“I didn’t really get a clear sense of how many there were,” I said. “The first time, when I got my head stuck between the rocks and was fading fast, I remember feeling as if I was somehow going to be magically transformed into a dace. And if that had happened, I thought, then I-as-fish would be looking back at the human me.”
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense. If you had drowned on that day, then the you who was peeping at the school of fish would no longer exist in this dimension at all.”
“You’re right,” I said dreamily. “I’m the old man who wasn’t able to become one of those fish (however many there may have been) swimming eternally in the bluish-green light of the grotto beyond the crack in the rocks.”
“Speaking of drowning,” Masao said. “You mentioned that you had never been able to imagine what it was like for your father — who was twenty years younger than you are now, at least — when he set out on the overflowing river, propelled by the powerful current, and was carried far downstream, where his lifeless body ended up rising and falling on the riverbed.”
“True,” I said. “And I can’t help thinking my father’s drowned body must have been moving exactly like one of those fish.” My eyes were suddenly wet in a way that had nothing to do with swimming in the river.
Masao paid no attention to my momentary lapse into grief. “Unaiko got mad at me when I told her I was planning to drag your old bones down here,” he remarked, speaking in a rather disrespectful manner. Along with the contrast between my elderly shoulders and his strong brown torso (we were both submerged in the river up to our sternums), his cocky tone seemed like a brutally explicit reminder of the difference in our ages. “She was worried you might catch a cold, or worse, from being in the water for such a long time.”
Masao turned around and looked downstream, where two concrete bridges — one old, one new — were suspended side by side. Atop the older of the two bridges (long since retired from active duty because it couldn’t handle the increased traffic) two women were wildly windmilling their arms in greeting. I immediately recognized one of them as Unaiko.
“Shall we head back now?” Masao said.
He and I let go of the rock we’d been clinging to, and after allowing the current to gently push us into place we commenced swimming, using the usual crawl stroke. Evidently showing off for the women — who continued to wave energetically in our direction and whom he could see every time he raised his head to take a breath — Masao made a visible effort to open up a lead on me. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it, so I redoubled my own efforts.
In my childhood, we used to make our way home by riding the vigorous current that rippled out from the deep water next to Myoto Rock and then climbing up the cliff next to the road along the river, but Masao kept heading diagonally toward the shore until the water became so shallow that we had to stop swimming. By the time we both stood up on the sandy gravel of the river bottom, with the water barely covering our knees, we must have swum at least 150 meters. I didn’t think about it until afterward, but I was no longer in shape for serious competitive swimming and the long burst of intense exertion clearly took a toll on my body.
We made our way onto the riverbank where we had left our things, and as we were drying off with the towels we’d brought, I couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about the prospect of having Unaiko observe my legs, which were quivering with exhaustion. But when I glanced at the bridge after Masao and I had finished throwing on our clothes, I saw that she and her companion had been engulfed in a gaggle of junior high students on their way home from school, and the two older women were focused on dealing with their clamorous admirers. There was no way I was going to climb up to the bridge in my bedraggled state with an audience of teenage girls, so I stood at the mouth of the river with Masao, chatting desultorily.
“In the autumn of last year,” he said, “there were masses of glorious red flowers on the slope below what’s left of the chestnut groves, and it occurred to me that they must be the red spider lilies you’ve written about.”
“Right, that’s where they harvest the bulbs of the red spider lilies — if anyone’s even doing those old-fashioned jobs these days. When those long-stemmed flowers are in full, extravagant bloom, with their delicate stamens and pistils bursting forth from inside the curvaceous outer petals of the bright red flowers, they almost look like fireworks. The entire slope becomes a sea of scarlet, and it’s really something to behold.”
“Oh, I know,” Masao agreed. “I was thinking last fall that if someone with entrepreneurial inclinations came across a field of these flowers they would naturally see the business possibilities and think, Ka-ching! I mean, there’s always a market for cut flowers. And then it occurred to me that when the young soldiers who were here during the war saw this slope in full bloom they might have thought it was on fire, like a great wave of flames blanketing the entire hillside.”
I really didn’t feel like getting into a discussion of the young officers — a subject to which Masao appeared to have given a great deal of thought. When I didn’t respond, he started talking about Unaiko’s throng of admirers.
“Unaiko has tons of fans around here,” he said. “Not only those girls you see on the bridge, but high school girls from the neighboring towns as well. Her master plan is to use the kids as conduits to reach their parents; that’s why she’s making such an effort to cultivate friendly relations with the young students. She’s thinking way beyond the theatrical aspect and is hoping to exploit these relationships for a higher purpose: to advance some of the social issues she cares about.”
I nodded, but I had something else on my mind. “Our swim seems to have taken rather a lot out of me,” I said. “Would you mind bringing the car around to the foot of the bridge? I mean, assuming Unaiko and her friend came down in the car.”
For the first time, Masao seemed to notice that I was in a state of complete exhaustion. However, it turned out Unaiko, too, had come on foot, so I wearily showed Masao an old shortcut back to the Forest House, by way of an iron ladder located a short ways upstream.
4
I turned in unusually early that night and awakened abruptly long before dawn. Even during the last stages of slumber, I was already in the throes of a panic that was distinctly physical as opposed to psychosomatic. Then something bizarre appeared in my darkly dreaming mind: a sort of emblem of entropy, a shapeless shape and formless form whose entire raison d’être seemed to be to disintegrate and crumble into nothingness. The force of the breakdown came as a massive shock to my system, but the part of my brain that should have registered the blow was strangely silent. Still vaguely dream-dazed and half asleep, I switched on the bedside lamp.
A startling sight met my newly opened eyes. A rough-edged, angular black disk, something like a dinged-up flying saucer, appeared to be lodged in the juncture where the bookcase met the sloping ceiling. The disk began to rotate sharply to the right, gaining power and momentum as it moved, and then it suddenly seemed to collapse with a thud. (I knew I was imagining the sound effects, but that didn’t make the sensation any less vivid.)
Instinctively, I closed my eyes. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, but I know what’s happening, I thought. I’m being attacked by a monstrous dizzy spell. When I opened my eyes again, the same thing happened: I saw the whirling-disk apparition, and then it tipped over to the right and dissolved roughly into nothingness.