He looks around at the golden screen, the stylized snowflakes, the single iris in a vase below a drawing of a deer, the paper wall. The only sound is the breathing of a humidifier behind him, and, despite the purity of the room, the view, no one has bothered to remove from its surface the sticker DAINICHI RELIABILITY. Before him: the warped view of the garden. He starts back in recognition. Here it is.
They must have based the miniature garden of his childhood on this four-hundred-year-old garden, because it is not merely a similar garden; it is the very garden: the mossy stone path beside shaggy bamboo, wandering, as in a fairy tale, off into the dark distant pines of a mountain where mysteries await (this is an illusion, because Less knows perfectly well that what awaits is an HVAC system). The movement in the grass that could be a river, the bits of old stone that could be the steps of a temple. The bamboo fountain filling and tipping its water into the stone pool—the same, all precisely the same. The wind moves; the pines move; the leaves of the bamboo move; and, like a flag in the same wind, the memory of this garden moves within Arthur Less. He remembers that he did indeed find a key (steel, belonging to the lawn mower shed) but never the door. It was always an absurd childish fantasy that he would. Forty-five years have passed, during which he forgot all about it. But here it is.
From behind him comes the girl’s sniffle; again, she struggles with the door as if with the stone of a tomb. He doesn’t dare look back. At last she conquers it and appears by his side with green tea and a brown lacquered basket. She produces a worn card and reads aloud from it: English, apparently, but it makes as much sense as someone talking in a dream. He does not need a translation, anyway; it is his old pal butter bean. Then she smiles and departs. Another wrestling match with the door.
He takes careful notes of what is on his plate. But he cannot taste it. Why have these memories been brought out again, here in Japan—the orange scarf, the garden—like a yard sale of his life? Has he lost his mind, or is everything a reflection? The butter bean, the mugwort, the scarf, the garden; is this not a window but a mirror? Two birds are quarreling in the fountain. Again, as he did as a boy, he can only look on. He closes his eyes and begins to cry.
He hears the girl struggling again with the door but does not hear it open. Here comes the mugwort.
“Mr. Less,” comes a male voice from behind him—from behind the door, in fact, he realizes when he turns around. Less kneels down close to it, and the voice says: “Mr. Less, we are so sorry.”
“Yes, I know!” Less says loudly. “I am too early for the cherry blossoms!”
A cleared throat. “Yes, and also, also…We are so sorry. This door is four hundred years old, and it is stuck. We have tried.” A long silence behind the door. “It is impossible to open.”
“Impossible?”
“We are so sorry.”
“Let’s think for a minute—”
“We have tried everything.”
“I can’t be trapped in here.”
“Mr. Less,” comes the male voice again, muffled by the door. “We have an idea.”
“I’m all ears.”
“It is this.” A whispered exchange in Japanese, followed by another clearing of the throat. “That you break the wall.”
Less opens his eyes and looks at the latticed paper wall. They might as well be asking him to leave a space capsule. “I can’t.”
“They are simple to repair. Please, Mr. Less. If you could break the wall.”
He feels old; he feels alone; he feels unpoplar. In the garden: a cluster of small birds passes like a school of colorless fish, darting back and forth before the window of this aquarium (in which it is Less who is contained, and not the birds), disappearing at last to the east with one stately gesture, and then—because life is comedy—there appears one final bird, scrambling across the sky to catch up with his mates.
“Please, Mr. Less.”
Says the bravest person I know: “I can’t.”
It was around seven in the morning not long ago that your narrator had a vision of Arthur Less.
I was awakened by a mosquito who had, impressively, made her way past a fortress of fuming coils, electric fans, and permethrin-coated netting to settle inside my ear. I thank that mosquito every hour. If she (for humans are only hunted by females) had not been so skilled an intruder, I think I never would have seen it. Life is so often made by chance. That mosquito: she gave her life for me; I killed her with one smack of my palm. The South Pacific made a quiet rumble from the open window, and the sleeper beside me made a similar sound.
Sunrise. We had arrived at the hotel in the dark, but gradually, light began to reveal that our room was covered on three sides by windows; I realized the house was set out in the ocean itself, like a thrust stage, and that the view from every window was of the water and the sky. I watched as they took on shades of iris and myrtle, sapphire and jade, until all around me, in sea and sky alike, I recognized a particular shade of blue. And I understood that I would never see Arthur Less again.
Not in the way I had; not in the casual sprawl of all those years. It was as if I had been informed of his death. So many times I had left his house and closed the door, and now, carelessly, I had locked it behind me. Married—it seemed instantly so stupid of me. Around me everywhere, that shade of Lessian blue. We would run into each other now, of course, on the street or at a party somewhere, and maybe even get a drink together, but it would be having a drink with a ghost. Arthur Less. It could never be anyone else. From somewhere high above the earth, I began a plummeting descent. There was no air to breathe. The world was rushing in to fill the void where Arthur Less had always been. I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there. Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it’s gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid. Arthur Less, who was supposed to remain in that bed forever, now on a trip around the world—and who knows where he might be? Lost to me. I started shaking. It seemed so long ago I had seen him at that party, looking like a man lost in Grand Central Station, that crown prince of innocence. Watching him only a moment before my father introduced me: “Arthur, you remember my son, Freddy.”
I sat upright in bed for a long time, shivering, though it was warm in Tahiti. Shivering, shaking; I suppose it was what you would call an attack of something or other. From behind me, I heard rustling and then a stillness.
Then I heard his voice, my new husband, Tom, who loved me, and therefore saw everything:
“I really wish you weren’t crying right now.”
And he is standing up within his paper room, our brave protagonist. He stands very still, fists clenched. Who knows what is raging through that queer head of his? They seem to echo now, the birds, the wind, the fountain, as if coming from the end of a long tunnel. He turns from the garden, which moves fluidly behind the ancient glass, and faces the paper wall. Here, he supposes, is the door. Not into the garden at all, but out of it. Nothing more than sticks and paper. Any other man could break it with a blow. How old is it? Has it ever seen a snowflake? Of all the absurdities of this trip, perhaps this is the most absurd—to be afraid of this. With one hand, he reaches out to touch the rough paper. The sunlight glows brighter behind it, making the shadow of a tree branch more distinct upon its surface—the Persian silk tree he climbed as a boy? There is no returning there. Or to the beach on a warm San Francisco day. Or to his bedroom and a good-bye kiss. In this room, everything is reflecting, but here is just the blank white wall of the future, on which anything might be written. Some new mortification, some new ridicule, surely. Some new joke to play on old Arthur Less. Why go there? And yet, despite everything, beyond it—who knows what miracle still awaits? Picture him lifting his fists above his head and, now with unconcealed pleasure, laughing, even, with ringing madness and a kind of crazed ecstasy, bringing them down with a splintering noise…