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Air Chrysalis
. Tengo was in the process of writing a longer and more complicated
story about that same world—and about himself. The fact that the setting was the
same might later prove to be a problem, but for now, his overwhelming desire was to
write a story about a world with two moons. Any problems that came up later he
would deal with then.
“In other words,” she said, “if there are two moons up there when night comes and
you look at the sky, you can tell, ‘Aha! This is the world that isn’t here!’ ”
“Right, that’s the sign.”
“Do the two moons ever overlap or anything?” she asked.
Tengo shook his head. “I don’t know why, but the distance between the two moons
always stays the same.”
His girlfriend thought about that world for a while. Her finger traced some kind of
diagram on Tengo’s bare chest.
“Hey, Tengo, do you know the difference between the English words ‘lunatic’ and
‘insane’?” she asked.
“They’re both adjectives describing mental abnormality. I’m not quite sure how
they differ.”
“ ‘Insane’ probably means to have an innate mental problem, something that calls
for professional treatment, while ‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily
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seized by the
luna
, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you
were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be
reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the
person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like
that actually existed. In other words, the fact that the moon can drive people crazy
was actually recognized in law.”
“How do you know stuff like that?” Tengo asked, amazed.
“It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to you. I’ve been living ten years
longer than you, so I ought to know a lot more than you do.”
Tengo had to admit that she was right.
“As a matter of fact, I learned it in an English literature course at Japan Women’s
University, in a lecture on Dickens. We had an odd professor. He’d never talk about
the story itself but go off on all sorts of tangents. But all I wanted to say to you was
that one moon is enough to drive people crazy, so if you had two moons hanging in
the sky, it would probably just make them that much crazier. The tides would be
thrown off, and more women would have irregular periods. I bet all kinds of funny
stuff would happen.”
“You may be right,” Tengo said, after giving it some thought.
“Is that what happens in the world you’re writing about? Do people go crazy all
the time?”
“No, not really. They do pretty much the same things we do in this world.”
She squeezed Tengo’s penis softly. “So in the world that isn’t here, people do
pretty much the same things as those of us who are in this world. If that’s the case,
then, what’s the point of its being a world that isn’t here?”
“The point of its being a world that isn’t here is in being able to rewrite the past of
the world that is here,” Tengo said.
“So you can rewrite the past any way you like, as much as you like?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you want to rewrite the past?”
“Don’t
you
want to rewrite the past?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or
history or whatever. What I’d like to rewrite is the present, here and now.”
“But if you rewrote the past, obviously, the present would change, too. What we
call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”
She released another deep sigh. Then, as if testing the operation of an elevator, she
raised and lowered the hand on which Tengo’s penis lay. “I can only say one thing.
You used to be a math prodigy and a judo belt holder and you’re even writing a long
novel. In spite of all that, you don’t understand
anything at all
about this world. Not
one thing.”
Tengo felt no particular shock at this sweeping judgment. These days, not
understanding anything had more or less become the normal state of affairs for him.
This was not a new discovery.
“It doesn’t matter, though, even if you don’t understand anything,” his older
girlfriend said, turning to press her breasts against him. “You’re a dreaming math
teacher who keeps writing his long novel day after day, and I want you to stay just
like that. I love your wonderful penis—the shape, the size, the feel. I love it when it’s
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hard and when it’s soft, when you’re sick and when you’re well. And for the time
being, at least, it belongs only to me. It does, doesn’t it?”
“That is correct,” Tengo assured her.
“I
have
told you that I’m a terribly jealous person, haven’t I?”
“You certainly have—jealous beyond reason.”
“All reason. I’ve been very consistent that way for many years now.” She slowly
began moving her fingers in three dimensions. “I’ll get you hard again right away.
You wouldn’t have any objection to that, would you?”
Tengo said that he would have no objection.
“What are you thinking about now?”
“You as a student, listening to a lecture at Japan Women’s University.”
“The text was
Martin Chuzzlewit
. I was eighteen and wearing a cute pleated dress.
My hair was in a ponytail. I was a
very
serious student, and still a virgin. I feel like
I’m talking about something from an earlier life. Anyhow, the difference between
‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’ was the first bit of knowledge I ever learned at the university.
What do you think? Does it get you excited to imagine that?”
“Of course it does,” he said, closing his eyes, imagining her pleated dress and her
ponytail. A very serious student, a virgin. But jealous beyond all reason. The moon
illuminating Dickens’s London. The insane people and the lunatics wandering around
London. They wore similar hats and similar beards. How was it possible to
distinguish one from the other? With his eyes closed, Tengo could not be sure which
world he now belonged to.
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