“You don’t say,” I answered. By that time, I had mastered a repertoire of three hundred stock responses that I could draw on to keep my respondents talking.
“The s-sun is tiny, too. Like an orange on home plate seen from center field. So it’s always dark,” he sighed.
“Then why doesn’t everyone leave?” I asked. “There must be nicer planets to live on.”
“Beats me. Maybe ’cause they were born there. It’s like that. Take me, for example. I’m going home to Saturn when I graduate. To make it a b-better place. It’s the r-r-revolution.”
Anyway, I just love stories about faraway towns. I stash some of them away in my mind, like a bear preparing for hibernation. If I close my eyes, I can picture the streets, line them with dwellings, hear the voices of the residents. I can even feel the gentle yet unmistakable rhythms of their lives, distant people whose paths I may never cross as long as I live.
On occasion, Naoko would tell me her stories. I can still remember every word.
“I don’t know what to call the place,” she said in a bored voice, her cheek resting on her hand in the bright sunlight of the student lounge. Then she gave a little laugh. I waited for her to continue. She was a girl who spoke slowly and chose her words with care.
We sat at a red plastic table, a paper cup stuffed with cigarette butts between us. The light streamed through the tall windows like in a Rubens painting, neatly dividing our table down the middle so that my right hand was illuminated and my left was in shade.
It was the spring of 1969, and we were both twenty. New students wearing new shoes, carrying new course catalogs, their heads crammed with new brains, packed the lounge. Throughout our conversation we heard complaints and apologies as people bumped into each other.
“I mean,” she continued, “you can’t even call it a real town. There’s just a railroad track and a station. A pathetic two-bit station the engineer could zip right past in the rain.”
I nodded. For a full thirty seconds we sat there in silence, watching the cigarette smoke curl in the sunlight.
“And there’s always a dog walking the platform from one end to the other. That kind of station. Got the picture?”
I nodded again.
“When you step out of the station there’s a little roundabout and a bus stop. And a few shops…Really sleepy-looking places. Go straight from there and you bump into a park. There’s a slide and three sets of swings.”
“Is there a sandbox?”
“A sandbox?” She thought for a moment before nodding, as if to confirm her recollection. “Yes, there’s one of those too.”
We fell silent again. I gingerly extinguished my cigarette, which I had smoked down to the butt, in the paper cup.
“It’s a nowhere kind of town. Why any place so boring was put on this earth is beyond me.”
“God reveals Himself in many forms,” I said.
Naoko shook her head and laughed. It was a regular sort of laugh, the kind you’d expect from a girl who had received straight A’s in school; yet for some strange reason it lingered long after she had left, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
But what excited me most was the thought of meeting the dog that walked up and down the platform.
Four years later, in May 1973, I did go alone to that station. I wanted to see that dog. In preparation, I shaved, donned a necktie for the first time in six months, and put on a new pair of cordovan shoes.
I stepped down from the sorry old suburban local train, whose two rusted passenger cars looked ready to disintegrate at any moment, and inhaled the smell of fresh grass. It was a fragrance from picnics long past; even the May breeze seemed to be reaching me from some distant time. When I listened carefully, I could hear skylarks singing overhead.
I let out a long yawn, sat down on a platform bench, and lit up a cigarette in disgust. The energy I had felt when I left my apartment early that morning had vanished. It was the same old thing over and over again. An endless déjà vu that got worse each time around.
At one time in my life I had gone to sleep each night sprawled on the floor with a group of friends. In the morning some guy would step on my head. Sorry, he’d say. Then I’d hear the sound of pissing. The same old thing.
With my cigarette hanging from the corner of my mouth, I loosened my tie and began rubbing the soles of my new shoes back and forth on the concrete platform. I was trying to lessen the pain in my feet. They weren’t killing me, but the soreness was making me feel disjointed, as if my body were out of whack.
The dog was nowhere to be seen.
Out of whack…
It’s a feeling I get a lot. As if I’m trying to put the jumbled pieces of two different puzzles together at the same time. When I get that way my solution is to drink whiskey and go to bed. The next morning, though, I feel even worse. The same old thing.
When I opened my eyes this time, there were two girls, twins, in bed with me, one on each side. I had awakened to a girl beside me many times before, but needless to say, this was the first time I had found myself next to twins. They were fast asleep, their noses touching my shoulders. It was a cloudless Sunday morning.
A short while later, they woke up at almost the same time, shimmied into the T-shirts and jeans they had dropped beside the bed, trooped into the kitchen without a word, brewed coffee, made toast, took butter out of the fridge, and spread everything out on the table. Not a move was wasted—it looked as if they’d been doing this for years. Outside my window, some kind of bird was perched on the chain-link fence that encircled the golf course, rattling away like a machine gun.
“So what are your names?” I asked the girls. I was in rough shape—my head was splitting.
“They’re not much, as names go,” said the one sitting on my right.
“That’s a fact,” said the one on my left. “Just about useless. Know what I mean?”
“Sure,” I said.
We sat there at the table, them on one side, me on the other, nibbling our toast and sipping our coffee. Terrific coffee, too.
“Will it be a hassle, us not having names?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know.”
They thought about it for a while.
“If we need names,” the other suggested, “why don’t you choose them for us?”
“Call us what you like.”
First one would speak, then the other. Like a sound check for a stereo broadcast. My headache was getting worse.
“For example?” I asked.
“Right and left,” said one.
“Horizontal and vertical,” said the other.
“Up and down.”
“Front and back.”
“East and west.”
“Entrance and exit,” I managed to interject, not to be outdone. They looked at each other and burst into satisfied laughter.
Where there is an entrance, there is usually an exit. That’s the way things are made. Mailboxes, vacuum cleaners, zoos, salt shakers. Of course there are exceptions. Mousetraps, for instance.
I put out a mousetrap once, under the sink in my apartment. For bait I used peppermint gum. I tried to locate something better, but that was the closest thing to food I came across. The gum was in one of the pockets of my winter coat, along with a movie ticket stub.
On the third morning I found a small mouse caught by its leg in the trap. It was still young, the color of the cashmere sweaters you see piled in London’s duty-free shops. Probably fifteen or sixteen in human years. A tender age. Beneath its feet lay a shred of gum.
The mouse had been snared, but I was clueless about what to do with it. By the morning of the fourth day it was dead, its hind leg still pinned. As I looked at its body, I realized one of life’s important lessons.
All things should have both an entrance and an exit. That’s just the way it is.
The tracks followed a row of hills in a line so straight it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. In the distance, like a cru
mpled piece of paper, I could make out a dark green thicket of trees. The rails gleamed dully in the sun all the way out to that point, then disappeared into the green. It seemed as though the landscape would continue like that for eternity, however far one went. The idea depressed me. If that’s how it was, give me the subway any day.
I finished my cigarette, stretched, and gazed up at the sky. I hadn’t looked at the sky for some time. In fact, it had been a long while since my eyes had rested on anything.
Not a cloud was visible. A veil of mist hovered in the air, as often happens in the spring, an elusive membrane waiting to be infiltrated from above by the blue sky. Particles of sunlight fell like fine dust, gathering unnoticed on the ground.
In the warm breeze, the light wavered. The air flowed at a leisurely pace, like a flock of birds flying from tree to tree. It skimmed the wooded slopes along the railroad line, crossed the tracks, and passed through the grove without so much as ruffling a leaf. A cuckoo’s sharp cry cut through the gentle light like an arrow and disappeared over the distant ridge. The undulating hills resembled a giant sleeping cat, curled up in a warm pool of time.
The pain in my feet was growing worse.
Now let me tell you about the wells.
—
Naoko had moved to the area when she was twelve. That was 1961, by the Western calendar. The year Ricky Nelson sang “Hello Mary Lou.” At the time there was nothing whatsoever to draw anyone’s attention to this peaceful green valley. A few farmhouses, some scattered fields, streams full of crayfish, the single-track train line with a yawn-inducing station, and that was it. Most of the farmhouses had persimmon trees growing in their yards, and off in a corner you could usually find a tottering, weather-beaten shed. Nailed to the side of the shed facing the train tracks were sheets of tin with garish painted advertisements for things like toilet paper and soap. That was the kind of place it was, said Naoko. No one even had a dog.
Naoko’s family lived in a Western-style two-story house built at the time of the Korean War. Though modestly sized, its pillars were massive and its wood had been chosen with care, so that it looked solid, even dignified. The exterior had been painted three shades of green: exposed to the sun, rain, and wind, the three greens had faded until they matched the color of the surrounding landscape. The grounds were spacious, with several groves of trees and a small pond. Tucked away amid the trees was a snug little structure, an octagonal studio with faded curtains hanging in its bay windows—their original color was anyone’s guess. A riotous profusion of narcissus bloomed by the pond, where little birds gathered to splash about in the mornings.
The house had been designed by an old man, an oil painter who had lived there until his lungs gave out the winter before Naoko moved in. That was 1960, the year Bobby Vee sang “Rubber Ball.” It rained like crazy that winter. Snow was rare in the area, but the rains were freezing cold. They covered the ground like a chilly blanket and soaked into the soil. All the while, a huge reservoir of sweet mineral water was forming beneath the surface.
—
The well digger’s house was a five-minute walk down the track from the station. It was in a swampy spot close by the river, besieged by mosquitoes and frogs in the summertime. The well digger was a man of about fifty, obstinate and ill-tempered, but a true genius when it came to his craft. He would spend days walking the properties that he had been hired to survey, grumbling to himself and occasionally scooping up a handful of earth and sniffing it. Then, when he was sure he had found the right spot, he would call a couple of his buddies and they would dig straight down until they hit water.
Thus it was that everyone from the area had all the delicious well water they could drink. It was icy cold and so clear you felt you could see through not only the glass but your hand as well. They called it “Fuji snow water,” but that was a joke. No way it had come that far.
The fall Naoko turned seventeen, the well digger was killed by a train. The causes of the accident were a driving rain, chilled sake, and partial deafness. The policemen who retrieved the well digger’s shredded body—five buckets’ worth, in thousands of pieces—from the field had to use long poles with hooks on the end to fend off the wild dogs who descended on the scene. The river swept another bucketful of remains off to various ponds, to become fish food.
Neither of the well digger’s two sons wanted to follow in their father’s footsteps; both moved out of the area soon after the accident. Nor did anyone else wish to take over the abandoned house, which crumbled bit by bit as the years passed. And so wells which produced that delicious water became harder and harder to find.
I love wells. Whenever I come across one I toss in a pebble. Nothing is more soothing than hearing that small splash rise from the bottom of a deep well.
It was Naoko’s father who decided that they would move to the area in 1961. Not only had the dead painter been his close friend; her father was taken by the place itself.
Naoko’s father seems to have been a French literary scholar of some note, but around the time she reached school age, without warning, he tossed away his university post to live a life of leisure and indulge his passion: translating enigmatic old French texts, tales of fallen angels and dissolute priests, exorcists and vampires. I don’t know all the details. I saw his picture once in a magazine, but that was it. According to Naoko, he had been a real bohemian in his youth. I could get a sense of that by looking at the photo, in which he wore dark glasses and a cap, and was glaring at a spot about a yard above the camera lens. Maybe he had seen something.
There were a number of cultured eccentrics like him in the area when Naoko and her family moved in, a kind of free-floating colony. Like the Siberian penal camps for thought criminals they had back in imperial Russia.
Speaking of penal camps, I remember reading about one of them in a biography of Leon Trotsky. Can’t remember much, just the parts about the cockroaches and the reindeer. So let me tell you about the reindeer…
Trotsky had stolen a sleigh and a team of four reindeer under cover of darkness and escaped from the penal colony where he had been imprisoned. The reindeer sped madly across the silvery waste. Their breath froze solid in the frigid air; their hooves scattered the virgin snow. When they reached the train station two days later, the exhausted reindeer collapsed, never to rise again. The weeping Trotsky threw his arms around the dead animals and vowed, I will bring justice, truth, and revolution to my country, whatever it takes! Even today, a statue of the four reindeer can be found in Red Square. One is facing east, one north, one west, and one south. Stalin himself couldn’t destroy them. If you visit Moscow, go to the square early Saturday morning and watch the junior high school students clean the reindeer with mops. Their red cheeks and white breath are a most refreshing sight.
—
Back to the other colony.
Its members shunned the flat land near the station, choosing instead to build their wildly idiosyncratic homes on the hillside. Each boasted a garden of preposterous size, preserving the original trees, ponds, and hills. One even had a pretty stream filled with small and tasty sweetfish.
The colony members woke each morning to the turtledove’s song and strolled about their gardens over fallen beechnuts, often lifting their eyes to the morning light filtering through the leaves.
But Japan was changing—the Tokyo Olympics were held around this time—and an inexorable wave of urban development was moving toward them. Their homes had overlooked a rich sea of mulberry trees, but now bulldozers were crushing the trees and turning the land black, and a monotonous townscape was taking shape around the train station.
The new residents were by and large mid-level office workers, the ubiquitous salarymen. They leapt out of bed at five o’clock in the morning, splashed water on their faces, and crammed themselves into commuter trains, returning half dead late at night.
And so it was only on Sunday afternoons that they were able to look around at their homes and their community. At the same time, a
s if by mutual agreement, they all took to raising dogs. The dogs started mating with each other, producing puppies that, in turn, went wild. When Naoko had said there were no dogs back in the old days, this is what she meant.
I spent a full hour waiting for the dog to show up. I smoked ten cigarettes in the process, crushing each butt with my foot. I walked to the middle of the platform to drink from the spigot; the icy water was delicious. Still no dog.
A large pond sat next to the station. It snaked like a winding river that had been dammed, with tall grass growing in the shallows. Every so often I saw a fish jump. A handful of fishermen were sitting at intervals along the bank, glumly watching the dark water. Their motionless lines pierced the surface like silver needles. A big white dog, apparently brought along by one of the fishermen, frisked about in the hazy spring sunshine, sniffing the clover.
When the dog reached within ten meters of where I was standing, I leaned over the fence and called out to it. The dog looked up at me with pitiful washed-out brown eyes and wagged its tail two or three times. When I snapped my fingers it came over, pushed its nose through the slats, and licked my hand with its long tongue.
“Come on, boy,” I said, stepping back. The dog hesitated and looked back over its shoulder, its tail still wagging.
“Come on now—I’ve waited long enough.”
I pulled a stick of gum from my pocket, unwrapped it, and showed it to the dog. He stared at it for a minute before making up his mind and squeezing under the fence. I patted him on the head a few times, rolled the gum into a ball, and threw it as far as I could toward the far end of the platform. The dog made a beeline in that direction.
I went home satisfied.
It’s all over, I kept telling myself on the train. You can forget her now. That’s why you made this trip. But I couldn’t forget. That I loved Naoko. That she was dead and gone. That not a single damn thing was over and done with.
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