Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

How long she slept, she didn’t know. It couldn’t have been long. She woke with a start, and for a minute had no idea where she was. Slowly her memory returned. That’s right, she thought, I’m stuck inside a Ferris wheel at an amusement park. She pulled her watch out of her bag; it was after midnight. Miu slowly stood up. Sleeping in such a cramped position had made all her joints ache. She yawned a couple of times, stretched, and rubbed her wrists. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep for a while, she took the paperback out of her bag to take her mind off her troubles, and began reading where she’d left off. It was a new mystery she’d bought at a bookshop in town. Luckily, the lights on the Ferris wheel were left on all night. After she’d read a few pages, though, she realized she wasn’t following the plot. Her eyes were following the lines all right, but her mind was miles away. Miu gave up and shut the book. She looked at the night sky. A thin layer of clouds covered the sky, and she couldn’t make out any stars. There was a dim sliver of moon. The lights cast her reflection clearly on the gondola’s glass window. She stared at her face for a long time. When will this be over? she asked herself. Hang in there. Later on this will all be just a funny story you’ll tell people. Imagine getting locked inside a Ferris wheel in an amusement park in Switzerland!

But it didn’t become a funny story.

This is where the real story begins.

A little later, she picked up her binoculars and looked out at the window of her apartment. Nothing had changed. Well, what do you expect? she asked herself, and smiled.

She looked at the other windows in the building. It was past midnight, and almost everyone was asleep. Most of the windows were dark. A few people, though, were up, lights on in their apartments. People on the lower floors had taken the precaution of closing their curtains. Those on the upper floors didn’t bother, and left their curtains open to catch the cool night breeze. Life within these rooms was quietly, and completely, open to view. (Who would ever imagine that someone looking in with binoculars was hidden away in a Ferris wheel in the middle of the night?) Miu wasn’t very interested in peeking in on others’ private lives, though. She found looking in her own empty room far more absorbing.

When she made one complete circuit of the windows and returned to her own apartment, she gasped. There was a naked man in her bedroom. At first she thought she had the wrong apartment. She moved the binoculars up and down, back and forth. But there was no mistake; it was her room all right. Her furniture, her flowers in the vase, her apartment’s paintings hanging on the wall. The man was Ferdinando. No mistake about it. He was sitting on her bed, stark naked. His chest and stomach were hairy, and his long penis hung down flaccidly like some drowsy animal.

What could he be doing in my room? A thin sheen of sweat broke out on Miu’s forehead. How did he get in? Miu couldn’t understand it. She was angry at first, then confused. Next, a woman appeared in the window. She had on a short-sleeve white blouse and a short blue cotton skirt. A woman? Miu clutched the binoculars tighter and fixed her eyes on the scene.

What she saw was herself.

Miu’s mind went blank. I’m right here, looking at my room through binoculars. And in that room is me. Miu focused and refocused the binoculars. But no matter how many times she looked, it was her inside the room. Wearing the exact same clothes she had on now. Ferdinando held her close and carried her to the bed. Kissing her, he gently undressed the Miu inside the room. He took off her blouse, undid her bra, pulled off her skirt, kissed the base of her neck as he caressed her breasts with his hands. After a while, he pulled off her panties with one hand, panties exactly the same as the ones she had on now. Miu couldn’t breathe. What was happening?

Before she realized it, Ferdinando’s penis was erect, as stiff as a rod. She’d never seen one so huge. He took Miu’s hand, and placed it on his penis. He caressed her and licked her from head to toe. He took his own sweet time. She didn’t resist. She—the Miu in the apartment—let him do whatever he wanted, thoroughly enjoying the rising passion. From time to time she would reach out and caress Ferdinando’s penis and balls and allow him to touch her everywhere.

Miu couldn’t drag her gaze away from this strange sight. She felt sick. Her throat was so parched she couldn’t swallow. She felt as if she was going to vomit. Everything was grotesquely exaggerated, menacing, like some medieval allegorical painting. This is what Miu thought: that they were deliberately showing her this scene. They know I’m watching. But still she couldn’t pull her eyes away.

A blank.

Then what happened?

Miu didn’t remember. Her memory came to an abrupt halt at this point.

“I can’t recall,” she said. She covered her face with her hands.

“All I know is that it was a horrifying experience,” she added quietly. “I was right here, and another me was over there. And that man—Ferdinando—was doing all kinds of things to me over there.”

“What do you mean, all kinds of things?”

“I just can’t remember. All kinds of things. With me locked inside the Ferris wheel, he did whatever he wanted—to the me over there. It’s not like I was afraid of sex. There was a time when I enjoyed casual sex a lot. But that wasn’t what I was seeing there. It was all meaningless and obscene, with only one goal in mind—to make me thoroughly polluted. Ferdinando used all the tricks he knew to soil me with his thick fingers and mammoth penis—not that the me over there felt that this was making her dirty. And in the end it wasn’t even Ferdinando any more.

Not Ferdinando any more? I stared at Miu. If it wasn’t Ferdinando, then who was it?

I don’t know. I can’t recall. But in the end it wasn’t Ferdinando any more. Or maybe from the beginning it wasn’t him.

The next thing she knew, Miu was lying in a hospital bed, a white hospital gown covering her naked body. All her joints ached. The doctor explained what had happened. In the morning one of the workers at the amusement park had found the wallet she’d dropped and worked out what had happened. He got the Ferris wheel down and called an ambulance. Inside the gondola Miu was unconscious, collapsed in a heap. She looked like she was in shock, her pupils non-reactive. Her face and arms were covered with abrasions, her blouse bloody. They took her to the hospital for treatment. Nobody could work out how she’d got the injuries. Thankfully none of them would leave any lasting scars. The police hauled in the old man who ran the Ferris wheel for questioning, but he had no memory at all of giving her a ride just near closing time.

The next day some local policemen came to question her. She had trouble answering their questions. When they compared her face with her picture in her passport, they frowned, strange expressions on their faces like they’d swallowed something awful. Hesitantly, they asked her: “Mademoiselle, we’re sorry to have to ask, but are you really 25?”

“I am,” she replied, “just like it says in my passport.” Why did they have to ask that?

A little while later, though, when she went to the bathroom to wash her face, she understood. Every single hair on her head was white. Pure white, like freshly driven snow. At first she thought it was somebody else in the mirror. She spun around. But she was alone in the bathroom. She looked in the mirror once more. And the reality of it all came crashing down on her in that instant. The white-haired woman staring back at her was herself. She fainted and fell to the floor.