NEW YORK MIINING DISASTER
By MURAKAMI Haruki
Translated by Philip Gabriel
They blew out their lamps to save on air, and darkness surrounded them. No one spoke. All they could hear in the dark was the sound of water dripping from the ceiling every five seconds.
“O.K., everybody, try not to breathe so much. We don’t have enough air left,” an old miner said. He held his voice to a whisper, but even so the wooden beams on the ceiling of the tunnel creaked faintly. In the dark, the miners huddled together, straining to hear one sound. The sound of pickaxes. The sound of life.
They waited for hours. Reality began to melt away in the darkness. Everything began to feel as if it were happening a long time ago, in a world far away. Or was it happening in the future, in a different far-off world?
Outside, people were digging a hole, trying to reach them. It was like a scene from a movie.
A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there’s a typhoon. He’s been doing this for ten years. At a time when most people are closing their storm shutters or running our to stock up on mineral water or checking to see if their radios and flashlights are working, my friend wraps himself in an army-surplus poncho from the Vietnam War, stuffs a couple of cans of beer into his pockets, and sets off. He lives about a fifteen-minute walk away.
If he’s unlucky, the zoo is closed, “owing to inclement weather,” and its gates are locked. When this happens, my friend sits down on the stone statue of a squirrel next to the entrance, drinks his lukewarm beer, and then heads back home.
But when he makes it there in time he pays the entrance fee, lights a soggy cigarette, and surveys the animals, one by one. Most of them have retreated their shelters. Some stare blankly at the rain. Others are more animated, jumping around in the gale-force winds.
Some are frightened by the sudden drop in barometric pressure; others turn vicious.
My friend makes a point of drinking his first beer in front of the Bengal tiger cage. (Bengal tigers always react the most violently to storms.) He drinks his second one outside the gorilla cage. Most of the time the gorillas aren’t the least bit disturbed by the typhoon. They stare at him calmly as he sits like a mermaid on the concrete floor sipping his beer, and you’d swear they actually felt sorry for him.
“It’s like being in an elevator when it breaks down and you’re trapped inside with strangers,” my friend tells me.
Typhoons aside, my friend’s no different from anyone else. He works for an export company, managing foreign investments. It’s not one of the better firms, but it does well enough. He lives alone in a neat little apartment and gets a new girlfriend every six months. Why he insists on having a new one every six months (and it’s always exactly six months) I’ll never understand. The girls all look the same, as if they were perfect clones of one another. I can’t tell them apart.
My friend owns a nice used car, the collected works of Balzac, and a black suit, a black tie, and black shoes that are perfect for attending funerals. Every time someone dies, I call him and ask if I can borrow them, even though the suit and the shoes are one size too big for me.
“Sorry to bother you again,” I said the last time I called. “Another funeral’s come up.
“Help yourself. You must be in a hurry,” he answered. “Why don’t you come over right away?”
When I arrived, the suit and tie were laid out on the table, neatly pressed, the shoes were polished, and the fridge was full of cold imported beer. That’s the kind of guy he is.
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