Sputnik Sweetheart

13

I read both documents twice, a quick run-through at first, then slowly, paying attention to the details, engraving them on my mind. The documents were definitely Sumire’s; the writing was filled with her one-of-a-kind phrasing. There was something different about the overall tone, though, something I couldn’t pin down. It was more restrained, more distanced. Still, there was no doubt about it—Sumire had written both.

After a moment’s hesitation, I slipped the floppy disk into the pocket of my bag. If Sumire were to come back without incident, I’d just put it back where it belonged. The problem was what to do if she didn’t return. If somebody went through her belongings, they were bound to find the disk, and I couldn’t abide the thought of other eyes prying into what I had just read.

After I read the documents, I had to get out of the house. I changed into a new shirt, left the cottage, and clambered down the staircase to town. I exchanged $100-worth of traveller’s cheques, bought an English-language tabloid at the kiosk, and sat under a parasol at a cafe, reading. A sleepy waiter took my order for lemonade and melted cheese on toast. He wrote down the order with a stubby pencil, in no particular hurry. Sweat had seeped through the back of his shirt, forming a large stain. The stain seemed to be sending out a message, but I couldn’t decipher it.

I mechanically leafed through half the paper, then gazed absently at the harbour scene. A skinny black dog came out of nowhere, sniffed my legs, then, losing interest, padded away. People passed the languid summer afternoon, each in his own personal spot. The only ones who seemed to be moving were the waiter and the dog, though I had my doubts about how long they’d keep at it. The old man at the kiosk where I’d bought the paper had been fast asleep under a parasol, legs spread wide apart. The statue of the hero in the square stood impassively as always, back turned to the intense sunlight. I cooled my palms and forehead with the cold glass of lemonade, turning over and over in my mind any connections there might be between Sumire’s disappearance and what she’d written.

For a long time Sumire had not written. When she first met Miu at the wedding reception, her desire to write had flown out of the window. Still, here on this little island, she’d managed those two pieces in a short space of time. No mean feat to complete that much in a few days. Something must have driven Sumire to sit at her desk and write. Where was the motivation?

More to the point, what theme tied these two pieces of writing together? I looked up, gazed at the birds resting on the wharf, and gave it some thought.

It was far too hot to think about complicated matters. Admittedly I was confused and tired. Still, as if marshalling together the remnants of a defeated army—minus any drums and trumpets—I rallied my scattered thoughts. My mind focused, I began to piece it together.

“What’s really important here,” I whispered aloud to myself,

“is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself, have.” My standard maxim I taught my own students. But was it really true? It’s easy to say, but putting it into practice isn’t. One’s hard put to start with even the small things, let alone the Big Picture. Or maybe the smaller the notion, the harder it is to grasp? Plus it didn’t help that I was so far from home.

Sumire’s dream. Miu’s split.

These are two different worlds, I realized. That’s the common element here.

Document 1: This relates a dream Sumire had. She’s climbing a long staircase to go to see her dead mother. But the moment she arrives, her mother is already returning to the other side. And Sumire can’t stop her. And she’s left standing on the spire of a tower, surrounded by objects from a different world. Sumire’s had many similar dreams.

Document 2: This one concerns the strange experiences Miu had 14 years ago. She was stuck inside a Ferris wheel overnight in an amusement park in a small Swiss town, and looking through binoculars at her own room she saw a second self there. A doppelgänger. And this experience destroyed Miu as a person—or at least made this destruction tangible. As Miu put it, she was split in two, with a mirror in between each self. Sumire had persuaded Miu to tell the story and wrote it down as best she could.

This side—the other side. That was the common thread. The movement from one side to the other. Sumire must have been drawn by this motif and motivated enough to spend so much time writing it all down. To borrow her own word, writing all this helped her think.

The waiter came to clear away the remnants of my toast, and I ordered a refill of lemonade. “Put in lots of ice,” I asked him. When he brought the drink over I took a sip and used it again to cool my forehead.

“And if Miu doesn’t accept me, then what?” Sumire had written. “I’ll cross that bridge when the times comes. Blood must be shed. I’ll sharpen my knife, ready to slit a dog’s throat somewhere.”

What was she trying to convey? Was she hinting that she might kill herself? I couldn’t believe that. Her words didn’t have the acrid smell of death. What I sensed in them was rather the will to move forwards, the struggle to make a new start. Dogs and blood are just metaphors, like I’d explained to her on that bench at Inogashira Park. They get their meaning from magical, life-giving forces. The story about the Chinese gates was a metaphor of how a story captures that magic.

Ready to slit a dog’s throat somewhere.

Somewhere?

My thoughts slammed into a solid wall. A total dead end. Where could Sumire have gone to? Is there somewhere she had to go to on this island?

I couldn’t shake the image of Sumire falling down a well in some remote area and waiting, alone, for help to arrive. Injured, lonely, starving, and thirsty. The thought of this nearly drove me crazy.

The police had made clear that there wasn’t a single well on the island. They’d never heard of any holes either anywhere near town. If there were, we’d be the first to know, they declared. I had to grant them that.

I decided to venture a theory.

Sumire went over to the other side.

That would explain a lot. Sumire broke through the mirror and journeyed to the other side. To meet the other Miu who was there. If the Miu on this side rejected her, wouldn’t that be the logical thing to do?

I dredged up from memory what she’d written: “So what should we do to avoid a collision? Logically, it’s easy. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living there for the rest of time.”

One question remains, however. A major question. How are you supposed to go there?

Put in simple logical terms, it’s easy. Though explaining it isn’t.

I was right back where I started.

I thought about Tokyo. About my apartment, the school where I taught, the kitchen rubbish I’d stealthily tossed in a bin at the station. I’d only been away from Japan for two days, but already it seemed like a different world. The new term was going to start in a week. I pictured myself standing in front of 35 pupils. Seen from this distance, the thought of my teaching anyone—even ten-year-old kids—seemed absurd.

I removed my sunglasses, wiped my sweating brow with a handkerchief, and put them on again, then gazed at the seabirds.

I thought about Sumire. About the colossal hard-on I had the time I sat beside her when she moved into her new place. The kind of awesome, rock-hard erection I’d never experienced before. Like my whole body was about to explode. At the time, in my imagination—something like the world of dreams Sumire wrote of—I made love to her. And the sensation was far more real than any sex I’d ever had.

I gulped down some lemonade to clear my throat.

I returned to my hypothesis, taking it one step further. Sumire had somehow found an exit. What kind of exit that was, and how she discovered it, I had no way of knowing. I’ll put that on hold. Suppose it’s a kind of door. I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental image—an elaborate image of what this door looked like. Just an ordinary door, part of an ordinary wall. Sumire happened to find this door, turned the knob, and slipped outside—from this side to the other. Clad only in thin silk pyjamas and a pair of flip-flops.

What lay beyond that door was beyond my powers of imagination. The door closed, and Sumire wouldn’t be coming back.

I went back to the cottage and made a simple dinner from things I found in the fridge. Tomato and basil pasta, a salad, an Amstel beer. I went out to sit on the veranda, lost in thought. Or maybe thinking of nothing. Nobody phoned. Miu might be trying to call from Athens, but you couldn’t count on the phones to work.

Moment by moment the blue of the sky turned deeper, a large circular moon rising from the sea, a handful of stars piercing holes in the sky. A breeze blew up the slopes, rustling the hibiscus. The unmanned lighthouse at the tip of the pier blinked on and off with its ancient-looking light. People were slowly heading down the slope, leading donkeys as they went. Their loud conversation came closer, then faded into the distance. I silently took it all in, this foreign scene seeming entirely natural.

In the end the phone didn’t ring, and Sumire didn’t appear. Quietly, gently, time slipped by, the evening deepening. I took a couple of cassettes from Sumire’s room and played them on the living room stereo. One of them was a collection of Mozart songs. The handwritten label read: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Walter Gieseking (p). I don’t know much about classical music, but one listen told me how lovely this music was. The singing style was a bit dated, but it reminded me of reading some beautiful, memorable prose—it demanded that you sit up straight and pay attention. The performers were right there in front of me, it seemed, their delicate phrasing swelling up, then retreating, then swelling up again. One of the songs in the collection must be “Sumire”. I sank back in my chair, closed my eyes, and shared this music with my missing friend.

I was awakened by music. Far-off music, barely audible. Steadily, like a faceless sailor hauling in an anchor from the bottom of the sea, the faint sound brought me to my senses. I sat up in bed, leaned towards the open window, and listened carefully. It was definitely music. The wristwatch next to my bed showed it was past one o’clock. Music? At this time of night?

I put on my trousers and a shirt, slipped on my shoes, and went outside. The lights in the neighbourhood were all out, the streets deserted. No wind, not even the sound of waves. Just the moonlight bathing the earth. I stood there, listening again. Strangely, the music seemed to be coming from the top of the hills. There weren’t any villages on the steep mountains, just a handful of shepherds and monasteries where monks lived their cloistered lives. It was hard to imagine either group putting on a festival at this time of night.

Outside, the music was more audible. I couldn’t make out the melody, but by the rhythm it was clearly Greek. It had the uneven, sharp sound of live music, not something played through speakers.

By then I was wide awake. The summer night air was pleasant, with a mysterious depth to it. If I hadn’t been worried about Sumire, I might very well have felt a sense of celebration. I rested my hands on my hips, stretched, looking up at the sky, and took a deep breath. The coolness of the night washed inside me. Suddenly a thought struck me—maybe, at this very moment, Sumire is listening to the same music.

I decided to walk for a while in the direction of the sound. I had to find out where it was coming from, who was playing it. The road to the hilltop was the same one I’d taken that morning to go to the beach, so I knew the way. I’ll go as far as I can, I decided.

The brilliant moonlight lit everything, making walking easy. It created complex shadows between the cliffs, dyeing the ground with unlikely shades. Every time the soles of my running shoes crushed a pebble on the road, the sound was amplified. The music grew more pronounced as I made my way further up the slopes. As I’d surmised, it was coming from the top of the hill. I could make out some kind of percussion instrument, a bouzouki, an accordion, and a flute. Possibly a guitar. Other than that, I couldn’t hear a thing. No singing, no people shouting. Just that music playing endlessly, at a detached, almost monotonous pace.

I wanted to see what was taking place on top of the mountain, yet at the same time I thought I should keep my distance. Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear. Still, I had to go forward. I felt as if I was in a dream. The principle that made other choices possible was missing. Or was it the choice that made that principle possible that was missing?

For all I knew, a few days before Sumire had awakened to the same music, her curiosity getting the better of her as she clambered up the slope in her pyjamas.

I stopped and turned to look behind me. The slope twisted palely down towards the town like the tracks of some gigantic insect. I looked up at the sky then, under the moonlight, and glanced at my palm. With a rush of understanding I knew this wasn’t my hand any more. I can’t explain it. But at a glance I knew. My hand was no longer my hand, my legs no longer my legs.

Bathed in the pallid moonlight, my body, like some plaster puppet, had lost all living warmth. As if a voodoo magician had put a spell on me, blowing my transient life into this lump of clay. The spark of life had vanished. My real life had fallen asleep somewhere, and a faceless someone was stuffing it in a suitcase, about to leave.

An awful chill swept through me and I felt choked. Someone had rearranged my cells, untied the threads that held my mind together. I couldn’t think straight. All I was able to do was retreat as fast as I could to my usual place of refuge. I took a huge breath, sinking in the sea of consciousness to the very bottom. Pushing aside the heavy water I plunged down quickly and grabbed a huge rock there with both arms. The water crushed my eardrums. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed, held my breath, resisting. Once I made up my mind, it wasn’t that difficult. I grew used to it all—the water pressure, the lack of air, the freezing darkness, the signals the chaos emitted. It was something I’d mastered again and again as a child.

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited. Sharp images—just the images alone—passed down dark corridors, like jellyfish, like souls adrift. But I steeled myself not to look at them. If I acknowledged them, even a little, they would envelop themselves in meaning. Meaning was fixed to the temporal, and the temporal was trying to force me to rise to the surface. I shut my mind tight to it all, waiting for the procession to pass.

How long I remained that way, I don’t know. When I bobbed to the surface, opened my eyes, and took a silent breath, the music had already stopped. The enigmatic performance was finished. I listened carefully. I couldn’t hear a thing. Absolutely nothing. No music, no people’s voices, no rustle of the wind. I tried to check the time, but I wasn’t wearing a watch. I’d left it by my bedside.

The sky was now filled with stars. Or was it my imagination?

The sky itself seemed to have changed into something different. The strange sense of alienation I’d felt inside had vanished. I stretched, bent my arm, my fingers. No sense of being out of place. My underarms were clammy, but that was all.

I stood up from the grass and continued to climb uphill. I’d come this far and might as well reach the top. Had there really been music there? I had to see for myself, even if only the faintest clues remained. In five minutes I reached the summit. Towards the south the hill sloped down to the sea, the harbour, and the sleeping town. A scattering of streetlights lit the coast road. The other side of the mountain was wrapped in darkness, not a single light visible. I gazed fixedly into the dark, and finally a line of hills beyond floated into sight in the moonlight. Beyond them lay an even deeper darkness. And here around me, no indication whatsoever that a lively festival had taken place only a short while before.

Though the echo of it remained deep inside my head, now I wasn’t even sure I’d heard music. As time passed, I became less and less certain. Maybe it had all been an illusion, my ears picking up signals from a different time and place. It made sense—the idea that people would get together on a mountaintop at 1 a.m. to play music was pretty preposterous. In the sky above the summit, the coarse-looking moon loomed awfully near. A hard ball of stone, its skin eaten away by the merciless passage of time. Ominous shadows on its surface were blind cancer cells stretching out feelers towards the warmth of life. The moonlight warped every sound, washed away all meaning, threw every mind into chaos. It made Miu see a second self. It took Sumire’s cat away somewhere. It made Sumire disappear. And it brought me here, in the midst of music that—most likely—never existed. Before me lay a bottomless darkness; behind me, a world of pale light. I stood there on the top of a mountain in a foreign land, bathed in moonlight. Maybe this had all been meticulously planned, from the very beginning.

I returned to the cottage and downed a glass of Miu’s brandy. I tried to get to sleep, but I couldn’t. Not a wink. Until the eastern sky grew light, I was held in the grip of the moon, and gravity, and something astir in the world.

I pictured cats, starving to death in a closed-up apartment. Soft, small carnivores. I—the real me—was dead, and they were alive, devouring my flesh, chewing on my heart, sucking my blood. If I listened very carefully, somewhere far, far away I could hear the cats lapping up my brain. Three lithe cats, surrounding my broken head, slurping up the mushy grey soup within. The tips of their red, rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick of their tongues, my mind—like a shimmer of hot air—flickered and faded away.