Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (24 page)

I quickened my step, but before I could reach Eeyore the doleful mother who had been waiting at the bus stop had rushed up the street to where he stood with the other women. During the short argument that ensued, the mother in the bulky overcoat had her arm around Eeyore's shoulder like a giant bird and appeared to be pulling at him as if to deliver him from the women. At that point I arrived and the young women hurried away at the sight of me. With one arm around Eeyore and the other around a girl who had also emerged from the center, her face darkly blotched in agitation, the mother glared at me and said, “You just stood there and watched! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Eeyore returned my gaze with a look of prim superiority that made it appear he agreed with his friend's mother wholeheartedly. I bowed and expressed my thanks and felt as if my son were being entrusted to me reluctantly.

On the bus I tried to learn what Eeyore had been asked by the women but he remained grimly silent. The mother who had hurried to his aid had taken the same bus and, in a tone of voice that had every passenger listening, offered me an explanation: “Those women are fighting to stop a welfare center from being built next to the town houses where they live. They were here today to reconnoiter. They interfere with construction, they write letters to the paper about depriving their children of space to play, a while ago they offered to donate seventy-five thousand dollars and to volunteer their own time to care for the handicapped. They promise to do all that and more in return for not having a welfare center in their neighborhood! They treat our children as if they were unclean!”

My wife joined me in questioning Eeyore at home but he declined to say a word about what he had been asked. It wasn't even clear that the women were part of the movement to stop a welfare center. Four or five days later we saw the construction site in question on the evening news. As work resumed, a bell was rung to alert the protesters in the neighboring apartment building, and housewives hurried down the fire escapes. As they shouted protests at the city workers on the other side of a chain-link fence with their children joining in beside them, their standard of living was plain to see in their expressions, their gestures, their grooming—clearly, the three young women in suede coats and leather boots had not “dressed up” when they had come to see the center. Listening to the commentary, Eeyore had exclaimed, “
Gosh! Are they against building a new center? That's terrible!
” I took the opportunity to ask him yet again what the three women in front of the center had asked him or said to him that had made him hang his head in anger or maybe embarrassment. “
That's enough! Let's stop!
” he said emphatically, and looked away. My wife had been watching, and when she spoke she also seemed to be subtly avoiding my eye: “The parent who helped Eeyore said they saw our children as unclean, but I think they feel they're being attacked by something frightening. I think they feel their lives are being invaded by something that terrifies them. And I think their feelings will infect their children. From what we just saw it looks as though it's already happened. What if it gets to the point where terrified children start throwing stones. I'm worried about the plastic plate in Eeyore's head. He may have to start going to the center in a helmet the way he did ten years ago. When he graduates this time, he'll be going to that building they're trying to stop… .”

In my novel
The Pinch Runner Memorandum,
an accident in the special education class at elementary school launches the protagonist on a campaign to train his and others’ disabled children to defend themselves. The hyperbole of the speech he delivers is in keeping with the “grotesque realism” that underlies the novel's comic tone:

In the opening of the novel, which is similarly overwritten, a handicapped child gets lost in Tokyo Station; in describing the father's franticness as he tries to find his son I quoted lines from Blake. As he searches for his lost child in the throng of people at the station the father feels that he is the one who has been abandoned:

At the time I was writing this book, two or three years before it was actually published, in the winter of Eeyore's tenth year, something similar to the incident I have just described actually happened to us. Except that Eeyore didn't simply wander off: a certain party took him from us and then left him stranded. I chose not to use the incident in the novel in just the way it had happened because I was afraid, paranoid perhaps, that it might inspire some reader to try the same thing. Wishing to avoid coverage in the press for the same reason, I did not go to the police. To be sure, my wife would have reported the incident if we hadn't located Eeyore by the end of the first day. And I wouldn't have tried to stop her.

At the time, my wife lived in fear that my paranoia might drive me to defend myself with a degree of violence that would have to be considered unjustified even though the other party was the aggressor. I'm not trying to shift responsibility for my paranoia at the time toward someone else. What I will say in fairness is that it was triggered by a tenacious campaign against me in the form of letters and telephone calls that had been going on for four or five years already and was a long way from being over. In the beginning, I had assumed that the letter writer, whose name and address I knew, and the telephone caller at the other end of the silent line when I answered his calls five or six times a day, were different people. As I also assumed the phone calls were the work of more than one person, I even felt that they were an expression of hostility directed at me by society in general. Later, I learned that the silent phone calls, not all of them perhaps but most, were from the letter writer.

I prefer not to go into details of what was already a nightmare of long duration. I will say that the person behind the letters and calls was a student in the commerce department at a well-known university who wrote to me requesting that I facilitate his debut as a professional critic, and suggested I might begin by helping him free his pen from the writer's block that kept him at his desk from morning to night without producing a single line. The arrogance of his letters, which never faltered from beginning to end, was possibly their only merit. Before long, he was addressing them not only to me but also to my wife and fulminating against us for attending to the needs of a handicapped child while dismissing the request of a healthy person. Our thoughts were frequently occupied by the letters and phone calls for days at a time, yet the student demanded to know as he maintained his attack on the family why he should be the only one to suffer. When he began hinting at suicide, I wrote him a letter suggesting that whether he planned to continue his studies or find a job, his first priority must be to regain his mental health, and urged him to see a psychiatrist. This resulted in a new pattern of phone calls that made it clear to me that the caller and the letter writer were one and the same person: the phone would ring from morning to early evening—while the student's parents were out of the house, I assumed—and when I answered, a voice would whisper, before the line went dead, “Take your own sick ass to a mental hospital!” When my wife answered and reported that I was not at home, the voice would ask her questions, for example, had she read in the papers about the man whose head was bashed in with a blunt weapon by a stranger sitting next to him on the train? It got to the point where my wife and I would steel ourselves every time the phone rang; the situation reminded me of another telephone attack more than ten years earlier, and reviving memories of that politically motivated assault drove me even deeper into paranoia.

About this time, an incident occurred. It was past the middle of the night and I was writing at my desk in my windbreaker with the hood over my head (because I had turned off the heater when the family went to bed) when I heard an insistent voice outside. At first I thought it was a conversation between two people but, no, the voice seemed to be calling my name. When I looked outside from the front entrance to the house, I saw the figure of a large man speaking into the broken intercom at the side of our gate. “Is anything wrong?” I called out. “As if you didn't know!” replied a voice that sounded drunk and spoiled, as though it issued from a peevish child. I asked the figure to return in the morning unless it was urgent, and closed the front door. But the young man continued speaking into the intercom. Unable to work, I began the bodybuilding routine that had been my nightly treatment for insomnia for several years. On top of the weight I still carried from the last years of my youth, the regular thirty-minute workout had given me a robust look. When I had finished the routine and the young man was still in the middle of what sounded like an argument with the intercom, I felt anger rising in me uncontrollably. I resolved to seize the youth by his shirtfront and walk him forcibly toward the station (naturally I knew better than to take along a barbell that could serve as a weapon). I suspect the incident in Blake's garden at Felpham may have been influencing my behavior at the time. As I emerged from the house and stepped into the circle of light from the lamp at the gate, my head hooded in the jacket, two voices screamed, one behind, the other in front of me. My wife had screamed at the sight of my hooded figure as she looked toward the gate from her bedroom. The source of the other scream had raced away down the street like mist before a wind. My wife's reaction was evidence of her fear that paranoia might impel me to do someone harm in a spasm of what I took to be self-defense.

Not that my life in my mid-thirties was entirely closed to interaction with outsiders. Consider, for example, a meeting at my house with two students and the fact that it resulted in the most terrifying day of my life with Eeyore and did very nearly drive me beyond the realm of acceptable behavior. My gloomy entries in my diary at the time allow me to reconstruct the day of their visit in some detail—the student, Unami, who said he came from the Kyoto-Osaka area, and his guide to my house, Inada, his high school classmate, now at college in Tokyo, who hardly spoke at all.

When I awoke late that morning and went downstairs from the study where I also slept, Eeyore appeared to be playing the Mozart game with some visitors in the family room. The object was for Eeyore to identify the composition and the key when someone read a K-number from a Mozart discography; as it happened, I had just published a short essay about the game. My wife was busily preparing lunch in the kitchen, bowls of rice with chicken and eggs on top in sufficient quantity to feed the family and the visitors. As she worked, she informed me that the students had been introduced by Professor W. The garrulous one reminded her of a municipal assemblyman from the Soka-Gakkai Party; the other was taciturn and shadowed. But together they seemed to be doing an excellent job of amusing Eeyore, whom she had kept home from school because he had awakened feeling out of sorts. Apparently, one of the students had interned in a special class for handicapped children.

I helped my wife carry the food into the family room and talked with the students over lunch. Eeyore seemed reluctant to interrupt his game with Unami, and remained in the room with his mother. His mood was cheerful, a rare occurrence at the stage he was in: in the brief time since he had arrived, Unami, whose hair was unfashionably short for those days, cropped so closely you could see his shiny skull, and who fit my wife's description so perfectly that I couldn't help smiling, had managed to charm both Eeyore and his mother with his ebullient chatter. The saturnine Inada, a type that was familiar from the days of the student riots, observed his friend's performance with what appeared to be a certain bewilderment.

The conversation that day, and specifically what Unami had to say, developed in three distinctly different stages, like a well-directed performance. After lunch, while my wife and Eeyore were still in the room with us, he reported recent news about a number of eminent scholars in a familiar manner that conveyed their regard for him. I had started this by asking what Unami had told Professor W about wanting to meet me. I inquired because I knew that the professor was no longer entirely trustful of student activists as a result of a series of incidents in the course of the past several years when students had carried books out of his offices at the besieged university and sold them to secondhand bookstores.