What was that itch on my back? I wondered. And then I realized that it was the night—the night was nibbling into me.
It wasn’t that late, still only twilight, but the darkness seemed to have collected just above my shoulders. A black clump of it had fastened onto me, eating away at my back.
I wriggled, trying to shake it off, but the night clung fast. When I tried to rip it off with my hands, it floated away, as vapour, and I couldn’t grasp it. I grabbed at a patch, where it was most intensely black, but immediately it dispersed, and another black patch swirled up somewhere else.
The itchiness became unbearable. I scratched frantically. The more I scratched, the more the darkness ate into my back, and the more the darkness ate into my back, the more I itched.
Unable to stand still, I broke into a run.
Immediately, I was running as fast as a horse. I thought, as I ran: you get faster when the night starts eating into you. Roads, pedestrians, signs, all fly by, retreating into the distance, like scenes through a train window.
After a minute or two I grew sick of running, so I stopped. My body was giving off steam like a horse. I was breathing loudly through my nose. Some of the darkness merged with the steam, producing swirling, hazy eddies.
People, standing at a distance, stared.
The darkness mixed with the breaths I was taking in, reappearing when I breathed out, floating in long trails. When I inhaled, the dark trails near my nostrils were sucked back in. When I exhaled again, they were longer than before. The darkness grew, stretching out like endless ribbons, issuing forth from my nostrils.
“That’s a sight you don’t see every day,” an onlooker exclaimed, and then clapped, purposefully, as if summoning koi to the surface of a pond. The other onlookers clapped too, in just the same way.
I grew irritated. “Get the fuck outta here!” I tried to shout.
But no words emerged from my mouth. I couldn’t get the first consonant out. Straining, blowing through my nostrils, bearing down, I tried for that first sound: “G— G— G—” But all I could manage was to snort and blow out air.
The onlookers were delighted, and clapped some more.
This infuriated me. I leapt into the air, trying to yell at them, but all that came out was a whinny—like I was a horse. I kept leaping. Landing on a roof, I whinnied again—and then again. The onlookers below were all clapping. I wasn’t going to be outdone by them, and I kept whinnying. By now I had acquired a horse’s body, and was covered with a thick black coat of hair.
“Night’s coming. The Night Horse has arrived,” an onlooker said—the first in the crowd to have clapped. At that moment the steam started to rise in clouds off my body. More darkness: spreading, covering everything.
Elated now, I whinnied over and over again. With every whinny, the darkness became blacker and more intense.
While I was walking, the number of people increased. We were all going in the same direction. I walked, swept along in the flow.
It was after dusk, an hour closer to night. I could see the outlines of people walking just ahead of me, but couldn’t tell the colour of their clothes. A lamplighter approached, holding a long pole, pushing his way against the stream of people. Raising the pole up to a lamp, he let it rest there a few seconds, and the lamp started to glow. Looking around, I realized that there were several lamplighters: everywhere about me, one street lamp after another started to give out a steady light.
Now there were even more people walking, and it was difficult keeping up the pace.
I glanced over my shoulder, and saw a slender girl with short hair walking behind me.
“I was thinking about it…,” I answered, without quite committing myself.
Hearing this, the girl, who didn’t stop walking, removed an envelope from her satchel, and opened it, all the while keeping pace with the stream of people.
In the envelope were some green tickets.
“I have an extra. You take it,” she said, as she quickly slipped the green ticket into my pocket. I was going to thank her—but she waved me off and pointed at the people behind us. Some kind of hitch had stopped the flow of people, and there was a pile-up. Knots of people were starting to form, and as more people kept coming from behind them, soon some of the knots were getting pushed up into the air, on top of the knots of people below them.
Quickly I turned to face forward again, and started to walk. A long gap had opened up between us and the people in front of us. Thinking I ought to catch up with them, I broke into a run. But again the girl stopped me.
“Don’t run, or we’ll have chaos. It’s too early. Too early.”
I didn’t understand what she was referring to, but in any case I resumed walking.
We seemed to be approaching a termination point. The stream of people was spreading out. Just ahead, something very tall was rising up to the sky.
Several dozen ticket collectors stood in a row, and once we passed through, showing our tickets, the tall object came into better view.
It was a singer, who stood as tall as a three-storey building. From where I was, I had a clear view of the beauty spot under her jaw, and the rise and fall of her breasts.
“The beauty spot is artificial,” the girl informed me, gazing up at the singer, enraptured.
The singer was producing notes at different pitches, as if she were warming up. When she sang high notes, flocks of birds took flight from the branches of the gingko trees. When she sang low notes, the earth heaved, and small furry creatures emerged from underground and crawled about.
When the square was packed with people, suddenly, with no warning, the singer commenced singing. It was as if an immense musical instrument was filling the firmament with sound, or as if the melody of her song was swimming through the skies… In the next moment her voice had overwhelmed all else, and rather than listening, we seemed to be encompassed within it. No longer able to know the words, we were conscious only that her lilting voice was, slowly and powerfully, all around us.
The crowd of people, filled with her music, started to break up and form lines, which began to flow from the square in every direction, like innumerable streams flowing from a lake.
“The chaos has started,” the girl said to me, joining a stream of people going by her. I watched as she was borne away.
I joined the same stream of people, and pretty soon caught up with her.
“Where are we going?” I enquired. The girl nodded several times, her eyes closed, looking unworried.
“Where?” I asked again.
“The night,” she replied.
With that, her head tilted downwards, and she fell into a deep sleep. She was carried along as she slept.
Now a part of the chaos, alongside the girl, I entered the night.
I ascended the stairs and found a door, which I opened to a banquet in full swing.
An array of gentlemen, each of them dressed in white, was seated at a table, eating and drinking. On the table were platters of raw seafood—sea urchin, halibut, scallops, clams, sea bream, flounder, silver trevally, tuna, squid, octopus, smelt—as well as an assortment of meat and vegetable dishes—broiled, boiled, fried. The gentlemen were savouring each dish.
I could hear them having little disagreements, in the soft-spoken manner befitting gentlemen.
“This part, just here. So succulent! Such flavour!”
“Oh, but it shouldn’t be soft. When it’s utterly fresh, it’s springy and firm. That’s the whole point.”
“So the divers have to gather it up from the seabed in the early hours.”
“That’s what makes it such a luxury.”
The food looked so mouth-wateringly delicious, I swallowed loudly, despite myself.
The gentlemen, unaware of my presence, turned and trained their gaze on me.
“Who do we have here? A traveller, perhaps, from a distant land?”
“A visitor.”
“We don’t often get visitors.”
“We should mark the occasion!”
They all rose from the table. The gentleman at the head placed his napkin on his chair and approached me, his arms open.
“So good of you to come!” he said.
And the others, who’d followed his lead placing their napkins on their chairs and greeting me, added their chorus of welcomes.
I was shown to a seat midway along the table, a napkin was tucked in at my collar, and a gleaming knife and fork placed beside me.
“Please, eat.”
“Please feel free, have whatever you like.”
The gentlemen took their seats at the table. The gentlemen on my right turned to the left, and the gentlemen on my left turned to the right. Two lines of faces, on both sides of the table, their eyes all fixed on the same point, receded into the distance on either side of me, like two lines of layered images.
“Please try the flounder. It’s out of this world.”
“And the cooked dishes—the stir-fried chicken with chilli peppers.”
“Or the pig’s liver gayettes.”
“If you’d prefer a dish with green curry, we’ll have it prepared specially.”
With all this encouragement, I was unable to decide. My fork hovered over the dishes. The gentlemen fixed their gaze, their eyes wide, on the end of my fork. They seemed almost to be drooling.
I stuck the fork into something that looked like meat, I wasn’t sure what kind, on a plate near me.
A sigh rose up from the company.
“Ahh!”
“Would you expect less from a guest from a distant land?”
“Such a discriminating palate!”
I cut the meat, or whatever it was, and ate it, piece by tiny piece. But I couldn’t taste it.
“What’ll she go for now, I wonder?”
“Come now, no more comments. Leave her to enjoy it.”
I continued to eat. With every bite, sighs and cries of joy and muffled surprise rose up, and I became even less able to taste what I was eating.
I had now eaten my fill, so I laid down my knife and fork. But the gentlemen glared at me.
“Our guest eats surprisingly little.”
“She’s probably just having a rest.”
“She couldn’t possibly want to stop eating yet.”
Embarrassed, I resumed eating. My stomach was so full I thought it might burst, but still I ate. I ate till nearly everything on the table was gone. I sighed in relief, thinking I was done, when one of the gentlemen rang a bell, which made a little tinkling sound.
A butler appeared, bringing out platters with dome-like silver dish covers.
“Our guest is fortunate!”
“Fortunate to be able to enjoy such a rare feast!”
“She can eat her fill, whatever she likes, until dawn breaks!”
I really felt that I could not force down another morsel. But the gentlemen were all staring at me sternly, even as they smiled.
Outside a nightingale started to sing in a high voice.
Please, I can’t eat anything more, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t.
The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright.
The night had only just begun.
I assumed that we’d been borne along for a while, but when I awoke, time was at a standstill. Since time had stopped, even if we had been moving for a while, no actual hours, or moments, would have passed.
The hair of the girl who had been carried along with me had grown down to her hips. So even if time had stood still, her hair had grown.
Good morning, I said, seeing she was awake. She laughed softly. It’s too early to say that, she said. It’s still evening. And she smiled.
Really? It’s evening now?
The girl entwined her arms with mine.
Some of her long hair got entwined as well. It felt silky and warm.
Your hair has grown, I said.
Yours hasn’t though, she replied.
It was true. My hair hadn’t grown an inch.
The girl’s hair rose, like a living being, and stroked my neck and shoulders. When I brought my face near hers, the girl exhaled gently out of her slightly opened mouth. The scent of her breath was like the odour of lilies at full bloom, and the sound of her breath coming out of her mouth was like a butterfly faintly beating its wings.
I kissed the girl on the lips, as if to suck her breath inside me. When I did this, the girl wilted, ever so slightly. In my arms, gradually she became lighter, and more transparent. The smell of lilies rose up, filling my breast, overwhelming me. The taste of the kiss was so sweet, I couldn’t stop—even though I knew she would go on wilting if I continued. The girl was wilting by the instant, and something thick and strong was filling my breast.
Holding the girl in the palm of my hand, for by now she had shrunk so that it was possible to do so, I continued to kiss her. A numbness came over me, covering me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes: I felt as if I was now enfolded by something soft and huge. Revelling in the sensation of being wrapped in giant overlapping petals, I kept my lips placed on the lips of the girl, who was now getting quite crumpled and tiny.
The girl finally grew incredibly small, about one centimetre wide. I no longer knew whether I was kissing her or simply enjoying the afterglow of the kiss, but now the girl’s breath was filled with the overpowering scent of lilies, and the sound of her breathing, like the beating of butterfly wings, grew loud, almost annoyingly loud.
As I looked at the girl in the palm of my hand, she shone whitely in the night. When I stroked her gently, she seemed beautifully lustrous, and I was struck by how smooth she was, by how she was warm but cold at the same time, and then, looking more closely, I realized she had become a pearl. In the depths of the pearl, I could see the girl’s face staring back at me, and, if I peered into the depths of her eyes, I could see another, smaller girl.
An endless number of girls, getting infinitely smaller and smaller, and all emitting the same scented breath, were quietly but persistently enticing me to go further. When I rolled the pearl over my palm, exploring its smooth surface, they all laughed gently, flutteringly, in response, drawing me in even more.
I put the pearl in my mouth, let it rest on my tongue for a while, and swallowed it.
The infinite number of girls descended my throat, passed down into my stomach, and were transmitted through my veins to all parts of my body. Waves of explosive pleasure rushed over me. Then I realized: my hair had started to grow. And time, previously at a standstill, had started to flow again.
Time continued to flow, as the granules of girl reached every nook and cranny of me. The girl was broken down into something very tiny indeed, tinier even than the smallest particle, and still she coursed round and round. The girl became more and more mixed and homogeneous with me, until in the end I lost track of whether the girl was me, or I was the girl. It was only then that I started to love her, and to miss her. I loved and missed something I couldn’t define, some combination of us both.
At this thought, time came to a standstill. A little while later, I was assailed by contractions of unbelievable force.
No matter how much I poured into the cup, it never filled. And then I realized that the liquid I assumed to be coffee had, unbeknownst to me, turned into night.
Peering into the night as it poured into the cup, I could see tiny stars and gases whirling near the surface, and down at the bottom, something laughing. In dismay, I took the cup to a sink, and tipped it so that all the night it contained would spill out, but as long as I held it there, the night kept on flowing, interminably.
I had been holding the cup there for a good hour, and still the night came. No matter how much was sucked away down the drain, there was always more. Resigning myself, I turned the cup upright and peered into it again: at this the laughter coming up from the bottom of the cup grew very loud. I hurled the cup against the wall. From the broken shards the soft clouds of night floated up, spreading outwards. And there, in among them, was the laughter’s source.
It was a large Japanese macaque.
It was laughing loudly, baring its teeth, exposing its gums. I was surprised that a monkey was laughing just like a human being: so I gave it a poke with the end of a mop to see what it would do.
At this, the monkey abruptly stopped laughing.
“Do you have to be so rude?” it demanded, in a terrifying voice.
I tried to apologize but my tongue seemed to stick to my palate, and no sound came out.
“Didn’t your parents teach you any manners at all?” the monkey shouted at me, even more loudly.
I made several small bows, and shuffled back bit by bit. The monkey edged forward.
“Apologize!” it bellowed. Its voice was ear-splittingly loud—the vibrations produced cracks in the room’s walls.
I shuffled back some more, and the monkey again roared, “Apologize!” At this, the entire ceiling came crashing down.
In the nick of time I opened the door and rushed into the corridor, and out into the night. Several neighbours had come out of their houses: they were pointing at the collapsed ceiling and talking among themselves. I ran off, pushing my way through them. When an angry monkey, howling at the top of his lungs, appeared from the rubble, the staring onlookers scattered in all directions, like baby spiders.
Blind with rage, the monkey swatted away several people who had been slow on the uptake, sending them flying into the distance. Turning back, I caught sight of them disappearing into the night, tracing parabolic curves, whooping and laughing as they went. For a moment, fascinated, I was about to stop, but then I realized that the monkey was just behind me, breathing roughly, and so I started running again.
“Apologize!” the monkey said, panting for breath.
I wanted to apologize but the momentum was taking my legs forward. They wouldn’t stop.
“Apologize!” Soon the monkey’s panting turned to wheezing, and inside the wheezing, another sound could be heard, something rather like thunder.
“Apologize!” the monkey said, close to the back of my neck. And immediately twenty or more rumbles of thunder boomed about us. The rumbles gradually got louder and louder, and flashes of lightning lit up the sky. The intervals between them shortened, and soon the crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning were occurring simultaneously. Several times a bolt of lightning struck something, and the surrounding darkness was lit up dazzlingly, then went black again. The speed with which my feet hit the ground got faster with each crash.
I appeared to be running faster than the speed of sound because suddenly there was no longer any thunder to be heard. I could only see flashes of lightning, which continued unceasingly, and inside them the silhouette of the monkey as it charged along after me. I couldn’t hear its commands to “Apologize!” any more. I continued to run, with all my might, through the soundless void.
Soon, exhaustion overcame me, my legs began to feel heavy, and the monkey caught up. It didn’t slow down. In an instant it had passed me, and no sooner had it gone by than it disappeared.
Little by little, my pace slowed and I began to hear sounds again—the heavy breathing of the monkey, peals of thunder—muted at first, like sounds heard underwater, but gradually getting clearer. The next instant, they all joined together in a great cacophony, which pressed in on me and burst.
Within the sudden inundation of sound, at the very bottom of it, was a sound much louder than anything else. I listened to it and realized it was laughter.
It was that same monkey’s laughter, noticeably more powerful and more resonant than any of the other many noises that were echoing in the night.
My mass had been missing for a while. You tend to assume that without any mass you wouldn’t exist. But I was definitely there. Hard to believe, but it was true.
Not only was I there, the girl was there with me, right by my side. She didn’t have any mass either. I knew she was there because I could hear her moving about in places where nothing could be seen.
I was just about to call out to her when our surroundings were suddenly illuminated by a blaze of light.
The light was shining out of a corner of the night sky. In just that part, a bit of the sky seemed to have been cut out and the night peeled back into a square, so that the light streamed through the square hole, straight down to the ground, in a single shaft. To a bystander, it would probably have looked as if a square-shaped pillar of light was rising straight up out of the ground towards the heavens.
Bathed in that light, we found we did have mass after all. The light was a special, miraculous kind. But as we had only a tiny amount of mass, we were both extremely small—smaller, even, than mice.
Small as I was, I turned to the girl, and told her: “I love you.” With the light pouring down, I repeated the words several times. And each time I said them, a curious creature emerged out of the earth.
The first creature to emerge seemed to be a failed version of the girl. She was about twice the size of the small girl by my side, and made of metal. Creaking, she made her way out of the shaft of light.
The second creature was another failed version of the girl. This one was silver. I thought at first she looked silver because of the silvery light, but even when she walked out of it she still shone with a silvery lustre. Her face, her hands, and her legs—every part of her glittered, menacingly. The silver girl followed in the footsteps of the metal girl. The glow of her silvery image lingered in my eye.
The third creature was yet another failed version of the girl. This one was almost identical to her in every way; the only thing different was that she had a tail. After wagging her tail wildly for a while, she hurried off after the first two versions.
I was about to say “I love you” a fourth time when the girl put out her hand and stopped my mouth, gently. Her hand as she touched my lips smelt of the night. I didn’t want it there, and grasping her wrist gently, I moved it away.
“You know why. Because it’s a lie,” she replied.
I hugged her gently, and she hugged me back, equally gently.
“It’s not something you say so easily,” she said as she hugged me.
She’s right, I thought, as we hugged each other, but before very long I wanted to tell her I loved her again.
Well, why don’t we stop, then, if it’s a lie! I blurted out.
As soon as I spoke, the ground started to roar and rumble, and in the next second it split open. Two more beings emerged—myself and the girl, this time perfectly accurately massed. To us, these two beings seemed gigantic: smiling benignly, using their gigantic eyes, they had no difficulty in locating the first girl, the imperfect metal one; and the second girl, the imperfect silver one; and the third girl, the one that had a tail, in the darkness. They shut them away in a briefcase. Then, turning towards us, they plucked up my companion, and locked her in there too.
Are they going to lock me up now? I wondered. And before I knew it, they had.
That was it: I was locked up, for ever.
There were a number of fish in the tank. They looked like loaches. Someone was scooping them up, one by one, with his hands and throwing them down hard on the floor.
It was a child.
Once thrown down, the loach lay in a half-dead state for a few seconds, then revived and shimmied its way over to one of the many puddles nearby, leaving arteries of water on the floor behind it.
“If you throw them down so hard, the loaches will die,” I said, reprovingly.
The child frowned. “They won’t die,” he replied in a low voice, and continued throwing them down—thwack! thwack!—on the floor.
He had been scooping up the loaches and throwing them down for quite some time, but it didn’t seem to make a difference to the number of fish in the tank. A small fluorescent light had been attached to it, illuminating it against the darkness. The child was standing slightly out of reach of the glow, so I couldn’t make out the features of his face.
He continued throwing the loaches down, one after another. But far from decreasing, the number of loaches in the tank seemed to be increasing.
“Do you like Yanagawa hotpot?” the child asked.
“What?” I said.
“Yanagawa loach hotpot,” the child repeated, throwing down another loach with force. Thwack.
“I don’t mind it.”
“In that case, I’ll give you this fish tank.” His voice had got lower.
Why hadn’t I walked past him and paid no attention to the loaches?
The child pulled at my sleeve with a wet hand, slipping a loach into my hand. “Try one!” he said, throwing down another loach.
At the bottom of the darkness, near my feet, I could see loaches making their way, shimmying, towards the puddles. As they slipped below the surface, the water seemed to vanish, then slowly to reappear.
“No. I can do without loaches,” I replied.
The child’s head drooped. “Are you sure?” he asked, and then he started to whimper.
I got a strong sense of foreboding at this, and I decided I’d better get away from him. Furtively putting the loach he’d deposited in my hand down on the floor, I began to walk away with an unconcerned look on my face. But the second I had put the loach down, a big puddle had formed in that very spot, spreading to my feet. The puddle looked like an oil spill, very thick and sticky: when the loaches found their way into it, it swallowed them up, without a ripple.
“Are you sure?” the child asked again.
“Quite sure!” I replied.
At that, the child shoved me, and I fell into a puddle. I found myself being sucked into it. When I was completely submerged, I looked around me. Everything was dark. Was it dark because it was night, or because the puddle was filled with black creatures? I wasn’t sure, but as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see.
Down below, at the bottom of the puddle, where I was now sinking, I could see countless loaches. No way… No way! I thought, and looking at my hands I saw that they were turning into fins—and my legs merging into a tail. I concentrated on my repugnance for loaches, and my fins started turning back into hands, but when my concentration waned, they immediately started turning back into fins.
“Are you so sure you don’t want the fish tank?”
The low voice of the child reached my ears from above.
The words stuck in my throat, but I knew I had no choice.
“I love Yanagawa hotpot!” I shouted up at him.
Suddenly I found myself scooped up in the child’s hands, and thrown down hard against the floor. I wriggled my way towards the child’s feet, and then shimmied up one of his legs. I kept going up to his hips, and from his hips to his belly, and finally I reached an arm. I then wriggled down this arm to his fingers, at which point he grabbed hold of me, and threw me down to the floor.
Seven times we repeated the process, until eventually I turned back into a human.
“You really love Yanagawa hotpot, don’t you,” the child said, laying it on thick.
“Oh yes, I love Yanagawa hotpot!” I replied, again.
After pressing the tank into my hands, the child flopped-flipped-flopped in a puddle, then disappeared. The puddle was still, and then it too disappeared.
The loaches in the tank were multiplying rapidly. The tank teemed with loaches.
I hurried home, careful not to let any water spill into the night, and began preparations for a loach hotpot. I sliced up burdock root, added water, and brought it all to a boil, using all the stewing pots I had. Then I threw the loaches live into the pots, and covered them. A delicious aroma rose into the air.
“You really can’t get enough of Yanagawa hotpot, can you?” I heard a child’s voice say from somewhere, one more time. As if in response, all the creatures that live and breathe in the night made their way into my apartment through the crack in my door. And they all had a Yanagawa hotpot feast.
Without my noticing, the girl and I had become separated. I looked for her everywhere, but could not find her.
The moon had risen to the highest place in the sky, and on the ground the shadows of the plants were dimly lit in the faint moonlight.
“Where are you? Where are you?” I called out, but there was no answer from the girl. I called out many times, but she did not answer.
As I walked, following one shimmering shape in the moonlight to the next, I found several of the girl’s soft outer skins that she must have discarded. Each time I saw one, I would gather it up in my hands, thinking it was the real girl, but every discarded skin was simply a discarded skin.
I didn’t know why I was searching so hard for the girl: I felt she was someone I had known all my life, and yet at the same time I hardly knew her. But I kept on looking. If someone had asked me if I liked her, I would probably have answered, yes, I did, but if someone had asked me whether I really cared about her, I might have answered, no, I didn’t, actually. Maybe the only reason I kept searching for her was that I had begun searching for her.
The discarded skin I now picked up was the largest yet, and it was still a bit warm. She was probably hiding somewhere nearby. I walked on, calling out, “Where are you? Where are you?”
At a spot where the shadows outlined by the moon abruptly stopped, there was a big box. I reached out to touch it, and felt it tremble.
The girl must be inside the box, I felt sure. In front of the box was a discarded skin even larger than the one I had found a moment ago. It was lying on the ground, looking just like the living girl with her knees slightly bent. I stroked it gently. But being only a skin, it didn’t have the slightest response.
I searched for a latch, some way to open the box, but it was just a smooth white box, nothing more. I sat there, wondering what to do, when the box trembled some more.
Open me up! it seemed to be saying. Or maybe it was saying: Don’t open me! Again, it shook. I clasped the box in my arms, and rubbed my cheek against it.
Simply doing this, of course, was going to get me nowhere. Somehow I had to force the box open. But the surface was completely smooth, sealed. I tried poking at the box with a pocket knife, but the blade simply bounced off the surface.
I walked back and forth, thinking.
Again the box trembled. I wondered: should I get an axe and chop it open? But that might end up splitting the girl in half. Well, maybe I should take the box home with me, just as it was, to stroke and treat it with affection for all eternity. But that would be no different from being without the girl altogether.
I thought on and on.
How would one describe the girl now, as she was inside the box? It was like she was there, only she wasn’t; or like she wasn’t, except that she was. Or maybe she occupied an indeterminate state of being, both there and not there, in exactly equal amounts.
I thought and thought, nudging the outer skin on the ground with the tip of my foot.
I thought until, unable to stand it any more, I rushed home, grabbed a sledgehammer, retraced my steps, and smashed the box open.
There, in the shattered box, lay the girl. As I had feared, she was in pieces, completely destroyed. Heartbroken, I started to sob. Why did I smash the box? I thought bitterly. But how could I have stopped myself?
How could anyone endure such a state, of having someone there and not there—not there and there—at the same time?
Deeply indignant at this quandary of quantum physics, I cried and cried.
As I collided with the man, several moles fell out of the front of his jacket.
“Oh, bother! Bother!” the man said, desperately trying to rake them together with his hands.
I walked on by, pretending I hadn’t noticed. Nothing good ever comes of getting caught up with people you meet in the night.
“Hey, wait! Wait!” the man yelled.
He appeared to be chasing the moles, going round in circles, but I didn’t look back and walked off as quickly as I could.
I walked just until he was out of earshot, and then I stopped. He did not appear to be following me. I waited a while, but there was not a single sign of him. I waited a few more minutes. Not the slightest sound. I could see the moon, high up in the sky, and I could feel the breeze gently caressing my skin, but nothing of what I was expecting might happen was happening.
Disappointed, I retraced my steps.
But, as the saying goes, seek too keenly, and ye shall never find. Sure enough, as far back along the path as I went, I could find no trace of him. Occasionally, though, I would catch sight of the odd mole dawdling about, so I continued back along the path, using these sightings as beacons.
I must have walked on a bit too single-mindedly, for the next thing I knew, I was on a path that seemed unfamiliar. There came a slow, lilting melody. I listened to its strains, and felt drowsy. I won’t listen, I won’t listen, I told myself, but the music seemed to pour into my ears of its own accord, producing a feeling now of utter physical and spiritual tranquillity.
In that state, I stretched myself out on the path. I could detect a faint warmth in the earth, left over from the day. Ah, I’m falling asleep, I thought. But the next moment, I was being rudely roused by the man.
“You transverse piece of lowlife!” he yelled.
I leapt to my feet.
“You think you can get away with such lopsided logic?”
Astounded, I stared at him.
The insults continued.
“Don’t you have any triangular consciousness at all?”
“You’re a pest! A quadri-transmogrifying pest!”
“I’ve a good mind to break you, fold you, then turn you upside-down and shake you. Then drop you in a pot!”
I was so blown back by the force of his words I couldn’t reply, but then he stopped abruptly. Looking closely at him, I saw his face resembled a mole’s. Actually, “resembled” was not the word: he was a mole. Struggling to conceal the moles packed down his jacket, Moley-Man resumed his invective.
“Two days ago, it would have been the Great Depression for you, oh yes, that’s for sure!”
“And a ding-dong, sing-song, plinkety-plunk: You better watch out! Hey Hey Hey… Pop!”
This was all getting difficult to make sense of. Oh well, he was a mole—what could I expect? I decided to keep silent and wait for him to finish. Evidently thinking me intimidated, he gradually got calmer. Finally, he just stood there, breathing short quick breaths.
He came up to me, now panting heavily.
I looked up in fright, and saw he was just about to put his hands on my shoulders. He brought his snout close to my face, sniffing and snuffling, with little whiny sounds. He sniffed again, carefully. When he had sniffed his fill, his expression suddenly softened:
“Well, hello!” Then: “That was a little rude of me. Heh, heh! Do excuse me. Got a little on edge for a moment there…”
He seemed to have made a complete U-turn.
“Come now. Let’s be friends,” he said.
He put out a paw. The back of it was as black as coal, and he had long, strong claws. I shook it, and stole a glance, and saw he was blinking repeatedly, nervously.
I told myself firmly: Do not let down your guard.
“Do you have any hobbies?”
“How’s business these days?”
“Do you know any nice cafes round here?”
His questions came thick and fast. Answering in what I hoped was the least objectionable way possible, I stole more glances, trying to suss out the situation.
Without intending to be, we were back on the familiar path: I could hear the strains of that same melody. I told myself to keep my wits about me, but when that tune found its way into my ears, something inside me fell apart.
By the time he asked me, “What do you feel is the most important quality in a man?” I was filled with a feeling of such recklessness, I was ready to throw caution to the winds. My mouth was itching to say it.
I said it in a low voice.
He didn’t appear to have heard me. “What’s that?” he asked, loudly.
“That he’s loaded. Loaded with moles…”
As soon as I uttered the words, the moles stuffed down his jacket burst out, tumbling onto the path.
The man clutched his fists.
“Loaded with moles?…” He was shaking all over.
The moles poured forth in a continuous stream, falling on top of each other at our feet. The ground was teeming with them. The moles filled the night with their eloquent, scrabbling sounds.
For a while, I just cried, as I gathered together the bits of the girl. But since nothing would be accomplished by crying, I decided I would take the bits to the Boss.
As I got closer to the Boss, I could hear a steady, continuous noise, which got louder and louder. It was a huge windmill, whose blades were going round and round, whirring. The windmill was located behind the throne where the Boss sat. It was pulling in the night, stirring it around.
Sucked in and turned around by the blades, the night at first flows smoothly, but then it starts to take on a denser consistency. Already the night was nearly halfway through its course, so a good portion of it had hardened. Because of this, as I walked through it, it gave me none of the easy, buoyant feeling you get in the early-evening hours. Something about it seemed creaky. But that was, in its own way, typical of the night too.
“I’d like to request a replay,” I said, dropping to the ground on my knees and bowing my head low.
“A replay, you say?” the Boss replied, narrowing his eyes.
The Boss’s body sank low in the throne. He was not a very big Boss. The enormous blue jewel in the sceptre he was holding sparkled brightly.
“It is my humble understanding that the Boss possesses the power to bring about a replay, and that is why…” I bowed again, very low, head to the ground.
But before I could raise my head, he growled:
“Request refused.”
“What?”
“Why would I want to do that, for a girl!”
And he refused to engage any more. I tried my most obsequious bow a number of times. To no avail. Maybe he didn’t really enjoy all this formalized ceremony.
I got up and was about to go on my way when something tapped me on the shoulder. It felt hard; I realized it was the tip of the sceptre.
“I won’t do it, but if you insist, you may have a try yourself,” he said, now poking me with the sceptre.
As I stood there in a quandary, he poked me again, several times. With each poke, the enormous blue jewel in the sceptre sparkled.
“Thank you,” I answered, finding this unbearable.
He finally stopped poking me and sank back down in his throne. The windmill made its loud whirring sound.
I walked to a place that was a distance away from the Boss, and then divided the bits of the girl into piles, carefully extracting the cell nuclei that looked as if they could be used for the replay. Copying the Boss’s usual practice, I injected a small amount of cell nuclei into the inside of my elbow with a micropipette, and then, again copying the Boss’s usual practice, I turned three somersaults. I had no idea how a somersault would help with a replay, but I wanted to do everything the exact same way the Boss did, so that’s what I did.
I waited a few moments, and then I dozed off.
I snoozed for a while, and woke up to find it was still night. So that meant there had been no replay, I thought, disappointed, but then, examining the inner part of my elbow, lo and behold, there were some new cells!
Overjoyed, I pressed my back against the ground, and spun myself round and round like a top. It was part of a little dance. I didn’t know what this was supposed to accomplish, but here again I was copying the Boss. The cells were gradually forming themselves into shapes—commas, ribbons, balls, all sorts of other weird things—and finally they turned into something that resembled a girl. By now my arm was getting numb with the weight of this girl-like thing. The time had come for separation, I understood, so I tied her stalk up with wire. Immediately, her stalk rotted, and she dropped off me.
She immediately did the replay dance, and then came and gave me a kiss.
The girl had come back to life. But she seemed mechanical, so I wasn’t totally convinced. I didn’t return her kiss very enthusiastically. She didn’t seem to care, and kissed me again.
The whirring sound of the windmill could be heard from far away. Coagulated bits of the night air were flung against me, and then unstuck themselves and flew off in great lumps somewhere else.
“You don’t care about me any more, do you?” the girl said, sensing my lack of enthusiasm.
“It’s not that,” I answered, vaguely.
The girl threw herself on the ground, wailing.
I was determined not to care.
“Why did you revive me then? Why did you bother?” she said, and started to sob loudly.
This irritated me, so I turned my back on her and started to walk away. The girl clung to me, crying.
“That’s so mean of you. To bring things this far…”
Nothing she said had the slightest effect on me. I knew I was being heartless, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Please. Please reconsider,” the girl begged.
The bits of coagulated night were now hitting me with more force, then falling about me like a meteor shower. I shook my head, dodging the paths of the flying lumps.
“All right, so that’s what you want. But I have my own ideas.”
There was a flash of silver, and the girl lunged at me with a knife, wielding it wildly.
Before I had time to react, the girl cut a piece of flesh from my right breast, then turned and raced away. I looked, dazed, at the blood dripping, and with a start it came to me what she was up to.
I made my way stealthily back, without being seen, to the place where the Boss was. As I thought, the girl was just handing the Boss the bit of flesh. The Boss nodded magnanimously, and immediately carried out a replay. As I watched, an exact replica of myself was born. The girl received the replica with an air of satisfaction.
After watching the girl leave hand-in-hand with the replica, I presented myself before the Boss.
“Is this how it’s supposed to go?” I asked.
The Boss cleared his throat, and nodded grandly.
“In general, this is how it’s supposed to go.” The blue jewel on the end of his sceptre was sparkling exaggeratedly.
“Do you have a problem?” the Boss asked.
“Sort of.”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. It was the truth.
“If that’s the case, you should do another replay.”
The breeze from the windmill hit me, blowing into my eyes, my head, my belly, smearing me with the elements of the night. The spots on my body hit by the night gleamed black for a while, and then returned to their normal colour.
I did as he suggested, and carried out a replay. Any number of times I brought the girl back to life, and any number of times the result was the same.
“You just don’t give up, do you?” I said, as the girl flashed her knife at me for the umpteenth time.
The girl hung her head sadly.
“It’s because I’m always new. It’s always the first time for me,” she said, hanging her head so low her slender neck looked as if it would snap.
I took pity on her, and for the first time kissed her of my own accord. The girl, drained of strength, responded to my kiss. I felt even sorrier for her then, and put some passion into it. And that was when a touch of my old feeling for her came back.
“You’re the last replay I’ll do,” I said, hugging her a little more tightly.
This is how it’s supposed to go, I thought, more or less resignedly. I held the girl tight.
The night pressing around our bodies was showing slight signs of change, like cream on the point of thickening. The girl was still weak and lifeless.
“I won’t allow it!” the girl suddenly said, in a voice that seemed to come up from the depths of the earth.
Making a petulant sound, she pulled herself sharply away. I found myself on my hands and knees.
“Goodbye!” The girl cut off a bit of my flesh, as she had done before, and went away looking very pleased.
With sadness, I presented myself before the Boss.
“Is this how it’s supposed to go?” I asked for a second time.
The Boss answered with an unperturbed air:
“Well, yes—in general, I’d say it is.”
I withdrew, despondent, and conducted my final replay. Carrying the girl I had recreated in my arms, carefully, like a treasured possession, I made my way into the night. I kept going, into its very depths, as far away from the Boss as I could.
I nodded off, holding the girl’s hand in mine. I slept lightly, though I longed to sleep deeply, and for a while not to wake up at all.
The creature was sitting on a velvet cloth decorated with green and reddish-brown tassels. The cloth had been spread on top of a mound that was five metres high and made of compacted dried branches and leaves with some soft earth mixed in. One knee up, arms outstretched, palms turned upwards, the creature sat in an expectant pose. The base of the mound was quite wide, and all the way up its slopes steam rose in loose drifts, together with the stench of fermentation. Sometimes the steam was thin, and sometimes it was thick. It wound and curled about the creature’s limbs, like mist. The creature sat unperturbed.
Waak, waak.
The birds squawked. In a cluster around the base of the mound, they kept up an endless screeching. They looked rather like pheasants, and they squawked and they screeched, stretching out their necks, at times as if to menace the creature, at times as if to petition him. He, however, made not a move in response to their clamour. He was still as a statue, one knee up, palms turned upwards. His eyes, which, depending on the angle, were either a shiny purple or a subdued, ashen grey, remained fixed on one corner of the heavens. There, nothing twinkled: the fixed stars and dwarf stars and the nebulae that filled the rest of the sky were nowhere to be seen, and the heavens were uniformly black, as if blotted out by a cloth.
A bird, squawking, flew to the top of the mound, loudly flapping its wings, and proceeded to peck at the creature. The creature still did not change his pose, keeping his one knee up and palms turned upwards. Blood flowed in trickles from where the bird had pecked most deeply. Another bird, and then another, flew to the top of the mound and pecked at him—and suddenly all the birds flew to the top of the mound, squawking, screeching, flapping their wings violently, and pecking at the creature, producing yet more trickles of blood, which turned into streams of blood that flowed down the body of the creature onto the velvet cloth, leaving blackish-red streaks.
In a great mob, the birds pecked at his arms, ankles, chin, temples, neck, stomach.
The creature started very slowly to keel over, but even so he maintained his original pose, one knee up, palms turned upwards. The surface of his skin was riddled with the holes gouged out by the birds. Deep and black, the holes threatened to take his body over completely.
One bird started attacking his eyes.
Out came the left eye. The creature stared even more determinedly at the heavens with his right eye. Teetering unsteadily in the breeze created by the flapping of the birds’ wings, he glared at the sky.
Another bird attacked his right eye, and still the creature glared up at the heavens. By now most of his body was a gaping hole, and it was no longer even possible to tell whether his knee was up, or his palms turned upwards. The vestiges of whatever had been there before remained on the velvet cloth, staring up at the heavens.
Waak, waak.
One last peck, and the body was gone completely. Bereft of the body’s weight, the velvet cloth was tossed aside with the beating of the birds’ wings. The mound was now the birds’ mound: and at the very top, where the odour of fermentation was rising from, dozens of eggs that had been covered by the velvet cloth were exposed. The birds sent up a chorus of joyful squawks and screeches.
Meanwhile, the night moved on, the shadows deepened, and midnight approached, the birds oblivious.
The presence of that creature-that-was-no-longer spread everywhere, filling the space between earth and sky. And the night, enveloped by that presence, reached its deepest and darkest state of being, the darkness a kind of truth in itself.
I awoke to the sound of something bursting. The girl who was supposed to be sleeping close to me was nowhere to be seen. I lifted myself up, drowsily, and looked around: the girl was sitting in the crotch of a tree, staring into the distance.
“What can you see?” I asked.
The girl beckoned to me, and pointed. “Look.”
I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw a huge firework going up into the sky.
The flaming ball shot up, higher and higher, and then exploded, sending a burst of tiny points of red and orange and green light outwards, like rain. Another firework rose, and then another, then another one, and every time, the girl’s face lit up in the darkness, tinged red and orange and green.
“Come on,” she said.
Climbing down from the tree, she headed towards where the fireworks were bursting, and I followed. Then she started rising rapidly into the air, as if she were ascending a staircase. She quickly rose high into the sky.
“Come on!” she said, stretching her hand out towards me.
I grasped it, and with her hand pulling me up, I took a step, gingerly, and felt steps under my feet. I followed the steps up, and found my whole body rising.
We rose rapidly, until finally we were on a level with the fireworks.
Up close, the fireworks were very hot. The sparks shot out and fell on us, fizzled, and vanished. We were heedless.
“Let’s go closer,” the girl said, gripping my hand tightly.
I was suddenly afraid. “Let’s not,” I tried saying.
But the girl wouldn’t give up. “We’ll be able to get through.” She gripped my hand even more tightly.
With her pulling me forcibly, we charged right in.
“Deeper, deeper,” she said. So I went in deeper. I couldn’t stand to—I hated to. But nevertheless I went in deeper. One place after another on my body caught fire, and I became engulfed in flames. It was hot, searingly hot.
I got burnt. The girl got burnt too. The fire consumed us so completely that not even our bones were left.
“Why do you do such things?” I asked, angrily.
The girl was silent.
“You can’t be happy unless you have everything your own way, can you?” I said, my voice growing shrill.
But the girl said nothing.
“I’ve had enough,” I said. And I left her.
I had no idea where I was going, but I stormed off. I was determined not to think about her any more. I tried not to think about anything. While I was walking, not thinking about anything, I forgot how to speak.
This wasn’t surprising: I had no body. And I had no brain.
I kept walking, on and on and on. Finally I found myself at a place that was darker even than night.
I was immediately sucked inside it, and I couldn’t get out. I did have the thought, briefly, that if I’d stayed with the girl, without leaving her, I wouldn’t be stuck in this God-awful place. But other than that, I didn’t think anything.
After a while, I forgot about the girl. I forgot about everything. Every now and then, I thought I saw a face that resembled mine staring back at me in the darkness, but by now nothing about me remained: no face, no body, nothing. So I couldn’t ask myself who it was. I couldn’t think about it, and I didn’t care.
Having heard that in the west there was something called the Elephant of Eternity, I ended up going on a quest for it. I wasn’t so keen on the quest myself, but as it had been decided that I should go on it, I had no choice. Going alone made me a little nervous, so I asked a few acquaintances if they would come along.
“Well, what would the point of that be?” they asked, and then, while I was struggling for a reply, they all found some excuse or other for why they couldn’t accompany me. Cash-flow difficulties ruled it out, or their common-law wife had got pregnant so the timing was bad, or they’d consulted a specialist in divination and been given a verdict of “Disaster Imminent”, et cetera, et cetera.
I had no choice but to set out alone.
Heading up a path with watermelon vines overgrowing it, I came out onto a square.
THIS WAY FOR THE ELEPHANT OF ETERNITY was written on an arrow-shaped sign.
I had imagined that the way would be beset with difficulty. This was almost disappointingly easy.
Heading in the direction indicated, I walked for an hour, and then there the elephants were.
They were quite small, and they had roundish ears. There was a whole line of them. Every one of them white. Even seeing them now, at night, they were white.
Which one of them was the Elephant of Eternity, though? I had no idea. So as an experiment, I addressed the one closest to me:
“Are you the Elephant of Eternity?”
He nodded emphatically, and emitted a roar. That special trumpeting roar peculiar to elephants.
This was not necessarily to be believed, and so I asked the same thing of another elephant.
That one nodded, just like the one before, and made exactly the same trumpeting sound. I asked about ten of the elephants, and got exactly the same response.
Irritated, I made my way up to the front of the line. As I moved forward, the number of elephants increased, and they were more and more intertwined.
Soon, I realized that the sight of the intertwining elephants reminded me of something. It dawned on me that it was a mandala. The elephants intertwined on the left side of the road were arranged like the Diamond Realm Mandala, and the elephants intertwined on the right side of the road were arranged like the Womb Realm Mandala.
I suspected I had been hoodwinked. This irritated me even more, so I decided to go back. But suddenly, from the forests beyond the intertwining lines of elephants, dozens of elephant handlers came scurrying out and accosted me.
“You do know those are mandalas.”
“The Diamond Realm and the Womb Realm mandalas, no less. You don’t come across them often.”
“Please, don’t hurry off. Stay.”
Each elephant handler was dressed in gold brocade. But their robes were a bit shabby, and here and there the gold threads were frayed.
“If you don’t like them, there’s always the option of becoming an elephant handler.”
“What a great idea.”
“You’d enjoy being an elephant handler.”
And with that, they quickly started dressing me in gold brocade. I didn’t like this at all, so without a word I ran off.
I ran all the way back to the square with the arrow-shaped sign, and as I was catching my breath, someone I seemed to recognize appeared. She immediately jumped to conclusions.
“So you’re running away!”
“But the mandalas were so boring!” I replied.
“Well, I want to see them. Come on. Turn around,” she ordered me, imperiously.
I was suspicious, wondering why I had to do what she said, but I obeyed her, despite myself.
“Come on! Quickly! We must get a good look at the Womb Realm Mandala,” she commanded, even more imperiously.
So I went back to where the elephants were. I found it completely uninteresting, but I gazed thoughtfully, as I’d been told to, at the Womb Realm Mandala, which was on the right. As I gazed, I started to feel drowsy. I’ll just have forty winks, I thought, drifting off. I suddenly remembered I should issue an order to someone, quickly. But by then I was fast asleep.
Whenever we were separated, I would long for her. Even when I thought I had forgotten her, she would suddenly pop back into my mind. In fact, whenever there was any reason at all to remember her, I would remember her. So I decided to go back to her.
I made my way back along an endless windswept path, and there the girl was. She was seated on a single chair, which she had placed on a totally bare stretch of land. To my surprise, she was smoking a cigarette.
“Why are you smoking, for goodness’ sake?” I asked.
“My body’s changed,” was her reply.
As an experiment, I tried stroking the girl’s hair: several dry strands came away. With each stroke, more strands came away, fluttering down to the ground. It was a pretty sight, so I stroked her hair some more.
“Please stop,” she said eventually.
By that time, her hair had got a lot thinner.
The smoke from her cigarette spread in every direction, blown by the wind. The smoke assumed the forms of all sorts of things, which was fascinating to watch. Cats, rats, weasels… They ran off into the darkness once they had been given form. Sometimes a rat would be caught by a cat, and I would hear it squeak, which was spectacular.
“Aren’t you dancing?” I asked. The girl got up from her chair, and came and pressed her body against mine. As we held each other and danced, I glanced down, and there, peeping out from the strands of hair at the nape of her neck were what looked like mushrooms. Tiny, red mushrooms with flattened caps.
Horrified, I pushed the girl away from me.
The girl looked at the ground. She didn’t say a word. I felt guilty, and pulled her back to me. I put my hands round her shoulders, and we started dancing again.
“They’re going to multiply,” the girl said, drooping dejectedly. “They scatter their spores once every few hours. They multiply rapidly.”
I had blanched visibly, and I knew it; but I didn’t stop dancing. I just nodded.
When the yowling of the cats and rats and weasels, which had got quite noisy, finally died down, and our feet grew heavy and tired, I looked again at the nape of the girl’s neck, and saw twice as many mushrooms there.
“They have multiplied,” I said. The girl looked up. Her eyes, which were dark, almost black, like the eyes of a herbivorous animal, were fringed with long eyelashes. Her lips were plump and slightly pink, and the line from her temples down to her chin, with its fine downy hairs, curved in a gentle sweep.
“You have some on your neck, too,” she said, in a voice like a whisper.
I put my fingers to the back of my neck, and felt a number of small growths. I scratched one off, and bringing it to my eyes, I saw the beginnings of a tiny mushroom.
“Your body’s changed, just like mine,” the girl said, sighing.
A feeling of disgust rose in me. I felt nauseated. I wanted to give the girl a good shaking. But I controlled myself.
“It can’t be helped,” I said, and I quickened our steps.
As we whirled round, dancing, I knew the mushrooms would get bigger. Their mycelial filaments would increase, the small round bumps would get caps, and eventually those caps would pop open and release spores, countless spores, which would flutter down to the ground. Wherever those spores landed, these mushrooms would grow and proliferate.
I could feel my body getting covered by the tiny red mushrooms. Though I’d hated them before, the repugnance gradually gave way to a nostalgic, almost sleepy feeling, and I became quite accustomed to them.
I carried on dancing, twirling faster and faster.
Hearing a small shrill voice at my feet, I looked down and realized that the speaker was a kiwi.
“OK, here’s your first question.” It was that high raspy voice so characteristic of the birds.
“What food is the most efficient at producing longevity in canaries?”
The kiwi was brown in colour, with what looked like black seeds scattered amid its plumage. Crouching down and peering at it closely, I saw they weren’t seeds but patches of darker coloration.
“Come on, haven’t you worked it out yet? There are three possible answers: the egg of the reticulated python, the call of the stork at night, or soluble glass at molecular weight 126.”
Somewhat astonished at this, I remained crouched and totally still.
“Come on, haven’t you worked it out yet?” it shrieked. “The correct answer is soluble glass, molecular weight 126! Soluble glass, molecular weight 126!”
I was still getting over my surprise at this line of questioning when another kiwi appeared.
“In the past year, what is the number of victims of non-fatal lightning strikes?” this second kiwi asked. Its voice was somewhat lower than the voice of the first.
“Come on! Haven’t you worked it out yet? The correct answer is…,” the bird screeched. “…Two billion and fifty million! Two billion and fifty million!” The kiwi repeated the answer over and over again, running around in circles.
The number of kiwis was increasing by the minute. When I looked about me, there were dozens of them, all identical, and each one fired off a question to me in turn.
“What colour was Henri Michaux’s favourite bread-making machine?”
“Which one exists most essentially: a bolt on a door, or a hen on a bar?”
“Which corner of a room gets darkest first on a rainy day?”
“On a cloudy day, which will spread farther, the smell of cornflour or the smell of fresh cream?”
“How many layers above the Cambrian layer are the round green stones discarded in the baths of ancient Rome?”
I gave my answers in equally rapid succession.
“Reddish-brown!”
“The east-south-east corner!”
“Cornflour!”
“Thirteen!”
At each answer, the kiwis squawked excitedly, the dozens of them running around in little circles together:
“Correct answer!”
“Quite correct!”
“Correct! Yes, quite correct!”
By the time I had answered fifty questions, the kiwis were getting tired, and so was I. We were all of us panting.
“Surely that’s enough. Happy now?” the kiwis asked me, wheezing.
“Me? It doesn’t make any difference to me!” I replied.
At this, the kiwis started screeching:
“That’s outrageous!”
“See? This is why nobody likes her.”
“It’s this kind of behaviour that makes you just want to…”
I listened without saying a word, as the kiwis got more and more agitated, coming out with every criticism and insult they could think of.
“Well, if that’s how you see it, how about if I just sell off the lot of you to an illegal trader of exotic birds!” I yelled, finally.
They suddenly piped down.
“You don’t have to react quite so harshly…”
“We didn’t mean it like that…”
“That’s so heartbreaking…,” some of them muttered.
“I’m sick of it! Just sick and tired of having to spend my nights being pushed around by creatures like you!” I yelled, even louder.
Every bird fell silent. Without a word, they started pecking at the grasses at their feet, some wandering off into the bushes.
“Well, we didn’t mean to hurt you,” they said. Turning their small, round rear ends to me, they disappeared.
The scent of flowers drifted over from somewhere. The flowers must have just blossomed a few minutes ago. Their scent had been blown quickly over on a breeze from the west.
As the last of the kiwis called out “Goodbye!” and vanished, the scent of the flowers grew overpowering. The nature of the air was changing: night was on the point of giving way to early dawn.
I waited a few moments, breathing in the scent of the flowers, but the undergrowth was utterly silent.
“Hey, guys!” I tried calling. “I apologize! I think I said too much!”
But no kiwis emerged.
The scent of the flowers remained for a while longer, trailing in the air.
I could hear a dry, rustling sound. It came from deep within the girl’s body.
I put my ear to her stomach and listened. It was a low sound that kept the same steady beat, like someone walking over grass, or like a rhythmic clank below the whirr of an astronomical clock.
The girl was breathing deeply and evenly, asleep. A thin film of odourless perspiration had started to moisten the nape of her neck and the space between her breasts. Like water rising in a lake, it gathered in every single hollow of the sleeping girl, and then brimmed over and cascaded: lines of sweat spread out over the girl’s body, dripping down onto the earth.
The sweat poured off the girl’s body as she lay there on the soft grass.
Drinking in the sweat, the grass on which the girl lay started to grow. The blades of the grass lengthened, the apical buds grew into branches, and the lateral buds rapidly sprouted into leaves. In the twinkling of an eye, the girl’s body was surrounded by a dense profusion of foliage.
In addition to growing upwards, the vegetation spread outwards, producing concentric circles around the girl as she lay on the ground. Thousands of leaves of grass sprouted from the ground, each one putting forth bright-green new buds, and growing at incredible speed.
If I listened carefully, I could hear rustling sounds falling like rain around me. It was the sound of branches growing, and leaves unfurling. The sound was fresher and more vital than the one I had heard from within the girl’s body.
The vegetation surrounding the girl grew thick and luxurious, eventually becoming a forest. In the deepest part of the forest, the girl continued to sleep. Pressing my ear to her stomach, I could still hear the rustling inside her, echoing the dry rustling falling outside her.
Soon the rustling seemed to be coming from more places: I realized that even though the forest had stopped growing, the rustling was still coming—from all directions around me.
What I was hearing was the sound of footsteps. A whole host of footsteps, coming towards me, crushing the undergrowth on the forest floor.
The footsteps belonged to the inhabitants of the forest, and even though I couldn’t see them because all the leaves and branches got in the way, I knew exactly which direction they were heading: I could judge it from the sounds blown towards me by the wind. At first they headed to the west, then they headed south, after that they headed east, and finally they headed north: the inhabitants were continually shifting direction.
The hundreds of footsteps were going round and round in a circle, I realized, making their way closer to the centre of the forest.
As they came closer, other sounds mixed with the footsteps: whispered exchanges of conversation, the clearing of throats, soft laughter, bugle calls. After a while, between the trees, I caught glimpses of the inhabitants. Gaudy feathers and bits of coloured cloth flashed among the trees.
The inhabitants’ voices were now clear enough for me to understand distinct words, and the bugle calls and drumming grew ever louder.
Finally, the inhabitants showed themselves.
Each was about one metre in height. They had round faces. They were smiling, wrapped in ornately patterned cloth, and holding either a musical instrument or a long pole. They were barefoot, and chewing energetically. Their mouths were smeared with whatever they were eating. With their round faces, and their mouths smeared with food, the inhabitants walked in a procession around the sleeping girl.
The girl continued sleeping. As if in response to the rustling sound the inhabitants were making with their bare feet, the rustling sound coming from within the girl’s body got even louder.
The inhabitants continued filing round the girl, in ever-tightening circles. When they got so close to the girl that it was impossible to reduce the diameter of the circle, they started to go round, again and again, describing a circle whose circumference remained constant.
The shuffling of their feet, their hushed voices, the drums, the bugles and their chewing mixed together in a cacophony, filling the centre of the forest with sound.
High in the sky the morning star twinkled, and below it the inhabitants tirelessly kept up their circular file. Soon I noticed their bodies trembling slightly after each completed circle, and I could see that they were getting smaller and smaller.
And in the twinkling of an eye, they were now no bigger than ants. Even after they had shrunk to the size of ants, the inhabitants were still chatting to each other in hushed voices, blowing their bugles, banging on their drums, and chewing.
After a few more circles, these miniature inhabitants formed a long line, marched straight inside the girl’s body, and disappeared.
When the last of the inhabitants had disappeared, I put my ear to the sleeping girl’s stomach, and heard, mixed with the rustling sound, the faint sounds of bugles and drums.
Dawn was due to arrive soon, we had heard, so a celebratory feast was to be held.
Numerous people whom I knew had been invited to a mansion on the bank of a river. We were all on easy, familiar terms, so the drinking started immediately, without pre-dinner speeches, and we then turned our attention to the lavish spread on the banquet table. I was drawn to the salted bonito viscera and the salted sweetfish entrails, but since no one else seemed to have any interest in them, I contented myself with the root vegetables and grilled fish.
After a bit, the host, who was the owner of the mansion, rose to his feet and, with his chin, made a slight upward movement. Immediately there was a tremendous commotion in the kitchen, and a gaggle of women in aprons and men with crew cuts came running out. Leaping over the table, they sprinted into the garden and made their escape. A couple of them were not so athletic, and their feet knocked cups and plates to the floor.
The guests carried on drinking, apparently not giving it a thought. The host sat down again, and started digging into various dishes, including the cod braised in its skin, gluttonously.
After several hours, or so I thought, had passed, I looked at the clock, and realized it was still well before dawn. The sky in the east was completely dark. Perhaps because the kitchen staff had run off, the serving dishes on the table were now bare of food. There was only the bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails, in platters at the centre of the table, completely untouched by anyone’s chopsticks.
Suddenly, there was a rumble of sound—Kin!—and from the kitchen a huge form emerged and passed over the table. It had no corporeality: it was just a shadow. The shadow roared Kin! and then drifted from one spot to another in the room.
Every now and then, it hopped onto the lap of the host, and took the host’s head in its maw. The host looked as if he had lost his head, as if his body ended at the neck. Regardless, the host went on tipping back the wine, drinking away, his head inside the shadow’s enormous mouth.
When it had finished with the host, the shadow then went to each of the guests, and took each of their heads in its mouth. They too became headless, every one of them. And when the creature released them from its jaws, they were left without any features.
As the host and guests were sitting there, without faces, the shadow became aware of the salted bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails in the centre of the table.
The shadow got onto the table and started to devour the sweetfish entrails, barely chewing them, snapping them down. In the blink of an eye, the mound of entrails was gone. The shadow then started on the bonito viscera. These too disappeared in a matter of seconds.
The shadow now looked around the room. The guests, faceless, were still tossing down their wine. The shadow approached one of the guests, fastened its mouth onto his neck, and began siphoning up the wine in his belly. It did this to all the guests in turn; then it went up to the host and sucked up the wine in him, and finally, coming to me, it took my entire head in its mouth, and sucked up the wine in me.
I thought I would faint from the pleasure.
When it had just about guzzled up everything in me, the shadow started to take on a form. First a gold mane appeared, then a neck, then a body, fluffy shanks, and finally a tail, and alongside those, a beautifully contoured coat of sleek fur. It was a lion.
The lion leapt up onto the table and sprang out into the garden. In the east the sky had begun to take on a faint colour. The lion ran to the sky in the east. It sprinted at full speed, devouring every creature it met in the night.
When not a single creature was left, and the lion had disappeared beyond the eastern sky, the host occupied his throne, and the guests dispersed by twos and threes.
Night was giving way to the first glimmers of dawn.
The girl was already showing signs of no longer being a girl.
In a short span of time, her skin had become like paper, her eyes transparent. The ends of her arms and legs had begun to divide into branches; her hair had fallen out.
I gazed at the girl, who continued to change as she lay on the ground.
She was changing into something I didn’t recognize at all. I had the feeling I was about to remember something I had forgotten. Because it was something I had forgotten, I had no idea what it might be, but it felt as if I was going to remember it any moment now.
“Darling.” I spoke to the girl.
“What?” answered the girl.
“Were you always that kind of thing?”
“Yes, I think I probably was.”
The voice replying wasn’t the voice of the girl, of course: it was the voice of the thing I didn’t recognize. It was high and low at the same time, the kind of voice that might echo inside the hollow of a tree.
I looked at the changing girl, and I started to feel sad, and I cried.
“What’s the matter?” asked the thing that had once been a girl.
“You’ve changed,” I replied.
“That’s how I’m made. There’s nothing I can do about it,” the thing said, laughing.
I started to feel even sadder.
“Are you still crying?”
“Yes.”
“This is what happens to everyone who is born.”
“But I had no idea.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, it’s happening to you as well.”
I looked at my arms and legs, and saw that they were now dividing into branches, just like the girl’s: they looked like something between trees and nets. The surface of my skin was rough and tattered, and the hair that had fallen from my head lay in clumps on the ground.
I kicked at the clumps of fallen hair, but all that happened was that something down there that had divided into countless branches, like a bamboo broom, swept them together in a pile.
“But why?” I asked, dispirited.
The thing that had once been the girl answered, smiling:
“We’ve got old.”
The moon, which should have sunk long ago, rose steeply in the eastern sky, as it had done at the beginning of the night. As we watched, it travelled across the emptiness, and then sank to the west.
We were still watching when again the moon rose in the eastern sky, but this time it was a little larger than it had been a moment ago. It proceeded to rise and sink again and rise and sink again, with incredible speed, becoming a full moon first, and after that gradually waning.
“Do you think we’re like that moon?” I asked.
“Not at all!”
“So we’re different?”
“The moon gets to renew itself. We don’t.”
Several brownish butterflies came flying by. The girl stopped talking, and closed her eyes. The butterflies alighted on her, their wings opening and closing slowly, then flew off.
I felt tired, so I lay down next to the girl. Lying there, I looked up and saw a lion roaring Kin! and flying through the sky, as the moon rose and sank over and over again. I listened to the roar of the lion, and I put my lips to the lips of the thing that had once been the girl, and kissed her. Then I grew old, very old, and rotted away.
“Any minute now, it’s going to begin!” someone shouted excitedly—and immediately people gathered in a huge crowd. The lamplighter was making his rounds, extinguishing the lamps with his long pole, pushing against a stream of people going the other way.
The forest had been cut down, and the rivers filled in. The hills had been scraped flat, and valleys levelled. When the land reclamation was completed, everyone in the crowd pulled out saws and mallets and chisels and hoes from the folds of their kimonos, and started to build a town, using the trees they had cut down, and the crushed stone they had quarried from the hills.
People were digging holes and sinking pillars into them, others were securing timber trusses for towers, and others were tamping the crushed stone prior to building residences. The sound was deafening.
In a short time, a town came into being. People whistled as they packed away their saws and mallets and chisels and hoes, and sat down and started to brag about the buildings.
The braggadocio continued till the sun was high in the sky. Finally, when they had tired of that, the people unpacked their lunch boxes and gobbled their food down.
One person lay down to take a nap, and soon everyone had flopped down to do the same. When everyone was asleep, the snoring loud, I poked my head above the surface of the water and sniffed the air.
The air smelt metallic. Moving my front legs and hind legs in turn, twisting my body, I dragged myself over the ground. My front legs were really very short, so I could only move slowly. Behind me came numerous other newts, my companions.
When we finally arrived at the centre of the town, we clambered over the faces of the sleeping people, clung to timbers of the towers, and foraged for bits of food left in the lunch boxes. While we occupied ourselves like this—for we could only move very slowly—the day turned into evening. Even when evening came, the people continued to slumber. After taking a nibble or two of their flesh, my companions and I made our way back to the water. The people slept like logs, unconscious of our nibbles.
On my return to the pond, I relieved myself, and licked the water plants. Whenever the mood took me, I laid a few eggs. When silence lay at last over the muddy swamp, we newts fell asleep. We slept deeply, dreaming our dreams, which rose and burst like bubbles many, many times in the space of the night.