Chapter Eight: Wishing Shop of Infinite Eternity
He is tall; in this neighborhood, it makes him self-conscious. His dusk shadow stretches out in front of him, thin, dark, and sinister. He hunches forward in a brown suit that weighs heavy on his shoulders, and is holding a briefcase in his right hand; in his left is a furoshiki holding a long, elegant bottle of sake. His long, slow strides eat up the ground and his eyes stay down, scanning the road in front of him as he glides over the path of flattened brown grass he has transpassed so many times that he has memorized it. Bees and butterflies dart in and out of the summer undergrowth to his sides. They do not concern him, but he watches for spiders and their silken webs. He does not trust them.
There it is, the puddle clear as a glass mirror, the one that never seemed to evaporate even in the hot summer, the uncanny marker of the gate only those in need of it could see. He steps over it, and stops, regarding the black, twisted cast iron gate. He pushes, and the gate creaks open. He walks down the path between the two halves of the front garden to the front porch and looks up into the dark shape of the house adorned by eccentric crescent moons. Suddenly his faithless fingers weaken and he drops the briefcase to thud at his feet as he stares into the brown shadows.
He leaves it there, and mounts the steps, almost unwillingly, almost despite himself, but he is compelled to move into those shadows and he ascends. He slides the shoji apart and walks inside, takes off his shoes, and the genkan recedes behind him and shop swallows him into itself.
Inside, the house is constructed of panels of dark brown lacquered wood on the floor and the walls and the ceiling, a staining liquid darkness like ink or tar. The only light in the house is the pure white of the doors, somehow illuminated. He walks. He walks between doors and more doors frantically looking of something—no, someone—and there are miles and miles of floorboards, floors and rooms going up, down, left, right, and backwards, each door turned impossibly in on other rooms and spaces he has already been in spirals never ending. The house muffles the sound of footsteps, sweeps away whatever moisture he tracks across the floor. The clocks on the walls are frozen in time. Pictures of faces that seem eerily familiar line the walls, but with sadness he doesn't recognize any of them. They are only people he should know, and doesn't, an aching reminder that something missing inside him and he hasn't found it yet. He should have brought thread or perhaps a piece of bread to leave breadcrumbs with, but he hasn't either, and he has no time.
The house creaks and his panic mounts. He is running out of time. He has to get out, before it takes him, too. He remembers—his mission. He has to find him.
He opens windows framed by white curtains, slides away the translucent paper doors, peeks through and shuts them. He sprints down the halls, trots down the stairs, leans over the balconies searching for his face until he is dizzy. He almost walks into a mirror once before he realizes that it reflects him; confused, not realizing at first what it was, he wondered if he could see that person in it and stared until he became mesmerized. But there wasn't, and he broke the stare, shuddering, and kept searching.
Where was he? That person doesn't belong here any more than he does. He must find him, save him. But where should he go to seek him? He is never here. He has been here, oh so many times before, he knows, and has never found him. Why isn't he here? Why?
At last he sinks to his knees and the shop shrinks and restructures itself around him. He crawls forward, and the last door leads into the kitchen, where he stands and wearily removes the furoshiki. Then he leaves the sake on the counter. An offering. He can smell the last meal that was made here, and it makes him hungry and oddly nostalgic. It welcomes him back, makes him want to stay. But he cannot eat here: the occupant of this place is gone, and this place wants to trap him, to possess him and make itself complete. It makes him want to weep, for this time among all the other times that he cannot remember he has failed to find him. Failed to save him, the one who was lost. And it is his duty to find him and he has no idea what to do.
For now, he leaves, as he has always done once the house has rejected him. He slides open the door out of the kitchen onto the outside porch, and follows the veranda around the house to his shoes set out on the porch, which he collects and puts on again. He picks up his briefcase and looks back at the house one last time. It is shrunken, faded, wistful, but it is firmly set against his entrance as he knew it would be. He leaves.
It is night now, a deep blue shot with starlight. He looks up through the gaps in the blue-green leaves of the garden trees, and witnesses the steel skyscrapers striving against the celestial beauty of the night, piercing the skyline in the distance and towering over the humble garden nearby impassively. As he watches the sheer cliff faces of them curve over the organic space sharply, possessively, crushing it. He stops before he reaches the gate, overwhelmed with horror mixed with awe and stricken with sudden, unbearable sadness. Around him, the garden begins to shrivel, die, burned by the death touch of ice and winter. The insects cease, and crumple into the red dirt. Soon enough, all that is left of the summer magnificence is soft reddish soil.
Unable to go on, he puts his hands on his knees and leans there, mind spinning. Get a grip. His empty thoughts whirl but finally they settle into a pattern, into eerie calmness, and he straightens again.
He turns and there is the house again, but he is different. The briefcase is still in his hand, but the furoshiki is gone, and so is the brown suit he had worn, revealing the white collared shirt underneath. The house stays there, cold and still and silvery-blue, lonely. Now it needs him.
He runs down to the house and as he does the dawn breaks, and it is daylight again; a red flush peeks over the horizon. Somewhere inside he knows it is the first sign of the spring to come. And at once he knows he can't give up now. It is now or never. He runs up the steps and smashes smack into the shoji, trying to get inside, and failing that, to see through, to see anything. It is locked. Reeling back on his heels, he rings the doorbell. If only he would come to answer it! The door opens—
Author's Note: I was listening to "Windmills of Your Mind" (the Thomas Crowne affair version sung by Noel Harrison) while writing this. It really inspired it. Which may explain some things. Or not. All I know is that I wouldn't have been able to write the next two chapters without this bizarre interlude.