The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [91]
How would it be, since I was so worried, if I went to meet you? Let’s not jump the gun. If I left now, we would miss each other on the road. Even if you had finished reading, it might well be taking you more time than I had calculated to collect your thoughts and decide how best to answer me. Then there was also the business of burying the mask, which I entrusted to you. Even though you left the notebooks as evidence, you may have decided to smash the button and cut the mask into bits in order to do away with every last vestige of this nightmare, and this may have taken more time than I anticipated. Whichever it was, from now on it was only a question of time. Perhaps you were already on the way home. In three more minutes you would be at the door, ringing your usual two short buzzes. Yes, only two more minutes … one more.…
It didn’t work. Let’s begin again from the beginning Five minutes more … four … three … two … one … As I kept repeating these sequences, nine o’clock came round, then ten, and before I knew it it was almost eleven. Like a steel pipe that has split open under strain, my senses vibrated with the commotion in the distant streets, moaning and answering back in timid whispers. What other possibilities could there be, in heaven’s name? Where else could you go besides returning here? But there was no answer. Naturally. There could be no answer. As long as you were careful and did not misread the notes.…
Then suddenly I let out a curse. Hastily wrapping the bandages around my face, I locked up and hurried out. What was I fiddling around for anyway? I should have made up my mind much sooner! Perhaps it was already too late! Late? How could it be too late? I did not know myself what I meant by that, but my premonitions, darker than the inside of a monster’s throat, spewed out ominous vapor.
The premonitions were absolutely correct. It was a little before midnight when I arrived at the apartment. The light in the room was out and there was no sign of anyone. Cursing the self-complacency with which I had gone on mindlessly waiting until it was so late, I mounted the emergency stairs and opened the door, a bitter taste in my mouth. My heart was pounding like a hammer. After making sure there was no sound in the room, I carefully turned on the light and looked around. You were not there. Your corpse was not there either. The room looked exactly as I had left it. The three notebooks lay on the table, and even the sheet of paper I had put there, with instructions for you to open to the first page of the first notebook, lay untouched under the ink bottle I had weighted it down with. Then you had not been in the room after all. The mystery was growing. Although the burden of my responsibility was lighter, the fact remained that it would be even more of a disaster if you had gone off without reading at all than if you had disappeared after having read. I looked in the closet. Neither the button nor the mask showed the slightest sign of having been touched.
But … just a minute. That smell.… Yes! The smell, faintly colored with the odor of mold and dust, was unmistakably yours. Then you had been here. Yet the fact that the note I had left was in the same place as before seemed to indicate that you had ignored the notebooks.… What in the deuce did it mean when you had taken the pains to come this far?
As I carelessly perused the note, I gave a start. The paper was just like what I had used, but the writing was different. It was a letter addressed to me, written in your hand on the back of my own note. You had apparently disappeared after having read the notebooks.