The Elephant Vanishes

I’m the one to blame, and I’m also the one to forgive.

Simultaneity, if ever there was such a thing: Here I had me thinking, and here I had me observing myself think. Time ticked on in impossibly minute polyrhythms.

A person can’t exist without morals. I wouldn’t doubt if morals weren’t the very balance to my simultaneity.

“I’m not judging anything. They’re waiting to be burned. I’m simply obliging. You get it? I’m just taking on what’s there. Just like the rain. The rain falls. Streams swell. Things get swept along. Does the rain judge anything?

“This might be a strange way to put it,” he took off again, spreading both hands, then bringing them slowly together before his eyes. “But there’s a lot of barns in this world, and I’ve got this feeling that they’re all just waiting to be burned. Barns built way off by the seaside, barns built in the middle of rice fields … well, anyway, all kinds of barns. But nothing that fifteen minutes wouldn’t burn down, nice and neat. It’s like that’s why they were put there from the very beginning. No grief to anyone. They just… vanish. One, two, poof!”

And the way I see it, with novelists, before even passing judgment on something, aren’t they the kind who are supposed to appreciate its form?

“Who knows? You burn barns. I don’t burn barns. There’s this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I’d like to clear up just what that difference is. Anyway, it was you who brought up this barn thing to begin with.”

A pleasant day, bright and clear, it found me idly gazing at the camphor tree outside and enjoying the new autumn apples. I must have eaten a good seven of them that day—it was either a pathological craving or some kind of premonition.

“Oh, this is nothing. Talent’s not involved. It’s not a question of making yourself believe there is an orange there, you have to forget there isn’t one. That’s all.”

The yard with the stone bird figurine.