Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

Darkness surrounded me. And my flashlight was gone. I seemed to have dropped it when I tumbled out. I remained on all fours, not moving. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t think anything. I was only aware, and barely at that, of a growing pain in my joints. Every tendon, every bone wailed in protest at what it had been put through during my escape.

Yes—I had escaped that dreadful tunnel! The realization hit me at last. I could still feel the eerie tentacle sliding over my ankle. I was grateful to have eluded that thing, whatever it was.

But then, where was I now?

There was no breeze. But there was smell. The odor I had caught a whiff of in the tunnel was everywhere. I couldn’t recall where I had encountered it before. Nevertheless, this place was dead quiet. Not a sound anywhere.

I needed to find my flashlight. I carefully searched the ground where I had fallen. On all fours, in a widening circle. The earth was moist. I was scared that I might touch something creepy in the dark, but there was nothing, not even a pebble. Just ground so perfectly flat it must have been leveled by human hands.

After a long search, I finally found the flashlight lying about three feet from where I had landed. The moment my hand touched its plastic casing was one of the happiest of my life.

But I didn’t switch it on right away. Instead, I closed my eyes and took a number of deep breaths. As if I were patiently unraveling a stubborn knot. My breathing slowed. My heartbeat did, too, and my muscles began to return to normal. I slowly exhaled the last deep breath and switched on the flashlight. Its yellow light raced through the darkness. But I couldn’t look yet. My eyes had grown too used to the dark—the tiniest light made my head split with pain.

I shielded my eyes with one hand until I could open my fingers enough to peer through the cracks. From what I could see, I had landed on the floor of a circular-shaped room. A room of modest size, with walls of stone. I shone the flashlight above my head. The room had a ceiling. No, not exactly that. Something more like a lid. No light seeped through.

I realized where I was: in the pit in the woods, behind the little shrine. I had crawled into the tunnel in Donna Anna’s cave and tumbled out onto the floor of this stone chamber. I was in a real pit in the real world. I had no idea how that could have happened. But it had. I was back at the beginning, so to speak. But why was there no light? The lid was made of wooden boards. There were cracks between those boards, through which some light should enter. Yet none did.

I was stumped.

At least I knew where I was. The smell was a dead giveaway. Why had it taken me so long to figure out? I carefully examined my surroundings with my flashlight. The metal ladder that should have been standing there was gone. Someone must have pulled it out and carted it off. Which meant there was no means of escape.

What I found strange—it should have been strange, I guess—was that I could find no trace of the opening, no matter how hard I looked. I had exited the narrow tunnel and fallen onto the floor of this pit. Like a newborn baby pushed out in midair. Yet I couldn’t find the aperture. It was as if it had closed after it spit me out.

Eventually, the flashlight’s beam illuminated an object on the ground. Something I recognized. It was the old bell the Commendatore had rung—hearing it had led me to discover the pit. Everything had begun with this bell. I had left it on the shelf in the studio—then at some point it had vanished. I picked it up and examined it under the flashlight. It had an old wooden handle. There could be no doubt—it was that bell .

I stared at it for some time, trying to understand. Had someone brought it back? Had it returned under its own power? The Commendatore had told me the bell belonged to the pit. What did that mean—belonged to the pit? But I was too tired to figure out the principles that might explain what was taking place. And there was no pillar of logic I could lean on.

I sat down, back against the stone wall, and switched off the flashlight. I had to figure out how to escape from this pit. I didn’t need light for that. And it was important to conserve the batteries.

So what should I do now?

Anumber of things made no sense. Most troubling of all was the total absence of light. Someone had sealed the pit’s opening. But who would do such a thing, and why?

I prayed that someone (whoever it was) hadn’t piled boulders on top of the lid, returning it to how it had been in the beginning. That would mean my chances of getting out were practically zero.

A thought struck me—I clicked on the flashlight and checked my watch. It read 4:32. The second hand was circling the face, doing its job. Time was passing, no doubt about it. At least I was back where time flowed at a set pace, and in a single direction.

Yet what was time, when you got right down to it? We measured its passage with the hands of a clock for convenience’s sake. But was that appropriate? Did time really flow in such a steady and linear way? Couldn’t this be a mistaken way of thinking, an error of major proportions?

I clicked off the flashlight and, with a long sigh, returned to absolute darkness. Enough pondering time. Enough pondering space. Thinking about stuff like that led nowhere. It only added to my stress. I had to think about things that were concrete, things I could see and touch.

So I thought about Yuzu. She was certainly something I could see with my eyes and touch with my hands (if I was ever given that opportunity again). Now she was pregnant. This coming January, the child—not my child, but that of some other man—would be born. That situation continued without my involvement, in a place far removed from me. A new life with which I had no connection would enter this world. Yuzu had asked nothing of me. So why was she refusing to marry the father? I couldn’t figure it out. If she planned to be a single mother, odds were she’d have to quit her job at the architectural firm. I doubted that a small business like that could extend a lengthy maternity leave to a new mother.

I could find no convincing answers to these questions, though I tried. I was stumped. And the darkness made me feel even more powerless.

If I ever got out of this pit, I would put aside my hesitations and go see Yuzu. No question about it, I was hurt when she left me for someone else. It angered me, too (although it took me a very long time to realize that). But why carry around my resentments for the rest of my life? I would go meet her and we could talk things out. I needed to know, from Yuzu herself, what she was thinking, and what she wanted. Before it was too late. Once I made that decision, I felt a little easier. If she wanted to be friends, well, maybe I could give it a shot. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, at least. Perhaps we could resolve things that way. If I managed to get out of the pit, that is.

After this I fell asleep. I had shed my leather jacket before entering the tunnel (what fate lay in store for that jacket of mine?), and the cold was starting to get to me. The thin sweater I had on over my T-shirt had been so shredded by the walls of the tunnel that it was a sweater in name only. Moreover, I had returned to the real world from the Land of Metaphor. In other words, I was back where time and temperature played their proper roles. Yet my need for sleep won out. I drifted off, sitting there on the ground, leaning against the hard stone wall. It was a pure sleep, free of dream or deception. A solitary sleep beyond anyone’s reach, like the Spanish gold resting on the floor of the Irish Sea.

It was still pitch black when I woke up. I couldn’t see my finger when I waved it in front of my face. The darkness blotted out the line between sleep and wakefulness as well. Where did one end and the other begin, and which side was I on? I dragged out my bag of memories and began flipping through them, as if counting a stack of gold coins: the black cat that had been our pet; my old Peugeot 205; Menshiki’s white mansion; the record Der Rosenkavalier; the plastic penguin. I was able to call up memories of each, in great detail. My mind was working okay—the Double Metaphor hadn’t devoured it. It’s just that I had been in total darkness for so long that I was having trouble drawing a line between the world of sleep and the waking world.