Transit Completed at Movie Theater; On to the Dolphin Hotel
The entire flight, she sat by the window and looked down at the scenery. I sat next to her reading my
“I really liked that guy,” she said after drinking her orange juice.
“That guy who?”
“The chauffeur.”
“Hmm,” I said, “I liked him too.”
“And what a great name, ‘Kipper.’”
“For sure. A great name. The cat might be better off with him than he ever was with me.”
“Not ‘the cat,’ ‘Kipper.’”
“Right. ‘Kipper.’”
“Why didn’t you give the cat a name all this time?”
“Why indeed,” I puzzled. Then I lit up a cigarette with the sheep-engraved lighter. “I think I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’”
“Hmm,” she said. “I do like the word ‘we,’ though. It has an Ice Age ring to it.”
“Ice Age?”
“Like ‘We go south’ or ‘We hunt mammoth’ or …”
When we stepped outside at Chitose Airport, the air was chillier than we’d expected. I pulled a denim shirt over my T-shirt, she a knit vest over her shirt. Autumn had come over this land one whole month ahead of Tokyo.
“We weren’t supposed to run into an Ice Age, were we?” she asked on the bus to Sapporo. “You hunting mammoths, me raising children.”
“Sounds positively inviting,” I said.
She soon fell asleep, leaving me gazing through the bus windows at the endless procession of deep forest on both sides of the road.
We hit a coffee shop first thing on arriving in the city.
“Right off, let’s set our prime directives,” I said. “We’ll have to divide up. That is, I go after the scene in the photograph. You go after the sheep. That way we save time.”
“Very pragmatic.”
“If things go well,” I amended. “In any case, you can cover the major former sheep ranches of Hokkaido and study up on sheep breeds. You can probably find what you need at a government office or the local library.”
“I like libraries,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
“Do I start right away?”
I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. “Nah, it’s already getting late. Let’s start tomorrow. Today we’ll take it easy, find a place to stay, have dinner, take a bath, and get some sleep.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie,” she said.
“A movie?”
“What with all that time we saved by flying.”
“Good point,” I said. So we popped into the first movie theater that caught our eye.
What we ended up seeing was a crime-occult double feature. There was hardly a soul in the place. It’d been ages since I’d been in a theater that empty. I counted the people in the audience to pass the time. Eight, including ourselves. There were more characters in the films.
The films were exemplars of the dreadful. The sort of films where you feel like turning around and walking out the instant the title comes on after the roaring MGM lion. Amazing that films like that exist.
The first was the occult feature. The devil, who lives in the dripping, dank cellar of the town church and manipulates things through the weak preacher, takes over the town. The real question, though, was why the devil wanted to take over the town to begin with. All it was was a miserable nothing of a few blocks surrounded by cornfields.
Nonetheless, the devil had this terrible obsession with the town and grew furious that one last little girl refused to fall under his spell. When the devil got mad, his body shook like quivering green jelly. Admittedly, there was something endearing about that rage.
In front of us a middle-aged man was snoring away like a foghorn. To the extreme right there was some heavy petting in progress. Behind, someone let out a huge fart. Huge enough to stop the middle-aged man’s snoring for a moment. A pair of high school girls giggled.
By reflex, I thought of Kipper. And it was only when I did that it came to me that we’d really left Tokyo and were now in Sapporo.
Funny about that.
Amid these thoughts I fell asleep. In my dreams, I encountered that green devil, but he wasn’t endearing in the least. He remained silent and I just observed his machinations.
Meanwhile, the film ended, the lights came on, and I woke up. Each member of the audience yawned as if in predetermined order. I went to the snack bar and bought ice cream for us. It was hard as a rock, probably left over from last summer.
“You slept through the whole thing?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How was it?”
“Pretty interesting. In the end, the whole town explodes.”
“Wow.”
The movie theater was deathly quiet. Or rather everything around us was deathly quiet. Not a common occurrence.
“Say,” she said, “doesn’t it seem like your body’s in a state of transit or something?”
Now that she mentioned it, it actually did.
She held my hand. “Let’s just stay like this. I’m worried.”
“Okay.”
“Unless we stay like this, we might get transported somewhere else. Someplace crazy.”
As the theater interior grew dark again and the coming attractions began, I brushed her hair aside and kissed her ear. “It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
“You’re probably right,” she said softly. “I guess we should have ridden in transportation with names after all.”
For the next hour and a half, from the beginning to the end of the film, we stayed in a state of quiet transport in the darkness. Her head resting on my shoulder the whole time. My shoulder became warm and damp from her breath.
We came out of the movie theater and strolled the twilit streets, my arm around her shoulder. We felt closer than ever before. The commotion of passersby was comforting; faint stars were shining through in the sky.
“Are we really in the right city, the two of us?” she asked.
I looked up at the sky. The polestar was in the right position, but somehow it looked like a fake polestar. Too big, too bright.
“I wonder,” I said.
“I feel like something’s out of place,” she said.
“That’s what it’s like, coming to a new city. Your body can’t quite get used to it.”
