The Tokyo-Montana Express (8 page)

It is at a picnic table covered with plates
of barbecue and salad, roast young goat, jalapenos and bottles of Pearl beer
that the truth is finally revealed.

He’s had four Pearl beers and is talking
very affectionately about the old homestead way back there in the 1930s when he
finally blurts out, “Did you know that I saw a ghost in that house? There was a
ghost there.”

Everybody stops eating and drinking and
looks at one another without really looking at one another. The table is very
silent. His oldest sister, fifty-live, puts her fork down.

Then his brother says, “I thought I was the
only one who saw a ghost there. I was afraid to mention it. I thought you would
all think that I was crazy. Was it the ghost of an old woman with long hair?
Was she wearing a nightgown?”

“Yes, that’s her.”

There is more silence and one of the
sisters breaks it by saying, “I saw her, too. She used to come and stand by my bed
and touch my hair. I was afraid to tell.”

Then they all turn toward the remaining
sister who just nods her head slowly. They sit there. Texas children are playing
in the background. Their voices are running and happy.

He reaches over and takes his bottle of
Pearl beer and holds it out in a toasting motion toward an abandoned house a
hundred miles away and says, “Here’s to her and to all of us these many years
later.”

This is the end of a ghost story.

There is no dignity, only the
windswept plains of Ankona, he thought as he looked at the calendar and wondered
if the year 3021 would be as boring as the year 3020. That could not be possible,
he thought, but then he reconsidered the past. The year 3019 had been just as
boring as 3018 and it had been the same as 3017. There was no difference
between them. They were all twin years of each other.

He examined the past very carefully in his
mind and the years had all been very boring ever since he had come to Ankona in
2751 as an experiment to see if a human being could live on the windswept
plains for 500 years by himself.

Well, they could God-damn it! he thought,
and then tried not to think about the 231 years he had left before the experiment
would be completed.

He would like to have met the mastermind
who thought up this thing, but the sound of the wind gradually silenced his
mind and its anger until he could hear nothing but the wind blowing across the
plains of Ankona.

I saw somebody on the street yesterday
that I almost knew very well. It was a man with a kind and interesting face.
Too bad we had never met before. We might have been very close friends if only
we had met. When I saw him I almost felt like stopping and suggesting that we
have a drink and talk about old times, mutual friends and acquaintances:
Whatever happened to so and so? and do you remember the night when we…?

The only thing missing was that we had
shared no old times together to talk about because you have to meet somebody
before you can do that.

The man walked by me without any
recognizing expression. My face wore the same mask, but inside I felt as if I almost
knew him. It was really a shame that the only thing that separated us from
being good friends was the stupid fact that we had never met.

We both disappeared in opposite directions
that swallowed any possibility of friendship.

Yesterday, being yesterday in Tokyo, I
cooked a spaghetti dinner for some Japanese friends. I bought the ingredients
in a supermarket that specializes in food for foreigners.

These are the things that I bought:

tomato paste,

tomato sauce,

green and red peppers,

mushrooms,

sweet basil,

a can of pitted black olives,

pasta,

olive oil,

400 grams of hamburger meat,

some butter,

two bottles of red wine,

and Parmesan cheese.

I took the ingredients to a Japanese friend’s
house and she had the rest of the things that I needed:

3 yellow onions,

oregano,

parsley,

sugar,

salt and pepper,

garlic.

And then I started cooking spaghetti.

I chopped, opened and mixed together until
there was the smell of spaghetti coming from the kitchen. It smelled just like
dozens of American kitchens where I have cooked spaghetti for over twenty years
except there was one thing different: a few feet away from my cooking was a
bucket of water filled with tiny live eels.

I had never cooked spaghetti before with
eels for company. The eels swam in circles like science-fiction children of
spaghetti.

I wonder if he jumped off the Golden Gate
Bridge. The details of him being there are unreal, fragmented and seem to be
further away than they actually were.

He was simultaneously a few feet away from
me and a mile away. He was standing on the other side of the railing, facing
San Francisco, ready to jump.

There were five or six other people
standing like extras in the background of this tapestry. I think that he had
just climbed over the railing. Soon there would be a lot more people sewn to it
like strange buttons, some out of compassion, others from morbid curiosity.

He was a man in his early twenties, wearing
a classic Clark Gable
It-Happened-One-Night
undershirt. He had taken his
coat and shirt off. They were piled neatly beside the railing. His mother would
have been proud of him.

He was very pale, white like the idea of
frost and seemed to be in shock as if he had just seen somebody jump off the
Golden Gate Bridge.

I was in a car with two friends crossing
the bridge and saw this as we drove by in the traffic. I felt as if we should stop
and try to help him, but I knew that we couldn’t because it would only make
things worse and add to the traffic jam already in his mind.

What could be done right now was being
done.

I don’t know why he wanted to kill himself
but I didn’t want him to do it and I couldn’t do anything about it.

The young man was like a lonely beacon of
humanity lost in stormy confusion and we were the reaching out helpless shadows
of his fading light. It was like trying to direct the events in a dream as we
drove past him and on into San Francisco, the car moving like a reel of film, splicing
and editing itself, taking us further away from him.

The question: How could I do it?

The answer: I didn’t give it a second
thought because somehow it seemed natural to me, the thing to do, and with no
regrets.

He had worked on the puzzle for three days.
It was a thousand pieces which were supposed to add up to some boats in a
harbor and lots of blue sky above.

The blue sky turned out to be the problem.

Everything else went as it was destined to
go hour after hour, piece after piece, the harbor and the boats appeared. Finally,
it came down to the blue sky.

There was a lot of blue sky with nothing in
it except itself and to finish it took hundreds of pieces. My friend pondered
them through a long slow evening.

They fiercely resisted taking shape. He
finally gave up, saying, “There is nothing here except blue sky. There are no
clouds or anything to help me. Just the same blue sky. I give up.”

And he went to bed and a fitful night’s
sleep.

The next day he did not work on the puzzle.

It lay 80% completed on the dining room
table. It was finished except for a couple hundred pieces of blue. Above the
harbor filled with boats was a huge hole the color of the table. It looked
strange. The sky should not be brown. My friend cautiously avoided the puzzle.

It was as if the Hound of the Baskervilles
was sitting there on the table. He didn’t want anything to do with that dog.

Early in the evening he sat down in a
rocking chair in the front room and looked into the dining room where the puzzle
sat on the table, licking its paws.

“I give up,” he said, finally, breaking a
long silence. “I can’t finish it. The blue sky is hopeless.”

Without saying a word, I went and got the
vacuum cleaner and plugged it in. He sat there watching me. He didn’t say
anything while I took a long nozzle and vacuumed the puzzle off the table. It
disappeared piece by piece into the vacuum cleaner; harbor, boats and unfinished
blue sky until it was gone, the table empty, not a piece remaining.