering to read the title. I don’t know why, I just didn’t feel like reading it. The letter was enough.

I pulled a chair up in front of the heater and smoked three cigarettes.

The Rat’s next letter came in May the following year.

The Rat’s Second Letter (Postmarked May, This Year)

Last letter I think maybe I was a little too chatty. Even so, I’ve forgotten completely what I said.

I changed addresses again. Some place totally different from any place I’ve been up to now. It’s really quiet here. Maybe a little too quiet.

In a sense, I’ve reached what is for me a final destination. I feel like I’ve come to where I was meant to come. What’s more, I feel I’ve had to swim against the current to get here. But that’s nothing I can pass judgment on.

What lousy writing! It’s so vague you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Or maybe you think I’m reading too much meaning into my fate. If that’s the case, then the blame is all mine.

I want you to know that the more I try to explain to you what’s going on with me, the more I start to digress like this. Still, I’m in good shape. Maybe better shape than I’ve ever been.

Let me put things more concretely.

Hereabouts, as I said earlier, it’s incredibly quiet. There’s nothing to do around here, so I read books (I’ve got enough books here to last me a decade) or listen to FM music or to records (got a whole lot here too). It’s been ten years since I listened to so much music. To my surprise, the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys are still going strong. Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

Here, there is nothing my size. There’s nobody around here to make himself the measure of everything, to praise or condemn others for their size.

Time keeps on flowing unchanged like a clear river too. Sometimes just being here I feel my slate has been cleaned, and I’m all the way back to my primal state. For example, if I catch sight of a car, it takes me a few seconds before I realize it’s a car. Sure, I must have some kind of fundamental awareness that it’s a car, but it doesn’t quite get across to my immediate waking consciousness. These experiences have been happening to me more and more lately. Maybe it’s because for a long time now I’ve been living by myself.

The nearest town is an hour and a half away by car. No, it’s not even a town. Imagine your smallest town, then reduce it to a skeleton. I doubt you can picture it. I guess you’d have to call it a town anyway. You can buy clothes and groceries and gasoline. And if you get an urge to see other human beings, they’re there to be seen.

All winter long the roads are frozen and almost no cars come through. Off the roads, it’s damp, so the ground is frosted over like sherbet. When there’s snowfall, it’s impossible to tell what’s road and what’s not. It’s a landscape that might as well be the end of the world.

I came here at the beginning of March. Driving through the thick of it, chains on the tires of the jeep. Just like being exiled to Siberia. But now it’s May and the snow has all melted. From April on, the mountains were rumbling with snowslides. Ever hear a snowslide? Right after a snowslide comes the most perfect silence. Complete, total silence. You lose almost all sense of where you are. It’s that quiet.

Sealed off in the mountains all this time, I haven’t slept with a woman for the last three months. Which isn’t bad, as far as that goes. All the same, if I stayed up here like this much longer, I know I’d lose all interest in people, and that’s not something I want to do. So I’m thinking that when the weather gets a little warmer I’ll stretch my legs and find myself a woman. I don’t want to brag, but finding women has never been much of a problem for me. So long as I don’t care—and staying here is living proof that I don’t care—then sex appeal’s easy, not a problem. It’s not a big deal for me to put the moves on. The problem is, I myself am not at ease with this ability of mine. That is to say, when things get to a certain point, I lose track of where I myself stop and where my sex appeal begins. It’s like where does Olivier stop and Othello begin? So midway when I find I’m not getting a return on all I’m putting into the situation, I toss everything overboard. Which makes problems for everyone all the way around. My whole life up to now has been nothing but one big repetition of this after another.

But this time I can be grateful (really, I am) that I don’t have anything to throw overboard. A great feeling. The only thing I could possibly throw overboard would be myself. Not such a bad idea, throwing myself overboard. No, this is getting to sound pathetic. The idea itself, though, isn’t pathetic in the least. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. It only sounds that way when I write it down.

Moan and groan.

What the hell was I talking about?

Women, that’s right.

Each woman has a drawer marked “beautiful,” stuffed full of all sorts of meaningless junk. That’s my specialty. I pull out those pieces of junk one by one, dust them off, and find some kind of meaning in them. That’s all that sex appeal really is, I think. But so what? What’s that good for? There’s nowhere to go from there short of stopping being myself.

So now I’m thinking about sex pure and simple. If I focus purely on sex, there’s no need to get all bent out of shape whether I’m feeling sorry for myself or not.

It’s like drinking beer on the shores of the Black Sea.

I just went back over what I’ve written so far. A few inconsistencies here and there, but pretty honest writing by my standards. All the more so because it’s boring.

I don’t even seem to be writing this letter to you. Probably the postbox is as far as my thinking goes. But don’t get on my case for that. It’s an hour and a half by jeep to the nearest postbox.

From here on, this letter is addressed to you.

I’ve got two favors to ask of you. Neither is in the particularly urgent category, so whenever you get around to taking care of them is fine. I’d really appreciate it. Three months ago I probably couldn’t have brought myself to ask anything of you. But now I can. That’s progress, I guess.

The first is a sort of sentimental request. Meaning it has to do with “the past.” Five years ago when I skipped town, I was in such a confused hurry, I forgot to say goodbye to a number of people. Specifically, you and J and this woman you don’t know. I guess I could probably see you again to tell you goodbye face-to-face, but with the other two I know I’ll never have the chance. So if you’re ever back there, can you say goodbye to them for me.

I know it’s a selfish request. I ought to write them myself. But honestly, I’d rather have you go back there and see them for me. I know my feelings will get across better that way. I’m including her address and phone number separately. If she’s moved or married by now, then it’s okay, you don’t have to see her. Leave things at that. But if she’s still at the same address, give her my best.

And be sure to give J my best too. Have a beer for me.

That’s one.

The other favor is maybe a bit odd.

I’m enclosing a photo. A picture of sheep. I’d like you to put it somewhere, I don’t care where, but someplace people can see it. I realize I’m making this request out of the blue, but I’ve got no one else I can ask. I’ll let you have every last ounce of my sex appeal if you do me this favor. I can’t tell you the reason why, though. This photo is important to me. Sometime, at some later date, I’ll explain everything to you.

I’m enclosing a check. Use it for whatever expenses you have. There’s no need for you to have to worry about money. I’m hard put even to find a way to use money here, and anyway at the moment it’s about the extent of what I can do for you.

Make sure you don’t forget to have a beer for me.

Your friend,

The Rat

I found the letter in my mailbox as I was leaving my apartment and read it at my desk at the office.

The postmark was obliterated beyond legibility. I tore open the flap. Inside the envelope was a check for one hundred thousand yen, a piece of paper with a woman’s name and address, and a black-and-white photograph of sheep. The letter was written on the same pale-green stationery as before and the check was drawn on a bank in Sapporo. Which would mean that the Rat had crossed further north to Hokkaido.

The bit about snowslides didn’t register with me, but it did strike me, as the Rat himself had said, as an honest letter. Besides, nobody sends a check for one hundred thousand yen as a joke. I opened my desk drawer and tossed in the whole lot, envelope and all.

Maybe it was because my marriage was falling apart at the time, but spring that year had no joy for me. My wife hadn’t come home in four days. Her toothbrush by the washbasin was caked and cracked like a fossil. The milk in the refrigerator smelled sour, and the cat was always hungry. A lazy spring sun poured in on this state of affairs. At least sunlight is always free.

A long, drawn-out dead-end street—probably just what she meant.

The Song Is Over

It was June before I returned to the town.

I cooked up some reason to take three days off and took the Bullet Train early one Tuesday. A white short-sleeved sports shirt, green cotton pants worn through at the knees, white tennis shoes, no luggage. I’d even forgotten to shave after getting up that morning. It was the first time I’d put on tennis shoes in ages and the heels were worn through crooked. I’d been walking off-center without knowing it.

Boarding a long-distance train without any luggage gave me a feeling of exhilaration. It was as if while out taking a leisurely stroll, I was suddenly like a dive-bomber caught in a space-time warp. In which there is nothing: no dentist’s appointments, no pending issues in desk drawers, no inextricably complicated human involvements, no favors demanded. I’d left that behind, temporarily. All I had with me were my tennis shoes with their misshapen rubber soles. They held fast to my feet like vague memories of another space-time. But that hardly mattered. Nothing that some canned beer and dried-out ham sandwiches couldn’t put out of mind.

It had been four years. Four years ago, the return home had been to take care of paperwork related to the family registry when I got married. When I thought back on it, what a pointless trip! I thought it was all paperwork. The problem was that nobody else thought it. It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What’s over for one person isn’t over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.

From that point on there was no hometown for me. Nowhere to return to. What a relief! No one to want me, no one to want anything from me.

I had a second can of beer and caught thirty minutes of shut-eye. When I woke up, that initial carefree sense of release was gone. The train moved on, and as it did, the sky turned a rain-gray. Beneath which stretched the same boring scenery. No matter how much speed we put on, there was no escaping boredom. On the contrary, the faster the speed, the more headway into boredom. Ah, the nature of boredom.

Next to me sat a business type in his mid-twenties, engrossed in a newspaper, hardly moving the whole time. Navy-blue summer suit, not a wrinkle. Starched white shirt, just back from the cleaners. Shiny black shoes.

I looked up at the ceiling of the car and puffed on a cigarette. I made mental lists of all the songs the Beatles ever recorded. Seventy-three titles before I ran out. I wonder how many numbers Paul McCartney himself would remember? I stared out the window awhile, then shifted my eyes back to the ceiling.

I was twenty-nine years old. In six months my twenties would be over. A whole decade since living here. One big blank. Not one thing of value had I gotten out of it, not one meaningful thing had I done. Boredom was all there was.

How were things before? Surely there had to have been something positive. Had there been anything that really moved me, anything that really moved anyone? Maybe, but it was all gone now. Lost, perhaps meant to be lost. Nothing I can do about it, got to let it go.

At least I was still around. If the only good Indian is a dead Indian, it was my fate to go on living.

What for?

To tell tales to a stone wall?

Really, now.

“Why stay in a hotel?” J asked when I wrote my hotel number on the back of a matchbook and handed it to him. “You’ve got a home, haven’t you? Why not stay there?”

“It’s not my home anymore,” I said.

J didn’t say anything to that.

With three plates of snacks lined up in front of me, I drank half my beer, then pulled out the Rat’s letters and handed them to J. He wiped his hands on a towel, read the two letters through quickly before going over them again carefully, word by word.

“Hmm, alive and kicking, is he?”

“He’s alive, all right,” I said, taking another sip of beer. “But you know, before I do anything else, I’ve got to shave. You have a razor and some shaving cream you could lend me?”

“I do,” said J, bringing out a travel kit from behind the counter. “You can use the washroom, but there’s no hot water.”

“Cold water’s fine,” I said. “As long as there’s no drunk woman sprawled out on the floor. Makes it hard to shave.”

J’s Bar had completely changed.

The old J’s Bar had been a dank place in the basement of an old building by the highway. On summer nights with the air conditioner going, a fine mist would form. After a long bout of drinking, even your shirt would be damp.

J’s real name was some unpronounceable Chinese polysyllable. The nickname J was given to him by some GIs on the base where he worked after the war. His real name was soon forgotten.

In 1954, J quit his job on the base and opened a small bar. The very first J’s Bar. The bar proved quite successful. A large part of the clientele was from the air force officer candidate school, and the atmosphere wasn’t bad. After the bar got its start, J got married, but five years later his wife died. J never talked about the cause of her death.

In 1963, as the Vietnam War was beginning to go great guns, J sold the bar and moved far away to my hometown. There he opened the second J’s Bar.

He had a cat, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, never touched a drop of alcohol. That’s the sum of everything I know about J.

Up until the time I met the Rat, I always went to J’s Bar alone. I’d sip a beer slowly, smoke cigarettes, and feed coins into the jukebox. This was when J’s Bar was usually empty, so I’d sit at the counter talking about all kinds of things with J, though about what exactly I don’t remember. What could a shy seventeen-year-old high school student and a Chinese widower have to talk about?

When I turned eighteen and left town, the Rat came along and took my place at the bar drinking beer. Five years ago, when the Rat left town, there was no one to take his place. Six months later, when the road was widened, J had to change shops again, and the second J’s Bar was relegated to legend.

The third J’s Bar was a quarter of a mile away, by the river. It wasn’t much bigger than the old place, but it was on the third floor of a new four-story building with an elevator. Taking an elevator to J’s Bar made me feel like I had the address wrong. The same with looking out over the lights of town from the counter.

This new place had big windows facing west and south, out onto the line of hills and the area where the ocean used to be. The oceanfront had been filled in a few years back, and the whole mile there was packed with gravestone rows of tall buildings.

“Used to be water over there,” I said.

“Right,” said J.

“Went swimming there a lot.”

“Yeah,” said J, bringing a generic lighter up to the cigarette at his lips, “they bulldoze the hills to put up houses, haul the dirt to the sea for landfill, then go and build there too. And they think it’s all fine and proper.”

I drank my beer. The ceiling speakers were playing the latest Boz Scaggs hit. There wasn’t a jukebox in sight. Almost all the customers in the place were university student couples, neatly dressed and politely sipping their highballs. No girls on the verge of passing out drunk, no hot fights brewing. You could tell that when they went home, they put on pajamas, brushed their teeth, and went straight to bed. There was nothing wrong with that. Nice and neat is fine and dandy. There’s nothing in a bar or in the world at large that says things have to be a certain way.

J kept his eyes on me the whole while.

“So, everything’s different and you feel out of place?”

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just that the chaos has changed shape. The giraffe and the bear have traded hats, and the bear’s switched scarves with the zebra.”

“Same as ever,” J laughed.

“Times have changed,” I said. “A lot of things have changed. But the bottom line is, that’s fine. Everyone trades places. No complaints.”

J didn’t say anything.

I had myself another beer, J had another cigarette.

“How’s your life going?” asked J.

“Not bad.”

“How’s the wife?”

“Don’t really know. You know how things are between two people. There are times when I think everything’s working out fine and times I don’t. Maybe that’s what marriage is all about.”

“Well maybe,” said J, scratching the tip of his nose with his little finger. “I forget what married life is like. It’s been so long.”

“How’s the cat?”

“Died four years ago. Right after you got married. Something intestinal…. But really, it had a good, long life. Lived twelve years. That’s longer than my wife was with me. Twelve years isn’t a bad little life, is it?”

“Guess not.”

“There’s this animal cemetery up on the hill, so I buried it there. Overlooking the tall buildings. Anywhere around here those buildings are all you can see. Not that it makes much difference to a cat.”

“Sad?”

“Sure. Even if a person had died, I wouldn’t have been as sad. Does that sound funny?”

I shook my head.

J set to making some fancy cocktail and a Caesar salad for a customer. Meanwhile, I played with a Scandinavian puzzle on the counter. You were supposed to put together this picture of three butterflies midair over a field of clover, all inside a glass case. I gave up after ten minutes and put the thing aside.

“No kids?” J came back over to ask. “You’re getting on the right age to have kids, you know.”

“Don’t want kids.”

“Oh?”

“I mean I would be at a loss if I had a kid like me.”

J chuckled and poured more beer into my glass. “You’re always thinking too far ahead.”

“No, that’s not it. What I mean is, I don’t really know if it’s the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more oceanfront filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?”

“That’s only the dark side of things. Good things happen too, good people can make things worthwhile.”

“Yeah? Name three,” I said.

J gave it a thought, then laughed. “That’s for your children’s generation to decide, not you. Your generation …”

“Is already over and done with?”

“In a sense,” said J.

“The song is over. But the melody lingers on.”

“You always had a way of putting things.”

“Just showing off,” I said.

At nine o’clock, J’s Bar was starting to get crowded, so I said good night to J and left. My face still tingled in the spots where I’d shaved, having only cold water. Maybe because I’d splashed on vodka lime instead of after-shave. J claimed it was just as effective, but now my whole face smelled like vodka.

The night was unexpectedly warm, though the sky was its usual heavy overcast. A moist breeze was blowing in slow and easy from the south. Same as it used to. A sea scent mingled with a hint of rain. Insects calling from the clumps of grass along the river. Everything brimming with a languid nostalgia. It seemed that it would rain any minute. When it did, it came in so fine a drizzle that you couldn’t tell if it was raining or not, but I got completely drenched anyway.

I could just make out the river flowing in the white light of the mercury-vapor streetlamp. The water was as clear as ever. It came straight out of the hills with nothing to pollute it along the way. The river had silted up with the small rocks and gravel washed down from the hills, creating little falls here and there. Beneath each fall, a deep pool had formed where small fish gathered.

During dry spells, the whole river used to dry up into a sandy bed, leaving only a faintly damp white trail. Years ago, on my walks, I’d trace that trail upstream, searching for where the river had gone.

The road by the river had been one of my favorites. I could walk at the same speed as the river. I could feel it breathing. It was alive. More than anything, it was the river we had to thank for creating the town. For grinding down the hills over how many hundreds of thousands of years, for hauling the dirt, filling the sea, and making the trees grow. The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be that way.

Because this was the rainy season, the river flowed uninterrupted to the sea. The trees planted along the banks were fragrant with new leaves. There was a greenness in the air. Couples strolled arm in arm, old folks walked their dogs, high school kids hung around their motorbikes, smoking cigarettes. Your typical early summer evening.

I stopped into a liquor store, bought two cans of beer, and carried them in a paper bag down to the sea. Where the river met the sea, it turned into an inlet, or rather into a half-filled-in canal. Here was the only untouched stretch of oceanfront left, fifty yards of it. There was even something of the old beach. Small waves rolled in, leaving smooth pieces of driftwood. On the concrete jetty, bits of old nails and spray-paint graffiti remained.

Fifty yards of honest-to-goodness shoreline. If you overlooked the fact that it was hemmed in by thirty-foot-high concrete walls. And that the walls kept going straight out for several miles, channeling the sea narrowly in between. And that tall buildings lined either side. Fifty yards of sea. The rest was history.

I left the river and walked east along what had been the coastline road. Bewilderingly enough, the old jetty was still there. Now a jetty without an ocean is an odd creature indeed. I stopped at the exact spot where I used to park to look at the sea, went over to sit down on the jetty, and drank a beer. What a view! Instead of ocean, a vast expanse of reclaimed land and housing developments met my eyes. Faceless blocks of apartments, the miserable foundations of an attempt to build a neighborhood.

Asphalt roads threaded through the building complexes, here a parking lot, there a bus terminal. A gasoline station and a large park and a wonderful community center. Everything brand new, everything unnatural. On one side, the piles of soil hauled down from the hills for landfill loomed harsh and gray next to the areas which, not a part of the grand scheme, had been overtaken by quick-rooting weeds.

But what was there to say? Already it was a whole new game played by new rules. No one could stop it now.

I polished off my two beers and hurled the empty cans across the reclaimed land, toward where the sea used to be. I watched them disappear into the sea of windblown weeds. Then I smoked a cigarette.

I was taking my last drag when I saw a man, flashlight in hand, heading my way. Fortyish, gray shirt, gray trousers, and a gray cap. Probably a security guard for the area.

“You just threw something, didn’t you?” said the man.

“Yeah, I threw something.”

“What did you throw?”

“Round, metallic, lidded objects.”

The security guard put on a sour face. “Why’d you throw them?”

“No particular reason. Been throwing things from twelve years back. At times, I’ve thrown half a dozen things at once and nobody said a word.”

“That was back then,” said the security guard. “This is city property now and it’s against the law to discard rubbish on city property.”

I swallowed. For a moment something inside me trembled, then stopped. “The real problem here,” I said, “is that what you say makes sense.”

“It’s the law,” he said.

I sighed and took the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket.

“So what should I do?”

“Well, I can’t ask you go pick them up. It’s too dark and it’s about to rain. So do me a favor and don’t throw things again.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said the security guard as he walked away.

I stretched out on the jetty and looked up at the sky. As the man said, it was starting to rain. I smoked another cigarette and thought over the encounter with the guard. Ten years ago I would have come on tougher. Well, maybe not. What difference would it make anyway?

I went back to the riverside road, and by the time I’d managed to catch a taxi the rain was coming down in a drizzle. To the hotel, I said.

“Here on a trip?” asked the old driver.

“Uh-huh.”

“First time in these parts?”

“Second time,” I said.

She Drinks Her Salty Dog, Talking about the Sound of the Waves

“I have a letter for you,” I said.

“For me?” she said.

The connection was bad, so we practically had to shout, which was not very conducive to communicating delicate shades of feeling. It was like talking on a windswept hill through upturned collars.

“Actually, the letter’s addressed to me, but somehow it seems to be meant more for you.”

“It does, does it?”

“Yes, it does,” I said. As soon as I’d said it, I knew this whole idiotic conversation was going nowhere fast.

She said nothing for a moment. Meanwhile, the connection cleared up.

“I have no idea what went on between you and the Rat. But he did ask me to see you, and that’s why I’m calling. Besides, I think it’d be better if you read his letters.”

“And that’s why you came out all the way from Tokyo?”

“That’s right.”

She coughed, excused herself, then said, “Because he’s your friend?”

“I suppose.”

“Why do you suppose he didn’t write to me directly?”

She did have a point.

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly.

“I don’t know either. I mean, I thought everything was over. Or isn’t it?”

I had no idea and I told her so. I lay back on the hotel bed, phone receiver in hand, and looked at the ceiling. I could be lying on the ocean floor counting fish, I thought. How many would I have to count before I could say I was done?

“It was five years ago when he disappeared. I was twenty-seven at the time,” she said, distant voice sounding like an echo from the bottom of a well. “A lot of things can change in five years.”

“True,” I said.

“And really, even if nothing had changed, I wouldn’t see it that way. I wouldn’t want to admit it. Once I did, I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. So as far as I’m concerned, everything’s completely changed.”

“I think I understand,” I said.

A brief pause hovered between us.

It was she who broke the silence. “When was the last time you saw him?” she asked.

“Spring, five years ago, right before he up and left.”

“And did he tell you anything? I mean about why he was leaving town … ?”

“Nope.”

“So he left you with no warning either?”

“That’s right.”

“And what did you think? At the time, I mean.”

“About him up and leaving like that?”

“Yeah.”

I got up from the bed and leaned against the wall. “Well, for sure I thought he’d give up and come back after six months. He never struck me as the stick-with-it type.”

“But he didn’t come back.”

“No, he didn’t.”

There was a slight hesitation on her end of the line.

“Where is it you’re staying now?” she asked.

I told her the name of the hotel.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow at five. The coffee lounge on the eighth floor all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be wearing a white sports shirt and green cotton slacks. I’ve got short hair and …”

“I’ve got the picture,” she said, cheerfully cutting me off. Then she hung up.

I replaced the receiver. What did she mean, she got the picture? I didn’t get the picture, but then again, there are lots of things I don’t know anything about. Age certainly hasn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.

I took a shower, washed my rain-soaked hair, and with the towel wrapped around my waist, I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

I switched off the television, climbed into bed, and was asleep in ten seconds.

The drizzle still hadn’t let up by five o’clock the next evening. The rain had been preceded by four or five days of crisp, clear early summer skies, fooling people into thinking the rainy season was over. From the eighth-floor window, every square inch of ground looked dark and damp, and a traffic jam stretched for several miles on the eastbound lanes of the elevated expressway.

As I stared out long and hard, things began to melt in the rain. In fact, everything in town was melting. The breakwater, the cranes, the rows of buildings, the figures beneath their black umbrellas, everything. Even the greenery was flowing down from the hills. Yet when I shut my eyes for a few seconds and opened them again, the town was back the way it had been. Six cranes loomed in the dark haze, trains headed east as if their engines had-just restarted, flocks of umbrellas dodged back and forth across the streets of shops, the green hills soaked up their fill of June rain.

In a sunken area in the middle of the coffee lounge, a woman wearing a bright pink dress sat at a cerulean blue grand piano playing quintessential hotel-coffee-lounge numbers filled with arpeggios and syncopation. Not bad actually, though not an echo lingered in the air beyond the last note of each number.

It was past five o’clock and she hadn’t arrived. Since I had nothing better to do, I had a second cup of coffee and watched the piano player. She was about twenty, her shoulder-length hair immaculately coiffed like whipped cream atop a cake. The coif swayed merrily, left and right, to the rhythm, bouncing back to center when the song ended. Then the next number would begin.

She reminded me of a girl I used to know in the third grade, when I was taking piano lessons. The same age, the same class. We sometimes had to play duets together. But her name and face, entirely forgotten. All I remember about her are her tiny pale hands and pretty hair and fluffy dress.

It’s disturbing to realize this. Have I stripped her of her hands and hair and dress? Is the rest of her still living unattached somewhere else? Of course, this can’t be. The world goes on without me. People cross streets through no intervention on my part, sharpen pencils, move fifty yards a minute west to east, fill coffee lounges with music that’s refined into nothingness.

The “world”—the word always makes me think of a tortoise and elephants tirelessly supporting a gigantic disc. The elephants have no knowledge of the tortoise’s role, the tortoise unable to see what the elephants are doing. And neither is the least aware of the world on their backs.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” a woman’s voice from behind me said. “Work ran late, and I just couldn’t get free.”

“No problem. I didn’t have anything to do today anyway.”

She dropped her keys down on the table and ordered an orange juice without bothering to look at the menu. Her age was not easy to tell. If she hadn’t mentioned it to me over the phone, I probably would not have known. If she had said she was thirty-three, she would have looked thirty-three to me. If she’d said twenty-seven, then she’d have looked twenty-seven. At face value.

Her taste in clothes was nicely succinct. Ample white cotton slacks, an orange-and-yellow checkered blouse, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a leather shoulder bag. None of them new, but all well cared for. She wore no rings or necklace or bracelet or earrings. Her bangs were short and brushed casually to the side.

The tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes might have been there from birth rather than acquired with age. Only her slender, fair neckline, visible from the button open at her collar, and the backs of her hands hinted at her age. People start aging from early, very early, on. Gradually it spreads over their entire body like a stain that cannot be wiped away.

“What sort of work?” I ventured to ask.

“Drafting work at an architectural office. I’ve been there for a long time now.”

The conversation trailed off. I slowly took out a cigarette and lit up. The piano player stopped playing, brought the lid down, and retired somewhere for her break. I envied her.

“How long have you been friends with him?” she asked.

“Eleven years, I guess. And you?”

“Two months, ten days,” she answered right off. “From the time I first met him to the time he disappeared. Two months and ten days. I remember because I keep a diary.”

The orange juice came and my empty coffee cup was spirited away.

“I waited three months after he disappeared. December, January, February. The coldest time of the year. Maybe it was a cold winter that year?”

“I don’t recall,” I said, though the cold of winter five years ago now seemed like yesterday’s weather.

“Have you ever waited for a woman like that?”

“No,” I said.

“You concentrate on waiting for someone and after a certain time it hardly matters what happens anymore. It could be five years or ten years or one month. It’s all the same.”

I nodded.

She drank half her orange juice.

“It was that way when I was first married,” she said. “I was always the one who waited, until I got tired of waiting, and in the end I didn’t care. Married at twenty-one, divorced at twenty-two. Then I came here.”

“It was the same with my wife.”

“What was?”

“Married at twenty-one, divorced at twenty-two.”

She studied my face awhile. Then stirred her orange juice with her swizzle stick. I’d spoken unnecessarily, it seemed.

“When you’re young, it’s hard getting married then getting divorced right away,” she said. “The thing is you’re looking for something two-dimensional and not quite real. It never lasts. But you can’t expect something unreal to last anyway, can you?”

“I suppose not.”

“In the five years between my divorce and when I met him, I was all alone in this town. Living a life that was, well, rather unreal. I hardly knew anyone, rarely went out, had no romance. I’d get up in the morning, go to the office, draft plans, stop by the supermarket on the way home to shop, and eat dinner at home alone. I’d listen to FM radio, read, write in my diary, wash my stockings in the bath. My apartment’s near the ocean, so there’s always the sound of the surf. It was cold and lonely.”

She finished the rest of her orange juice.

“It seems I’m boring you.”

I shook my head.

Past six. The lights in the lounge dimmed for cocktail hour. The lights of town began to blink on. Red lights lit up on the cranes. Fine needles of rain became visible through the gathering dusk.

“Care for a drink?” I asked.

“What do you call vodka with grapefruit juice?”

“A salty dog.”

I called the waiter and ordered a salty dog and a Cutty Sark on the rocks.

“Where were we?”

“Your cold and lonely life.”

“Well, if you really want to know, it hasn’t been all that cold and lonely,” she said. “Just the sound of the waves is. That alone puts a chill on things. When I moved in, the superintendent said I’d get used to it soon enough, but I still haven’t.”

“The ocean’s no longer there.”

She smiled softly. A hint of movement came to the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “True. As you say, the ocean’s no longer there. But even so, I swear I can sometimes still hear the waves. It’s probably imprinted into my ears over the years.”

“Then the Rat appeared.”

“Yes. Although I never called him that.”

“What did you call him?”

“By his name. Like everybody else.”

Come to think it, “The Rat” did sound a bit childish, even for a nickname. “Hmm,” I said.

They brought our drinks. She took a sip of her salty dog, then wiped the salt from her lips with the napkin. The napkin came away with the slightest trace of lipstick. Then she folded the lipstick-blushed napkin deftly and laid it down.

“He was, what can I say … unreal enough. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I guess it took someone as unreal as him to break through my own unreality. It struck me the very first time I met him. That’s why I liked him. Or maybe I only thought so after I got to like him. It amounts to the same thing either way.”

The piano player returned from her break and began to play themes from old film scores. Perfect: the wrong background music for the wrong scene.

“I sometimes think maybe, in the end, I was only using him. And maybe he sensed it all along. What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “That’s between you and him.”

She said nothing.

After a full twenty seconds of silence, I realized she’d run out of things to say. I downed the last of my whiskey and retrieved the Rat’s letters from my pocket, placing them in the center of the table. Where they sat for a while.

“Do I have to read them here?”

“Please take them home and read them. If you don’t want to read them, then do whatever you want with them.”

She nodded. She put the letters in her bag, which she fastened with a snap of the clasp. I lit up a second cigarette and ordered another whiskey. The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.

“You came all the way from Tokyo for this reason?” she asked.

“Pretty much so.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I’ve never thought about it that way. A matter of habit. If the tables were turned, I’m sure he’d do the same for me.”

“Have you ever asked something like this of him?”

I shook my head. “No, but we go back a long time imposing our unrealities on each other. Whether we’ve managed to take care of things realistically or not is another question.”

“Maybe nobody really can.”

“Maybe not.”

She smiled and got up, whisking away the bill. “Let me take care of this. I was forty minutes late, after all.”

“If you’re sure, then by all means,” I said. “But one more thing, I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”

“Certainly.”

“Over the phone you said you could picture how I looked.”

“I meant there was something I could sense about you.”

“And that was enough for you to spot me right away?”

“I could tell in no time at all.”

The rain kept falling at the same rate. From my hotel window, through the neon signs of the building next door, a hundred thousand strands of rain sped earthward through a green glow. If I looked down, the rain seemed to pour straight into one fixed point on the ground.

I plopped down on the bed and smoked a couple cigarettes, then called the front desk to make a reservation for a train the following morning. There was nothing left for me to do in town.

The rain kept falling until midnight.