Hear the Wind Sing (2 page)

I stared at the Rat, shocked. “What are you, rich or somethin’?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, that’s great.”

To this, the Rat said nothing, just shaking his head a few times as if unsatisfied. “Still, anyway, we’re lucky.”

“Yep.”

The Rat crushed out his cigarette under the heel of his tennis shoe, throwing the butt towards the monkey cage.

“Say, how about the two of us become a team?

Together, we could do just about anything.”

“What should we do first?”

“Let’s drink beer.”

We went to a nearby vending machine and bought a half-dozen beers, then we walked to the beach. We layed ourselves down on the beach, and when we were finished drinking our beer, we gazed out at the ocean. It was incredibly good weather.

“You can call me ‘Rat,’” he said.

“How’d you get a name like that?”

“I forget. It was a really long time ago. Back then I used to hate being called that, but now I don’t care. For some reason I’ve gotten used to it.”

After we tossed our empty beer cans into the ocean, we leaned against the embankment, putting our duffel coats under our heads as pillows and sleeping for an hour. When I woke up, my body was pulsing with some kind of mysterious energy. It was a really strange feeling.

“I feel like I could run a hundred kilometers,” I told the Rat.

“Me too,” he said.

However, in reality, what we ended up doing was paying off the damage to the park in installments to the municipality over three years.

* * *

The Rat never read books. He never ran his eyes across anything more than the sports pages or his junk mail.

Sometimes, when I’d be killing time by reading a book, he’d peek at me curiously like a fly looking at a flyswatter.

“Why do you read books?”

“Why do you drink beer?”

After eating a mixed mouthful of pickled horse mackerel and vegetable salad, without making eye contact, I asked him again. He thought it over for a long time, but it took him five minutes to open his mouth.

“The good thing about beer is that it all comes out as piss. Like a double play with one out to go, there’s nothing left over.”

Having said that, he watched as I continued to eat.

“Why are you always reading books?”

After washing down my last mouthful of horse mackerel with beer and cleaning my plate, I grabbed the copy of L’Education sentimentale I’d been reading and started flipping through the pages.

“Because Flaubert’s already dead.”

“You don’t read books by living people?”

“Living authors don’t have any merit.”

“Why’s that?”

“Dead authors, as a rule, seem more trusting than live ones.”

I said this as I was watching the rebroadcast of Route 66 on the portable television in the middle of the counter. The Rat thought about my answer for a minute.

“Hey, how about living authors? Aren’t they usually trusting?”

“How should I put this…I haven’t really thought about it like that. When they’re chased into a corner, they might become that way. Probably less trusting.”

J came over and set two cold beers in front of us.

“And if they can’t trust?”

“They fall asleep clutching their pillows.”

The Rat shook his head, looking upset.

“It’s strange, I’ll give you that. Me, I have no idea.”

So said the Rat.

I poured the Rat’s beer into his glass, and with his bottle half-empty he sat there thinking.

“Before this, the last time I’d read a book was last summer,” said the Rat, “I don’t remember who wrote it or what it was about. I forget why I even read it. Anyway, it was written by some woman. The protagonist was this thirty year-old fashion designer girl, and somehow she starts to believe she’s come down with some incurable disease.”

“What kind of disease?”

“I forget. Cancer or something. Is there something more terminal than that? Anyway, she goes to this beach resort and masturbates the whole time. In the bath, in the forest, on her bed, in the ocean, really, all kinds of places.”

“In the ocean?”

“Yeah…can you believe it? Why write a story about that? There’s so much else you could write about.”

“Beats me.”

“Sorry for bringing it up, that’s just how the story went. Made me wanna throw up.”

I nodded.

“If it were me, I’d write a completely different story.”

“For example?”

The Rat ran his finger along the edge of its beer glass as he thought it over.

“How about this? The ship I’m on sinks in the middle of the Pacific.

“I grab a life preserver and look at the stars, floating all alone in the night sea. It’s a quiet, beautiful night. From nearby, clinging to another life preserver like mine, a young girl comes swimming over.”

“Is she cute?”

“Oh yeah.”

I took a swig of beer and nodded.

“It’s a little ridiculous.”

“Hey, listen. So we’re still floating in the ocean together, chatting. Our pasts, our futures, our hobbies, how many girls I’ve slept with, talking about TV shows, what we dreamed about the night before, stuff like that. Then we drink beer together.”

“Hold on a sec, where the hell did you get beer?”

The Rat considered this for a moment.

“It’s floating there. It’s beer in cans, floating over from the ship’s mess hall. Together with the canned sardines. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

“During that time, the sun comes up. ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asks, then adds, ‘I’m going to swim to where I think an island should be.’

“‘But it doesn’t look like there’s any islands. What’s more, if we just float here drinking beer, an airplane will definitely come to rescue us,’ I say. But she goes off swimming by herself.”

The Rat pauses to catch his breath and drink beer.

“For two days and two nights, the girl struggles to make her way to some island. I stay there, drunk for two days, and I’m rescued by an airplane. Some years later, at some bar on the Yamanote, we happen to meet again.”

“And then the two of you drink beer together once again?”

“Sad, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

6

The Rat’s stories always follow two rules: first, there are no sex scenes, and second, not one person dies. Even if you don’t acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That’s just how it is.

* * *

“Do you think I’m wrong?” she asked.

The Rat took a sip of beer and shook his head deliberately. “I’ll just come right out and say it, everybody’s wrong.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Hm,” the Rat grunted and licked his upper lip. He made no effort to respond.

“I thought my arms were going to fall off with how hard I swam to get to that island. It hurt so much I thought I was going to die. Over and over I kept thinking about it. If I’m wrong, then you must be right. I struggled so hard, so why were you able to just float on the ocean’s surface ding nothing?”

When she said this, she laughed a little, looking depressed with her eyes crinkling at the corners. The Rat bashfully dug around randomly in his pocket. For the last three years he’d wanted so much to smoke a cigarette.

“You’d rather I died?”

“Heh, a little.”

“Really? Only a little?”

“I forget.”

The two of them were silent for a moment. The Rat felt compelled to say something.

“Well, some people are just born unlucky.”

“Who said that?”

“John F. Kennedy.”

7

When I was little, I was a terribly quiet child. My parents were worried, so they took me to the house of a psychiatrist they knew.

The psychiatrist’s house was on a plateau overlooking the sea, and while I sat on the waiting room sofa, a well-built middle-aged woman brought me orange juice and two donuts. I ate half a donut, carefully, as if trying not to spill sugar on my knees, and I drank the entire glass of orange juice.

“Do you want some more to drink?” the psychiatrist asked me, and I shook my head. We sat facing each other, just the two of us.

From the wall in front of me, a portrait of Mozart glared at me reproachfully, like a timid cat.

“Once upon a time, there was a kind-hearted goat.”

It was a spectacular way to start a story. I closed my eyes and imagined a kind-hearted goat.

“This goat always had a heavy gold watch hanging around his neck, and he always walked around panting heavily. What’s more, this watch was not only heavy, but it was also broken. One time, his friend the rabbit comes along and says, ‘Hey goat, why are you always lugging around that broken watch? It looks so heavy, don’t you think it’s useless?’

‘It really is heavy,’ said the goat. ‘But, you know, I’ve gotten used to it. Even though it’s heavy, even though it’s broken.’

The psychiatrist paused and took a sip of his own orange juice, then looked at me, grinning. I said nothing, waiting for him to continue his story.

“So one day, it’s the goat’s birthday, and the rabbit brings a small box with a pretty ribbon as a present. It was a shiny, glittering, very light, and yet stillworking new watch. The goat was incredibly happy and hung it around his neck, then went around showing it to everyone.”

The story suddenly ended there.

“You’re the sheep, I’m the rabbit, and the watch is your soul.”

Feeling tricked, all I could do was nod. Once a week, on Sunday afternoon, I rode a train and then a bus to the psychiatrist’s house, eating coffee rolls and apple pies and pancakes and croissants topped with honey while receiving my treatment. It took an entire year, but thanks to all those sweets, I got stuck going to the dentist. With civilization comes communication, he said. Whatever can’t be expressed might as well not exist. Nil, nothing. Suppose you’re hungry. You say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and even that short phrase will suffice. I’ll give you a cookie. You can eat it. (I was now holding a cookie.) If you say nothing, there’s no cookie. (The psychiatrist then hid the plate of cookies under the table with a sadistic look on his face.) Nothing. You get it? You don’t want to talk. But you’re hungry. Without making words, you can’t express your hunger. Here’s a gesture game. Come watch this. I grabbed my stomach like it was hurting. The psychiatrist laughed. I had indigestion.

Indigestion…

After that, the next thing we did was ‘free talking’.

“Tell me about cats. Say whatever pops into your head.”

I pretended to think about it, then shook my head back and forth.

“Anything you can think of.”

“They’re animals with four legs.”

“So are elephants.”

“Cats are much smaller.”

“What else?”

“They live in the house, and they can kill mice if they want.”

“What do they eat?”

“Fish.”

“How about sausage?”

“Sausage, too.”

That’s how it went.

What the psychiatrist said was true. With civilization comes communication. Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization ends. *Click*…OFF.

The spring when I turned 14, an unbelievable thing happened: as if a dam had burst, I suddenly began talking. I don’t really remember what I talked about, but it was like I was making up for lost time, talking non-stop for three months, and when I stopped talking in the middle of July, I came down with a 105

degree fever and missed school for three days. After the fever, I wasn’t completely silent, nor was I a chatterbox; I became a normal teenager.

8

I woke up at six in the morning, probably because I was thirsty. Waking up in someone else’s house, I always feel like I’m in someone else’s body with someone else’s soul stuffed inside. Eventually collecting myself, I rose from the narrow bed, and from the sink next to the door, like a camel, I drank glass after glass of water before returning to bed. From the open window, I could see just a tiny sliver of the ocean. The sunlight glimmered above the tiny waves, and I gazed upon the who-knowshow-many rusty freighters going nowhere in particular. It looked like it was going to be a hot day. All the nearby houses were sleeping quietly, and every once in a while the squeaking of the trains on the rails could be heard, and I thought I detected a faint trace of a radio playing the melody for morning calisthenics.

Still naked, I was leaning against the bed and, after lighting a cigarette, I let my eyes wander over to the girl sleeping next to me. From the southward-facing window, rays of sunlight illuminated the full spread of her body. She was sleeping with her bedsheets pushed down to below her knees. Occasionally, she would struggle when taking a breath, and her wellshaped breasts would jiggle up and down. Her body was well tanned, but over time, the dark color had begun to change, and with the clear tanlines of her swimsuit leaving those areas looking strangely white, she looked like her flesh was decaying.

Ten whole minutes after finishing my cigarette, I made an attempt to remember the girl’s name, but it was useless. First off, I couldn’t even remember if I’d known her name to begin with. I gave up, yawned, then went back to gazing at her body. She was a little younger than twenty, and she was a little on the slim side. I spread out my fingers and measured her from head to toe. She was eight handspans long, with a remainder of a thumb. Somewhere in the

neighborhood of 158 centimeters, I’d say.

Under her right breast was a birthmark the size of a nickel, and on her abdomen a thin happy trail of pubic hair had sprung up like weeds along a river. As an added bonus, she only had four fingers on her left hand.

From then, it was still three whole hours before she woke up. After that, it took her five minutes to become fully cognizant. During that time, I hunched my shoulders together and looked out towards the east, at the thick clouds changing shape over the horizon of the ocean.

A short time later, when I looked back, she had the covers pulled up to her neck. She was struggling with the whiskey vapors rising from the pit of her stomach, staring at me without any expression.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She shook her head just once. I lit a cigarette and tried to offer one to her, but she ignored me.