Secret Rendezvous

by Kōbō Abe

  When they went downstairs, the emergency doctor had already been loaded into the back of the van, stretcher and all. The heavy-set man was in the driver’s seat. The secretary seated herself beside him, so the man took a seat next to the assistant director, on a bench beside the stretcher.

  The van began to move, and the air conditioning came on. Perhaps the interior of the ambulance that had carried away his wife had been like this. When they crossed over the ridge of hills, they came to a broad, paved street, beyond which a succession of two-story wooden row houses stretched parallel with a low, double-wired fence.

  Clouds were rolling in from the west. It might rain.

  “But why—”

  Cutting off the man’s words in midsentence, the assistant director lifted back the towel from the doctor’s lower abdomen in front of him.

  “How does that compare with yours? It’s not exactly stunted, but for a man his size it isn’t too impressive, is it? Of course, there isn’t necessarily any direct connection between penis size and libido, but—”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ve got to get this man to the hospital right away.”

  “But I—”

  “Why don’t you wait in my office? As soon as I get him taken care of, I’ll be right with you.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “They say his spermatogenetic capacity is really something.”

  “I want to get to work so I can attend a conference this afternoon… .”

  “You know, modern medicine understands next to nothing about the mechanism of erection.”

  The penis had begun to show small wrinkles, but when the assistant director flicked it with the tip of his finger, it swelled out again beautifully. Soon they passed beyond the rows of wooden buildings, and in front of them appeared the maple grove. Beyond an empty lot of red clay was a low-lying area that had been deeply dug out. From that valley, as though resting its elbow on the edge of the empty lot, rose a tall building. That would be the one he had seen from the top of E4. It had a good fifteen floors, narrowing in slightly at the top; on the bottom, giant arms spread out in all four directions like the legs of some monstrous bird that was menacingly clawing the ground.

  The top of an arm was level with the red clay lot. They drove straight in, past pairs of white-coated men playing catch, into the center of the building. The man and the secretary were let off there, and the van drove away somewhere.

  The assistant director’s office was on the top floor.

  (The forty-odd minutes after the white van drove off, while I was kept waiting in the assistant director’s office, are completely missing from the tape. That’s understandable: I spent most of the time stuffing down sandwiches and coffee that the secretary had ordered for me. My conversation with her was awkward and fragmented. Knowing she had seen through my secret about hiding the tape of the woman’s voice in my back pocket, I felt uneasy about her very presence. Looking back now, I can’t help thinking that she was aware of that, and included it in her calculations. At any rate, it was definitely not a time period that lent itself to recording. Next is the interview with the assistant director that I included in the beginning, and with that the first tape comes to an end.)

  Now I am back in that room in E4, writing out these notes. This is the room covered with nude photographs, formerly occupied by the doctor who lost consciousness without losing his erection, inside the area earmarked for cemetery expansion. The assistant director let me have the key to it as a temporary place to sleep. The tape playback equipment is of fairly high quality, and except for the lack of running water, I have no complaints. The doctor is still unconscious, I understand, lying in a ward in the cartilage surgery department.

  It is late at night. The time is nearly eleven o’clock. I have been working on these notes since early this morning, and finally managed to finish off the first cassette. But I’ve barely accomplished a third of what I set out to do. In terms of the number of days, it doesn’t even amount to a sixth of it all. I hadn’t imagined that writing was anywhere near this difficult.

  I may have spent a little too much time on details. Picking out only the relevant sounds from tape segments packed with so much interfering noise that they are as dense as trampled felt, relying solely on memory, tends to become as intricate an operation as assembling a clock. If I were to organize everything perfectly and keep going, determined to stay up all night, I might be able to keep my promise by dawn. But I’m tired. The muscles in my right thumb ache from overuse. My writing has disintegrated. I think I’ll quit here for tonight; whether I continue writing or not is something I’ll think about again in the morning, after I have sounded out the horse once more about his intentions.

  Frankly, I don’t get it. I have the persistent feeling that the horse has put one over on me. No matter how precisely I may file my complaint, I’m afraid it will all come to nothing in the end. I suppose it will provide me with an alibi. But what I need right now isn’t an alibi; I need some clues as to my wife’s whereabouts. I have been provided with a white coat to enable me to walk around freely inside the hospital, and I’ve even been registered as a temporary employee. But all that could just be candy designed to divert my attention from other things and keep me pinned quietly to my desk here.

  The horse has been awfully jumpy lately. With the hospital’s founding anniversary only four days off, he seems to be in a hurry to put on the finishing touches. I can understand his desire to evade responsibility. Besides, he may have wanted to sound out my thinking in these notes. Nothing is so dangerous as betrayal by someone who knows too much. And from the horse’s point of view, the fact that I am so healthy must be especially hard to take.

  Drops of sweat running off the end of my nose have made three spots, lined up in a row on the page. I do think that this labor will help me somehow to preserve my sanity. On the edge of the black sea, where lights of squid-fishing boats appear and disappear, hangs a fat orange half-moon; somehow that familiar, banal sight fills me with horror tonight.

  Already four days have passed since I stopped going to work. There is no going back now, I know.

  NOTEBOOK TWO

  At 4:43 a.m. I was startled from my sleep by a phone call from the horse.

  In sharp contrast to my grouchiness from lack of sleep, the horse was in high spirits again this morning, no less than the day before. And true enough, his running was greatly improved, so like the real thing now it seemed a shame there was no accompanying noise of hoofbeats. The pacing and rhythm of his front and hind legs were precisely matched; each leg touched ground at a slightly different time, giving a smoothly integrated impression overall. Best of all was the way his body no longer bent and twisted. Without a sense of evenly interlocking motion, he tends to look like a play horse. My only complaint was his way of waving his arms to stabilize his upper body. That’s an unfortunate habit; it almost makes him look as though he has six legs.

  The horse cut short his practice and came bounding over toward me, flapping the bottom of his athletic shirt to let the air through. His face wore an expression of earnest questioning. I knew he was after my opinion of his performance, but I passed over it in silence. Handing him a sandwich and the thermos of coffee, I merely reported in a businesslike way that the notes were not yet completed.

  To my surprise, the horse showed so much interest in that first unfinished notebook that he held on to it, saying he wanted to go over it again more carefully when he had time. He gave me money to buy a second notebook.

  Without a moment’s hesitation I served notice, “I’ve had enough. All this playing hide-and-seek with myself isn’t going to lead anywhere, no matter how’ long I keep it up. I feel no responsibility to carry out a deal when the conditions for payment are this vague.”

  With a look of calm bemusement, the horse glanced thoughtfully through the last few pages before answering, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips.

  “Seen through it, have you
? Well, it could be you’re right; maybe these notebooks are a means of sounding out where you stand, just as you suspect. But you seem to have the wrong idea about the purpose of it all. Any question about your loyalties is centered on your attitude toward your wife. How serious are you about looking for her? That’s what I’ve got to make sure of. .. .”

  “There you go again. That’s just what I don’t like.” I wasn’t yielding any ground. “A man’s wife doesn’t go around getting lost every day, you know, so if she disappears, of course I’m going to look for her. You keep switching the point; that’s why I can’t trust you any more.”

  “Don’t go too far, now.” He shifted his weight to his back legs and crossed his front legs in a rather unhorsy way. Then, pouring himself a second cup of coffee, he went on: “I’m already doing everything I can to help you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—come on; I gave you the key to solving the riddle of how your wife managed to disappear from that sealed-box waiting room, didn’t I?”

  “When was that?”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t even notice!”

  “Come off it, will you?”

  “The very beginning of the tape, right after it starts to play.”

  “Oh, if that’s what you mean, I couldn’t figure that part out. It’s all in the notebook, but in the first place, at that point nobody could possibly have known yet who I was or what I’d come for. .. .”

  “Are you talking about your conversation in the street with the lady from the Mano Agency?”

  “No matter how I figure it, it seems awfully strange that you were keeping tabs on me that soon. It completely contradicts what security told me about the bugs they planted, and …”

  “That was different. It wasn’t aimed at you in particular.

  All conversations with service agency customers are monitored in the general diagnostic room, on principle. In order to assemble all the data on you, we put in a special request to the recording supervisor there and got a copy of their tape, first try comparing it with the parts that security did; the sound quality is completely different. You know, I think it’s high time you understood how the hospital really works. Improving the medical care system and streamlining the administration are two goals that aren’t always compatible. It’s certainly not desirable to have to use the agencies as we do, but as things stand it’s a necessary evil.”

  As a recent example, the horse told me about one unfortunate patient. A certain middle-aged man was waiting for a bus, when a girl rode past the bus stop on a bicycle, riding onehanded and carrying a transparent plastic bag filled with about fifty eggs. She seemed to be a beginner on the bike, and handled the bars unsteadily. Just then two trucks approached from opposite directions. As they passed each other, they would occupy between them the entire width of the road. From where the man stood, it looked as though they would come together right next to the girl on the bicycle. In his imagination her bike crashed into a telephone pole and the plastic bag was knocked against a cement wall. The next instant, when the fifty eggs smashed into one slimy yellow mass, rose vividly in his mind’s eye. He felt sick, doubled over, and passed out. (For the record, the trucks passed safely without harm to the girl, and the plastic bag contained Ping-pong balls.)

  In thirteen minutes an ambulance arrived. Since it was daytime, an agency representative took care of the business details of hospital admittance. The agent’s questioning was relayed by walkie-talkie to the general diagnostic room, where it was attended by six specialists stationed in front of speakers, waiting for patients. Their specialties were peripheral circulatory organs, endocrinology, cell metabolism, neurosurgery, medicinal poisoning, and sensory nerves, all relatively small fields.

  Agents are bound by agreement to persuade the patients to comply with the opinion of the diagnostic room. However, as a rule, when the wishes of the patient or his family are known they must be honored. As a result, most cases tend to gravitate to the general departments of internal medicine, surgery, and psychiatry. The patient cannot very well be blamed for not properly understanding the nature of his own illness, but the situation poses a grave problem for the minor departments. There are even extreme cases, it seems, in which the entire caseload of a department consists of doctors and nurses from the hospital who register as patients out of a sense of duty. Ideally, it would be best to lump all the general departments together into one diagnostic department, but administratively it makes much more sense just to get rid of all the specialists who are so hard up for patients. Every year the scramble for patients becomes more and more intense as departments try desperately to improve their records in order to stave off budget cuts.

  The middle-aged man, since he was still unconscious and unaccompanied by any family members, represented an unparalleled boon to the crowd of specialists. Besides, according to eyewitnesses—none of whom would have dreamed of blaming a girl carrying eggs on a bicycle—it was a case of utterly unprovoked fainting. The patient was not very advanced in years, showed no signs of infirmity, had experienced no convulsions or spasms, and yet was still unconscious. It was hardly surprising that every department claimed him for its own. Ordinarily the specialists would come to an agreement after a certain amount of consultation, but on this occasion tempers flared, and each man stubbornly pressed his own case without yielding. Finally it turned into an ugly mud-slinging contest, with allegations being hurled right and left about this one’s philandering and that one’s game of chess.

  The agent, meanwhile, could not complete his papers without an answer from the diagnostic center; while he fretted away the time, the patient’s condition took a sudden turn for the worse, resulting in death. And so the doctors’ prize was finally snatched from them by the resuscitation department.

  In the resuscitation department, the middle-aged man started to breathe again. Since that department takes little interest in treating illnesses, however, they merely accepted his thanks and released him right away, shortly after which he died again. But the resuscitation department lives fully up to its name; even now, at intervals of every four or five days he dies and comes back to life, then dies and comes back to life again, his waking hours one long hymn of gratitude.

  “What’s all that got to do with my wife?”

  “I never said it had anything to do with her.”

  “You did, too. You said the key to the riddle of the sealed room, or something, was on the beginning of the tape.”

  “That comes even earlier. It’s only about ten seconds or so, very short, but it’s there.”

  “It is not.”

  “You missed it, then. You must have thought it was just noise, and skipped over it. When you get back, listen to it carefully again.”

  “What is there to hear?”

  “After you’ve listened to it, why don’t we go into that subject together?”

  “If there’s that obvious a clue lying around, then shouldn’t we do something about it right now, not sit around wasting time on these damn notebooks? …”

  “You’re the one who’s wasting time. Or have you got some reason why you don’t want to move ahead with it, and is that why you’ve purposely put on the brakes?”

  “You’re too suspicious.”

  “I hope so. But tell me, if a ship vanished without a trace, leaving only an SOS, would you just send out a rescue boat? Why not try a lighthouse, too? Action is all very well, but shouldn’t you do more than just sniff around like a dog? It seems to me that lighting up the way back is a perfectly good, realistic step to take. My real intention with these notebooks is to use them as a sort of map to guide your wife back with. See? Wait until the results are in before you decide if this is such a thankless job or not.”

  I didn’t see, but I’d been outmaneuvered. Feeling sour, unable to argue back, I thought I understood why innocent people confess to crimes they never did. Leaving the horse, I went back to my room and immediately started playing back the first tape. Sure enough, when I liste
ned carefully there were indeed some very suggestive sounds.

  I went out to the basement of the main building to buy a second notebook. While there I rode the elevator up to the top floor and poked my head inside the assistant director’s office. The secretary had just come to work. Picking up two pep pills and a key, I went across the hall to the security room. I wanted to have a look at the floor plan for mikes around the outpatient waiting room. There was only one, it turned out, inside the pharmacy. I figured that knowing the position of the microphone might make it easier to analyze the sounds on the tape. I must have been a little excited. Shaking off the secretary, who was full of questions about the horse and seemed to have other things she wanted to talk about, too, I hurried back to my room.

  First I made a rough floor plan of the outpatient waiting room, including the pharmacy. I marked out the position of the mike. Then, mentally stationing myself there, I listened to the start of the tape over and over, tracing changes in tone and volume over the twin axes of time and space, reconstructing them. What was at first mere noise gradually took shape as a distinct scene.

  The sound of wind rattling window panes in the pharmacy … wait, the wind hadn’t come up till well after sunrise … maybe it was the air conditioner… footsteps coming closer … rubber-soled sandals… coming closer, hesitating, suddenly distinct. .. no, that wasn’t it, it was just that the background noise had suddenly stopped … the footsteps kept coming closer, still hesitating … what kind of natural sound would stop so suddenly? Let’s hear it once more … maybe I was stretching things, but it sounded to my imagination as if someone were fooling around with the pharmacy shelves … the footsteps stopped … a momentary pause, then a sharp, metallic sound … then, from somewhere nearby, a dull, heavy thud….