"How on earth do you manage to survive? You're practically Robinson Crusoe here!"
"No, it's not as much fun as that."
"I should think not."
I shut up and drank my hot tea.
"I'm giving you all this."
I choked on the tea. "You're what?"
"You had to answer so many of my phone calls. This is thanks."
"But what about you, don't you need this stuff?"
She shook her head repeatedly. "I'm moving tomorrow, so I won't be needing anything."
I gave the situation a silent moment's thought, but couldn't imagine what had happened.
"Good news? Bad news?"
"None too good, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to quit school and return to the old homefront."
The roomful of winter sunshine clouded over, then brightened again.
"But that's nothing you want to hear about. I don't even want to hear about it. Who'd want to use dishes from someone who left you with bad feelings, right?"
The next day, a cold rain fell from morning on. A fine rain, but it penetrated my raincoat and got my sweater wet all the same. The rain made everything dark and slick. The oversized trunk I carried, the suitcase she carried, her shoulder bag, everything. The taxi driver even growled, Would we be so kind as to not put the luggage on the seat?
The taxi was stuffy inside from the heater and cigarette smoke, and an old enka ballad crooned out of the car radio. A real oldie from the days of pop-up turn signals. Groves of leafless trees that might have just as well been undersea coral stretched out their damp branches from both sides of the road.
"You know, from the very first sight of it, I never did like the look of Tokyo," she said.
"Really?"
"The soil's too dark, the waterways are polluted, no mountains. How about you?"
"I never paid much attention to the scenery myself."
She let out a sigh and laughed. "You, I just know you're a survivor."
Her luggage safely deposited on the station platform, this was the part where she got to tell me many thanks.
"I can manage it from here, thanks."
"Where you heading?"
"Way up north."
"Cold, I bet."
"It's okay, I'm used to it."
As the train pulled away, she waved from the window. I raised my hand as far as my ear, but by that time the train had gone. I didn't know what to do with it, so I buried the hand in the pocket of my raincoat.
The rain continued on into the night. I bought two bottles of beer at the neighborhood liquor store, and poured myself a drink in one of the glasses I got from her. I felt as if my body was going to freeze clean through to the core. On the glass was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock playing atop the doghouse, and over that, this caption:
HAPPINESS IS A WARM FRIENDSHIP
* * *
I woke up after the twins were sound asleep. Three AM. An unnaturally bright autumn moon shone through the window of the john. I sat down on the edge of the kitchen sink and drank two glasses of tapwater, then lit a cigarette on a burner of the stove. Out on the moonlit golf course, the autumnal droning of the insects overlapped in layers across the turf.
I picked up the switch-panel the twins had stood by the side of the sink, and looked it over. No matter how you turned the thing over, front or back, it was nothing but a meaningless piece of fiberboard. I gave up and put it back where I'd found it, brushed the dust off my hands, took a puff on my cigarette. Everything took on a blue cast in the moonlight. It made everything look worthless, meaningless. I couldn't even be sure of the shadows. I crushed out my cigarette in the sink and immediately lit a second.
I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy consideration, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedoplanes were scrapped thirty years ago.
I went back to bed and snuggled in between the twins. Their bodies, each tracing a gentle curve, their heads facing outward, breathing lightly, asleep. I pulled the blanket over me and stared up at the ceiling.
6
She closed the bathroom door behind her. Presently there was the sound of the shower.
The Rat sat up in bed, unable to collect his thoughts, put a cigarette to his mouth, and looked for his lighter. It wasn't in the pocket of his trousers on the table. Couldn't even find any matches. He rummaged through her purse, but no luck. He had no other choice but to turn on the room light and search through all the desk drawers, at last coming up with an old book of matches bearing the name of some restaurant somewhere.
Over the back of the rattan chair on which she'd laid her neatly folded stockings and underwear was draped a finely tailored dress of a mustard color.
And on the night table, alongside a lady's wristwatch, was a Baggagerie shoulder bag, not new, but well cared for.
The Rat sat himself down in the rattan chair opposite and, cigarette still in his mouth, gazed absently out the window.
From his apartment up in the hills, he could take in the random scatter of human activity enveloped in darkness below. From time to time, the Rat would put his hands on his hips, like a golfer standing at the brink of a downhill course, and fix his attention on the scene for hours on end. The slope was dotted with patches of houselights, sweeping down in a slow descent that began from below his very feet. There were dark clumps of trees, small rises in the land, and here and there the white glare of mercury-vapor lamps gleaming off private pools. Where the slope leveled off, an expressway snaked through; a waistband of light cinched across the earth, and beyond that maybe a mile of flat urban sprawl stretched to the sea. The dark sea, so obscure you couldn't make out the water from the sky. And out of the midst of that darkness would surface the orange glow of the beacon, only to vanish. Through all these distinct strata descended a single dark fairway.
A river.
* * *
The Rat met her for the first time at the beginning of September, when the sky still held a hint of summer's brilliance.
He had been looking through the local newspaper's weekly "White Elephant" corner in the classifieds. There among the toddler's playpens and linguaphones and kiddy bikes, he found an electric typewriter. A woman answered the phone, her voice very businesslike, "Well, yes, it has been used for one year, but it still has a year left on the warranty. Monthly payments not acceptable. Could you come down and pick it up yourself?" The terms settled, the Rat got in his car and headed out to the woman's apartment, paid the money, took the typewriter. The price was almost exactly what he'd earned working at odd jobs over the summer.
Slender and on the small side, the woman wore a pretty little sleeveless dress. A whole array of potted ornamentals of various shapes and colors lined the entryway. Neat, prim face, hair tied back in a bun. Her age? Doubtless he would have agreed with anything between twenty-two and twenty-eight.