Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,62

I get it. It’s your personality. You’ve always been like this.”

“Uh-huh.”

We downed several whiskeys over the next hour without much enthusiasm.

“Tell me,” I said. “What’s so depressing about her?”

“I don’t know, it’s like my mother’s keeping an eye on me.”

“I wonder why?”

“You wonder why?! Hey, that’s probably my mother glued up there on your back.”

Judging from the impressions of a number of people (since I myself was unable to see her), what I had on my back was not a poor aunt with a single fixed form: she was apparently a kind of ether that changed shape in accordance with the mental images of each observer.

For one friend, it was a dog of his, an Akita, that had died the previous fall from cancer of the esophagus.

“She was on her last legs anyway, I guess. Fifteen years old. But what an awful way to die, poor thing.”

“Cancer of the esophagus?”

“Yeah. It’s really painful. I’d rather have anything else. All she did was cry—though she had pretty much lost her voice by then. I wanted to put her to sleep, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“Who the hell knows? Probably would have felt guilty. We kept her alive two months on a feeding tube. Out in the shed. God, what a stink!”

He stayed silent for a while.

“She wasn’t much of a dog. Scared of her own shadow. Barked at everybody who came by. A really useless animal. Noisy, covered with scabs…”

I nodded.

“She’d have been better off born a cicada. Could have screamed her head off and nobody’d give a damn. No cancer of the esophagus, either.”

But there she was, up on my back still, a dog with a plastic tube sticking out of her mouth.

For one real estate agent, it was his old elementary school teacher.

“Must have been 1950, first year of the Korean War,” he said, using a thick towel to wipe the sweat from his face. “I had her two years in a row. It’s like old times seeing her again. Not that I missed her, exactly. I’d kind of forgotten that she even existed.”

The way he offered me a cup of ice-cold barley tea, he seemed to think I must be some kind of relative of his old elementary school teacher.

“She was a sad case, though, come to think of it. Husband got drafted the year they were married. He was on a transport ship and boom! Must have been ’43. She stayed on teaching school after that. Got bad burns in the air raids of ’44. Left side of her face, down to her arm.” He drew an arc from his cheek to his left arm. Then he drained his cup of barley tea and wiped his face again. “Poor thing. She must have been pretty before that happened. Changed her personality, too, they say. Must be near sixty if she’s still alive. Hmmm…1950, huh…?”

And so there took shape all kinds of wedding reception seating charts and neighborhood maps. My back was at the center of the poor aunt’s gradually widening circle.

At the same time, though, one friend and then another and another began to drop away from me, the way a comb loses teeth.

“He’s not a bad guy,” they would say about me, “but I don’t want to have to look at my depressing old mother (or old dog that died of esophageal cancer or the teacher with her burn scars) whenever I see him.”

I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair—hated by no one but avoided by everyone. If I bumped into friends on the street they’d find some reason to disappear as soon as possible. “I don’t know,” one girl confessed to me with difficulty—and honesty, “it’s kind of hard to be around you these days. I wouldn’t mind so much if you had an umbrella stand on your back or something…”

An umbrella stand.

Oh, what the hell, I’d tell myself, I was never much of a social animal anyway. And I certainly didn’t want to have to live with an umbrella stand on my back.

While friends avoided me, the media couldn’t get enough of me. Especially the weekly magazines. Reporters would show up every couple of days, take photos of me and the aunt, complain when her image didn’t come out clearly, and shower me with pointless questions. I kept hoping that my cooperation with the magazines would lead to some new discovery or development with regard to the poor aunt, but instead all I got was exhaustion.

Once, I appeared on the