Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,4

how’s that going to help?”

“Well, you never know. Sometimes the unexpected happens.”

“You mean like pulling out a cork?” my cousin said. I glanced at him, but didn’t detect any sarcasm.

“It’ll feel different having a new doctor treat you, and sometimes just a slight change in procedure might make all the difference. I wouldn’t give up so easily.”

“I’m not giving up,” my cousin said.

“But you are kind of fed up with it?”

“I guess,” he said, and sighed. “The fear is the worst thing. The pain I imagine is worse than the actual pain. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know.”

A lot of things had happened that spring. A situation developed at work and I ended up quitting my job at a little advertising firm in Tokyo where I’d been working for two years. Around the same time I broke up with my girlfriend; we’d been going out since college. A month after that my grandmother died of intestinal cancer, and for the first time in five years I came back to this town, small suitcase in hand. My old room was just as I’d left it. The books I’d read were still on the shelf, my bed was still there, my desk, and all the old records I used to listen to. But everything in the room had dried up, had long ago lost its color and smell. Time alone had stood still.

I’d planned to go back to Tokyo a couple of days after my grandmother’s funeral to run down some leads for a new job. I was planning to move to a new apartment, too; I needed a change of scenery. As the days passed, though, it seemed like too much trouble to get off my butt and get going. To put a finer point on it, even if I’d wanted to get up and get going, I couldn’t. I spent my time holed up in my old room, listening to those records, rereading old books, occasionally doing a little weeding in the garden. I didn’t meet anybody, and the only people I talked to were members of my family.

One day my aunt dropped by and asked me to take my cousin to a new hospital. She should take him herself, she said, but something had come up on the day of the appointment and she couldn’t. The hospital was near my old high school, so I knew where it was, and since I had nothing else going on, I couldn’t very well refuse. My aunt handed me an envelope with some cash in it for us to use as lunch money.

This switch to a new hospital came about because the treatment he’d been getting at his old hospital hadn’t done a thing to help. In fact, he was having more problems than ever. When my aunt complained to the doctor in charge, he suggested that the problem had more to do with the boy’s home environment than anything medical, and the two of them went at it. Not that anybody really expected that changing hospitals would lead to a quick improvement in his hearing. Nobody said as much, but they’d pretty much given up hope that his condition would ever improve.

My cousin lived nearby, but I was just over a decade older than him and we had never been what you’d call close. When the relatives got together I might take him someplace or play with him, but that was the extent of it. Still, before long everyone started to look at my cousin and me as a pair, thinking that he was attached to me and that he was my favorite. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. Now, though, seeing the way he tilted his head, his left ear aimed at me, I found it strangely touching. Like the sound of rain heard long ago, his awkwardness struck a chord with me. And I began to catch a glimpse of why our relatives wanted to bring us together.

The bus had passed by seven or eight bus stops when my cousin anxiously looked up at me again.

“Is it much farther?”

“Yeah, we still have a ways. It’s a big hospital, so we won’t miss it.”

I casually watched as the wind from the open window gently rustled the brims of the old people’s hats and the scarves around their necks. Who were these people? And where could they possibly be headed?

“Hey, are you going to work in my father’s company?” my cousin asked.

I looked at him in surprise. His