Some thoughts on "after the quake," by Haruki Murakami

I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, after the quake. Like the stories in Dubliners, Spiks, and Drown, the six stories in this book are all interlaced with the same “referential material,” as Shkovsky would say: the earthquake that decimated the city of Kobe, Japan, in January 17, 1995.

Unlike Dubliners and Drown, though, the characters in these stories don’t reappear throughout; while they definitely seem to inhabit the same world, they do not bump into each other, as the characters in a Robert Altman film would (for an Altmanesque—and, while we're at it, highly cinematic—Murakami book, see After Dark, a quiet, beautiful tone poem of a novel). Rather, the stories function like the pieces of a symphony: variations on a theme.

Instead of focusing on characters directly affected by the calamity, Murakami chooses in these tales to tackle those for whom the calamity is a peripheral fact: a woman spends “five straight days . . . in front of the television, starng at crumbled banks and hospitals…;” a painter who left his wife and children years ago suddenly thinks of them when the earthquake hits—for he used to live with them in Kobe; a woman, who has been seething with resentment for her ex-husband (who lives in Kobe) for years, who has prayed for his violent death, wonders with terror and sadness if the earthquake is the universe’s perverse way of making her wish come true; and on and on. We see the tragedy through the eyes of these characters who themselves experience it secondhand, refracted through the lens of a TV screen, a newspaper report, the thought of an estranged loved one whom the tragedy may or may not have affected.

The book announces its thematic concerns at the very epigraph, with a quote from the Godard film, Pierrot Le Fou. A woman bemoans about a news report on the radio: “They say 115 guerrillas [died], yet it doesn’t mean anything, because we don’t know anything about these men, who they are whether they love a woman, or have children, if they prefer the cinema to the theater. We know nothing. They just say … 115 dead.”

So we are not dealing here with the 6,434 lives that the earthquake took; we are dealing with the one-hundred million Japanese people who did not get affected--or, rather, we are dealing with the very notion of "getting affected." When a stone is thrown in the water, there is a ripple effect: we are looking at the outer ripples, those whose wavelengths are hardly discernible in the water surface.

We are not dealing with the family whose son died. We are dealing with the man reading an article about mounting death rates. The son is not mentioned in the article—“they just say… 115 dead.” 

In other words, we are referring to most people. Those who sift through images of violence and death every day, who can choose to be obsessed with images of death, or can choose to shrug them off, but who otherwise must process them in their own way. And are unavoidably affected by them. We experience the tragedy tangientally, peripherally: it stops us on our tracks for a few seconds, and then life goes on. Murakami examines the strangeness of this fact. Just what this means--this is the territory that Murakami's stories explore, with empathy and descriptive preciseness that is nonetheless always suggestive, always implicative of many meanings, and thus of the complexity of human behavior. 

With this in mind, we can understand why the short story collection was a better choice to tackle this subject than the novel. A novel would have undoubtedly given too much attention to the earthquake, too many paragraphs. It would have too obviously pointed at how this earthquake unites these characters. But in a short story collection, the earthquake appears as a chord, or a note, or a tangent, in each story. To continue the musical metaphor, the earthquake is a chord that strikes every now and then, coloring each tale; the reader takes note of the pattern this creates in the book as a whole, the repetition and variation of the earthquake-chord—as pure image, as symbol, as theme. With each tale, the chord had a different phrasing, with 7^th-Majors and Minors, with diminished tones, etc. It strikes. It leaves. The song continues.

The earthquake is not the only repeating theme. Indeed, part of the reader’s pleasure derives from spotting these common themes and symbols and images as they sprout out. Sometimes these are concrete images: a stone, a little box. The image may appear as metaphor in one story and as actual thing in another. More frequently, the theme will be emotional: an estranged loved one in Kobe, fatherhood, the media. By repeating such themes and images, I cannot help but think that Murakami meant for us to juxtapose them, to consider them both separately and comparatively. Thus on the one hand, they function as nexuses that bind the stories tightly together; on the other, the juxtaposition of them creates a certain imaginative sparkle, as the rubbing of rocks creates fire. One’s understanding of a symbol in one story will enrich  one’s understanding of the same symbol used in another story.

One should, then, feel uneasy when one calls the book merely a collection of short stories. For the book subtly carries the wholeness of a novel; in nudging us to juxtapose the stories, Murakami is already daring us to experience the book as a whole rather than just as the sum of its parts. Isn’t that novelistic?

All these literary machinations serve what is ultimately a very moving book. Murakami has a way of creating vivid and endearing characters, even in the most bizarre of circumstances. As in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, one encounters the bizarre, the comic, and the tragic all in one same moment. (This is especially the case in “super-frog saves tokyo,” a story whose denouement, I will admit, caused quite the tearful knot to form in my throat).  In other words, this book does what all great fiction does: it indulges our imagination and our empathy muscles. Or rather, it exercises the latter through the former, the former through the latter. 

I am purposefully remaining vague re: storylines and such because, of course, I want you to read this book, go on the adventure for yourself. I feel like have done enough harm spoiler-wise with what I’ve already said. If you have already read the book, I welcome your comments on it; if you’re going to spoil stuff, please warn the reader. 

Dream #1: Half-Dusk (in the tradition of Soseki's "Ten Nights of Dreams")

Dear friend,

I live in a dark cabin. Centipedes, ants, and other critters lurk behind doorways.  I can hear them clickety-clacking around me. Sand surrounds my cabin. The foam of ocean waves hits the shore not too far away. And all around, half-darkness coats everything.

By the cabin stands a lighthouse. It does good job of rotating, but I have never seen a sailor moor his boat here. I have come to think the lighthouse is useless.

Only one window in my cabin frames the post-dusk sky. Every now and then the black silhouette of a seagull will form a check-marked blot on the landscape.

I used to think the blue post-dusk sky would comfort me. But when I arrived, something in the air stopped. The engines of the cosmos ceased running. The sky’s heavy slog towards the night froze. And now, Time’s pendulum hangs still. The sky is the color that comes just before the sunrise, dark enough to mistake the shadow of the tree for a monster, but not dark enough to make the island seem like an empty hole of nothing. It is a blue half-darkness. Everything is stuck here, except the animals and the lighthouse. And me? I write.

Every twelve seconds a light flashes up my house, drowning the cabin in a white flare. It wakes me up from dreams. Sometimes I think it is the white flame of an explosion. Let me explain.

In the dream we are in a green park, and I can see the sunlight. You are looking at the sun. You notice something suspicious about it. Isn’t it too white today? you say. I am lying on the grass, and though I think I am just reclining, when you turn to look at me, you see my feet are buried underground, as if the grass has swallowed me. I look down and see green tendrils crawling up my torso. How long have I been half-buried like this? I ask myself. Why did I not notice? Why did you not notice, friend? My face is tense. I begin to shout. It is not your fault that I am being eaten.

Your mouth opens as if to say something, but then the sun explodes, and a wave of white fire reaches out to hug us. And your instinct is to reach down to my arms, grab my hands, pull me. Before the white fire consumes us, your hands grip mine.

I wake up to see the light of the lighthouse lighting me up. The light spends many seconds away from my house—twelve of darkness for every burst of light. But that one feels like an explosion every time, especially when I am sleeping.

Can you hear that explosion of light in my voice? Is my voice shaking with the nervousness of the bugs in my room? Is it foaming with the waves? Most of all, friend, can you recognize this voice through my writing, so long enveloped in my island’s darkness? Do I show up in your dreams, trying to save you, trying to love you?

I have yet to give this place a name. Does it deserve one, friend? What do you think it should be called? I would love to sit with you and discuss this, if you still think we can still do that sort of thing. I know I ran away. Did my disappearance ease your anguish? Did my ghost linger? Yours did in me.

When I walk along the beach, I will feel a soft breath behind my back. Something is about to tell me a secret, I think. I look back and the wind blows its voice at me. Its voice does not have a language. It is palpable, it has identity, but I cannot talk to it like we used to talk in half-nights as half-dark as mine.

Can you still hear me? Are you still there? Have you run away yet?

I was talking about the wind. The wind does not have a voice but it carries the voices of other things. I can hear, for example, whale songs from my house sometimes. They offer a dim kind of company, only the knowledge that living things too populate the seas. I cannot give myself the illusion that they sing for me.

The whales ultimately offer me as much company as the stars. They lead parallel lives, the stars and the whales. Whales and stars both offer spectacles, effortlessly. But the whales and the stars will never meet. So many sublime things that will never ever meet. The whales will never sing with the stars and the stars will always explode alone.

But you and I, friend, we met, and you can only meet once. We met once and your face is a ghost to me now, as surely as my voice must be a ghost to you. I am hoping that when you hear this, you will see my face. Maybe then I’ll be able to see yours. Even in dreams your face is covered in shadows.

We met, friend. We met and our bodies were once as immediate to each other as the foot is to the ground. Friend, if you don’t remember anything, tell me at least that you remember the aftertaste of that immediacy, that it lingers, that it haunts you, that it comforts you.

I know now that I live in the dark. But were I to spend too much time in a place of light, without any kind of reminder of the dark, I would come to forget what darkness felt like, its hollow black glow. Do you know what surrounded us, friend? Do you know what songs we sang? Do you know what children played in the parks where we used to stroll? Do you remember anything about where we lived beside its name? Can you infuse that name with a history, with buildings, with dates and rain and clouds and games?

I can’t. I do not even remember the name. 

I do not know your shape. I do not know your gender. I do not know if I kissed you or hugged you. I do not remember anything. I only know with surefooted certainty that we were once friends. I know you are not a fiction. You are not a fiction.

Maybe it’s the post-dusk. Or maybe it’s the disembodied voices: is the skittering really of bugs? Or are they just pellets falling from the roof? Are the waves really foamy, or is it just a crunching inside my brain? Do whales really sing or is it just the wind howling? Are the shadows of trees outside my house really monsters? 

Crying at the Supermercado

In the year 1994, Rolandito Salas Jusino was born. I was four that year. He was four when he disappeared.

In other words he was by himself in the community park and he was four and he had mousy ears and he was four and he was light-skinned and he was four and he smiled through many milk carton photographs and he smiled frozenly, smiled frozenly four, in many news reports and in many news hours and news half hours and news quarterly reports and commentary sessions and black and white El Nuevo Día Puerto Rico’s Finest Newspaper shots and in many Front Page color shots—smiling frozenly four: a smile that’s fit to print, frozen into the year 1999, his eyes emanating from some center, his eyes in print and in monitor seeing the eyes seeing him on the milk cartons and the reports and the television screens and the FBI Missing Persons page.

He was called Rolandito like I was called by my parents and my grandparents. But this is about Rolandito not about me, this is about a four year old, actually no it’s about something else, it’s not about 1999 when he was 4 and I was 8, it’s about 2000 when I was a little older, a little young but still a little older, and Rolandito was still four even though he might have been older too, because he was frozen.

I was nine maybe and I was in a classroom with drawings of test tubes on the walls and it was always hot in there we were talking, I think maybe we had gone off-topic and the off-topic topic was done with and we were just talking about something off the off-topic, and I don’t know how it was brought up, conversation-wise, but I know that it all started with a raised hand, the raised hand of a boy, a boy named Christian, or that’s how it starts for me in my memory anyway, with the teacher looking at a seat behind me, me turning my head to see the raised hand of Christian, the athletic boy who never let me play volleyball, who always had an it-wasn’t-me face.

He said, “Missi,” as in Missus, pronounced Mee-See—he said “Missi,” as in Teacher, as in Maybe You Have The Answer Because I Didn’t Ask My Mom Because I Don’t Ask My Mom Things Like This—he said with his hand up, “Missi,” and Missi said, “Yes?” “Missi, I was in the supermercado the other day, I was with my mom, and we were at the cashier’s box, paying, I mean I wasn’t paying but my mom was,” and the lighting was fluorescent and pale and people always look gray then, “and two aisles ahead, I saw Rolandito’s mom.”

Rolandito’s mom, unlike Rolandito, was not frozen, and the year 1999 ended and 2000 began and time continued for her and the only way Rolandito grew for her was through those digitized age progression pictures. Or that frozen one.

“I saw Rolandito’s mom,” Christian said, “and I didn’t get it, Missi.” And then Missi said, “What didn’t you get, Christian?” And Christian said, “Well, it’s just,” and he even rolled his eyes a little bit, because he knew it was very obvious, “it’s just that she wasn’t crying.”

And so Missi, middle-aged and attractive, Missi who had her own daughters and her volleyball body and her volleyball career and her volleyball hotness and who taught science and who had a great ass even though I didn’t know about great asses then or if I did I wasn’t aware on the “Look She Has A Great Ass” level—Missi with the great ass said, “Well, Christian, life goes on.”

Now we were all confused: how can life go on? She expanded: “We can’t always be crying in the supermercados and the supermalls and the supermax and the wal mart,” she said or something like that, “we need to do what we need to do. Believe me, Rolandito’s mom had had a lot of time to cry. And maybe she still does, but not in the supermercados. It’s okay not to cry at the supermercados.” But Christian still didn’t understand, I could tell. 

I didn’t understand it either. 

Sketch: Claudia and Lewis

They’re walking down a downtown street when a classmate spots her. “Hi Evelyn,” Claudia says to her classmate. They talk for a minute as if he doesn’t exist. Meanwhile Lewis thinks of how he will introduce himself. An old man like him and a beautiful young woman like her walking down the street? He needs to come up with a way to introduce himself. He could say, I’m her uncle, but then that would be lying, and maybe she’s not one of those improvisational yes, and people, maybe he should say something that is in the realm of truth without giving away its subtle undertones, without suggesting the existence of subtlety. So he can say neighbor, as in, the person who lives next door, which is what he is. Neighbor implies, we were walking and we bumped into each other. He could say that. He will say that. And so he says, “I’m her,” but Claudia takes his words away from him.

“This is Lewis,” she says.

This is Lewis. People always know what that means. No modifiers, just the man and his name. She’s wearing the prettiest red dress a woman has ever worn and he’s wearing the best thing he could find in his dusty closet. They can see it, he thinks, she’s going out with some old man.

A quick shake of hands, old mannered Lewis with downcast eyes nodding nervously Hello, followed by a quick chat before the classmate leaves.

Old man Lewis in raspy voice intones, “Oh, shit.”

“What do you mean?” Claudia asks.

“They’ll know now." 

"Well, isn't that the point? What's two people walking down the street?"

"Hell if I know."

"Exactly. I don't, either. And they know even less."

He lets his head sit on that one.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, you know,” she says. “Besides, all my friends are always raving about Humphrey Bogart, about Cary Grant, about Frank Sinatra.”

“But Humphrey’s distinguished,” Old Man Lewis says, stretching out his hands, in a I mean, look at me kind of way. “I’m falling apart.”

“Over my dead body,” she says, unaware of the line’s implications. Or maybe she is.

This is how they met: she ran every day from seven to eight am, and his house was on her route. He picked up the newspaper at 8. And it was like clockwork: he opened the door, and there she was, at the far end of the street, heading towards his house. By the time he was picking up the paper from the mailbox, she was right in front of him, running by, her moist shirt describing the shape of her thin body, the circumference of her breasts, the lines of her clavicles. And she always gave him a hello, muttered between huffs, just a simple gesture for her, probably; but to him her hellos felt like little golden fronds that she gave him every day. He carried those hellos to bed sometimes, let them flit about in his imagination. And as hello mounted on hello mounted on hello, he decided one day to bring out with his old body not only his two hands to pick up the paper, but in one of the hands a thermos with water in it, cold water with ice to offer to the runner. He was out by seven-fifty that day, the paper tucked in his left armpit, wearing a long-sleeve button-down too nice-looking for that morning, but not nice-looking enough for the runner, he thought. When her figure emerged from the end of the street, he cleared his throat and stood like another mailbox beside the mailbox, looking at her, waving with his right hand. He heard that morning’s paper thump on the ground beside him. He was assaulted by an impulse to pick it up. So he began to bend down. But then he would miss her response to his wave. So he returned to his position and looked at the runner, who was waving back. And he waved back at her wave. He didn’t know her name yet. But he didn’t ask it first. He just held out the thermos like that, communicating in semaphore before saying, “I thought you migh be thirsty.”

She must have realized the effort that he put into it, the whole performance. The clothes, the waking up, the thermos and the water, the unplanned falling of the paper. She must have understood that he was not only saying thank you for the many golden fronds she had given him, but that he wanted to take the next step in the relationship: he wanted to give her golden flowers in turn.

So she stopped and put her hands on her knees, head bent down panting.

“That is so sweet, thank you,” she said, huffing between “thank” and “you.” She stood upright again and he handed her the bottle and she drank from it lustily. He could see her neck bulging, could hear her gulps. Thousands of clear beads rested on her face. Some of them trickled down. Her eyes were closed, and for a moment it seemed like she had the peaceful expression of a sleeping baby being caressed by a mother’s hand.

She gulped one last time and took the bottle away from her mouth and breathed out, the relief coming out of her like fuel exhaust. “That's some good, cold water! Thanks, sir.”

“Call me Lewis,” he said, stretching out his other hand. She shook it.

“Claudia,” she said. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

ANNE OF FIRESTAR BAY (revision of "At Night, The Children")

At night, Anne waits for the firestars. She sits on her porch, the only lit part of the house, an aluminum bucket full of water and a broom at the ready; she spends hours looking up at the dark dome of night.

She has memorized the names and shapes of all the constellations and can tell planets from stars. The firestars are orange falling stars. She looks out for them, her eyes open through 3 a. m. exhaustion as her parents sleep in their queen-sized beds.

At 4 a. m. the first firestar appears: small and flickering flakes, distant like all the other stars and falling at the pace of an airplane in flight. As time passes, the firestar’s shape becomes more distinguishable: she sees what comprises the heart of the firestar, the black and burning core which emanates fire and has that orange tail. And as it gets even closer to the ground—and this is how she knows if the firestar is going to land anywhere near her house—the crackling sound of fire, like that of wrinkling paper, accompanies the sight of the firestar.

And then, with a soft tap, the firestar lands on the front yard, poofing out a ring of fire small enough for a bucket of water to soak out. If it had landed on the roof, she would have had to climb the ladder, which had been fastened to the wall specifically for this—as have been all ladders in all the houses of Firestar Bay.

As the child of her parents, Anne ensures that the fire is put out before it spreads and consumes the house. She picks up the bucket and the broom, rushes over to the front yard, and pours the water over the burning fire, drowning its last few flames, leaving behind a wrinkled-up, ashen, and paper-textured star, its five triangular legs curled up, like the head and arms and legs of a baby in the fetal position. When the firestar has been put out, it is no longer black, but fossil-grey.

She puts the bucket on its side on the ground and, using the broom, sweeps the star into the bucket. She walks back to the house and then puts the star on the porch. The more firestars fall, the more she piles them up on the porch, as the night wears on and eventually makes way for morning. Tonight, she collects fifteen.

When the first rays of the sun appear and the dark blue begins to brighten—that is when she can clean her hands and go back to sleep, not seeing the bucket or the night for another twelve or so hours.

For her parents, the day begins when the sun comes up. They wake up with wide smiles and slip on their morning sandals. They rush down the stairs, almost stumbling over each other, slam the porch door open and see the heap of firestars.

“Look how beautiful they look,” they say to each other.

They then run to their daughter’s bedroom to wake her up.

Mother says: “You are so good at star-gazing!”

Father says: “We wish we could still be children, putting out the fires!”

Mother says: “I miss the smell of the night, the smell of the smoke…”

Father says: “…the contemplation that the solitude allowed!”

Mother says: “If only I could only stay up late without worry of performing badly in my job the next day, I would surely stay up with you and gaze at the sky!”

Both say: “Oh, isn’t it wonderful to watch a rain of firestars? We sure are proud of you, dear, for keeping us safe!”

Anne mumbles along, a yes or a no under a sleepy, croaking voice. The parents nod and nod and nod and go back outside to look at the heap of dried-up firestars on their front porch with doting eyes, holding each other’s hands and remembering their beautiful childhoods and their shared past before quickly blowing at the dried-up stars with their mouths and seeing them disintegrate into the white morning air, so dispersed that they form into nothing, nothing at all, the porch now looking as clean as it will until the next morning. Then they go back inside and have coffee and breakfast together, sipping and chatting in whispers so as not to wake up the girl.

Then they go to work in their cars, which vroom away and leave wakes of black smoke.

Two hours later, the girl wakes up and, with eyes surrounded by black rings, slings a backpack and walks to school, where she will slouch through a day of assignments and lectures.

Firestar season lasts August to May. During the summer vacation, no firestars fall, and Anne is free to play at night and run around with her friends. But what most children do, and what she definitely does, at least for the first few weeks of summer, is sleep, because summer is the only time that she can dream.

***

At the cafeteria, Anne and the boys eat sandwiches at the table.

“I hate the firestars,” a boy says. All nod along, except Anne. They do not ask her why she doesn’t nod along. But this time, she feels the need to say something.

“But it will end soon,” she says.

All the boys turn their heads, a little befuddled. Perhaps the vagueness of the comment has given it a cosmic dimension that confuses them. She clarifies it.

“Whether we like it or not, it’s going to end soon. And then we’ll be adults who can’t be awake through the night, and we’ll miss it,” she says.

“That’s what my parents always say,” another boy says. “But I’m not going to miss anything made of fire or night.”

The other boys agree and applaud him. All of them, even the girl, have black rings under their eyes.

The girl crosses her arms. “You’ll see it,” she mutters to herself. “It’ll end soon, and you’ll only know that it’s over when you grow up.”

But that night, sitting alone on the porch of her house, after having received forehead-kisses from both her parents, looking at the boy sitting on the porch of the house across the street, looking at all the children sitting on the porches in all the houses she can see from left to right, she thinks that she does not actually like the firestars, but only that she is supposed to like them, and that she is only supposed to like them when they stop. That is, she does not really need to like the firestars right now, she only needs to miss them when she doesn’t see them alive anymore. But all this supposing makes her sick, so instead she lets her thoughts turn to the black night sky, hoping that she won’t fall asleep, because she supposes that it is better for the children to catch the firestars than it is for them to fall asleep and let all the houses go up in flames.

Because if the houses go up in flames, then her parents will die, and if their parents die, then her own children will not have any grandparents.

But if her parents die, she won’t have to hear all this about tradition and the firestars. She won’t have to look out for the firestars at all. Somebody else could do it.

But somebody would always have to do it.

And she never told this to the children. This line of thought she kept to herself. Because she felt that she knew something that was hers in an exclusive way—that was only hers. It was the kind of knowledge, she thought, that would allow her to see the world unfold with more relaxed eyes. She could have rings under her eyes, yes, but she didn’t need to feel all that hate. She could simply look out for the orange dots and have a happiness that nobody else had.

HIS SEVEN DEAD DAYS

I left the funeral home alone. I knew it wasn’t a good idea.

            As I drove and the night fell and got deeper and blacker, I played no songs in my car. My only company: the comfortable hum of the air conditioner and the occasional roar of a car passing by. The city lights went by. Buildings went by. Everything went by. And the lights cast their orange glow on everything, and people walking down sidewalks looked neon-orange. Junkies. High-school girls. Prostitutes. Everybody lives in the same city.

            I resisted many impulses. But I gave in to two.

            I threw my cell phone out the window.

And I went to a bar on the seashore. It had that red on blue OPEN sign. Inside, dusty speakers played a song I knew since childhood. “Todo Tiene Su Final,” Hector LaVoe. Behind the counter, Hector LaVoe stared at me through a portrait drawn more than forty years ago. Twelve years after Lo Mato, LaVoe, his mind full of suffering and his head full of heroin, jumped off a ninth floor hotel balcony. The hotel was in Condado, and Condado’s not that far from here.

He survived the fall with a limp. AIDS took him in 1993. Todo tiene su final.

The song was ending when I came in. Outside, sea waves lapped against the bar’s walls.

            One hour later I was sitting on the sand, looking at the night, thinking about the man in the casket, whom I’d earlier helped to bury. I’d known him for a long time. I let thoughts wander. On the beach at night, facing the black night like that, I felt more acquainted with it, like I was sitting across the table from it.

            Then a man emerged from the darkness. For a minute, he looked like a ghost from a pulp story. On the beach, at night, even a crab can look like a ghost. I thought it might be my friend, but the clothes on him were too shabby for that. Even as a ghost, my friend would always wear the best clothes, I knew.

At first I thought he was going to ask me for money. I flicked my hand at him, like he was a fly hovering over my face. When he did not move, I turned to look at him. The light of the moon let me see the colors on his face.

            Two yellow bags hung under his eyes. Bags, I imagined, from long sleepless nights. Below them wrinkles paved labyrinthine paths of old age. His sunken grey eyes gave me a tired stare. His beard had the pale yellow color of urine.

            And his neck.

            It was slashed—it looked like a smile had been tattooed there, a bulging, fresh and pink smile-like scar. So pink it was, it looked like a lip that ran across his neck.

            He began speaking.

“The night reminds you of death,” he said. “That’s the only reason you could be staring at it like that now.”

The deep bass of his voice hit the pit of my stomach. Then, smiling and like a father who mischievously says so you believe in Santa Claus, he said, “You’re thinking that death is a curse.” Then he chuckled, tracing that line across his neck with his index finger. “See this?” He gave me time to give it a good look, which I could not help but do even though all better judgment told me to avert my gaze and leave right away.

“I did it to myself,” he said. “Done it to myself over and over.”

            He sat down beside me. And perhaps it had something to do with my drunkenness, my grief, or my nausea—but I did not move.

            “When I did this here, I—” he said and stopped, pausing to find the right phrase: “I embraced the mystery, if you will. Or I didn’t mind the idea of embracing it. Must’ve been twenty or so, in my prime. Used a knife. Buried myself in a sewer when I did it, too. Right under a busy city street. The joke would have been that the smell would take over the street, and people walking down the street would think: where the hell is that smell of dead coming from? Of course, they would eventually find me, rotting underground, in the street’s intestines. But the point was for those questions to pop up. For them to think, maybe for just a second, that the smell of dead had taken over the city, inexplicably. Would’ve fit with the time, too. Lots of dying going on then, both overseas and at home.

            “So I did it. I crawled into the sewer and slit my own throat. I felt myself dying and I died. I know this like I know nothing else.”

            That’s a big claim, I thought. I didn’t know where I was then, but the man had a friendliness about him that I couldn’t avoid noticing. It’s like he was talking about his summer in college.

            “Many days went by before people found out,” he continued. “I was dead down there, being nothing for a whole week. I can imagine little kids, grandmothers, mothers, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs as they walked by. Businessmen cupping their mouths as they entered the bank. Anti-war protesters holding up signs with one hand, covering their mouth with the other. Even homeless men didn’t sleep near there. Least, that’s what I heard. Here was I, doing damage to the living while being dead. Of course, you see me here now, so you know I didn’t stay dead.

            “I woke up. My corpse was found amidst rats and filth, and when it was loaded onto the ambulance—boom. My dust-covered eyes opened to garish ambulence lights. Just like that. Paramedics changed the direction of their course because the corpse had begun wheezing in their ambulance. ‘Don’t go to the morgue,’ I heard one say. ‘Get me to the emergency room.’ I stayed at the hospital ten days.

            “I had been dead for seven days, but it only took me three days to recover. By my third afternoon in the hospital, I didn’t even need the crutches. I remember the look on my nurse’s face. A nice, wholesome lady. Spoke to me of God and Jesus and redemption through the three days, gripping that metal Jesus that hung from her necklace. I let her talk. Didn’t say much in return, except, ‘more juice, please;’ ‘less meat, ma’am;’ ‘thanks for the story, ma’am.’ On account of the sickness, she imagined. Drowsiness, post-traumatic something or other—grief. So she went on and on, neglecting her other duties because she thought I was some kind of prophet. And I nodded here and there, to keep her satisfied. And even when I both pretended to be asleep and when I was asleep, she spoke and prayed on. She liked to talk about Paul. ‘Paul fell off a horse,’ she said, ‘but you fell off death.’ Only one thing there was that she wanted to hear from me—one thing that she didn’t want to preach me about. She asked me, ‘what did you see?’”

            He stopped, looked at me, and repeated, making an arc-gesture with his hands, like a circus man introducing the next big act, “What did I see, do you think?”

            I imagined it was a rhetorical question, because he kept going.

            “When she asked me that, I saw her eyes and ears open, like clouds that part to reveal the sun. Only it wasn’t a sun I saw in her eyes, but more like an eclipse. See, as miraculous as my situation was, she’d been reading off a script in her mind. Imitating homilies that she’d heard time and time again from her preacher, I supposed. But when it came to actually knowing what came afterwards—then she fell silent and her jaw dropped. ‘What did you see?’

            “I said I couldn’t say. And I couldn’t. Throughout my hospital stay, I had been too busy looking at the gash in my throat to think on the blackness. But it was there. I knew it then.”

I didn’t believe it yet at this point, but I still wondered about the idea. Earlier today, I had been crying over the death of my friend. I had been complaining against death. Here was a man who could not have it.

            “She attributed it to the mystery or to the Holy Spirit. And she told me to pray for the vision. That if I prayed hard enough, I’d be able to see the place I’d visited during my seven dead days. Gave me a rosary on my last day, to send me off. Kissed my hand, said, ‘Go with God.’

            “And when I left the hospital, I knew just what I wanted to do. I wanted to visit that place again, but not by praying.

            “I went back home, watched television, ate dinner, and tried to feel life around me like it was all new. I went back to the city street that I had stunk up for a week. Nobody looked up at the building, nobody looked down at the sewer. Everybody walked ahead. The sky was grey and the concrete was, too, and I didn’t know how it could be any other way. Like the smell of your mother’s perfume brings you back to your mother, years across time—so did the street bring back the pain in my throat. It hurt. But the memory of absence from this world—that is, the memory of not remembering anything, of not possessing a soul that whole time—it delighted me. So if there was a God in that street, He wasn’t telling me to be the world’s second Paul, to live and spread His word. He was telling me to die again, to taste it again. Now what kind of God would do that? Tempt you to do something that’ll never come through?”

            It could just as well have been the devil, I thought and did not say.

But maybe he saw the thought on my face, because he paused and sighed, as if he was remembering an affair with a long-lost woman. The kind of thing where one bad decision led to a morass of conflict. Had it not been for that one thing, I saw him thinking. That one thing.

            Something in the beach had fallen still. At night, the sand looks like a grey sheet and the ocean, save for the wave froth, like an extension of the night’s darkness.

            “That day, I went to a kitchen store and got myself another carving knife. Then I did it again, this time on the balcony of my fourth-floor apartment. The last thing I saw before welcoming back the darkness was the city skyline, simmering with the white light of the sun. Some kids in the street played a LaVoe song. Mind you, this was Hector in his prime: 1969. A cheerful song that faded away as the blackness returned.

            “This time, I woke up in the morgue. Imagine the scare I gave those folks, holding their autopsy blades and scalpels. They knew about me, they knew I’d been the man who died twice. What kind of organs does a man like that have? What kind of cells?

            “Of course, I was shuffled away to the hospital in a hurry. But this time I didn’t even need the three days. By the afternoon of the second day, I was walking down the hospital aisle, passing by all the rooms, waving my hand at all the nurses. And of course, the Jesus lady came to my room again. She was disappointed. Told me that at first she thought I had a gift, but that now maybe it was something else. Something pagan. When I was about to leave my room, she rushed over to me and squeezed my arm and asked me, what had I seen this time? And then, without letting me say anything, she tacked on another question to that one: was it the devil I saw? Is that why I didn’t want to mention it? Was I protecting her and everyone else from something horrible? I saw that eclipse in her eyes again.

            “I can’t say what I saw,’ I said. ‘It can’t fit all the books in the world.’ Her mouth remained half-open, her eyes innocent with understanding. She let go of my arm. My answer hadn’t comforted her. It plunged her into a foggy, gray place. I knew—I felt it then—she would never return from it.

            “That time, I didn’t even go home. I got another knife and got in my car and drove away. I went to a forest, the deepest part, where I knew I wouldn’t be discovered. I stopped the car in the forest and then I walked a long way into a clearing. No human sound entered there. Only anonymous chirps, tree-creaks. Leaves on the ground. I lay myself down there and I did it again. The knife hurt a little more.

            “I woke up alone on a bed of dead leaves, a halo of festive flies hovering over my neck. I was face-up and the sun was staring me down. I put my hand on my neck, felt the dry blood, the fresh scar. I couldn’t bend my neck. I couldn’t swallow. I thought maybe I’d become numb to the pain if I did myself in enough times. Maybe I could try doing myself in different places: the wrists, the arms... All of those I did, in my many years in the forest, thinking I’d find the perfect place in my body where I could grow numb. All my efforts gave me were seven-day deaths and scars.

            “I thought about somehow crushing my head, incinerating my body. But I realized I would wake up anyway, in whatever form that death would leave me in. Even if I did crush my head, I would wake up and would have to make do with it. Can you imagine me, walking around with a broken head? Or waking up as the scattered ashes of an incinerated body, drifting across the world?”

            “I understood then. I had my habit, and I had my methods of going through with that habit, and I would have both forever. It’s more than what anybody in this world has. It’s mine.

            “All I wish is that I could grow numb.”

            He looked at his hands, and my eyes looked at them too.

            All kinds of tracks paved his skin—red tracks mingled and intersected the tracks of his wrinkles. It was everywhere.

            “I feel it all,” he said.

            I thought then: Did you ever cry? But I couldn’t muster the courage to ask . Somehow I thought that doing that would break whatever spell had been cast, whatever clockwork the world had worked so that this man could tell me his story. So I simply said to myself that maybe that was the way the world forgave him. Gave him bare physical pain without tears.

            “I don’t know what I was born with,” he said. “I don’t know what condition it is. But, my friend, I cannot die. I don’t know how many days have passed since that first time, in that busy city street, but you see the age in my face. And sure as you can see that, you can see how fresh my throat is. I tried it so many times. I lost count. And always, all it took was seven days, and I would come back. Slashed myself so much, knife went blunt and my neck turned yellow. And now I am here, but I am not here.

“I’ve never remembered the gap between my death and my waking. When I tried to think about what it actually was, only a pleasant blackness shone forth in my mind. A warmly-greeted emptiness, a desirable hole. No experience, no seeing, no sensing, no smells. No pain nor pleasure—something lacking so much in substance that it even lacked silence. That’s what kept me coming back, especially as my physical pain worsened. I don’t know if I wanted to return to see if the experience had some kind of thingness to it—if somehow, if I dug deep enough into death, I could actually start feeling something within it—or if I was simply attracted to the complete lack of everything. Or if I was simply running away from the hurt the scars caused.”

He clenched his fists and opened his hands again. He did this a couple of times, as if testing the life that coursed through him.

“I remember that moment when I first woke up. A dazed feeling, like when you wake up from a nap at night. How many days had I been freed from ‘something’-ness? Who had descended into the sewers to find my body, and in what shape did this person find me? What had been happening in all the corners of this world while I’d been dead? How many people walked above me as I dumbly stared up with a limp mouth and an open neck? It pleased me. It tickled me as the thought of a birthday present tickles a little boy. To think that while the earth orbited the sun and all the universe’s levers and hinges clockworked through their busy days, I was in a happy unawareness, a cool trance. Not there.”

He looked at me with his gray, tired eyes. He let a silence drift between us, let the night go on.

He produced a knife from his pocket and showed it to me. The parts of the blade that weren’t overrun with rust or dried blood reflected the moonlight. I did not feel any fear then.

He put the knife in my lap. I grabbed it. “How old are you?” I asked.

He shook his head. Don’t even go there, I imagined him thinking.

He stood up and left.

I returned to the beach some days later, at the same time, with the same songs playing at the bar. But the man was gone. I’ve never seen him again.

I put the knife in the glove box of my car. It’s been there ever since. 

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

            Along the way, on the red dirt road, the men trudged with dirty backpacks slung over their shoulders, skin and shirts and hands coated with sweat and the red dust that the wind picked up since they began their trek many days ago. Black and green trees hemmed the road, onto which scattered shafts of sunlight beamed. Behind the trees, an opulent forest housed legions of undiscovered flora.

There is a town at the end of the red dirt road, they have heard.

I’ve heard there is a steady job there, they say to each other.

Each had parted from a distant home, on his own. Along the way their numbers had grown as roads of concrete intersected and converged in the red dirt road. Now, every man walked with others at his side.

When, setting foot upon the red dirt road, a man chanced upon the group of like men heading the same way, he would ask: Are you all going to the butchering town?

Yes, the others would answer, wiping sweat off their foreheads.

There were more questions. Such as:

Have you, as have I, heard that there are animals of all colors and shapes and sizes in the slaughterhouse?

Yes.

Have you, as have I, heard that one can kill as many as four-thousand

animals a day in the slaughterhouse?

Yes.

Have you ever met anybody from the town?
            Men would think about that question and realize that, no, they have never heard stories from someone who was actually from there. One man said: No, but my brother went there and he never returned. My brother said to me, if I never return, it might be that I am dead, or it might be that I am so happy that I forgot to send word. My brother doesn’t know how to write, see.

            They also talked about the women they had left, and, during midnight campfires, when the air cooled down and the mosquitoes preyed on their arms and legs and dotted them with red spots, the men showed each other pictures of their siblings, children, mothers, wives, and the others they had left behind. Around them, the forest creaked and groaned.

            But one night, during the campfire, when a man tried to tell a story about his wife, his mouth fell silent. When he searched in his pocket for a picture of her and took it out and showed it and said, look, here she is, isn’t she beautiful, he, for a moment, did not recognize the woman in the picture, and his mouth froze. And the man that he showed the picture to said, yes, I see it—I saw the picture last night, and the night before, and the night before that. And then another man added as he searched his own pocket, did I show you the picture of my wife? Yes, the two other men said. And the man who had originally held out the picture, who now looked at his photograph as if it were an artifact from a strange dream, said, Yes, but you can show it to me again. Then he put his picture back in his pocket.

So then they started showing each other pictures, until the pictures themselves became so engraved in the minds of the men that it became unnecessary to take them out of their dark pockets. Eventually they just sat in a circle and stared at the fire. Sometimes, to break the silence, they would ask the old questions as though they were new ones.

Are you going to the butchering town?

Yes.

Thirsty butterflies stuck to their shirts to suck out the sweat, and the men did not stare down at the butterflies.

Sounds accompanied them, too: flapping campfire flames and the other forest sounds that sometimes awoke them, later in the night, from their sleep—the sounds of nature conversing with itself. The creaking of branches, like that of old house doors, at the wind’s stroke. The humming of crickets and general click-clacking of insects.

One night, they were awoken by animal sounds. Sad howls, scattered bleats, snarls, hoots, chirps of unseen birds. They did not know if this was the tenth or hundreth night of their trek, but when they heard the animal sounds, they began taking count of the days.

This is the second night that we hear animal sounds, said one on the second night.

This is the third night, said another one the third night.

The animal sounds perked up the midnight chatter. The conversation turned to the possible origins of the sounds. Are they escaped slaughterhouse animals? they asked. Hallucinations? Many of them considered the sounds a sign of danger, others a sign that they were getting closer to the slaughterhouse. Maybe it’s both, thought a minority. Either way, all of them agreed that they had been on this road too long to turn back. They woke up every morning and marched farther along the red dirt road.

And today, under the shafts of hard morning light, as they walk, the leaves that hem the road begin to rustle. Then all the bushes and the leaves that surround them stir together, like thousands of clapping hands.

Some of the men grow stiff. Others are able to hold the stiffness in, show instead a learned fearlessness. A few draw knives.

All huddle close, tighten up their line, edge as far away as possible from the road’s edge, walk as close to the center of the road as possible, taking wary steps, their eyes darting everywhere now, looking for movement behind the leaves, listening for snarls, barks, chirps, their shirts hanging with round damp emblems of sweat, emblems that hang heavier and darker as the sunlight penetrates the canopy.

Then, from the bushes, the animals emerge, like strokes of exotic colors shooting from the sides of the road, red and blue and green macaws flying from trees and over the men’s heads, antelope and black-and-white zebras emerging from the bushes, trotting alongside the line, as do horses, brown, black, white, beige; a spotted cheetah and a striped tiger march along with a long-maned lion, the three of them not paying any heed to the zebras and antelopes. Mice and squirrels skitter between the men’s feet. Overhead, birds fly. Some settle on the men’s shoulders.

Dogs walk up to the men and, like long-lost slaves who find their masters, jump at them, lick their hands, the men’s hands then tingling and their hairs bristling with the lost memory of touch. The men laugh at the dogs’ clumsiness and put their knives back in their sheaths. Their hands reach out to all the animals, petting the skins of predator and prey alike. They do not ask questions.

During the night campfire they talk.

My wife would love this, one says.

This squirrel reminds me of my grandfather, another one says.

That night, the animals curl up beside the men, and the men sleep soundly and their dreams do not make them shiver.

For many nights zebra and lion and dog and rat march and sleep alongside man. Then one day, before the men get bored with the animals as they had gotten with the pictures, the forest ends and the path continues through an endless field of grass. For the first time, they can see above them the uninterrupted blue sky. Many of them stretch their arms, as one does when one leaves a cramped attic. And the animals run and play in the fields—always, of course, returning to their masters.

And way down, at the end of the road, the men see a structure, a gray building that grows taller as the men approach. It was a plain affair, painted with an nondescript gray. It did not bear the famous insignia of the company that they had so much heard about. But they knew that the giant, looming gravestone was the slaughterhouse.

When the men looked for something resembling an entrance, they saw but one opening in the building’s façade: a black rectangle, a black hole of a doorway.

And as they marched on, they realized that both animal and man were to go through the same entrance into the same place. This gave the men some pause, not in their outer movements (their bodies were too used to walking), but in their minute movements—nerves bulged in their foreheads, fists tightened, the corners of their lips quivered, their eyes vibrated microscopically.

Then the men hear the voices of their children once more, their wives calling out to them from the dark crevices of their minds. The men hear a call coming forth from the black hole in the slaughterhouse. They do not see it but they create it: a black angel of memory that waits for them behind that entryway. The animals walk on without any seeming change in their demeanor. But some men begin to salivate with the anticipation of reunion. And other men reach to their pockets and clutch the pictures that they had once forgotten, with the same force that they had before gripped their knives.

But none of them ever think of turning back.