A “POOR AUNT” STORY
1
It started on a perfectly beautiful Sunday afternoon in July—the very first Sunday afternoon in July. Two or three chunks of cloud floated white and tiny in a distant corner of the sky, like well-formed punctuation marks placed with exceptional care. Unobstructed by anything at all, the light of the sun poured down on the world to its heart’s content. In this kingdom of July, even the crumpled silver sphere of a chocolate wrapper discarded on the lawn gave off a proud sparkle, like a legendary crystal at the bottom of a lake. If you stared at the scene long enough, you could tell that the sunlight enfolded yet another kind of light, like one Chinese box inside another. The inner light looked like countless grains of pollen—grains that were soft and opaque and that hung in the sky, almost motionless, until, at long last, they settled down upon the surface of the earth.
On the way home from a Sunday stroll, I had stopped by the plaza outside the Picture Gallery. Sitting at the edge of the pond, my companion and I looked across the water toward the two bronze unicorns on the other shore. The long rainy season had finally ended, and a new summer breeze stirred the leaves of the oak trees, raising tiny ripples now and then on the surface of the shallow pond. Time moved like the breeze: starting and stopping, stopping and starting. Soft-drink cans shone through the clear water of the pond. To me, they looked like the sunken ruins of an ancient lost city. Before us passed a softball team in uniform, a boy on a bicycle, an old man walking his dog, a young foreigner in jogging shorts. The breeze carried snatches of music from a large portable radio on the grass: a sugary song of love either lost or about to be. I seemed to recognize the tune, but I couldn’t be sure. It may have just sounded like one I knew. Half-listening, I could feel my bare arms soaking up the sunlight—soundlessly, softly, gently. Every once in a while, I would bring my arms up to face level and stretch them straight out. Summer was here.
Why a poor aunt, of all things, should have grabbed my heart on a Sunday afternoon like this, I have no idea. There was no poor aunt to be seen in the vicinity, nothing to make me imagine her existence. She came to me, nonetheless, and then she was gone. If only for some hundredth part of a second, she had been in my heart. And when she moved on, she left a strange, human-shaped emptiness in her place. It felt as if someone had zipped past a window and disappeared. You run to the window and stick your head out, but no one is there.
A poor aunt?
I scanned the area, then looked up at the sky. Come and gone. Like the transparent path of a bullet, the words had been absorbed into the early Sunday afternoon. Beginnings are always like this. One minute everything exists, the next minute everything is lost.
I tried the words out on my companion. “I’d like to write something about a poor aunt.” I’m one of those people who try to write stories.
“A poor aunt?”
She seemed a bit surprised. For a moment, she looked at me with eyes that were attempting to gauge something. “Why? Why a poor aunt?”
Not even I knew the answer to that. For some reason, things that grabbed me were always things I didn’t understand.
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertip along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
“I wonder if anybody would want to read a story like that?” she said.
“True,” I said, “it might not be what you’d call a good read.”
“Then why write about such a thing?”
“I can’t put it into words very well,” I said. “In order to explain why I want to write a story about a poor aunt, I’d have to write the story, but once the story was finished, there wouldn’t be any reason to explain the reason for writing the story—or would there?”
She smiled and lit a crumpled cigarette that she took from her pocket. She always crumpled her cigarettes, sometimes so badly they wouldn’t light. This one lit.
“By the way,” she said. “Do you have any poor aunts among your relatives?”
“Not a one,” I said.
“Well, I do. Exactly one. The genuine article. I even lived with her for a few years.”
I watched her eyes. They were as calm as ever.
“But I don’t want to write about her,” she added. “I don’t want to write a single word about that aunt of mine.”
The portable radio started playing a different tune, much like the first one, but this I didn’t recognize at all.
“You don’t have a single poor aunt in your family, but still you want to write a ‘poor aunt’ story. Meanwhile, I do have a real, live poor aunt, but I don’t want to write about her. Sort of strange, don’t you think?”
I nodded. “I wonder why.”
She just tipped her head a little and said nothing. With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.
I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why.
From the tip of her crumpled cigarette, she dropped her crumpled ashes on the ground. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I do have some things I’d like to say about my poor aunt. But it’s impossible for me to come up with the right words. I just can’t do it—because I know a real poor aunt.” She bit her lip. “It’s hard—a lot harder than you seem to realize.”
I looked up at the bronze unicorns again, their front hooves thrust out in angry protest against the flow of time for abandoning them in its wake. She wiped the pond water from her fingers on the hem of her shirt, wiped them again, and then she turned to face me. “You’re going to try to write about a poor aunt,” she said. “You’re going to take on this responsibility. And the way I see it, taking on the responsibility for something means offering it salvation. I wonder, though, whether you are capable of that just now. You don’t even have a real poor aunt.”
I released a long, deep sigh.
“Sorry,” she said.
“That’s OK,” I replied. “You’re probably right.”
And she was. I didn’t even have / A poor aunt of my own.
Huh. Like lines from a song.
2
Chances are, you don’t have a poor aunt among your relatives, either. In which case, you and I have something in common. It’s an odd thing to have in common—like sharing a puddle on a quiet morning.
But still, you must have at least seen a poor aunt at someone’s wedding. Just as every bookshelf has a long-unread book and every closet has a long-unworn shirt, every wedding reception has a poor aunt.
Almost no one bothers to introduce her. Almost no one even talks to her. No one asks her to give a speech. She sits at the table where she belongs, but she’s just there—like an empty milk bottle. With sad, little slurps, she spoons in her consommé. She eats her salad with her fish fork. She can’t manage to scoop up all her green beans. And she’s the only one without a spoon when the ice cream comes. With luck, the present she gives the young couple will be lost in the back of the closet. And if luck goes the other way, hers will be the present thrown out at moving time along with that dusty, unidentifiable trophy and all that goes with it.
Oh, her picture is there all right, whenever they pull out the album of wedding photos, but her image is as cheering as a freshly drowned corpse.
Honey, who’s this woman here, in the second row, with glasses?
Never mind, that’s nobody, says the young husband. Just a poor aunt of mine.
No name. Just a poor aunt.
All names fade away, of course. We can say that much for sure.
But there are many ways for this to happen. First there are those whose names fade the moment they die. They’re the easy ones. We mourn their deaths: “The river ran dry and the fish died out,” or “Flames covered the forest, roasting every bird within it.” Next there are those who go out like an old television, leaving white flickers that play over the face of the tube until suddenly, one day, it burns out completely. These aren’t bad, either: sort of like the footprints of an Indian elephant that’s lost its way. No, definitely not bad. And finally there’s the type whose names fade even before they die—the poor aunts.
I myself fall into this poor aunt state of namelessness now and then. Suddenly, in the bustle of a terminal, my destination, my name, my address will no longer be there in my brain. But this never lasts long: five or ten seconds at most.
And then you have this:
“For the life of me, I can’t remember your name,” someone says.
“Never mind. Don’t let it bother you. It’s not much of a name, anyway.”
Over and over, he points to his mouth. “It’s right here, on the tip of my tongue, I swear…”
I feel as if I’ve been buried in the earth with half my left foot sticking out. People trip over it and start to apologize. “I swear, it’s right here, on the tip of my tongue…”
All right, then, where do the lost names go? The probability of their surviving in this maze of a city must be extremely low. Some are flattened on the road by enormous trucks, some die in the gutter for simple lack of spare change that would get them on a streetcar, while others sink to the bottom of the river, with a pocketful of pride to weigh them down.
Still, there might be some who have survived and found their way to the town of lost names where they have built a quiet, little community. A tiny town, at the entrance to which there would have to be a sign:
NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS
Those who dare to enter without business, of course, receive an appropriately tiny punishment.
Perhaps it was the tiny punishment that had been prepared for me. A poor aunt—a little one—was stuck to my back.
I first realized she was there in the middle of August. Not that anything in particular happened to alert me to her presence. I simply felt it one day: I had a poor aunt there on my back.
It was not an unpleasant sensation. She wasn’t especially heavy. She didn’t puff bad breath across my shoulder. She was just stuck there, on my back, like a bleached shadow. People had to look hard even to realize she was there. True, the cats I shared my apartment with gave her suspicious looks for the first few days, but as soon as they understood that she had no designs on their territory, they got used to her.
She made some of my friends nervous. We’d be sitting at a table with drinks when she’d peek over my shoulder at them.
“Gives me the creeps,” said one friend.
“Don’t let her bother you. She minds her own business. She’s harmless enough.”
“I know, I know. But, I don’t know why, she’s depressing.”
“So try not to look.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Then a sigh. “Where’d you have to go to get something like that on your back?”
“It’s not that I went anywhere. I just kept thinking about some things. That’s all.”
He nodded and sighed again. “I think I get it. It’s your personality. You’ve always been like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
We downed several whiskeys over the next hour without much enthusiasm.
“Tell me,” I said. “What’s so depressing about her?”
“I don’t know, it’s like my mother’s keeping an eye on me.”
“I wonder why?”
“You wonder why?! Hey, that’s probably my mother glued up there on your back.”
Judging from the impressions of a number of people (since I myself was unable to see her), what I had on my back was not a poor aunt with a single fixed form: she was apparently a kind of ether that changed shape in accordance with the mental images of each observer.
For one friend, it was a dog of his, an Akita, that had died the previous fall from cancer of the esophagus.
“She was on her last legs anyway, I guess. Fifteen years old. But what an awful way to die, poor thing.”
“Cancer of the esophagus?”
“Yeah. It’s really painful. I’d rather have anything else. All she did was cry—though she had pretty much lost her voice by then. I wanted to put her to sleep, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”
“Why not?”
“Who the hell knows? Probably would have felt guilty. We kept her alive two months on a feeding tube. Out in the shed. God, what a stink!”
He stayed silent for a while.
“She wasn’t much of a dog. Scared of her own shadow. Barked at everybody who came by. A really useless animal. Noisy, covered with scabs…”
I nodded.
“She’d have been better off born a cicada. Could have screamed her head off and nobody’d give a damn. No cancer of the esophagus, either.”
But there she was, up on my back still, a dog with a plastic tube sticking out of her mouth.
For one real estate agent, it was his old elementary school teacher.
“Must have been 1950, first year of the Korean War,” he said, using a thick towel to wipe the sweat from his face. “I had her two years in a row. It’s like old times seeing her again. Not that I missed her, exactly. I’d kind of forgotten that she even existed.”
The way he offered me a cup of ice-cold barley tea, he seemed to think I must be some kind of relative of his old elementary school teacher.
“She was a sad case, though, come to think of it. Husband got drafted the year they were married. He was on a transport ship and boom! Must have been ’43. She stayed on teaching school after that. Got bad burns in the air raids of ’44. Left side of her face, down to her arm.” He drew an arc from his cheek to his left arm. Then he drained his cup of barley tea and wiped his face again. “Poor thing. She must have been pretty before that happened. Changed her personality, too, they say. Must be near sixty if she’s still alive. Hmmm…1950, huh…?”
And so there took shape all kinds of wedding reception seating charts and neighborhood maps. My back was at the center of the poor aunt’s gradually widening circle.
At the same time, though, one friend and then another and another began to drop away from me, the way a comb loses teeth.
“He’s not a bad guy,” they would say about me, “but I don’t want to have to look at my depressing old mother (or old dog that died of esophageal cancer or the teacher with her burn scars) whenever I see him.”
I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair—hated by no one but avoided by everyone. If I bumped into friends on the street they’d find some reason to disappear as soon as possible. “I don’t know,” one girl confessed to me with difficulty—and honesty, “it’s kind of hard to be around you these days. I wouldn’t mind so much if you had an umbrella stand on your back or something…”
An umbrella stand.
Oh, what the hell, I’d tell myself, I was never much of a social animal anyway. And I certainly didn’t want to have to live with an umbrella stand on my back.
While friends avoided me, the media couldn’t get enough of me. Especially the weekly magazines. Reporters would show up every couple of days, take photos of me and the aunt, complain when her image didn’t come out clearly, and shower me with pointless questions. I kept hoping that my cooperation with the magazines would lead to some new discovery or development with regard to the poor aunt, but instead all I got was exhaustion.
Once, I appeared on the Morning Show. They dragged me out of bed at six o’clock, drove me to the TV studio, and filled me full of godawful coffee. Incomprehensible people ran all around me doing incomprehensible things. I thought about getting the hell out of there, but before I could bring myself to do it, they said it was my turn. When the cameras weren’t on, the show’s host was a grumpy, arrogant bastard who did nothing but bawl people out, but the second the camera’s red lamp lit, he was all smiles and intelligence: your regulation middle-aged nice guy.
“And now it’s time for our daily feature, ‘Look What Else Is Out There,’” he announced to the camera. “Today’s guest is Mr.——, who suddenly found he had a poor aunt on his back. Not many people have this particular problem, and what I’d like to do today is ask our guest how it happened to him, and what kind of difficulties he’s had to face.” Turning to me, he continued, “Do you find having a poor aunt on your back in any way inconvenient?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t exactly call it inconvenient or difficult. She’s not heavy, and I don’t have to feed her.”
“No lower back pain?”
“No, none at all.”
“When did you find her stuck there?”
I briefly summarized my afternoon by the pond with the bronze unicorns, but he seemed unable to grasp my point.
“In other words,” he said, clearing his throat, “she was lurking in the pond near where you were sitting, and she possessed your back. Is that it?”
No, I said, shaking my head, that was not it. Oh, no! How had I let myself in for this? All they wanted was jokes or horror stories. I couldn’t take much more of this.
“The poor aunt is not a ghost,” I tried to explain. “She doesn’t ‘lurk’ anywhere, and she doesn’t ‘possess’ anybody. The poor aunt is just words,” I said. “Just words.”
No one said a thing. I would have to be more specific.
“A word is like an electrode connected to the mind. If you keep sending the same stimulus through it, there is bound to be some kind of response created, some effect that comes into being. Each individual’s response will be entirely different, of course, and in my case the response is something like a sense of independent existence. It’s the way you’d feel if your tongue swelled into some huge thing inside your mouth. What I have stuck to my back, finally, is the phrase ‘poor aunt’—those very words, without meaning, without form. If I had to give it a label, I’d call it a ‘conceptual sign’ or something like that.”
The host looked confused. “You say it has no meaning or form,” he observed, “but we can clearly see…something…some real image there on your back. And it gives rise to some sort of meaning in each of us…”
I shrugged. “Of course,” I said. “That’s what signs do.”
“So,” interjected the host’s young female assistant, in hopes of breaking up the barren atmosphere that was beginning to congeal around the show, “you could erase this image or this being or whatever it is, by your own free will if you wanted to.”
“No, that I can’t do,” I said. “Once something has come into being, it continues to exist independent of my will. It’s like a memory. You know how a memory can be—especially a memory you wish you could forget but you can’t. It’s just like that.”
She went on, seemingly unconvinced: “This process you mentioned of turning a word into a conceptual sign: is that something even I could do?”
“I can’t say how well it would work, but in principle, at least, you could,” I answered.
Now the host got into the act. “Say if I were to keep repeating the word ‘conceptual’ over and over every day, the image of ‘conceptual’ might appear on my back at some point, is that it?”
“In principle, at least, that could happen,” I repeated myself mechanically.
“So the word ‘conceptual’ will be turned into a conceptual sign.”
“Exactly,” I replied, but the strong lights and bad-smelling air of the studio were beginning to give me a headache. The piercing voices of the other speakers were intensifying the pain as well.
“What would a ‘conceptual’ look like?” ventured the host, drawing laughter from some of the other guests.
I said I didn’t know. It was not something I wanted to think about. My hands were full already with only one poor aunt that had taken on a separate existence. None of them really gave a damn about any of this. All they were concerned about was keeping the patter alive until the next commercial.
The whole world is a farce, needless to say. Who can escape that? From the glare of a TV studio to the gloom of a hermit’s cabin in the woods, it all comes from the same root. Walking through this clownish world with the poor aunt on my back, I was of course the biggest clown of all. Maybe the girl had been right: maybe I’d have been better off with an umbrella stand up there. Maybe then people would have let me into their cliques. I could’ve painted the umbrella stand a new color twice a month and gone with it to all the parties.
“All riiight! Your umbrella stand is pink this week!” somebody says.
“Sure thing,” I answer. “Next week I’m going for British green.”
And maybe there are girls out there eager to get into bed with a guy wearing a pink umbrella stand on his back.
Unfortunately, though, what I had on my back was not an umbrella stand but a poor aunt. As time passed, people’s interest in me and in the poor aunt on my back faded away. My companion had been right: nobody was interested in poor aunts. Once the initial mild curiosity had run its course, all that was left was a silence as deep as at the bottom of the sea, as deep as if the poor aunt and I had become a single entity.
3
“I saw you on TV,” said my companion.
We were sitting by the pond again. I hadn’t seen her for three months. It was now early autumn. The time had shot by. We had never gone so long without seeing each other.
“You looked a little tired.”
“I was wiped out.”
“You weren’t yourself.”
I nodded. It was true: I hadn’t been myself.
She kept folding and unfolding a sweatshirt on her knees. Folding and unfolding. As if she were turning time backward or urging it ahead.
“I guess you finally succeeded in getting your own separate poor aunt.”
“I guess.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like a watermelon at the bottom of a well.”
She smiled, caressing the soft but tightly folded sweatshirt on her knees as if it were a cat.
“Do you understand her better now?”
“A little,” I said. “I think. Maybe.”
“And has it helped you to write something?”
“Nope.” I gave my head a little shake. “Not a thing. The urge to write just isn’t there. Maybe I’ll never be able to do it.”
“Quitter.”
“You yourself once told me I couldn’t save anything at all with my writing. If that’s the case, what’s the point of writing about the poor aunt?”
She bit her lower lip and said nothing for a while.
“I’ve got an idea. Ask me some questions. Maybe I can help out a little.”
“As the poor aunt authority?”
“Uh-huh.” She smiled. “So fire away. This mood might never hit me again, when I feel like answering poor aunt questions.”
It took me a while to know where to start.
“I sometimes wonder what kind of a person becomes a poor aunt. Are they born that way? Or does it take special ‘poor aunt’ conditions—like some kind of huge bug that laps up everybody passing by a certain street corner and turns them into poor aunts?”
She nodded several times as if to say that my questions were very good.
“Both,” she said. “They’re the same thing.”
“The same thing?”
“Uh-huh. Well, look. A poor aunt might have a ‘poor aunt’ childhood or youth. Or she might not. It really doesn’t matter. There are millions of reasons floating around the world for millions of results. Millions of reasons to live, and millions of reasons to die. Millions of reasons for giving reasons. Reasons like that are easy to come by—just a phone call to find out how much a bunch. But what you’re looking for is not one of those, is it?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess not.”
“She exists. That’s all. You have to recognize that fact and accept it. Reasons, causes: these just don’t matter. The poor aunt is there. She exists. And that’s what a poor aunt is. Her existence is her reason. Just like us. We exist here and now, without any particular reason or cause.”
We sat by the pond for a long time, neither of us moving or speaking. The clear autumn sunlight cast little shadows on her profile.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I see on your back?”
“What do you see on my back?”
“Nothing at all,” she said with a smile. “I see only you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally—the way that driver beat his old horse until it died on the road. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.
In a poor aunt, however, we can see the tyranny of time before our eyes, as if through an aquarium window. In the cramped glass case, time has been squeezing the poor aunt like an orange, until there’s not a single drop of juice left to spill. What draws me to her is that completeness of hers, that utter perfection within her.
It’s true—there’s not a drop left to spill!
Yes, perfection. It rests its full weight upon the core of the poor aunt’s being, like a corpse sealed inside a glacier—a magnificent glacier made of ice like stainless steel. Only ten thousand years of sunshine could melt such a glacier. But no poor aunt can live for ten thousand years, of course, and so she will have to live with her perfection, die with her perfection, and be buried with her perfection.
Perfection and the aunt beneath the ground.
Ten thousand years go by. Then, perhaps, the glacier melts in darkness and perfection thrusts its way out of the grave to reveal itself on the earth’s surface. Everything on the earth is completely changed by then, but if by any chance the ceremony known as “wedding” still exists, the perfection left behind by the poor aunt might be invited to one, there to eat an entire dinner with impeccable table manners and be called upon to deliver heartfelt words of congratulation.
But never mind. These events would not take place until the year 11,980.
4
It was late in autumn when the poor aunt left my back. Recalling some work I had to complete before the onset of winter, my poor aunt and I boarded a suburban train. Like any suburban train in the afternoon, it was practically empty. This was my first trip out of the city for quite some time, and I enjoyed watching the scenery go by. The air was crisp and clear, the hills almost unnaturally green, and here and there along the tracks stood trees with bright red berries.
Sitting across the aisle from me on the return trip were a skinny woman in her midthirties and her two children. The older child, a girl, sat on her mother’s left wearing a navy serge dress—a kindergarten uniform. On her head she wore a brand-new gray felt hat with a red ribbon—a nice hat with a round, narrow brim. On the mother’s right sat a boy perhaps three years old. Nothing about the mother or her children was particularly noteworthy. Their faces, their clothing were ordinary in the extreme. The mother held a large package. She looked tired—but then, most mothers look tired. I had hardly noticed them board the train, perhaps glanced over at them once when they took their seats across from me, after which I continued to look down at the paperback I was reading.
Not long afterward, however, sounds from the little girl began to reach me across the aisle. There was an edge to her voice, an urgency that suggested pleading.
Then I heard the mother say, “I told you to keep still on the train!” She had a magazine spread open on top of her bundle and seemed reluctant to tear her eyes from it.
“But Mama, look what he’s doing to my hat,” said the little girl.
“Just shut up!”
The girl made as if to speak, but then she swallowed her words. Separated from her by the mother, the little boy held the hat that she had been wearing earlier, and he kept pawing and pulling on it. The girl reached out and tried to grab it, but he twisted himself away, determined to keep it out of her grasp.
“He’s going to ruin my hat,” the girl said, on the verge of tears.
The mother glanced up from her magazine with a look of annoyance and went through the motions of reaching for the hat, but the boy clamped both his hands on the brim and refused to give it up. So much for the mother’s attempt to retrieve it. “Let him play with it a while,” she said to the girl. “He’ll get bored soon enough.” The girl did not look convinced, but she didn’t try to argue. She pursed her lips and glared at the hat in her brother’s hands. The mother went on reading. Encouraged by his mother’s indifference, the boy started yanking at the red ribbon. He was obviously doing it out of sheer nastiness. He knew it would drive his sister crazy—and it had its effect on me as well. I was ready to stomp across the aisle and snatch the thing out of his hands.
The girl stared at her brother in silence, but you could see that she had a plan. Then, all of a sudden, she got to her feet and slapped him hard on the cheek. In the stunned moment that followed, she grabbed the hat and returned to her seat. The little girl did this with such speed and dispatch, it took the interval of one deep breath before the mother and brother could realize what had happened. As the brother let out a wail, the mother slapped the girl’s bare knee. She then turned to stroke the boy’s cheek and tried to comfort him, but he kept on wailing.
“But Mama, he was ruining my hat,” said the little girl.
“Don’t talk to me,” said the mother. “You don’t belong to me anymore.”
The girl bit her lip and looked down, staring at her hat.
“Get away from me,” the mother said. “Go over there.” She pointed at the empty seat next to mine.
The girl looked away, trying to ignore her mother’s outstretched finger, but it continued pointing at my left, as if it had been frozen in midair.
“Go on,” the mother insisted. “You’re not part of this family anymore.”
Resigned to her fate, the girl stood up with her hat and schoolbag, trudged across the aisle, and sat down next to me, head bowed. Hat on her lap, she tried smoothing its brim with her little fingers. It’s his fault, she was clearly thinking; he was going to tear the ribbon off my hat. Her cheeks were streaked with tears.
It was almost evening now. Dull yellow light seemed to filter down from the car lamps like dust from the wings of a doleful moth. It hovered in space to be silently inhaled through the passengers’ mouths and noses. I closed my book. Resting my hands on my knees, I stared at my upturned palms for the longest time. When had I last studied my hands like this? In the smoky light, they seemed grimy, even dirty—not like my hands at all. The sight of them filled me with sadness: these were hands that would never make anyone happy, never save anyone. I wanted to place a comforting hand on the shoulder of the little girl sobbing next to me, to tell her that she had been right, that she had done a great job taking the hat that way. But of course I never touched her, never spoke to her. It would only have confused and frightened her all the more. And besides, those hands of mine were so black and dirty.
By the time I left the train, a cold winter wind was blowing. Soon the sweater season would be over, the time for thick winter coats upon us. I thought about coats for a while, trying to decide whether or not to buy myself a new one. I was down the stairs and out the gate before I became aware that the poor aunt had vanished from my back.
I had no idea when it happened. Just as she had come, she had gone before anyone noticed. She had gone back to wherever it was that she had originally existed, and I was my original self again.
But what was my original self? I couldn’t be sure anymore. I couldn’t help feeling that it was another me, another self that strongly resembled my original self. So now what was I to do? I was all alone, like a blank signpost in the middle of the desert. I had lost all sense of direction. I shoved my hand in my pocket and fed every piece of change I found there into a pay phone. Eight rings. Nine. And then she answered.
“I was sleeping,” she said with a yawn.
“At six o’clock in the evening?”
“I was up all last night working. Just finished two hours ago.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “This may sound strange, but I called just to make sure you’re still alive. That’s all. Really.”
I could feel her smiling into the phone.
“Thanks, that was nice of you,” she said. “Don’t worry, though, I’m still alive. And I’m working my tail off to stay alive. Which is why I’m dead tired. OK? Are you relieved?”
“I’m relieved.”
“You know,” she said, as if she was about to share a secret with me, “life is pretty damn hard.”
“I know,” I said. And she was right. “So how would you like to have dinner with me now?”
“Sorry, I’m not hungry. The only thing I want to do right now is turn my head off and go to sleep.”
“I’m not really hungry, either,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to you. About things.”
In the silence at her end, I could sense her biting her lip and touching her little finger to her eyebrow.
“Not right now,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “We’ll talk later. You have to let me sleep now. Not a lot. Everything will be fine if I can just sleep a little. I’ll call you when I wake up. OK?”
“OK,” I said. “Good night.”
“You, too. Good night.”
She hesitated a moment. “Was it some kind of emergency—what you wanted to talk about?”
“No, no emergency,” I said. “We can talk about it later.” True, we had plenty of time. Ten thousand years, twenty thousand. I could wait.
“Good night,” she said again and hung up. For a while, I looked at the yellow receiver in my hand, then hung it in its cradle. The moment it left my hand, I felt an incredible hunger. I’d go mad if I didn’t get something to eat. Anything. Anything at all. If they’d give me something to put in my mouth, I’d crawl to them on all fours. I might even suck their fingers clean.
Yes, I would, I would suck your fingers clean. And then I’d sleep like a weathered crosstie. The meanest kick wouldn’t wake me. For ten thousand years I’d be sound asleep.
I leaned against the telephone, emptied my mind out, and closed my eyes. Then I heard footsteps, thousands of footsteps. They washed over me like a wave. They kept walking, on and on, tramping in time. Where was the poor aunt now? I wondered. Where had she gone back to? And where had I come back to?
If, ten thousand years from now, a society came into being that was peopled exclusively by poor aunts, would they open the gates of their town for me? In that town would be a government and town hall run by poor aunts who had been elected by poor aunts, a streetcar line for poor aunts driven by poor aunts, novels for poor aunts written by poor aunts.
Or, then again, they might not need any of those things—the government or the streetcars or the novels.
They might prefer instead to live quietly in giant vinegar bottles of their own making. From the air you could see tens—hundreds—of thousands of vinegar bottles lined up, covering the earth as far as the eye could see. And it would be a sight so beautiful it would take your breath away.
Yes, that’s it. And if, by any chance, that world had space to admit a single poem, I would gladly be the one to write it: the first honored poet laureate of the world of poor aunts.
Not bad. Not bad.
And I would sing in praise of the brilliant glow of the sun in the green bottles, sing in praise of the broad sea of grass below, sparkling with the morning dew.
But this is looking far ahead, to the year 11,980, and ten thousand years is too long for me to wait. I have many winters to survive until then.
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN
NAUSEA 1979
Thanks to his rare talent for keeping a diary over an extended period of time without missing a single day, he was able to cite the exact date his vomiting started and the exact date it stopped. It had started on June 4, 1979 (clear), and stopped on July 14, 1979 (cloudy). I knew this young illustrator from the time he did a drawing for a story I published in a certain magazine.
He was a few years younger than I, but we shared an interest in collecting old jazz LPs. Another thing he liked to do was sleep with his friends’ girlfriends and wives. There had been quite a number of them over the years, and often he would fill me in on his exploits. He had even done it a few times while the friend was out buying beer or was taking a shower during one of his visits.
“You do it as fast as you can, with most of your clothes on,” he said. “Ordinary sex can drag on and on, right? So once in a while you take exactly the opposite approach. It gives you a whole new perspective. It’s fun.”
This kind of tour de force was not the only kind of sex that interested him, of course. He could enjoy it the slow, old-fashioned way, too. But it was the act of sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends and wives that really turned him on.
“I have absolutely no interest in tricking my friends—in turning them into cuckolds, that sort of thing. Sleeping with their women makes me feel closer to them. It’s a family thing. And it’s just sex, after all. It’s not hurting anybody as long as it doesn’t come out in the open.”
“That never happened?”
“No, never.” He seemed a little surprised by my question. “As long as you don’t have some kind of subconscious desire to expose what you’re doing, these things don’t come out. True, you have to be careful not to do or say anything that’s going to give the guy ideas. And you have to set very clear ground rules right at the beginning, make sure the woman knows that this is just a friendly game, that you’re not going to get involved or hurt anybody. Of course, you don’t say it quite so directly.”
I found it hard to believe that such things could be carried off so easily, but he didn’t seem the type to spout a lot of nonsense just to make himself look good, so I began to think he might be right.
“And finally, most of the women have been looking for something like this. Their husbands or lovers—which is to say, my friends—are usually way better than me: they’re better looking, say, or smarter, or they’ve got bigger penises. But the women don’t care about things like that. They’re OK as long as their men are reasonably normal and kind and they’ve achieved some level of understanding. What they want is for somebody to be interested in them beyond the—in a sense—static framework of ‘girlfriend’ or ‘wife.’ That’s the most fundamental rule in all this. Of course, on a more superficial level, their motives are all over the map.”
“For example?”
“For example, getting even with a husband for fooling around, or boredom, or the sheer satisfaction of attracting another man. That kind of thing. I just have to look at them to know. It’s not a question of learning a technique. This is strictly an inborn talent. You either have it or you don’t.”
He did not have a steady girlfriend himself.
As I said, we were both record collectors, and we’d get together now and then to trade. We collected jazz from the fifties and early sixties, but our interests were different enough so that we could always find stuff to exchange. I concentrated on some of the lesser known West Coast musicians, and he liked the later recordings of more nearly middlebrow people like Coleman Hawkins or Lionel Hampton. So if he had a Pete Jolly Trio on Victor and I had Vic Dickenson’s Mainstream, we’d be happy to call it an even swap. We’d spend the day drinking beer and checking out performances and examining our disks for flaws and striking deals.
It was after one of our LP-trading sessions that he told me about his vomiting. We were in his apartment, drinking whiskey. Our conversation had moved from music to whiskey to experiences of getting drunk.
“I once vomited every day for forty days. Every single day without a break. Not from drinking, though. And I wasn’t sick, either. I’d just throw up for no reason at all. Forty straight days it went on like that. Forty days. It was really something.”
His first round of nausea and vomiting came on June 4. This particular episode was not a complete surprise because he had slugged down a good deal of whiskey and beer the night before. He had also, as usual, slept with a friend’s wife that night—the night of June 3.
So when he vomited the entire contents of his stomach into his toilet bowl at eight o’clock in the morning on June 4, general common sense could hardly have pronounced this an unnatural occurrence. Neither could it be said of the sheer fact that this was the first time he had vomited from drinking since college. Pressing the flush handle, he sent the unpleasant products of his stomach down the sewer, sat at his desk, and set to work. He did not feel sick at all. If anything, he approached his drawing that day with a special vigor. His work went well, and by noon he had developed a healthy appetite.
He made himself a ham and cucumber sandwich, which he washed down with a can of beer. Half an hour later, the second wave of nausea hit him, and he disgorged the whole sandwich in the toilet. Soppy chunks of bread and ham floated to the surface of the water in the bowl. Still, he did not feel unwell. He had simply vomited. He had felt as if something might be stuck at the back of his throat, and he had knelt down at the toilet more or less out of curiosity when everything in his stomach came gushing out the way a magician pulls pigeons or rabbits or the flags of the world from a hat.
“I had experienced nausea any number of times—in college, when I drank like crazy, or sometimes on buses and things, but this was something completely different. I didn’t even have the usual knotting in the stomach. It was as if my stomach was pushing up the food with no particular feeling at all, and absolutely no resistance. I didn’t feel bad, and there was none of that suffocating smell. So then I started to feel very strange. I mean, it had happened not once but twice. It was beginning to worry me, so I decided to lay off alcohol for a while.”
His third round of vomiting hit him, though, right on schedule the next morning. The eel he had eaten the night before and that morning’s marmalade-smeared English muffin emerged from his stomach all but unscathed.
He was brushing his teeth afterward when the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver to hear a man’s voice speak his name, and the connection was cut, nothing more.
“It must have been the husband or boyfriend of one of the women you slept with, don’t you think?” I asked.
“No way,” he said. “I knew all their voices. This was definitely a voice I had never heard before. And it had a nasty ring to it. I started getting calls like this every day. From June 5 to July 14. This coincided almost exactly with the period of my vomiting, you realize.”
“OK, but I don’t see any way there could be a connection between these prank calls and your vomiting.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “Which is why I’m still kind of upset by the whole thing. Anyhow, every call was the same. The phone would ring, he’d say my name and hang up. Once a day, every day, but I never knew when—morning, evening, the middle of the night. Of course, I could have just not answered the phone, but that’s the way I get jobs, and girls call me sometimes, too.”
“Well, sure…,” I said.
“And right along with the calls the nausea continued without a single day’s break. I think I threw up almost everything I ate. Then I’d get starved and eat again, and then throw up every bit of that. It was a vicious circle. Still, I managed to keep down, say, one meal in three—probably just enough to stay alive. If I had been vomiting three meals out of three, I would have needed intravenous feeding or something.”
“Didn’t you see a doctor?”
“Of course I did. I went to a hospital in my neighborhood, a pretty good-sized one. They took X-rays and tested my urine. Cancer was a real possibility, so they looked me over pretty well. But they couldn’t find a thing wrong with me. I was the picture of health. They ended up prescribing me medicine for ‘chronic stomach fatigue’ or maybe stress. They gave me the old ‘early to bed, early to rise,’ said to cut back on liquor, and not to let little things bother me. But who did they think they were kidding? I know about chronic stomach fatigue: you’d have to be an idiot not to know you have it. You get this heavy feeling in your stomach, and heartburn, and no appetite, and like that. If you do get nauseated, it’s only after you get all those other symptoms. You don’t just start throwing up out of nowhere. Which is what happened to me. I might have been hungry all the time, but otherwise, I felt great, and my mind was perfectly clear.
“And as far as ‘stress’ goes—it’s just not something I have. True, I had quite a backlog of work, but not enough to let it get to me, and girls were no problem at all. Plus, I was going to the pool for a good swim two or three times a week. I was doing everything right, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sounds like it to me,” I said.
“I was just throwing up, that was all,” he said.
It went on like this for two weeks, the vomiting and the phone calls. By the fifteenth day, he decided that he had had more than enough of both and took off from work. He might not be able to stop the vomiting, but at least he wanted to get away from the calls, so he went to a hotel and spent the day watching TV and reading. At first, the change of scene appeared to be working. He managed to digest the roast beef sandwich and asparagus salad he ordered for lunch. At 3:30 he met a friend’s girlfriend in the hotel tearoom, where he sent his stomach a piece of cherry pie and black coffee, which also stayed down. Then he and the woman went to bed. This also worked without a hitch. After he had sent her home, he ate dinner alone at a nearby restaurant: Kyoto-style broiled mackerel with tofu, vinegared vegetables, miso soup, and a bowl of white rice. As usual, he kept away from alcohol. This was 6:30 p.m.
He went back to his room, watched the news, and started reading a new Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel. When nine o’clock rolled around and he still felt no nausea, he breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, after two long weeks, he was able to enjoy the simple pleasure of a full stomach. Things would probably go back to normal now, he felt. He closed his book, switched on the TV again, and after flicking through the channels with the remote, decided to watch an old western. The movie ended at eleven, and the late news came on. When that ended, he turned off the TV. What he wanted more than anything now was a good whiskey, and he came close to going to the bar upstairs for a nightcap, but he was able to stop himself. Why mess up one perfectly clean day? He turned out the reading lamp and snuggled under the covers.
It was the middle of the night when the phone rang. He opened his eyes to find the clock reading 2:15. At first he was too groggy to grasp why a bell might be ringing nearby, but he shook his head and, almost unconsciously, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.
“Hello.”
The now familiar voice pronounced his name again and, a second later, the connection was cut.
“But you didn’t tell anyone you were staying in the hotel, did you?” I asked.
“Of course not—except for the woman I slept with.”
“Maybe she leaked it to someone else.”
“What possible reason could she have for doing that?”
He had a point there.
“After the call, I threw up every last bit of food in my stomach. The fish, the rice—everything. It was as if the phone call had opened a door and made a passageway for the nausea to get inside me.
“When I was done throwing up, I sat on the edge of the tub and tried to put things in order inside my head. My first thought was that the telephone call had been someone’s clever joke or malicious mischief. I didn’t know how they knew I was in the hotel, but setting that aside, I figured it might be a trick that someone was playing on me. The second possibility was that I was imagining the phone call. This seemed ridiculous to me at first, but analyzing the situation more coolly, I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Maybe I had thought I heard the phone ring, and when I picked up the receiver I had thought I heard the voice saying my name, but in fact there had been nothing at all. Theoretically, at least, such a thing was conceivable, don’t you think?”
“Well, I suppose so…”
“I rang the front desk and asked them to see if a call had just come in to my room, but they couldn’t help me. Their system kept track of all outgoing calls, but no record at all of incoming calls. That left me with nothing to go by.
“That night in the hotel was a kind of turning point for me. It’s when I started thinking about these things more seriously—the nausea and the phone calls—and the idea that they might be linked—whether wholly or partially, I didn’t know. But I was beginning to see that I couldn’t go on taking either of them as lightly as I had been doing.
“I spent two nights in the hotel, but even after I went home to my apartment, the vomiting and phone calls went on the same as before. I had friends put me up a few times to see what would happen, but the phone calls always found me—and always when I was alone in their houses. Needless to say, it started to give me the creeps, like I had some invisible thing standing behind me and watching every move I made: it knew exactly when to call me and when to jam its finger down my throat. When you start having thoughts like this, it’s the first sign of schizophrenia, you know.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but there aren’t too many schizophrenics who worry about getting schizophrenia, are there?”
“No, you’re right. And there are no known cases of a link between schizophrenia and vomiting. At least, that’s what the psychiatrists told me at the university hospital. They wouldn’t even look at me. They only want patients with unmistakable symptoms. Every carload of commuters on the Yamanote Line contains anywhere from 2.5 to 3 people with symptoms like mine, they said: they simply don’t have the facilities to treat each and every one of those. I should take my vomiting to an internist and the phone calls to the police.
“But as you may know, there are two kinds of crimes the police won’t bother with: crank calls and stolen bicycles. There are too many cases, and as crimes they’re too petty. Police operations would be paralyzed if they got involved in every one. They wouldn’t listen to me. Crank calls? What does the person say to you? Your name? That’s all? OK, fill out this form and contact us if something worse happens. That’s as far as they were willing to go. OK, I said, but how come the guy knows exactly where I am every time? They wouldn’t take me seriously. And I knew they’d think I was crazy if I insisted too much.
“Obviously, I wasn’t going to get any help from the doctors or the police or anybody else. I would have to take care of it myself. This became clear to me on the twentieth day from the beginning of the ‘nausea phone calls.’ I think of myself as pretty tough, both physically and mentally, but by this point it was beginning to get to me.”
“Everything was OK with that one friend’s girlfriend, though?”
“Pretty much. My friend happened to go to the Philippines for two weeks on business, so the two of us enjoyed each other a lot.”
“Didn’t you get any calls while you were with her?”
“Not one. I could check my diary, but I don’t think it ever happened. The calls only came when I was alone. Same with the vomiting. So then I began to wonder: how come I’m alone so much? In fact, I probably average a little over twenty-three hours a day alone. I live alone, I hardly ever see anybody in connection with my work, I take care of most of my business by phone, my girlfriends belong to other people, I eat out ninety percent of the time, the only sport I ever practice is long, lonely swims, my only hobby is listening to these more or less antique records by myself, and the only way I can ever get my kind of work done is to concentrate on it alone. I do have a few friends, but when you get to this age, everybody’s busy, and it’s impossible to get together all the time. You know what this life is like, I’m sure.”
“Sure, more or less,” I said.
He poured more whiskey over the ice in his glass, stirred it with a finger, and took a sip. “So then I started thinking seriously. What was I going to do from now on? Was I going to go on suffering with crank calls and vomiting?”
“You could have gotten a girlfriend. One of your own.”
“I thought about that, of course. I was twenty-seven at the time, not a bad age to settle down. But I’m not that type of guy. I couldn’t give up so easily. I couldn’t let myself be defeated by something so stupid and meaningless as nausea and phone calls, to change my whole way of life like that. So I decided to fight back. I’d fight until every last ounce of physical and mental strength was squeezed out of me.”
“Wow.”
“Tell me, Mr. Murakami, what would you have done?”
“I wonder,” I said. “I have no idea.” Which was true: I had no idea.
“The calls and the vomiting kept up for a long time after that. I lost a tremendous amount of weight. Wait a minute—here it is: On June 4, I weighed 141 pounds. June 21, 134 pounds. July 10, whoa, 128 pounds. 128 pounds! For my height, that’s almost unthinkable! None of my clothes fit anymore. I had to hold my pants up when I walked.”
“Let me ask one question: why didn’t you just install an answering machine, or something like that?”
“Because I didn’t want to run away, of course. If I had done that, it would have been like admitting defeat to the enemy. This was a war of wills! Either he was going to run out of steam or I was going to kick the bucket. I took the same approach with the vomiting. I decided to think of it as an ideal way to diet. Fortunately, I didn’t have any extreme loss of muscle strength, and I could keep up my work and daily chores. So I started drinking again. I’d have beer for breakfast and drink plenty of whiskey after the sun went down. I threw up whether I drank or not, so what the hell, why not? It felt better to drink, and it all made more sense.
“So then I took some cash out of my savings account and had a suit and two pairs of pants made to fit my new body shape. Looking at myself so thin in the tailor’s mirror, I rather liked what I saw. Come to think of it, throwing up was no big deal. It was a lot less painful than hemorrhoids or tooth decay, and more refined than diarrhea. This was relative, of course. With the problem of nutrition solved and the problem of cancer gone, throwing up was essentially harmless. I mean, in America they go so far as to sell emetics for weight loss.”
“So then,” I said, “the vomiting and phone calls continued through July 14, was that it?”
“Strictly speaking—wait a second—strictly speaking, my last round of vomiting occurred on July 14 at nine thirty in the morning when I brought up my toast, tomato salad, and milk. The last phone call came at ten twenty-five p.m. that night when I was listening to Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea and drinking Seagram’s VO. Handy, isn’t it, keeping a diary like this?”
“It really is,” I agreed. “But you’re saying that, after July 14, both things came to a sudden stop?”
“Just like that,” he said. “It was like Hitchcock’s The Birds. You open the door the next morning and everything’s gone. The nausea, the prank calls: I never had either of them again. I went right back up to 140 pounds, and the new suit and pants are still hanging in my closet. They’re like souvenirs.”
“And the guy on the phone—he just kept saying the same thing, the same way, right up to the end?”
He gave his head a slight shake and looked at me a little vaguely. “Not quite,” he said. “His very last call was different. First, he said my name. That was nothing new. But then he added, ‘Do you know who I am?’ After that, he just waited without saying anything. I kept quiet, too. It must have lasted ten or fifteen seconds, without either of us saying a word. Then he hung up, and the only sound was the dial tone.”
“Really, that’s all he said? ‘Do you know who I am?’”
“That’s it, exactly. He pronounced the words slowly: ‘Do you know who I am?’ I had absolutely no recollection of that voice. At least among the people I had dealt with over the previous five or six years, there was nobody with a voice like that. I suppose it could have been someone from my childhood, or someone I had barely spoken with, but I couldn’t think of anything I might have done to make someone like that hate me, and I’m not in such demand that some other illustrator would have had it in for me. Of course, as I’ve told you, my conscience was not entirely clear where my love life was concerned, I grant you that. I was no innocent babe after twenty-seven years of living. But I knew all the voices of those guys. I would have recognized them in a second.”
“Still,” I said, “you have to admit it’s not exactly normal to specialize in sleeping with your friends’ partners.”
“So, what you’re telling me, Mr. Murakami, is that my own guilt feelings—feelings of which I myself was unaware—could have taken on the form of nausea or made me hear things that were not there?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”
“Hmm,” he said, taking a mouthful of whiskey and looking up at the ceiling.
“And there are other possibilities,” I said. “One of the friends you deceived could have hired a private detective to tail you and make phone calls to you to teach you a lesson or warn you to back off. And the nausea could have been just a temporary condition that happened to coincide with the calls.”
“Hmm,” he said again. “Both of those make sense. I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not. But still, where the detective theory is concerned, I didn’t stop sleeping with the women, but the calls suddenly stopped coming. Why would that be? It doesn’t fit.”
“Maybe the guy got fed up, or he ran out of money to keep hiring the detective. Anyhow, it’s just a theory. I can give you hundreds of those. The problem is which theory you’re willing to accept. And what you learn from it.”
“Learn from it?” he shot back. He pressed the base of his whiskey glass to his forehead for a few seconds. “What do you mean, ‘learn from it’?”
“What to do if it happens again, of course. Next time it might not end in forty days. Things that start for no reason end for no reason. And the opposite can be true.”
“What a nasty thing to say,” he said with a chuckle. Turning serious again, he went on, “But it’s strange. Until you just said that, it never occurred to me. That it might happen again. Do you think it will?”
“How should I know?”
Giving his glass an occasional swirl, he took a few sips of his whiskey. When the glass was empty, he set it on the table and blew his nose into a tissue.
“Maybe next time,” he said, “it might happen to somebody else. To you, for example, Mr. Murakami. You’re probably not all that innocent either, I suspect.”
He and I have gotten together a few times since then to trade our far-from-avant-garde records and enjoy a drink, maybe two or three times a year. I’m not the diary-keeping type, so I can’t say for sure. Fortunately, neither he nor I have been visited by nausea or phone calls so far.
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN