Amid the gathering darkness, a clear image of Noboru Watanabe’s four feet comes into my head. Four quiet brown paws with rubbery pads on the soles. Without a sound, they go traipsing over the terrain.

What terrain? Where?

I have no idea.

Mightn’t you have a fatal blind spot somewhere? says the woman softly.

I AWAKE TO FIND I’m alone. Gone is the girl from the deck chair nestled next to mine. The towel and cigarettes and magazines remain, but the cola and radio-cassette player have disappeared.

The sun is slanting westward and I’m up to my ankles in the shade of the pine trees. The hands of my watch point to 3:40. I shake my head a few times as if rattling an empty can, get up from the chair, and take a look around. Everything looks the same as when I first saw it. Big lawn, dried-up pond, hedge, stone bird, goldenrod, TV aerial, no cat. No girl, either.

I plunk myself down on a shady patch of grass and run my palm over the green turf, one eye on the cat path, while I wait for the girl to return. Ten minutes later, there’s still no sign of cat or girl. Not even a whiff of anything moving about. I’m stumped for what to do now. I feel like I must have aged something awful in my sleep.

I stand up again and glance over at the house. But there’s no hint of anyone about. Only the western sun glaring off the bay window. There’s nothing to do but cut across the grass into the passage and beat a path home. So I didn’t find the cat. Well, at least I tried.

BACK HOME. I take in the dry laundry and throw together the makings of a simple meal. Then I collapse onto the living-room floor, my back against the wall, to read the evening paper. At 5:30, the telephone rings twelve times, but I don’t pick up the receiver. After the ringing has died away, a lingering hollowness hovers about the dark room like drifting dust. The clock atop the TV strikes an invisible panel of space with its brittle claws. A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

I consider writing a poem about the wind-up bird. But no first lines come. Besides, I find it hard to believe that high-school girls would be terribly thrilled to read a poem about the wind-up bird. They don’t even know that any such thing as a wind-up bird exists.

IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY when my wife comes home.

“Sorry, I had to work late,” she apologizes. “I had the darnedest time tracking down one pupil’s tuition record. The part-time girl is so lame, it all falls to me.”