Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

“Then what?”

“Maybe he fell into the valley when his mother took her eyes off him.”

The bantering air of familiarity that had arisen between me and the shop assistant became unbearable, so I hurried away with my cart. The dog, who’d apparently been asleep at the foot of the passenger seat, looked up at me blearily, and I gave his head a stroke.

I swung by the gas station. There was an elderly attendant there who would always try to strike up a conversation with me. I found it a bit of a trial, but it was the only gas station in town.

I didn’t keep in touch with anyone. I’d always considered my only strengths to be that I was completely content not to talk to a single soul all day and that I had a high tolerance for monotony. The exception was the phone call I got once a week from a certain man. Of the few people I’d met over the years, he was the only one I felt I could still confide in. We had no romantic feelings for each other, simply a relationship where we could say what we honestly thought. When I heard his voice, my shoulders would let go of some of their tension, like the knot in a firmly tied silk scarf loosening deep inside a forest, far from where people are. His speech was distinct, like an oiled egg popping out of his mouth.

There was no doubt he was a misanthrope, like me, but unlike me he had enough courtesy and presence of mind not to let it show. He was the one who let me use this cabin, and would always joke that it was because he wanted me to pursue the life he couldn’t. We often put our opinions to battle on the subject of whether it was better to distance ourselves from civilization or immerse ourselves in it, and when we tired of that we could hang up without a hint of awkwardness. He had a family. After our phone calls, I felt relieved at having fulfilled some minimal quota of human interaction, and comforted by the thought that he seemed to be making steady progress in the kind of life that was my “road not taken.”

There wasn’t a set time for our phone calls, but on that day, like on others, I had a premonition that made me look up from my magnifying glass. I must have been engrossed in the work—though I’d barely had a sip of my hot milk, five hours had passed since I’d come up to the attic. I put my tweezers down on their stand and got up from the chair, checking that none of the tiny pieces of colored paper were stuck to my hands or clothes. Above the desk there was a window with two layers of glass, and I could see several dogs running around in the snow outside.

I descended the ladder with the empty thermos and mug in one hand, and was warming up some more milk when the phone rang. Stirring the aluminum saucepan with a spoon, I reached over with my other hand and slowly lifted the receiver.

“Hey,” he said. “I hope you’re not suffering from isolation fatigue.”

No, I said, and asked whether he wasn’t suffering from socializing fatigue, to which he responded that of course he was.

“You settled in your burrow? Anything giving you trouble?”

I told him about mountain life—the hair dryer blasting out air that was unbelievably cold, the paths that got buried in snow despite constant shoveling, the front door that I had to hurl my body against when it jammed, the hunks of snow that fell into the fireplace and sent ash flying everywhere.

He said, “That’s why I never go there in winter. I don’t know how you stand it. After living like that, are you really going to want to come back down when spring comes?”

I informed him I’d been down to the town just that day, thank you very much, then asked him never to speak of spring again, because I didn’t want to think about it. That brought the afternoon’s events back to mind, so I told him about the huddle of townspeople I’d come across. “There might have been some kind of incident down there.”

“An incident? Wonder what, in such a nowhere town.”

I was reluctant to tell him more. I didn’t want him to latch on to it and start looking it up in the papers or on the internet. I stopped stirring the saucepan and looked over to the dogs stretched out in the living room. Sprawled on the rugs like white sausages, they acted unconcerned, but I could tell they were a little unsettled by my being on the phone, like a jealous boyfriend. I guess my demeanor changed slightly during these phone calls. It occurred to me that I could ask him about them. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? They might have been his dogs.

“Hey, about those little white fellows,” I said.

“Those ones?” he asked.

“Yeah. They’re doing really well.”

There was a pause. “Oh,” he said. “Here, not so much, but I did spot some of those little white fellows by the road today. Although maybe they weren’t so white. Most of them are black now, with all the gravel and the dirt.”

“Is that so?” I wondered whether black dogs were really more common in cities.

“Plus, the black fellows aren’t doing so well. All melting and deformed, more or less on their last legs.”

I cut off his laughter. “You really don’t know?”

“Know what?”

He wasn’t playing dumb. But for some reason now, I didn’t find it strange in the slightest that he didn’t know about the dogs. One of them came up to me and pressed his fluffy coat against my shin. I knelt down and rubbed his sides as if I was giving him a good scrub, and just said, “I’ll tell you next time.”

“Sure,” he replied, as though to say he was used to my crotchety ways.

After that, we chatted about nothing in particular, and I got through two mugfuls of hot milk. As we were about to hang up, he asked whether I’d seen the weather forecast. I reminded him there was no civilization up here, and he told me, laughing, that a fierce chill would be invading over the weekend.

I decided to follow the dogs in secret when they went out to play in the woods. Once I was holed up in my workroom with the thermos, they knew I wouldn’t be back out for a few hours, so they would start to disperse. They each had a favorite spot. Some liked to be just outside the door to my workroom, and others to lie on the clothes strewn around the bedroom and the living room, but most seemed to be happier outside.

I put on sunscreen to protect against snow burn, and some mirrored sunglasses and an anorak, and left the house. I traced the dogs’ footprints through the bare trees, reveling in my afternoon stroll. Picking up a branch that I liked the look of, I drew meandering lines in the bright snow as I walked, occasionally swapping the branch for another when I encountered a better one.

The dogs’ prints were almost always all in a bunch. They were basically toddling along the least arduous path. Every so often, a set of tracks diverged from the rest, but then shortly came back to rejoin the group. I thought they must hunt as a team, like wolves.

Before I knew it, I was on a path that I’d never been on before. I looked over to a clump of trees and saw one dog peeking through them from behind a bank of snow. His eyes were wide, and he was only visible from the nose up. I waved my branch number five, which was curled like a spring, removed my sunglasses, and said, “I followed you. Is everyone over there? May I join you?”

The dog got lightly to his feet and barked. Then he turned on his heels and ran off. I advanced into the clump of trees through knee-high snow, calling after him, “Should I not have come?” Feeling like a parent secretly checking on whether my children were doing their homework, and suppressing a grin, I looked out from behind a great tree.

I was astonished to see where they were: on a large frozen lake. I hadn’t known it was here, but there the dogs were, stepping with a practiced air across the lake, which was big enough to hold several games of baseball at once. It was as if a ready-made dog park, sculpted by nature, had suddenly appeared before my eyes.