She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.
“Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works.”
“I see,” the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. “I see.”
“So, is my wish OK?”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. It’s no trouble at all for me.”
The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something—perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down—floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.
“That did it,” he said. “Your wish has been granted.”
“Already?”
“Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted, lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don’t worry, I’ll put the cart in the hall.”
She took the elevator down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as though she were walking on some kind of mysterious fluff.
“Are you OK? You look spaced out,” the younger waiter said to her.
She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. “Oh, really? No, I’m fine.”
“Tell me about the owner. What’s he like?”
“I dunno, I didn’t get a very good look at him,” she said, cutting the conversation short.
An hour later she went to bring the cart down. It was out in the hall, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and vegetables gone. The wine bottle and coffeepot were empty. The door to room 604 stood there, closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time, feeling it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the cart down in the elevator and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked blankly at the plate: empty as always.
“I never saw the owner again,” she said. “Not once. The manager turned out to have just an ordinary stomachache and went back to delivering the owner’s meal again himself the next day. I quit the job after New Year’s, and I’ve never been back to the place. I don’t know, I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition.”
She toyed with a paper coaster, thinking her own thoughts. “Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was some kind of illusion. It’s as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened at all. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knickknack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me, too.”
The two of us kept silent, drinking our drinks and thinking our separate thoughts.
“Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” I asked. “Or, more precisely, two things.”
“Go right ahead,” she said. “I imagine you’re going to ask me what I wished for that time. That’s the first thing you want to know.”
“But it looks as though you don’t want to talk about that.”
“Does it?”
I nodded.
She put the coaster down and narrowed her eyes as if staring at something in the distance. “You’re not supposed to tell anybody what you wished for, you know.”
“I won’t try to drag it out of you,” I said. “I would like to know whether or not it came true, though. And also—whatever the wish itself might have been—whether or not you later came to regret what it was you chose to wish for. Were you ever sorry you didn’t wish for something else?”
“The answer to the first question is yes and also no. I still have a lot of living left to do, probably. I haven’t seen how things are going to work out to the end.”
“So it was a wish that takes time to come true?”
“You could say that. Time is going to play an important role.”
“Like in cooking certain dishes?”
She nodded.
I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.
“And the answer to my second question?”
“What was that again?”
“Whether you ever regretted your choice of what to wish for.”
A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.
“I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”
“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.
“Even if the Audi’s bumper has two dents?”
“Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”
“That would make a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.’”
I looked at her mouth when she said that.
“What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”
“There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.’”
She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.
She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?”
“On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come up with a single wish.
“I can’t think of anything,” I confessed. “I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.”
“You really can’t think of anything?”
I nodded.
“Not one thing?”
“Not one thing.”
She looked into my eyes again—straight in—and said, “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”
“But you had better think about it very carefully, my lovely young fairy, because I can grant you only one.” In the darkness somewhere, an old man wearing a withered-leaf-colored tie raises a finger. “Just one. You can’t change your mind afterward and take it back.”
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN
NEW YORK MINING DISASTER
A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there’s a typhoon. He’s been doing this for ten years. At a time when most people are closing their shutters, running out to stock up on mineral water, or checking to see if their radios and flashlights are working, my friend wraps himself in a Vietnam-era army surplus poncho, stuffs a couple of cans of beer into his pockets, and sets off. He lives about a fifteen-minute walk away.