Alone in my room, I wear a piratical black patch over my right eye. The eye may look all right, but the truth is I have scarcely any sight in it. I say scarcely, it isn’t totally blind. Consequently, when I look at this world with both eyes I see two worlds perfectly superimposed, a vague and shadowy world on top of one that’s bright and vivid. I can be walking down a paved street when a sense of peril and unbalance will stop me like a rat just scurried out of a sewer, dead in my tracks. Or I’ll discover a film of unhappiness and fatigue on the face of a cheerful friend and clog the flow of an easy chat with my stutter. I suppose I’ll get used to this eventually. If I don’t, I intend to wear my patch not only in my room when I’m alone but on the street and with my friends. Strangers may pass with condescending smiles—what an old-fashioned joke!—but I’m old enough not to be annoyed by every little thing.
The story I intend to tell is about my first experience earning money; I began with my right eye because the memory of that experience ten years ago revived in me abruptly and quite out of context when violence was done to my eye last spring. Remembering, I should add, I was freed from the hatred uncoiling in my heart and beginning to fetter me. At the very end I’ll talk about the accident itself.
Ten years ago I had twenty-twenty vision. Now one of my eyes is ruined. Time shifted, launched itself from the springboard of an eyeball squashed by a stone. When I first met that sentimental madman I had only a child’s understanding of time. I was yet to have the cruel awareness of time drilling its eyes into my back and time lying in wait ahead.
Ten years ago I was eighteen, five feet six, one hundred and ten pounds, had just entered college and was looking for a part-time job. Although I still had trouble reading French, I wanted a cloth-bound edition in two volumes of L’Âme Enchanté. It was a Moscow edition, with not only a foreword but footnotes and even the colophon in Russian and wispy lines like bits of thread connecting the letters of the French text. A curious edition to be sure, but sturdier and more elegant than the French, and much cheaper. At the time I discovered it in a bookstore specializing in East European publications I had no interest in Romain Rolland, yet I went immediately into action to make the volumes mine. In those days I often succumbed to some weird passion and it never bothered me, I had the feeling there was nothing to worry about so long as I was sufficiently obsessed.
As I had just entered college and wasn’t registered at the employment center, I looked for work by making the rounds of people I knew. Finally my uncle introduced me to a banker who came up with an offer. “Did you happen to see a movie called Harvey?” he asked. I said yes, and tried for a smile of moderate but unmistakable dedication, appropriate for someone about to be employed for the first time. Harvey was that Jimmy Stewart film about a man living with an imaginary rabbit as big as a bear; it had made me laugh so hard I thought I would die. “Recently, my son has been having the same sort of delusions about living with a monster.” The banker didn’t return my smile. “He’s stopped working and stays in his room. I’d like him to get out from time to time but of course he’d need a—companion. Would you be interested?”
I knew quite a bit about the banker’s son. He was a young composer whose avant-garde music had won prizes in France and Italy and who was generally included in the photo roundups in the weekly magazines, the kind of article they always called “Japan’s Artists of Tomorrow.” I had never heard his major works, but I had seen several films he had written the music for. There was one about the adventures of a juvenile delinquent that had a short, lyrical theme played on the harmonica. It was beautiful. Watching the picture, I remember feeling vaguely troubled by the idea of an adult nearly thirty years old (in fact, the composer was twenty-eight when he hired me, my present age), working out a theme for the harmonica, I suppose because my own harmonica had become my little brother’s property when I had entered elementary school. And possibly because I knew more about the composer, whose name was D, than just public facts; I knew he had created a scandal. Generally I have nothing but contempt for scandals, but I knew that the composer’s infant child had died, that he had gotten divorced as a result, and that he was rumored to be involved with a certain movie actress. I hadn’t known that he was in the grips of something like the rabbit in Jimmy Stewart’s movie, or that he had stopped working and secluded himself in his room. How serious was his condition, I wondered, was it a case of nervous breakdown, or was he clearly schizophrenic?
“I’m not certain I know just what you mean by companion,” I said, reeling in my smile. “Naturally, I’d like to be of service if I can.” This time, concealing my curiosity and apprehension I tried to lend my voice and expression as much sympathy as possible without seeming forward. It was only a part-time job, but it was the first chance of employment I had had and I was determined to do my accommodating best.
“When my son decides he wants to go somewhere in Tokyo, you go along—just that. There’s a nurse at the house and she has no trouble handling him, so you don’t have to worry about violence.” The banker made me feel like a soldier whose cowardice had been discovered. I blushed and said, trying to recover lost ground, “I’m fond of music, and I respect composers more than anyone, so I look forward to accompanying D and talking with him.”
“All he thinks about these days is this thing in his head, and apparently that’s all he talks about!” The banker’s brusqueness made my face even redder. “You can go out to see him tomorrow,” he said.
“At—your house?”
“That’s right, did you think he was in an asylum?” From the banker’s tone of voice I could only suppose that he was at bottom a nasty man.
“If I should get the job,” I said with my eyes on the floor, “I’ll drop by again to thank you.” I could easily have cried.
“No, he’ll be hiring you (All right then, I resolved defiantly, I’ll call D my employer), so that won’t be necessary. All I care about is that he doesn’t get into any trouble outside that might develop into a scandal…. There’s his career to think about. Naturally, what he does reflects on me—”
So that was it! I thought, so I was to be a moral sentinel guarding the banker’s family against a second contamination by the poisons of scandal. Of course I didn’t say a thing, I only nodded dependably, anxious to warm the banker’s chilly heart with the heat of reliance on me. I didn’t even ask the most pressing question, something truly difficult to ask: This monster haunting your son, sir, is it a rabbit like Harvey, nearly six feet tall? A creature covered in bristly hair like an Abominable Snowman? What kind of a monster is it? In the end I remained silent and consoled myself with the thought that I might be able to pry the secret out of the nurse if I made friends with her.
Then I left the executive’s office, and as I walked along the corridor grinding my teeth in humiliation as if I were Julien Sorel after a meeting with someone important I became self-conscious to the tips of my fingers and tried assessing my attitude and its effectiveness. When I got out of college I chose not to seek nine-to-five employment, and I do believe the memory of my dialogue with that disagreeable banker played a large part in my decision.
Even so, when classes were over the next day I took a train out to the residential suburb where the composer lived. As I passed through the gate of that castle of a house, I remember a roaring of terrific beasts, as at a zoo in the middle of the night. I was dismayed, I cowered, what if those were the screams of my employer? A good thing it didn’t occur to me then that those savage screams might have been coming from the monster haunting D like Jimmy Stewart’s rabbit. Whatever they were, it was so clear that the screaming had rattled me that the maid showing me the way was indiscreet enough to break into a laugh. Then I discovered someone else laughing, voicelessly, in the dimness beyond a window in an annex in the garden. It was the man who was supposed to employ me; he was laughing like a face in a movie without a sound track. And boiling all around him was that howling of wild beasts. I listened closely and realized that several of the same animals were shrieking in concert. And in voices too shrill to be of this world. Abandoned by the maid at the entrance to the annex, I decided the screaming must be part of the composer’s tape collection, regained my courage, straightened up and opened the door.
Inside, the annex reminded me of a kindergarten. There were no partitions in the large room, only two pianos, an electric organ, several tape recorders, a record player, something we had called a “mixer” when I was in the high-school radio club—there was hardly room to step. A dog asleep on the floor, for example, turned out to be a tuba of reddish brass. It was just as I had imagined a composer’s studio; I even had the illusion I had seen the place before. His father had said D had stopped working and secluded himself in his room, could he have been mistaken?
The composer was just bending to switch off the tape recorder. Enveloped in a chaos that was not without its own order, he moved his hands swiftly and in an instant those beastly screams were sucked into a dark hole of silence. Then he straightened and turned to me with a truly tranquil smile.
Having glanced around the room and seen that the nurse was not present I was a little wary, but the composer gave me no reason in the world to expect that he was about to get violent.
“My father told me about you. Come in, there’s room over there,” he said in a low, resonant voice.
I took off my shoes and stepped up onto the rug without putting on slippers. Then I looked around for a place to sit, but except for a round stool in front of the piano and the organ, there wasn’t a bit of furniture in the room, not even a cushion. So I brought my feet together between a pair of bongo drums and some empty tape boxes and there I stood uncomfortably. The composer stood there too, arms hanging at his sides. I wondered if he ever sat down. He didn’t ask me to be seated either, just stood there silent and smiling.
“Could those have been monkey voices?” I said, trying to crack a silence that threatened to set more quickly than any cement.
“Rhinoceros—they sounded that way because I speeded the machine up. And I had the volume way up, too. At least I think they’re rhinoceros—rhino is what I asked for when I had this tape made—of course I can’t really be sure. But now that you’re here, I’ll be able to go to the zoo myself.”
“I may take that to mean that I’m employed?”
“Of course! I didn’t have you come out here to test you. How can a lunatic test a normal person?” The man who was to be my employer said this objectively and almost as if he were embarrassed. Which made me feel disgusted with the obsequiousness of what I had said—I may take that to mean that I’m employed? I had sounded like a shopkeeper! The composer was different from his businessman father and I should have been more direct with him.
“I wish you wouldn’t call yourself a lunatic. It’s awkward for me.” Trying to be frank was one thing, but what a brainless remark! But the composer met me half way, “All right, if that’s how you feel. I suppose that would make work easier.”
Work is a vague word, but, at least during those few months when I was visiting him once a week, the composer didn’t get even as close to work as going to the zoo to record a genuine rhino for himself. All he did was wander around Tokyo in various conveyances or on foot and visit a variety of places. When he mentioned work, he must therefore have had me in mind. And I worked quite a lot; I even went on a mission for him all the way to Kyoto.
“Then when should I begin?” I said.
“Right away if it suits you. Now.”
“That suits me fine.”
“I’ll have to get ready—would you wait outside?”
Head lowered cautiously, as though he were walking in a swamp, my employer picked his way to the back of the room past musical instruments and sound equipment and piles of manuscript to a black wooden door which he opened and then closed behind him. I got a quick look at a woman in a nurse’s uniform, a woman in her early forties with a longish face and heavy shadows on her cheeks that might have been wrinkles or maybe scars. She seemed to encircle the composer with her right arm as she ushered him inside, while with her left hand she closed the door. If this was part of the routine, I would never have a chance to talk with the nurse before I went out with my employer. Standing in front of the closed door, in the darkest part of that dim room, I shuffled into my shoes and felt my anxiety about this job of mine increase. The composer had smiled the whole time and when I had prompted him he had replied. But he hadn’t volunteered much. Should I have been more reserved? Since outside might have meant two things and since I was determined that everything should be perfect on my first job, I decided to wait just inside the main gate, from where I could see the annex in the garden.
D was a small, thin man, but with a head that seemed larger than most. To make the bony cliff of his forehead look a little less forbidding he combed his pale, well-washed, and fluffy hair down over his brow. His mouth and jaw were small, and his teeth were horribly irregular. And yet, probably due to the color of his deeply recessed eyes, there was a static correctness about his face that went well with a tranquil smile. As for the overall impression, there was something canine about the man. He wore flannel trousers and a sweater with stripes like fleas. His shoulders were a little stooped, his arms outlandishly long.
When he came out of the back door of the annex, my employer was wearing a blue wool cardigan over his other sweater and a pair of white tennis shoes. He reminded me of a grade-school music teacher. In one hand he held a black scarf, and as if he were puzzling whether to wrap it around his neck, there was perplexity in his grin to me as I waited at the gate. For as long as I knew D, except at the very end when he was lying in a hospital bed, he was always dressed this way. I remember his outfit so well because I was always struck by something comical about an adult man wearing a cardigan around his shoulders, as if he were a woman in disguise. Its shapelessness and nondescript color made that sweater perfect for him. As the composer pigeon-toed toward me past the shrubbery, he absently lifted the hand that held the scarf and signaled me with it. Then he wrapped the scarf resolutely around his neck. It was already four in the afternoon and fairly cold out-of-doors.
D went through the gate, and as I was following him (our relationship was already that of employer and employee) I had the feeling I was being watched and turned around: behind the same window through which I had discovered my employer, that forty-year-old nurse with the scarred—or were they wrinkled?—cheeks was watching us the way a soldier remaining behind might see a deserter off, her lips clamped shut like a turtle’s. I resolved to get her alone as soon as I could to question her about D’s condition. What was wrong with the woman, anyway? Here she was taking care of a young man with a nervous condition, maybe a madman, yet when her charge went out she had nothing to say to his companion! Wasn’t that professional negligence? Wasn’t she at least obliged to fill in the new man on the job? Or was my employer a patient so gentle and harmless that nothing had to be said?
When he got to the sidewalk D shuttered open his tired-looking eyes in their deep sockets and glanced swiftly up and down the deserted, residential street. I didn’t know whether it was an indication of madness or what—sudden action without any continuity seemed to be a habit of his. The composer looked up at the clear, end-of-autumn sky, blinking rapidly. Though they were sunken, there was something remarkably expressive about his deep brown eyes. Then he stopped blinking and his eyes seemed to focus, as though he were searching the sky. I stood obliquely behind him, watching, and what impressed me most vividly was the movement of his Adam’s apple, which was large as any fist. I wondered if he had been destined to become a large man; perhaps something had impeded his growth in infancy and now only his head from the neck up bespoke the giant he was meant to be.
Lowering his gaze from the sky, my employer found and held my puzzled eyes with his own and said casually, but with a gravity that made objection impossible, “On a clear day you can see things floating up there very well. He’s up there with them, and frequently he comes down to me when I go outdoors.”
Instantly I felt threatened. Looking away from my employer, I wondered how to survive this first ordeal that had confronted me so quickly. Should I pretend to believe in “him,” or would that be a mistake? Was I dealing with a raving madman, or was the composer just a poker-faced humorist trying to have some fun with me? As I stood there in distress, he extended me a helping hand: “I know you can’t see the figures floating in the sky, and I know you wouldn’t be aware of him even if he were right here at my side. All I ask is that you don’t act amazed when he comes down to earth, even if I talk to him. Because you’d upset him if you were to break out laughing all of a sudden or tried to shut me up. And if you happen to notice when we’re talking that I want some support from you, I’d appreciate it if you’d chime right in and say something, you know, affirmative. You see, I’m explaining Tokyo to him as if it were a paradise. It might seem a lunatic paradise to you, but maybe you could think of it as a satire and be affirmative anyway, at least when he’s down here with me.”
I listened carefully and thought I could make out at least the contours of what my employer expected of me. Then was he a rabbit as big as a man after all, nesting in the sky? But that wasn’t what I asked; I permitted myself to ask only: “How will I know when he’s down here with you?”
“Just by watching me; he only comes down when I’m outside.”
“How about when you’re in a car?”
“In a car or a train, as long as I’m next to an open window he’s likely to show up. There have been times when he’s appeared when I was in the house, just standing next to an open window.”
“And … right now?” I asked uncomfortably. I must have sounded like the class dunce who simply cannot grasp the multiplication principle.
“Right now it’s just you and me,” my employer said graciously. “Why don’t we ride in to Shinjuku today; I haven’t been on a train in a long time.”
We walked to the station, and all the way I kept an eye peeled for a sign that something had appeared at my employer’s side. But before I knew it we were on the train and, so far as I could tell, nothing had materialized. One thing I did notice: the composer ignored the people who passed us on the street even when they greeted him. As if he himself did not exist, as if the people who approached with hellos and how-are-yous were registering an illusion which they mistook for him, my employer utterly ignored all overtures to contact.
The same thing happened at the ticket window; D declined to relate to other people. Handing me one thousand yen he told me to buy tickets, and then refused to take his own even when I held it out to him. I had to stop at the gate and have both our tickets punched while D swept through the turnstile onto the platform with the freedom of the invisible man. Even on the train, he behaved as if the other passengers were no more aware of him than of the atmosphere; huddling in a seat in the farthest corner of the car, he rode in silence with his eyes closed. I stood in front of him and watched in growing apprehension for whatever it was to float in through the open window and settle at his side. Naturally, I didn’t believe in the monster’s existence. It was just that I was determined not to miss the instant when D’s delusions took hold of him; I felt I owed him that much in return for the money he was paying me. But, as it happened, he sat like some small animal playing dead all the way to Shinjuku Station, so I could only surmise that he hadn’t had a visit from the sky. Of course, supposition was all it was: as long as other people were around us, my employer remained a sullen oyster of silence. But I learned soon enough that my guess had been correct. Because when the moment came it was more than apparent (from D’s reaction, I mean) that something was visiting him.
We had left the station and were walking down the street. It was that time of day a little before evening when not many people are out, yet we ran across a small crowd gathered on a corner. We stopped to look; surrounded by the crowd, an old man was turning around and around in the street without a glance at anyone. A dignified-looking old man, he was spinning in a frenzy, clutching a briefcase and an umbrella to his breast, mussing his gray, pomaded hair a little as he stamped his feet and barked like a seal. The faces in the watching crowd were lusterless and dry in the evening chill that was stealing into the air; the old man’s face alone was flushed, and sweating, and seemed about to steam.
Suddenly I noticed that D, who should have been standing at my side, had taken a few steps back and had thrown one arm around the shoulders of an invisible something roughly his own height. Now he was peering affectionately into the space slightly above the empty circle of his arm. The crowd was too intent on the old man to be concerned with D’s performance, but I was terrified. Slowly the composer turned to me, as if he wanted to introduce me to a friend. I didn’t know how to respond; all I could do was panic and blush. It was like forgetting your silly lines in the junior high school play. The composer continued to stare at me, and now there was annoyance in his eyes. He was seeking an explanation for that intent old man turning singlemindedly in the street for the benefit of his visitor from the sky. A paradisical explanation! But all I could do was wonder stupidly whether the old man might have been afflicted with Saint Vitus’ dance.
When I sadly shook my head in silence, the light of inquiry went out of my employer’s eyes. As if he were taking leave of a friend, he dropped his arm. Then he slowly shifted his gaze skyward until his head was all the way back and his large Adam’s apple stood out in bold relief. The phantom had soared back into the sky and I was ashamed; I hadn’t been equal to my job. As I stood there with my head hanging, the composer stepped up to me and indicated that my first day of work was at an end: “We can go home, now. He’s come down today already, and you must be pretty tired.” I did feel exhausted after all that tension.
We rode back in a taxi with the windows rolled up, and as soon as I’d been paid for the day, I left. But I didn’t go straight to the station; I waited behind a telephone pole diagonally across from the house. Dusk deepened, the sky turned the color of a rose, and just as the promise of night was becoming fact, the nurse, in a short-skirted, one-piece dress of a color indistinct in the dimness, appeared through the main gate pushing a brand-new bicycle in front of her. Before she could get on the bicycle, I ran over to her. Without her nurse’s uniform, she was just an ordinary little woman in her early forties; vanished from her face was the mystery I had discovered through the annex window. And my appearance had unsettled her. She couldn’t climb on the bike and pedal away, but neither would she stand still; she had begun to walk the bike along when I demanded that she explain our mutual employer’s condition. She resisted, peevishly, but I had a good grip on the bicycle seat and so in the end she gave in. When she began to talk, her formidable lower jaw snapped shut at each break in the sentence; she was absolutely a talking turtle.
“He says it’s a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown. Big as a kangaroo, he says. It’s supposed to be afraid of dogs and policemen and it comes down out of the sky. He says its name is Aghwee! Let me tell you something, if you happen to be around when that spook gets hold of him, you’d better just play dumb, you can’t afford to get involved. Don’t forget, you’re dealing with a looney! And another thing, don’t you take him anyplace funny, even if he wants to go. On top of everything else, a little gonorrhea is all we need around here!”
I blushed and let go of the bicycle seat. The nurse, jangling her bell, pedaled away into the darkness as fast as she could go with legs as round and thin as handlebars. Ah, a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown, big as a kangaroo!
When I showed up at the house the following week, the composer fixed me with those clear brown eyes of his and rattled me by saying, though not especially in reproof, “I hear you waited for the nurse and asked her about my visitor from the sky. You really take your work seriously.”
That afternoon we took the same train in the opposite direction, into the country for half an hour to an amusement park on the banks of the Tama river. We tried all kinds of rides and, luckily for me, the baby as big as a kangaroo dropped out of the sky to visit D when he was up by himself in the Sky Sloop, wooden boxes shaped like boats that were hoisted slowly into the air on the blades of a kind of windmill. From a bench on the ground, I watched the composer talking with an imaginary passenger at his side. And until his visitor had climbed back into the sky, D refused to come down; again and again a signal from him sent me running to buy him another ticket.
Another incident that made an impression on me that day occurred as we were crossing the amusement park toward the exit, when D accidentally stepped in some wet cement. When he saw that his foot had left an imprint he became abnormally irritated, and until I had negotiated with the workmen, paid them something for their pains and had the footprint troweled away, he stubbornly refused to move from the spot. This was the only time the composer ever revealed to me the least violence in his nature. On the way home on the train, I suppose because he regretted having barked at me, he excused himself in this way: “I’m not living in present time anymore, at least not consciously. Do you know the rule that governs trips into the past in a time machine? For example, a man who travels back ten thousand years in time doesn’t dare do anything in that world that might remain behind him. Because he doesn’t exist in time ten thousand years ago, and if he left anything behind him there the result would be a warp, infinitely slight maybe but still a warp, in all of history from then until now, ten thousand years of it. That’s the way the rule goes, and since I’m not living in present time, I mustn’t do anything here in this world that might remain or leave an imprint.”
“But why have you stopped living in present time?” I asked, and my employer sealed himself up like a golf ball and ignored me. I regretted my loose tongue; I had finally exceeded the limits permitted me, because I was too concerned with D’s problem. Maybe the nurse was right; playing dumb was the only way, and I couldn’t afford to get involved. I resolved not to.
We walked around Tokyo a number of times after that, and my new policy was a success. But the day came when the composer’s problems began to involve me whether I liked it or not. One afternoon we got into a cab together and, for the first time since I had taken the job, D mentioned a specific destination, a swank apartment house designed like a hotel in Daikan Yama. When we arrived, D waited in the coffee shop in the basement while I went up the elevator alone to pick up a package that was waiting for me. I was to be given the package by D’s former wife, who was living alone in the apartment now.
I knocked on a door that made me think of the cell blocks at Sing Sing (I was always going to the movies in those days; I have the feeling about ninety-five percent of what I knew came directly from the movies) and it was opened by a short woman with a pudgy red face on top of a neck that was just as pudgy and as round as a cylinder. She ordered me to take my shoes off and step inside, and pointed to a sofa near the window where I was to sit. This must be the way high society receives a stranger, I remember thinking at the time. For me, the son of a poor farmer, refusing her invitation and asking for the package at the door would have taken the courage to defy Japanese high society, the courage of that butcher who threatened Louis XIV. I did as I was told, and stepped for the first time in my life into a studio apartment in the American style.
The composer’s former wife poured me some beer. She seemed somewhat older than D, and although she gestured grandly and intoned when she spoke, she was too round and overweight to achieve dignity. She was wearing a dress of some heavy cloth with the hem of the skirt unraveled in the manner of a squaw costume, and her necklace of diamonds set in gold looked like the work of an Inca craftsman (now that I think about it, these observations, too, smell distinctly of the movies). Her window overlooked the streets of Shibuya, but the light pouring through it into the room seemed to bother her terrifically; she was continually shifting in her chair, showing me legs as round and bloodshot as her neck, while she questioned me in the voice of a prosecutor. I suppose I was her only source of information about her former husband. Sipping my black, bitter beer as if it were hot coffee, I answered her as best I could, but my knowledge of D was scant and inaccurate and I couldn’t satisfy her. Then she started asking about D’s actress girl friend, whether she came to see him and things like that, and there was nothing I could say. Annoyed, I thought to myself, what business was it of hers, didn’t she have any woman’s pride?
“Does D still see that Phantom?”
“Yes, it’s a baby the size of a kangaroo in a white cotton nightgown and he says its name is Aghwee, the nurse was telling me about it,” I said enthusiastically, glad to encounter a question I could do justice to. “It’s usually floating in the sky, but sometimes it flies down to D’s side.”
“Aghwee, you say. Then it must be the ghost of our dead baby. You know why he calls it Aghwee? Because our baby spoke only once while it was alive and that was what it said—Aghwee. That’s a pretty mushy way to name the ghost that’s haunting you, don’t you think?” The woman spoke derisively; an ugly, corrosive odor reached me from her mouth. “Our baby was born with a lump on the back of its head that made it look as if it had two heads. The doctor diagnosed it as a brain hernia. When D heard the news he decided to protect himself and me from a catastrophe, so he got together with the doctor and they killed the baby—I think they only gave it sugar water instead of milk no matter how loud it screamed. My husband killed the baby because he didn’t want us to be saddled with a child who could only function as a vegetable, which is what the doctor had predicted! So he was acting out of fantastic egotism more than anything else. But then there was an autopsy and the lump turned out to be a benign tumor. That’s when D began seeing ghosts; you see he’d lost the courage he needed to sustain his egotism, so he declined to live his own life, just as he had declined to let the baby go on living. Not that he committed suicide, he just fled from reality into a world of phantoms. But once your hands are all bloody with a baby’s murder, you can’t get them clean again just by running from reality, anybody knows that. So here he is, hands as filthy as ever and carrying on about Aghwee.”
The cruelness of her criticism was hard to bear, for my employer’s sake. So I turned to her, redder in the face than ever with the excitement of her own loquacity, and struck a blow for D. “Where were you while all this was going on? You were the mother, weren’t you?”
“I had a Caesarean, and for a week afterwards I was in a coma with a high fever. It was all over when I woke up,” said D’s former wife, leaving my gauntlet on the floor. Then she stood up and moved toward the kitchen. “I guess you’ll have some more beer?”
“No, thank you, I’ve had enough. Would you please give me the package I’m supposed to take to D?”
“Of course, just let me gargle. I have to gargle every ten minutes, for pyorrhea—you must have noticed the smell?”
D’s former wife put a brass key into a business envelope and handed it to me. Standing behind me while I tied my shoes, she asked what school I went to and then said proudly: “I hear there’s not even one subscriber to the T —— Times in the dormitories there. You may be interested to know that my father will own that paper soon.”
I let silence speak for my contempt.
I was about to get into the elevator when doubt knifed through me as though my chest were made of butter. I had to think. I let the elevator go and decided to use the stairs. If his former wife had described D’s state of mind correctly, how could I be sure he wouldn’t commit suicide with a pinch of cyanide or something taken from a box this key unlocked? All the way down the stairs I wondered what to do, and then I was standing in front of D’s table and still hadn’t arrived at a conclusion. The composer sat there with his eyes tightly shut, his tea untouched on the table. I suppose it wouldn’t do for him to be seen drinking materials from this time now that he had stopped living in it and had become a traveler from another.
“I saw her,” I began, resolved all of a sudden to lie, “and we were talking all this time but she wouldn’t give me anything.”
My employer looked up at me placidly and said nothing, though doubt clouded his puppy eyes in their deep sockets. All the way back in the cab I sat in silence at his side, secretly perturbed. I wasn’t sure whether he had seen through my lie. In my shirt pocket the key was heavy.
But I only kept it for a week. For one thing, the idea of D’s suicide began to seem silly; for another, I was worried he might ask his wife about the key. So I put it in a different envelope and mailed it to him special delivery. The next day I went out to the house a little worried and found my employer in the open space in front of the annex, burning a pile of scores in manuscript. They must have been his own compositions: that key had unlocked the composer’s music.
We didn’t go out that day. Instead I helped D incinerate his whole opus. We had burned everything and had dug a hole and I was burying the ashes when suddenly D began to whisper. The phantom had dropped out of the sky. And until it left I continued working, slowly burying those ashes. That afternoon Aghwee (and there was no denying it was a mushy name) the monster from the sky remained at my employer’s side for fully twenty minutes.
From that day on, since I either stepped to one side or dropped behind whenever the baby phantom appeared, the composer must have realized that I was complying with only the first of his original instructions, not to act amazed, while his request that I back him up with something affirmative was consistently ignored. Yet he seemed satisfied, and so my job was made easier. I couldn’t believe D was the kind of person to create a disturbance in the street; in fact his father’s warning began to seem ridiculous, our tours of Tokyo together continued so uneventfully. I had already purchased the Moscow edition of L’Âme Enchanté I wanted, but I no longer had any intention of giving up such a wonderful job. My employer and I went everywhere together. D wanted to visit all the concert halls where works of his had been performed and all the schools he had ever been to. We would make special trips to places he had once enjoyed himself—bars, movie theaters, indoor swimming pools—and then we would turn back without going inside. And the composer had a passion for all of Tokyo’s many forms of public transportation: I’m sure we rode the entire metropolitan subway system. Since the monster baby couldn’t descend from the sky while we were underground, I could enjoy the subway in peace of mind. Naturally, I tensed whenever we encountered dogs or officers of the law, remembering what the nurse had told me, but those encounters never coincided with an appearance by Aghwee. I discovered that I was loving my job. Not loving my employer or his phantom baby the size of a kangaroo. Simply loving my job.
One day the composer approached me about making a trip for him. He would pay traveling expenses, and my daily wage would be doubled; since I would have to stay overnight in a hotel and wouldn’t be back until the second day, I would actually be earning four times what I usually made. Not only that, the purpose of the trip was to meet D’s former girlfriend the movie actress in D’s place. I accepted eagerly, I was delighted. And so began that comic and pathetic journey.
D gave me the name of the hotel the actress had mentioned in a recent letter and the date she was expecting him to arrive. Then he had me learn a message to the girl: my employer was no longer living in present time; he was like a traveler who had arrived here in a time machine from a world ten thousand years in the future. Accordingly, he couldn’t permit himself to create a new existence with his own signature on it through such acts as writing letters.
I memorized the message, and then it was late at night and I was sitting opposite a movie actress in the basement bar of a hotel in Kyoto, with a chance first to explain why D hadn’t come himself, next to persuade his mistress of his conception of time, and finally to deliver his message. I concluded: “D would like you to be careful not to confuse his recent divorce with another divorce he once promised you he would get; and since he isn’t living in present time anymore, he says it’s only natural that he won’t be seeing you again.” I felt my face color; for the first time I had the sensation that I had a truly difficult job.
“Is that what D-boy says? And what do you say? How do you feel about all this that you’d run an errand all the way to Kyoto?”
“Frankly, I think D is being mushy.”
“That’s the way he is—I’d say he’s being pretty mushy with you, too, asking this kind of favor!”
“I’m employed; I get paid by the day for what I do.”
“What are you drinking there? Have some brandy.”
I did. Until then I’d been drinking the same dark beer D’s former wife had given me, with an egg in it to thin it down. By some queer carom of a psychological billiard, I’d been influenced by a memory from D’s former wife’s apartment while waiting to meet his mistress. The actress had been drinking brandy all along. It was the first imported brandy I’d ever had.
“And what’s all this about D-boy seeing a ghost, a baby as big as a kangaroo? What did you call it, Raghbee?”
“Aghwee! The baby only spoke once before it died and that was what it said.”
“And D thought it was telling him its name? Isn’t that darling! If that baby had been normal, it was all decided that D was going to get a divorce and marry me. The day the baby was born we were in bed together in a hotel room and there was a phone call and then we knew something awful had happened. D jumped out of bed and went straight to the hospital. Not a word from him since—” The actress gulped her brandy down, filled her glass to the brim from the bottle of Hennessy on the table as if she were pouring fruit juice, and drained her glass again.
Our table was hidden from the bar by a display case full of cigarettes. Hanging on the wall above my shoulder was a large color poster with the actress’s picture on it, a beer advertisement. The face in the poster glittered like gold, no less than the beer. The girl sitting opposite me was not quite so dazzling, there was even a depression in her forehead, just below the hairline, that looked deep enough to contain an adult thumb. But it was precisely the fault that made her more appealing than her picture.
She couldn’t get the baby off her mind.
“Look, wouldn’t it be terrifying to die without memories or experiences because you’d never done anything human while you were alive? That’s how it would be if you died as an infant—wouldn’t that be terrifying?”
“Not to the baby, I don’t imagine,” I said deferentially.
“But think about the world after death!” The actress’s logic was full of leaps.
“The world after death?”
“If there is such a thing, the souls of the dead must live there with their memories for all eternity. But what about the soul of a baby who never knew anything and never had any experiences? I mean what memories can it have?”
At a loss, I drank my brandy in silence.
“I’m terribly afraid of death so I’m always thinking about it—you don’t have to be disgusted with yourself because you don’t have a quick answer for me. But you know what I think? The minute that baby died, I think D-boy decided not to create any new memories for himself, as if he had died, too, and that’s why he stopped living, you know, positively, in present time. And I bet he calls that baby ghost down to earth all over Tokyo so he can create new memories for it!”
At the time I thought she must be right. This tipsy movie actress with a dent in her forehead big enough for a thumb is quite an original psychologist, I thought to myself. And much more D’s type, I thought, than the pudgy, tomato-faced daughter of a newspaper baron. All of a sudden I realized that, even here in Kyoto with hundreds of miles between us, I, the model of a faithful employee, was thinking exclusively about D. No, there was something else, too, there was D’s phantom. I realized that the baby whose appearance I waited for nervously every time my employer and I went out together hadn’t been off my mind for a minute.
It was time for the bar to close and I didn’t have a room. I’d managed to get as old as I was without ever staying in a hotel and I knew nothing about reservations. Luckily, the actress was known at the hotel, and a word from her got me a room. We went up in the elevator together, and I started to get off at my floor when she suggested we have one last drink and invited me to her room. It was from that point that memories of the evening get comic and pathetic. When she had seated me in a chair, the actress returned to the door and looked up and down the hall, then went through a whole series of nervous motions, flounced on the bed as if to test the springs, turned lights on and switched them off, ran a little water in the tub. Then she poured me the brandy she had promised and, sipping a Coca-Cola, she told me about another man who had courted her during her affair with D, and finally going to bed with him, and D slapping her so hard the teeth rattled in her mouth. Then she asked if I thought today’s college students went in for “heavy petting”? It depended on the student, I said—suddenly the actress had become a mother scolding a child for staying up too late and was telling me to find my own room and go to sleep. I said good night, went downstairs, and fell asleep immediately. I woke up at dawn with a fire in my throat.
The most comic and pathetic part was still to come. I understood the minute I opened my eyes that the actress had invited me to her room intending to seduce a college student who was wild for heavy petting. And with that understanding came rage and abject desire. I hadn’t slept with a woman yet, but this humiliation demanded that I retaliate. I was drunk on what must have been my first Hennessy VSOP, and I was out of my head with the kind of poisonous desire that goes with being eighteen. It was only five o’clock in the morning and there was no sign of life in the halls. Like a panther wild with rage I sped to her door on padded feet. It was ajar. I stepped inside and found her seated at the dresser mirror with her back to me. Creeping up directly behind her (to this day I wonder what I was trying to do), I lunged at her neck with both hands. The actress whirled around with a broad smile on her face, rising as she turned, and then she had my hands in her own and was pumping them happily up and down as if she were welcoming a guest and sing-songing, “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning!” Before I knew it I had been seated in a chair and we were sharing her toast and morning coffee and reading the newspaper together. After a while the movie actress said in a tone of voice she might have used to discuss the weather: “You were trying to rape me just now, weren’t you!” She went back to her makeup and I got out of there, fled downstairs to my own room and burrowed back into bed, trembling as though I had malaria. I was afraid that a report of this incident might reach D, but the subject of the movie actress never came up again. I continued to enjoy my job.
Winter had come. Our plan that afternoon was to bicycle through D’s residential neighborhood and the surrounding fields. I was on a rusty old bike and my employer had borrowed the nurse’s shiny new one. Gradually we expanded the radius of a circle around D’s house, riding into a new housing development and coasting down hills in the direction of the fields. We were sweating, relishing the sensation of liberation, more and more exhilarated. I say “we” and include D because that afternoon it was evident that he was in high spirits, too. He was even whistling a theme from a Bach sonata for flute and harpsichord called Siciliana. I happened to know that because when I was in high school I had played flute. I never learned to play well but I did develop a habit of thrusting out my upper lip the way a tapir does. Naturally, I had friends who insisted my buck teeth were to blame. But the fact is, flutists frequently look like tapirs.
As we pedaled down the street, I picked up the tune and began to whistle along with D. Siciliana is a sustained and elegant theme, but I was out of breath from pedaling and my whistle kept lapsing into airy sibilance. Yet D’s phrasing was perfect, absolutely legato. I stopped whistling then, ashamed to go on, and the composer glanced over at me with his lips still pursed in a whistle like a carp puckering up to breathe and smiled his tranquil smile. Granted there was a difference in the bikes, it was still unnatural and pathetic that an eighteen-year-old student, skinny maybe, but tall, should begin to tire and run short of breath before a twenty-eight-year-old composer who was a little man and sick besides. Unjust is what it was, and infuriating. My mood clouded instantly and I felt disgusted with the whole job. So I stood up on the pedals all of a sudden and sped away as furiously as a bicycle racer. I even turned down a narrow gravel path between two vegetable fields purposely. When I looked back a minute later, my employer was hunched over the handle bars, his large, round head nodding above his narrow shoulders, churning the gravel beneath his wheels in hot pursuit of me. I coasted to a stop, propped a foot on the barbed wire fence that bordered the field and waited for D to catch up. I was already ashamed of my childishness.
His head still bobbing, my employer was approaching fast. And then I knew the phantom was with him. D was racing his bike down the extreme left of the gravel path, his face twisted to the right so that he was almost looking over his right shoulder, and the reason his head appeared to bob was that he was whispering encouragement to something running, or maybe flying, alongside the bicycle. Like a marathon coach pacing one of his runners. Ah, I thought, he’s doing that on the premise that Aghwee is neck and neck with his speeding bike. The monster as large as a kangaroo, the fat, funny baby in a white cotton nightgown was bounding—like a kangaroo!—down that gravel path. I shuddered, then I kicked the barbed wire fence and slowly pedaled away, waiting for my employer and the monster in his imagination to catch up.
Don’t think I had let myself begin to believe in Aghwee’s existence. I had taken the nurse’s advice, sworn not to lose sight of the anchor on my common sense as in those slightly solemn slapstick comedies where, for example, the keeper of the mad house goes mad; consciously derisive, I was thinking to myself that the neurotic composer was putting on a show with his bicycle just to follow up a lie he had told me once, and what a lot of trouble to go to! In other words, I was keeping a clinical distance between myself and D’s phantom monster. Even so, there occurred a strange alteration in my state of mind.
It began this way: D had finally caught up and was biking along a few feet behind me when, as unexpectedly as a cloudburst, and as inescapably, we were enveloped by the belling of a pack of hounds. I looked up and saw them racing toward me down the gravel path, young adult Dobermans that stood two feet high, more than ten of them. Running breathlessly behind the pack, the thin black leather leashes grasped in one hand, was a man in overalls, chasing the dogs perhaps, or maybe they were dragging him along. Jet-black Dobermans, sleek as wet seals, with just a dusting of dry chocolate on their chests and jowls and pumping haunches. And down on us they howled, filling the gravel path, keening for the attack at such a forward tilt they looked about to topple on their foaming snouts. There was a meadow on the other side of the field; the man in overalls must have been training the beasts there and now he was on his way home with them.
Trembling with fear, I got off my bike and helplessly surveyed the field on the other side of the fence. The barbed wire came up to my chest. I might have had a chance myself but I would never have been able to boost the little composer to safety on the other side. The poisons of terror were beginning to numb my head, but for one lucid instant I could see the catastrophe that was bound to occur in a few seconds. As the Dobermans neared, D would sense that Aghwee was being attacked by a pack of the animals it most feared. He would probably hear the baby’s frightened crying. And certainly he would meet the dogs head-on, in defense of his baby. Then the Dobermans would rip him to pieces. Or he would try to escape with the baby and make a reckless leap to clear the fence and be just as cruelly torn. I was rocked by the pity of what I knew must happen. And while I stood there dumbly without a plan, those giant black-and-chocolate devils were closing in on us, snapping in the air with awful jaws, so close by now that I could hear their alabaster claws clicking on the gravel. Suddenly I knew I could do nothing for D and his baby, and with that knowledge I went limp, unresisting as a pervert when he is seized in the subway, and was swallowed whole in the darkness of my fear. I backed off the gravel path until the barbed wire was a fire in my back, pulled my bike in front of me as if it were a wall, and shut my eyes tight. An animal stench battered me, together with the howling of the dogs and the pounding of their feet, and I could feel tears seeping past my eyelids. I abandoned myself to a wave of fear and it swept me away….
On my shoulder was a hand gentle as the essence of all gentleness; it felt like Aghwee touching me. But I knew it was my employer; he had let those fiendish dogs pass and no catastrophe of fear had befallen him. I continued crying anyway, with my eyes closed and my shoulders heaving. I was too old to cry in front of other people, I suppose the shock of fright had induced some kind of infantile regression in me. When I stopped crying, we walked our bikes past that barbed wire fence like prisoners in a concentration camp, in silence, our heads hanging, to the meadow beyond the field where strangers were playing ball and exercising dogs (D wasn’t occupied with Aghwee anymore, the baby must have left while I was crying). We laid our bikes down and then sprawled on the grass ourselves. My tears had flooded away my pretensions and my rebelliousness and the perverse suspicion in my heart. And D was no longer wary of me. I lay back on the grass and clasped my hands beneath my head, curiously light and dry after all that crying. Then I closed my eyes and listened quietly while D peered down at me with his chin in his hand and spoke to me of Aghwee’s world.
“Do you know a poem called ‘Shame’ by Chuya Nakahara? Listen to the second verse:
The mournful sky
High where branches tangle
Teems with dead baby souls;
I blinked and saw
above the distant fields
fleece knit into a dream
of mastodons.
“That’s one aspect of the world of the dead baby I see. There are some Blake engravings, too, especially one called ‘Christ Refusing the Banquet Offered by Satan’—have you ever seen it? And there’s another, ‘The Morning Stars Singing Together.’ In both there are figures in the sky who have the same reality about them as the people on the ground, and whenever I look at them I’m sure Blake was hinting at an aspect of this other world. I once saw a Dali painting that was close, too, full of opaque beings floating in the sky about a hundred yards above the ground and glowing with an ivory white light. Now that’s exactly the world I see. And you know what those glowing things are that fill the sky? Beings we’ve lost from our lives down here on earth, and now they float up there in the sky about a hundred yards above the ground, quietly glowing like amoebas under a microscope. And sometimes they descend the way our Aghwee does (my employer said it and I didn’t protest, which doesn’t mean I acquiesced). But it takes a sacrifice worthy of them to acquire the eyes to see them floating there and the ears to detect them when they descend to earth, and yet there are moments when suddenly we’re endowed with that ability without any sacrifice or even effort on our part. I think that’s what happened to you a few minutes ago.”
Without any sacrifice or even effort on my part, just a few tears of expiation, my employer seemed to have wanted to say. The truth was I had shed tears out of fear and helplessness and a kind of vague terror about my future (my first job, an experiment in a kind of microcosm of life, was guarding this mad composer, and since I had failed to do that adequately, it was predictable that situations I couldn’t cope with would recur as one of the patterns of my life), but instead of interrupting with a protest, I continued to listen docilely.
“You’re still young, probably you haven’t lost sight of anything in this world that you can never forget, that’s so dear to you you’re aware of its absence all the time. Probably the sky a hundred yards or so above your head is still nothing more than sky to you. But all that means is that the storehouse happens to be empty at the moment. Or have you lost anything that was really important to you?”
The composer paused for my answer, and I found myself remembering his former mistress, that movie actress with a dent in her forehead as big as an adult thumb. Naturally, no crucial loss of mine could have had anything to do with her, all that crying had eroded my head and a sentimental honey was seeping into the crevices.
“Well, have you?” For the first time since we had met, my employer was insistent. “Have you lost anything that was important to you?”
Suddenly I had to say something silly to cover my embarrassment.
“A Siamese or what?”
“Just an ordinary cat with orange stripes; he disappeared about a week ago.”
“If it’s only been a week he might come back. Isn’t it the season for them to wander?”
“That’s what I thought, too, but now I know he won’t be back.”
“Why?”
“He was a tough tom with his own territory staked out. This morning I saw a weak-looking cat walking up and down his block and it wasn’t even on its guard—my cat won’t be coming back.” When I’d stopped talking I realized I’d told a story intended for laughs in a voice that was hoarse with sadness.
“Then there’s a cat floating in your sky,” my employer said solemnly.
Through closed eyes I pictured an opaque cat as large as an ad balloon, glowing with an ivory-white light as it floated through the sky. It was a comical flight all right, but it also made me wistful.
“The figures floating in your sky begin to increase at an accelerating rate. That’s why I haven’t been living in present time ever since that incident with the baby, so I could stop that spreading. Since I’m not living in our time, I can’t discover anything new, but I don’t lose sight of anything, either—the state of my sky never changes.” There was profound relief in the composer’s voice.
But was my own sky really empty except for one bloated cat with orange stripes? I opened my eyes and started to look up at the clear, now almost evening sky, when dread made me close my eyes again. Dread of myself, for what if I had seen a glowing herd of numberless beings I had lost from time down here on earth!
We lay on the grass in that meadow for quite a while, ringed by the passive affinity two people have for one another when the same gloom is gripping them. And gradually I began to get my perspective back. I reproached myself: how unlike the eighteen-year-old pragmatist I really was to have let myself be influenced by a mad composer! I’m not suggesting my equilibrium was perfectly restored. The day I succumbed to that strange panic, I drew closer than ever to the sentiments of my employer and to that glowing herd in the sky one hundred yards above the ground. To an extent, what you might call the aftereffects remained with me.
And then the final day came. It was Christmas Eve. I’m certain about the date because D gave me a wristwatch with a little apology about being a day early. And I remember that a powdery snow fell for about an hour just after lunch. We went down to the Ginza together but it was already getting crowded, so we decided to walk out to Tokyo harbor. D wanted to see a Chilean freighter that was supposed to have docked that day. I was eager to go, too; I pictured a ship with snow blanketing her decks. We had left the Ginza crowds and were just passing the Kabuki Theater when D looked up at the dark and still snowy sky. And Aghwee descended to his side. As usual, I walked a few steps behind the composer and his phantom. We came to a wide intersection. D and the baby had just stepped off the curb when the light changed. D stopped, and a fleet of trucks as bulky as elephants heaved into motion with their Christmas freight. That was when it happened. Suddenly D cried out and thrust both arms in front of him as if he were trying to rescue something; then he leaped in among those trucks and was struck to the ground. I watched stupidly from the curb.
“That was suicide; he just killed himself!” said a shaky voice at my side.
But I had no time to wonder whether it might have been suicide. In a minute that intersection had become backstage at a circus, jammed with milling trucks like elephants, and I was kneeling at D’s side, holding his bloody body in my arms and trembling like a dog. I didn’t know what to do, a policeman had dashed up and then disappeared on the run again.
D wasn’t dead; it was more awful than that. He was dying, lying there in the filthy wet that had been a light snow, oozing blood and something like tree-sap. The dark and snowy pattern of the sky ripped open and the stately light of a Spanish pieta made my employer’s blood glisten like silly fat. By that time a crowd had gathered, snatches of “Jingle Bells” wheeled above our heads like panic-stricken pigeons, and I knelt at D’s side listening hard for nothing in particular and hearing screaming in the distance. But the crowd just stood there silently in the cold, as if indifferent to the screams. I have never listened so hard on a street corner again, nor again heard screams like that.
An ambulance finally arrived and my employer was lifted inside unconscious. He was caked with blood and mud, and shock seemed to have withered his body. In his white tennis shoes, he looked like an injured blind man. I climbed into the ambulance with a doctor and an orderly and a young man about my age who seemed haughty and aloof. He turned out to be the driver’s helper on the long-distance truck that had hit D. The congestion was getting worse all the time as the ambulance cut across the Ginza (according to some statistics I saw recently, there were record crowds that Christmas Eve). Those who heard the siren and stopped to watch us pass, nearly all of them, shared a look of circumspectly solemn concern. In one corner of my dazed head I reflected that the so-called inscrutable Japanese smile, while it seemed likely to exist, did not. Meanwhile D lay unconscious on that wobbly stretcher, bleeding his life away.
When we arrived at the hospital, two orderlies who didn’t even pause to change out of shoes into slippers rushed D away to some recess of the building. The same policeman as before appeared out of nowhere again and calmly asked me a lot of questions. Then I was permitted to go to D. The young worker from the truck had already found the room and was sitting on a bench in the corridor next to the door. I sat down next to him and we waited for a long time. At first he would only mutter about all the deliveries he still had to make, but when two hours had passed he began to complain that he was hungry in a surprisingly young voice, and my hostility toward him dwindled. We waited some more, then the banker arrived with his wife and three daughters, who were all dressed up to go to a party. Ignoring us, they went inside. All four of the women had fat, squat bodies and red faces; they reminded me of D’s former wife. I continued to wait. It had been hours by then, and the whole time I had been tormented by suspicion—hadn’t my employer intended to kill himself from the beginning? Before taking his life he had settled things with his ex-wife and former mistress, burned his manuscripts, toured the city saying goodbye to places he would miss—hadn’t he hired me because he needed some good-natured help with those chores? Kept me from seeing his plan by inventing a monster baby floating in the sky? In other words, wasn’t it the case that my only real function had been to help D commit suicide? The young laborer had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder and every minute or two he would convulse as though in pain. He must have been dreaming about running over a man with a truck.
It was pitch black outside when the banker appeared in the door and called me. I eased my shoulder from under the worker’s head and stood up. The banker paid me my salary for the day and then let me into the room. D lay on his back with rubber tubes in his nostrils as in a joke. His face gave me pause: it was black as smoked meat. But I couldn’t help voicing the doubt that had me so afraid. I called out to my dying employer: “Did you hire me just so you could commit sucide? Was all that about Aghwee just a cover-up?” Then my throat was clogged with tears and I was surprised to hear myself shouting, “I was about to believe in Aghwee!”
At that moment, as my eyes filled with tears and things began to dim, I saw a smile appear on D’s darkened, shriveled face. It might have been a mocking smile and it might have been a smile of friendly mischief. The banker led me out of the room. The young man from the truck was stretched out on the bench asleep. On my way out, I slipped the thousand yen I had earned into his jacket pocket. I read in the evening paper the next day that the composer was dead.
And then it was this spring and I was walking down the street when a group of frightened children suddenly started throwing stones. It was so sudden and unprovoked, I don’t know what I had done to threaten them. Whatever it was, fear had turned those children into killers, and one of them hit me in the right eye with a rock as big as a fist. I went down on one knee, pressed my hand to my eye and felt a lump of broken flesh. With my good eye I watched my dripping blood draw in the dirt in the street as though magnetically. It was then that I sensed a being I knew and missed leave the ground behind me like a kangaroo and soar into the teary blue of a sky that retained its winter brittleness. Good-bye, Aghwee, I heard myself whispering in my heart. And then I knew that my hatred of those frightened children had melted away and that time had filled my sky during those ten years with figures that glowed with an ivory-white light, I suppose not all of them purely innocent. When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of my sky.