The Box Man Read Online Free Page B

like blind beasts. This is an ideal place not only for the disposal of corpses but for living humans as well. And an ideal place for murder must be an ideal place to be murdered.
    The lead in my pencil is gone. Come on, come on … I’ve had enough. Is she really going to come or not?
    (I can’t sharpen the pencil with this rusty knife. Tomorrow, if I’m able to prolong my existence until then, I must get two or three ballpoint pens. The ones around the service entrance of the Middle School have the most ink left in them.)

    Two or Three Additions
    Concerning the Photographic Evidence Attached to the Inner Cover
    Time of shooting: One evening about a week or ten days ago (paralysis of the sense of time is one of the chronic ailments of a box man).
    Place of shooting: The mountainside end of the long black wall of the soy sauce factory (the shadow of the wall cuts diagonally across the foreground of the picture).
    At the time I was just in the act of standing there relieving myself. Suddenly there was a sharp noise. It resembled the sound of a pebble kicked up by a truck striking the box (that frequently happened, for I often lay by the roadside). But no truck, not to mention any three wheeled conveyance, had passed by. At the same time a sharp pain like biting down on ice with a bad tooth pierced my left shoulder: and my urine stopped flowing. Looking out the little hole in the side, I saw the sweeping branches of an old mulberry tree just where the curve began along the sweet potato field of the hatchery and where the wall of the soy factory ended and became a slope and the pavement gave way to a graveled walk (a part is visible on the left side of the photo). Turning away from the shadow of the tree (that is, as if to run away), a man was beginning to get up. He shifted a sort of stick about three feet long from his shoulder and put it under his arm, whereupon it caught the evening sun and gleamed a reddish black. I at once concluded that it was an air rifle. Without rearranging myself after urinating, I set up my camera. (To tell the truth, before I became a box man I was a photographer who had just become independent. Since I had become a box man right in the midst of my career, for no particular reason I still went around with a minimum of photographic equipment.) Changing the direction of the box, I snapped three pictures in succession. (I did not have the time to regulate the distance, but as the camera was set at f I i at one two hundred and fiftieth of a second, it was more or less in focus.) The fellow sprang to the side, crossed the road, and disappeared from view.
    Almost everything up until now can be proved by analyzing the film. But from this point on, nothing at all is backed by objective evidence. I expect that either you or the finder of these notes will believe my testimony and justify it on your own.
    FIRST CONJECTURE CONCERNING THE TRUE CHARACTER OF THE
    SNIPER . I should like you to refer to the “Case of A.” When someone is infected by the idea of a box man and tries himself to become one, there is a general tendency to overreact by shooting him with an air rifle. Thus I did not cry out for help or make any attempt at pursuit. Rather I thought that the candidates for box man had increased by one, and I experienced a feeling of closeness to him. Thereupon the pain in my shoulder receded and changed into a feeling of incandescence. From now on it was rather the sniper who must endure a pain a hundred times worse. There was no need to inflict any greater chastisement on him than this.
    As I gazed at the deserted sloping road after the disappearance of the rifle man, I felt moist like a broken water faucet. The smoke that smelled like burnt sugar came from the soy factory and diligently filed away at the ends of the sharp shadows east by the evening sun, dulling the angles. Somewhere in the distance, the monotonous grating of firewood being sawed. And still further in the distance, the lively sound of