Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (41 page)

"Why don't you stick around and watch the whole thing?" invited Mrs. Video Shop.

I'd really have liked to, I told her, if it weren't for the things I had in the drier. I cast an eye at my watch. One-twenty-five. The drier had already stopped.

She made one last pitch. "Three classic Hitchcock pictures coming in next week."

I retraced my steps to the laundromat. Which, I was pleased to find, was empty. Just the wash awaiting my return at the bottom of the drier. I stuffed the wash into my bag and headed home.

The chubby girl didn't hear me come in and was fast asleep on the bed. I placed her clothes by the pillow and the cake box on the night stand. The thought of crawling into bed was appealing, but it was not to be.

I went into the kitchen. Faucet, gas water heater, ventilator fan, gas oven, various assorted pots and pans, refrigerator and toaster and cupboard and knife rack, a big Brooke Bond tea cannister, rice cooker, and everything else that goes into the single word "kitchen". Such order composed this world.

I was married when I first moved in to the apartment. Eight years ago, but even then I often sat at this table alone, reading in the middle of the night. My wife was such a sound sleeper, I sometimes worried if she was still alive. And in my own imperfect way, I loved her.

That meant I'd lived for eight years in this dump. Three of us had moved in together: me and my wife and the cat. My wife was the first to move out, next was the cat. Now it was my turn. I grabbed a saucer for an ashtray and lit a cigarette. I drank a glass of water.

Eight years. I could hardly believe it.

Well, it didn't matter. Everything would be over soon enough. Eternal life would set in.

Immortality.

I was bound for the world of immortality. That's what the Professor said. The End of the World was not death but a transposition. I would be myself. I would be reunited with what I had already lost and was now losing.

Well, maybe so. Not probably so. The old man had to know what he was talking about. If he said it was an undying world, then undying it was. Yet, none of the Professor's words had the ring of reality. They were abstractions, vague shadows of contingency. I mean, I already was myself, wasn't I? And how would someone who's immortal perceive his immortality? What was this about unicorns and a high wall?
The Wizard of Oz
had to be more plausible.

So what had I lost? I'd lost many things. Maybe a whole college chapbook full, all noted down in tiny script. Things that hadn't seemed so important when I let go of them. Things that brought me sorrow later, although the opposite was also true. People and places and feelings kept slipping away from me.

Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn't imagine not doing things the same.

After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn't be any other self but my self. Could I?

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically—whether actually more realistic or not—I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self.

Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read
The Greening of America
, and I saw
Easy Rider
three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Was that so depressing?

Who knows? Maybe that was "despair". What Turgenev called "disillusionment". Or Dostoyevsky, "hell". Or Somerset Maugham, "reality". Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

A world of immortality? I might actually create a new self. I could become happy, or at least less miserable. And dare I say it, I could become a better person. But that had nothing to do with me now. That would be another self. For now,
I
was an immutable, historical fact.

All the same, I had little choice but to proceed on the hypothesis of my life ending in another twenty-two hours. So I was going to die—I told myself for convenience sake.

That was more like me, if I did say so myself. Which, I supposed, was some comfort.

I put out my cigarette and went to the bedroom. I looked at the chubby girl's sleeping face. I went through my pockets to check that I had everything I needed for this farewell scene. What did I really need? Almost nothing any more. Wallet and credit cards and… was there anything else? The apartment key was of no use, neither were my car keys, nor my Calcutec ID. Didn't need my address book, didn't need a knife. Not even for laughs.

I took the subway to Ginza and bought a new set of clothes at Paul Stuart, paying the bill with American Express. I looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad. The combination of the navy blazer with burnt orange shirt did smack of yuppie ad exec, but better that than troglodyte.

It was still raining, but I was tired of looking at clothes, so I passed on the coat and instead went to a beer hall. It was almost empty. They were playing a Bruckner symphony. I couldn't tell which number, but who can? I ordered a draft and some oysters on the half shell.

I squeezed lemon over the oysters and ate them in clockwise order, the Bruckner romantic in the background. The giant wall-clock read five before three, the dial supporting two lions which spun around the mainspring. Bruckner came to an end, and the music shifted into Ravel's
Bolero
.

I ordered a second draft, when I was hit by the long overdue urge to relieve myself. And piss I did. How could one bladder hold so much? I was in no particular hurry, so I kept going for a whole two minutes—with
Bolero
building to its enormous crescendo. It made me feel as if I could piss forever.

Afterwards I could have sworn I'd been reborn. I washed my hands, looked at my face in the warped mirror, then returned to my beer at the table and lit up a cigarette. /

Time seemed to stand still, although in fact the lions had gone around one hundred eighty degrees and it was now ten after three. I leaned one elbow on the table and considered the clock. Watching the hands of a clock advance is a meaningless way to spend time, but I couldn't think of anything better to do. Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

The hands of the clock reached half past three, so I paid up and left. The rain had virtually stopped during this beer interlude, so I left my umbrella behind too. Things weren't looking so bad. The weather had brightened up, so why not me?

With the umbrella gone, I felt lighter. I felt like moving on. Preferably to somewhere with a lot of people. I went to the Sony Building, where I jostled with Arab tourists ogling the lineup of state-of-the-art TV monitors, then went underground to the Marunouchi Line and headed for Shinjuku. I apparently fell asleep the instant I took a seat, because the next thing I knew I was there.

Exiting through the wicket, I suddenly remembered the skull and shuffled data I'd stashed at the station baggage-check a couple days before. The skull made no difference now and I didn't have my claim stub, but I had nothing bet-ter to do, so I found myself at the counter, pleading with the clerk to let me have my bag.

"Did you look for your ticket carefully?" asked the clerk.

I had, I told him.

"What's your bag look like?"

"A blue Nike sports bag," I said.

"What's the Nike trademark look like?"

I asked for a piece of paper and a pencil, drew a squashed boomerang and wrote Nike above it. The clerk looked at it dubiously and wandered off down the aisles of shelves.

Presently he returned with my bag.

"This it?"

"That's right," I said.

"Got any ID?"

My prize retrieved, it suddenly struck me, you don't go to out to dinner lugging gym gear.

Instead of carrying it around, I decided to rent a car and throw the bag nonchalantly in the back seat. Make that a smart European car. Not that I was such a fan of European cars, but it seemed to me that this very important day of my life merited riding around in a nice car.

I checked the yellow pages and jotted down the numbers of four car-rental dealerships in the Shinjuku area. None had any European cars. Sundays were high-demand days and they never had foreign cars to begin with. The last dealership had a Toyota Carina 1800

GT Twin-Cam Turbo and a Toyota Mark II. Both new, both with car stereos. I said I'd take the Carina. I didn't have a crease of an idea what either car looked like.

Having done that, I went to a record shop and bought a few cassettes.
Johnny Matbis's
Greatest Hits
, Zubin Mehta conducting Schonberg's
Verkldrte Nacht
, Kenny Burrell's
Stormy Sunday, Popular Ellington
, Trevor Pinnock on the harpsichord playing the
Brandenburg Concertos
, and a Bob Dylan tape with
Like A Rolling Stone
. Mix'n'match. I wanted to cover the bases—how was I to know what kind of music would go with a Carina 1800 GT Twin-Cam Turbo?

I bagged the tapes and headed for the car rental lot. The driver's seat of the Carina 1800 GT seemed like the cabin of a space shuttle compared to my regular tin toy. I popped the Bob Dylan tape in the deck, and
Watching the River Flow
came on while I tested each switch on the dashboard control panel.

The nice lady who'd served me came out of the office and came over to the car to ask if anything was wrong. She smiled a clean, fresh TV-commercial smile.

NFo problems, I told her, I was just checking everything before hitting the road.

"Very good," she said. Her smile reminded me of a girl I'd known in high school. Neat and clear-headed, she married a Kakumaru radical, had two children, then disappeared.

Who would have guessed a sweet seventeen-year-old, J. D. Salinger- and George Harrison-fan of a girl would go through such changes.

"I only wish all drivers were as careful as you. It would make our job a lot easier," she said. "These computerized panels in the latest models are pretty complicated."

"Which button do I push to find the square root of 185?" I asked.

"I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the next model," she laughed. "Say, isn't that Bob Dylan you have on?"

"Right," I said.
Positively 4th Street
.

"I can tell Bob Dylan in an instant," she said.

"Because his harmonica's worse than Stevie Wonder?"

She laughed again. Nice to know I could still make someone laugh.

"No, I really like his voice," she said. "It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain."

After all the volumes that have been written about Dylan, I had yet to come across such a perfect description.

She blushed when I told her that.

"Oh, I don't know. That's just what he sounds like to me."

"I never expected someone as young as you to know Bob Dylan."

"Hike old music. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix—you know."

"We should get together sometime," I told her.

She smiled, cocking her head slightly. Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men. I thanked her and started the car.
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
. I felt better for having met her.

The digital dashboard clock read four-forty-two. The sunless city sky was edging toward dusk as I headed home, crawling through the congested streets. This was not your usual rainy Sunday congestion; a green sports compact had slammed into an eight-ton truck carrying a load of concrete blocks. Traffic was at a standstill. The sportscar looked like a cardboard box someone sat on. Several raincoated cops stood around as the wrecker crew cleaned up the debris.

It took forever to get by the accident site, but there was still plenty of time before the appointed hour, so I smoked and kept listening to Dylan.
Like A Rolling Stone
. I began to hum along.

We were all getting old. That much was as plain as the falling rain.

Skulls

I see birds flying. They strafe the white frozen slope of the Western Hill and vanish from my field of vision. I warm my feet and hands at the stove and drink the hot tea the Colonel has brought me.

"Are you going to read dreams tonight? The snow will be deep. It will be dangerous walking on the Hill. Perhaps you might rest a day," he suggests.

"I cannot lose a day," I tell him.

The Colonel shakes his head goesyout, and returns with a pair of snow boots.

"Here, wear these. At least you not will slip."

I try them on. They fit well, a good sign.

It is time to go. I wrap my scarf around my neck, pull on my gloves, borrow a cap from the Colonel. Then I slip the folded accordion into my pocket. I refuse to be without it.

"Take care," bids the old officer.

As I had envisioned, the hole is filling with drifts of snow. Gone are the old men; gone too are their tools. If the snow continues like this, the hole will be brimming by tomorrow morning. I watch the bold white gusts, then begin down the Hill.

Snow is falling thick and fierce. It is difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. I remove my glasses and pull my scarf to beneath my eyes. I hear birds crying overhead, above the squeak and crack of these boots. What do birds feel about snow? And the beasts, what do they think about this blizzard?

I arrive at the Library a full hour early and find her waiting for the stove to heat the room.

She brushes the snow from my coat and dislodges the snow caked between the spikes of the boots.

Although I was here only yesterday, I am overcome with feelings of nostalgia at the yellow light through the frosted glass, the warm intimacy of the stove, the smell of coffee steaming out of the pot.

"Would you care to eat now? Or perhaps a little later?"

"I don't want to eat. I'm not hungry," I say.

"Would you like coffee?"

"Yes, please."