When four o'clock rolled around I wrapped things up, handed over my day's worth of translations to the girl, and left the office. I decided to wear the lightweight raincoat I made a habit of keeping at the office so as not to carry around an umbrella. At the station I bought an evening paper, and was jostled about the better part of an hour in a crowded train. Even the inside of the train smelled like rain, but so far not a single drop had fallen.
It wasn't until I'd finished shopping for dinner at the supermarket by the station that it finally began to rain. Little by little, misty fine droplets you could hardly see turned the pavement at my feet rain-gray. After checking the bus schedule, I dodged into a nearby coffee shop and ordered a coffee. The place was crowded, and everything smelled once and for all like real rain. The blouse the waitress was wearing, the coffee, everything.
As the streetlamps around the bus terminal began to flicker on in the twilight, buses slid back and forth between the lights like giant trout navigating a current. Each bus filled with commuter types and students and housewives; each disappeared into the gloom. A middle-aged woman dragged the dark shape of a German shepherd past the window. School kids went by bouncing a rubber ball. I put out my fifth cigarette, and took one last sip of cold coffee.
Then I took a good, hard look at my reflection in the glass. Maybe it was the fever, but my eyes looked shot. Well okay, we'll disregard that. A five-thirty shadow darkened my face. What say we let that pass, too. The point is, it didn't even look like my face. It was the face of any twenty-four-year-old guy who might have been sitting across the way on the commuter train. My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street – what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya! That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.
Maybe if I put gardenias in both ears, or wore flippers over both hands, somebody might take a second look. But that'd be it. They'd put it all behind them after three steps. Their eyes not looking at anything. Nor my eyes. I felt emptied out, a blank. Would I ever again have anything to give to anyone?
* * *
The twins were waiting for me.
I handed over the brown-paper supermarket bag to one or the other of them, then went and took a shower, a lit cigarette still in my mouth. I didn't even soap up; I just let the stream of water beat down on me while I gazed absently at the tiles. Some flickering movement passed over the wall before my eyes, and was gone. The shadow of something I could neither touch nor bring back.
I stepped from the bathroom right into the bedroom and toweled myself dry before tumbling into bed. The sheets were freshly washed, coral blue, not a wrinkle on them. As I lay there looking up at the ceiling, the events of the day played back in my head. The whole while the twins were busy slicing vegetables, sauteing meat, and cooking rice.
"How about a beer?" one of them asked me.
"Guh."
And the twin wearing the 208 sweatshirt brought a beer and a glass.
"Some music?"
"Would be nice."
She pulled Handel's Recorder Sonatas out of the record rack, put it on the player, and lowered the needle. A Valentine's Day present from a girlfriend a good many years before. The sound of sauteing meat came through the recorder, violin, and cello like a continuous undertone. My girlfriend and I had often had sex to this record. Even after the record ended, what did we care that the needle was scratching on and on, revolution after revolution? We would still be going at it.
Outside the window, rain was falling noiselessly over the dark golf course. I finished my beer, and by the time Hans-Martin Linde played the last note of the Sonata in F Major, dinner was ready. The three of us were unusually quiet over the meal that night. By then the record had ended, so other than the patter of rain on the eaves, and the sound of three sets of jaws chewing meat, the room was silent. When we were through, the twins cleared the table, and the two of them stood around in the kitchen brewing coffee. Then the three of us drank our hot coffee. Brimming with the aroma of life, that coffee was. One of them got up to put on a record. It was the Beatles' "Rubber Soul."
"Hey, I don't remember buying that record," I blurted out in surprise.
"We bought it."
"Little by little we saved up the money you gave us.
I just shook my head.
"You don't like the Beatles?"
Silence.
"What a shame. And we thought you'd be pleased."
"Sorry."
One of them got up, took the record off, and lovingly brushed off the least speck of dust before slipping it back into its jacket. All the while, none of us spoke a word. Then I let out a sigh.
"I didn't mean it that way," I explained. "I'm just a little tired and irritable. Let's give it another listen."
The two of them looked at each other and broke into a chuckle.
"Don't put yourself out now. It's your house after all."
"No, really, you don't have to put up with it on our account."
"Let's give it another listen."
So we ended up listening to both sides of "Rubber Soul" over coffee. And I managed to loosen up a bit. The twins seemed in particularly good spirits.
After we finished our coffee, the twins took my temperature. Back and forth, the two of them grimaced at the thermometer. One hundred one degrees. Up a degree since morning. I felt light-headed.
"Taking showers like that, worst thing for you."
"You ought to get some sleep."
They were perfectly right, of course. I got undressed and climbed into bed with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of cigarettes. The blanket somehow smelled of the sunny outdoors. Kant was as brilliant as ever, but the cigarettes tasted like damp newspaper lit from a gas burner. I closed the book, and was half-listening to the twins' voices, with eyes closed, when the darkness dragged me under.
8
The cemetery occupied a good spread near the top of the hill. Narrow gravel walkways crisscrossed between the graves, and close-cropped azalea bushes stood about here and there like grazing sheep. A row or two of mercury-vapor lamps, peering down over the expanse, arched up like overgrown fiddleheads, casting an unnatural white light into every corner of the grounds.
The Rat stopped the car in the woods at the southeast corner of the cemetery and surveyed the night streets below, his arm around her shoulder. All those lights. The whole town looked to have been cast in a single sheet, still glowing warm in the mold. Either that, or a giant moth had just sprinkled its golden dust all over the place.
Dreamily she closed her eyes and pressed against the Rat. From his shoulder on down, the Rat felt the supple weight of her body. An odd sensation, that weight. This being that could love a man, bear children, grow old, and die; to think one whole existence was in this weight. The Rat took a cigarette from his pack and lit up. Every once in a while a sea breeze would sweep up the slope from below and rustle the pine trees. Maybe she had really fallen asleep. The Rat put his hand to her cheek, then touched a fingertip to her lips. He felt her breath, warm and humid.