Hat's off to Murakami-san

My cell phone rang. When I see who it is I feel that ephemeral moment of joy I always get when she calls.

“Huh. I didn’t think I’d get service down here” I say, answering.

“Down where?” she asks.

“At the bottom of this well.”

Talking to her always made me ecstatically happy and immeasurably miserable at the same time. Just the same, I never could bring myself to ignore her calls; so I was hoping that being here would save me the trouble. It seems the laws of physics are out to spite me, yet again.

“What the hell are you doing at the bottom of a well?”

Hmm. A fair question I suppose. Should I tell her that I’m questing for meaning in the existential sense? That I’m emulating the inane narrator of an off-kilter Japanese novelist’s book? Either she wouldn’t get it or I wouldn’t have the energy to explain, I decide.

“Um…I fell?”

“Are you D-F-S? Why haven’t you called for help?”

“No, it’s alright. I like it down here.”

“Whatever.” And then its business as usual, she tells me about her day, about what new and odious bill she has been saddled with. Inwardly I wish I didn’t care, that I could just be callous and tell her I know she only calls because she has nothing else to do, and the people she’d rather be talking to aren’t available. But I don’t. I listen attentively and give her all the reactions she wants, and hope that I never get out of this well.

“…And then my cell-phone bill is due the 21st, what am I going to do?” She says.

“God, I wish I could help you” I reply. That’s true actually, though I wish it weren’t. It’s not because I’m a selfless giver or anything like that. I want to help her for my own selfish reasons, which I suppose are glaringly obvious.

Talking to her is like reading a Murakami novel. Maybe that’s why I do it, to hear the trivial ins and outs of her existence like I’m being narrated to by the man himself. She rarely sounds as sad as I picture him sounding. I wonder if she’d ever climb to the bottom of a well.

“…anyway I’m going inside now so I’m gonna lose service. I’ll call you back in a sec.”

“Alright, talk to you later.”

“Okay, bye”

She says this in her cute voice, which makes me shiver and bang my head against the moldy stone wall. I wonder why she does that to me.

What would Murakami do? I wonder, not for the first time. The first book of his that I read was called “Sputnik Sweetheart.” It’s about a guy whose only true friend is a bizarre, self-absorbed bohemian. When she disappears he travels the world looking for her. He never does find her, at least not in the capacity he had wanted, and he never tells her how deeply, tragically in love with her he is. Instead he comes to the conclusion that physical distance doesn’t compare to the emotional distance between us all. We’re all just satellites slowly floating through the void, searching for signs of life. You know, or some existential crap like that. I’m not sure if the book should have more meaning to me now.

Murakami’s narrators are always the same guy, it seems. Sometimes they are named, but often they are not. They never flinch in the face of tragedy, or the unexplained weirdness that pervades his work. They are nonchalantly miserable. It isn’t a stoic denial of pain or loneliness or sadness. It’s more like a “whatever” shrug. The closest thing there is to a word for it is sound you make when you sob and sigh at the same time.

I suppose your also wondering why I’m in this damn well. I just finished another book by the man, called “the Wind-up Bird Chronicle.” In it the narrator is told a story by a salty old veteran, about a secret mission in war-time Mongolia. The veteran and his companions are captured by Russians. One is flayed alive, one escapes and the veteran himself is flung down a well and left for dead. There at the bottom his terror and loneliness overwhelm him until one day, for a brief, fleeting second he finds himself bathed in golden light and feels a sense of deep calm fill him. I suppose I’m waiting for my own golden epiphany.

Golden epiphany.

I must have dozed off thinking about this. I don’t immediately open my eyes when I awaken; not until I notice there’s something sitting on my lap. It was a cat, blacker than a moonless night; its giant golden eyes caught the last rays of the sinking sun. They were truly dazzling to me at that moment and I sat still, too mesmerized to break the cats gaze.

“Good evening” it says in a low, pleasant voice.

I’d never considered what my reaction should be when confronted with talking animals, so I start laughing, perhaps a bit hysterically. I laugh until I’m gasping for breath; stop it I tell myself Murakami’s narrators never laugh at strangeness. I clear my throat to regain my composure, and try to put on my best expression of total apathy.

“I don’t know what you think is so funny. If I am here something must be seriously wrong” the cat said chidingly.

“I always wondered what its like to go crazy” I said “I somehow figured it would be more subtle than this.”

“Don’t be immature. I’m not here because you’re crazy. I am your third brain given form, and we have a lot of ground to cover before the night is through. Leave your phone up here, you won’t be needing it” Saying this, the cat leapt off my lap and crossed the muddy floor to spiral staircase I hadn’t noticed before. A talking cat… oh, Fritz Leiber I can taste your jealousy.

“Third brain huh? You know there’s some debate to whether I have a brain.” I say.

“Yes, that’s very funny” The cat says, possibly with a hint of sarcasm, as he starts to descend the stairs. “You are familiar with the concept of the lower and higher brains?” The cat asks.

“Uh…sure, lower brain is primal, survival-instinct kinda stuff and higher brain is like reasoning and creativity, right?” I reply, following him, and being sure not to step on his tail.

“Precisely. Just as the higher brains reasoning power is exponentially more than that of the lower, so is your third brain exponentially more powerful than the other two combined” The cat says with no hint of pride in his voice.

“If you’re a manifestation of my own thoughts, why are you a cat? I hate cats, you should be a monkey, or a penguin or something” I say, though it’s rather beside the point considering the circumstances.

“You know exactly why I’m a cat; you just want me to spell it out for you and I’m not going to do that.” The cat says.

“I guess asking where we are going would be a dumb question too.” The cat says nothing in reply and we descend the rest of the way in silence.

It is pitch dark at the bottom of the stairs. I couldn’t tell the dimensions of the room there, I could only make out pair of double doors by the light leaking from their edges.

“Could you get those please?” the cat asks me, I can see his golden eyes looking up at me in the dark. I step forward and fling the doors open.

At first the light hurts my I eyes and I turn away. Gradually the stinging recedes and I try to act uninterested by what lies beyond. It’s a sunny place, my old backyard somewhere. I feel like I’ve never been here before, though I know I have. Jamais vu I believe it’s called. The cat and I cross the yard, shoulder our way through some bushes and are walking through an old friends kitchen.

“This is the chapel of your memories,” the cat says “you can come here whenever you want, you know”

I wonder to myself why I’d want to do that. I’m in high school now and I see all the people that should seem more familiar than they do. Then I’m somewhere else and that girl and I are locked in an embrace. When did that ever happen? I wonder to myself.

“This isn’t actually where we are going, this is just the fastest way to get there. I have got to warn you that past here it gets a bit…strange” says the cat. I stifle a laugh in response to this. Stranger than this?

We are suddenly somewhere else, and I know it’s not a memory. It’s a crowded room; in here men are packed shoulder to shoulder. The impatient tension here is tangible. I look at one of the men’s faces. It’s me. They’re all me. Hundreds, maybe thousands. And they all look pissed off.

“There he is! Get him!” one shouts. They all turn on me, indescribable hatred and fury twist their faces, and it’s all I can do not to smile guiltily.

“Run” the cat says, and I comply. Briefly I ponder the symbolic
ramifications of an army of me’s trying to kill me, but mostly I just run. My eyes are shut tightly and I don’t notice that we have lost them until I find myself splashing through water. I open my eyes and find myself on a desolate beach. There’s not a single star in the night sky, and the cold open space across the water makes me feel like I’m on the surface of the moon.

“Here it is” the cat says. He is sitting next to a doorway that’s standing there incongruously on the beach. “This is the door to ultimate truth, my friend. Beyond this door lie all the answers you seek, the cure to your misery. A golden epiphany.”

He continues on, but I don’t listen. For once in this odyssey I know what I’m looking at. I wade right into the inky waters; its icy cold but I feel like a red hot poker.

“Get away from there!” The cat shrieks frantically, “don’t you know what that is?”

“You can’t tell me what to do, stupid cat.” I say drunkenly, splashing
happily in the numbing coldness.

“That ocean is nepenthe. You won’t find answers there” he says.

“Enough with the lectures, Cat. Your golden epiphany is a lie.” I reply, the waters up to my neck now. I can’t feel the rest of my body anymore.

“Your denial is a lie! Your inability to accept and move forward is a lie! You’re too scared to face the truth. Forgetting your pain won’t erase it, and it certainly won’t prepare you for the world of it to come!” the cat desperately entreats.

I think about how wrong he is as I sink like a stone into the cold, dark.

I open my eyes and don’t know where I am. Is this the bottom of a well? I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I feel happier than I have since…I don’t remember. My cell phone rings, I answer.

“Hello?”

“Hey. So where was I?” It’s a girls voice.

“I’m sorry” I reply “Who is this?”