After dark

14

Eri Asai’s room.

The TV is switched on. Eri, in pajamas, is looking out from inside the screen. A lock of hair falls over her forehead. She shakes her head to sweep it away. She presses her hands against her side of the glass and begins speaking in this direction. It is as though a person had wandered into an empty fish tank at an aquarium and was trying to explain the predicament to a visitor through the thick glass. Her voice, however, does not reach our side. It cannot vibrate the air over here.

Something about Eri suggests that her senses are still numbed, as though she is unable to use the full force of her limbs. This is probably because her sleep was so very deep and long. She is trying, nevertheless, to gain some understanding, however limited, of the inscrutable circumstances in which she finds herself. Disoriented and confused though she may be, she is exerting all her strength to comprehend the logic underlying this place—the basis of its existence. Her emotional state communicates itself through the glass.

Which is not to suggest that she is shouting at the top of her voice or making an impassioned appeal. She seems exhausted from having done precisely that. She knows all too well that her voice will not get through.

What she is trying to do now is to transform what her eyes grasp and her senses perceive into the simplest and most appropriate words she can find. And so the words themselves emerge directed half at us and half at herself. This is no simple task, of course. Her lips move only sluggishly and intermittently. It is as though she were speaking a foreign language: her sentences are all short, and irregular gaps form between her words. The gaps stretch out and dilute the meaning that ought to be there. We train our eyes intently upon her from our side of the glass, but we can not clearly distinguish between the words and the silences that Eri Asai is forming with her lips. Reality spills through her slim fingers like the sands of an hourglass. Thus time is by no means on her side.

Eventually she tires of directing her speech outward and closes her mouth in apparent resignation. A new silence comes to overlay the silence that is already there. With clenched fists, she begins knocking lightly on her side of the glass. She is willing to try anything, but the sound fails to reach this side.

It appears that Eri is able to see what is on this side of the TV’s glass. We can guess this from the movement of her eyes. They seem to be shifting from item to item in her room (the room on this side): the desk, the bed, the bookcase. This room is where she belongs. She should be sleeping peacefully in the bed over here. But now it is impossible for her to pass through the transparent glass wall and return to this side. Some kind of agency or intent transported her to that other room and sealed her in there as she slept. Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like gray clouds reflected in a calm lake.

Unfortunately (we should say), there is nothing we can do for Eri Asai. Redundant though it may sound, we are sheer point of view. We cannot influence things in any way.

But—we wonder—who was that Man with No Face? What could he have done to Eri Asai? And where has he gone off to now?

Suddenly, before any answer can be given, the TV screen begins to lose its stability. The signal shudders. Eri Asai begins to blur and quiver slightly around the edges. Aware that something is happening to her body, she turns away and scans her surroundings. She looks up at the ceiling, down at the floor, and finally at her wavering hands. She stares at them as their edges lose their clarity. Her face looks apprehensive. What could possibly be happening? The harsh crackling sound of static rises. A strong wind seems to have picked up again on a distant hilltop somewhere. The contact point in the circuit connecting the two worlds is being shaken violently, threatening to obliterate the clear outlines of her existence. The meaning of her physical self is eroding.

“Run!” we shout to her. On impulse we forget the rule that requires us to maintain our neutrality. Our voice doesn’t reach her, needless to say, but Eri perceives the danger on her own. She tries to escape. She heads away with rapid strides—probably toward a door. Her image disappears from the camera’s field of view. The TV picture suddenly loses its earlier clarity, distorts, and all but disintegrates. The light of the picture tube gradually fades. It shrinks to a small, square window, and finally is extinguished altogether. All information gives way to nothingness, all sense of place is withdrawn, all meaning is dismantled, and the two worlds are divided, leaving behind a silence lacking all sensation.


A different clock in a different place. A round electric clock hanging on the wall. The hands point to 4:31. This is the kitchen of the Shirakawa house. Collar button open, necktie loosened, Shirakawa sits alone at the breakfast table, eating plain yogurt with a spoon. He scoops it directly from the plastic container to his mouth.

He is watching the small TV they keep in the kitchen. The remote control sits next to the yogurt container. The screen is showing pictures of the sea bottom. Weird deep-sea creatures. Ugly ones, beautiful ones. Predators, prey. Miniature research submarine outfitted with high-tech equipment. Powerful floodlights, precision arm. The program is called Creatures of the Deep. The sound is muted. His face expressionless, Shirakawa follows the movements on the screen while conveying spoonfuls of yogurt to his mouth. His mind, however, is thinking about other things. He is considering aspects of the interrelationship of thought and action. Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action? His eyes follow the TV image, but he is actually looking at something deep inside the screen—something miles beyond the screen.

He glances at the clock on the wall. The hands point to 4:33. The second hand glides its way around the dial. The world moves on continuously, without interruption. Thought and action continue to operate in concert. At least for now.