A Wild Sheep Chase

There. That’s everything I know about her.

From the autumn of that year on into the spring of the next, once a week on Tuesday nights, she’d drop in at my apartment outside Mitaka. She’d put away whatever simple dinner I cooked, fill my ashtrays, and have sex with me with the radio tuned full blast to an FEN rock program. Waking up Wednesday mornings, we’d go for a walk through the woods to the ICU campus and have lunch in the dining hall. In the afternoon, we’d have a weak cup of coffee in the student lounge, and if the weather was good, we’d stretch out on the grass and gaze up at the sky.

Our Wednesday afternoon picnic, she called it.

“Everytime we come here, I feel like we’re on a picnic.”

“Really? A picnic?”

“Well, the grounds go on and on, everyone looks so happy …”

She sat up and fumbled through a few matches before lighting a cigarette.

“The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. The time breezes by. That’s like a picnic, isn’t it?”

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

How many times did I dream of catching a train at night? Always the same dream. A nightliner stuffy with cigarette smoke and toilet stink. So crowded there was hardly standing room. The seats all caked with vomit. It was all I could do to get up and leave the train at the station. But it was not a station at all. Only an open field, with not a house light anywhere. No stationmaster, no clock, no timetable, no nothing—so went the dream.

I still remember that eerie afternoon. The twenty-fifth of November. Gingko leaves brought down by heavy rains had turned the footpaths into dry riverbeds of gold. She and I were out for a walk, hands in our pockets. Not a sound to be heard except for the crunch of the leaves under our feet and the piercing cries of the birds.

“Just what is it you’re brooding over?” she blurted out all of a sudden.

“Nothing really,” I said.

She kept walking a bit before sitting down by the side of the path and taking a drag on her cigarette.

“You always have bad dreams?”

“I often have bad dreams. Generally, trauma about vending machines eating my change.”

She laughed and put her hand on my knee, but then took it away again.

“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“Not today. I’m having trouble talking.”

She flicked her half-smoked cigarette to the dirt and carefully ground it out with her shoe. “You can’t bring yourself to say what you’d really like to say, isn’t that what you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Two birds flew off from nearby and were swallowed up into the cloudless sky. We watched them until they were out of sight. Then she began drawing indecipherable patterns in the dirt with a twig.

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

“I’m sorry I make you feel that way,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not like you’re thinking of some other girl when we’re having sex. What difference would that make anyway? It’s just that—” She stopped mid-sentence and slowly drew three straight lines on the ground. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“You know, I never meant to shut you out,” I broke in after a moment. “I don’t understand what gets into me. I’m trying my damnedest to figure it out. I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, but I don’t want to pretend they’re not there. It takes time.”

“How much time?”

“Who knows? Maybe a year, maybe ten.”

She tossed the twig to the ground and stood up, brushing the dry bits of grass from her coat. “Ten years? C’mon, isn’t that like forever?”

“Maybe,” I said.

We walked through the woods to the ICU campus, sat down in the student lounge, and munched on hot dogs. It was two in the afternoon, and Yukio Mishima’s picture kept flashing on the lounge TV. The volume control was broken so we could hardly make out what was being said, but it didn’t matter to us one way or the other. A student got up on a chair and tried fooling with the volume, but eventually he gave up and wandered off.

“I want you,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

So we thrust our hands back into our coat pockets and slowly walked back to the apartment.

I woke up to find her sobbing softly, her slender body trembling under the covers. I turned on the heater and checked the clock. Two in the morning. A startlingly white moon shone in the middle of the sky.

I waited for her to stop crying before putting the kettle on for tea. One teabag for the both of us. No sugar, no lemon, just plain hot tea. Then lighting up two cigarettes, I handed one to her. She inhaled and spat out the smoke, three times in rapid succession, before she broke down coughing.

“Tell me, have you ever thought of killing me?” she asked.

“You?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’re you asking me such a thing?”

Her cigarette still at her lips, she rubbed her eyelid with her fingertip.

“No special reason.”

“No, never,” I said.

“Honest?”

“Honest. Why would I want to kill you?”

“Oh, I guess you’re right,” she said. “I thought for a second there that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get murdered by someone. Like when I’m sound asleep.”

“I’m afraid I’m not the killer type.”

“Oh?”

“As far as I know.”

She laughed. She put her cigarette out, drank down the rest of her tea, then lit up again.

“I’m going to live to be twenty-five,” she said, “then die.”

July, eight years later, she was dead at twenty-six.

Part Two July, Eight Years Later

Sixteen Steps