“You have no need to move it,” Fuka-Eri said.

“I do have a need to move it. It’s my body,” Tengo said.

Fuka-Eri said nothing in response to that.

Tengo could not even be sure whether what he was saying was vibrating in the air as vocal sounds. He had no clear sense that the muscles around his mouth were moving and forming the words he tried to speak. The things he wanted to say were more or less getting through to Fuka-Eri, it seemed, but their communication was as uncertain as a long-distance phone call with a bad connection. She, at least, could get by without hearing what she had no need to hear. But this was not possible for Tengo.

“Don’t worry,” Fuka-Eri said, moving her body lower down on his. The meaning of her movement was clear. Her eyes had taken on a certain gleam, the hue of which he had never seen before.

It seemed inconceivable that his adult penis could penetrate her small, newly made vagina. It was too big and too hard. The pain should have been enormous. Before he knew it, though, every bit of him was inside her. There had been no resistance whatever. The look on her face remained totally unchanged as she brought him inside. Her breathing became slightly agitated, and the rhythm with which her breasts rose and fell changed subtly for five or six seconds, but that was all. Everything else seemed like a normal, natural part of everyday life.

Having brought Tengo deep inside her, Fuka-Eri remained utterly still, as did Tengo, feeling himself deep inside of her. He remained incapable of moving his body, and she, eyes closed, perched on top of him like a lightning rod, stopped moving. He could see that her mouth was slightly open and her lips were making delicate, rippling movements as if groping in space to form some kind of words. Aside from this, she exhibited no movement at all. She seemed to be holding that posture as she waited for something to happen.

A deep sense of powerlessness came over Tengo. Even though something was about to happen, he had no idea what that something might be, and had no way of controlling it through his own will. His body felt nothing. He could not move. But his penis had feeling—or, rather than feeling, it had what might have been closer to a concept. In any case, it was telling him that he was inside Fuka-Eri and that he had the consummate erection. Shouldn’t he be wearing a condom? He began to worry. It could be a real problem if she got pregnant. His older girlfriend was extremely strict about birth control, and she had trained Tengo to be just as strict.

He tried as hard as he could to think of other things, but in fact he was unable to think about anything at all. He was in chaos. Inside that chaos, time seemed to have come to a stop. But time never stopped. That was a theoretical impossibility. Perhaps it had simply lost its uniformity. Taking the long view, time moved ahead at a fixed pace. There could be no mistake about that. But if you considered any one particular part of time, it could cease to be uniform. In these momentary periods of slackness, such things as order and probability lost all value.

“Tengo,” Fuka-Eri said. She had never called him by his first name before. She said it again: “Tengo” as if practicing the pronunciation of a foreign word. Why is she calling me by my name all of a sudden? Tengo wondered. Fuka-Eri then leaned forward slowly, bringing her face close to his. Her partially open lips now opened wide, and her soft, fragrant tongue entered his mouth, where it began a relentless search for unformed words, for a secret code engraved there. Tengo’s own tongue responded unconsciously to this movement and soon their tongues were like two young snakes in a spring meadow, newly wakened from their hibernation and hungrily intertwining, each led on by the other’s scent.

Fuka-Eri then stretched out her right hand and grasped Tengo’s left hand. She took it powerfully, as if to envelope his hand in hers. Her small fingernails dug into his palm. Then, bringing their intense kiss to an end, she righted herself. “Close your eyes.”

Tengo did as he was told. Inside his closed eyes he found a deep, gloomy space—so deep that it appeared to extend to the center of the earth. Then a light evocative of dusk broke into this space, the kind of sweet, nostalgic dusk that comes at the end of a long, long day. He could see, suspended in the light, numberless fine-grained cross-section-like particles—dust, perhaps, or pollen, or something else entirely. Eventually the depths began to contract, the light began to grow brighter, and the surrounding objects came into view.

The next thing he knew he was ten years old and in an elementary school classroom. This was real time and a real place. The light was real, and so was his ten-year-old self. He was really breathing the air of the room, smelling its varnished woodwork and the chalk dust permeating its erasers. Only he and the girl were in the room. There was no sign of other children. She was quick to seize the opportunity and she did so boldly. Or perhaps she had been waiting for this to happen. In any case, standing there, she stretched out her right hand and grasped Tengo’s left hand, her eyes looking straight into his.

His mouth felt parched. It all happened so suddenly, he had no idea what he should do or say. He simply stood there, letting his hand be squeezed by the girl. Eventually, deep in his loins, he felt a faint but deep throbbing. This was nothing he had ever experienced before, a throbbing like the distant roar of the sea. At the same time actual sounds reached his ears—the shouts of children resounding through the open window, a soccer ball being kicked, a bat connecting with a softball, the high-pitched complaints of a girl in one of the younger classes, the uncertain notes of a recorder ensemble practicing “The Last Rose of Summer.” After-school activities.

He wanted to return the girl’s grasp with equal force, but the strength would not come into his hand. Part of it was that the girl’s grip was too strong. But Tengo realized, too, that he could not make his body move. Why should that be? He couldn’t move a finger, as if he were totally paralyzed.

Time seems to have stopped, Tengo thought. He breathed quietly, listening to his own inhalations and exhalations. The sea went on roaring. Suddenly he realized that all actual sounds had ceased. The throbbing in his loins had transformed into something different, something more limited, and soon he felt a particular kind of tingling. The tingling in turn became a fine, dust-like substance that mixed with his hot, red blood, coursing through his veins to all parts of his body, by the power of his hardworking heart. A dense, little, cloud-like thing formed in his chest, changing the rhythm of his breathing and stiffening the beating of his heart.

I’m sure I’ll be able to understand the meaning and purpose of this incident sometime in the future, Tengo thought. What I have to do now, in order to make that happen, is to record this moment in my mind as clearly and accurately as possible. Now Tengo again was nothing more than a ten-year-old boy who happened to be good at math. A new door stood before him, but he did not know what awaited him on the other side. He felt powerless and ignorant, emotionally confused, and not a little afraid. This much he knew. And the girl, for her part, had no hope of being understood at that moment. All she wanted was to make sure that her feelings were delivered to Tengo, stuffed into a small, sturdy box, wrapped in a spotless sheet of paper, and tied with a narrow cord. She was placing such a package in his hands.

You don’t have to open the package right now, the girl was telling him wordlessly. Open it when the time comes. All you have to do is take it now.

She already knows all kinds of things, Tengo thought. They were things that he did not know yet. She was the leader in this new arena. There were new rules here, new goals and new dynamics. Tengo knew nothing. But she knows.