Cart
A body, carried in on the current, now lies on the water.
The right heel hits the concrete wall first, then the hip bone, and a second later the right shoulder. The eyes might have seen the silhouette of a dragonfly flit across scattered gray clouds. But there’s no one around.
So, no gasps at the sight of the body, only the sound of the river, a mass that pushes against the shoulders, held in place by the wall until the body starts to move again, carried by the current. It picks up speed, as if it had been aiming for another darkness all along, and, legs together, slips straight through the duct and into the channel.
A combination of chance and water pulls the body in deeper. Suddenly it’s dark, like someone blacking out. About five feet below the surface is an underground channel, separate from the natural ground water. It skirts the border between the wheat fields and the forest, never freezing completely even in the depths of winter, when the earth is covered with a layer of hard, packed snow.
In the pitch-darkness, with both hands pressed against the walls on either side, the body might have stopped, but the arms don’t move. The waterlogged fingertips are soft but the joints are stiff. The water easily buoys up its 132 pounds. It floats toward the exit waiting somewhere up ahead, feet at the bow, head at the stern. Though flowing at the same speed as the river, the channel is perfectly straight, never allowing the body to diverge from it, to swirl around or get stuck in one spot. Nor are there any salmon swimming upstream to block its way. It’s headed in one direction, and nothing can stop it.
Beyond is a point of light, shining on waves as black as liquid obsidian. It grows brighter, the sound of water louder. The current gets faster. Splashing, like a swimming lesson, when all the kids practice the flutter kick in the pool. The smell of fresh air, drifting up from the light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly it’s brighter still, and the body is thrown out into a shallow bath, wider and flatter than the channel, but also slightly sloping. There’s a dome above. The feet hit a metal grate, and the body stops. The water that carried it in keeps flowing downward through the grate like a miniature waterfall. A draft of cold air blows up from the darkness.
It can go no farther. It doesn’t need to.
Sketching the day’s route with a red pencil in her mind, Keiko Muyō headed for the gravelly parking lot behind the post office. She hadn’t worn a uniform since junior high, twenty years ago, and this one felt at first like it would never fit her, but now that she was used to it, she found it easy to move around in. Her back straightened when she put it on, and her steps were lighter, her strides longer, even when she was walking on gravel. Yet another part of her thought maybe it only felt that way in the morning.
She loaded the blue box with a stock of Yu-Pack parcels and Letter Pack envelopes into the back of the red Suzuki Jimny. Next to the pile were her neatly folded khaki rain-coat; dark green rubber boots, without a trace of mud on them; a clean, dry rag; an aluminum four-step ladder; and an old wooden box with first aid equipment, just where she’d placed them the day before. She now checked the arrangement to make sure everything would be close at hand when she needed it.
“Why do you always start clearing the table while I’m still eating?” the man she’d lived with had asked her. “Is that all you think about—washing up?”
Keiko ate quickly but neatly. A coworker had noticed this once when they were having lunch in the company cafeteria. “I wish I could handle my chopsticks like you do,” she’d said.
She didn’t eat nearly as much as he did, so she always finished first and was ready to start clearing things away.
He’d start with beer, then switch to wine, or sake, or shōchū, nibbling at his food between drinks, dragging the meal out. She found this distasteful, and tried not to look across the table at him.
Leaving him to snore in the bedroom, she’d return to the dining-kitchen. There would be nothing on the table now—not even a teacup—so plenty of room to spread out her map of Hokkaido. She often found herself sketching the outline of this northern island at the office, on a memo pad while she was talking on the phone to a client. She imagined leaving the man and their house in Setagaya Ward, and finding a job somewhere inside that outline she’d drawn. Her family had moved to Edaru, a town in eastern Hokkaido, when her father was transferred there, and that’s where she’d spent the three years of junior high school. Now she was homesick for the place, and for names like Edaru, in which you could hear the old Ainu language. Those sounds, and the characters used to write them, seemed comforting somehow. Looking at the map, she recited them silently to herself: Horokanai, Otoineppu, Tomakomai, Shimukappu, Akan, Saroma, Makkari.
She put sheets of stamps, postcards, a portable cash box, and her mail bag on the passenger seat. Turning on the engine, she noticed that she was almost out of gas. There was a gas station on the corner where you turned onto the highway. She didn’t like the man who ran it, though. The way he looked at her made her uneasy. What was his name? Tachiki? Or Tachikawa? . . . He was probably in his mid-thirties, so about her age.
“I saw you in front of the Asagiya Store yesterday. That sure was a big yawn,” he said, grinning. The tag on his uniform said Tachiki. As he handed her the receipt, he leered at her, his mind on other things. The Asagiya? She’d bought some miso and beer there, along with something else—batteries for her alarm clock. She didn’t even remember it until this man told her that he’d seen her yawning, as if they were close friends.
“Oh?” Neither affirming nor denying it, she smiled stiffly, drawing a veil around her.
Still smiling, she cut Tachiki off by closing the window, then faced forward and turned on the engine. Careful not to step too hard on the accelerator, she pulled out of the gas station. Every morning the postmaster warned them: “No matter what you do, drive carefully.” The smile disappeared as soon as she reached the road. “Damn you—quit gawking at me,” she muttered, screwing up her face. Tachiki grew smaller in the rearview mirror. Looking straight ahead, she whispered, “Drop dead.”