“Awful traffic,” I said.
“That it is, but sure as dawn follows night, it’s got to let up sometime.”
“Fair enough, but doesn’t it get on your nerves?”
“Certainly. I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”
“That sounds like a religious interpretation of a traffic jam if there ever was one.”
“I’m a Christian. I don’t go to church, but I’ve always been a Christian.”
“Is that so? Don’t you see any contradiction between being a Christian and being the chauffeur for a major right-wing figure?”
“The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I’ve ever met.”
“You’ve met God?”
“Certainly. I telephone Him every night.”
“Excuse me?” I stammered. Things were starting to jumble up in my head again. “If everyone called God, wouldn’t the lines be busy all the time? Like directory assistance right around noon.”
“No problem there. God is your simultaneous presence. So even if a million people were to telephone Him at once, He’d be able to speak with everyone simultaneously.”
“I’m no expert, but is that an orthodox interpretation? I mean, theologically speaking.”
“I’m something of a radical. That’s why I don’t go to church.”
“I see,” I said.
The limousine advanced fifty yards. I put a cigarette to my lips and was about to light up when I saw I’d been holding the lighter in my hand the whole time. Without realizing it, I’d walked off with the sheep-engraved silver Dupont. It felt molded to my palm as naturally as if I’d been born with it. The balance and feel couldn’t have been better. After a few seconds’ thought, I decided it was mine. Who’s going to miss a lighter or two? I opened and closed the lid a few times, lit up, and put the lighter in my pocket. By way of compensation, I slipped my Bic disposable into the pocket of the door.
“The Boss gave me it a few years ago,” said the chauffeur out of nowhere.
“Gave you what?”
“God’s telephone number.”
I let out a groan so loud it drowned out everything else. Either I was going crazy or they were all Looney Tunes.
“He told just you, alone, in secret?”
“Yes. Just me, in secret. He’s a fine gentleman. Would you care to get to know Him?”
“If possible,” I said.
“Well, then, it’s Tokyo 9-4-5-…”
“Just a second,” I said, pulling out my notebook and pen. “But do you really think it’s all right, telling me like this?”
“Sure, it’s all right. I don’t go telling just anyone. And you seem like a good person.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “But what should I talk to God about? I’m not Christian or anything.”
“No problem there. All you have to do is to speak honestly about whatever concerns you or troubles you. No matter how trivial you might think it is. God never gets bored and never laughs at you.”
“Thanks. I’ll give him a call.”
“That’s the spirit,” said the chauffeur.
Traffic began to flow smoothly as the Shinjuku skyscrapers came into view. We didn’t speak the rest of the way there.
Summer’s End, Autumn’s Beginning
By the time the limousine reached its destination, a pale indigo dusk had spread over the city. A brisk wind blew between the buildings bearing tidings of summer’s end, rustling the skirts of women on their way home from work.
I went to the top of a high-rise hotel, entered the spacious bar, and ordered a Heineken. It took ten minutes for the beer to come. Meanwhile, I planted an elbow on the armrest of my chair, rested my head on my hand, and shut my eyes. Nothing came to mind. With my eyes closed, I could hear hundreds of elves sweeping out my head with their tiny brooms. They kept sweeping and sweeping. It never occurred to any of them to use a dustpan.
When the beer finally arrived, I downed it in two gulps. Then I ate the whole dish of peanuts that came with it. The sweeping had all but stopped.
I went over to the telephone booth by the register and tried calling my girlfriend, her with the gorgeous ears. But she wasn’t at her place and she wasn’t at mine. She’d probably stepped out to eat. She never ate at home.
Next I tried my ex-wife. I reconsidered and hung up after the second ring. I didn’t have anything to say to her after all, and I didn’t want to come off like a jerk.
After them, there was no one to call. Smack in the middle of a city with a million people out roaming the streets, and no one to talk to. I gave up, pocketed the ten-yen coin, and exited the booth. Then I put in an order with a passing waiter for two more Heinekens.
And so the day came to an end. I could hardly have spent a more pointless day. The last day of summer, and what good had it been? Outside, an early autumn darkness had come over everything. Strings of tiny yellow streetlamps threaded everywhere below. Seen from up here, they looked ready to be trampled on.
The beer came. I polished off the one, then dumped the dish of peanuts into the palm of my hand and proceeded to eat them, bit by bit. Four middle-aged women, finished with swimming lessons at the hotel pool, sat at the next table chatting over colorful tropical cocktails. A waiter stood by, rigidly upright, crooking his neck to yawn. Another waiter explained the menu to a middle-aged American couple. After the peanuts, I moved on to my third Heineken. After it was gone, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
I fished the envelope out of the hip pocket of my Levi’s, tore open the seal, and started to count the stack of ten-thousand-yen notes. It looked more like a deck of cards than a bound packet of new bills. Halfway through, my fingers began to tire. At ninety-six, an elderly waiter came to clear away my empty bottles, asking whether to bring another. I nodded as I continued counting. He seemed totally uninterested in what I was doing.
There were one hundred and fifty bills. I stuck them back into the envelope and shoved it back into my hip pocket just as the new beer came. Again I ate the whole dish of peanuts, and only then did it occur to me that I was hungry. But why was I so hungry? I’d only eaten one slice of fruitcake since morning.
I called the waiter, ordered a cheese and cucumber sandwich. Hold the chips, double the pickles. Might they have nail clippers? Of course, they did. Hotel bars truly have everything you could ever want. One place even had a French-Japanese dictionary when I needed it.
I took my time with this beer, took a long took at the night scenery, took my time trimming my nails over the ashtray. I looked back at the scenery, then I filed my nails. And so on into the night. I’m well on the way to veteran class when it comes to killing time in the city.
A built-in ceiling speaker called my name. At first it didn’t sound like my name. Only a few seconds after the announcement was over did it sink in that I’d heard the special characteristics of my name, and only gradually then did it come to me that my name was my name.
The waiter brought a cordless transceiver-phone over to the table.
“There has been a small change in plans,” said the voice I knew from somewhere. “The Boss’s condition has taken a sudden turn for the worse. There is not much time left, I fear. So we are curtailing your time limit.”
“To how long?”
“One month. We cannot wait any longer. If after one month you have not found that sheep, you are finished. You will have nowhere to go back to.”
One month. I thought it over. But my head was beyond dealing with concepts of time. One month, two months, was there any real difference? And who had any idea, any standard, of how much time it should take to find one sheep in the first place? “How did you know to find me here?” I asked.
“We are on top of most things,” said the man.
“Except the whereabouts of one sheep,” I said.
“Exactly,” said the man. “Anyway, get on it,
you waste too much time. You should take good account of where you now stand. You have only yourself to blame for driving yourself into that corner.”
He had a point. I used the first ten-thousand-yen note out of the envelope to pay the check. Down on the ground, people were still walking about on two legs, but the sight no longer gave me much relief.
One in Five Thousand
Returning to my apartment from the hotel bar, I found three pieces of mail together with the evening paper in my mailbox. A balance statement from my bank, an invitation to what promised to be a dud of a party, and a direct-mail flyer from a used-car dealership. The copy read: “BRIGHTEN UP YOUR LIFE—MOVE UP TO A CLASSY CAR.” Thanks, but no thanks. I put all three envelopes together and tore them in half.
I took some juice out of the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table with it. On the table was a note from my girlfriend: “Gone out to eat. Back by 9:30.” The digital clock on the table read 9:30. I watched it flip over to 9:31, then to 9:32.
When I got bored with watching the clock, I got out of my clothes, took a shower, and washed my hair. There were four types of shampoo and three types of hair rinse in the bathroom. Every time she went to the supermarket, she stocked up on something. Step into the bathroom and there was bound to be a new item. I counted four kinds of shaving cream and five tubes of toothpaste. Quite an inventory. Out of the shower, I changed into jogging shorts and a T-shirt. Gone was the grime of one bizarre day. At last I felt refreshed.
At 10:20 she returned with a shopping bag from the supermarket. In the bag were three scrub brushes, one box of paperclips, and a well-chilled six-pack of canned beer. So I had another beer.
“It was about sheep,” I said.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she said.
I took some sausages out of the refrigerator, browned them in a frying pan, and served them up for us to eat. I ate three and she ate two. A cool breeze blew in through the kitchen window.
I told her about what happened at the office, told her about the limo ride, the estate, the steely-eyed secretary, the blood cyst, and the heavyset sheep with the star on its back. I was talking forever. By the time I’d finished talking, it was eleven o’clock.
All that said and done, she didn’t seem taken aback in the least. She’d cleaned her ears the whole time she listened, yawning occasionally.
“So when do you leave?”
“Leave?”
“You have to find the sheep, don’t you?”
I looked up at her, the pull-ring of my second beer still on my finger. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“But you’ll be in a lot of trouble if you don’t.”
“No special trouble. I was planning on quitting the company anyway. I’ll always be able to find enough work to get by, no matter who interferes. They’re not about to kill me. Really!”
She pulled a new cotton swab out of the box and fingered it awhile. “But it’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is find one sheep, right? It’ll be fun.”
“Nobody’s going to find anything. Hokkaido’s a whole lot bigger than you think. And sheep—there’ve got to be hundreds of thousands of them. How are you going to search out one single sheep? It’s impossible. Even if the sheep’s got a star marked on its back.”
“Make that five thousand sheep.”
“Five thousand?”
“The number of sheep in Hokkaido. In 1947, there were two hundred seventy thousand sheep in Hokkaido, but now there are only five thousand.”
“How is it you know something like that?”
“After you left, I went to the library and checked it out.”
I heaved a sigh. “You know everything, don’t you?”
“Not really. There’s lot more that I don’t know.”
I snorted, then opened the second beer and split it between us.
“In any case, there are only five thousand sheep in Hokkaido. According to government surveys. How about it? Aren’t you even a little relieved?”
“It’s all the same,” I said. “Five thousand sheep, two hundred seventy thousand sheep, it’s not going to make much difference. The problem is still finding one lone sheep in that vast landscape. On top of which, we haven’t a lead to go on.”
“It’s not true we don’t have a lead. First, there’s the photograph, then there’s your friend up there, right? You’re bound to find out something one way or another.”
“Both are awfully vague as leads go. The landscape in the photograph is absolutely too ordinary, and you can’t even read the postmark on the Rat’s letter!”
She drank her beer. I drank my beer.
“Don’t you like sheep?” she asked.
“I like sheep well enough.”
I was starting to get confused again.
“Besides,” I went on, “I’ve already made up my mind. Not to go, I mean.” I meant to convince myself, but the words didn’t come out right.
“How about some coffee?”
“Good idea,” I said.
She cleared away the beer cans and glasses and put the kettle on. Then while waiting for the water to boil, she listened to a cassette in the other room. Johnny Rivers singing “Midnight Special” followed by “Roll Over Beethoven.” Then “Secret Agent Man.” When the kettle whistled, she made the coffee, singing along with “Johnny B. Goode.” The whole while I read the evening paper. A charming domestic scene. If not for the matter of the sheep, I might have been very happy.
As the tape wound on, we drank our coffee and nibbled on a few crackers in silence. I went back to the evening paper. When I finished it, I began reading it again. Here a coup d’état, there a film actor dying, elsewhere a cat who does tricks—nothing much that related to me. It didn’t matter to Johnny Rivers, who kept right on singing. When the tape ended, I folded up the paper and looked over at her.
“I can’t figure it out. You’re probably right that it’s better to do something than nothing. Even if it’s futile in the end, at least we looked for the sheep. On the other hand, I don’t like being ordered and threatened and pushed around.”
“To a greater or lesser extent, everybody’s always being ordered and threatened and pushed around. There may not be anything better we could hope for.”
“Maybe not,” I said, after a moment’s pause.
She said nothing and started to clean her ears again. From time to time, her fleshy earlobes showed through the long strands of hair.
“It’s beautiful right now in Hokkaido. Not many tourists, nice weather. What’s more, the sheep’ll all be out and about. The ideal season.”
“I guess.”
“If,” she began, crunching on the last cracker, “if you wanted to take me along, I’d surely be a help.”
“Why are you so stuck on this sheep hunt?”
“Because I’d like to see that sheep myself.”
“But why should I go breaking my back over this one lousy sheep? And then drag you into this mess on top of it?”
“I don’t mind. Your mess is my mess,” she said, with a cute little smile. “I’ve got this thing about you.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s all you can say?”
I pushed the newspaper over to a corner of the table. The slight breeze coming in through the window wafted my cigarette smoke off somewhere.
“To be honest, there’s something about this whole business that doesn’t sit right with me. There’s a hook somewhere.”
“Like what?”
“Like everything but everything,” I said. “The whole thing’s so damn stupid, yet everything has a painful clarity to it, and the picture all fits together perfectly. Not a good feeling at all.”
She paused a second, picked up a rubber band from the table, and started playing with it.
“But isn’t that friend of yours already up to his neck in trouble? If not, why would he have gone out of his way to send you that photo?”
She had me there. I’d laid all my cards out on the tab
le, and they’d all been trumped. She’d seen straight through me.
“I really think it has to be done. We’ll find that sheep, you’ll see,” she said, grinning.
She finished her ear-cleaning ritual and wrapped up the cotton swabs in a tissue to throw away. Then she picked up a rubber band and tied her hair back behind her ears.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said.
Sunday Afternoon Picnic
I woke up at nine in an empty bed. No note. Only her handkerchief and underwear drying by the washbasin. Probably gone out to eat, I guessed, then to her place.
I got orange juice out of the refrigerator and popped three-day-old bread into the toaster. It tasted like wall plaster.
Through the kitchen window I could see the neighbor’s oleander. Far off, someone was practicing piano. It sounded like tripping down an up escalator. On a telephone pole, three plump pigeons burbled mindlessly away. Something had to be on their mind to be going on like that, maybe the pain from corns on their feet, who knows? From the pigeons’ point of view, probably it was I who looked mindless.
As I stuffed the second piece of toast down my gullet, the pigeons disappeared, leaving only the telephone pole and the oleander.
It was Sunday morning. The newspaper’s weekend section included a color photo of a horse jumping a hedge. Astride the horse, an ill-complexioned rider in a black cap casting a baleful glare at the next page, which featured a lengthy description of what to do and what not to do in orchid cultivation. There were hundreds of varieties of orchids, each with a history of its own. Royalty had been known to die for the sake of orchids. Orchids had an ineffable aura of fatalism. And on the article went. To all things, philosophy and fate.
Now that I’d made up my mind to go off in search of the sheep, I was charged up and raring to go. It was the first time I’d felt like this since I’d crossed the great divide of my twentieth year. I piled the dishes into the sink, gave the cat his breakfast, then dialed the number of the man in the black suit. After six rings he answered.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.