While I waited for her, leaning on the steering wheel, I thought about the order in which I would eat the food in the refrigerator, but, at any rate, one liter was way too much ice cream, and the lack of salad dressing for the lettuce was lethal.
It was a little after five when she came through the gate. She was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt and a miniskirt with white stripes. She had her hair up, and she was wearing glasses. In just one week, she had aged almost three years. It was probably due to the hair and the glasses.
“What a downpour,” she said as she got into the passenger seat, nervously fixing the hem of her skirt.
“You get wet?”
“A little.”
From the backseat, I pulled out a beach towel I’d had there from my trip to the pool and I handed it to her. She used it to wipe the sweat off her face, then patted her hair with it a few times before she gave it back.
“When it started pouring, I was having coffee near here. It was like a flood.”
“Still, it really cooled things off.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded, then put her arm out the window to check the temperature outside. Between us, I sensed a different vibe than the last time we’d met, something in the atmosphere was a little off.
“Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked.
“I didn’t really go on a trip. I lied to you about that.”
“Why’d you lie to me?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
34
Sometimes I tell lies.
The last time I told a lie was last year. Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society, you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence.
However, if we were constantly talking year-round, and telling only the truth, truth would probably lose some of its value.
* * *
Last autumn, my girlfriend and I were naked, having climbed into bed together. And then we got really hungry.
“Don’t you have anything to eat?” I asked her.
“I’ll go and check.”
She rose from the bed, naked, opened the refrigerator and took out some old bread she’d found, made some simple sandwiches with lettuce and sausage, then brought them back to bed with some instant coffee. Being October, it was a really cold night, and when she crawled back into bed her body was completely chilled, like canned salmon.
“There wasn’t any mustard.”
“Mmm…delicious.”
Wrapped up in blankets in her futon, we munched on sandwiches as we watched an old movie on television.
It was The Bridge on the River Kwai.
In the end, when the bridge was bombed, she groaned for a little while.
“Why’d you go through all that just to build a bridge?” she said with her finger pointed to the dumbfounded, petrified Alec Guinness.
“So they could keep their pride.”
“Hmph,” she said with her mouth stuffed full of bread, as she thought for a moment on the subject of human pride. It was always this way, but I had no idea what the hell was going on inside her head.
“Hey, do you love me?”
“Sure.”
“You wanna get married?”
“Now? Right away?”
“Sometime…someday.”
“Of course I’d like to marry you.”
“But until I asked you about it, you’ve never breathed a word about it.”
“I forgot to tell you.”
“Hmm…how many kids do you want?”
“Three.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Two girls and a boy.”
She washed down the bread in her mouth with some coffee and then fixed her eyes upon my face.
“LIAR!”
She said.
However, she was mistaken. I only lied once.
35
We went into a small restaurant near the harbor, finished a simple meal, and ordered a Bloody Mary and a bourbon.
“You wanna know the truth?” she asked.
“Last year, I dissected a cow.”
“Yeah?”
“When I ripped open its stomach, there was only a handful of grass inside. I put that grass in a plastic bag and took it home,
then set it on top of my desk. When I’m feeling bad about something, I stare at that lump of grass and think about this: why do cows take this unappetizing, miserable-looking food and reverently eat it, chewing their cud?”
She laughed a little, pursing her lips, then gazed at my face.
“I understand. I won’t say a word.”
I nodded.
“There’s something I want to ask you. Can I?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do people die?”
“Because we’re evolving. One individual can’t withstand all the energy of evolution, so we go through the alternation of generations. Of course, that’s just one theory.”
“Even now, we’re evolving?”
“Little by little.”
“What’s the point of evolving?”
“There are many opinions about that. One thing that’s for sure is that the universe itself is evolving. Putting aside the question of whether or not it’s some kind of trend or willful intervention, the universe is evolving, and in the end, we’re merely a small part of that.” I pushed away my glass of whiskey and lit a cigarette.
“Where that energy comes from, nobody knows.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Spinning the ice around in her glass with her fingertip, she stared at the white tablecloth.
“Hey, after I die, a hundred years later, nobody’ll remember I even existed.”
“Looks that way.”
Leaving the restaurant, in the midst of a strangely vivid twilight, we walked slowly along the quiet lane of warehouses. Walking together, I could sense the smell of her hair conditioner. The wind, shaking the leaves of the willow trees, made me think just a little bit about the end of the summer. After walking for a while, she grabbed my hand with her five-fingered hand.
“When are you going back to Tokyo?”
“Next week. I’ve got a test.”
She was silent.
“I’ll be back in the winter. It’s just until around Christmas. My birthday’s on December 24th.”
She nodded, but she seemed to be thinking about something else.
“You’re a Capricorn?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Me too. January 10th.”
“Feels like an unlucky star to be born under. Same as Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” saying that, she grabbed my hand again.
“I’m feeling like I’ll get lonely once you’re gone.”
“We’ll definitely see each other again.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
One by one, the warehouses were really starting to look old, a deep greenish, smooth moss clinging there in the spaces between the bricks. There were sturdylooking iron bars set into the high, dark windows, on each heavily-rusted door hung the nameplate bearing the name of the trading company. The distinct smell of the ocean could be felt throughout the vicinity, interrupted by the row of warehouses, and then ended like a row of willow trees, or a pulled-out tooth. We crossed the overgrown harbor railroad tracks, sat on the steps of a warehouse storing concrete water-breakers that had fallen into disuse, and stared out at the ocean.
There were lights on at the dock in front of the shipbuilding company, next to that a Greek freighter unloading cargo with its waterline rising, floating there like it was abandoned. The white paint of the deck was red with rust, the sides of it encrusted with shells and resembling an injured person’s scabs. For a really long time, we stared in silence at the ocean and the sky and the ships. The evening wind crossed the ocean, and while it shook the grass, the darkness slowly replaced the faint night, and a few stars started to twinkle above the dock.