Hear the Wind Sing

31

The following day, I invited the Rat to the pool at the hotel on the mountainside. Summer was almost over, traffic was rough, and there were only ten other guests at the pool. Of them, half were swimming and the other half were contentedly-sunbathing Americans staying there.

The hotel was a remodeled nobleman’s estate spanned by a splendid lawn, the pool and the main wing partitioned by a hedge rising up a slightly inclining hill, with a clear view of the ocean, the town, and the harbor below.

After racing the Rat back and forth down the length of the twenty-five meter pool, we sat in the deck chairs and drank cola. I caught my breath and then in the time it took to take one hit of my cigarette, the Rat was all alone, his gaze fixed absently on an American girl swimming beautifully.

In the brilliant sky, a few jet trails could be seen, stuck to the sky as if frozen there.

“I feel like lots more planes used to fly by when I was a kid,” said the Rat as he looked up.

“They were mostly US Air Force planes, though. Twin-fuselage propeller planes. You’ve seen ‘em?”

“Like the P-38?”

“Nah, transport planes. Much bigger than P-38s. They’d be flying really low, and you could see the emblems painted on the side…also I saw a DC-6, a DC-7, and a Sabrejet.”

“Those are really old.”

“Yep, back from the Eisenhower days. The cruisers would enter the bay, and the town would be full of sailors. You ever seen an MP?”

“Yeah.”

“Times change,” he sighed. “Not that I particularly like sailors or anything…”

I nodded.

“The Sabres were really great planes. They were only used to drop napalm. You ever see an airplane drop napalm?”

“Just in war movies.”

“People really think up a lot of things. And napalm is one of them. After ten years, you’d even start to miss the napalm, I bet.”

I laughed and lit my second cigarette. “You really like airplanes, don’t you?”

“I thought I wanted to be a pilot, back in those days. But my eyes were bad, so I gave it up.”

“Yeah?”

“I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don’t want to look at it anymore, you stop.”

The Rat was silent for five minutes, then suddenly spoke.

“Sometimes, there’s nothing I can do, I just can’t stand it any longer. ‘Cause I’m rich.”

“I can’t pretend to know how you feel,” I said resignedly, “but it’s okay to run away. If you really feel that way.”

“Probably…I think that would be the best thing to do. Go to some town I don’t know, start all over again. Wouldn’t be too bad.”

“You won’t go back to college?”

“I’m done. There’s no way I can go back.”

From behind his sunglasses, the Rat’s eyes followed the girl who was still swimming.

“Why’d you quit?”

“I don’t know, ‘cause I was bored? Still, in my own way, I tried my best. More than even I could believe. I thought about other people just as much as myself, and thanks to that I got punched by a policeman. But, when the time comes, everybody goes back to their own routine. I just had nowhere to go back to. Like a game of musical chairs.”

“So what are you going to do?”

He wiped his legs with a towel as he thought this over.

“I’m thinking of writing novels. What do you think?”

“Of course I think it’s a great idea.”

He nodded.

“What kind of novels?”

“Good ones. By my standards, anyway. Me, I don’t think I have talent or anything. At least, I think that my writing has got to be the result of some epiphany or it won’t have any meaning. Don’t you think?”

“I agree.”

“I’ve got to write for myself…or maybe for the cicadas.”

“Cicadas?”

“Yep.”

The Rat fiddled around for a moment with the Kennedy half-dollar hung around his neck as a pendant.

“Some years back, me and this girl went to Nara. It was a terribly hot summer afternoon, and we’d been walking on these mountain trails for three whole hours. During that time, to give you an idea, we had for company: the shrieking of wild birds shooting out of the trees, these monster cicadas buzzing across the paths between the rice fields, and the like. ‘Cause it was hot as hell, you know.

“After walking for a bit, we sat on a hillside covered thick with summer grass, and there was a nice breeze blowing the sweat off our bodies. There was a deep moat stretching out below the hill, and on the other side was this mound, covered with trees, looking like an island. It was a burial mound. For some Emperor from a long time ago. You ever seen one?”

I nodded.

“Looking at that, I started thinking, ‘why did they make such a huge tomb for him?’ Of course, every grave has meaning. Like they say, everybody dies sometime. They teach you that.

“Still, this was just too big. Bigness, sometimes it changes the very essence of something into something else entirely. Speaking practically, it was like this didn’t even look like a tomb. A mountain. The surface of the moat was covered with frogs and water plants, and the whole edge of it was covered with cobwebs.

“I stared at it in silence, the wind from the water clearing my ears. What I felt at that time, I really can’t even put into words. No, wait, it wasn’t really a feeling. It was its own completely-packaged sensation. In other words, the cicadas and frogs and spiders, they were all one thing flowing into space.”

Saying this, the Rat drank the last sip of his already-flat cola.

“When I’m writing, I’m reminded of that summer afternoon and that overgrown burial mound. Then I think this: the cicadas and frogs and spiders, the summer grass and the wind, if I could write for them, it would be a wonderful thing.”

Finishing his story, the Rat folded both his arms behind his head and stared quietly up at the sky.

“So…have you tried writing anything?”

“Nope, I can’t write a single line. I can’t write anything.”

“Really?”

“‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’”

“What?”

“‘But if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’”

So said the Rat.

When the evening sun started to dim, we left the pool and went into the hotel’s small bar, which was filled with Mantovani’s Italian mood music, and drank cold beer. Through the large windows, we could clearly make out the lights of the harbor.

“What happened with the girl?” I’d made up my mind to ask.

The Rat wiped the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand, then gazed at the ceiling as if suddenly remembering something.

“I’ll come right out and say it, I wasn’t going to say anything to you about that. Because it was stupid.”

“But you tried once, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. But I thought it over all night and gave up on the idea. There are some things in the world you just can’t do anything about.”

“For example?”

“Cavities, for example. One day your tooth just starts hurting. Someone comforting you isn’t going to make it stop hurting. When that happens, you just start to get mad at yourself. Then you start to get really pissed off at the people who aren’t pissed off. Know what I mean?”

“Kind of,” I said, “still, think about this. Everyone’s built the same. It’s like we’re all riding together on a broken airplane. Of course there are lucky people, there are also unlucky people. There’re tough people, and weak people, rich people, and poor people. However, not a single person’s broken the mold with his toughness. We’re all the same. Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they’ll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll want to get stronger. Even if you’re just pretending. Don’t you think?

There aren’t any real strong people anywhere. Only people who can put on a good show of being strong.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

I nodded.

“You really believe all that?”

“Yeah.”

The Rat was silent for a moment, fixing his gaze on his beer glass.

“You sure you’re not bullshitting me?” the Rat said earnestly.

After I drove the Rat back to his house, I dropped by J’s Bar.

“You talk to him?”

“I did.”

“That’s good.”

Saying that, J set a plate of French fries in front of me.