I nodded.
“But Pasteur was different. He already had A equaling C in his head, is what I mean. No proofs or anything. But the correctness of his theories was proven by history; during his life he made countless useful discoveries.”
“The smallpox vaccine.”
She set her wineglass on the table and narrowed her eyes at me.
“Um, wasn’t Jenner the one who made the smallpox vaccine? You sure you’re in college?”
“…rabies antibodies, then pasteurization, yeah?”
“Bingo.”
She managed to laugh without showing her teeth, a seemingly practiced skill, and then she drank her glass dry and poured herself a new one.
“On that panel discussion show, that’s where they called it ‘scientific intuition’. Do you have it, too?”
“Almost not at all.”
“Don’t you wish you did?”
“It’d probably come in handy for something. I’d probably use it when there’s a girl I wanna sleep with.”
She laughed and went into the kitchen, then came back with the pot of stew and a bowl of salad and some rolls. Little by little, a cool breeze finally started to blow in through the open window.
We took our time eating while we listened to her record player. During that time she mostly asked me about college and my life in Tokyo. Nothing too terribly interesting. About the experiments where we used cats (of course we don’t kill them, I told her. mostly just psychological experiments, I said. However, in truth, in eleven months I killed thirty-six cats, large and small.), and the demonstrations and strikes. Then I showed her the scar from when the riot policeman knocked out my front tooth.
“You ever wanna get him back?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Why not? If I were you, I’d find him and knock out a few of his teeth with a hammer.”
“Well, I’m me, and it’s the past now, for everybody involved. More importantly, all those guys looked the same, so there’s no way I’d ever find him.”
“So you’re saying there was no reason for any of it?”
“Reason?”
“The reason for going so far as to get your tooth knocked in.”
“None.”
She grunted boredly and took a bite of her beef stew.
We drank our after-dinner coffee, washed and stacked the dishes in her tiny kitchen, then went back to the table and lit cigarettes as we listened to Modern Jazz Quartet.
Her shirt was so thin I could clearly make out the shape of her nipples, her cotton pants hung comfortably around her hips, and as an added bonus our feet kept bumping underneath the table. When this happened, I would blush a little.
“Was it good?”
“It was great.”
She bit lightly on her lower lip.
“Why don’t you ever say anything unless you’re answering a question?”
“Just a habit, I guess. I’m always forgetting to say important things.”
“Can I give you some advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“If you don’t fix that, it’ll end up costing you.”
“You’re probably right. Still, it’s like a junky car. If I fix one thing, it’ll be easier to notice something else that’s broken.”
She laughed and changed the record to Marvin Gaye. The hour hand was almost pointing to eight.
“Is it okay if you don’t polish the shoes tonight?”
“I polish them at night. Same time I polish my teeth.”
She rested both of her skinny elbows on the table, then with her chin resting pleasantly on top of them, she sneaked peeks at me as we talked. This made me pretty flustered. I pretended to look out the window as I lit a cigarette, constantly trying to avert her gaze, but then she gave me an extra-strange look.
“Hey, I believe you.”
“Believe what?”
“That you didn’t do anything to me that night.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You really wanna hear it?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” she laughed and poured wine into my glass, then looked out the dark window as if thinking about something.
“Sometimes I think it would be wonderful if I could live without getting in anyone else’s way. You think it’s possible?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Am I getting in your way?”
“You’re okay.”
“This time?”
“This time.”
She gently reached her hand across the table and set it on my own, and after leaving it there for a while, she drew it back.
“I’m going on a trip tomorrow.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know yet. I want to go somewhere quiet and cool, for about a week.”
I nodded.
“I’ll call you when I get back.”
* * *
On my way home, sitting in my car, I was suddenly reminded of the first girl I ever went on a date with. It was seven years before.
The whole time we were on this date, from beginning to end, I feel like I kept asking, ‘Hey, isn’t this boring?’ over and over.
We went to see a movie starring Elvis Presley. The theme song went something like this:
We had a quarrel, a lovers spat
I write I’m sorry but my letter keeps coming back So then I dropped it in the mailbox
And sent it special D
Bright in early next morning
It came right back to me
She wrote upon it:
Return to sender, address unknown.
Time flows pretty quickly.
23
The third girl I slept with, she called my penis my
‘raison d’etre’.
* * *
I once tried to write a short story with the theme being each person’s raison d’etre. In the end, I never finished the story, but for a while I kept thinking about people’s various reasons for living, and thanks to that it went from a strange habit to an obsession. It was a habit that had absolutely no effect on anything. This impulse stuck with me, chasing me for roughly eight months. Riding the train, the first thing I did was to count all the passengers, I counted the stairs in the stairwell, and if I’d had enough time I’d have counted my heartbeats. According to my records of that time, from August 15, 1969 to April 3, I went to three hundred fifty-eight lectures, had sex fifty-four times, and smoked six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-one cigarettes. During that time, when I counted everything, I seriously considered telling someone about my habit. So I told as many people as I could, giving them what I thought were very reliable numbers. However, naturally, the number of cigarettes I smoked, stairs I climbed, and the size of my penis were things nobody was interested in. So, without losing sight of my own raison d’etre, I became very lonely.
* * *
Thanks to all that, I know that when I found out about her death I was smoking my six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-second cigarette.
24
That night, the Rat didn’t drink a drop of beer. It wasn’t a good sign. Instead, he drank five Jim Beams on the rocks in a row.
We drank in a dark corner of J’s Bar, killing time with the pinball machine. We fed who knows how much change to the machine to purchase this slaughtered time; a perfect waste. However, the Rat was as earnest as ever, and because of that it was nearly a miracle that I managed to win two of the six games we played.
“Hey, what happened?”
“Nothing,” said the Rat.
We went back to the counter and drank beer and Jim Beam.
Saying almost nothing, we listened absentmindedly to records playing one by one on the jukebox. Everyday People, Woodstock, Spirit in the Sky, Hey There, Lonely Girl…
“I have a favor to ask you,” said the Rat.
“What is it?”
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”