enough, but I still haven’t.”
“The ocean’s no longer there.”
She smiled softly. A hint of movement came to the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “True. As you say, the ocean’s no longer there. But even so, I swear I can sometimes still hear the waves. It’s probably imprinted into my ears over the years.”
“Then the Rat appeared.”
“Yes. Although I never called him that.”
“What did you call him?”
“By his name. Like everybody else.”
Come to think it, “The Rat” did sound a bit childish, even for a nickname. “Hmm,” I said.
They brought our drinks. She took a sip of her salty dog, then wiped the salt from her lips with the napkin. The napkin came away with the slightest trace of lipstick. Then she folded the lipstick-blushed napkin deftly and laid it down.
“He was, what can I say … unreal enough. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I guess it took someone as unreal as him to break through my own unreality. It struck me the very first time I met him. That’s why I liked him. Or maybe I only thought so after I got to like him. It amounts to the same thing either way.”
The piano player returned from her break and began to play themes from old film scores. Perfect: the wrong background music for the wrong scene.
“I sometimes think maybe, in the end, I was only using him. And maybe he sensed it all along. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “That’s between you and him.”
She said nothing.
After a full twenty seconds of silence, I realized she’d run out of things to say. I downed the last of my whiskey and retrieved the Rat’s letters from my pocket, placing them in the center of the table. Where they sat for a while.
“Do I have to read them here?”
“Please take them home and read them. If you don’t want to read them, then do whatever you want with them.”
She nodded. She put the letters in her bag, which she fastened with a snap of the clasp. I lit up a second cigarette and ordered another whiskey. The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.
“You came all the way from Tokyo for this reason?” she asked.
“Pretty much so.”
“You’re very kind.”
“I’ve never thought about it that way. A matter of habit. If the tables were turned, I’m sure he’d do the same for me.”
“Have you ever asked something like this of him?”
I shook my head. “No, but we go back a long time imposing our unrealities on each other. Whether we’ve managed to take care of things realistically or not is another question.”
“Maybe nobody really can.”
“Maybe not.”
She smiled and got up, whisking away the bill. “Let me take care of this. I was forty minutes late, after all.”
“If you’re sure, then by all means,” I said. “But one more thing, I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”
“Certainly.”
“Over the phone you said you could picture how I looked.”
“I meant there was something I could sense about you.”
“And that was enough for you to spot me right away?”
“I could tell in no time at all.”
The rain kept falling at the same rate. From my hotel window, through the neon signs of the building next door, a hundred thousand strands of rain sped earthward through a green glow. If I looked down, the rain seemed to pour straight into one fixed point on the ground.
I plopped down on the bed and smoked a couple cigarettes, then called the front desk to make a reservation for a train the following morning. There was nothing left for me to do in town.
The rain kept falling until midnight.
A Wild Sheep Chase, II
The Strange Man’s Strange Tale
The black-suited secretary took his chair and looked at me without saying a word. He didn’t seem to be sizing me up, nor did his eyes betray any disdain, nor was his a pointed stare to bore right through me. Neither cool nor hot, not even in the mid-range. That gaze held no hint of any emotion known to me. The man was simply looking at me. He might have been looking at the wall behind me, but as I was situated in front of it, the end result was that the man was looking at me.
The man picked up the cigarette case from the table, opened the lid and withdrew a plain-cut cigarette, flicked the tip a few times with his fingernail, lit up with the tabletop lighter, and blew out the smoke at an oblique angle. Then he returned the lighter to the table and crossed his legs. His gaze did not waver one blink the whole time.
This was the same man my partner had told me about. He was overdressed, his fingers overly graceful. If not for the sharp curve of his eyelids and the glass-bead chill of his pupils, I would surely have thought him homosexual. Not with those eyes, though. So what did he look like? He didn’t resemble any sort, anything.
If you took a good look at his eyes, they were an arresting color. Dark brown with the faintest touch of blue, the hue of the left eye, moreover, different from the right. Each seemed to focus on a wholly different subject.
His fingers pursued scant movements on his lap. Hauntingly, as if separated from his hand, they moved toward me. Tense, compelling, nerve-racking, beautiful fingers. Slowly reaching across the table to crush out the cigarette not one-third smoked. I watched the ice melt in the glass, clear ice water mixing with the grape juice. An unequally variegated mix.
The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.
“Everyone dies,” said the man softly with downcast eyes. He seemed to have an uncanny purchase on the drift of my thoughts. “All of us, whosoever, must die sometime.”
Having said that, the man fell again into a weighty silence. There was only the frantic buzzing of the cicadas
