A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

The truth was that I didn’t want to go. After meeting Haruki #1, who was a real hero, and hearing about what he went through in the war, I couldn’t get excited about seeing Mickey-chan and shaking his hand.

So there you have it. Philosophy, Law, Literature, and the Economy, all sacrificed to the glorious cause of War. How splendid is that?

The way ahead was clear, and I could stop worrying about all the silly metaphysical business of life—identity, society, individualism, totalitarianism, human will—that in university had so preoccupied and clouded my mind.

I will continue to write and to study, so that when the time of my death comes, I will die beautifully, as a man in the midst of a supreme and noble effort.

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being.

So I skipped over the great lizards and in November, just around the time I’d started on the extinct Hominidae, my dad committed suicide again.

looked like he and the Falling Man were having a conversation, like the man had stopped falling in midair for a moment to consider my dad’s questions.

I wonder if the Falling Man answered.

What would you do?

Does falling scare you?

when we moved to Tokyo and my dad fell down in front of the train, I started thinking about it a lot. It seemed to make sense. If you’re just going to die anyway, why not just get it over with?

I jumped off the edge of the world and went flying toward the ocean. It’s the same big Pacific Ocean where Number One crashed his plane into the aircraft carrier. That’s nice. The jellyfish would eat my flesh, and my bones would sink to the bottom, and I would be with Haruki forever. He’s so smart, we would have lots to talk about. Maybe he could even teach me French.

It looked exactly like his Socrates note, and he turned pale and opened and closed his mouth like a dying fish.

Here’s what my first sentence said: Your uncle Haruki #1 would not keep screwing up like this. And here’s the second: If you’re going to do something, please do it properly.

I sneaked into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and the electric clipper my mom bought to give Dad haircuts when he still cared about grooming and personal hygiene and employment and stuff. In the cold bathroom light, I chopped off my hair in chunks. It took me a long time to cut it all off until it was short enough to buzz.

The supapawa of my bald and shining head radiated through the classroom and out into the world, a bright bulb, a beacon, beaming light into every crack of darkness on the earth and blinding all my enemies.

My dad had gotten so good at not looking at me that after I shaved my head and defeated my classmates with my awesome supapawa, I went home and waited for the rest of the day for him to notice that I had no hair, but he never did.

I was dropping out of school and leaving home to become a nun. I was half serious.

That same week at the public baths, I saw the bar hostess I’d almost hit with The Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and even with no hair, she recognized me immediately. But instead of looking away like most people, she narrowed her eyes and inspected me, and finally she nodded.

“I don’t give a shit about pretty,” I informed her. “I’m a superhero. Superheroes don’t need pretty.”

“But I just don’t understand you. The girl is attacked, tied up and almost raped, her video gets put up on some fetish website, her underpants get auctioned off to some pervert, her pathetic father sees all this and instead of doing anything to help her he tries to kill himself in the bathroom, where she has to find him—after all that, the only thing you can say is Babette is cool? It’s sad about the bugs?”

“Oliver, Babette is a pimp! She’s not being nice to Nao, she’s recruiting her. She’s running a compensated-dating operation out of that awful maid café.”

“Cyclommatus imperator,” he continued. “Don’t you remember?” She didn’t. “It’s the Latin name for the staghorn beetle,” he explained. “The one he folded out of paper? It was a flying Cyclommatus imperator. He won third place for it in the origami bug wars.”

She hated that now he felt he needed to speak slowly and carefully and explain everything as if she were an imbecile or had Alzheimer’s. He used to use this tone of voice on her mother.

‘I should only make myself ridiculous in the eyes of others if I clung to life and hugged it when I have no more to offer.’ Her father was referring to the bidding, and Nao figured it out, which was why she went to check her computer. That’s my theory.”

He knew better than to needle her about her memory. She knew better than to call him a loser.

“It’s my greatest triumph!” he said, and while she cooked, he sat on the stairs and told her all about the history of the medlar, about the applelike fruits, which were best eaten rotten, in spite of their nasty,

unmistakable smell. “Kind of like sugar-frosted baby shit.” “Nice,” she said, stirring sage into her soup.

The French called them cul de chien, or dog’s asshole.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “If I’d wanted a captain of industry, I would have married one.” He shook his head, sadly. “You picked a lemon in the garden of love.”

“You told him it was a matter of some urgency?” “Of course. The girl is suicidal. So is her father.

“Well, you’re not making a lot of sense. I mean, it’s not like this is happening now, right?”

Nao was sixteen when she started writing the diary. But that was more than a decade ago, and we know the diary’s been floating around for at least a few years longer.

It wasn’t that she’d forgotten, exactly. The problem was more a kind of slippage.

Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.

“The eternal now,” he said. “She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.”

“I’ve always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide,” she said. “That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.”

“Oh!” she said, sitting up in bed. “She doesn’t know!” “Know what?” “About why her dad got fired! She doesn’t know that he’s a man of conscience.

“Maybe,” he said, rubbing her forehead. “But don’t worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination.

It’s your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”

I do not feel like a person who is going to die tomorrow. I feel like a person who is already dead.

Nao doesn’t know this yet. She still thinks her great-uncle flew his plane into the enemy’s battleship. She thinks he died a war hero, carrying out his mission. She doesn’t know he scuttled it. How can this be? The

Nao must read this, and her father, too. They have to know the truth.

Haruki #1 was struggling with the most profound moral and existential issues of genocide and war and the consequences of his imminent death, and we’re upset about a missing cat? How is this even possible?

I guess this is it. This is what now feels like.

Ruth turned the page, felt her heart miss a beat. The page was blank. She turned another. Blank. And the page after that. Blank.

She knew the pages had once been filled because on at least two occasions she had checked, riffling through to see if the girl’s handwriting had persisted to the end of the book, and indeed it had.

“It’s like her life just got shorter. Time is slipping away from her, page by page . . .”

“It calls our existence into question, too, don’t you think?”

Maybe that’s what happened to Pesto, too. He just fell off our page.”