The Box Man (4 page)

But no matter how much I chain smoke, the executioner will not wait. Indeed the time for execution is drawing closer. By dawn the wound in my shoulder had begun to fester and the pain had constricted me like an overly narrow rubber tunnel. When I slipped out of the box, I found myself at the hospital at the top of the slope. The bicycle girl holding a hypodermic needle and the air rifle man grasping a scalpel were waiting for me. Rather than being surprised by this turn of events, it seemed that I had been expecting it from the very beginning.

After a while I awoke in a bed; the bicycle girl was peering at me and there was a heavy smell of disinfectant and vitamins. Apparently the white nurse’s uniform had the function of stopping time. When time stopped, the causal relationship among things was naturally interrupted; and no matter what indecent act I might commit, I had absolutely no fear of being blamed. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, I was not relaxed enough to try anything indecent, but with the box off, I experienced such a sense of release that it made me forget that I was showing my naked face. With each random detail I told her about myself she smiled encouragingly, a smile hewn of solidified air, so transitory and yet so defenseless, as if colored with a brush of light, that I had the illusion of having been made a confession of love to. Her face was so wreathed in smiles that it even made me forget the fact that her legs were quite hidden by the overly low hemline of her uniform. I beat my wings like a little bird starting to fly for the first time (clumsily, incompetently, yet in a daze). Then my wings took the air-now I’m going to fly!-and intoxicated with her airy smile, I felt that I no longer need return to the box. Before I realized it I was making a promise I myself did not understand, a promise to buy the box for her for fifty thousand yen directly from the box man. I had had an acquaintance with box men (quite naturally); I even stressed that I would sell it to her for nothing. I thought I had best inquire on the spot just what she planned to do with it. But I was powerless before her smile. It seemed foolish even to discuss the uses of a box.

As soon as I had left the hospital, her smile vanished. When I returned to the place where I had concealed my box under the bridge, I began to have stomach spasms and vomited for some time. It seemed that I had been drugged without knowing it. Though at last I realized that I had apparently been taken in, I could not hate her.

(Here a score or more lines of marginal addenda. The writing and, of course, the color of the ink are all but indistinguishable from those of the main text.)

-I’m talking about the beggar who wore a box over his head, she said.

-I know, because I’m a photographer. A photographer’s a Peeping Tom. His specialty is boring holes . . anywhere. By nature a churl…

-A wornout cardboard box…

-I thought perhaps it was a friend of mine. I guess I was wrong. But I can’t claim to be completely mistaken. A fellow photographer happened to take a picture of the box man without realizing it himself. Then he got interested and ran around chasing him all over, but he didn’t run into him again. Instead, he got interested in photographing the town. The seamy side of town that has an aversion to being seen … and since he took pictures of what had an aversion to being seen, he was obliged to do it on the sly so that he wouldn’t be noticed. It suddenly occurred to him to put on a box and go around taking pictures in the guise of a box man. Since he himself had not seen the box man when he had been looking straight at him, nobody would take any notice of him with a box on his head. In effect no one did seem to notice him, and he was able to take as many pictures as he wanted. He became a fake box man and threw himself into taking snapshots of the streets. But just as he was acquiring sonic reputation among his fellow photographers he suddenly vanished. Since then he has not returned to his apartment. Rumor has it that he has become a real box man.

-I wouldn’t mind how much I was seen.

-But this kind of seeing is like shaving something off with a knife, like tearing off the clothes you’re wearing.

-A long time ago I used to do modeling.

-Seriously, I’d like to do whatever I can. But I can’t do anything. It’s exasperating, but about the only thing I can manage is to squint through the range finder and snap the shutter. And then float your transparent image in the developer. The yellowish green bulb that resembles fluorite… the second hand of the clock in the darkroom that indicates the position of eight … the surface of the water repellent photographic paper that gleams like an oily membrane… the faint outline that gradually appears… an outline from which another appears… an outline superimposed on an outline … at length the contours of your naked body, like the footprints of some criminal imprinted in my heart…

-I want that box.

DEAD
BY
THE
ROADSIDE

Ignored by 100,000 People

About seven o’clock in the evening of the twenty third, members of the Shinjuku patrol discovered a forty year old vagrant dead, leaning against a pillar in the underground passage of the West Exit to Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, where people returning from work and shoppers were coming and going. According to the information provided by the same officials, the man was five feet two and of medium weight. He was wearing a long sleeved shirt with a floral pattern and work boots; his hair was in the mussy style of a vagrant. Besides a hundred and twenty five yen in change, he had only several sheets of newspaper, which he perhaps intended to use to sleep on. He possessed nothing else with which to establish his identity, place of residence, or name. Several hundreds of thousands of passengers a day frequent the underground passage in question (Shinjuku Station Report), and nearby there were many people and a line of public telephones. According to eyewitnesses, the man had remained sitting in the same position since noon that day, but no one had taken any notice of him, nor had he been reported for the six or seven hours before the police found him. Further, the man was scarcely ten yards from the police box, but the officer on duty said he was not visible on the other side of the pillar.

Then I Dozed Off a Number of Times

I wonder if you’ve heard about shell weed. It may be this grass with thorny leaves like twists of firecrackers that covers the whole rocky slope where I am now sitting.

When you smell the fragrance of shell weed they say you dream of being a fish.

The story should be taken with a grain of salt, I feel, but it’s not implausible. As shell weed prefers swampy land containing considerable salt, naturally it grows readily at the seashore, and it is not particularly surprising that there should be a tradition of its odor producing dreams of fish. Furthermore, according to one explanation, the alkaloids in its pollen bring about a floating sensation that resembles dizziness; and since at the same time it irritates the respiratory membranes, it is also possible, apparently, to have the hallucination of drowning in water.

But if that were all, it would not be particularly surprising. What’s worrisome about a shell weed dream is not so much the dream itself as the problem of awakening from it. With a real fish there’s no way of knowing, but they say that the passage of time that the dream fish experiences is quite different from when it is awake. The speed is remarkably slower, and one has the feeling that a few terrestrial seconds are drawn out to several days or several weeks.

Nevertheless, thanks to the strangeness of the dream scenery, one at first takes the utmost delight in the lightness of one’s body, subtracted as it is from gravity, sporting among the undulating seaweed in the shadows of rocks, passing through strips of light limned by the lens of the waves, chasing after schools of trusting fish. As one is light oneself, one feels as if the world itself has become buoyant. One is completely liberated from bodily afflictions caused by gravity -drooping belly, stiffness of shoulders and neck, pain in the knee joints, falling arches-and one frolics around as if one were at least ten years younger. The lightness intoxicates the dream fish like alcohol.

But unless the fish is real, every case of intoxication sobers up and ultimately palls. In the sluggish flow of time, boredom soon becomes unbearable. It should not be too hard to imagine the feeling of irritation the completely bored dream fish experiences, the lack of resistance as if its five senses were numbed. Soon the free lightness of substance gradually begins to pall. One’s whole body is wrapped round and round, as if forced into a restrictive garment in the shape of a fish. The soles of the feet send out feelers, seeking the sense of resistance they are used to when walking on land. The joints begin to recall fondly the heaviness of the various tissues and musculature that govern them. There is an unreasonable desire to walk. And suddenly one is amazed to realize that one lacks the legs necessary to do so.

But legs aren’t the only thing lacking. No ears, no neck, no shoulders, and more than anything else, no arms. An inexpressible sense of deficiency. Quite definitely because the arms have been torn off. No curiosity can ultimately be satisfied unless one can check by touching with one’s hands. If one wants really to know another person, if one does not know

him with one’s fingers, push him, punch him, bend him, tear at him, one can scarcely claim to know him completely. One wants to touch, to pass one’s hands all over him. The bag of scales is insufferable for the fish. It strains to tear it off, but all it can do is to open its gills wide, raise its dorsal fin with one’s fingers, push him, punch him, bend him, tear at him, one can scarcely claim to know him completely. One wants to touch, to pass one’s hands all over him. The bag of scales is insufferable for the fish. It strains to tear it off, but all it can do is to open its fin rigid, and trail a cord several inches long of pepper colored excrement.

Writhing in a pain that floods to the very tips of its toes, the sham fish suddenly arrives at the fatal suspicion that he is perhaps fake. The instant doubt begins, everything becomes very strange. When one has the body of a fish, without any vocal cords to begin with, to say nothing of hands or feet, one is plagued in one’s use of such words. Double perception is as irritating as an itch.

Perhaps all such happenings are dream sequences.

Nevertheless, the dream is too long. It has been going on for so long that one can no longer remember when it started. However protracted, one will supposedly awaken from it sometime.

To ascertain that one is dreaming, the first thing-and it’s reliable, for I have tried it several times myself-is to give the back of the hand a good pinch. But unfortunately a fish doesn’t have nails to pinch with, nor a hand to pinch the back of. If that doesn’t work, you can jump heroically from a steep cliff. That too I remember having succeeded at any number of times. Certainly if a fish is capable of that, there’s no particular inconvenience in not having arms or legs. But what kind of a fall would a sea fish have?

I have never, of course, heard of a fish falling. Even a dead fish floats to the surface. It’s much more complicated than a balloon falling in air. As far as the descent is concerned, it’s a reverse fall. A reverse fall…

Indeed, does such a way of waking from a dream exist? I suppose a fish may well drown in air by falling in reverse, upward, toward the sky. The danger of death is the same. It’s the same as a fall on land, and one of necessity awakens from the dream.

Yet once having pushed his thinking this far, the fake fish, with a timidity unexpected in a cold blooded animal, still hesitates. They say that when one is able to realize that one is dreaming one is already near the end of the dream. The fish has clone all he can do to wake rip, and although it is waiting a while longer to see just what will happen, it will not influence the outcome.

The fake fish decided to wait. His very determination touched with the pallidness of the sea seemed to have paled.

Days, weeks passed, and the time had come for the fake fish to reach his decision. A storm had broken. A great tropical storm bore down, causing the bottom of the sea to tremble. Great waves rose, making the timid and indecisive fake fish demonstrate what little courage he had. But he was in no hurry to die. He simply gave himself over to the movement of the waves.

Suddenly a wave crest like the blades of fifty electric saws marshaled horizontally bore down on him. Sweeping the fake fish before it, it broke momentously against the cliffs and tossed the fish high into the air. And the fake fish drowned in the atmosphere.

Now I wonder if he awoke from his dream. No, one does not have a shell weed dream so casually. It is altogether different from an ordinary one. As the fake fish died before awakening, he could not expect to awaken from his dream again. He still had to go on dreaming until after he died. Ultimately the dead fake fish apparently would exist forever as a fake fish, as if it had received the latest freezing treatment. They say that among those fish tossed up onto the seashore after the storm there were not a few unlucky ones who had fallen asleep suffocated by the flowers of the shell weed.

But for some reason I have not yet become a fish. I have apparently dropped off any number of times, but I am still

the box man I was. On reflection, a fake fish and a box man don’t seem conspicuously different. The fake me becomes something not at all myself when I put on the box, Perhaps I who have been immunized against being something fake no longer possess the capability of having the dream of a fish. No matter how many times box men keep awakening from their dreams, they apparently end up being only the box men they always were.

The Promise Is Fulfilled, and a Letter with Fifty Thousand Yen Covering the Cost of the Box Was Dropped from the Top of the Bride. This Was Barely Five Minutes Ago. I Attach the Letter Herewith.

I trust you. No receipt is required. As for the disposal of the box, I leave that up to you too. Before the tide goes out, tear it up and throw it into the sea.

Something strange has happened. I have read and reread her letter. Can there be some other way of interpreting it? At this point, I can only give a literal explanation. I try smelling the stationery with green lines that has been folded in three. It simply has the faint odor of disinfectant.