Somersault (20 page)

Patron had taken to his bed to recuperate and now, five days later, he was allowed to return to normal activities. In the evening, while Dancer was helping him take a bath, Ogi took a phone call from Guide in his annex.

Patron’s bathroom was like a greenhouse, a brightly lit wing built onto the north side of his bedroom study. Patron liked to take long soaks in his roomy Western-style tub. Cordless phone in hand, Ogi called to him from just outside the changing room. There wasn’t any sound of running water, but no one seemed to have heard him, so he stepped inside the changing room and stood facing the open door to the bathroom, going too far to turn back.

The first thing Ogi saw was Patron stretched out in the bottom of the nearly empty tub that lay at right angles to his line of sight. Dancer abruptly cut off his view as she slipped in from the side and leaned her nude body over the edge of the tub; she had a detachable shower hose in her right hand. Her head seemed bulky with her hair piled high, and she cast a piercing glare at Ogi from upside down. She didn’t try to hide anything; her legs were spread wide on the tiles. With her magnificent body, then, she was trying to hide Patron’s naked form. Ogi placed the phone down on the threshold and retreated. Guess even the changing room’s off limits to me! he thought, finding it comical and yet disturbing.

Dancer soon appeared, neatly dressed, in front of Ogi’s desk.

“I guess there’s nothing we can do now that you saw it,” she said, in a sort of affected calm, “but I would appreciate your not saying anything to Ikuo, Ms. Tachibana, or, of course, Professor Kizu.”

She turned her back on him, her rump tightly sheathed in her skirt, and walked to the kitchen; after a time, she came back, her tongue visible between her slightly parted lips.

“You saw the wound in Patron’s side, right? When I said
you saw it
a moment ago, what did you think I was talking about?”

Dancer said this very quickly and then gazed at Ogi silently, her face flushed with anger.

“When you wash a man’s body, you have to undress yourself, right? If you think I was reproaching you for looking between my legs, I don’t know what to say! When animals aren’t in heat, their genitals aren’t even genitals really, are they? Which goes double for humans! You’re no longer the innocent you once were. I thought you’d grown up a little!”

Dancer twirled her high waist in an about-face to the right and set off again to the kitchen to prepare a late dinner for Patron, Guide, Ogi, and herself.

Ogi felt numbed with a vague coldness as he rested his face in his hands. He lowered his eyes to some documents on his desk, but he couldn’t concentrate on the words. I
saw
it, he thought, and I
did
turn away as fast as I could, didn’t I? Didn’t I try to erase what I saw as much as I could? Despite what went on with Mrs. Tsugane, I set my gaze on Dancer’s fleshy genitals! But I did see it, and can see it still—that reddish dark
thing
on the upper part of Patron’s chubby white left side.

Back when Patron was made the leader of the church, did he already have that red gouged-out pomegranate-shaped wound in his side? That wasn’t a scar but an open
wound
, with fresh blood oozing out. Ten years ago when he did his Somersault, was the wound like that? Or did it appear in the decade that followed? Or maybe it opened up only now that he’s starting a religious movement again? At any rate, Ogi thought, now I’ve seen something I never imagined I would—the strangest of wounds.

2

The following week was a busy one for Ogi. The reason lay in that phone call he’d answered from Guide to Patron, the urgent call that led to all those complications. Guide had told him over the phone that he wanted to have a chance to talk with Patron.

The doctor had recommended, as part of his recovery, that Patron take a short trip for a change of scenery, so Patron decided to take the three young people, Ikuo, Dancer, and Ogi, on a trip outside Tokyo. Preparations fell to
Ogi. He got in touch with his mother for the first time in a long while and had her send him the keys to their cottage in Nasu Plateau—the place where he first saw Mrs. Tsugane. Ms. Tachibana dropped by the office on a day off from work at the library—she was planning to quit the job someday—and Ogi decided their trip should take place on Saturday and Sunday, when Ms. Tachibana could take care of the office for them the whole day.

They set off from Tokyo in the minivan, Ikuo at the wheel, late on Friday night. They’d chosen this late departure to avoid any traffic jams, but soon found themselves side by side with eighteen-wheelers that monopolized the highway. The minivan was comically puny compared to these mammoth trucks, but with Ikuo’s bold driving, not once did any trucker behind them blare his horn to hound them to let him by. Even when they left behind the satellite cities that ringed Tokyo, the highway was still lit by streetlights, the inside of the minivan darker than the outside. Patron was sitting directly behind Ikuo, Dancer beside him, with Ogi in the rear seat, which allowed him to view everyone else from the back.

Ogi wanted to take a good long look at these three people, the core group of Patron’s new movement—minus Guide, of course—and as he looked at their shoulders and the backs of their heads, he was struck by emotions he’d never felt before, a combined sense of how strange it all was and how thrilling.

Ogi was indeed drawn to this elderly man, fast asleep like a worn-out teddy bear, his large head fallen back; even though Ogi was working for him, he still didn’t understand the part of Patron that was on a quest for spiritual matters. Ten years ago, Patron had denied all the teachings he was working so hard to disseminate and had renounced his church. And now, even though he was starting a new movement, he still hadn’t shown them any new teachings to take the place of the old. And here was this unknown factor—Ikuo—seeking to talk about spiritual matters with Patron. What sort of fate could possibly have brought Ogi together with these people as fellow voyagers? That he was with them was a fact, but each day it was one unexpected thing after another. Add eccentric Dancer to the mix, and Ogi had a premonition that this group was about to take him on the ride of his life.

The country house to which Ogi was taking Patron and the others was part of a large parcel of land his grandfather had originally obtained when the Nasu Plateau area was first developed, which had remained in their family ever since. When they arrived at dawn it was still dark, with low-lying clouds, and through a line of barren trees they could see two or three other villas. The Ogi family’s place, though, a large Western-style home, stood
alone in a desolate spot. It seemed different from his memories of childhood summer vacations.…

They decided that Ogi would go up to the villa alone to open it, while Patron and the others stayed in the minivan they’d parked on the road below; the ground rose up on either side of the road, which lay below a dried-up grassy slope. After checking the lights and the water and switching on the propane gas heater next to the stove, Ogi looked down through the cloudy window. The barren forest surrounding the building was an old one, with huge gnarled trees; some trunks that had been cruelly felled by a typhoon were scattered about. Ogi began to regret bringing Patron to such a cold, forbidding place.

Before long Dancer ran up to the house to get it ready and told him she’d give a signal when the house was warm, so Ogi walked back down to the minivan. For the first time ever, he found Patron and Ikuo engaged in a friendly conversation. Ogi boarded the warm minivan in time to hear Patron say, “It’s not exactly a desolate wilderness, but with the woods like this, after the leaves have fallen and before the snows, it does have that feeling. The place I went to in my visions was like this.”

Ikuo seemed surprised. “Guide told me it was more like a dreamy atmosphere.”

“Guide was almost always the first person I talked to when my visions were finished and I returned to this side, so his impression of what it was like may very well be just as accurate. The sense
I
had of it, though, was like being in a desolate place like this, confronting that blurred white light. Since it was painful to go from the
other side
back to this side, as painful as dying, I imagine, I suppose it’s a bit of a contradiction to say that the
other side
is a more bitter, desolate place than this side.”

“I had the impression that Guide always spoke of your visionary world in bright, cheery terms.”

“Whenever I come back from the
other side
I talk about what I saw there in a kind of delirious way, and Guide listens and explains it all in a logical way. What he says stuns me.”

“How could that be possible? You’re stunned by hearing your own experiences told back to you?”

“It’s entirely possible,” Patron replied spiritedly, turning an amused look first at Ikuo, then at Ogi.

“You take leave of reality, go over to the
other side
, and accept the spiritual, right?” Ikuo said. “How can you be stunned by hearing about what you yourself saw?”

“Maybe that’s the fate involved in using language to speak and to listen, especially when you’re dealing with transcendental matters. There’s no
direct connection between the visions I see in my trances and our language on this side. If I wanted to go over to the
other side
permanently, all I’d have to do would be to immerse myself in experiences that have nothing to do with language on this side. Being immersed like that is how God reveals Himself; it’s everything to me.

“Still, I suffer tremendously to return to this side. There wouldn’t be any problems if I stayed silent after I came back, but that would be as if what I experienced on the
other side
never took place. Guide’s the one who told me I couldn’t leave it at that and encouraged me to put my experiences into words. Often when I listen to Guide retelling my experiences, though, I feel he’s unearthed deeper meaning to them than I ever realized. He definitely is my guide when it comes to making this mystical world clear to me. But I do sometimes feel uncomfortable with it. That’s what I mean by saying I feel stunned.”

There was more they seemed to want to say, but they fell silent for a time. Ogi sensed a movement out the van window and discovered Dancer out on the porch, doing a pirouette leap—her signal that the villa had warmed up enough to come inside.

3

The living room had the very latest propane heater—a device with self-regulating temperature and a gas leak detector—as well as a wood-burning fireplace, and it was there the three young people had a breakfast of ham, bacon, eggs, and vegetable salad the next morning. Dancer put away as much as the two young men. Patron’s breakfast consisted of liquid food, appropriate to an elderly convalescent, that Dancer had brought along from Tokyo in a thermos. Once they were free of the day-to-day routine of the office, Ogi was struck by how very simple a matter it was to satisfy Patron’s worldly desires. The same, of course, could be said of Guide.

After eating, they all went out for a walk. Before they left the villa, Dancer made Patron prepare for the winter cold by wearing an overcoat over his sweater and a long muffler that trailed down to his knees. The clouds hung lower than one would expect on a high plain, and it felt like the first snow of the season was just around the corner. Ogi took Patron’s arm to help him along, but Patron soon said he needed time alone to think and strode aloofly off ahead of them.

The three young people walked behind Patron, keeping their distance, Ogi first, with Ikuo and Dancer side by side after him. Ikuo had taken out a
folding wheelchair from the minivan and, with the chair still folded up, pushed it along, Dancer helping him.

Dancer had recommended that they buy the wheelchair after Guide had collapsed and it looked like he wouldn’t soon recover. After he left the hospital, though, Guide had no need of it, and it had been stored in the outbuilding and then loaded into the minivan. Patron was descending the gentle slope now with a healthy stride, but coming back he’d have the uphill slope to face and might be glad to use the chair. Dancer took all possible precautions when it came to Patron’s health.

“I felt closer to Guide at first, but there was something I couldn’t quite grasp about him,” Dancer said to Ikuo, loud enough for Ogi, two or three paces ahead, to hear. “I don’t know anything about what happened more than ten years ago. I’ve been thinking about this since I came to live with Patron and Guide and observe them up close. Guide always seems to be urging Patron to do things, but once it seems that his words and actions are actually influencing Patron’s judgment and actions, he immediately pulls back. I find his hesitation hard to fathom.

“I don’t have anything to base this on, but I came up with a guess. I’m not saying that Patron was led into doing the Somersault by Guide, but maybe Guide did have an influence on Patron’s decision. With this talk you’re planning to have with Patron, didn’t you say you wanted to talk without Professor Kizu and Guide around? Even if Professor Kizu couldn’t make the trip because of his health, I wonder if Guide didn’t think it better that he not be there since you and Patron had some important things to discuss. That must be the reason he didn’t come, despite that long phone call and the fact that he urged you to go ahead and talk with Patron.”

“It was Guide who encouraged me to bring my main concerns directly to Patron,” said Ikuo, who had been silent up to this point.

Ogi sensed something, turned around, and saw Dancer twist to turn around to face Ikuo, who was a head taller than she was. In a very sharp tone of voice she said, “You’re free to voice your own concerns, but whatever Patron tells you should be shared with all of us. Patron isn’t going to give you a hint for you alone; he will indicate the direction
all
of us should be taking. Don’t forget that!”