The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (43 page)

Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. How come you don’t get it?

I fell asleep a few times and woke up just as often. These were short, unsettled snatches of sleep, as on an airplane. Whenever deep sleep was about to arrive, I would shrink back and wake up; whenever full wakefulness was about to arrive, I would drift off into sleep, in endless repetition. Without changes in the light, time wobbled by like a wagon with a loose axle. My cramped, unnatural posture robbed my body of rest in small, accumulating doses. Each time I woke, I would check the time on my watch. Its pace was heavy and uneven.

With nothing better to do, I would pick up the flashlight and shine it at random—at the ground, at the walls, at the well cover. What I found there was always the same ground, the same walls, the same well cover. The shadows cast by the moving beam would sway, stretch and shrink, swell and contract. When I tired of this, I would spend time feeling my face, probing every line and crevice, examining my features anew to learn their shape. I had never been seriously concerned about the shape of my ears before this. If someone had told me to draw a picture of my own ears—even a rough sketch—I would have been at a loss. Now, though, I would have been able to reproduce every hollow and curve in accurate detail. I found it odd how different the ears were. I had no idea how this had come about or what effect this lack of symmetry might have (it probably had some effect).

The hands of my watch showed seven twenty-eight. I must have looked at my watch some two thousand times since coming down here. Now it was seven twenty-eight at night, that much was certain; at a ball game, it would be the bottom of the third or the top of the fourth. When I was a kid, I used to like to sit up high in the outfield stands and watch the summer day trying not to end. The sun had sunk below the western horizon, but the afterglow was still brilliant and beautiful. The stadium lights stretched their long shadows across the field as if to hint at something. First one and then another light would be turned on with the utmost caution shortly after the game got going. Still, there was enough light in the sky to read a newspaper by. The memory of the long day’s glow remained at the door to keep the summer night from entering.

With patience and persistence, though, the artificial illumination was winning its quiet victory over the light of the sun, bringing forth a flood of festive colors. The brilliant green of the playing field, the handsome black earth, the straight white lines newly drawn upon it, the glinting varnish on the bats of players waiting for their turn at the plate, the cigarette smoke floating in the beams of light (looking, on windless days, like souls wandering in search of someone to take them in)—all these would begin to show up with tremendous clarity. The young beer sellers would hold their hands up in the light, flashing bills tucked between their fingers. The crowd would rise from their seats to follow the path of a high fly ball, their voices rising with its arc or dissolving into a sigh. Small flocks of birds returning to their roosts would fly past toward the sea. This was the stadium at seven-thirty in the evening.

I thought about the baseball games I had seen over the years. The Saint Louis Cardinals had come to Japan once, when I was little, for a friendship game. I had seen that one with my father from an infield seat. Before the game itself, the Cardinals players stood along the perimeter of the field with baskets full of autographed tennis balls, throwing them into the stands as fast as they could. People went crazy trying to grab a ball for themselves, but I just stayed in my seat without moving, and before I knew it, I had a ball in my lap. It was a magical happening: strange and sudden.

I looked at my watch again. Seven thirty-six. Eight minutes had gone by since the last look. Just eight minutes. I took the watch off and held it against my ear. It was ticking away just fine. I shrugged my shoulders in the darkness. Something strange was happening to my sense of time. I decided not to look at my watch for a while. Maybe I didn’t have anything
else to do, but it wasn’t healthy to be looking at a watch this often. I had to make a tremendous effort to keep myself from looking, though. The pain was like what I had felt when I quit smoking. From the moment I decided to give up thinking about time, my mind could think of nothing else. It was a kind of contradiction, a schizoid split. The more I tried to forget about time, the more I was compelled to think about it. Before I knew it, my eyes would be seeking out the watch on my left wrist. Whenever this happened, I would avert my face, close my eyes, and struggle not to look. I ended up taking the watch off and stuffing it into my knapsack. Even so, my mind went on groping for the watch inside the pack, where it continued to tick off the time.

And so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. Once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will. Within this kind of time, I slept and woke and slept and woke, and became slowly and increasingly accustomed to life without timepieces. I trained my body to realize that I no longer needed time. But soon I was feeling tremendous anxiety. True, I had been liberated from the nervous habit of checking my watch every five minutes, but once the frame of reference of time faded completely away, I began to feel as if I had been flung into the ocean at night from the deck of a moving ship. No one noticed my screams, and the boat continued its forward advance, moving farther and farther away until it was about to fade from view.

Abandoning the effort, I took the watch from the knapsack and returned it to my wrist. The hands were pointing to six-fifteen. Probably six-fifteen a.m. The last time I had looked at my watch, it had been seven thirty-six. Seven thirty-six at night. It seemed reasonable to conclude that eleven hours had gone by since then. It could hardly have been twenty-three hours. But I could not be sure. What was the essential difference between eleven hours and twenty-three hours? Whichever it was—eleven or twenty-three—my hunger had become far more intense. The sensation was nothing like what I had vaguely imagined an intense hunger to be. I had assumed that hunger would be a feeling of absence. Instead, it was closer to pure physical pain—utterly physical and utterly direct, like being stabbed or throttled. And the pain was uneven. It lacked consistency. It would rise like a swelling tide until I was on the verge of fainting, and then it would gradually recede.

To divert my attention from these intensely painful hunger pangs, I
tried to concentrate my thoughts on something else. But it was no longer possible for me to do any serious thinking. Fragmentary thoughts would drift into my mind, then disappear just as quickly as they had come. Whenever I tried to grab one, it would slip through my fingers like some slimy, shapeless animal.

I stood up and stretched and took a deep breath. Every part of my body hurt. Every muscle and joint cried out in pain from having been in an awkward position for so long. I stretched myself slowly upward, then did some knee bends, but after ten of those I felt dizzy. Sitting down again on the well floor, I closed my eyes. My ears were ringing, and sweat streamed down my face. I wanted to hold on to something, but there was nothing to hold on to. I felt like throwing up, but there was nothing inside me that I could have thrown up. I tried deep breathing, hoping to refresh my mind by exchanging the air inside my body and giving my circulation a charge, but the clouds in my mind refused to clear. My body’s so weak now, I thought, and in fact I tried saying the words aloud—“My body’s so weak now”—but my mouth had difficulty forming the words. If only I could see the stars, I thought, but I could not see stars. May Kasahara had sealed the mouth of the well.

I assumed that May Kasahara would come to the well again sometime during the morning, but she never did. I spent the time waiting for her to arrive, leaning against the wall. The sick feeling stayed with me all morning, and my mind had lost the power to concentrate itself on any thoughts, however briefly. The hunger pangs continued to come and go, and the darkness around me grew thicker and thinner, and with each new wave another chunk of my ability to concentrate would be taken away, like furniture being stripped a piece at a time by burglars in an empty house.

Noon passed, and still May Kasahara did not appear. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, hoping to dream of Creta Kano, but my sleep was too shallow for dreams. Not long after I gave up any effort to concentrate on thinking, all kinds of fragmentary memories began to visit me. They arrived in silence, like water slowly filling an underground cavern. Places I had gone, people I had met, wounds I had received, conversations I had had, things I had bought, things I had lost: I was able to recall them all with great vividness and in amazing detail. I thought of houses and apartments in which I had lived. I thought of their windows and closets and furniture and lighting fixtures. I thought of teachers and professors I had had, all the way from elementary school to college. Few if any of these
memories had any connection with each other. They were minute and meaningless and came in no chronological order. Now and then, my recollections would be interrupted by another painful wave of hunger. But each memory was incredibly vivid, jolting me physically with the force of a tornado.

I sat there watching my mind pursue these memories, until it brought to life an incident that had occurred in the office some three or four years earlier. It had been a stupid, pointless event, but the more time I filled with re-creating its absurd details, the more annoyed I felt, until the annoyance turned to outright anger. The anger that seized me was so intense that it blotted out everything else—my fatigue, my hunger, my fears—causing me to tremble physically and my breath to come in gasps. My heart pounded audibly, and the anger pumped my bloodstream full of adrenaline. It had been an argument that started from a minor misunderstanding. The other guy had flung some nasty phrases at me, and I had managed to have my say as well, but we both realized how pointless the whole thing had been and apologized to each other, putting an end to the matter without any lingering hard feelings. These things happen: you’re busy, you’re tired, and you let some careless remark slip out. I just forgot about the whole thing. Down in the pitch blackness at the bottom of the well, though, far removed from reality, the memory came back to life with searing vividness. I could feel the heat of it against my skin, hear it sizzling my flesh. Why had my response to such an outrageous comment been so feeble? Now I came up with all kinds of things I should have said to the guy. I polished them, sharpened them, and the sharper they got, the angrier I got.

Then, all of a sudden, the possessing demon fell away, and none of this mattered anymore. Why did I have to warm up stale memories like this? What good did it do? The other guy had probably forgotten about the argument long since. I certainly had until this moment. I took a deep breath, let my shoulders droop and my body sink back into the darkness. I tried pursuing another memory, but once the incredibly intense anger passed, I had run out of memories. My head was now as empty as my stomach.

Then, before I knew it, I was talking to myself, mumbling fragmentary thoughts that I didn’t know I was having. I couldn’t stop myself. I heard my mouth forming words, but I could hardly understand a thing I was saying. My mouth was moving by itself, automatically, spinning long strings of words through the darkness, words the meaning of which I
could not grasp. They came out of one darkness, to be sucked into the next. My body was nothing but an empty tunnel, a conduit for moving the words from there to here. They were definitely fragments of thought, but thought that was happening outside my consciousness.

What was going on here? Were my nerves beginning to lose it? I looked at my watch. The hands said three forty-two.
Probably
three forty-two in the afternoon. I pictured to myself what the light looked like at three forty-two on a summer afternoon. I imagined myself in that light. I listened for any sound my ears might pick up, but there was nothing: no cicada or bird cries, no children’s voices. Maybe, while I was down here in the well, the wind-up bird had not wound the spring, and the world had stopped moving. Bit by bit, the spring had run down, and at one certain point in time, all movement—the rivers’ flow, the stirring of leaves, birds flying through the sky—had stopped.

What was May Kasahara doing? Why didn’t she come? She hadn’t shown up here for a very long time. The thought struck me that something terrible might have happened to her—a traffic accident, say. In which case, there was no longer anyone in the world who knew I was down here. And I really would die a slow death in the bottom of the well.

I decided to look at things differently. May Kasahara was not such a careless person. She was not about to let herself get run over so easily. She was probably in her room now, scanning this yard every once in a while with her binoculars and imagining me down here in the well. She was doing this on purpose: letting a lot of time go by to give me a scare, to make me feel abandoned. That was my guess. And if she was purposely letting a lot of time go by, then her plan was succeeding admirably. I really was scared. I did feel abandoned. Whenever the thought struck me that I might very well just rot down here in the dark over a long period of time, I could hardly breathe with the fear that gripped me. The more time that went by, the more I would weaken, until my hunger pangs became violent enough to kill me. Before that happened, though, I might lose the ability to move my body at will. Even if someone were to lower the rope ladder to me, I might not be able to climb it. All my hair and teeth might fall out.