Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [104]
“They’ll be back in two or three days.”
“I have fifty-eight hours to go. A whole two days and ten hours … until the investigation contract expires … it said a week, but with Sunday out, it comes to six days.”
“I’ll go out to work. I’m worrying about expenses.”
The nausea was growing worse. My stomach was as heavy as lead and I was chilled.
“There are apparently some eighty thousand taxi drivers in Tokyo alone. There are about four hundred companies, but if you include the independents, there may be more than a thousand. Even if I want to visit taxi companies every day, at the rate of five per day, you can see how long it would take to cover them all.”
“Do you feel bad?”
“A little, yes.”
“Then you’d better lie down …”
The pain in my head and the nausea had reduced my vision, and all my senses concentrated shamelessly on her small hand that lay on my arm, as if that were the cosmic axis. I leaned forward, desperately fighting down the vomiting that threatened to erupt at any moment. For the first time I passed through the door to her room. I saw the white bed still rumpled from her sleeping … and the depression she had left in the sheet. I could clearly catch her scent despite my stuffy nose. The depression she had left lay away from the center, slightly toward the wall … a vessel for my sleep … the purple membrane between a frog’s spread toes.
“Sorry. Anyway, the map I drew was too simple compared to the actual town.”
“It’s not good to be talking when you’re nauseous. There are still thirty-four hours to go.”
She sat down at the foot of the bed, staring at me intently from some place I could not see. Was she really looking at me? I wondered. Or, like the guest she had had to coffee, was I being made to join the phantoms who played the foil to her monologues with herself?
For whom does it beat … this enormous heart of the city that goes on pulsating, not knowing for whom? I changed my position and looked for her, but she was no place to be seen. If that were the case, where in heaven’s name was I, looked at by that nonexistent her?
“What time is it now?”
“After five.”
Suddenly the floor lamp at the bedside was lit and she was standing in front of me. The quilted pajamas had changed into a soft yellow kimono; the hair net had vanished and long tresses cascaded across her shoulders.
“Five after what?”
“Just about five minutes ago the contract expired.”
“What?” Taken by surprise, I rose up in bed. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t get upset.” She glanced over her shoulder, and taking three or four steps, stopped in the middle of the room. “I go to work from tomorrow on.”
Her faint freckles spilled from her face just before she looked around, leaving a delicate taste on my lips. An unrecognized recollection pressed hard on my chest. How did I know so well that she had been doing something before she had turned on the light? Now her gaze followed the wall beside my bed to the waist-high window immediately beside the mirror stand … the chestnut-colored curtains with a white-dotted crystal pattern.
“What were you looking at?”
“A window.”
“No, no. I mean what were you looking at through the window?”
“Windows … lots of windows. One by one the lights are going off. That’s the only instant you really know somebody’s there.”
“Well then, it must be evening already.”
“Five after.”
“Has it been as long as that?”
“No. I’m going to bed now.”
She shook her head, exposing the nape of her neck, and slowly swung her long hair in great arcs, to the right and to the left. Through the kimono the flesh of her hips and the two supporting columns could be distinctly seen twisting and turning. I quietly slipped my body to the edge of the bed and placed my left foot on the floor. Leaning my whole weight upon it, I left the bed. I took a step forward, and stretching out both hands, I thrust them under her arms and suddenly tickled her hard. Giving a short cry, she wrenched free of me and made as if to escape. But she went neither for the door nor for the window—she