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February 26 - February 28, 2022
If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
He never cried, not even in his dreams, for hard-heartedness was a point of pride. A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom—that was how he liked to imagine his heart. Someday he would have an anchor tattooed on his chest.
Suddenly the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.
Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there’s just one thing I’m destined for and that’s glory; that’s right, glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.
She would never forget his eyes as he confronted her in the corridor. Deep-set in the disgruntled, swarthy face, they sought her out as though she were a tiny spot on the horizon, the first sign of a distant ship. That, at least, was the feeling she had. Eyes viewing an object so near had no business piercing that way, focusing so sharply—without leagues of sea between them, it was unnatural. She wondered if all eyes that endlessly scanned the horizon were that way. Unlooked-for signs of a ship descried—misgivings and delight, wariness and expectation . . . the sighted vessel just barely able
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Ryuji knew better than anyone that no Grand Cause was to be found at sea. At sea were only watches linking night and day, prosaic tedium, the wretched circumstances of a prisoner.
The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discoloring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo. Saying goodbye now entailed not a single new emotion.
She wished he could be something less defined, like mist. This horrid hulk was too much like rock to fade from memory: the heavy brows, for example, or the too solid shoulders. . . .
Finally, rocking the whole harbor and carrying to every city window; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rakuyo’s horn screamed one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea. Ryuji was lost from sight.
Noboru had prepared for Ryuji’s entrance by resolving not to smile with pleasure. Using illness as a pretext, he succeeded in maintaining a glum face. “That’s strange! He was so happy and excited just a little while ago. Do you feel feverish again, dear?” An unwarranted little speech! Never before had his mother seemed such a petty person.
Naturally Noboru stuck close to Ryuji during the vacation and listened to sea stories by the hour, gaining a knowledge of sailing none of the others could match. What he wanted, though, was not that knowledge but the green drop the sailor would leave behind when someday, in the very middle of a story, he started up in agitation and soared out to sea again. The phantoms of the sea and ships and ocean voyages existed only in that glistening green drop. But with each new day, another of the fulsome odors of shore routine adhered to the sailor: the odor of home, the odor of neighbors, the odor of
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Though Ryuji didn’t realize it, the distant influence of the sea was at work on him again: he was unable to distinguish the most exhaulted feelings from the meanest, and suspected that essentially important things did not occur on land. No matter how hard he tried to reach a realistic decision, shore matters remained suffused with the hues of fantasy.
Tripping over bared tree roots which swelled like tumid black blood vessels across the face of the slope, the boys scrambled down the hill and broke onto the withered grass path that led into the evergreens surrounding the pool.
Even as he spoke the boy appeared to have forgotten the subject, as though it were a balloon he had abandoned to the sky.
