Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [67]
I could not believe that a toll gate lay ahead. I could not and, indeed, there was no need to believe it. My taking this freeway now was itself inexplicable. The hour when I was supposed to go back to the office and see the chief had long since passed. I had quite neglected contacting my client, too. I had no need to be here; there was no necessity of getting any place, I suppose. Pure time … time spent to no purpose. What a luxury. I pressed down on the accelerator. The speedometer steadily mounted … seventy-five. The wind began to affect the steering. I was a point of tenseness. I had the sensation of suddenly awakening on a calendarless day at a place that appeared on no map. You are free to call this sufficiency flight if you wish. When a pirate becomes a pirate and sets sail for unknown seas or when a brigand becomes a brigand and conceals himself in the depths of a city or a forest or an uninhabited desert, both—surely some place, some time—feel like this. Sympathy … no thanks, I’m nobody. It’s as absurd as a man dying of thirst in a desert shedding tears for one who is drowning.
But if this pure time was an awakening, then the sequel to the dream at once blocked the way. The toll gate. A long dream sequence after a short artificial awakening. Immediately I made a U-turn and entered the line of cars going toward the city. But for some reason my state of mind was no longer so euphoric as before. Was it because a red sports car passed me, trailing its faint humming? It was, I think, rather that my awareness of going back, of the futility of going back, which was my only choice, had let the air out of a bouncing rubber ball. Perhaps it had something to do with the sun being at my back. This time, the sky rather than the roadway stretched interminably before me. There were clouds here and there, but even so the blue was stretched taut like a sized piece of cotton cloth. Perhaps it was a trick of perspective, but in the sky before me more clouds were gathering and it was growing dark. The town lay under the dappled sky. The town that I had left behind a half hour before stretched out a great scab-covered arm, waiting for me to come back. I was a pirate who had run his ship aground, a repentant brigand. Could it be that I was merely seeing mirages? No, that was not it. There was no proof that the town I had left was the same as the one I was coming back to. There was a really very slight one-micron discrepancy between the two, and I had been able to realize the difference perhaps because it was so small. Even one micron’s worth made a big difference. Just traveling on the toll road once a week away from town made a four-micron difference a month … forty-eight a year. If you went on for thirty years, it made 1440 microns … precisely one and a half millimeters. Since even Fuji was crumbling away faster, the figure was one you might as well accept without reservation.
The dirty part of the sky expanded and rose, pushing aside the blue. Again there was a slight twinge in my molar. Why should I have to be so apologetic? Was it in order to stress my own rightness vis-à-vis my wife? Or was it in order to explain to my client that I had played no role in her brother’s death? Or else was it in order to demonstrate to the chief that I had no desire to go deeper into the case than was necessary? But it was indeed a part of my work. “No good hunter pursues his quarry too far. Rather he puts himself in his quarry’s place as he looks for the path of flight; by pursuing himself he corners his quarry” (from The Memoirs of a Sleuth). Indeed, that seemed valid enough … yes, I wonder. Was I not, some place in my mind, intentionally competing with the missing husband? Could I be contending with him? That would only