The Tokyo-Montana Express (9 page)

I unplugged the vacuum cleaner and took it
away with the puzzle inside of it.

When I came back, he spoke for the first
time since I had vacuumed up his puzzle.

“There was just too much blue sky,” he
said.

Sometimes I am sloppy when I dial the
telephone. I don’t get the number right and have to redial but I always dial
her number very carefully as if I am an accountant for a glass factory.

I have just dialed her number and I wait
and it rings… and… it rings again.

A third ring follows…

And a fourth.

I am listening to her telephone ring very
carefully as if I am listening to a complicated piece of classical music or a couple
of interesting people talking about a technical problem.

I am listening so carefully that I can see
her telephone on the small wooden table in her front room. There is a book
beside the telephone. It is a novel.

…a seventh ring passes, an eighth ring
follows… I have been listening so carefully to her telephone ring that I am now
in her apartment, standing beside it in the dark room, listening to it ring.

She is not home. She’s gone out. She’s
someplace else.

Then I get bored with the telephone and
begin wandering around her apartment. I turn the lights on and look at things.
I look at a painting on the wall that I like and her bed is made very neatly. I
can almost see my reflection in it, but that was last year.

There’s some unopened mail on the kitchen
table; bills. That’s one of her habits. She doesn’t like to open her bills. She
opens all the rest of her mail but leaves the bills on the kitchen table. They
pile up. Sometimes she has people over to dinner with the bills still on the table.

I open the refrigerator and look inside.
There’s half a tuna casserole there and half a bottle of wine and a tomato there.
It looks like a good tomato. She’s very talented at selecting produce.

Her cat comes into the kitchen and looks at
me. He’s seen me many times. He’s bored with me. He leaves the room.

Now what?

The telephone has rung over twenty times or
so… at least. She’s not home.

I hang up.

I had nothing else to do but float
along on a tide of memories carrying me toward no particular shore. I was lying
in bed. It was the afternoon of a day that I would never really be in.

There are days like that when you just aren’t
there.

…gone before we open our eyes.

I was thinking about a long-time-ago room
and the objects in that room. I could remember five or six of them and part of
the feeling in that room but there were other things that I couldn’t remember.

I tried as hard as I could but they wouldn’t
come back to me. Finally, I gave up and made a vow. I was going to write down
what I had remembered of the room and the feeling there and then wait a few
months before looking at it again. At that time I would take my notes and try
again to remember more things about that room and how it felt.

I thought it was an interesting thing to do
lying there floating on shoreless memories.

So far so good, except for one thing; When
I finally got out of bed in the late afternoon of a day that would never be, I
forgot to write down the things I remembered about the room, and I even went so
far as to totally forget about the room until today, a week later, and now I
can remember nothing about the room.

Alas, once upon a time there was a room
that I have forgotten.

He is almost invisible wandering
around Tokyo, taking photographs of beautiful women. He is so nondescript looking
in appearance and presence that it is not possible to describe him. He is one
of those people that even when you are looking at him you are forgetting him so
that the second he is out of your sight he is totally forgotten.

The beautiful women are never aware that he
is taking their photograph or if they are aware of it they instantly forget it.

He has thousands of photographs of
beautiful women. He develops them in his own darkroom and makes life-size prints.
He has the prints hanging like clothes in his closet on thousands of hangers.

Whenever he feels lonely he just takes one
of them out.

There was an article in the paper
yesterday about a mother sitting on her teenage son, so that the police couldn’t
arrest and take him away.

The boy committed a crime and then ran home
to his mother with the police in what I guess they call hot pursuit. They were
trying to handcuff him when his mother came into the room, saw what was
happening to her son, and then sat down on him, so the police couldn’t finish their
arrest.

I can imagine the thoughts that went
through the police officers’ minds when this happened. I can see them trying to
talk the mother off her son.

Nobody needs this kind of shit. When people
say to you, “Have a nice day,” they don’t mean for this to happen.

Come on, lady, get up
.

Come on, lady, get off
.

The woman was arrested for obstructing
justice, “allegedly” sitting on her son.

We were eating cantaloupe and it
wasn’t very good. We should have let it ripen a little longer or maybe it never
would have tasted good. Perhaps it was a cantaloupe doomed to fail from the
very beginning but we will really never know because it didn’t have a full
chance to prove itself.

When my wife and I finished, feeling
vaguely unsatisfied, we put our plates on the floor. I don’t know why. We could
just as easily have put them on the coffee table.

We have a new borrowed cat in the house.
Because we don’t spend the entire year here in Montana, we lure our neighbors’
cats over with extravagant promises of cat delicacies and all-expense paid
vacations to the Cat Ritz in Paris. We have a lot of mice. The cats never get
to Paris. When we leave Montana for California, the cats go back to their
original homes with unused passports.

Anyway, the new cat walked over to the
cantaloupe rinds on the floor and began very carefully examining one of them.
The cat gave the cantaloupe an exploring lick. Then the cat, who would never
get to use its French, gave the rind a few more licks, but they were very much
more familiar.

The cat started eating the cantaloupe. I
had never seen a cat eat cantaloupe before. I tried to imagine what the cantaloupe
tasted like to the cat. I cannot think of anything that a cat would normally
eat that would taste like a cantaloupe.

We have to rule out mice, birds, gophers,
insects, and eliminate such housecat foods as fish, chicken, milk and all the
stuff that comes in cans, pouches and boxes.

What is left that would taste like
cantaloupe to a cat?

I have not the slightest idea nor will I
probably ever have but I know one thing for certain: I will never walk into a
grocery store and go to the pet food section and see a can of cat cantaloupe on
the shelf.

Al went to sea for ten years and saved
his money. He wanted to buy a bar because he liked good times. He bought the bar.
It was called Al’s Good Time Harbor. It failed because it was in the wrong
location and he didn’t know anything about the bar business and he wouldn’t let
any of his friends pay for drinks.

When he owned the bar, he had a lot of
friends. He thought the next time they came back they would bring paying
customers with them and those paying customers would bring other paying
customers. The free drinks he was buying for all his friends were a good form
of advertising that would contribute toward his having a chain of Al’s Good
Time Harbors all over the world.