Sputnik Sweetheart

14

In the end we never found out what happened to Sumire. As Miu put it, she vanished like smoke.

Two days later Miu came back to the island on the noon ferry together with an official from the Japanese embassy and a police official in charge of tourist affairs. They met with the local police and launched a full-scale investigation involving the islanders. The police put out a public appeal for information, publishing a blown-up version of Sumire’s passport photo in a national newspaper. Many people got in touch, but nothing connected. The information always turned out to be about someone else.

Sumire’s parents came to the island, too. I left just before they arrived. The new school term was around the corner, but mostly I couldn’t stand the thought of facing them. Besides, the mass media in Japan had caught wind of events and had begun to contact the Japanese embassy and the local police. I told Miu it was about time for me to be getting back to Tokyo. Staying any longer on the island wasn’t going to help find Sumire. She nodded. “You’ve done so much already,” she said.

“Really. If you hadn’t come, I would have been completely lost. Don’t worry. I’ll explain things to Sumire’s parents. And I’ll handle any reporters. Leave it to me. You had no responsibility for any of this to begin with. I can be pretty businesslike when I need to be, and I can hold my own.”

She saw me off at the harbour. I was taking the afternoon ferry to Rhodes. It was exactly ten days since Sumire had disappeared. Miu hugged me just before I left. A very natural embrace. For a long moment, she silently rubbed my back as she held me. The afternoon sun was hot, but strangely her skin felt cool. Her hand was trying to tell me something. I closed my eyes and listened to those words. Not words -something that couldn’t coalesce into language. In the midst of our silence, something passed between us. “Take care of yourself,” said Miu.

“You, too,” I said. For a while we stood there in front of the gangplank.

“I want you to tell me something, honestly,” She said in a serious tone, just before I boarded the ferry. “Do you believe Sumire is no longer alive?”

I shook my head. “I can’t prove it, but I feel like she’s still alive somewhere. Even after this much time, I just don’t have the sense that she’s dead.”

Miu folded her tanned arms and looked at me.

“Actually I feel exactly the same,” she said. “That Sumire isn’t dead. But I also feel that I’ll never see her again. Though I can’t prove anything either.”

I didn’t say a word. Silence wove itself into the spaces of everything around us. Seabirds squawked as they cut across the cloudless sky, and in the café the ever-sleepy waiter hoisted yet another tray of drinks.

Miu pursed her lips and was lost in thought. “Do you hate me?” she finally asked.

“Because Sumire disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I hate you?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was tinged with a long-suppressed exhaustion. “I have the feeling I’ll never see you again, either. That’s why I asked.”

“I don’t hate you,” I said.

“But who can tell, maybe later on?”

“I don’t hate people over things like that.”

Miu took off her hat, straightened her fringe, and put it back on. She squinted at me.

“That might be because you don’t expect anything from anyone,” she said. Her eyes were deep and clear, like the twilit darkness on the day we met. “I’m not like that. I just want you to know that I like you. Very much.”

And we said goodbye. The ship edged backwards out of the harbour, the propeller churning up the water as it lumbered through a 180° change of direction; all the while, Miu stood on the wharf watching me go. She wore a tight white dress and occasionally reached out to keep her hat from flying away in the wind. Standing there on that wharf on this little Greek island, she looked like something from a different world, fleeting, full of grace and beauty. I leaned against the railing on deck and watched her for a long time.

Time seemed to stand still, the scene forever etched on my memory.

But time began to move again, and Miu got smaller and smaller, first a vague dot, then swallowed up whole in the shimmering air. The town grew distant, the shape of the mountains indistinct, and finally the island merged into the mist of light, blurred, and vanished altogether. Another island rose up to take its place and likewise disappeared into the distance. As time passed, all the things I left behind there seemed never to have existed at all.

Maybe I should have stayed with Miu. So what if the new school term was starting? I should encourage Miu, do everything I could to help in the search, and if something awful happened, then I should hold her, give her what comfort I could. Miu wanted me, I believe, and in a sense I wanted her as well.

She’d grabbed hold of my heart with a rare intensity. I realized all this for the first time as I stood on the deck and watched her disappear in the distance. A feeling came over me, like a thousand strings were tugging at me. Perhaps not fullblown romantic love, but something very close. Flustered, I sat on a bench on the deck, placed my gym bag on my knees, and gazed out at the white wake trailing behind the ship. Seagulls flew after the ferry, clinging to the wake. I could still feel Miu’s small palm on my back, like a soul’s tiny shadow.

I planned to fly straight back to Tokyo, but for some reason the reservation I’d made the day before was cancelled, and I ended up spending the night in Athens. I took the airline shuttle bus and stayed at a hotel in the city that the airline recommended. A pleasant, cosy hotel near the Plaka district, which, unfortunately, was crowded with a boisterous German tour group. With nothing else to do, I wandered around the city, bought some souvenirs for no one in particular, and in the evening walked to the top of the Acropolis. I lay down on a slab of stone, the twilight breeze blowing over me as I gazed at the white temple floating up in the bluish floodlights. A lovely, dreamy scene.

But all I felt was an incomparable loneliness. Before I knew it, the world around was drained of colour. From the shabby mountaintop, the ruins of those empty feelings, I could see my own life stretching out into the future. It looked just like an illustration in a science fiction novel I read as a child: the desolate surface of a deserted planet. No sign of life at all. Each day seemed to last for ever, the air either boiling hot or freezing. The spaceship that brought me there had disappeared, and I was stuck. I’d have to survive on my own.

All over again I understood how important, how irreplaceable, Sumire was to me. In her own special way she’d kept me tethered to the world. As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded, and I could see things I’d never seen before. Without even trying, we grew close. Like a pair of young lovers undressing in front of each other, Sumire and I had exposed our hearts to one another, an experience I’d never have with anyone else, anywhere. We cherished what we had together, though we never put into words how very precious it was.

Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far happier if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons—something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn’t going to last for ever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

I loved Sumire more than anyone else and wanted her more than anything in the world. And I couldn’t just shelve those feelings, for there was nothing to take their place. I dreamed that someday there’d be a sudden, major transformation. Even if the chances of it coming true were slim, I could dream about it, couldn’t I? But I knew it would never come true.

Like the tide receding, the shoreline washed clean, with Sumire gone I was left in a distorted, empty world. A gloomy, cold world in which what she and I had would never ever take place again.

We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone for ever. What I’d lost was not just Sumire. I’d lost that precious flame.

What is it like—on the other side? Sumire was over there, and so was the lost part of Miu. Miu with black hair and a healthy sexual appetite. Perhaps they’ve come across each other there, loving each other, fulfilling each other. “We do things you can’t put into words,” Sumire would probably tell me, putting it into words all the same.

Is there a place for me over there? Could I be with them? While they make passionate love, I’d sit in the corner of a room somewhere and amuse myself reading the Collected Works of Balzac. After she showered, Sumire and I would take long walks and talk about all kinds of things—with Sumire, as usual, doing most of the talking. But would our relationship last for ever? Is that natural? “Of course,” Sumire would tell me. “No need to ask that. ‘Cause you’re my one and only true friend!”

But I hadn’t a clue how to get to that world. I rubbed the slick, hard rock face of the Acropolis. History had seeped through the surface and was stored up inside. Like it or not, I was shut up in that flow of time. I couldn’t escape. No—that’s not entirely true. The truth is, I really don’t want to escape.

Tomorrow I’ll get on a plane and fly back to Tokyo. The summer holidays are nearly over, and I have to step once more in that endless stream of the everyday. There’s a place for me there. My apartment’s there, my desk, my classroom, my pupils. Quiet days await me, novels to read. The occasional affair.

But tomorrow I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was. Not that anyone will notice after I’m back in Japan. On the outside nothing will be different. But something inside has burned up and vanished. Blood has been shed, and something inside me is gone. Face turned down, without a word, that something makes its exit. The door opens; the door shuts. The light goes out. This is the last day for the person I am right now. The very last twilight. When dawn comes, the person I am won’t be here any more. Someone else will occupy this body.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

I turned face-up on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the Earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink on in the deep, wine-coloured sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot one with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.