Thinking about travel and stories about travel while I was in a state that made it difficult for me to travel anymore, I thought about getting lost in my own story about traveling. Or in other words, making the story continue to deviate — the easiest thing would be to have other stories continue to make their way into the story to get a taste of the difficulty, trouble, and pleasure of getting lost in a story.
And yet there were moments in which I vaguely picture travel spots, which often included Tuvalu, the island nation that’s slowly sinking and will soon be disappearing into the Pacific Ocean, and Madagascar, the island nation in the Indian Ocean. I know why I think of Tuvalu — it wouldn’t be so bad to move to an island nation that will soon be disappearing into the ocean — but why does Madagascar come to my mind? The only thing I knew about Madagascar was that it broke away from a continent a long time ago and has been separated from the continent for a long time, hence its variety of unusual plants and animals, including all kinds of colorful and marvelous chameleons — which isn’t surprising, considering that half of the chameleon species on earth live in Madagascar. Nevertheless, when someone calls me on the phone and asks how I’m doing, I say that I might be going to Madagascar — even though I know for sure that I won’t — and tell them about the baobab trees there. But I could go to Madagascar, just to see the baobab trees which, according to legend, were placed upside down by a god who got caught in one of them and became infuriated.
A memory that has to do with Madagascar suddenly comes to my mind. It starts out with a French girl majoring in French literature, whom I came to know while staying in a small town in France, inviting me to her home in the country at the beginning of summer vacation (perhaps here, where I’m about to talk about something that has to do with Madagascar, I could attempt to get lost in a story by making a detour). Several days later I went to the small town where she lived and called her on the phone and she picked up, but she sounded quite cold, although I had no idea what had happened in the meantime, and told me to go back because she didn’t want to see me, without telling me the reason, and I ended up being abandoned in a feeling of abandonment in the town I had arrived at after several hours of train ride. We sort of liked each other from the beginning, which could have been my imagination, but not quite, for if it wasn’t true, she would’ve had no reason to invite me to her home.
There may have been a good reason for her to do so, or there may have been no such thing as a good reason — there may have been many reasons, or no reason at all — but I was a little angry at first, and after a little while, more puzzled than angry, and then more bewildered than puzzled, but I could accept what happened as something that could happen.
While on the train on my way to meet her, I pictured, with some excitement, a romance that could soon be taking place — it was summer, and thinking that there might be a little lake near her town and we might go swimming together (I pictured the beginning of our romance with us swimming in a lake), I thought that it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t bring my swimsuit, that maybe we could go skinny dipping — and the dismay I experienced upon arriving reminded me of the beginning of another somewhat strange — it becomes somewhat strange as I think about it — romance I experienced.
What you could call my first romantic relationship in college began while I was on my way home one night, taking a somewhat long way around to my house from the bus stop and going toward an alley. A girl was walking ahead of me, and we walked for a while, keeping a fixed distance between us, but sensing that someone was following her, she — I wasn’t following her but felt as if I were, and the moment that I felt that she, too, could feel that way, I felt more certain of it — she quickened her pace and began to run in the end, sensing danger, and ran through the last alley into her house, and as I stood hesitantly in front of her gate, the gate suddenly flew open and a dog came running out. It wasn’t a very large dog, but it came running out so fiercely that I stepped back and had to run in the end, but the dog, faster than I was, easily caught up to me and nipped at my trouser leg, making it impossible for me to go any further. Thus began our relationship, and we ended up seeing each other for some time because of that encounter, and she later told me that she’d felt, as I had, that someone was following her, and came out through the gate with her dog to give that someone a little scare, but the dog, which saw me at that moment, became agitated, and she let go of the leash — she said that she may have let go of the leash without really thinking about it, that she may have just wanted to do so — and that was why the dog came after me. For a long time after that, I would talk about the humiliation the dog inflicted upon me, and for a long time, she would talk about how ridiculous I looked in my humiliation. But I never told her about how once, when we went to a café together, and a dog there came running and went under the table we were sitting at and stayed there with its head stuck between my legs, I stayed still and let it smell the smell it wanted to smell.
Recalling that episode from long ago, I felt, despite the rejection, the kind of delight you feel when something ridiculous happens to you, so I didn’t go back right away. Curiously, I wanted to further explore the town of the French girl who had made something absurd happen to me. The small town was a typical small French town, and it took less than ten minutes to walk from one end of the town to the other on its main road. I went around every nook and cranny of the town as if everything piqued my curiosity, even though there was nothing to see there.
That night, after roaming around the small town, I stayed at a little hotel there, and while reading Molloy, one of Beckett’s Trilogy, which I bought and was reading at her recommendation, I thought about the Irish author who died not long after he said, while spending his last hours in a hotel in Paris, that he would die if somebody didn’t change the horrible wallpaper.
I also thought about something I read in another author’s autobiography, something his aunt said before she passed away, her last words being, “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water.” She, who was a doctor herself, went to a dinner party where she met Chekhov, a young doctor who later became an author, and she offended him somehow while having a conversation with him on medicine, and made him express his anger toward her in a letter he later wrote.
That night, in a hotel in a small town in France, I thought for a long time about how you could spend your dying moments. Since dying moments could be important to anyone, or could be considered important, I could think about them for a very long time, and then maybe get a small live octopus and spend my dying moments with it, thinking that the only thing left for me to spend my dying moments with was an octopus, and feeling a certain gratitude toward it for that, and time it well and die at the same time with the octopus, which can’t live long out of water, or die thinking that I’m following the octopus which died before I did. Or I could go buy an octopus a little earlier, and spend my remaining hours, the rest of my life, with it, and die with the realization that there’s no difference whatsoever between the death of the octopus and my own. And I could realize anew, or not anew at all, the fact that death is what eliminates the difference between every living thing, which isn’t anything new, and that everything becomes one before death and extinction, as I share my fate with the octopus. And looking at the octopus, I could mutter, That really strange looking green cat looks like a pineapple somehow, and think, But even as a pineapple, it looks somewhat strange.