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By Root 678 0

public telephone. I had only one clue left now: the telephone number underneath the map. If I were not careful I might well have an experience like the treatment I had received beyond the curve a while ago. I picked up the receiver and inserted a ten-yen piece. I dialed, and this time the line was free and I could hear the bell ringing. I was flustered. Evidently I had been off my guard, assuming the line would be busy. Maybe I’d best put the receiver back. Even if there was an answer, in my present psychological state I could not possibly go through with it. I began counting the cracks in the booth window, which had begun to deteriorate. If there were an even number I would hold on, if an odd number I would hang up. But before I had finished counting, the ten-yen piece fell through and a voice answered.

It was a woman’s voice, strangely clear, as if she were around the corner. At once a glib lie came mechanically to my lips.

“Excuse me, but I’ve found a purse. There was a piece of paper in it with this number on it. I called, thinking it might by chance be yours …”

The response was more than I expected. Suddenly the woman broke out laughing.

“What? It’s you, isn’t it?” she said guilelessly and smoothly in a low, throaty voice. “What were you saying?”

“Do you know me … who I am …? Someone …”

“Don’t go on with that ridiculous joke.”

“I want you to help me,” I pleaded, concentrating all my thoughts. “I’m in the telephone booth at the foot of the slope that leads to High Town. Please. Come and get me here.”

“You’re terrible … at this hour! Are you tight?”

“Please! I’m sick. Please. Won’t you do something?”

“You’re impossible. Well … wait there where you are. Don’t move. I’ll be right down.”

Replacing the receiver, I squatted down right there where I was in the telephone booth. A rolled-up newspaper lay in the corner; the dried black tip of a turd of human excrement peeped out from underneath. The tip was tapered, and there were ropelike depressions in it. In the depressions some vegetable fibers, like the tufts of a rough painter’s brush, stood out. There was no particular smell, but without thinking I rose. The cracks, like those on the shell of a broken boiled egg, which covered the tapering head end, frightened me. This was excrement that had stood for a long time. The man must have held it back until he had had to go in the telephone booth … it was probably a man … it might have been a woman … but it was probably a man. Some lonely man denied the use even of one of the innumerable toilets in the limitless labyrinth of the city. When I imagined the figure of the man crouching over in the telephone booth, I was stricken with a feeling of dread.

Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean that the man was someone who, like me, had lost a place to go. Perhaps he was a simple vagrant who did not even realize he had lost anything. But there wasn’t much difference between the two. A doctor would be inclined to insist that I had lost my memory, not something beyond the curve. Who would believe such a statement? There was no reason why any normal man would know about a place other than the one he was acquainted with. It was the same with anyone, enclosed like me, in his small, familiar world. Yes, the triangle formed by the place just before the curve, the entrance to the subway, and the coffee shop was a small one. It was too small. But when you expanded the triangle ten times, what then? What would the difference be if you blew the triangle up into a decagon?

Supposing I were to realize that this decagon was not a map to endless infinity. Suppose the savior who would come in response to my urgent call was a messenger from outside the map, who would make me realize that my chart was nothing more than an abbreviated map, full of omissions … then that person would again look beyond the curve which although existing was nonexistent. The telephone cord could also be a noose for hanging oneself.

I slammed the booth door, but just before it closed the force of the spring failed and a crack about one inch wide was left. There