I sat gazing into space, thinking back over the scene in the hotel, calling up an image of Sarah as she'd looked when I saw her there, and the face of her son, so familiar and so terribly dear to me that it made me shake. And I remembered Mari during the past year, how she'd been as dark and quiet as a shadow, and myself, never far from her, making my own way through a difficult time.

I got under the covers of my futon.

“Listen, Mari. This has been a strange year for the two of us. It's like we've been living in a space different from the rest of our lives, like we've been moving at a different speed. We've been sealed off—it's been very quiet. I'm sure that if we look back on all this later it'll have its own unique coloring, it'll be a single separate block.”

“Yes, I think you're right.”

Mari climbed down into her futon too, then pushed her arm up and out so that it extended beyond the base of her downturned chin. She showed me the sleeve of her pajamas.

“It'll be this kind of deep blue,” she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks in your eyes and your ears and all your words—the color of a completely closed-in night.”

The snow kept falling, and we lay with our faces turned up toward the TV screen, each trying desperately to win the video games we were playing, and then eventually we both drifted off to sleep.

I awoke with a start. Looking over to my side, I saw that Mari was asleep, her face illuminated by the glow of the television. One hand was still holding the controls for the game, and a good half of her body was lying outside of her covers. She looked as if she'd just suddenly dropped dead, right in the middle of things. Under the quiet music of the game I could hear the sound of her breath.

The expression on her face was bizarre. Her face looked pure and lonely, like the face of someone who's been crying. And it hadn't changed at all since a year ago, or since long before that, when Mari was small.

I pulled the covers up over her and switched off the television. Suddenly the room was completely dark. But of course outside the window the same snow continued to tumble down. The fuzzy pale-bright glimmer of the snow streamed into the room through the gap between the curtains.

“Good night,” I whispered, and lay down.

Love Songs

Late at night the trees in my garden seemed to shine.

Awash in light from the street, the quiet glittering green of the leaves and the deep brown of the trunk seemed startlingly vivid.

I'd noticed this for the first time just recently, after I'd started drinking more heavily. Each time I looked out on that scenery with drunken eyes I'd be overwhelmed by the unbelievable purity of those colors, and I'd start feeling as if nothing really mattered, like I wouldn't really care at all even if I were to lose everything I had.