CHAPTER I:The Well of Unspoken Melodies

At times, late into the night, just before dawn arrives, I find myself standing at the brink of the well behind my apartment, which is but the lame remains of a stone opening from which an unwelcome dampness and an inexplicable nostalgic odor egress. The woman I have fallen in love with exists in the silence of the well, although she has never visited, lived, or moved into this space. She could reside in the negative spaces: the interval between the drops of water, the shadow that hugs the bricks, the remembered laughter of a laugh I dreamed once. I have made a secret of her name even to myself.I met her in a jazz bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, while the saxophone's vapid breath fogged the windows and the ice in my whiskey would freeze in time. She sat two barstools down from me and was reading from an old edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, her fingers slowly stroking the book's spine as if it were an artifact of divine significance. Her hair settled as a curtain of protection between us, and every time she turned a page, the sound rumbled like nearby thunder. I made myself order another drink that I didn't want, to remain comfortable to the warm silence while she had not left. She left before the set was over and left a hair clip, which was shaped like a small sparrow.I concealed it within my pocket, where it buzzed against my thigh like a caged cicada.The hairpin now rests upon my poor, sad desk next to an unwanted stack of letters that regretfully, I have never sent. Of an evening, when the pulse of the city becomes somewhat relaxed, I will press it to my ear and imagine I can hear something—a jazz standard played backward or a train running on tracks too far out of the imagination to fully comprehend. I write her about these oddities; “The well is deeper than it seems,” I scrawl once, and crumple the paper. The language fails. It lays claims to the canted shape of desire.The dreams started in October. I am trapped in a hotel with a winding labyrinth of a space; a corridor might break into the sky without stars, an elevator opening into a field of wheat, not a cloud, or an elevator. She is always there, just out of reach type of way; a shadow out of a window, and a voice, somewhere down a corridor. At one point, a cat, a black stray that seemed to be unchanged in my likeness was about to meet me like a time traveler. Flicking its tail like a pendulum, I made eye contact, finding my girl's reflection on the solid blackness of its iris. “You are chasing a ghost, you know,” it said, though it had no working mouth. “The question is, isn't that the point of the story, for you to chase a ghost?"

During the day, I work at a transcription service converting cassette tapes of meetings in corporate America, and though I could not be more bored, each transcription is a wealth of labor. The meetings are dull as dirt, but once in a while, sandwiched between reels, I hear a hint of a song! - a piano reel, or alady's soft, beautiful laugh -- that makes me stop typing for a second. My boss, a large fellow, with ears like satellite dishes, gives me a dissatisfied look. "Focus," he says. I think about that word, "focus," as a thing that costs possibility it's spent elsewhere and to him, I am wasting it. I have rewritten her absence in the mundane umbrellas mine and hers hold with the rain running down my window in the same number of drops that makes the long-running fist of her writing; or the steam coming off the coffee in the mug shaping into her catch-all shrug. I stare at her clothes while they spin in the laundromat with mine - red scarf, wool coat, socks with holes at the heel. A othere man, just standing close to me, trying to appear empathetic, asks me, "unrequited?" as he feeds the dryer coins! I shrug. Unrequited feels too small a word; a cardboard box for a galaxy.In the month of November, the well has a voice. I squat at the steep edge of the well with a flashlight in my hand and the beam goes black. "Jump," the darkness says, "She's down here." Of course, I don't. But on some nights, I lower a bucket down into the well and pull up bits of history: a movie ticket from 1973, an old scarf that smells like jasmine, a cassette tape with the words For Nobody scribbled on it. I play the tape on my Walkman. All I hear is static. Then a voice, whose voice? There is singing in a language I don't understand. The cat arches its back, with pupils wide open. "Be careful," the cat says. "Some doors never fully close." The letters pile up. I write about the well, the cat, the hotel with identical doors. "I am creating a museum," I write her. "I am creating a museum where each exhibit represents a moment in time we almost touched." One day, I send a letter with no address. Weeks later, it comes back with a stamp that reads Undeliverable. The smell of her perfume might be on the paper; then again, maybe I'm imagining it. Imagination is the last faith I have left.On New Year's Eve, I encounter her at the jazz bar again. She occupies the same dark wooden stool, immersed in the same old novel. My heart beats and reverberates like a fist pounding on a door; no words come to mind. When she looks up, her eyes are twin wells. "I've been waiting," she says. Or maybe it's me. The saxophone drowns us. When I blink, she's gone. But the next morning on my desk, I see my hairpin warm, like a hand pressed it.In March, the cat's gone. In its place, I receive a postcard: a photo of the hotel in my dreams. On the reverse side, one sentence. The labyrinth is the way. I hold it to the light, and for one moment, the ink shifts—a constellation, a fingerprint, a dim I'm sorry.

I am seated at the well, attuned to the sounds. Water, below me, meets the stone. Above me, the sparrow flies. The it is rustling, many letters, filled with words that are neither hers, nor mine, but, instead, in-between: a language of maybe, almost, not quite. The flame of a strike match devours a sentence, love is a rebellion. The smoke dances like a laugh. It is enough. It has to be.