Hear the Wind Sing

19

It’s a long story, it happened when I was twentyone. Still a lot of youth left, but not as young as I once was. If I wasn’t happy with that, the only choice I had was to jump off the roof of the Empire State Building on a Sunday morning.

I heard this joke in an old movie about the Great Depression:

‘You know why I always have my umbrella open when I walk by the Empire State Building? ‘Cause people are always falling like raindrops!’

When I was twenty-one, at least at this point I wasn’t planning to die. At that point I’d slept with three girls.

The first girl was my high school classmate, and when we were seventeen we got to believing that we loved each other. Bathed in the lush twilight, she took off her slip-on shoes, her cotton socks, her thin seersucker dress, her weird underwear she obviously knew didn’t fit her, and then after getting a little flustered, took off her wristwatch. After that, we embraced each other atop the Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun.

Just a few months after we graduated from high school, we suddenly broke up for some forgettable reason. After that, I never saw her again. I think of her every now and then, during those nights when I can’t sleep. That’s it.

The second girl I slept with, I met her at the Shinjuku station on the subway. She was sixteen, flat broke, and had nowhere to sleep, and as an added bonus she was almost nothing but a pair of breasts, but she had smart, pretty eyes. One night, when there were violent demonstrations sweeping over Shinjuku, the trains, the busses, everything shut down completely.

“You hang around here and you’ll get hauled off,” I told her. She was crouched in the middle of the shutdown ticket-taker, reading a sports section she’d taken from the garbage.

“But the police’ll feed me.”

“That’s a terrible way to live.”

“I’m used to it.”

I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. Thanks to the tear gas, my eyes were prickling.

“Have you eaten?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Hey, let me get you something to eat. Anyway, we should get out of here.”

“Why do you want to get me something to eat?”

“Who knows?” I don’t know why, but I pulled her out of the ticket-taker and we walked the empty streets all the way to Mejiro.

That incredibly quiet girl’s stay at my apartment lasted for all of one week. Every day, she’d wake up after noon, eat something, smoke, absent-mindedly read books, watch television, and occasionally have uninterested sex with me. Her only possession was a white canvas bag which held inside it: a thin windbreaker, two T-shirts, one pair of blue jeans, three pairs of dirty underwear, and one box of tampons; that’s all she had.

“Where’re you from?”

Sometimes I asked her this.

“Someplace you don’t know.”

Saying that, the refused to elaborate. One day, when I came back from the supermarket clutching a grocery bag, she was gone. Her white bag was gone as well. A number of other things were gone as well. Some loose change I’d scattered atop the desk, a carton of cigarettes, and my carefully washed T-shirt. On the desk there was a torn piece of paper like a note, bearing the simple message: ‘rat bastard’. It’s quite possible that was a reference to me.

My third partner was a girl I’d met at our university’s library, she was a French Lit major, but in the spring of the following year she was found in a small forest past the edge of the tennis courts, hanged. Her corpse hung there unnoticed until past the beginning of spring semester, for an entire two weeks it dangled there, blown around by the wind. Even now, nobody goes in those woods after the sun goes down.