The Elephant Vanishes (2 page)

“Hmm, let’s see,” I say. “Haven’t made up my mind yet. I thought I’d decide when I go shopping.”

“You know,” my wife starts in with a new tone of voice, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe you don’t really need to be looking for work.”

“And why not?” I spit out. Yet more surprises? Is every woman in the world out to shake me up over the phone? “Why don’t I have to be looking for work? Another three months and my unemployment compensation is due to run out. No time for idle hands.”

“My salary’s gone up, and my side job is going well, not to mention we have plenty in savings. So if we don’t go overboard on luxuries, we should be able to keep food on the table.”

“And I’d do the housework?”

“Is that so bad?”

“I don’t know,” I say in all honesty. I really don’t know. “I’ll have to think it over.”

“Do think it over,” reiterates my wife. “Oh, and by the way, has the cat come back?”

“The cat?” I’m caught off guard, then I realize I’d completely forgotten about the cat all morning. “No, doesn’t seem so.”

“Could you scout around the neighborhood a bit? He’s been gone four days now.”

I give some spur-of-the-moment reply, switching the receiver back to my right hand.

“My guess is that the cat’s probably in the yard of that vacant house at the end of the passage. The yard with the stone bird figurine. I’ve seen him there often enough. You know where I’m talking about?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” I say. “And since when have you been snooping around in the passage on your own? Never once have you mentioned—”

“You’ll have to forgive me, but I’ve got to hang up. Have to be getting back to work. Don’t forget about the cat, now.”

And the telephone cuts off.

I sit there looking dumbly at the receiver a second before setting it down.

Now why would my wife know so much about the passage? I can’t figure it out. She’d have to climb over a high cinder-block wall to get there from our yard, and what possible reason was there to go to all that trouble to begin with?

I go to the kitchen for that drink of water, turn on the FM radio, and trim my nails. They’re doing a feature on Robert Plant’s new album. I listen to two songs before my ears start to hurt and I switch the thing off. I go out to the porch to check the cat’s food dish; the dried fish I put in the previous night hasn’t been touched. Guess the cat really hasn’t come back.

Standing there on the porch, I look at the bright spring sun slicing down into our tiny yard. Hardly the sort of yard that lingers fondly in the mind. The sun hits here only the briefest part of the day, so the soil is always dark and damp. Not much growing: just a couple of unremarkable hydrangeas. And I’m not terribly crazy about hydrangeas in the first place.

From a nearby stand of trees comes the periodic scree-ee-eech of a bird, sharp as a tightening spring. The “wind-up bird,” we call it. My wife’s name for it. I have no idea what it’s really called. Nor even what it looks like. Nonetheless, this wind-up bird is there every morning in the trees of the neighborhood to wind things up. Us, our quiet little world, everything.

As I listen to the wind-up bird, I’m thinking, Why on earth is it up to me to go searching after that cat? And more to the point, even if I do chance to find it, what am I supposed to do then? Drag the cat home and lecture it? Plead with it—Listen, you’ve had everyone worried sick, so why don’t you come home?

Great, I think. Just great. What’s wrong with letting a cat go where it wants to go and do what it wants to do? Here I am, thirty years old, and what am I doing? Washing clothes, planning dinner menus, chasing after cats.

Not so long ago, I’m thinking, I was your regular sort of guy. Fired up with ambition. In high school, I read Clarence Darrow’s autobiography and decided to become a lawyer. My grades weren’t bad. And in my senior year I was voted by my
classmates runner-up “Most Likely to Succeed.” I even got accepted into the law department of a comparatively reputable university. So where had I screwed up?

I plant my elbows on the kitchen table, prop up my chin, and think: When the hell did the compass needle get out of whack and lead my life astray? It’s more than I can figure. There’s nothing I can really put my finger on. No setbacks from student politics, no disillusionment with university, never really had much girl trouble. As near as I can tell, I’ve had a perfectly normal existence. Yet one day, when it came time for me to be graduating, I suddenly realized I wasn’t the same guy I used to be.

Probably, the seed of a schism had been there all along, however microscopic. But in time the gap widened, eventually taking me out of sight of who I was supposed to be. In terms of the solar system, if you will, I should by now have reached somewhere between Saturn and Uranus. A little bit farther and I ought to be seeing Pluto. And beyond that—let’s see—was there anything after that?

At the beginning of February, I quit my longtime job at the law firm. And for no particular reason. It wasn’t that I was fed up with the work. Granted, it wasn’t what you could call an especially thrilling job, but the pay wasn’t bad and the atmosphere around the office was friendly enough.

My role at the firm was, in a word, that of full-time office boy.

Although I still believe I did a good job of it, by my standards. Strange as it may sound coming from my own mouth, I find I’m really very capable when it comes to carrying out immediate tasks around the office like that. I catch on quickly, operate methodically, think practically, don’t complain. That’s why, when I told the senior partner I wanted to quit, the old man—the father half of this “——and Son, Attorneys at Law”—even offered to raise my salary if I’d just stay on.

But stay on I didn’t. I don’t exactly know why I up and quit. Didn’t even have any clear goals or prospects of what to do after quitting. The idea of holing up somewhere and cramming for
one more shot at the bar exam was too intimidating. And besides, I didn’t even especially want to become a lawyer at that point.

When I came out and told my wife over dinner I was thinking of quitting my job, all she said was “Fair enough.” Just what that “Fair enough” was supposed to mean, I couldn’t tell. But that was the extent of it; she didn’t volunteer a word more.

When I then said nothing, she spoke up. “If you feel like quitting, why don’t you quit? It’s your life, you should do with it as you like.” She’d said her piece and was straightaway deboning the fish on her plate with her chopsticks.

My wife does office work at a design school and really doesn’t do badly, salarywise. Sometimes she gets illustration assignments from editor friends, and not for unreasonable pay, either. I, on my part, was eligible for six months’ unemployment compensation. So if I stayed home and did the housework regularly every day, we could even swing a few expenses like eating out and dry cleaning, and our life-style wouldn’t change all that much from when I was working and getting a salary.

So it was I quit my job.

A
T 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.