Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

Out of all of Hartfield’s works, one story, The Wells of Mars stands out, almost suggesting a hint of Ray Bradbury’s future appearance on the writing scene. It was a long time ago when I read it, and I forget most of the details, so I’m only going to give you the most important points.

This story is about the countless bottomless wells dug into the surface of Mars and the young man who climbed down into one. These wells were dug by the Martians tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s well-known, but the strange thing is that all of them, and I mean all of them, were dug so they wouldn’t strike water. So the question of why the hell they bothered to dig them is something nobody knew. As for the Martians themselves, aside from these wells, there wasn’t a trace of them left. Their written language, their dwellings, their plates and bowls, metallic infrastructure, their graves, their rockets, their vending machines, even their shells, there was absolutely nothing left. Just those wells. And the Earthlings had a hell of a time deciding whether or not you could even call that civilization, but those wells were definitely really well made, and all those tens of thousands of years later there wasn’t even so much as a single brick of a ruin.

To be sure, a few adventurers and explorers went down into those wells. They descended with their ropes in hand, but due to the depth of the wells and length of the caves, they had to turn back for the surface, and of those without ropes, not a single soul ever returned.

One day, there was this young guy wandering around in outer space, and he went into one of the wells. He was sick of the utter hugeness of space, and he wanted to die alone, without anybody around. As he descended, the well started to feel like a more and more relaxing and pleasant place, and this uncanny, familiar power started to envelop his body. After going down an entire kilometer, he found a real cave and climbed into it, and he continued to walk along, following its winding paths along intently. He had no idea how long he was walking along. This is because his watch stopped. It could have been two hours, but it just as easily could have been two days. It was like he couldn’t feel hunger or exhaustion, and the previously-mentioned strange power continuing to encase his body just as before. And then, all of a sudden, he felt sunlight. Turns out the cave was connected to a different well. He clambered up out of the well, and once again he was above ground. He sat on the edge of the well and stared at wasteland ahead of him free of any obstacles, and then he gazed at the sun. Something about it was different. The smell of the wind, the sun…the sun was in the middle of the sky, an orange twilight sun that had become an enormous orange blob.

“In 250,000 years, the sun is going to explode.

*Click*…OFF. 250,000 years. Not such a long time,”

the wind whispered to him.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m just the wind. If you want to call me that, or call me a Martian, that’s okay, too. I’m not an evil echo. But then, words don’t mean anything to me.”

“But, you’re speaking.”

“Me? You’re the one talking. I’m just giving your spirit a little hint, a little prodding.”

“What the hell happened to the sun?”

“It’s old. It’s dying. Me, you, there’s nothing either of us can do.”

“How’d it happen so quickly…?”

“Not quickly at all. In the time it took you to get out of that well, fifteen hundred million years have passed. As your people say, time flies. That well you came from was built along a distortion in spacetime. To put it another way, we wander around through time. From the birth of the universe ‘til its death. And so we never live, and we never die. We’re the wind.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Ask away.”

“What have you learned?”

The atmosphere shook a little, and the wind laughed. And then, the stillness of eternity once again covered the surface of Mars. The young man pulled a revolver out of his pocket, put the muzzle to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

The phone rang.

“I’m back,” she said.

“Let’s meet up.”

“Are you free now?”

“Of course.”

“Pick me up in front of the YWCA at five.”

“What do you do at the YWCA?”

“French lessons.”

“French?”

“Oui.”

After I hung up the phone, I took a shower and drank a beer. When I finished it, the evening rain started in like a waterfall.

When I made it to the YWCA the rain had almost completely lifted, but the girls coming out of the gate looked distrustfully up at the sky as they opened and closed their umbrellas. I parked on the side of the road facing the gate, cut the engine, and lit a cigarette. Soaked by the rain, the gateposts looked like two tombstones in a wasteland. Next to the dirty, gloomy YWCA building were newer buildings, but they were just cheap rentals, and stuck to the rooftop was a giant billboard showing a refrigerator. A thirty year-old seemingly telling the word that she was, indeed, anemic, was slouching, but still looking as if she were having a good time opening the refrigerator door, and thanks to her, I could take a peek at the contents inside.

In the freezer, there were ice cubes, a liter of vanilla ice cream, and a package of frozen shrimp. On the second shelf was a carton of eggs, some butter, camembert cheese, and boneless ham. The third shelf held packs of fish and chicken, and in the plastic case at the very bottom were tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus and grapefruit. In the door, there were large bottles of cola and beer, three of each, and a carton of milk.

While I waited for her, leaning on the steering wheel, I thought about the order in which I would eat the food in the refrigerator, but, at any rate, one liter was way too much ice cream, and the lack of salad dressing for the lettuce was lethal.

It was a little after five when she came through the gate. She was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt and a miniskirt with white stripes. She had her hair up, and she was wearing glasses. In just one week, she had aged almost three years. It was probably due to the hair and the glasses.

“What a downpour,” she said as she got into the passenger seat, nervously fixing the hem of her skirt.

“You get wet?”

“A little.”

From the backseat, I pulled out a beach towel I’d had there from my trip to the pool and I handed it to her. She used it to wipe the sweat off her face, then patted her hair with it a few times before she gave it back.

“When it started pouring, I was having coffee near here. It was like a flood.”

“Still, it really cooled things off.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded, then put her arm out the window to check the temperature outside. Between us, I sensed a different vibe than the last time we’d met, something in the atmosphere was a little off.

“Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked.

“I didn’t really go on a trip. I lied to you about that.”

“Why’d you lie to me?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Sometimes I tell lies.

The last time I told a lie was last year. Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society, you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence.

However, if we were constantly talking year-round, and telling only the truth, truth would probably lose some of its value.

* * *

Last autumn, my girlfriend and I were naked, having climbed into bed together. And then we got really hungry.

“Don’t you have anything to eat?” I asked her.