Zoo Read online

  But that young man did not stab me. I grabbed his hand, the one with the knife, and pulled it to my own chest. All he would have had to do was put a little force into it, stick it in a little, and it would have been all over. Instead, he started to shake and apologize. The other members of his gang turned pale. Then the police came, and they all ran away. I called out to them, “Wait for me! Take me with you!”

  Some filthy old bag had called the police. She happened to see the whole thing as they surrounded me on the street. She was a tiny little thing and cowered behind the policeman. She was kind of shabby-looking, and from what she was wearing and what she had on her feet, you wouldn’t think she was a modern-day Japanese citizen at all. I bet she was poor and had no money. I bet she slept in a tunnel that reeked of piss and shit. The wrinkles in her face were filled with grime. Her hair was filthy. Around her neck hung something that looked like a wooden board. At first I thought it was an advertisement for a pachinko parlor, but I was wrong.

  It was a wet piece of wood she must have picked up from the garbage dump or someplace. In simple block letters it read, “Have you seen this man?” Under these words was a photograph of a young man. Compared with the photograph of my girlfriend I was holding, it was almost unbelievably old. She told me her only son had gone missing twenty years ago and now she was standing on street corners looking for him. She stroked the tattered old photograph and mumbled something in an almost indecipherable accent. The picture, apparently, was the only tangible thing she had of her son. She was at her wit’s end.

  I knelt at the feet of that old woman. I lay down flat out in front of her and rubbed my face in the dirt. I could not stop crying. The old woman and the police officer beside her tried to console me, but all I could do was shake my head from side to side.

  3

  My girlfriend and I had a huge fight in an abandoned mountain cabin. She was an impulsive sort of person. That’s why we went to the zoo that one day. She saw a road sign and made a snap decision. Similarly, on the day of our fight, we spotted a side road in the foothills. “Let’s see where this goes,” she piped up. I think she just suddenly wanted to see what was down that road. Being impulsive was one of the things I really liked about her.

  After driving for a period we spotted the cabin. The word cabin isn’t exactly correct. It really looked more like a pile of old boards. We stopped the car and went in.

  The place smelled of mold. We both glanced up at the ceiling—it looked like it was about to crash down on us. I took her picture with a Polaroid camera. Ever since our visit to the zoo, I had developed quite a fondness for photography.

  She made a funny face when the camera’s flash flared. “It’s too bright,” she said bluntly. She grabbed the photo from the camera and crumpled it into a ball. That really upset me. Then she said I should forget all about her. What do you mean, I asked, and she said a whole lot of other hurtful things. She was telling me she didn’t love me anymore.

  That was the day when, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, she became a missing person. The reason was obvious. She never emerged from that mountain cabin. That day, she confessed that she had never told anyone we were dating. And now in hindsight I believe her. If she had told her family, her friends, or her coworkers about me, the police would surely have suspected me of murder. And had they asked, I would have confessed. The only call I ever got was from her mother who asked if I knew her daughter. Over the phone I got the sense that she didn’t love her daughter very much. She wasn’t too worried about her sudden disappearance either.

  I was on the verge of confessing to the mother, but the words that came out were different from the ones I was thinking. “What’s that? Missing you say? Have you contacted the police? Wait there, I’ll come right over.” That was the start of my long, meaningless theater performance.

  I went to her house and filled out a form for the police. I played the part of a concerned acquaintance. I created a fake self, one who desperately wanted to track her down, one who was going crazy at the thought that she might be dead.

  4

  One day, after I had been wandering around town with my ex-girlfriend’s photograph, I returned to my car in the parking lot. The day was ending and as the sun sank lower, I looked up at the buildings surrounding me. They cast dark shadows on the ground below.

  “Another day finished and nothing to show for it,” I grumbled to myself. Every false breath that came from my mouth turned to white mist in the chilly winter air. From the pocket of my tattered coat I took out her photograph and stared at it. I had a cut on my finger and my skin was stiff from the cold, but I gently stroked the image of her face.

  My car was the only one in the whole parking lot. My shadow stretched behind me on the concrete surface.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to get that guy . . .”

  My entire body was exhausted from walking around. I felt like I would topple right over. I opened the car door and sat down behind the wheel. It was then that I noticed something that had fallen under the passenger seat.

  “What’s this?”

  It was a piece of paper, crumpled up in a ball. I picked it up. It was a photograph. I flattened it out to see what it was.

  “What the . . . ?” It was her. She looked a little grumpy, but cute nonetheless. Behind her was a ramshackle wall of wooden boards. In the lower right corner was a date.

  “What the . . . ?! This was the day she disappeared!” I put on my best puzzled act. This was the very photograph she had gotten angry about and crumpled up that day.

  “What the hell is this picture doing in my car? This is too weird. I can’t understand it. The criminal must have planted it here. I can’t think of any other way . . .”

  I opened the glove compartment to put the photo away. There amidst the car registration and manual was a suspicious scrap of paper.

  “What’s this now?”

  A gas station receipt.

  “The date . . . also from the day she disappeared! It has the gas station’s address! Such lunacy! I never went there that day. I was at home all day . . . Maybe . . .”

  My suspicions were leading to an important conclusion. Or at least so I pretended.

  “Whoever it was must have used this car to kidnap her! That’s it! That’s how the criminal managed to entice her. She saw this car and mistakenly believed it was me. She had no fear!”

  I turned the key in the ignition and drove away. I knew right where I had to go: the gas station whose address was on the receipt.

  “The attendant may have noticed who was driving this car that day! But I wonder if they’ll remember. I wonder.”

  Mumbling to myself, I started the car and headed for the country. Along the sides of the road stood old-fashioned farm houses and untended fields. The sinking sun was red, and its light hit me through the windshield.

  It was dark when I finally arrived at the gas station. A middle-aged man approached my car. He was wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit and was wiping his greasy hands with a rag. I rolled down my window, showed him the photo of my girlfriend, and asked him some questions.

  “Hey, buddy, have a look at this photo, would you?”

  He looked annoyed as he answered.

  “Oh yeah, her. She came in a long time ago. Said she was heading west.”

  “West? What kind of car was she in?

  “Who’re you kidding? She was in the car you’re driving right now.”

  “I knew it!”

  “And you were the one driving. Are we done here? Have we finished the script? I can’t believe you still do this every day. Aren’t you tired of it yet? How many months now have you been playing this game with me? But of course, you’re the customer, so I can’t refuse to play along.”

  “Don’t B.S. me. You say I was driving? That’s a load of crap.”

  I was shocked, or so I pretended.

  “You mean, on that day, the car she was in? I was driving?”

  He made a gesture as if to dismiss me. I stepped on the gas and drove west.

  “Shit! I have no idea what’s going on anymore!”

  I pounded my hand on the steering wheel.

  “That guy at the gas station says I was driving . . . But that day I was at home all day! What is going on here?! What is fact, and what is fantasy?!”

  That was the instant I started to have doubts about myself. My conversation with the gas station mechanic shook me up. I told myself to get a grip. I had to be prepared for what was to come.

  At some point the surrounding countryside turned into a thick forest with tree branches intertwined on both sides of the road. My headlights caught sight of a seldom-traveled side road. I braked hard.

  “I’ve seen this place before, especially this view. But that’s stupid. There’s no reason to think that.”

  I turned the steering wheel and entered the side road. It was just wide enough for a single car. After a while the road opened into a clearing. My headlights illuminated the darkness and I could see an old wooden cabin in front of me.

  “I know this place . . . I . . .”

  I got out of the driver’s seat and looked around. There was no one there. The air in the forest was cold and still. From the trunk I grabbed a pocket flashlight and approached the crumbling shack. I opened the door and went in.

  It smelled of mold. With each breath I took I felt like something dangerous was invading my lungs. The circle of light from the flashlight lit the inside of the small cabin. The first thing I noticed was a tripod and a camera. It was a Polaroid camera.

  The floor of the cabin was bare earth, and a hole was dug in it. The lens of the camera pointed toward the black gap. I moved closer. It seemed filled with blackness like water. I tipped my flashlight downward and the light shone into the hol
e.

  I saw it.

  I fell to my knees.

  “Now I remember. How could I . . .”

  I continued my act. This was a one-man show. I was the actor. I was the audience.

  “I killed her . . .”

  I burst into tears. They streamed down my cheeks and fell on the parched earth. In the hole beside me, there she lay. She was completely decayed, desiccated, nothing to interest the bugs anymore. There she was, shrunken, small.

  “I . . . I . . . her. I must have sealed away the memory . . .”

  I had thought out all these lines. The truth is I had forgotten nothing. I remembered everything. But this was the plot of the play I was trapped in.

  “All this time I’ve been tracking down the criminal who killed her. But I am that criminal . . . She said things to me that made me crazy and I burst into a fit of rage . . .” I moaned and screamed. My voice echoed in the hut, where there was no one else but me.

  The flashlight was the only light in the room.

  I pushed my hands against the cold ground and stood up. My entire body creaked from fatigue. I went up to the edge of the hole and looked down at her. Deep in the hole, no longer human, she lay covered in sand and dust, half-buried in the earth.

  “I have to tell the police . . . I have to turn myself in . . .” I mumbled to myself as I made up my mind. This too was just part of the script, but it was also what I truly believed in my heart of hearts. From the depths of my soul, that was what I wanted.

  “Do I have the courage to do this?”

  My fists were shaking. I was asking and answering my own questions.

  “Am I ready for this?”

  But no matter what, I had to do it. I could not allow myself to run away from the fact that I had committed the crime of killing another person. The fact was, I had murdered someone I loved, and I had to accept the consequences.

  “This is a problem . . . To admit this is . . . hard.”

  I shook my head, grew discouraged, and shed more tears. How would I be able to turn myself in? How would I be able to confess?

  “By tomorrow, I will have forgotten how I feel now. I feel like I will have forgotten the truth . . . I will have locked out this memory again, and I will resume my search for the nonexistent criminal . . . I . . .”

  I covered my face with my hands. My shoulders shook. Then I remembered something. Or at least I acted as if I did.

  “That’s right. All I have to do is set myself up! A photograph! If I take a photograph of her I won’t be able to forget what I have done.

  I walked up to the Polaroid camera and pushed the shutter button. In the brief flash, her body seemed to float up out of the darkness. The camera made its little noise as it spit out the photograph.

  “When I look at this picture I will remember my crime. No matter how much I try to turn away from the facts, I won’t be able to deny it. This will show me what I have done . . . I will not be able to get out of paying for this.”

  My voice quavered as I realized what I had to do. I took the photograph and walked back to my car.

  “I have to go to the police . . . I will show them this picture and tell them I killed her . . .”

  I put the flashlight back in the trunk and got in the car. The image in the photo was just starting to develop, and I laid it on the passenger seat. I stepped on the gas.

  I drove through the darkness. The engine throbbed as I pressed my foot on the accelerator. All around me was lonely wasteland. In the headlights the white stripes on the road seemed to float upward. The blackness of the asphalt was surrounded by even more blackness.

  On the passenger seat beside me lay the photo, from which my ex-girlfriend’s decayed body seemed to rise up to keep me company.

  “I will confess. I will go to the police. I will admit my crimes. I will not run away. I must not run away. I was the one who killed her. This cannot be. But this is how it is. These are the facts. I don’t want to admit it. I am not the kind of person who does things like that. I loved her. But I was the one who killed her . . .”

  This was what I kept repeating to myself, in an effort to keep myself focused.

  But I knew. I knew what would happen next. Even as I stuck to the script, I knew I would never go to the police. No, not that I wouldn’t go, I couldn’t go. The truth was, I wanted to go through with it and be free of all this. But I knew I would not be able to carry out my decision.

  This was the pattern I had been repeating every day and every night. Not just this day. This was the play I had been acting out over and over. Around the time the sun began to go down every evening I would discover the photo of her in my car. That is the start of the act about doubting myself. I go to the gas station and I talk to the man there who is helping me act out the scene. Every day I show up at roughly the same time and I repeat the same lines. I go and find the cabin in the forest, I look at her dead body, and I remember what I have done.

  And then I make up my mind to go to the police. This part is still an act, but it’s also what I truly want to do.

  But I never follow through. If I were not so depressed, I would have been in prison long ago living an easier life.

  I pass the gas station where I stopped earlier. The lights are out and it is closed for the night. In a little while I will see a certain sign. When I see the sign my determination will crumble. I know this for sure. Every day, every night, this same scenario. “ZOO. Left turn. 200 meters ahead.”

  That’s what I expect to see. Those three letters in English, written at the bottom of the road sign, branded into my retinas: Z-O-O.

  In that instant, everything about her comes rushing back into my consciousness. We went to a movie together. We went to the zoo. I took her picture. The first time we met. Telling her about growing up in an orphanage. The fact that she rarely smiled, and the first time she smiled for me. All these things come back to me.

  The sign emerges from the darkness and she is sitting beside me in the passenger seat. Not really, of course. But the photograph of her dead body mysteriously takes her form, looks at me, gently reaches out her hand and touches my hair. That’s just the way it is.

  I must be depressed. It’s no good. It can’t be true. It can’t be me who killed her . . . That’s what I will think. A little farther down the road I will stop the car in the middle of the street and cry like a baby. I will go back to my apartment, and I will take the photo from the passenger seat and put it in the mailbox. I will pray that when I wake up tomorrow I will look at this photo and it will inspire me to do the right thing. Otherwise I just hope that the film, now one-twelfth of a second longer, will be the breakthrough I need. I will set the stage for the coming evening by placing the crumpled Polaroid and the gas station receipt back in my vehicle. The show must go on. And that’s the end of it.

  That’s right. In the end, I don’t get it. At the end of the day, I never admit to myself that I killed her. Nothing changes. I am no better than that stupid ugly monkey walking in circles in his cage at the zoo. I will relive the same day over and over again. Forever. Tomorrow I will discover the photo in the mailbox, and once again I will be transfixed. For better or worse that’s just the way it is.

  The car drives through the darkness. The same road I drive every night. How many months have I been doing this now? How many more months like this are in my future? The sign will be coming up soon—the sign that sparks all those memories of her. I grip the steering wheel and wait for the approaching moment.

  “I . . . killed her . . . I . . . her.”

  Mouthing those words, I steel my resolve. In my heart, though, I know it is no use. Still I continue to pray that somehow I can break the cycle. Like believing in God, still in the thrall of revelation, I pray that I can simply pass before the letters Z-O-O.

  In my headlights, the white lines of the road seem to go on without end. Along both sides of the road, the withered grass passes by me at high velocity. It’s coming soon. The sign will appear—the place where my revelation fails me.

  I stop breathing. The car passes the spot. The instant arrives when time itself seems to stop. In the darkness the car seems to be floating through the air, stopped in space. That’s the kind of moment it is.

  I continue driving from sheer momentum and then I stop in the middle of the street. Leaving the key in the ignition, and neglecting to engage the handbrake, I get out of the car. The breeze cools the sweat that covers my entire body. I look back at the overwhelming darkness behind me.