The Tokyo-Montana Express (18 page)

We walked up the second flight of stairs
and just as we reached the top, the light blew out. My heart dropped like a
stone into a cold well.

“Oh, no!” I said, staring in disbelief at
the suddenly, eternally gone light bulb.

My wife had a sympathetic expression on her
face. She was showing empathy because she knew how much that light bulb meant
to me.

I opened the door to my writing room and I
turned the light on in there and she put the daffodil on the desk. I was still
in a state of shock.

She said something which I can’t remember
to try and make me feel better about the bulb burning out. It was as if half of
Times Square had gone out at midnight, a blackout, leaving people in a state of
surprise and shock.

Just after she finished saying that which
was very nice—too bad I have forgotten what it was—there was another flash in
the barn like a small explosion.

Through a window in my writing room that
looks back into the barn where the flash had come from, I could see that the
stairs were dark.

“Oh, no!”

I opened the door and all of Times Square
was gone. The other 200 watt bulb had blown out, too.

“Poor man,” my wife said.

I found the 25 watt bulb that I had retired
in my room and screwed it in at the top of the stairs, just outside the door.

We made our way down the stairs.

There was a dim bulb on the main floor of
the barn that helped provide us with enough light so as not to make it a hazardous
journey.

As we went down, I retrieved the two burnt-out
bulbs.

“You know what I’m going to do with these
bulbs?” I said to my wife, my voice reflecting anger.

“No,” she said, cautiously. She’s Japanese
and sometimes she gets cautious when I make dramatic announcements. She comes
from a different culture. The Japanese do not respond to life the way I do. “What
are you going to do?” she said.

“Take them back to the store and get some
more bulbs.”

“Do you think they’ll accept them?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice rising. “They don’t
work! LIGHT BULBS SHOULD LAST LONGER THAN TEN SECONDS!”

I don’t think she really thought that I was
going to do it. The idea of a store accepting and exchanging burnt-out light
bulbs seemed like a foreign idea to her. I don’t think that was a common
practice in Japan, but right now I didn’t care about Japan. I had been wronged
and I wanted satisfaction.

We were going to town to watch another
basketball game that evening, so I put the bulbs in a paper bag, along with the
receipt for the bulbs and took them into town with me.

After the game, we stopped at the store.

She still didn’t believe that I was going
to try and exchange two burnt-out light bulbs. She thought of a convenient
reason to stay out in the car and I stormed into the store carrying a paper bag
with two burnt-out light bulbs in it.

The store was huge and abandoned because it
was after ten and there was a snowstorm going on in Montana. People were not
interested in shopping at that time and under those conditions, and I think
this was ultimately to my advantage.

There was a middle-aged lady at the
checkout counter. She was just standing there with a dreamy-late-February-night
expression on her face, no customers and not much prospect of getting any.

Then I was standing there with my paper bag
in my hands. I was carrying the bag in such a way as to return her from
wherever she was dreaming to the direct reality of the store and somebody
mysteriously appearing out of a winter storm holding a paper bag dramatically
in his hands.

“Can I help you?” she said automatically,
and probably hoping that I wasn’t some kind of crazed stick-up man with a bomb
in a bag on a winter night.

“These light bulbs,” I said, reaching into
the bag and taking out two light bulbs. “They burned out within a few seconds
after I turned the light on,” I said. I put the bulbs down on the counter. She
stared at them. I don’t think anyone had ever walked out of a snowstorm and put
two burnt-out light bulbs on the counter before.

It was a first.

“I put them in the barn,” I said. “It’s
wired for 220 and I have circuit breakers but the bulbs just burnt out. They lasted
for only a few seconds. I think light bulbs should last longer than that. I’d
like to return them,” I said, already having returned them because they were
now lying on the counter between the checker and me. Now I would have to see
what would happen.

My wife waited in the car, probably
examining her decision to marry me or at least looking at it in a different perspective.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” the woman said.

One of life’s victories had just fallen
into my hands!

“Do you want to see the receipt?” I said,
thinking that it would add a nice professional touch to it all.

“No,” she said. “That’s not necessary. I remember
you.”

That was interesting because I didn’t remember
her. I wonder why she remembered me. Oh, well, it was just another life detail
better left banished to oblivion.

“Do you want your money back or two more
light bulbs?” she said.

“I want two more light bulbs,” I said. “But
I don’t want 200 watters. I don’t trust them. I want 150 watt bulbs. I have
faith in them.”

I had learned my lesson about experimental
light bulbs.

I had never seen a 200 watt bulb before and
I didn’t want to see another one again. I would stick to the traditional ways
of light.

Times Square was a good idea but if it didn’t
work, what good was it? I would retreat to the electric power of a Broadway
play in my barn.

That would satisfy me.

A total wattage increase from 100 watts to 300
watts would be enough for me and my barn.

After I got the two 150 watt bulbs, we had
to make a price adjustment because the 150 watt bulbs were more expensive. The
transaction was an exchange of a few pennies.

I went out and got into the car with an air
of triumph carrying a different bag with my two new light bulbs.

“What happened?” my Japanese wife said.

I held the bag toward her.

“Electric
sushi
,” I said.

Today I put the two 150 watt bulbs in the
barn and now I will wait again for night to come and to see my barn light up
like a Broadway play.

…hopefully.

PART THREE:

My barn just opened like a Broadway play,
the hottest ticket in town, when I turned the lights on. These two 150 watt
bulbs are like starring John Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt in a tap-dancing
version of
Hamlet
with original music composed and played by Mozart.

What a ticket!

My barn tonight.

I have admired the Japanese novelist
for years and at my request somebody has arranged this meeting between us. We
are having dinner in a Tokyo restaurant. Suddenly, the novelist reaches into a
bag he is carrying and takes out a pair of goggles and puts them on.

Now: The two of us are sitting across from
each other and he is wearing a pair of goggles. The people in the restaurant
are staring at us. I act as if it is perfectly natural for a man to be wearing
a pair of goggles in a restaurant, but I am thinking very gently, and directing
a single thought at him:
Please take the fucking goggles off
.

I don’t say a word about him wearing the
goggles. My face does not betray what I am thinking. I admire him so much. I
don’t want him to be wearing goggles at dinner. I keep directing my single
thought at him. Maybe three minutes pass and then suddenly, just as suddenly as
he put the goggles on, he takes them off and they go back into the bag… good.

Later he talks about the big earthquake
that occurred a few days before in Tokyo. He says that he has a son who is not
mentally normal and he’s been trying to explain to the child what an earthquake
is, so the boy will understand and not be frightened, but he can’t find a way
to do it.

“Does he understand what the wind is?” I
ask.

“Yes.”

“Tell him that an earthquake is a wind that
blows through the ground.”

The Japanese novelist likes the idea.

I admire him so much.

I am glad he has put his goggles away.

I have a vice in Tokyo that I am
trying to break. It is a small weed in my soul and I must pull it out. I got
started doing it last year when I was in Japan, and it’s very hard to break.

I fall asleep watching television.

I know that in the dominions of vice it is
one dimensional compared to some vices that are four dimensional and howl like
a toothless vampire in the endless garlic mirrors of eternity.

I turn the television sound down very low
until Japanese voices murmur like the sea at descending tide. I love the sound
of Japanese being spoken. It sounds like music to me and I fall asleep with
hundreds of Japanese people talking very quietly across the room from my bed.

Now that you have a little background I
will tell you what makes it a vice. Eventually all the programs and commercials
disappear and the voices of midnight samurai dramas turn into droning snow that
after a while wakes me up in the middle of the night.

I get out of bed and stumble from sleep
over to the set and turn it off.

The noisy snow vanishes and it is the rainy
season again here in Tokyo. I get back in bed and it takes a little while for
me to fall asleep and sometimes I feel lonely because the hundreds of Japanese
people have left me all alone again and I lie here in the middle of the Tokyo
night, waiting for sleep to come like a friend and keep me company.

Even as I write this, vowing to end this
vice and tool of loneliness, I know I will fall asleep tonight with hundreds of
Japanese people talking quietly a few feet away like the sea from my bed until
they turn to snow.

The last of my Armstrong Spring Creek
mosquito bites fade quickly from my body like the end of a movie leaving the
screen.