Sunlight spilled in stripes across the bed from between the shutter slats. My watch lying on the floor read 7:35. My blanket and shirt were as wet as if they’d been soaked in a bucket of water.
My head was still fuzzy, but the fever had gone. Outside, the world was a snowswept landscape. The pasture gleamed positively silver in the new morning light. I went downstairs and took a hot shower. My face was pale, my cheeks stripped of their flesh overnight. I coated my entire face with three times the necessary amount of shaving cream, and I proceeded to shave methodically. Then I went and pissed so much I could hardly believe it myself.
I was so exhausted from the piss that I collapsed on the chaise longue for fifteen minutes. The birds kept on singing. The snow had begun to melt and drip from the eaves. Occasionally in the background there’d be a sharp creaking.
It was almost on eight-thirty by the time I got up. I drank two glasses of grape juice, ate a whole apple. Then I picked out a bottle of wine, a large Hershey bar, and two more apples from the cellar.
I packed my things. The room took on a forlorn air. Everything was coming to an end.
Checking with my watch, at nine o’clock I wound up the three weights of the grandfather clock. Then I slid the heavy timepiece around and connected the four cords behind. Green cord to green cord, red cord to red cord.
The cords came out of four holes drilled in the back. One pair above, one pair below. The cords were secured with twists of the same wire I’d seen in the jeep. I pushed the grandfather clock back in place, then went to the mirror and bid farewell to myself.
“Hope all goes well,” I said.
“Hope all goes well,” the other I said.
I crossed the middle of the pasture the same way as I had come. The snow crunched beneath my feet. The pasture looked like a silver volcanic lake. Not a footprint anywhere. Only mine which, when I turned around, led back in a trail to the house. My tracks meandered all over the place. It’s not easy to walk in a straight line.
From this far off, the house looked almost like a living thing. Cramped and hunched over, it twisted to shake the snow down from its gabled roof. A block of snow slid off the roof and dashed to the ground with a thud.
I kept walking across the pasture. On through the endless birch woods, across the bridge, around the base of the conical peak, onto the unlucky bend in the road.
Miraculously, the snow on the curve had not frozen to the road. No matter, I was sure that as carefully as I stepped, I would get dragged to the bottom of that sheer drop. It was an effort just to keep walking until I cleared that curved ledge clinging to the crumbling cliff face. My armpits were soaked with sweat. A regular childhood nightmare.
Off to the right were the flatlands. They too were covered in snow, the Junitaki River glistening right down the middle. I thought I could hear a steam whistle in the distance. It was marvelous, actually.
I took a breath and hitched up my backpack, then set off down the gentle slope. At the next bend was a brand-new jeep. In front of the jeep, the Boss’s black-suited secretary.
The Twelve-O’clock Rendezvous
“I have been waiting for you,” said the man in the black suit. “Albeit only for twenty minutes.”
“How’d you know?”
“The place? Or the time?”
“The time,” I said, setting down my backpack.
“How do you think I got to be the Boss’s secretary? Diligence? IQ? Tact? No. I am the Boss’s secretary because of my special capacities. Sixth sense. I believe that’s what you would call it.”
He was wearing a beige down jacket over ski pants and green Ray-Ban glasses.
“We used to have many things in common, the Boss and I. Things that reached beyond rationality and logic and morality.”
“Used to?”
“The Boss died a week ago. We had a beautiful funeral. All Tokyo is turned upside down now, trying to decide a successor. The whole mediocre lot of them running around like fools.”
I sighed. The man took a silver cigarette case out of his jacket pocket, removed a plain-cut cigarette, and lit up.
“Smoke?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“But I must say you did your stuff. Much more than I expected. Honestly, you surprised me. At first, I thought I might have to help you along and give you hints when you got stuck. Which makes your coming across the Sheep Professor an even greater stroke of genius. I almost wish you would consider working for me.”
“So I take it you knew about this place here from the very beginning?”
“Naturally. Come now, who do you think I am?”
“May I ask you something, then?”
“Certainly,” said the man, in top spirits. “But keep it short.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right from the start?”
“I wanted you to come all this way spontaneously of your own free will. And I wanted you to lure him out of his lair.”
“Lair?”
“His mental lair. When a person becomes sheeped, he is temporarily dazed out of his mind and goes into retreat. As with, say, shell shock. It was your role to coax him out of that state. Yet in order for him to trust you, you had to be a blank slate, as it were. Simple enough, is it not?”
“Quite.”
“Lay out the seeds and everything is simple. Constructing the program was the hard part. Computers can’t account for human error, after all. So much for handiwork. Ah, but it is a pleasure second to none, seeing one’s painstakingly constructed program move along exactly according to plan.”
I shrugged.
“Well then,” the man continued, “our wild sheep chase is drawing to a close. Thanks to my calculations and your innocence. I’ve got him right where I want him. True?”
“So it would seem,” I said. “He’s waiting for you up there. Says you’ve got a rendezvous at twelve o’clock sharp.”
The man and I glanced at our watches simultaneously. Ten-forty.
“I had better be going,” the man said. “Must not keep him waiting. You may ride down in the jeep, if you wish. Oh yes, here is your recompense.”
The man reached into his pocket and handed me a check. I pocketed it without looking at it.
“Should you not examine it?”
“I don’t believe there’s any need.”
The man laughed, visibly amused. “It has been a pleasure to do business with you. And by the way, your partner closed down your company. Regrettable. It had such promise too. There is a bright future for the advertising industry. You should go into it on your own.”
“You must be crazy,” I said.
“We shall meet again, I expect,” said the man. And he set off on foot around the curve toward the highlands.
“Kipper’s doing fine,” said the chauffeur, as he drove the jeep down. “Gotten nice and fat.”
I took the seat next to the chauffeur. He was a different person than the man who drove that monster of a limo. He told me in considerable detail about the Boss’s funeral and about his Kipper-sitting, but I hardly heard a word.
