He thought again of the socializing between Sonny and Cher and the two pythons. Would they have anything to talk about? And if so, what could it be? Finally, when his ability to imagine the ark in the storm gave out, he tried multiplying sets of three-digit numbers. He would often do that when he was having sex with his older girlfriend. This would enable him to delay the moment of ejaculation (the moment of ejaculation being something about which she was particularly demanding). Tengo did not know if it would also work to hold off an erection, but it was better than doing nothing. He had to do something.

“I don’t mind if it gets hard,” Fuka-Eri said, as if she had read his mind.

“You don’t mind?”

“There is nothing wrong with that.”

“There is nothing wrong with that,” Tengo said, echoing her words. Sounds like a grade school kid in sex education. “Now, boys, there is nothing shameful or bad about having an erection. But of course you must choose the proper time and occasion.”

“So, anyhow, has the purification begun?” Tengo asked in order to change the subject.

Fuka-Eri did not reply. Her small, beautiful ear seemed still to be trying to catch something in the rumbling of the thunder. Tengo could tell that much, and so he decided not to say any more. He also gave up trying to multiply three-digit numbers. If Fuka-Eri doesn’t mind, what’s the difference if I get hard? he thought. In any case, his penis showed no signs of movement. For now, it was just peacefully lying in the mud.

“I like your thingy,” his older girlfriend had said. “I like its shape and color and size.”

“I’m not so crazy about it,” Tengo said.

“Why not?” she asked, slipping her palm under Tengo’s flaccid penis as if handling a sleeping pet, testing its weight.

“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “Probably because I didn’t choose it for myself.”

“You’re so weird,” she said. “You’ve got a weird way of thinking.”

That had happened once upon a time. Before Noah’s flood, probably.

Fuka-Eri’s warm, silent breath grazed Tengo’s neck in a regular rhythm. Tengo could see her ear in the faint green light from the electric clock or in the occasional flash of lightning, which had finally started. The ear looked like a soft secret cave. If this girl were my lover, I would probably never tire of kissing her there, Tengo thought. While I was inside her, I would kiss that ear, give it little bites, run my tongue over it, blow my breath into it, inhale its fragrance. Not that I want to do that now. This was just a momentary fantasy based on pure hypothesis concerning what he would do if she were his lover. Morally, it was nothing for him to be ashamed of—probably.

But whether this involved a moral question or not, he should not have been thinking about it. Tengo’s penis began to wake from its tranquil sleep in the mud, as if it had been poked in its back by a finger. It gave a yawn and slowly raised its head, gradually growing harder until, like a yacht whose sails are filled by a strong northwest tailwind, it achieved a full, unreserved erection. As a result, his hardened penis could not help but press against Fuka-Eri’s hip. Tengo released a deep mental sigh. He had not had sex for more than a month following the disappearance of his girlfriend. Probably that was the cause. He should have continued multiplying three-digit figures.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Fuka-Eri said. “Getting hard is only natural.”

“Thank you,” Tengo said. “But maybe the Little People are watching from somewhere.”

“Just watching. They can’t do anything.”

“That’s good,” Tengo said, his voice unsettled. “But it does kind of bother me to think that I’m being watched.”

Again a lightning bolt cracked the sky in two, like the ripping of an old curtain, and the thunder gave the windowpane a violent shake as if they were seriously trying to shatter the glass. The glass might actually break before long, it seemed. The window had a sturdy aluminum frame, but it might not hold up if such ferocious shaking continued. Big, hard raindrops went on knocking against the glass like bullets slamming into a deer.

“The thunderbolts have hardly moved, it seems,” Tengo said. “Lightning storms don’t usually go on this long.”

Fuka-Eri looked up at the ceiling. “It won’t go anywhere for a while.”

“How long a while?”

Fuka-Eri did not answer him. Tengo went on holding Fuka-Eri apprehensively, his unanswered question and his useless erection both intact.

“We will go to the cat town again,” Fuka-Eri said. “So we have to sleep.”

“Do you think we can sleep with all this thunder going? And it’s barely past nine,” Tengo said anxiously.

Tengo arranged mathematical formulas in his head. It was a problem concerning long, complex mathematical formulas, but he already knew the answer. The assignment was to find how quickly and by how short a route he could arrive at the answer. He wasted no time setting his mind in motion, pushing his brain to the point of abuse. But this did nothing to relieve his erection. Its hardness only seemed to increase.

“We can sleep,” Fuka-Eri said.

And she was right. Even in the midst of the violent downpour, surrounded by thunder rattling the building, and beset by his jangled nerves and his stubborn erection, Tengo drifted into sleep before he knew it. He couldn’t believe such a thing was possible, and yet …

This is total chaos, Tengo thought just before he fell asleep. I’ve got to find theshortest route to the solution. Time is running out, and there’s so little space on the examination sheet they distributed. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the clock dutifully counted off time.

He was naked when he awoke, and so was Fuka-Eri. Completely and totally naked. Her breasts were perfect hemispheres. Her nipples were not overly large, and they were soft, still quietly groping for the maturity that was to come. Her breasts themselves were large, however, and fully ripe. They seemed to be virtually uninfluenced by the force of gravity, the nipples turned beautifully upward, like a vine’s new tendrils seeking sunlight. The next thing that Tengo became aware of was that Fuka-Eri had no pubic hair. Where there should have been pubic hair there was only smooth, bare white skin, its whiteness giving emphasis to its utter defenselessness. She had her legs spread; he could see her vagina. Like the ear he had been staring at, it looked as if it had just been made only moments before. And perhaps it really had been made only moments before. A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought. Both appeared to be turned outward, trying to listen closely to something—something like a distant bell.

I was sleeping, Tengo realized. He had fallen asleep still erect. And even now he was firmly erect. Had the erection continued the whole time he was sleeping? Or was this a new erection, following the relaxation of the first (like Prime Minister So-and-So’s Second Cabinet)? How long was I sleeping? But what’s the difference? I’m still erect now, and it shows no sign of subsiding. Neither Sonny and Cher nor three-digit multiplication nor complex mathematics had managed to bring it down.

“I don’t mind,” Fuka-Eri said. She had her legs spread and was pressing her freshly made vagina against his belly. He could detect no hint of embarrassment on her part. “Getting hard is not a bad thing,” she said.

“I can’t move my body,” he said. It was true. He was trying to raise himself, but he couldn’t move a finger. He could feel his body—feel the weight of Fuka-Eri’s body on top of his—feel the hardness of his erection—but his body was as heavy and stiff as if it had been fastened down by something.