The Box Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

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