The Footbridge
Every evening before I left the nursing station I did the same arithmetic: six patients, nineteen kilometers, all of it by bicycle, done by 9:30 if the rain held. Night visits in a canal town run on paths no car can take — the towpath, the shrine underpass, the crossing at the freight spur — and those were the paths my schedule was built on. Three evening diabetics, one bedridden stroke case, and Mr. Sonobe, whose insulin I drew up at 8:40 sharp because his dinner ran late and his pride ran earlier.
The footbridge by the rice cooperative went first. Tuesday, September 13th, 8:12 p.m., clear sky. I came down the coop driveway ringing my bell for the dog that always lunges at the culvert, and the dog was there, and the culvert was there, and the bridge was not. Not closed for repair. Not collapsed. The gravel ran into grass, the grass ran to the far bank, and the whole stretch read as a field that had never once been interrupted. My bicycle computer put the detour at eleven minutes. I decided it was demolition and rode on. Insulin waits for no bridge.
On the way back I checked the coop billboard, where they pin the pesticide schedule and the rice-prize clippings. No notice. The handlebar map still showed the bridge, a confident double line across the canal.
The Underpass
The shrine underpass took Wednesday. The freight crossing took Thursday. I started counting.
One route a night. Never two. Never a road I hadn’t ridden myself. The subtraction had my schedule pinned to its wall — six patients, nineteen kilometers — and it took its picks in the order I used them.
My phone kept its nerve longer than I did. The map showed the underpass until the moment I steered into it, then recalculated with the serenity of an institution, offering the long way as though it had never promised anything else. The paper map in my handlebar bag never learned anything at all. Between the two of them I rode at fences and field edges like a woman testing a locked door.
Nobody said a word. That is the part I need you to believe. The fish van that had used the freight crossing took the bypass, driver’s elbow out the window, cigarette going as always. A mother I’d known since her first son was born walked her boys along the canal bank where the footbridge used to stand, turned them up the embankment, and kept going. At the pharmacy I asked whether the demolition near the shrine would run through winter. The pharmacist counted out my needles. “Demolition?”
I bought my gauze and left.
The 1998 Map
Mr. Sonobe was eighty-four and kept his father’s road map on the tatami table — the town as printed in 1998, soft as cloth along the folds. In October he called me in early, before the light went, and spread it flat under the lamp with both hands.
Pencil. Every route he had lost, struck through and dated.
Orchard lane — May 2.
The crematorium road — May 9.
The sea dike road — May 16.
Market street — June 11.
“Three years now,” he said. “One a week, for me. It goes slower for old people. Fewer places to go.” He tapped the canal on the map with one finger, patient, the way he tapped his own ankle when it swelled. “The town is getting smaller, nurse. No —” he corrected himself with the care he took over his doses — “not the town. The roads. Our roads.”
The map carried more than strikes. Midway across the canal, in the middle of Nakamachi 3-chōme, sat a small pencil circle. My street. My building. Dated the June before I ever missed a bridge at all.
“You’ll want to start one of these,” he said, and slid the pencil across the tatami like a man settling a debt.
The Last Crossing
By November the arithmetic had changed: six patients, thirty-one kilometers, done by eleven if the rain held. On the ninth, two crossings still reached Sonobe’s district. On the tenth there was one — the service road on the rail bridge, closed to bicycles on paper, open to everyone in practice, rattling under the handrail.
I stood at the mouth of it long enough to be honest with myself. I could turn back. Phone the station, let the morning shift draw up his dose; the schedule would survive and so, most likely, would he. Or I could cross, and spend the road like a coin, because by then I knew whose schedule the subtraction read, and what it did with the roads I used.
His dinner had run late. His pride ran earlier. I went.
We kept the visit in its ordinary order, because the ordinary order was the last ordinary thing either of us had. Blood sugar. Dose. The logbook. The weatherman on NHK apologizing for the front moving in. At 9:40 he walked me to the door with the flashlight he’d carried since the war, the rain came across the canal in one grey sheet, and the service road was gone.
Not flooded. The rail bed was there. The handrail was there, the sodium lamp, the moth against it. The road off the mouth of the bridge ran to grass, to fence, to a field edge — the same unhurried stitching as the coop bank, except that this grass was mine.
He didn’t lift the flashlight. He looked at the bank as long as I did, then turned and shuffled inside, and from the hallway, not loudly, he called: “I aired the spare futon out this morning.”
That stopped me where the missing road had not. He had circled my street in June. He had known which direction I would arrive from, and — the way you know a wound is going to scar — which crossing I would spend last.
I can see my building from his kitchen window. Sixty meters of canal, the rail embankment, the backs of the shops on the Nakamachi arcade; my window on the fourth floor; the plant I left on the balcony, still drinking the rain. A person could shout across that distance. Nobody does. Both districts are full of voices that gave up shouting at what the map insists is a ten-minute walk.
I do his 8:40 myself now, so the morning nurse takes her long way round to the south side, where she still has roads left. Two maps lie on the table, his soft at the folds, mine still stiff, my first four lines dated. It was never the town. We are being subtracted from each other, one road a night, until the town is nothing but islands the map still insists on connecting.
The futon is warm.