The Elephant Vanishes: Stories Read online

  So it was I quit my job.

  AT TWELVE-THIRTY I go out shopping as usual, a large canvas carryall slung over my shoulder. First I stop by the bank to pay the gas and telephone bills, then I shop for dinner at the supermarket, then I have a cheeseburger and coffee at McDonald’s.

  I return home and am putting the groceries away in the refrigerator when the telephone rings. It sounds positively irritated, the way it rings. I leave a half-opened plastic tub of tofu on the table, head into the living room, and pick up the receiver.

  “Finished with your spaghetti?” It’s that woman again.

  “Yeah, I’m done,” I say. “But now I have to go out looking for the cat.”

  “Can’t that wait ten minutes? Looking for the cat!”

  “Well, ten minutes, maybe.”

  What the hell am I doing?, I think. Why am I obliged to spend ten minutes passing the time of day with some strange woman?

  “Now, then, perhaps we can come to an understanding,” says the woman, nice and quiet. From the sound of it, this woman—whoever she is—is settling back into a chair there on the other end of the line, crossing her legs.

  “Hmm, I don’t know about that,” I say. “Some people, ten years together and they still can’t understand each other.”

  “Care to try?” the woman teases.

  I undo my wristwatch and switch on the stopwatch mode, then press the timer’s start button.

  “Why me?” I ask. “Why not ring up somebody else?”

  “I have my reasons,” the woman enunciates slowly, as if measuredly masticating a morsel of food. “I’ve heard all about you.”

  “When? Where?”

  “Sometime, somewhere,” the woman says. “But what does that matter? The important thing is now. Right? What’s more, talking about it only loses us time. It’s not as if I had all the time in the world, you know.”

  “Give me some proof, then. Proof that you know me.”

  “For instance.”

  “How about my age?”

  “Thirty,” the woman answers on the spot. “Thirty and two months. Good enough?”

  That shuts me up. The woman really does know me. Yet no matter how I rack my brains, I can’t place her voice. I simply couldn’t have forgotten or confused someone’s voice. Faces, names—maybe—but voices, never.

  “Well, now, it’s your turn to see what you can tell about me,” she says suggestively. “What do you imagine from my voice? What kind of woman am I? Can you picture me? This sort of thing’s your forte, isn’t it?”

  “You got me,” I say.

  “Go ahead, try,” the woman insists.

  I glance at my watch. Not quite a minute and a half so far. I heave a sigh of resignation. Seems I’ve already taken her up, and once the challenge is on, there’s no turning back. I used to have a knack for guessing games.

  “Late twenties, university graduate, native Tokyoite, upper-middle-class upbringing,” I fire away.

  “Amazing,” says the woman, flicking a cigarette lighter by the receiver. A Cartier, by the sound of it. “Keep going.”

  “Fairly good-looking. At least, you yourself think so. But you’ve got a complex. You’re too short or your breasts are too small or something like that.”

  “Pretty close,” the woman giggles.

  “You’re married. But all’s not as smooth as it could be. There are problems. No woman without her share of problems would call up a man and not give her name. Yet I don’t know you. At least I’ve never talked with you before. This much imagined, I still can’t picture you.”

  “Oh, really?” says the woman in a hush calculated to drive a soft wedge into my skull. “How can you be so sure of yourself? Mightn’t you have a fatal blind spot somewhere? If not, don’t you think you’d have pulled yourself a little more together by now? Someone with your brains and talent.”

  “You put great stock in me,” I say. “I don’t know who you are, but I should tell you I’m not the wonderful human being you make me out to be. I don’t seem to be able to get things done. All I do is head off down detour after detour.”

  “Still, I used to have a thing for you. A long time ago, that is.”

  “A long time ago, you say,” I prompt.

  Two minutes fifty-three seconds.

  “Not so very long ago. We’re not talking history.”

  “Yes, we are talking history,” I say.

  Blind spot, eh? Well, perhaps the woman does have a point. Somewhere, in my head, in my body, in my very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing my life ever so slightly off.

  No, not even that. Not slightly off—way off. Irretrievably.

  “I’m in bed right now,” the woman says. “I just took a shower and have nothing on.”

  That does it, I think. Nothing on? A regular porno tape this is getting to be.

  “Or would you rather I put on panties? How about stockings? Do they turn you on?”

  “Anything’s fine. Do what you like,” I say. “But if you don’t mind, I’m not that kind of a guy, not for this sort of stuff over the telephone.”

  “Ten minutes, that’s all. A mere ten minutes. That’s not such a fatal loss, is it? I’m not asking for anything more. That much is plain goodwill. But whatever, just answer the question. Do you want me naked? Or should I put something on? I’ve got all kinds of things, you know. Garter belts and …”

  Garter belts? I must be going crazy. What woman has garter belts in this day and age? Models for Penthouse, maybe.

  “Naked is fine. And you don’t have to move,” I say.

  Four minutes down.

  “My pubic hair is still wet,” the woman says. “I didn’t towel it dry. So it’s still wet. Warm and oh so wet.”

  “Listen, if you don’t mind—”

  “And down below that, it’s a whole lot warmer. Just like hot buttercream. Oh so very hot. Honest. And what position do you think I’m in right now? I have my knee up and my left leg spread out to the side. It’d be around 10:05 if I were a clock.”

  I could tell from the way she said it that she wasn’t making this up. She really did have her legs spread to 10:05, her vagina warm and moistened.

  “Caress the lips. Gently, slowly. Then open them. Slowly, like that. Now caress them gently with the sides of your fingers. Oh, yes, slowly … slowly. Now let one hand fondle my left breast, from underneath, lifting gently, tweaking the nipple just so. Again and again. Until I’m about to come—”

  I hang up without a word. Then I roll over on the sofa, smoke a cigarette, and gaze up at the ceiling, stopwatch clicked at five minutes twenty-three seconds.

  I close my eyes and darkness descends, a darkness painted blind with colors.

  What is it? Why can’t everyone just leave me in peace?

  Not ten minutes later, the telephone rings again, but this time I don’t pick up. Fifteen rings and it stops. I let it die, and all gravity is displaced by a profound silence. The stone-chill silence of boulders frozen deep into a glacier fifty thousand years ago. Fifteen rings of the telephone have utterly transformed the quality of the air around me.

  A LITTLE BEFORE two o’clock, I climb from my backyard over the cinder-block wall into the passage. Actually, it’s not the corridor you’d expect a passage to be; that’s only what we call it for lack of a better name. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a corridor at all. A corridor has an entrance and an exit, forming a route from one place to another.

  But this passage has neither entrance nor exit, and leads smack into a cinder-block wall at one end and a chain link fence at the other. It’s not even an alleyway. For starters, an alley has to at least have an entrance. The neighbors all call it “the passage” for convenience sake.

  The passage meanders between everyone’s backyards for about six hundred feet. Three-foot-something in width for the most part, but what with all the junk lying around and the occasional hedge cropping in, there are places you can barely squeeze through si
deways.

  From what I’ve heard—this is from a kindly uncle of mine who rents us our house ridiculously cheap—the passage used to have an entrance and an exit, offering a shortcut across the block, street-to-street. But then, with the postwar boom years, new homes were built in any available space, hemming in the common ground to a narrow path. Which ushered in the none-too-inviting prospect of having strangers walking through backyards, practically under the eaves, so the residents surreptitiously covered the entrance. At first an innocent little bush barely disguised the opening, but eventually one resident expanded his yard and extended his cinder-block wall to completely seal it over. While the corresponding other aperture was screened off with a chain link fence to keep the dogs out. It hadn’t been the residents who made use of the passage to begin with, so no one complained about its being closed at both ends. And anyway, closing it wouldn’t hurt as a crime-prevention measure. Thus, the path went neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal, merely serving as a kind of buffer zone between the houses, the ground overgrown with weeds, sticky spider webs strung everywhere a bug could possibly alight.

  Now, why should my wife frequent such a place? It was beyond me. Me, I’d only set foot in the passage one time before. And she can’t even stand spiders.

  Yet when I try to think, my head’s filled to bursting with some gaseous substance. I didn’t sleep well last night, plus the weather’s too hot for the beginning of May, plus there was that unnerving telephone call.

  Oh, well, I think, might as well look for that cat. Leave later developments for later. Anyway, it’s a damn sight better to be out and about than to be cooped up indoors waiting for the telephone to ring.

  The spring sun cuts clean and crisp through the ceiling of overhanging branches, scattering patches of shadow across the ground. With no wind, the shadows stay glued in place like fateful stains. Telltale stains sure to cling to the earth as it goes around and around the sun for millennia to come.

  Shadows flit over my shirt as I pass under the branches, then return to the ground. All is still. You can almost hear each blade of grass respiring in the sunlight. A few small clouds float in the sky, vivid and well formed, straight out of a medieval engraving. Everything stands out with such clarity that I feel buoyant, as if somehow my body went on forever. That, and it’s terribly hot.

  I’m in a T-shirt, thin cotton slacks, and tennis shoes, but already, just walking around, my armpits and the cleft of my chest are drenched with sweat. I’d only just this morning pulled the T-shirt and slacks out of storage, so every time I take a deep breath there’s this sharp mothball smell, as if some tiny bug had flown up my nose.

  I keep an eye peeled to both sides and walk at a slow, even pace, stopping from time to time to call the cat’s name in a stage whisper.

  The homes that sandwich the passage are of two distinct types and blend together as well as liquids of two different specific gravities. First there are the houses dating from way back, with big backyards; then there are the comparatively newer ones. None of the new houses has any yard to speak of; some don’t have a single speck of yard space. Scarcely enough room between the eaves and the passage to hang out two lines of laundry. In some places, clothes actually hang out over the passage, forcing me to inch past rows of still-dripping towels and shirts. I’m so close I can hear televisions playing and toilets flushing inside. I even smell curry cooking in one kitchen.

  The old homes, by contrast, hardly betray a breath of life. Judiciously placed hedges of cypress and other shrubbery guard against inquisitive eyes, although here and there you catch a glimpse of a well-manicured spread. The houses themselves are of all different architectural styles: traditional Japanese houses with long hallways, tarnished copper-roofed early Western villas, recently remodeled “modern” homes. Common to all, however, is the absence of any visible occupants. Not a sound, not a hint of life. No noticeable laundry, either.

  It’s the first time I’ve taken in the sights of the passage at leisure, so everything is new to my eyes. Propped up in a corner of one backyard is a lone, withered, brown Christmas tree. In another yard lies several childhoods’ worth of every plaything imaginable—a virtual scrap heap of tricycle parts, a ringtoss set, plastic samurai swords, rubber balls, a toy turtle, wooden trucks. One yard sports a basketball hoop, another a fine set of garden chairs and a rattan table. By the look of them, the chairs haven’t been sat on in months (maybe years), they’re so covered with dirt; the tabletop is rain-plastered with lavender magnolia petals.

  One house presents a clear view into its living room through large glass sliding doors. There I see a kidney-shaped sofa with matching lounge furniture, a sizable television, a cellarette topped with a tank of tropical fish and two trophies of some sort, and a decorator floor lamp. It all looks as unreal as a set for a TV sitcom.

  In another yard, there’s a massive doghouse penned in with wire screening. No dog inside that I can see, though. Just a wide-open hole. I also notice that the screening is stretched shapeless, bulging out as if someone or something had been leaning into it for months.

  The vacant house my wife told me about is only a little farther along, past the one with the doghouse. Right away, I can see it’s vacant. One look tells you that this is not your scant two-or three-months’ absence. The place is a fairly new two-story affair, yet the tight shutters look positively weather-beaten and the rusted railings around the upstairs windows seem about ready to fall off. The smallish yard hosts a stone figurine of a bird with wings outstretched atop a chest-high pedestal surrounded by a thicket of weeds, the taller stalks of goldenrod reaching clear to the bird’s feet. The bird—beats me what kind—finds this encroachment most distressing and flaps its wings to take flight at any second.

  Besides this stone figurine, the yard has little in the way of decoration. Two beat-up old vinyl chaises are parked neatly under the eaves, right next to an azalea blazing with ethereally crimson blossoms. Otherwise, weeds are about all that meets the eye.

  I lean against the chest-high chain link fence and make a brief survey of the yard. Just the sort of yard a cat would love, but hope as I might, nothing catty puts in an appearance. On the rooftop TV aerial, a pigeon perches, its monotone carrying everywhere. The shadow of the stone bird falls across the tangle of weeds, their blades cutting it into fragments of different shapes.

  I take a cigarette out of my pocket, light up, and smoke it, leaning against the fence the whole while. The pigeon doesn’t budge from the aerial as it goes on cooing nonstop.

  Cigarette finished and stamped out on the ground, I still don’t move for the longest time. Just how long, I don’t know. Half asleep, I stare dumbly at the shadow of the bird, hardly even thinking.

  Or maybe I am thinking, somewhere out of range of my conscious mind. Phenomenologically speaking, however, I’m simply staring at the shadow of the bird falling over stalks of grass.

  Gradually I become aware of something—a voice?—filtering into the bird’s shadow. Whose voice? Someone seems to be calling me.

  I turn around to look behind me, and there, in the yard opposite, stands a girl of maybe fifteen or sixteen. Petite, with short, straight hair, she’s wearing dark sunglasses with amber frames and a light-blue Adidas T-shirt with the sleeves snipped off at the shoulders. The slender arms protruding from the openings are exceedingly well tanned for only May. One hand in her shorts, the other on a low bamboo gate, she props herself up precariously.

  “Hot, huh?” the girl greets me.

  “Hot all right,” I echo.

  Here we go again, I think—again. All day long it’s going to be females striking up conversations with me, is it?

  “Say, you got a cigarette?” the girl asks.

  I pull a pack of Hope regulars from my pocket and offer it to her. She withdraws her hand from her shorts, extracts a cigarette, and examines it a second before putting it to her mouth. Her mouth is small, with the slightest hint of a curl to her upper lip. I strike a match an
d give her a light. She leans forward, revealing an ear: a freshly formed, soap-smooth, pretty ear, its delicate outline glistening with a tracery of fine hairs.

  She parts her lips in the center with an accomplished air and lets out a satisfied puff of smoke, then looks up at me as if she’s suddenly remembered something. I see my face split into two reflections in her sunglasses. The lenses are so hideously dark, and even mirror-coated, that there’s no way to make out her eyes.

  “You from the neighborhood?” the girl asks.

  “Yeah,” I reply, and am about to point toward the house, only I can’t tell if it’s really the right direction or not. What with all these odd turns getting here. So—what’s the difference, anyway?—I simply point any which way.

  “What you been up to over there so long?”

  “I’m looking for a cat. It’s been missing three or four days now,” I explain, wiping a sweaty palm on my slacks. “Someone said they saw the cat around here.”

  “What kind of cat?”

  “A big tom. Brown stripes, a slight kink at the end of its tail.”

  “Name?”

  “Name …?”

  “The cat’s. It has a name, no?” she says, peering into my eyes from behind her sunglasses—at least, I guess she is.

  “Noboru,” I reply. “Noboru Watanabe.”

  “Fancy name for a cat.”

  “It’s my brother-in-law’s name. My wife’s little joke. Says it somehow reminds her of him.”

  “Like how?”

  “The way it moves. Its walk, the sleepy look in its eyes. Little things.”

  Only then does the girl smile. And as she lets down her façade, I can see she’s much more of a child than I thought on first impression. The quirky curl of her upper lip shoots out at a strange angle.

  Caress, I can swear I hear someone say. The voice of that telephone woman. Not the girl’s voice. I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.

  “A brown-striped cat with a kink in the end of its tail, huh?” the girl reconfirms. “Wearing a collar?”

  “A black flea collar.”

  The girl gives it a cool ten-, fifteen-second think, hand still resting on the gate. Whereupon she flicks the stub of her cigarette to the ground by my feet.