She removes her finger from my lips, and the same finger now travels to my wrist.

“I think about what it would be like to cut the thing open with a scalpel. Not the corpse. That lump of death itself. There’s got to be something like that in there somewhere, I just know it. Dull like a softball—and pliable—a paralyzed tangle of nerves. I’d like to remove it from the dead body and cut it open. I’m always thinking about it. Imagining what it’d be like inside. It’d probably be all gummy, like toothpaste that cakes up inside the tube, don’t you think? That’s okay, you don’t have to answer. All gooey around the outside, getting tougher the further in. That’s why the first thing I’d do once I cut through the outer skin is scoop out all the glop, and there inside where it starts to firm up would be this teeny little core. Like a superhard ball bearing, don’t you think?”

The girl gives a couple of short coughs.

“Lately, it’s all I think about. Probably ’cause I’ve got so much free time every day. But really, I do think so. If I’ve got nothing to do, my thoughts just wander off far away. I get so far off in my thoughts, it’s hard to find my way back.”

At this, the girl takes her finger away from my wrist to drink the rest of her cola. I can tell from the empty-glass sound of the ice.

“It’s okay, I’m keeping an eye out for the cat. Don’t worry. As soon as I see Noboru Watanabe, I’ll let you know. So you can keep your eyes closed. Noboru Watanabe’s bound to come walking through here any minute now. I mean, all the cats take the same route, so he’s got to show up. Let’s just imagine while we wait. Like, Noboru Watanabe’s getting closer, closer. He’s coming through the grass, sneaking under a wall, stopping and sniffing the flowers, getting closer every minute. Try and picture him.”

I play along and try to see the cat in my mind’s eye, but it’s all I can do to conjure up even the blurriest backlit snapshot of a cat. The bright sun burns through my eyelids, dispersing any dark areas of the image; on top of which, no matter how I try I just can’t recall the little fur face with any accuracy. My Noboru Watanabe is a failed portrait, somehow distorted and unnatural. Only the quirks are there; the basics are missing. I can’t even remember how he walked.

The girl places her finger on my wrist once more and this time draws a pattern. An odd diagram of indeterminate configuration. While she diagrams my wrist, as if in unison I feel a wholly other variety of darkness infiltrating my mind. I must be falling asleep, I think. Not that I’m particularly sleepy, but something tells me I can’t hold out against the inevitable. My body feels unseemingly heavy in the soft canvas curve of the deck chair.