but which he had now forgotten, each had from the start shown a complete lack of interest in the minutiae of the other’s life, a life that was after all unrelated to their own and could be called absolute and unvarying—in that, at least, Yang could feel confident in his own memory—yet none of this was to suggest that they were indifferent to one another. It was just that the Mira Yang had known, Mira as she had been back then, had never once thrown that expression “entire life” at him. To Mira—or indeed, he thought, to anyone else—Yang was not someone who warranted deploying such a term. Back then, Mira had never even written “my life,” or mentioned plain “life” in casual conversation, where its appearance would have gone unnoticed. Not only would such expressions, which comprehend time and human beings as a single, indivisible whole, have been inappropriate for Mira as an individual living a present of innumerable dimensions, they were also—and this Yang found especially unpardonable—utterly unoriginal. He read Mira’s letter several times, it not being overly long; those ostentatious expressions—my entire life, and eternal ruin, sticking their heads arrogantly and impatiently out from in between the otherwise well-behaved sentences—meant that any kind of future connection they might have could only take the form of Yang’s plunging into Mira’s world and attending closely to its atmosphere of ruin, and so, shackled by an awkwardness and discomfort as though that high-handed and inconsiderate expression were a pair of handcuffs, there was nothing to do but write an equivocal reply, one that would avoid both definite consent and outright refusal.
Yang was lying supine by the lake. The water was surprisingly warm, given the cold wind, and in fact the heat was sufficient for the grass to give off a strange and sickening scent. The sun kept poking out from between the clouds, and as long as he stayed wrapped in his towel he wasn’t bothered by any chill. The lake didn’t have many swimmers that year, perhaps because the summer hadn’t been as warm as usual. A handful of wild ducks were huddled unmoving not far from Yang, so as an experiment he tried tossing them the breadcrumbs left over from his lunch, but this didn’t seem to interest them in the slightest, as though having to move for the sake of mere crumbs was too much hassle to even contemplate. Now and then there was a decent gust of wind, each one ruffling the ducks’ long feathers so that their round bodies appeared even plumper, while the down on the backs of their bowed necks was swept briefly flat, gleaming like a pale gray blanket. Yang wanted to stay where he was for as long as possible. Hoping that his skin and general constitution would withstand the chill of the wind, he closed his eyes. The feeling of his whole body, from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, being as light as the down on the ducks’ necks, and thus being whisked away by the wind, that was it, as though in a dream—a dream, that is, of flying low and languid over the earth, sighing quietly at the sight that lies below, the seclusion of flat fields stretching on and on, low houses, people and their bicycles, looking friendly as toys—he struggled to keep that feeling. All the while, as though in a dream, he was taking care to regulate his breathing and not suddenly plummet down to earth, or lose the calm control of his orbit and go spinning away into the empty air like a baseball struck by a bat, governed only by centrifugal force. He was flying, and at the same time was sinking in a measure of fear and anonymous sadness—which was muted and mild enough to be enjoyable, and he felt the urge to shed actual tears. Tears warm as the gentle heat of an autumn evening, harmless as spiderwebs floating quietly in the November breeze. He tried to make the tears well up by calling to mind some concrete sadness, but it didn’t work. He dredged up several lines of poetry: “Today, only today I am beautiful / Tomorrow all disappears / Death, death approaches.” These lines had always seemed to him both beautiful and sad, but even they could not cause the tears to flow. Even while regretting this, the original sad-yet-tranquil feeling persisted. Of all the sadnesses he knew, the early morning kind when you’ve only just woken up, the kind against which there is no defense, for which you’re never prepared, was the most poetic. Mornings when birds cried outside his window, the inside of his mouth was washed with salty tears, the distant drone of traffic sounded as though it had just started up, the street below echoed with the soft footsteps of people heading out early to work, a dog groaned in the kitchen, and none of it, not the leaves or sunlight or wind or the flowers on the balcony, was the least bit different from the day before; curled up in bed, he would often be gripped by a sadness so irremediable that only the day before it had threatened to make his heart judder to a stop; he would sleep for so long that he forgot it, and would forget even himself, as fully as paper dissolved in water, and would feel that kind of obscure sadness that seemed to have flowed far away on the river of oblivion, still further away, finally to be washed up here. The moment he opened his eyes, though the already-forgotten dream had given him an intimation of sadness, this was now, in his waking state, only a hypothetical sadness that could not be approached even through the contours of memory. Sadness and tranquility, which belonged to and yet were indifferent to him. In this state of willed torpor, Yang waited for evening.
Some time later, Yang opened his eyes to find a young man and woman lying down near his own spot, side by side. Their bodies were fully stretched out, and they were both extremely tall. Shockingly tall, in fact. Close to 190 centimeters, Yang estimated, or perhaps even more. Even sunbathing, the two of them hadn’t removed their black, thick-framed glasses—for myopia, not the sun—and the parts of their bodies that weren’t covered by their swimsuits looked firm yet sleek, such a vast pale expanse it was almost inhuman; the woman’s legs were unshaven, so the splayed pattern of wet brown hairs clinging to her pale skin, plus the goose bumps on her thighs, was conspicuous. Yang had always liked tall people. Though of course, he didn’t know how they thought of him from their perspective. And so, these tall people having taken his fancy, Yang wanted to look at them for as long as possible within the bounds of propriety. Aside from the issue of their height, their physical bodies harbored a factor that Yang had never before encountered in reality, a factor that could probably be called literary particularity. Because it felt as though those two bodies lying side by side were addressing him with incomprehensible words, like speech formed of some alien language. Like a song thrown together in dialect, like a wordless question, like a braying donkey. But at the same time, and despite the fact that, at least superficially, they made no gestures to indicate particular boundaries, their posture and facial expressions as they lay there with their eyes closed revealed a strong, primitive, animalistic awareness of their own borders, and an equally strong desire to safeguard these from seepage, to the extent that, for example, if they were to appear at a party holding hands, no one around them would dare approach as they crossed the threshold, their bodies formed one discrete region, solid and impermeable. They could not be called skinny, but it was true that their figures were spare, extremely ascetic. In the man’s case, each time he took a breath the scaffolding of his ribs was clearly outlined, and those long, strong frames were ever so elegant, yet it was as though they were being borne on the currents of a strange and ineluctable fate. They looked like they might be brother and sister; more than in any similarity of facial features, the resemblance lay in their attitude and bearing, their movements and self-made mentality. The language of such acquired, a posteriori flesh made them seem like twins, closer even than brother and sister. Flesh of familiarity and homogeneity, shared exclusivity and extreme bashfulness. The transparent black-framed glasses, the woman’s dully gleaming swimsuit, its thick black fabric patterned with water droplets, hair cut short as a duck’s feathers, slightly protruding jaw, navel concealed neatly with both hands; large, flat hands that seemed to be clutching something wallet-sized, and long toes curled together in a way that looked both stubborn and shy. Reckoned in terms of sensitivity, the man was superior. He had both eyes closed behind his glasses and each time the light undulated his eyelids trembled perceptibly, their speed in precise proportion to the degree of that undulation. Though he was lying down undressed and with his eyes closed, he resembled “man thinking about anxiety” more than “man sleeping.” Alongside the habitual, though very slight, forward thrust of his jaw, the look on his face was one of surprise. It seemed a private indication of his having come face to face with some abstract surprise that can be discovered only with one’s eyes closed. As for the woman, she opened her eyes now and then to examine the situation with respect to the sunshine and her own body. She shifted her body a little at a time, stretching out both legs but taking care that her feet didn’t touch the sand if it could possibly be avoided. In spite of the fact that the beach towels they had brought with them were extremely large, larger than Yang had ever before
