The man, who was darkly tanned, told me, who hadn’t asked him anything about his trip, about the time he explored the jungle one afternoon. You couldn’t really say that he explored, for what he did was follow a relatively well maintained forest path with a guide showing the way. He said that he fell behind, suddenly tired of being led as a group by a tour guide like children on a school excursion, and entered the jungle, imagining that while following the path into the jungle, he might arrive at a community of natives who lived almost in the nude, and be invited to the home of a kind native and have roasted iguana or lizard for dinner, and then about midway through crossing an old rope bridge that looked quite dangerous, he suddenly ran into a huge coiled up snake that looked splendid and beautiful — the rope bridge was so narrow that you couldn’t pass through unless the other party stepped aside — and without realizing what he was doing, he took out the fan he had and opened it up, and when the snake, quite startled for some reason — considering that snakes don’t have good eyesight, it was more likely that the snake was startled by the sound of the fan that suddenly opened up, than by the sight of the fan that suddenly opened up — fell into the water under the bridge — the bridge wasn’t high, and the snake didn’t seem in danger of losing its life, having fallen on water, and although the snake got quite a scare, it was fine — he felt almost happy that he was there, he said.
Afterwards I for some reason wrapped bandage all over the reclining Buddha, whose giver seemed to have posed a riddle for me, and which itself seemed like a riddle, because I thought about wrapping a scarf around the reclining Buddha’s neck while picturing the black girl I saw in a subway station in Coney Island, unwrapping the scarf around her neck, but then thought that bandage might be better than a scarf. But it suddenly occurred to me that I forgot to rub Vaseline on the reclining Buddha, because I once thought about the pleasant feeling that comes when pronouncing the word Vaseline, a compound word of the words water and oil, the name of a petroleum extract used as a healing ointment for the injured during the first and second world wars, and used for too many purposes at one time, while picturing a pantomime with no action or sound, in which a Buddha with Vaseline rubbed all over the body, a Vaseline Buddha, you could call it, quietly sits in a little room whose floor, ceiling, and four walls are covered in Vaseline, a room gushing Vaseline and gradually becoming filled with it. And I thought that I could give the title Vaseline Buddha—the name was something that could be given to something indefinable, something unnamable, and also meant untitled — to what I was writing, but as soon as I did, I thought that it wasn’t a good idea, and as soon as I thought that perhaps this story had its beginning when I sat cross-legged in the middle of my room one day, thinking of Vaseline Buddha, and picturing the Buddha buried and melting in Vaseline, I thought that it wasn’t really true, and after thinking that when I unwrapped the bandage, I should perhaps hold a mirror up to the reclining Buddha, I put it under my bed, reclining, and from time to time, I lowered my head and looked at the Buddha, reclining peacefully under the bed, and recited at random, to pass the time, Buddhist mantras, such as om mani padme hum, maha prajna paramita, and doro amitabha. And I thought that a name like Fasting Clown could suit the bandaged Buddha, but that I could give him the name, The Difficulty of Light Swimming on Difficult Waters, or The Difficulty of a Water Strider Walking on Difficult Waters, because someone who performed the miracle of walking on water came to my mind, and I thought that perhaps he got the idea of performing the miracle from a water strider.
But when I returned home a dead goldfish was waiting for me. The person who watched my house for me while I was away didn’t say anything about the death of the fish. At night, I put the goldfish in a plastic bag and went to a cemetery by the river, where I took a walk now and then. Once, looking out at the sea, I thought that the sea was a huge grave for fish — I pictured the countless dead fish in the sea, and the sea was the biggest grave in the world — so I thought that I should bury the goldfish in the pond where it once lived, but I couldn’t think of a suitable pond.
The cemetery was a burial ground for missionaries who were beheaded while proselytizing Christianity during a period in the past. I dug up a bit of the soil in front of a missionary’s grave and buried the goldfish. The place, where beheaded missionaries were buried, and which overlooked a river, seemed the perfect grave for a fish, and I felt that by burying it there, I gave the fish a proper funeral. I suddenly recalled that the Danish word kierkegaard means churchyard, and I named the dead fish Kierkegaard, which seemed to suit the fish. And I was pleased by the fact that I was the only one who knew that a fish named Kierkegaard lay sleeping in a graveyard for missionaries, and that I could come to a kierkegaard, or a churchyard, whenever I wished and think about Kierkegaard the fish and Kierkegaard the philosopher.
Anyway, there were moments when I felt so dizzy that I really felt as if I would die, and wanted desperately to die for that reason. Or could I say I wanted desperately to die, and felt as if I would die for that reason? At any rate, I learned that a desire to die could be more desperate than a desire for anything else. My consciousness was urging me, badgering me to come to a decision, but I didn’t listen, not even to my own consciousness
I still thought about suicide only in a faint, vague way, and in fact, I’ve never thought properly about it. And my idea of suicide in those days was a quite playful one, regarding the issue of whether a person who committed suicide behaved no differently from usual, or differently from usual.
Still, I had a lethal dose of sleeping pills, which I could use whenever I wished, a part of which I kept in a music box I bought as a souvenir on a trip. From time to time, I opened the music box to check up on the sleeping pills, and when I looked at them, listening to the music box, they always raised some kind of a hope in me, and put me at ease. Perhaps I could take the sleeping pills and wind the spring, and fall into eternal sleep while listening to the music box play.
I didn’t see phantoms, but I saw signs, visions, that foretold the coming of phantoms before long. Once, in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up in bed and saw a large black dog quietly sitting in the darkness of the room, and took it into my sleep and let it lead me to a mysterious place, and before I knew it, we were surrounded by a countless number of other large black dogs. Seeing the vision, I thought about having a chat with phantoms when they actually came.
And what enabled me to just barely endure the depression that seemed as if it would lead to death were the thoughts I had in secret. Thinking those thoughts, I smiled to myself at times. And the smile I smiled to myself in secret, while rereading Molloy for the first time in a long time, during days when there was almost nothing to smile about, seemed my only genuine smile, and the smile, which wasn’t different from a certain kind of sneer, was directed at strange things. But at times, all kinds of smile, not just that smile, seemed strange, and awful as well.
I applied modifiers, such as corrosive, or sparkling, or coagulative, to my smile, and thought that I could apply them to my dizziness as well. In any case, such modifiers endowed a smile and dizziness with physical characteristics, and I felt that my smile and dizziness were physical states.
But from some time on, I no longer smiled even that smile, and I felt as if I were an empty house where no sound was heard anymore, abandoned by the people who had once lived there, talking and laughing. I also had the vague thought that perhaps my smile, which had vanished like an erased figure in an ancient wall painting, could be found only in the expression of a character in a novel I hadn’t yet written.