Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

In the fine-grained, multiveiled darkness, the room looked exactly as I remembered it. As my eyes became used to the darkness, though, I began to pick out slight differences. First, the telephone was in a different place. It had moved from the night table to the top of a pillow, in which it was now all but buried. Then I saw that the amount of whiskey in the bottle had gone down. There was just a little left in the bottom now. All the ice in the bucket had melted and was now nothing but old, cloudy water. The glass was dry inside, and when I touched it I realized it was coated with white dust. I approached the bed, lifted the phone, and put the receiver to my ear. The line was dead. The room looked as if it had been abandoned, forgotten for a very long time. There was no sense of a human presence there. Only the flowers in the vase preserved their strange vividness.

There were signs that someone had been lying in the bed: the sheets and covers and pillows were in slight disarray. I pulled back the covers and checked for warmth, but there was none. No smell of cosmetics remained, either. Much time seemed to have gone by since the person had left the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, scanned the room again, and listened for sounds. But I heard nothing. The place was like an ancient tomb after grave robbers had carried off the body.

All of a sudden, the phone began to ring. My heart froze like a frightened cat. The airs sharp reverberations woke the floating grains of pollen, and the flower petals raised their faces in the darkness. How could the phone have been ringing? Only a few moments before, it had been as dead as a rock in the earth. I steadied my breathing, calmed the beating of my heart, and checked to make sure I was still there, in the room. I stretched out my hand, touched my fingers to the receiver, and hesitated a moment before lifting it from its cradle. By then, the phone had rung three or perhaps four times altogether.

Hello. The phone went dead as I lifted the receiver. The irreversible heaviness of death weighed in my hand like a sandbag. Hello, I said again, but my own dry voice came back to me unaltered, as if rebounding from a thick wall. I set the receiver down, then picked it up again and listened. There was no sound. I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to control my breathing as I waited for the phone to ring again. It did not ring. I watched the grains in the air return to unconsciousness and sink into the darkness. I replayed the sound of the telephone in my mind. I was no longer entirely certain that it had actually rung. But if I let doubts like that creep in, there would have been no end to them. I had to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise, my very existence in this place would have been open to question. The phone had rung; there could be no mistake. And in the next instant, it had gone dead. I cleared my throat, but that sound, too, died instantly in the air.

I stood up and made a circuit of the room. I studied the floor, stared up at the ceiling, sat on the table, leaned against the wall, gave the doorknob a quick twist, turned the switch of the floor lamp on and off. The doorknob didn't budge, of course, and the lamp was dead. The window was blocked from the outside. I listened for any sounds I could make out, but the silence was like a smooth, high wall. Still, I felt the presence of something here that was trying to deceive me, as if the others were holding their breath, pressing themselves flat against the wall, obliterating their skin color to keep me from knowing they were there. So I pretended not to notice. We were very good at fooling each other. I cleared my throat again and touched my fingers to my lips.

I decided to inspect the room once more. I tried the floor lamp again, but it produced no light. I opened the whiskey bottle and sniffed what was left inside. The smell was unchanged. Cutty Sark. I replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the table. I brought the receiver to my ear one more time, but the phone could not have been any deader than it was. I took a few slow steps to get a feel of the carpet against my shoes. I pressed my ear against the wall and concentrated all my attention in an attempt to hear any sounds that might have been coming through it, but there was, of course, nothing. I stepped to the door and, knowing that to do so was pointless, gave the knob a twist. It turned easily to the right. For a moment, I could not absorb this fact as a fact. Before, the knob had been so solid it could have been set in cement. I went back to square one and tried again, taking my hand from the knob, reaching out for it again, and turning it back and forth. It turned smoothly in my hand. This gave me the strangest feeling, as if my tongue were swelling inside my mouth.

The door was open.

I pulled the knob until the door swung in just enough for a blinding light to come streaming into the room. The bat. If only I had the bat, I would have felt more confident. Oh, forget the bat! I swung the door wide open. Checking left, then right, to be sure no one was there, I stepped outside. It was a long, carpeted corridor. A short way down the corridor, I could see a large vase filled with flowers. It was the vase I had hidden behind while the whistling waiter was knocking on this door. In my memory, the corridor was a long one, with many turns and branches along the way. I had managed to get here by coming across the waiter whistling his way down the corridor and following after him. The number plate on the door had identified this as Room 208.

Stepping carefully, I walked toward the vase. I hoped I could find my way to the lobby, where Noboru Wataya had been appearing on television. Many people had been in the lobby, moving to and fro. I might be able to find some clue there. But wandering through the hotel was like venturing into a vast desert without a compass. If I couldn't find the lobby and then was unable to find my way back to Room 208,1 might be sealed up inside this labyrinthine place, unable to return to the real world.

But now was no time for hesitation. It was probably my last chance. I had waited every day in the bottom of the well for six months, and now, at last, the door had opened before me. Besides, the well was going to be taken from me soon. If I failed now, all my time and effort would have been for nothing.

I turned several corners. My filthy tennis shoes moved soundlessly over the carpet. I couldn't hear a thing-no voices, no music, no TV, not even a ventilator fan or an elevator. The hotel was silent, like a ruin forgotten by time. I turned many corners and passed many doors.

The corridor forked again and again, and I had always gone right, on the assumption that if I chose to go back, I should be able to find the room by taking only lefts. By now, though, my sense of direction was gone. I felt no nearer to anything in particular. The numbers on the doors had no order, and they went by endlessly, so they were no help at all. They trickled away from my consciousness almost before they had registered in my memory. Now and then I felt I had passed some of them before. I came to a stop in the middle of the corridor and caught my breath. Was I circling back over and over the same territory, the way one does when lost in the woods?

As I stood there wondering what to do, I heard a familiar sound in the distance. It was the whistling waiter. He was in perfect tune. There was no one who could match him. As before, he was whistling the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie-not an easy tune to whistle, but it seemed to give him no trouble. I proceeded down the corridor in the direction of the whistling, which grew louder and clearer. He appeared to be heading in my direction. I found a good-sized pillar and hid behind it.

The waiter carried a silver tray again, with the usual bottle of Cutty Sark and an ice bucket and two glasses. He hurried past me, facing straight ahead, with an expression on his face that suggested he was entranced by the sound of his own whistling. He never looked in my direction; he was in such a hurry that he couldn't spare a moments wasted motion. Everything is the same as before, I thought. It seemed my flesh was being carried back in time.