The Elephant Vanishes Read Online Free PDF Page B

her finger away from my wrist to drink the rest of her cola. I can tell from the empty-glass sound of the ice.
    “It’s okay, I’m keeping an eye out for the cat. Don’t worry. As soon as I see Noboru Watanabe, I’ll let you know. So you can keep your eyes closed. Noboru Watanabe’s bound to come walking through here any minute now. I mean, all the cats take the same route, so he’s got to show up. Let’s just imagine while we wait. Like, Noboru Watanabe’s getting closer, closer. He’s coming through the grass, sneaking under a wall, stopping and sniffing the flowers, getting closer every minute. Try and picture him.”
    I play along and try to see the cat in my mind’s eye, but it’s all I can do to conjure up even the blurriest backlit snapshot of a cat. The bright sun burns through my eyelids, dispersing any dark areas of the image; on top of which, no matter how I try I just can’t recall the little fur face with any accuracy. My Noboru Watanabe is a failed portrait, somehow distorted and unnatural.Only the quirks are there; the basics are missing. I can’t even remember how he walked.
    The girl places her finger on my wrist once more and this time draws a pattern. An odd diagram of indeterminate configuration. While she diagrams my wrist, as if in unison I feel a wholly other variety of darkness infiltrating my mind. I must be falling asleep, I think. Not that I’m particularly sleepy, but something tells me I can’t hold out against the inevitable. My body feels unseemingly heavy in the soft canvas curve of the deck chair.
    Amid the gathering darkness, a clear image of Noboru Watanabe’s four feet comes into my head. Four quiet brown paws with rubbery pads on the soles. Without a sound, they go traipsing over the terrain.
    What terrain? Where?
    I have no idea.
    Mightn’t you have a fatal blind spot somewhere?
says the woman softly.
    I AWAKE TO FIND I’m alone. Gone is the girl from the deck chair nestled next to mine. The towel and cigarettes and magazines remain, but the cola and radio-cassette player have disappeared.
    The sun is slanting westward and I’m up to my ankles in the shade of the pine trees. The hands of my watch point to 3:40. I shake my head a few times as if rattling an empty can, get up from the chair, and take a look around. Everything looks the same as when I first saw it. Big lawn, dried-up pond, hedge, stone bird, goldenrod, TV aerial, no cat. No girl, either.
    I plunk myself down on a shady patch of grass and run my palm over the green turf, one eye on the cat path, while I wait for the girl to return. Ten minutes later, there’s still no sign of cat or girl. Not even a whiff of anything moving about. I’m stumped for what to do now. I feel like I must have aged something awful in my sleep.
    I stand up again and glance over at the house. But there’s no hint of anyone about. Only the western sun glaring off the bay window. There’s nothing to do but cut across the grass into the passage and beat a path home. So I didn’t find the cat. Well, at least I tried.
    B ACK HOME . I take in the dry laundry and throw together the makings of a simple meal. Then I collapse onto the living-room floor, my back against the wall, to read the evening paper. At 5:30, the telephone rings twelve times, but I don’t pick up the receiver. After the ringing has died away, a lingering hollowness hovers about the dark room like drifting dust. The clock atop the TV strikes an invisible panel of space with its brittle claws. A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.
    I consider writing a poem about the wind-up bird. But no first lines come. Besides, I find it hard to believe that high-school girls would