The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan Page B

of that night,
eleven o’clock, and the hours pass here in Montana for night to come and then
Times Square in my barn.
    These are the pleasures of my life.
    I wait like a child for my electric light
dessert.
    PART TWO:
    I waited through the day, and night carne
to Montana as it always does… and the moment to Times-Square my barn with a
Great White Way of 200 watt bulbs, all two of them.
    I had told my wife about the bulbs and my
excitement to see the barn shining like Broadway and she got a daffodil from a
bunch we’d bought in town earlier and put it in a little old bottle and we
headed out through the snow to the barn. I had a feeling of magic in my hand as
I touched the switch and the barn exploded into light, bathed in bounty like
Times Square.
    “It’s beautiful,” she said.
    I was so proud of the light that I couldn’t
think of anything to say. We started upstairs. She was walking in front of me,
carrying the daffodil.
    We reached the top of the first landing and
I looked at the light bulb shining away. I felt like stroking it as if it were
a cat, and if I did, I knew that it would start purring.
    We walked up the second flight of stairs
and just as we reached the top, the light blew out. My heart dropped like a
stone into a cold well.
    “Oh, no!” I said, staring in disbelief at
the suddenly, eternally gone light bulb.
    My wife had a sympathetic expression on her
face. She was showing empathy because she knew how much that light bulb meant
to me.
    I opened the door to my writing room and I
turned the light on in there and she put the daffodil on the desk. I was still
in a state of shock.
    She said something which I can’t remember
to try and make me feel better about the bulb burning out. It was as if half of
Times Square had gone out at midnight, a blackout, leaving people in a state of
surprise and shock.
    Just after she finished saying that which
was very nice—too bad I have forgotten what it was—there was another flash in
the barn like a small explosion.
    Through a window in my writing room that
looks back into the barn where the flash had come from, I could see that the
stairs were dark.
    “Oh, no!”
    I opened the door and all of Times Square
was gone. The other 200 watt bulb had blown out, too.
    “Poor man,” my wife said.
    I found the 25 watt bulb that I had retired
in my room and screwed it in at the top of the stairs, just outside the door.
    We made our way down the stairs.
    There was a dim bulb on the main floor of
the barn that helped provide us with enough light so as not to make it a hazardous
journey.
    As we went down, I retrieved the two burnt-out
bulbs.
    “You know what I’m going to do with these
bulbs?” I said to my wife, my voice reflecting anger.
    “No,” she said, cautiously. She’s Japanese
and sometimes she gets cautious when I make dramatic announcements. She comes
from a different culture. The Japanese do not respond to life the way I do. “What
are you going to do?” she said.
    “Take them back to the store and get some
more bulbs.”
    “Do you think they’ll accept them?”
    “Yes,” I said, my voice rising. “They don’t
work! LIGHT BULBS SHOULD LAST LONGER THAN TEN SECONDS!”
    I don’t think she really thought that I was
going to do it. The idea of a store accepting and exchanging burnt-out light
bulbs seemed like a foreign idea to her. I don’t think that was a common
practice in Japan, but right now I didn’t care about Japan. I had been wronged
and I wanted satisfaction.
    We were going to town to watch another
basketball game that evening, so I put the bulbs in a paper bag, along with the
receipt for the bulbs and took them into town with me.
    After the game, we stopped at the store.
    She still didn’t believe that I was going
to try and exchange two burnt-out light bulbs. She thought of a convenient
reason to stay out in the car and I stormed into the store carrying a paper bag
with two burnt-out light bulbs in it.
    The store was huge and abandoned