Dance Dance Dance

anyone. A perfection of sorts. That didn't go anywhere. Like my head.

What was that all about? Kiki repeated in my brain.

The camera pans around. Gotanda's able fingers sail gen­tly down her back. Seeking for that long-lost sea passage.

What was going on here? I was thoroughly confused. Gone was my self-confidence. Love and used Subarus were two different things. Weren't they? I was jealous of Gotan­da's fingers. Had Yuki put out her cigarette? Had she turned off the heater? Yes, Dad. You said it. No confidence at all. Was I doomed to rot, muttering away to myself like this in this elephants' graveyard of advanced capitalist society?

Leave it to tomorrow. Everything.

I brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, then pol­ished off the last of the whiskey in my glass. The moment I got into bed, the phone rang. At first I just stared at the thing ringing there in the middle of the room, and finally I picked it up.

«I turned off the heater,» Yuki began. «Put out my cigarette. Everything's okay. Sleep easier now?»

«Yes, thank you,» I replied.

«Nighty-night then,» she said.

«Good night,» I said.

«Hey,» Yuki started, then paused, «you saw that guy in the sheepskin up at the Sapporo hotel, didn't you?»

I sat down on the bed, holding the telephone to my chest as if keeping a cracked ostrich egg warm.

«You can't fool me. I know you saw him. I knew that right away.»

«You saw the Sheep Man?» I blurted out.

«Mmm,» Yuki skirted the question, then clicked her tongue. «But we can talk about that later. Next time, huh? We'll have a long talk. I'm beat right now.»

And she hung up, just like that. Click.

I had a pain in my temples. I went to the kitchen and poured myself another whiskey. I was trembling all over. A roller coaster was rumbling under me. It's all connected, the Sheep Man had said.

Connected.

All sorts of strange connections were starting to come together.

17

I leaned up against the sink in the kitchen and downed the whiskey. What should I do? How could Yuki have known about the Sheep Man? Should I ring her back? But I really was exhausted. It'd been one long day. Maybe I should wait for her to call. Did I know her phone number?

I climbed into bed and stared at the phone. I had a feeling that Yuki might call. If not Yuki, somebody else. At times like this, the telephone becomes a time bomb. Nobody knows when it's going to go off. But it's ticking away with possibility. And if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily, you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hits home. The phone either looks like it's dying to say something, or else it's resenting that it's trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested within a clunky body. That's the tele­phone.

Now the phone company. All those lines coming together. Lines stretching all the way from this very room. Connecting me, in principle, to anyone and everyone. I could even call Anchorage if I wanted. Or the Dolphin Hotel, for that mat­ter, or my ex-wife. Countless possibilities. And all tied together through the phone company switchboard. Com­puter-processed these days of course. Converted into strings of digits, then transmitted via telephone wires to underground cable or undersea tunnel or communications satel­lite, ultimately finding its way to us. A gigantic computer-controlled network.

But no matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there's no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don't know the other party's num­ber. Or even if we know the number, we misdial. We are an imperfect and unrepentant species. But suppose we clear those hurdles, suppose I manage to get through to Yuki, she could always say, «I don't want to talk now. Bye.» Click! End of conversation, before it ever began. Talk about one­way communication.

Actually, the telephone looked rather irritated.

It—or let's call it a «she»—seemed pissed off at being less than pure idea. Angered at the uncertain and imperfect grounds upon which volitional communication must neces­sarily base itself. So very imperfect, so utterly arbitrary, so wholly passive.

I propped myself up on my pillow and watched the tele­phone fume. A perfectly pointless exercise. It's not my fault, the phone seemed to be telling me. Well, that's communica­tion. Imperfect, arbitrary, passive. The lament of the not-quite-pure idea. But I'm not to blame either. The phone probably tells this to all the boys. It's just that being part of these quarters of mine makes her—it—all the more irritable. Which makes me feel responsible. As if I'm aiding and abet­ting all the imperfection.

Take my ex-wife, for example. She'd just sit there and, without a word, put me in my place. I'd loved her. We'd had some really good times. Traveled together. Made love hun­dreds of times. Laughed a lot. But sometimes, she'd give me the silent treatment. Usually at night, subtle, but unrelenting. As punishment for my imperfection, my arbitrariness and passiveness.

I knew what was eating her. We got along well, but what she was after, the image in her mind, was somewhere else, not where I was. She wanted a kind of autonomy of commu­nication. A scene where the hero— whose name was «Com­munication»—led the masses to a bright, bloodless revo­lution, spotless white flags waving. So that perfection could swallow imperfection and make it whole. To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of under­ground cable. An all-too- imperfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.

I explained it to her. Over and over again.

Then one day she left.

Or else I'd magnified that imperfection, and helped her out the door.

I looked at the telephone and replayed scenes of me get­ting it on with my wife. For the three months before she left, she hadn't wanted to sleep with me once. Because she was sleeping with the other guy. At the time, I didn't have the least idea.

«Sorry dear, but why don't you go sleep with someone else? I won't be mad,» she'd said. And I thought she was joking. But she was serious. I told her I didn't want to sleep with another woman, which was true. But she wanted me to, she said. Then we could think things over from there.

In the end, I didn't sleep with anyone. I'm not a prude, but I don't go sleeping with women just to think things over. I sleep with someone because I want to.

Not long after that, she walked out on me. But say I had gone and slept with someone like she wanted me to, would that have kept her from leaving? Did she really believe that that would've put our communication on even slightly more autonomous grounds? Ridiculous.

Already past midnight, but the drone of the expressway showed no sign of letting up. Every now and then a motor­cycle would blast by. The soundproof glass dampened the noise, but not much. It was right out there, up against my life, oppressing me. Circumscribing me to this one patch of ground.

I grew tired of looking at the phone and closed my eyes.

And as soon as I did, the surrender I must have been wait­ing for silently filled the void. Very deftly and ever so quick. Sleep came over me.

After breakfast, I thumbed through my address book for the number of a guy in talent management I'd met when I needed to interview young stars. It was ten in the morning when I rang him up, so naturally he was still asleep. That's showbiz. I apologized, then told him I had to find Gotanda. He moaned and groaned, but eventually came across with the goods. The number for Gotanda's agency, a midsize entertainment production firm.