After dark

17

Mari and Takahashi are walking down the street side by side. Mari has her bag slung over her shoulder and her Red Sox hat pulled low over her eyes. She is not wearing her glasses.

“You’re not tired?” Takahashi asks.

Mari shakes her head. “I had a little nap.”

“Once after an all-night practice like this, I got on the Chuo Line at Shinjuku to go home, and I woke up way out in the country in Yamanashi. Mountains all around. Not to boast, but I’m the type who can fall fast asleep just about anywhere.”

Mari remains silent, as if she is thinking about something else.

“Anyhow, to get back to what we were talking about before…about Eri Asai,” Takahashi says. “Of course, you don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to. But just let me ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Your sister has been sleeping for a long time. And she has no intention of waking up. You said something like that, right?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but could she be in a coma or some kind of unconscious state?”

Mari falters briefly. “No, that’s not it,” she says. “I don’t think it’s anything life-threatening at the moment. She’s…just asleep.”

“Just asleep?” Takahashi asks.

“Uh-huh, except…” Mari sighs. “Sorry, but I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it.”

“That’s okay. If you’re not ready, don’t talk.”

“I’m tired, and I can’t get my head straight. And my voice doesn’t sound like my voice to me.”

“That’s okay. Some other time. Let’s drop it for now.”

“Okay,” Mari says with obvious relief.

For some moments, they don’t talk about anything at all. They simply walk toward the station. Takahashi quietly whistles a tune.

“I wonder what time it starts to get light out,” Mari says.

Takahashi looks at his watch. “At this season…hmm…maybe six forty. This is when the nights are longest. It’ll stay dark a while.”

“When it’s dark, it really makes you tired, doesn’t it?”

“That’s when everybody’s supposed to be asleep,” Takahashi says. “Historically speaking, it’s quite a recent development that human beings have felt easy about going out after dark. It used to be after the sun set, people would just crawl into their caves and protect themselves. Our internal clocks are still set for us to sleep after the sun goes down.”

“It feels like a really long time since it got dark last night.”

“Well, it has been a long time.”

They walk past a drugstore with a large truck parked out front. The driver is unloading the truck’s contents through the store’s half-open shutter.

“Think I can see you again sometime soon?” Takahashi asks.

“Why?”

“Why? ’Cause I want to see you and talk to you some more. At a more normal time of day if possible.”

“You mean, like, a date?”

“Maybe you could call it that.”

“What could you talk about with me?”

Takahashi thinks about this. “Are you asking me what kind of subject matter we have in common?”

“Aside from Eri, that is.”

“Hmm…common subject matter…put it to me like that all of a sudden, and I can’t think of anything concrete. Right this second. It just seems to me we’d have plenty to talk about if we got together.”

“Talking to me wouldn’t be much fun.”

“Did anybody ever say that to you—like, you’re not much fun to talk to?”

Mari shakes her head. “No, not really.”

“So you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“I have been told I’ve got a darkish personality. A few times.”

Takahashi swings his trombone case from his right shoulder to his left. Then he says, “It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort. I don’t think you have a particularly dark character.”

Mari thinks about Takahashi’s words. “I am a coward, though,” she says.

“Now there you’re wrong. A cowardly girl doesn’t go out alone like this in the city at night. You wanted to discover something here. Right?”

“What do you mean, ‘here’?”

“Someplace different: someplace outside your usual territory.”

“I wonder if I discovered something—here.”

Takahashi smiles and looks at Mari. “Anyhow, I want to see you and talk to you again at least one more time. That’s what I’d like to do.”

Mari looks at Takahashi. Their eyes meet.

“That might be impossible,” she says.

“Impossible?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You mean you and I might never meet again?”

“Realistically speaking,” Mari says.

“Are you seeing somebody?”

“Not really, now.”

“So you just don’t like me?”

Mari shakes her head. “I’m not saying that. I won’t be in Japan after next Monday. I’m leaving for Beijing. To be a kind of exchange student there until next June at least.”

“Of course,” Takahashi says, impressed. “You’re such an outstanding student.”

“I applied on the off chance they’d pick me—and they did. I’m just a freshman, I figured there was no way I could get in, but I guess it’s a kind of special program.”

“That’s great! Congratulations.”

“So, anyhow, I’ve just got a few days till I leave, and I’ll probably be so busy getting ready…”

“Of course.”

“Of course what?”

“You’ve got to get ready to leave for Beijing, you’ll be busy with all kinds of stuff, and you won’t have time to see me. Of course,” Takahashi says. “I understand perfectly. That’s okay, I don’t mind. I can wait.”

“But I won’t be coming back to Japan for six months or more.”

“I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. And killing time is one of my specialties. Give me your address over there, okay? I want to write to you.”

“I don’t mind, I guess.”

“If I write, will you answer me?”

“Uh-huh,” Mari says.

“And when you come back to Japan next summer, let’s have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we’ll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.”

Mari looks at Takahashi again—straight in the eyes, as if to verify something.

“But why should you be interested in me?”

“Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this second. But maybe—just maybe—if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.”

When they reach the station, Mari takes a small red notebook from her pocket, writes down her Beijing address, tears the page out, and hands it to Takahashi. Takahashi folds it in two and slips it into his billfold.

“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll write you a nice long letter.”

Mari comes to a halt before the automatic ticket gate, thinking about something. She is unsure whether she should tell him what is on her mind.

“I remembered something about Eri before,” she says, once she has decided to go ahead. “I had forgotten about it for a long time, but it came back to me all of a sudden after you called me at the hotel and I was spacing out in the chair. I wonder if I should just tell you about it here and now.”

“Of course you should.”

“I’d like to tell somebody about it while the memory is fresh,” Mari says. “Otherwise, the details might disappear.”

Takahashi touches his ear to signal his readiness to listen.

“When I was in kindergarten,” Mari begins, “Eri and I once got trapped in the elevator of our building. I think there must have been an earthquake. The elevator made this tremendous shake between floors and stopped dead. The lights went out, and we were in total darkness. I mean total: you couldn’t see your own hand. There was nobody else on the elevator, just the two of us. Well, I panicked: I completely stiffened up. It was like I turned into a fossil right then and there. I couldn’t move a finger. I could hardly breathe, couldn’t make a sound. Eri called my name, but I couldn’t answer. I just fogged over: it was like my brain went numb and Eri’s voice was barely reaching me through a crack.”

Mari closes her eyes for a moment and relives the darkness in her mind.

She goes on with her story. “I don’t remember how long the darkness lasted. Now it seems awfully long to me, but in fact it may not have been that long. Exactly how many minutes it lasted—five minutes, twenty minutes—really doesn’t matter. The important thing is that during that whole time in the dark, Eri was holding me. And it wasn’t just some ordinary hug. She squeezed me so hard our two bodies felt as if they were melting into one. She never loosened her grip for a second. It felt as though if we separated the slightest bit, we would never see each other in this world again.”

Takahashi leans against the ticket gate, saying nothing, as he waits for the rest of Mari’s story. Mari pulls her right hand from the pocket of her varsity jacket and stares at it for a while. Then, raising her face, she goes on:

“Of course, Eri was scared to death, too, I’m sure. Maybe even as scared as I was. She must have wanted to scream and cry. I mean, she was just a second-grader, after all. But she stayed calm. She probably decided on the spot that she was going to be strong. She made up her mind that she would have to be the strong big sister for my sake. And the whole time she kept whispering in my ear stuff like, ‘We’re gonna be okay. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m here with you, and somebody’s gonna come and help soon.’ She sounded totally calm. Like a grownup. She even sang me songs, though I don’t remember what they were. I wanted to sing with her, but I couldn’t. I was so scared my voice wouldn’t come out. But Eri just kept singing for me all by herself. I entrusted myself completely to her arms. The two of us became one: there were no gaps between us. We even shared a single heartbeat. Then suddenly the lights came on, and the elevator shook again and started to move.”

Mari inserts a pause. She is backtracking through her memory, looking for the words.

“But that was the last time. That was…how should I say it?…the one moment in my life when I was able to draw closest to Eri…the one moment when she and I joined heart to heart as one: there was nothing separating us. After that, it seems, we grew farther and farther apart. We separated, and before long we were living in different worlds. That sense of union I felt in the darkness of the elevator, that strong bond between our hearts, never came back again. I don’t know what went wrong, but we were never able to go back to where we started from.”

Takahashi reaches out and takes Mari’s hand. She is momentarily startled but doesn’t pull her hand from his. Takahashi keeps his gentle grip on her hand—her small, soft hand—for a very long time.

“I don’t really want to go,” Mari says.

“To China?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I’m scared.”

“That’s only natural,” he says. “You’re going to a strange, far-off place all by yourself.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be fine, though,” he says. “I know you. And I’ll be waiting for you here.”

Mari nods.

“You’re very pretty,” he says. “Did you know that?”

Mari looks up at Takahashi. Then she withdraws her hand from his and puts it into the pocket of her varsity jacket. Her eyes drop to her feet. She is checking to make sure her yellow sneakers are still clean.

“Thanks. But I want to go home now.”

“I’ll write to you,” he says. “A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel.”

“Okay,” Mari says.

She goes in through the ticket gate, walks to the platform, and disappears into a waiting express train. Takahashi watches her go. Soon the departure signal sounds, the doors close, and the train pulls away from the platform. When he loses sight of the train, Takahashi picks his instrument case up from the floor, slings the strap over his shoulder, and heads for his own station, whistling softly. The number of people moving through this station gradually increases.