Before I knew it, though, almost as a reflex action, I was kicking at him. I had never had formal training in martial arts, but a friend of mine in high school with some ranking in karate had taught me a few elementary moves. Day after day, he had had me practicing kicks- nothing fancy: just training to kick as hard and high and straight as possible. This was the single most useful thing to know in an emergency, he had said. And he had been right. Entirely taken up with swinging his bat, the man had obviously never anticipated the possibility that he might be kicked. Just as frantic as he was, I had no idea where my kick was aimed, nor was it very strong, but the shock of it seemed to take the wind out of him. He stopped swinging his bat, and as if there had been a break in time at that point, he stared at me with vacant eyes. Given this opening, I aimed a stronger, more accurate kick at his groin, and when he curled up with the pain, I wrenched the bat from his hands. Then I kicked him hard in the ribs. He tried to grab my leg, so I kicked him again. And then again, in the same place. Then I smashed his thigh with the bat. Emitting a dull scream, he fell on the floor.
At first I kicked and beat him out of sheer terror, so as to prevent myself from being hit. Once he fell on the floor, though, I found my terror turning to unmistakable anger. The anger was still there, the quiet anger that had welled up in my body earlier while I was walking along and thinking about Kumiko. Released now, it flared up uncontrollably into something close to intense hatred. I smashed the mans thigh again with the bat. He was drooling from the corner of his mouth. My shoulder and left arm were beginning to throb where he had hit me. The pain aroused my anger all the more. The mans face was distorted with pain, but he struggled to raise himself from the floor. I couldn't make my left arm work, so I threw the bat down and stood over him, smashing his face with my right hand. I punched him again and again. I punched him until the fingers of my right hand grew numb and then started to hurt. I was going to beat him until he was unconscious. I grabbed his neck and smashed his head against the wooden floor. Never in my life had I been involved in a fistfight. I had never hit another person with all my strength. But now hitting was all I could do, and I couldn't seem to stop. My mind was telling me to stop: This was enough. Any more would be too much. The man could no longer get to his feet. But I couldn't stop. There were two of me now, I realized. I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me. An intense chill ran through my body.
Then I realized the man was smiling. Even as I went on hitting him, the man kept smiling at me-the more I hit him, the bigger the smile, until finally, with blood streaming from his nose and lips, and choking on his own spit, the man gave out a high, thin laugh. He must be crazy, I thought, and I stopped punching him and stood up straight. I looked around and saw the black guitar case propped against the side of the shoe cabinet.
I left the man where he lay, still laughing, and approached the guitar case. Lowering it to the floor, I opened the clasps and lifted the cover. There was nothing inside. It was absolutely empty-no guitar, no candles. The man looked at me, laughing and coughing. I could hardly breathe. All of a sudden, the hot, steamy air inside this building became unbearable. The smell of mold, the touch of my own sweat, the smell of blood and saliva, my own sense of anger and of hatred: all became more than I could bear. I pushed the door open and went outside, closing the door behind me. As before, there was no sign of anyone in the area. All that moved was a large brown cat, slowly making its way across the vacant lot, oblivious of me.
I wanted to get out of there before anyone spotted me. I wasn't sure which way I should go, but I started walking and before long managed to find a bus stop labeled To Shinjuku Station. I hoped to calm my breathing and straighten my head out before the next bus came, but failed to do either. Over and over, I told myself: All I was trying to do was look at peoples faces! I was just looking at the faces of people passing by on the street, the way my uncle had said. I was just trying to untangle the simplest complications in my life, thats all. When I entered the bus, the passengers turned toward me. Each of them gave me the same shocked look and then averted his eyes. I assumed it was because of the mark on my face. Some time had to go by before I realized it was because of the splatters on my white shirt of the mans blood (mostly blood from his nose) and the baseball bat I was still clutching in my hands.
I ended up bringing the bat all the way home with me and throwing it in the closet.
That night I stayed awake until the sun came up. The places on my shoulder and left arm where the man had hit me with the bat began to swell and to throb with pain, and my right fist retained the sensation of punching the man over and over and over again. The hand was still a fist, I realized, still clutched into a ball and ready to fight. I tried to relax it, but the hand would not cooperate. And where sleeping was concerned, it was less a matter of being unable to sleep than of not wanting to sleep. If I went to sleep in my present state, there was no way I could avoid having terrible dreams. Trying to calm myself, I sat at the kitchen table, taking straight sips of the whiskey my uncle had left with me and listening to quiet music on the cassette player. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to talk to me. I set the telephone on the table and stared at it for hours. Call me, somebody, please, anybody-even the mysterious phone woman; I didn't care. It could be the most filthy and meaningless talk, the most disgusting and sinister conversation. That didn't matter. I just wanted someone to talk to me.
But the telephone never rang. I finished the remaining half-bottle of scotch, and after the sky grew light, I crawled into bed and went to sleep. Please don't let me dream, please just let my sleep be a blank space, if only for today.
But of course I did dream. And as I had expected, it was a terrible dream. The man with the guitar case was in it. I performed the same actions in the dream as I had in reality- following him, opening the front door of the apartment house, feeling the impact of the bat, and hitting and hitting and hitting the man. But after that it was different. When I stopped hitting him and stood up, the man, drooling and laughing wildly as he had in reality, pulled a knife from his pocket-a small, sharp-looking knife. The blade caught the faint evening glow that spilled in through the curtains, reflecting a white glimmer reminiscent of bone. But the man did not use the knife to attack me. Instead, he took all his clothes off and started to peel his own skin as if it were the skin of an apple. He worked quickly, laughing aloud all the while. The blood gushed out of him, forming a black, menacing pool on the floor. With his right hand, he peeled the skin of his left arm, and with his bloody, peeled left hand he peeled the skin of his right arm. In the end, he became a bright-red lump of flesh, but even then, he went on laughing from the dark hole of his open mouth, the white eyeballs moving spasmodically against the raw lump of flesh. Soon, as if in response to his unnaturally loud laughter, the mans peeled skin began to slither across the floor toward me. I tried to run away, but my legs would not move. The skin reached my feet and began to crawl upward. It crept over my own skin, the mans blood-soaked skin clinging to mine as an overlay. The heavy smell of blood was everywhere. Soon my legs, my body, my face, were entirely covered by the thin membrane of the mans skin. Then my eyes could no longer see, and the mans laughter reverberated in the hollow darkness. At that point, I woke up.
Confusion and fear overtook me then. For a while, I even lost hold of my own existence.
My fingers were trembling. But at the same time, I knew that I had reached a conclusion.