Authors: Kōbō Abe
“How’s that ankle?” he asked. “Are you okay? Do you want to see a doctor?”
“I can’t walk.”
“There’s a jeep right outside.”
The shill cut in impatiently, “Her
bone’s
broken, you know. Just how do you think she’s going to climb the ladder and hang on to the rope?”
“I’ll carry her piggyback. Fractures need attention fast.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” The shill made a noise in the back of his throat like a balloon popping. “You can’t climb a rope with someone on your back.”
“I used to be a member of the Self-Defense Forces. They trained us in that sort of maneuver. Besides, there won’t be any climbing; on the way back it’s all downhill.”
“You mean uphill.” The shill’s voice was thick with saliva; his voice quivered at the end of the sentence for lack of breath. “The way here was downhill, so they way back is uphill.”
“You mean to say you two climbed
down
to get here?” The insect dealer shot me an accusing look out of the corner of his eye. I grew flustered. “Where from?” he demanded.
“From the road overhead, of course.”
“You mean the town road?”
“Whatever. The one overhead.”
“There’s no rope there.”
“I brought my own.” He bent down under the staircase and picked up a bag like a photographer’s case. “See this?” he said. “I keep a set of essential tools in it.”
“What for?”
“Just in case.”
“I see.” The insect dealer nodded, drawing an X with his large head. “That explains how you got past the dogs.”
“But how did you find your way here?” I asked.
“I just showed that map to a taxi driver, and he brought us straight here.”
“A
taxi
driver?” Hold on, mustn’t get too excited. It would only amount to a display of weakness. “Well, that was a damn fool thing to do. That’s why I didn’t want to let you have a ticket in the first place. That’s the sort of person you are, I could tell. You wreck everything—”
“Calm down, please. All I did was show him the map.”
“That’s
exactly
what you shouldn’t have done.”
“The captain does have a point.” The insect dealer squatted down comfortably on the floor next to the girl. “The fewer people who know about this, the bigger each one’s share, after all.”
“It’s unpardonable. Hand me that ticket and get out of here right now.”
“But what about me? I’m hurt,” the girl said forlornly, looking up at the insect dealer, beside her.
The shill added deliberately, in a hard voice, “If a taxi driver is dangerous, I’m more so. I know too much—more than any cabbie. You can’t afford to throw me out.”
The silence that followed, though short, seemed interminable.
“What’s that smell?” murmured the girl.
There
was
a smell of some kind. I had already decided it was the scent of the girl’s body—but she would hardly react to that herself.
“Maybe it’s the bleaching power I use for disinfectant.”
“No. I have a very good nose. This is more like … burned soy sauce.
Simultaneously we three men began to stick our noses up and swing our heads around as we sniffed the air.
“Do you know, you’re right; I had squid with soy sauce for dinner yesterday.”
“Not spear squid, was it? The ones around here are fit for a king.” The insect dealer’s voice was eager, and he spoke with that twitch of the soft palate that comes when one is fondly recalling a particular taste. “Good raw too.”
“As a matter of fact, I fried up the leftovers of some I ate raw the night before.”
“Look, will you hurry and call an ambulance,
please,”
the girl begged, drawing out the vowel at the end of the sentence as if she were singing. It really seemed as much a test of the echo as a cry of exasperation. I was about to tell her that it was out of the question; the insect dealer opened his mouth too, apparently on the verge of some similar remark; but it was the shill who said it first:
“Forget it. We can’t possibly do that.”
“Oh, I know. Never mind.” She gave in without a fight. “If you’re trying to avoid contact with the outside world, then it doesn’t make sense to call an ambulance, does it? But God, it’s killing me… .”
“Oh, let me give this back to you before I forget,” said the shill. He took my padlock out from a compartment in his bag and threw it at me all of a sudden, though we were barely an arm’s length apart. I missed it, and it fell to the floor—but there was no clank when it hit the stone. It was still twirling around the shill’s finger. More parlor tricks. This time he passed it slowly into my palm. “You can never be too careful with a lock, can you?” he said.
“How about the key, while you’re at it?”
“Sure thing.” He fumbled in his pocket. “Komono, you give back yours too.”
“All right.” Without the slightest hesitation, the insect dealer tossed over his passkey, which flew in a precise parabola, landing smack in the shill’s hand before being transferred to mine. I was not impressed. Such virtuoso performances leave me cold. It’s always the same: the ball goes back and forth, back and forth, in a quick, light rhythm … and then before I know it, somebody switches it for a hand grenade; I catch it, and that’s the end of the game. I had recovered the padlock and keys, but in return I had been forced to acknowledge that the shill and the girl would stay.
“Just tell me when you want out. I’ll open the door right up.”
“No problem. I have no pressing commitments.” He sucked in a bit of saliva at the corner of his mouth. “Besides, in here you don’t have to worry about bill collectors chasing after you.”
“That’s right,” the insect dealer chimed in. Everybody laughed but me. The girl began massaging her ankle as if she’d just remembered. I could see right through her little ruse, but there seemed no point in bringing it up.
“Doesn’t anybody know a good doctor? Someone discreet, who makes house calls.”
“Yes, we’ll need a ship’s doctor. Ships always have one, you know.” The shill sought the insect dealer’s concurrence; the insect dealer nodded. “Not only should he be exempted from paying a fare; he should be paid a salary. Does anybody know a good person?”
I did, but I didn’t want to say so. “For now, why don’t you let me have a look at that leg?” I offered. “I used to work for the fire department. I can at least tell a sprain from a fracture.”
Again everybody laughed. I could only join in, estimating as I did so the distance between her and me. A good eighteen to twenty paces. The thing to do was to stroll over casually, timing it so that as I finished talking I was right by her side. If all went well, I might be able to touch her leg without anybody stopping me.
“They make you learn first-aid procedures even if you’re not a member of the emergency squad,” I said. “Things like splinting a fracture or administering artificial respiration—but this is a bit uncomfortable, so why don’t we go to my cabin? It has a sofa and some cushions. Nothing too fancy, but comfortable.”
Just as planned, I maneuvered myself into place directly opposite the insect dealer, with the girl between us. She nodded and raised her right arm high, signaling that she wanted to lean on my shoulder. Unbelievably, she had accepted my invitation. I knelt down by her side on the left, scarcely breathing, like someone slipping a windfall in change into his pocket. Such a chance would never come again. I could not afford to worry about what anyone else might think.
Her hand rested on my right shoulder. This was no fantasy, but a real woman’s hand. The sensation was so novel that I can scarcely describe it; if anything, it felt as if someone had applied an icy flatiron to the surface of my brain. Under the circumstances, no one could have objected if I slipped an arm around her waist, but I forbore, content merely to imagine what it would be like. As I stood up, a hand reached in my crotch and tickled my balls. It had to be the insect dealer. I ignored it.
The shill had gone ahead toward the bridge—my cabin. He kicked at the toilet below the stairs and let out a nervous laugh. These people laughed a lot for no good reason.
“Sure looks like a toilet,” he said.
“It
is
one,” I said.
The insect dealer caught up with the shill and peered over his shoulder. “This is a special-order size. Are you sure it isn’t for horses? Does it work?”
“Of course it does.”
“You must be some kind of exhibitionist.” The shill leaned against a stick beside the toilet. “How you could drop your drawers here, in such an open place, is beyond me.”
What he had leaned against was a steel rod sticking up out of the floor like a railway switch; it looked like something to grab for support, but actually it was the flush lever. Before I could warn him, the lever moved, and he staggered back. An earthshaking tremor arose, as if a subway were roaring in. The noise was concentrated in the core of the toilet, as if it had been passed through a parabolic lens and magnified. An instant later, water came surging in with a cloud of spray, rose up just level with the bowl, formed a whirlpool, and vanished with another roar. There was a wet noise of rupture, then a hush.
“How awful.” Shaking my shoulder, the woman emitted a soundless laugh. Judging from the way she carried herself, the ankle was certainly not broken. I doubted if it was even sprained. That was fine with me. I only wanted to stay forever the way we were.
“That water pressure is ridiculous!” The insect dealer looked back at me and said sharply, “Is this really a john? It’s big enough to service ten elephants—all at the same time. The shape is funny too. I mean, it looks sort of like a john, but it’s really not, is it?”
“Well, who says that all toilets have to look alike?” I countered. “There’s no law, is there?” I wasn’t dead sure myself. Maybe it
was
something else. It was bigger than your ordinary facility, and higher; its back was indistinguishable from its front, and it was unusually wide. The absence of a seat made it difficult to straddle and hard to keep your balance. It was also a peculiar shape: the heavy porcelain bowl rested like a giant tulip on stainless-steel pipes protruding from the floor.
My first encounter with this toilet went back to the time I was confined here under suspicion of rape, and my biological father, Inototsu, had chained me to those very pipes. Every prison cell needs some sort of facility for disposing of human waste. The men at work nearby (who regarded me with a mixture of disgust and awe for having supposedly committed rape so young) used to share their lunches with me and then relieve themselves right in front of me without batting an eyelash, while I was still eating. Also, they would dispose of cigarette butts, the paper bags they brought their lunches in, things like that. Sometimes they would drag over a cat carcass or a bug-infested cushion and flush it away. Kittens could fit in whole, and the mother cat could be managed either by hammering the body to bits or by severing it in two. It was doubtless constructed in such a way as to take advantage of different water levels underground—but why and how it generated such tremendous pressure I never understood. Despite its mystery, it was in fact all-powerful, capable of washing anything away.
“If you say so. But I wish you’d put a screen around it, anyway,” said the shill. Moving on ahead, he laid a hand on the banister of the steps leading up to the bridge.
“Watch out!” I yelled, pulling away from the woman’s arm. I grabbed the shill’s shirt and hauled him back. “Please don’t go anywhere or touch anything without first checking with me. I
told
you there are booby traps everyplace.”
As I spoke, skyrockets went off at the top of the stairs, exploding as they hit the floor, and sending out a cloud of orange smoke.
“What in hell was
that?”
The shill’s voice was shrill and unnerved. The woman made a sound like a whistling teakettle.
“I’d say you’ve gone a little overboard.” The insect dealer spoke slowly and decisively. “That’s going too far. Sheer paranoia.” He signaled me with his eyes all the while he spoke. I couldn’t get what he had in mind, but he was apparently seeking some sort of carte blanche.
“Relax. Registered crew members will be informed of all booby traps aboard the ship. If necessary, I can turn off the power as a safety precaution.”
I turned around, intending to offer the woman my shoulder again—only to find that the insect dealer had swiftly stepped forward and wrapped his arm around her. She was compliant, showing no signs of resisting. The shill looked away with a faint smile. That was a dirty trick. But
I
was the only one who had the right to put a compress on her ankle.
It was a steep stone staircase, six and a half feet wide, with twenty-three steps in all. The banister was a square-cut log of cryptomeria. At the top, on the right, was a stone pillar some thirty inches square, and in the back a parapet twenty inches high. The bridge (also known as the forward observation deck—my quarters) formed an elongated diamond some 235 square feet in area. The walls were open, balcony style. Living here alone with my imaginary crew, I had taken pleasure in the uninterrupted view, and in the sense of spaciousness (besides, I had foolproof measures in place to guard against surprise attack). But community life, it now struck me, would necessitate the acquisition of heavy curtains.
I led the way, followed by the girl on the insect dealer’s arm, with the shill bringing up the rear.
“What a mess!” exclaimed the insect dealer, his voice an unconvincing shriek of dismay. “A junkman’s backyard has nothing on this.”
He needn’t have said anything; I was quite aware of the room’s shocking state. I had not planned on bringing anyone here for some time yet, and so everything was in the same topsy-turvy order as my own brain cells, scarcely fit to withstand the cold scrutiny of outsiders. I gnashed my teeth to think that if only I had known they were coming, I could have straightened things up and made the place more presentable. Both the TV and the stereo were fairly new models, but the effect this might have had was lost.