"I was there then."

"Blowing up bridges?"

"Yes, I was there, blowing up bridges."

"Metaphorically."

"Of course."

You hold her in your arms, draw her close, kiss her. You can feel the strength deserting her body.

"We're all dreaming, aren't we?" she says.

All of us are dreaming.

"Why did you have to die?"

"I couldn't help it," you reply.

Together you walk along the beach back to the library. You turn off the light in your room, draw the curtains, and without another word climb into bed and make love. Pretty much the same sort of lovemaking as the night before. But with two differences. After sex, she starts to cry. That's one. She buries her face in the pillow and silently weeps. You don't know what to do. You gently lay a hand on her bare shoulder. You know you should say something, but don't have any idea what. Words have all died in the hollow of time, piling up soundlessly at the dark bottom of a volcanic lake. And this time as she leaves you can hear the engine of her car. That's number two. She starts the engine, turns it off for a time, like she's thinking about something, then turns the key again and drives out of the parking lot. That blank, silent interval between leaves you sad, so terribly sad. Like fog from the sea, that blankness wends its way into your heart and remains there for a long, long time. Finally it's a part of you.

She leaves behind a damp pillow, wet with her tears. You touch the warmth with your hand and watch the sky outside gradually lighten. Far away a crow caws. The Earth slowly keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams. And everyone's living in them.

Chapter 32

When Nakata woke up at five a. m. he saw the big stone right next to his pillow. Hoshino was still sound asleep on the futon next to his, mouth half open, hair sticking every which way, Chunichi Dragons cap tossed beside him. His sleeping face had a determined no-matter-what-don't-dare-wake-me-up look to it.

Nakata wasn't particularly surprised to find the stone there. His mind adapted immediately to the new reality, accepted it, didn't question why it happened to be there. Figuring out cause and effect was never his strong suit.

He sat down formally beside his bed, legs tucked neatly under him, and spent some quality time with the stone, gazing intently at it. Finally he reached out and, like he was stroking a large, sleeping cat, touched it. At first gingerly, with only his fingertips, and when that seemed safe he ran his entire hand carefully over the whole surface. All the while he rubbed it, he was thinking-or at least had the pensive look of someone thinking. As if reading a map, he ran his hand over every part of the stone, memorizing every bump and cranny, getting a solid sense of it. Then he suddenly reached up and rubbed his short hair, searching, perhaps, for the correlation between the stone and his own head.

Finally he gave what might have been a sigh, stood up, opened the window, and stuck his face out. All that was visible was the rear of the building next door. A shabby, miserable sort of building. The kind where shabby people spend one shabby day after another doing their shabby work. The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing. The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set afloat in the sky. Regardless, it was going to rain soon. Nakata looked down and spied a skinny black cat, tail alert, patrolling the top of a narrow wall between the two buildings. "There's going to be lightning today," he called out. But the cat didn't appear to hear him, didn't even turn around, just continued its languid walk and disappeared in the shadows of the building.

Nakata set off down the hall, plastic bag with toilet kit inside in hand, to the communal sinks. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and shaved with a safety razor. Each operation took time. He carefully washed his face, taking his time, carefully brushed his teeth, taking his time, carefully shaved, taking his time. He trimmed his nose hairs with a pair of scissors, straightened up his eyebrows, cleaned out his ears. He was the type who took his time no matter what he did, but this morning he took everything at an even slower pace than usual. No one else was up washing his face at this early hour, and it was still a while before breakfast was ready. Hoshino didn't look like he'd be getting up anytime soon. With the whole place to himself, Nakata looked in the mirror, leisurely preparing for the day, and pictured the faces of all the cats he'd seen in the book in the library two days before. Unable to read, he didn't know the names of the cats, but a clear picture of each and every cat's face was etched in his memory.

"There really are a lot of cats in the world, that's for sure," he said as he cleaned out his ears with a Q-tip. His first-ever visit to a library had made him painfully aware of how little he knew. The amount of things he didn't know about the world was infinite. The infinite, by definition, has no limits, and thinking about it gave him a mild migraine. He gave up and turned his thoughts back to Cats of the World. How nice it would be, he thought, to be able to talk with each and every cat in there. There must be all kinds of cats in the world, all with different ways of thinking and talking. Would foreign cats speak in foreign languages? he wondered. But this was another difficult subject, and again his head began to throb.

After washing up, he went to the toilet and took care of business as usual. This didn't take as long as his other ablutions. Finished, he took his plastic bag with the toilet kit inside back to the room. Hoshino was sound asleep, exactly as he'd left him. Nakata picked up the discarded aloha shirt and jeans, folding them up neatly. He set them down on top of each other next to Hoshino's futon, adding the Chunichi Dragons baseball cap on top like a summary title given to a motley collection of ideas. He took off his yukata robe and put on his usual trousers and shirt, then rubbed his hands together and took a deep breath.

He sat down again in front of the stone, gazing at it for a while before hesitantly reaching out to touch it. "There's going to be thunder today," he pronounced to no one in particular. He may have been addressing the stone. He punctuated this with a couple of nods.

Nakata was over next to the window, running through an exercise routine, when Hoshino finally woke up. Humming the radio exercise music quietly to himself, Nakata moved in time to the tune.

Hoshino squinted at his watch. It was just after eight. He craned his neck to make sure the stone was where he'd put it. In the light the stone looked much bigger and rougher than he'd remembered. "So I wasn't dreaming after all," he said.

"I'm sorry-what did you say?" Nakata asked.

"The stone," Hoshino said. "The stone's right there. It wasn't a dream."

"We have the stone," Nakata said simply, still in the midst of his exercises, making it sound like some central proposition of nineteenth-century German philosophy.

"It's a long story, though, Gramps, about how the stone got to be there."

"Yes, Nakata thought that might be the case."

"Anyway," Hoshino said, sitting up in bed and sighing deeply. "It doesn't matter. The important thing is it's here. To make a long story short."

"We have the stone," Nakata repeated. "That's what matters."

Hoshino was about to respond but suddenly noticed how famished he was. "Hey, what d'ya say we grab some breakfast?"

"Nakata's quite hungry."