South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,70
I reached out my hand and touched the window of the cab, stroked the surface of the glass with my fingertips. I had no idea why. A couple of passersby, startled, stopped and stared. But I couldn’t help myself. Through the glass, I slowly stroked that faceless face. Izumi didn’t move a muscle or so much as blink. Was she dead? No, not dead. She was still alive, in an unblinking world. In a deep, silent world behind that pane of glass, she lived. And her lips, motionless, spoke of an infinite nothingness.
The light finally changed to green, and the taxi took off. Izumi’s face was unchanged to the end. I stood rooted to the spot, watching until the taxi was swallowed up in the surge of cars.
I walked back to my car and slumped into the seat I had to get out of there. As I was about to turn on the engine I was hit by a sudden wave of nausea. Like I was going to spew my guts out But I didn’t vomit Resting both hands on the steering wheel, I sat there for a good fifteen minutes. My underarms were drenched in sweat, and an awful smell rose from my body. This wasn’t the body that Shimamoto had so gently loved. It was the body of a middle-aged man, giving off an awful acrid stink.
A few minutes later, a patrolman came up to my car and knocked on the window. I rolled it down. “You can’t park here, pal,” he said, looking around inside. “Get your car out of here.” I nodded and started the motor.
“You look terrible. Do you feel sick?” the policeman asked me.
Wordlessly, I shook my head. And started driving.
It took me several hours to recover. I was drained, completely, leaving an empty shell behind. A hollow sound reverberated through my body. I parked my car inside Aoyama Cemetery and stared listlessly through the windshield at the sky beyond. Izumi was waiting for me there. She was always somewhere, waiting for me. On some street corner, beyond some pane of glass, waiting for me to appear. Watching me. I just hadn’t noticed.
For several days afterward, I couldn’t speak. I’d open my mouth to talk, but the words would disappear, as if the utter nothingness that was Izumi had taken over.
After that strange encounter, though, the afterimages of Shimamoto began, gradually, to fade. Color returned to the world, and I no longer had the helpless feeling that I was walking on the surface of the moon. Vaguely, as if looking through a glass window at changes happening to someone else, I could detect a minute shift in gravity and a gradual sloughing off of something that had clung to me.
Something inside me was severed, and disappeared. Silently. Forever.
While the trio was on break, I went up to the pianist and told him he no longer needed to play “Star-Crossed Lovers.” I mustered up the friendliest smile I could. “You’ve played it for me enough. It’s about time to stop.”
He looked at me as if weighing something in his mind. The two of us were friends, had shared a few drinks and gone beyond your usual polite conversation.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “You don’t want me to go out of my way to play that song? Or you don’t want me to ever play that song again? There’s a big difference, and I’d like to be clear about this.”
“I don’t want you to play it,” I said.
“You don’t like the way I play it?”
“I have no problems with your playing. It’s great. There aren’t many people who can handle that tune the way you do.”
“So it’s the tune itself you don’t want to hear anymore?”
“You could say that,” I replied.
“Sounds a little like Casablanca to me!” he said.
“Guess so,” I said.
After that, sometimes when he catches sight of me, the pianist breaks into a few bars of “As Time Goes By.”
The reason I didn’t want to hear that tune again had nothing to do with memories of Shimamoto. The song just didn’t do to me what it used to. Why, I can’t say. The special something I’d found ages ago in that melody was no longer there. It was still a beautiful tune, but nothing more. And I had no intention of lingering over the corpse of a beautiful song.
“What are you thinking about?” Yukiko asked me as she came into the room.
It was two-thirty in the morning. I was lying on the sofa,