“But hey, think about the poor driver of the
“Well put,” said I.
“Maybe,” said she, “but I’d still ride the
“Well there you are,” said the chauffeur. “That’s just how it’d be. Names on ships are familiar from times before mass production. In principle, it amounts to the same thing as naming horses. So that airplanes treated like horses are actually given names too. There’s the
“Which is to say that life is the basic concept here.”
“Exactly.”
“And that purpose, as such, is but a secondary element in naming.”
“Exactly. For purpose alone, numbers are enough. Witness the treatment of the Jews at Auschwitz.”
“Fine so far,” I said. “So let’s just say that the basis of naming is this act of conscious identification with living things. Why then do train stations and parks and baseball stadiums have names, if they’re not living?”
“Why? Because it’d be chaos if stations didn’t have names.”
“No, we’re not talking on the purposive level. I’d like you to explain it to me in principle.”
The chauffeur gave this serious thought. He failed to notice that the traffic light had turned green. The camper van behind us honked its horn to the overture to the
“Because they’re not interchangeable, I suppose. For instance, there’s only one Shinjuku Station and you can’t just replace it with Shibuya Station. This non-interchangeability is to say that they’re not mass-produced. Are we clear on these two points?”
“Sure would be fun to have Shinjuku Station in Ekoda, though,” said my girlfriend.
“If Shinjuku Station were in Ekoda, it would be Ekoda Station,” countered the chauffeur.
“But it’d still have the Odakyu Line attached,” she said.
“Back to the original line of discussion,” I said. “If stations were interchangeable, what would that mean? If, for instance, all national railway stations were mass-produced fold-up type buildings and Shinjuku Station and Tokyo Station were absolutely interchangeable?”
“Simple enough. If it’s in Shinjuku, it’d be Shinjuku Station; if it’s in Tokyo, it’d be Tokyo Station.”
“So what we’re talking about here is not the name of a physical object, but the name of a function. A role. Isn’t that purpose?”
The chauffeur fell silent. Only this time he didn’t stay silent for very long.
“You know what I think?” said the chauffeur. “I think maybe we ought to cast a warmer eye on the subject.”
“Meaning?”
“I mean towns and parks and streets and stations and ball fields and movie theaters all have names, right? They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth.”
A new theory.
“Well,” said I, “suppose I utterly obliterated my consciousness and became totally fixed, would I merit a fancy name?”
The chauffeur glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. A suspicious look, as if I were laying some trap. “Fixed?”
“Say I froze in place, or something. Like Sleeping Beauty.”
“But you already have a name.”
“Right you are,” I said. “I nearly forgot.”
We received our boarding passes at the airport check-in counter and said goodbye to the chauffeur. He would have waited to see us off, but as there was an hour and a half before departure time, he capitulated and left.
“A real character, that one,” she said.
“There’s a place I know with no one but people like that,” I said. “The cows there go around looking for pliers.”
“Sounds like ‘Home on the Pampas.’”
“Maybe so,” I said.
We went into the airport restaurant and had an early lunch. Shrimp au gratin for me, spaghetti for her. I watched the 747s and Tristars take flight and swoop down to earth with a gravity that seemed fated. Meanwhile, she dubiously inspected each strand of spaghetti she ate.
“I thought that they always served meals on planes,” she said, disgruntled.
“Nope,” I said, waiting for the hot lump of gratin in my mouth to cool down, then gulping down some water. No taste but hot. “Meals only on international flights. They give you something to eat on longer domestic routes. Not exactly what you’d call a special treat, though.”
“And movies?”
“No way. C’mon, it’s only an hour to Sapporo.”
“Then they give you nothing.”
“Nothing at all. You sit in your seat, read your book, and arrive at your destination. Same as by bus.”
“But no traffic lights.”
“No traffic lights.”
“Just great,” she said with a sigh. She put down her fork, leaving half the spaghetti untouched.
“The thing is you get there faster. It takes twelve hours if you go by train.”
“And where does the extra time go?”
I also gave up halfway through my meal and ordered two coffees. “Extra time?”
“You said planes save you over ten hours. So where does all that time go?”
“Time doesn’t go anywhere. It only adds up. We can use those ten hours as we like, in Tokyo or in Sapporo. With ten hours we could see four movies, eat two meals, whatever. Right?”
“But what if I don’t want to go to the movies or eat?”
“That’s your problem. It’s no fault of time.”
She bit her lip as we looked out at the squat bodies of the 747s on the tarmac. 747s always remind me of a fat, ugly old lady in the neighborhood where I used to live. Huge sagging breasts, swollen legs, dried-up neckline. The airport, a likely gathering place for the old ladies. Dozens of them, coming and going, one after the other. The pilots and stewardesses, strutting back and forth in the lobby with heads held high, seemed quaintly planar. I couldn’t help thinking how it wasn’t like the DC-7 and Friendship-7 days, but maybe it was.
“Well,” she went on, “does time expand?”
“No, time does not expand,” I answered. I had spoken, but why didn’t it sound like my voice? I coughed and drank my coffee. “Time does not expand.”
“But time is actually increasing, isn’t it? You yourself said that time adds up.”
“That’s only because the time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn’t change. It’s only that you can see more movies.”
“If you wanted to see movies,” she added.
As soon as we arrived in Sapporo, we actually did see a double feature.
The Dolphin Hotel Affair
