Hear The Wind Sing Part 8

"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 p.e.n.i.s 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 s.e.x 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 p.e.n.i.s were things n.o.body 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."

"...a girl?"

Looking a little confused, the Rat finally nodded.

"Why me?"

"Who else is there?" he said quickly as he took the first sip of his sixth gla.s.s of whiskey.

"You have a suit and a necktie?"

"I do, but..."

"Tomorrow at two p.m." the Rat said, "Hey, what the h.e.l.l do you think girls eat to survive?"

"The soles of their shoes."

"No way," said the Rat.

25

The Rat's favorite food was pancakes. He'd pile a bunch of them up on a deep plate and cut them neatly into four sections, then pour a bottle of Coca Cola on top of them.

The first time I visited the Rat's house, beneath the soft sunlight of May, he had them out on the table and was in the middle of shoveling that odd concoction into his stomach.

"The great thing about this food is," the Rat said, "it's food and drink rolled into one."

The overgrown yard was full of trees, and birds of many shapes and colors were gathered there, eagerly pecking at the white popcorn scattered on the gra.s.s. 26 26 I'll tell you about the third girl I slept with. It's really difficult to talk about dead people, but it's even harder to talk about dead young women. It's because from the time they die, they'll be young forever.

On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older. Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It's a terrible thing, but that's reality.

She wasn't what anyone would call a beautiful girl. However, saying 'she wasn't a beauty' probably isn't a fair way to put it. 'She wasn't as beautiful as she could have been' seems like an accurate way to describe it, I think.

I have only one picture of her. The date is written on the back, August 1963. The year Kennedy was shot in the head. She's sitting on a seawall, a beach seemingly near some summer resort, smiling slightly uncomfortably. She's wearing a short, Jean Seburgstyle hairdo (no matter what anybody says, it reminds me of Auschwitz), wearing a long-edged gingham one-piece dress. She looks clumsy, beautiful. It's a beauty that could pierce the most delicate regions of the heart of the viewer.

Her thin lips pressed together, her tiny, upturned nose looking like a dainty insect's antenna, her bangs looking as if she'd cut them herself, dangling carelessly across her wide forehead, her slightly bulging cheeks, upon which tiny pockmarks, remnants of pimples can be seen.

When she was fourteen years old, that was the time in her twenty-one-year lifetime when she was the happiest. And then she disappeared so suddenly, is all I can think. For what purpose, what reason such a thing could be possible, I have no idea. n.o.body does.

She said once, seriously (I'm not joking), "I entered college to have a heavenly revelation."

This was before four a.m., both of us naked in bed. I asked her what kind of heavenly revelation she was expecting.

"How should I know?" she said, but added a moment later, "Maybe something like angels' feathers falling from the sky."

I tried to imagine the spectacle of angels' feathers falling onto the university's courtyard, and from afar it looked much like tissue paper.

n.o.body knows why she killed herself. I have a suspicion that maybe she herself may not have known.

27

I was having a bad dream.

I was a big black bird, flying west across the jungle. I had a deep wound, the black blood clinging to my wings. In the west I could see an ominous black cloud beginning to stretch out, and from there I could smell rain.

It was a long time since I'd had a dream. It had been so long that it took me a while to realize it was a dream.

I got out of bed, washed the horrible sweat off my body, and then had toast and apple juice for breakfast. Thanks to the cigarettes and the beer, my throat felt like it was full of old mothb.a.l.l.s. After was.h.i.+ng and putting away the dishes, I put on an olive green cotton jacket, a s.h.i.+rt I'd ironed as best I could, chose a black tie, and with the tie still in my hand I sat in the air conditioned parlor.

The television news announcer proudly declared that it was likely to be the hottest day of the summer. I turned off the television and went into my older brother's room, picked a few books from his enormous pile of books, then took them back to the parlor where I plopped onto the sofa and stared at the words printed within.

Two years before, my brother left his roomful of books and his girlfriend and took off to America without so much as a word. Sometimes she and I ate together. She told me I was just like him.

"In what way?" I asked, surprised.

"In every way," she said.

I probably was just like him. It was probably due to the ten-plus years of our polis.h.i.+ng those shoes, I think.

The hour hand pointed to twelve, and after milling about and thinking about the heat outside I fastened my tie and put on my suit jacket.

I had lots of time to kill. I drove around town for a bit. The town was almost miserably long and narrow, starting at the sea and climbing into the mountains. River, tennis court, golf course, rows of estates lined up, walls and more walls, some nice little restaurants, boutiques, an old library, fields of primrose, the park with the monkey pen, the town was the same as ever. After driving around for a while on the road that wound its way into the mountains, I drove along the river towards the ocean, then parked my car at the mouth of the river and dipped my legs in the water to cool them off. There were two well-tanned girls on the tennis court, hitting the ball back and forth, wearing their white hats and sungla.s.ses. The rays of the sun bringing the afternoon suddenly increased in intensity, and as they swung their rackets, their sweat flew out onto the court.

After watching them for five minutes, I went back to my car, put down my seat, and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the waves mixing with the sound of the ball being hit.

The scent of the sea and the burning asphalt being carried on the southerly wind made me think of summers past. The warmth of a girl's skin, old rock n' roll, b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts right out of the wash, the smell of cigarettes smoked in the pool locker room, faint premonitions, everyone's sweet, limitless summer dreams. And then one year (when was it?), those dreams didn't come back.

When I arrived at J's Bar at exactly two o' clock, the Rat was sitting on a guardrail reading Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified.

"Where's the girl?" I asked.

He silently closed his book, got into his car, and put on his sungla.s.ses and said, "She's not coming."

"Not coming?"

"Not coming."

I sighed and loosened my necktie, pitched my jacket into the backseat, and lit a cigarette.

"So, where are we going?"

"The zoo."

"Great," I said.

28

Let me tell you about the town. The town were I was born, raised, and slept with my first girl. Ocean in front, mountains in back, and next to it is a large port city. It's a small town. Speeding back from the port city, you decide not to smoke, because by the time you light a match you'd blow right by the town.

The population's a little over seven thousand. This number has hardly changed after five years. Most of them live in two-story houses with yards, own cars, and more than a few of them even have two cars. This number isn't my vague recollection, it was the number published by the munic.i.p.al census bureau at the end of the fiscal year. It's nice to live in a place with two-story houses.

The Rat lived in a three-story house which went to far as to have a hothouse on the roof. Set into the hillside was a garage, with his father's Benz and the Rat's Triumph TR III lined up snugly inside. Strangely, the part of the Rat's house that emanated the homelike atmosphere the most was this garage. The garage was large enough that it seemed like a small airplane would fit right in it, and inside there was a collection of things that had fallen into disuse or were replaced by newer things inside the house: televisions and refrigerators, a sofa, a table and chairs, a stereo system, a sideboard; with all of these things arranged neatly in the garage, we had a lot of good times sitting out there drinking beer. As for the Rat's father, I know very little about him. I never met him. When I'd ask about him, 'He's a guy, and he's much older than me,' was the Rat's answer.

According to rumor, the Rat's father used to be incredibly poor. This was before the war. Just before the war started, he sc.r.a.ped together enough money to acquire a chemical plant and sold insect-repelling ointment. There was some question as to its effectiveness, but as the front lines expanded southward, it practically flew off the shelves. When the war ended, he put the ointment in a warehouse, and shortly after that he sold dubious vitamin powder, which, after the Korean War ended, he repackaged as household detergent. Everyone seems to agree on this point. It seems quite possible. Twenty-five years ago, the insect repelling ointment-slathered bodies of j.a.panese soldiers piled up like mountains in the jungles of New Guinea, and now toilet cleaner stamped with the same insignia lies toppled in the bathrooms of houses everywhere. Thanks to that, the Rat's father was loaded. Of course, I also had friends who were poor. One kid, his dad was a bus driver for the town. There're probably rich bus drivers out there, but my friend's dad wasn't one of them. His parents were almost never home, so I hung out there quite a bit. His dad would be driving the bus, or maybe at the racetrack, and his mom would be out all day at her part-time job.

He was in the same grade as me, but our friends.h.i.+p began with a chance occurrence. One day, on my lunch break, I was taking a p.i.s.s and he came over and stood next to me and unzipped his jeans. We p.i.s.sed together in silence, then went to wash our hands when we were finished.

"I've got something you might wanna see," he said as he wiped his hands on the a.s.s of his jeans.

"Yeah?"

"You wanna see it?"

He pulled a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. It was a naked girl with her thighs completely spread out, a beer bottle jammed up inside.

"It's great, yeah?"

"Sure thing."

"If you come over to my house, there's even better ones," he said.

That's how we became friends.