I enjoyed listening to stories about faraway places so much that it became a kind of sickness.
I put out a mousetrap once, under the sink in my apartment. For bait I used peppermint gum. I tried to locate something better, but that was the closest thing to food I came across. The gum was in one of the pockets of my winter coat, along with a movie ticket stub.
On the third morning I found a small mouse caught by its leg in the trap. It was still young, the color of the cashmere sweaters you see piled in London’s duty-free shops. Probably fifteen or sixteen in human years. A tender age. Beneath its feet lay a shred of gum.
The mouse had been snared, but I was clueless about what to do with it. By the morning of the fourth day it was dead, its hind leg still pinned. As I looked at its body, I realized one of life’s important lessons.
All things should have both an entrance and an exit. That’s just the way it is.
“?”
“I didn’t like Tokyo the first time I laid eyes on it,” she said, “and I still don’t.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The soil is too black, the rivers are filthy, there aren’t any mountains…How about you?”
“I’ve never thought about the scenery.”
She sighed. “That’s why you’re going to survive this place,” she said with a smile.
When I opened the door she was standing there in a bulky white sweater and jeans. I thought for a moment I had made a mistake, that the call had been for someone else, but she said nothing, just stood there shivering with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on me. She looked like someone in a lifeboat watching the ship go down. Or maybe the other way around.
J studied his fingertips for a minute. “I’ve been around for forty-five,” he said, “and all I know is this. We can learn from anything if we put in the effort. Right down to the most everyday, commonplace thing. I read somewhere that how we shave in the morning has its own philosophy, too. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive.”
On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.
By the end of those three days the Rat’s apartment was filled with empty cans and cigarette butts. He missed the woman like crazy. His whole being longed for her warmth. He wanted to enter her and stay there. Yet he could never go back. Face the music, he told himself. You’re the one who burned the bridges. You’re the one who plastered the walls and sealed yourself inside, right?
“Are you good at pinball?”
“I used to be. It was the only thing I could really take pride in.”
“I’ve got nothing like that.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.”
“Who said that?”
“Can’t recall. But I agree with the idea.”
“Is there anything in this world that can’t be lost?”
“I believe there is. You should too.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Breaking up had been easy. He simply hadn’t phoned the woman one Friday evening.
But when it’s over, it all seems like a dream.
some nice quotes from alternate translations (i read the wind/pinball one with ugly cover)
“If you look at things from a distance, most anything looks beautiful.”
So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.
Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that’s all.
We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.
Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers