Free Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami Page B

well-known, but the strange thing is that all of them, and I mean all of them, were dug so they wouldn’t strike water. So the question of why the hell they bothered to dig them is something nobody knew. As for the Martians themselves, aside from these wells, there wasn’t a trace of them left. Their written language, their dwellings, their plates and bowls, metallic infrastructure, their graves, their rockets, their vending machines, even their shells, there was absolutely nothing left. Just those wells. And the Earthlings had a hell of a time deciding whether or not you could even call that civilization, but those wells were definitely really well made, and all those tens of thousands of years later there wasn’t even so much as a single brick of a ruin.
    To be sure, a few adventurers and explorers went down into those wells. They descended with their ropes in hand, but due to the depth of the wells and length of the caves, they had to turn back for the surface, and of those without ropes, not a single soul ever returned.
    One day, there was this young guy wandering around in outer space, and he went into one of the wells. He was sick of the utter hugeness of space, and he wanted to die alone, without anybody around. As he descended, the well started to feel like a more and more relaxing and pleasant place, and this uncanny, familiar power started to envelop his body. After going down an entire kilometer, he found a real cave and climbed into it, and he continued to walk along, following its winding paths along intently. He had no idea how long he was walking along. This is because his watch stopped. It could have been two hours, but it just as easily could have been two days. It was like he couldn’t feel hunger or exhaustion, and the previously-mentioned strange power continuing to encase his body just as before. And then, all of a sudden, he felt sunlight. Turns out the cave was connected to a different well. He clambered up out of the well, and once again he was above ground. He sat on the edge of the well and stared at wasteland ahead of him free of any obstacles, and then he gazed at the sun. Something about it was different. The smell of the wind, the sun…the sun was in the middle of the sky, an orange twilight sun that had become an enormous orange blob.
    “In 250,000 years, the sun is going to explode.
    *Click*…OFF. 250,000 years. Not such a long time,”
    the wind whispered to him.
    “Don’t worry about me. I’m just the wind. If you want to call me that, or call me a Martian, that’s okay, too. I’m not an evil echo. But then, words don’t mean anything to me.”
    “But, you’re speaking.”
    “Me? You’re the one talking. I’m just giving your spirit a little hint, a little prodding.”
    “What the hell happened to the sun?”
    “It’s old. It’s dying. Me, you, there’s nothing either of us can do.”
    “How’d it happen so quickly…?”
    “Not quickly at all. In the time it took you to get out of that well, fifteen hundred million years have passed. As your people say, time flies. That well you came from was built along a distortion in spacetime. To put it another way, we wander around through time. From the birth of the universe ‘til its death. And so we never live, and we never die. We’re the wind.”
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Ask away.”
    “What have you learned?”
    The atmosphere shook a little, and the wind laughed. And then, the stillness of eternity once again covered the surface of Mars. The young man pulled a revolver out of his pocket, put the muzzle to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
    33
    The phone rang.
    “I’m back,” she said.
    “Let’s meet up.”
    “Are you free now?”
    “Of course.”
    “Pick me up in front of the YWCA at five.”
    “What do you do at the YWCA?”
    “French lessons.”
    “French?”
    “Oui.”
    After I hung up the phone, I took a shower and drank a beer. When I finished it, the evening rain started in like a