The Elephant Vanishes (14 page)

If death was like this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the darkness like this, what should I do?

At last, I managed to open my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass.

I
’M TAKING OFF
my pajamas and putting on jeans, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker. I tie my hair back in a tight ponytail, tuck it under the windbreaker, and put on a baseball cap of my husband’s. In the mirror, I look like a boy. Good. I put on sneakers and go down to the garage.

I slip in behind the steering wheel, turn the key, and listen to the engine hum. It sounds normal. Hands on the wheel, I take a few deep breaths. Then I shift into gear and drive out of the building. The car is running better than usual. It seems to be gliding across a sheet of ice. I ease it into higher gear, move out of the neighborhood, and enter the highway to Yokohama.

It’s only three in the morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means small. Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don’t sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency.

What a waste. I could work day
and
night. I don’t have to sleep.

This is biologically unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it inductively. I’m beyond that. A priori. An evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.

I have to smile. A priori. An evolutionary leap.

Listening to the car radio, I drive to the harbor. I want classical music, but I can’t find a station that broadcasts it at night. Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to those. They make me feel I’m in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.

I pull into one of the white-outlined spaces in the big parking lot at the waterfront park and cut my engine. This is the brightest area of the lot, under a lamp, and wide open all around. Only one car is parked here—an old white two-door coupe of the kind that young people like to drive. Probably a couple in there now, making love—no money for a hotel room. To avoid trouble, I pull my hat low, trying not to look like a woman. I check to see that my doors are locked.

Half-consciously, I let my eyes wander through the surrounding darkness, when all of a sudden I remember a drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college freshman. We parked and got into some heavy petting. He couldn’t stop, he said, and he begged me to let him put it in. But I refused. Hands
on the steering wheel, listening to the music, I try to bring back the scene, but I can’t recall his face. It seems to have happened such an incredibly long time ago.

All the memories I have from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody notices. Only I know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I’m feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive worldview.

I am changing, though.
Really
changing.

How long have I been sitting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into the sleepless darkness.

Suddenly I’m aware of a human presence, and I come to myself again. There’s somebody out there. I open my eyes and look around. Someone is outside the car. Trying to open the door. But the doors are locked. Dark shadows on either side of the car, one at each door. Can’t see their faces. Can’t make out their clothing. Just two dark shadows, standing there.

Sandwiched between them, my Civic feels tiny—like a little pastry box. It’s being rocked from side to side. A fist is pounding on the right-hand window. I know it’s not a policeman. A policeman would never pound on the glass like this and would never shake my car. I hold my breath. What should I do? I can’t think straight. My underarms are soaked. I’ve got to get out of here. The key. Turn the key. I reach out for it and turn it to the right. The starter grinds.

The engine doesn’t catch. My hand is shaking. I close my eyes and turn the key again. No good. A sound like fingernails clawing a giant wall. The motor turns and turns. The men—the dark shadows—keep shaking my car. The swings get bigger and bigger. They’re going to tip me over!

There’s something wrong. Just calm down and think, then
everything will be okay. Think. Just think. Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong.

Something is wrong.

But what? I can’t tell. My mind is crammed full of thick darkness. It’s not taking me anywhere. My hands are shaking. I try pulling out the key and putting it back in again. But my shaking hand can’t find the hole. I try again and drop the key. I curl over and try to pick it up. But I can’t get hold of it. The car is rocking back and forth. My forehead slams against the steering wheel.

I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.

—translated by Jay Rubin

I
FIRST NOTICED
the wind had begun to blow in the afternoon on Sunday. Or more precisely, at seven past two in the afternoon.

At the time, just like always—just like I always do on Sunday afternoons, that is—I was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to some innocuous music while catching up on a week’s worth of entries in my diary. I make a practice of jotting down each day’s events throughout the week, then writing them up on Sunday.

I’d just finished with the three days up through Tuesday when I became aware of the strong winds droning past my window. I canned the diary entries, capped my pen, and went out to the veranda to take in the laundry. The things on the line were all aflutter, whipping out loud, dry cracks, streaming their crazed comet tails off into space.

When I least suspected it, the wind seemed to have picked up out of nowhere. Hanging out the laundry on the veranda in
the morning—at eighteen past ten in the morning, to be exact—there hadn’t been the slightest whisper of a breeze. About that my memory is as airtight as the lid on a blast furnace. Because for a second there I’d even thought: No need for clothespins on such a calm day.

There honest to goodness hadn’t been a puff of air moving anywhere
.

Swiftly gathering up the laundry, I then went around shutting all the windows in the apartment. Once the windows were closed, I could hardly hear the wind at all. Outside in the absence of sound, the trees—Himalayan cedars and chestnuts, mostly—squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch. Swatches of cloud cover slipped across the sky and out of sight like shifty-eyed secret agents, while on the veranda of an apartment across the way several shirts had wrapped themselves around a plastic clothesline and were clinging frantically, like abandoned orphans.

It’s really blowing up a gale
, I thought.

Upon opening the newspaper and checking out the weather map, however, I didn’t find any sign of a typhoon. The probability of rainfall was listed at 0%. A peaceful Sunday afternoon like the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was supposed to have been.

I let out a slight, maybe 30% sigh and folded up the newspaper, tidied the laundry away in the chest of drawers, made coffee while listening to more of the same innocuous music, then carried on with my diary keeping over a hot cup.

Thursday, I slept with my girlfriend. She likes to wear a blindfold during sex. She always carries around a piece of cloth in her airline overnight bag just for that purpose.

Not my thing, really, but she looks so cute blindfolded like that, I can’t very well object. We’re all human, after all, and everybody’s got something a little off somewhere.

That’s pretty much what I wrote for the Thursday entry in my diary. Eighty percent facts, 20% short comments, that’s my diary policy.

Friday, I ran into an old friend in a Ginza bookstore. He was wearing a tie with the most ungodly pattern. Telephone numbers, a whole slew of them, on a striped background—I’d gotten that far when the telephone rang.

I
T WAS THIRTY-SIX
past two by the clock when the telephone rang. Probably her—my girlfriend with the thing about blindfolds, that is—or so I thought. She’d planned on coming over on Sunday anyway, and she always makes a point of ringing up beforehand. It was her job to buy groceries for dinner. We’d decided on oyster hot pot for that evening.

Anyway, it was two-thirty-six in the afternoon when the telephone rang. I have the alarm clock sitting right next to the telephone. That way I always see the clock when I go for the telephone, so I recall that much perfectly.

Yet when I picked up the receiver, all I could hear was this fierce wind blowing. A
rummmmmble
full of fury, like the Indians all rising on the warpath in 1881, right there in the receiver. They were burning pioneer cabins, cutting telegraph lines, raping Candice Bergen.

“Hello?” I ventured, but my lone voice got sucked under the overwhelming tumult of history.

“Hello? Hello?” I shouted out loud, again to no avail.

Straining my ears, I could just barely make out the faintest
catches of what might have been a woman’s voice through the wind. Or then again, maybe I was hearing things. Whatever, the wind was too strong to be sure. And I guess too many buffalo had already bitten the dust.

I couldn’t say a word. I just stood there with the receiver to my ear. Hard and fast, I had the thing practically glued to my ear. I almost thought it wasn’t going to come off. But then, after fifteen or twenty seconds like that, the telephone cut off. It was as if a lifeline had snapped in a seizure. After which a vast and empty silence, warmthless as overbleached underwear, was all that remained.

That does it
. I let out another sigh. And I continued with my diary, thinking I’d better just finish logging it in.

Saturday, Hitler’s armored divisions invaded Poland. Dive bombers over Warsaw—

No, that’s not right. That’s not what happened. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was on September 1, 1939. Not yesterday. After dinner yesterday, I went to the movies and saw Meryl Streep in
Sophie’s Choice
. Hitler’s invasion of Poland only figured in the film.

In the film, Meryl Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman, but then in a commuter train she meets this civil engineer played by Robert De Niro, and remarries. A pretty all-right movie.

Sitting next to me was a high-school couple, and they kept touching each other on the tummy the whole time. Not bad at all, your high-school student’s tummy. Even me, time was I used to have a high-school student’s tummy.

O
NCE I’D SQUARED
away the previous week’s worth in my diary, I sat myself down in front of the record rack and picked out some music for a windy Sunday afternoon’s listening. I settled on a Shostakovich cello concerto and a Sly and the Family Stone album, selections that seemed suitable enough for high winds, and I listened to these two records one after the other.

Every so often, things would strafe past the window. A white sheet flying east to west like some sorcerer brewing an elixir of roots and herbs. A long, flimsy tin sign arching its sickly spine like an anal-sex enthusiast.

I was taking in the scene outside to the strains of the Shostakovich cello concerto when again the telephone rang. The alarm clock beside the telephone read 3:48.

I picked up the receiver fully expecting that Boeing 747 jet-engine roar, but this time there was no wind to be heard.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I said, too.

“I was just thinking about heading over with the fixings for the oyster hot pot, okay?” said my girlfriend. She’ll be on her way with groceries and a blindfold.

“Fine by me, but—”

“You have a casserole?”

“Yes, but,” I say, “what gives? I don’t hear that wind anymore.”

“Yeah, the wind’s stopped. Here in Nakano it let up at three twenty-five. So I don’t imagine it’ll be long before it lets up over there.”

“Maybe so,” I said as I hung up the telephone, then took down the casserole from the above-closet storage compartment and washed it in the sink.

Just as she had predicted, the winds stopped, at 4:05 on the dot. I opened the windows and looked around outside. Directly below, a black dog was intently sniffing around at the ground. For fifteen or twenty minutes, the dog kept at it tirelessly. I couldn’t imagine why the dog felt so compelled.