Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online Page B

stew?”
    “Yep.”
    “I made some, but it’d take me a week to eat all this all by myself. Wanna come over and eat some?”
    “If it’s all right.”
    “Okay, be here in one hour. If you’re late, I’m pitching it all into the garbage. Understand?”
    “Yes…”
    “I just hate waiting, that’s all.”
    Saying that, she hung up before I’d had a chance to open my mouth.
    I lied back down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for about ten minutes, listening to the Top 40
    on the radio, then I took a shower and shaved my face cleanly with hot water, then put on a shirt and Bermuda shorts just back from the dry cleaner’s. It was a pleasant-feeling evening.
    Watching the sun set parallel to the beach as I drove, I stopped at a place by the highway on-ramp to buy chilled wine and two cartons of cigarettes. She’d cleaned the table, and in the space between the shining white dishes, I was using the edge of a fruit knife to wrest the cork out of the bottle. The moist steam from the beef stew made the room humid.
    “I didn’t think it’d get this hot. It’s like Hell.”
    “Hell is much hotter.”
    “Sounds like you’ve been there to see it.”
    “I heard it from someone. As soon as you’re about to go crazy from the heat, they move you somewhere cooler. As soon as you recover a little, they toss you back into the heat.”
    “Just like a sauna.”
    “It’s like that. But sometimes, when people go crazy, they don’t put them back in.”
    “What do they do with them?”
    “Drop ‘em off in Heaven. Then they make ‘em paint the walls. After all, the walls always have to be perfectly white. They get real upset if there’s even a single spot. Hurts their image.
    “Thanks to the constant painting from morning ‘til night, these guides usually ruin their windpipes.”
    She didn’t ask any more after that. After carefully picking the debris from the cork from the inside of the bottle, I poured us two glasses.
    “Cold wine, warm heart,” she said when we toasted.
    “What’s that from?”
    “A television commercial. Cold wine, warm heart. You ever seen it?”
    “Nope.”
    “You don’t watch television?”
    “I watch it a little. I used to watch it all the time. My favorite was Lassie. The original Lassie, I mean.”
    “You really do like animals.”
    “Yeah.”
    “If I had the time, I’d watch it all day. Anything. Yesterday, I was watching this panel discussion with biologists and chemists. You see it?”
    “Nah.”
    She took a sip of wine and then shook her head slightly, as if remembering something.
    “You know, Pasteur had a lot of scientific intuitiveness.”
    “Scientific intuitition?”
    “…what I mean is, normal scientists think this certain way. A equals B, B equals C, so it follows that A equals C, you know what I mean?”
    I nodded.
    “But Pasteur was different. He already had A equaling C in his head, is what I mean. No proofs or anything. But the correctness of his theories was proven by history; during his life he made countless useful discoveries.”
    “The smallpox vaccine.”
    She set her wineglass on the table and narrowed her eyes at me.
    “Um, wasn’t Jenner the one who made the smallpox vaccine? You sure you’re in college?”
    “…rabies antibodies, then pasteurization, yeah?”
    “Bingo.”
    She managed to laugh without showing her teeth, a seemingly practiced skill, and then she drank her glass dry and poured herself a new one.
    “On that panel discussion show, that’s where they called it ‘scientific intuition’. Do you have it, too?”
    “Almost not at all.”
    “Don’t you wish you did?”
    “It’d probably come in handy for something. I’d probably use it when there’s a girl I wanna sleep with.”
    She laughed and went into the kitchen, then came back with the pot of stew and a bowl of salad and some rolls. Little by little, a cool breeze finally started to blow in through the open window.
    We took our time eating while we listened to her