“You mean overseas? How? Did she have AIDS?” I asked.

“It was drinking. She died from drinking,” he said quietly.

Icy chills, like a double shock, jittered down my spine. For an instant I felt sure I must be cursed, just as she'd been.

“She got to where she was drunk all the time, and then one day in the apartment her patron kept for her she just . . . she'd been in and out of some specialist rehab center for alcoholics, and from what I hear it sounds like she just totally collapsed toward the end. This friend of mine who just got back from Paris told me about it—said he'd heard it all from some guy who was close to her.”

“Oh.”

I took a gulp of coffee and nodded slightly, as if appreciating the flavor.

“I thought you two hated each other's guts. What's up?”

“‘Even travelers who brush sleeves on the road are bound by ties from a former life’ . . . isn't exactly what I mean, but I hadn't heard a word from her since she left, you know, so I started wondering what she was doing. After all, I'm with Mizuo now, and I'm happy—you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, stuff like that happens sometimes, doesn't it?”

Back during the days when Haru and the man and I were pretty much living together, this guy was working as a bartender, and I was always going to the bar where he worked, to get drunk and blow off steam. He'd always been completely indifferent to things that were happening in other people's lives, so it was easy to talk to him, and you could talk to him about anything. I sat looking at him now, his form hovering in the dun light of the shop, feeling paralyzed, and found myself remembering the feeling that had hung in the air in those days—felt it all coming back. Weary, tomorrowless, smoldering. I certainly had no desire to put myself back there, to feel the sensations whose memory I was now reliving, and yet they called up an odd sentimentality.

“Well, so Haru's no longer in this world,” I said.

Across the counter my old friend nodded.

I went back to my apartment and drank all alone in memory of Haru. For some reason I felt that it was okay for me to drink a lot that night, so I was able to pour in as much as I wanted and still feel good. In the past, whenever my mind had begun to circle vaguely around thoughts of Haru, an image of the Eiffel Tower had drifted up before me, like a shot of it on television, but tonight the image didn't appear. Instead I saw the world that had opened up inside Haru after she lost the only outlet she'd had for her overabundance of energy, and quickly lost herself in drink. I completely understood what Haru had gone through when the man left, and why she hadn't been able to pull herself together and move on again. Because that's how totally involved our love for him was—both of us had given it everything we could. The man was extremely attractive to begin with, of course, but to tell the truth, Haru and I couldn't have put so much effort into that love if we hadn't been competing. I don't know if he found all this amusing or if it made him feel like he needed some space to breathe or what, but for some reason the man always used to do stuff like invite one of us over to his house and then go out on a date with the other. Toward the end he frequently left Haru and me at his house together and didn't come back all night.