Somersault (23 page)

Dancer, who’d come in unnoticed and was standing behind Kizu, reached out the ball of her thumb, wet with saliva, and closed Guide’s one open eyelid. Drawn by Patron’s pitiful look, Kizu turned around and watched as, still gazing down at Guide, she stuck her wet thumb in her mouth again and sucked it.

Soon Dancer wiped her wet thumb on the paper apron each visitor was given, and straightened the clothes around Guide’s bare chest and legs. A steel ball the size of a tennis ball dropped down from the hem of his
yukata
, startling Patron and Kizu, but without a word, Dancer picked it up and showed them how it was used to strengthen one’s grip.

She then spoke to Patron, whose back was hunched up.

“Let’s all go back to the office now,” she whispered, and then explained things to Kizu in a composed voice. “Yesterday he was much better, and when the nurses called to him he made a V-for-victory sign, something he never does. Patron was ecstatic. But even today the doctors are amazed how strong his grip is. Try gripping his hand.”

She looked alertly at the mister that was spraying disinfectant near the entrance of the ward. Kizu stuck his hands out toward it and misted his hands wet again. Guide’s right hand did squeeze Kizu’s hand back with a crude strength. Patron reached out and laid his plump palm on top of where the sharp joints of the two men’s hands touched.

After this, they all headed back to the office. As Ikuo pulled up the minivan in front, Dancer, clearly the one in charge of their little group, straightened Patron’s muffler and coat collar.

“You’ve been up and about since morning,” she said to Patron, “so I’d like you to rest for a while. I know you have things to talk about with Professor
Kizu, but I want you to wait a little. Professor, you don’t mind waiting for a while in the living room, do you? Ikuo, you’ll give him a ride home later, right?”

Patron acquiesced silently. If meeting Patron for the first time in so long wasn’t going to lead to any substantive discussion, Kizu felt he might as well have hailed a cab in front of the hospital and gone home alone. He didn’t mind waiting for a time, though.

Since Guide suffered his calamity, the front gate of their residence had been bolted, so when he heard the van pull up Ogi came out to greet them and let them in. Supported on both sides by Dancer and Ogi as he walked into the house, Patron had none of the vitality he’d displayed in front of the nurses’ station; watching him leaning his entire weight on the two young people, Kizu was cut to the quick.

2

In the corner office, Ms. Tachibana was sorting the letters they’d received from people who’d learned of Patron’s new movement through newspaper reports of the incident involving Guide. When Kizu stopped by to ask her how the work was going, she merely said she’d taken over because Ogi was busy, her eyes remaining glued to the computer screen.

After leading Patron to his bedroom study and letting Dancer take over from there, Ogi came back and stood beside Ms. Tachibana’s desk, but he didn’t seem to have anything new to report. Ikuo had parked the car in the garage, reset the bolt in the gate, and come to sit down beside Kizu, silent, his arms folded over his massive chest.

Not long after, Dancer appeared in the office, leaned over, and whispered something into Ogi’s ear. Usually Ogi played the role of younger brother to Dancer, but now she seemed to rely on him more than the other way around. After listening to her, Ogi shared her confusion. Before long he spoke up.

“If that’s what Patron wants, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Why don’t you just tell him exactly what Patron said?”

Dancer looked like a little girl who had been slapped in the face as she walked over to Kizu. “Patron says he wants you to be the new Guide,” she said.

“New
Guide?
That’s pretty unexpected!” Rather than replying to Dancer, Kizu seemed to be muttering to no one in particular. His words were like a pebble thrown down a deep well without response, but after some time Dancer finally spoke up.

“Whether you accept or not, you need to tell Patron yourself. I tell you, it’s been one surprise after another. I have no idea what to do.”

Dancer’s voice was different from its usual piercing whisper, more muffled now; Kizu could catch a hint of her Hokkaido accent seeping through. Most likely this was the way she spoke when, years before, she was struggling to convince her family to let her study modern dance. At the same time, Kizu felt Ikuo’s tense gaze clinging to him.

The person waiting for him, lying in bed, blanket and down comforter up to his chest, was neither the unusually vigorous person of the first half of their hospital visit nor the plainly exhausted person of the second half. Patron had a sort of composed strength about him now. He looked up at Kizu with distant eyes and, with a solemn movement of his head, motioned for Dancer to leave them.

“In my new church,” he said, “I’d like you to succeed Guide in his work. To repay you, I’ll help you overcome the terrible thing that’s assailing you spiritually and physically.”

Kizu answered at once, “If you have that kind of power, then you should fix Guide’s brain!”

Patron didn’t react to these mean-spirited words but lamented instead, in a voice so full of grief it was comical, “Ah—if only I
could!”

Taken aback by Patron’s directness, Kizu felt deflated. Having lost his chance to continue by Kizu’s interruption, Patron looked away, a dark look on his brow. Then he pulled himself together and began to speak in a more prosaic way, quite the opposite of the enthusiasm with which he’d invited Kizu to take Guide’s place.

“With Guide the way he is now, maybe I’m just an old man who can’t do a thing, and maybe I should just forget about this new movement and spend the rest of my days taking care of Guide. Isn’t that what you’re thinking? When we read R. S. Thomas that topic came up, as I recall. I’d like to talk with Guide about it, though I have no idea if he’d understand what I say. At the time of the Somersault we’d already imagined that sort of future for us.

“But Professor, with Guide in the hospital, I can’t just abandon my role as Patron and spend my time pushing him around in his wheelchair as he goes through rehabilitation; Guide was injured facing up to a group that held him against his will and put him through a trumped-up trial to get him to admit that the Somersault was a mistake.

“I don’t think he’ll ever be able to communicate with us again. But even if he were to die without regaining full consciousness or the ability to talk, he’s fulfilled his mission in life. He has suffered as a true prophet.

“But
I
have to live on. Having done the Somersault and now unable, without Guide, to put my visions into words, I still have the audacity to keep on living. But if I just grow decrepit and senile and die, my life will have been in vain. And then what would being Patron amount to? Nothing—just one big joke.

“Only after I’ve lived a life befitting Patron do I want to die. Those people held Guide prisoner, gouging out what wounded him most, a more abominable act than actually killing him. That being the case, I want to rise up again to the point where they have to choose
me
as their target.”

Patron turned sharp birdlike eyes to Kizu.

“Professor,
please
. You don’t need to say a thing. You can be a Guide who just paints!” Patron implored. “You can express things in a way I cannot. Your painting can clarify what my visions mean. If you turn your eyes in the direction of my beliefs, that’s enough. With Guide in the shape he’s in now, can you really refuse? I have only a handful of young people around me. Other than you, what mature person can I count on?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to fill the role, but I’ll do my best until he recovers,” Kizu replied, overcoming his nervousness. “I’ve been stopping by the office every once in a while, but I’ll come more often. I can be your partner.”

“Ikuo can drive you back and forth,” Patron said, his eyes sleepy like those of a contented bird. “Now, would you mind asking Dancer to bring me my sleeping pills?”

Kizu returned to the living room and told Dancer, who was still standing beside the desk with Ogi, what Patron had said to him. As the young man and woman listened, he noticed for the first time a shared expression on their faces, like brother and sister. Kizu also noticed, in Ikuo’s attitude as he looked up at him, that all three of them agreed with the decision Kizu had come to. Ms. Tachibana, too, in her unobtrusive way, looked content.

As powdery snow swirled around him, Kizu stood on the pavement waiting for Ikuo to bring the minivan around. The snow was different from the light flakes that had fallen in the United States at his East Coast university and had the soft, easy-melting quality of snow he remembered from his childhood. He felt a tinge of nostalgia. He got in beside Ikuo and looked up at the snowy sky, his heated mind reviewing his conversation with Patron.

Patron had said that if Kizu undertook the role of Guide he would help him overcome his spiritual and physical crisis; Kizu smiled coolly at the thought. He’s not just dealing with my soul, he mused, but maybe sensed the reoccurrence of my cancer as well. He felt his cheeks tense up, though, at the memory of his huffy, mean response.

“There’s something different about you,” Ikuo said. “You seem—I don’t know—cold, I guess. I’ve never seen you smile like that before. Have you changed your mind?”

“I’m smiling at myself, not at other people,” Kizu replied.

“If you see Patron’s proposal as too painful, I can understand that,” Ikuo said, “but I was really keeping my fingers crossed you’d accept. I know you weren’t too enthusiastic about the idea when Dancer first brought it up, and I was afraid it was going to be a problem. I was afraid you’d feel forced to go back to America, and I didn’t want to end up having to choose between you. If you left Japan, Patron would lose his new Guide, but we’d be completely lost as well.”

“But I don’t have any of the qualities to make Patron want to rely on me,” Kizu said. “I don’t know anything about his earlier teachings, even if he has renounced them. And when I think of Guide, still such a unique spirit despite his condition, I don’t think I understand him, either.”

“You’ve only known Patron a short time, but the two of you have had some pretty deep conversations,” Ikuo said. “Knowing you, Professor, I imagine that if you take on the role of the new Guide you’ll use the opportunity to study Patron more. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, but I really want you to ask Patron why he began calling himself the
savior
of mankind—whether fake or otherwise. I wanted to ask him myself, but our trip to Nasu Plateau was cut short.”

“If it’s so important to you, I’ll do it. I need to ask Patron about Guide, too, why he called himself the
prophet
of mankind—fake or otherwise.”

In the faint light of the snowy sky, an unexpected smile rose, like a cheerful mask, to Ikuo’s angular, deeply chiseled features. Kizu had no idea how he was interpreting his response but didn’t pursue it further. Staring out at the thickening snow lashing the windshield, he began to feel a decided softness coming from Ikuo. Not that Ikuo’s soldierly frame or muscles softened, it was rather that something inside was seeping out. When he turned to Ikuo, the young man’s faint smile was gone, replaced by a relaxed, youthful expression.

Ever since he had first met Ikuo at the athletic club and invited him to pose for him at his apartment, and even more so after they began a sexual relationship, Kizu sensed the tension draining from the young man from time
to time. But still Ikuo’s attitude toward him, and probably toward everyone, contained, deep down, something hard and unrelenting; when Kizu had been about to write the letter to Patron for him, he had thought about how the incident he’d talked about, about God calling him as a child, had affected his life ever since.

Not that Kizu believed everything that Ikuo revealed to him. Kizu didn’t believe that in this day and age there was a God who would let a young boy have such a mystical experience—not that, for God, such a concept as
this day and age
was relevant. Nevertheless, it was true that after Ikuo quit college, the conviction that he’d had this experience was the cornerstone of his life. When Kizu first saw Ikuo at the athletic club he had the look of a lone jungle fighter. In his rugged features and hard body, Ikuo’s expression was far removed from the soft, gentle look Kizu had often seen in people of the same age after he returned to Japan. This didn’t mean that Ikuo had anything in common with the dry and prosaic Vietnam vets that Kizu sometimes taught in the United States; this young man’s heart was full of a yearning that wouldn’t allow him to settle for being dull and ordinary.

At first Kizu had sensed something of the wild animal in Ikuo. A true loner, he drew no one else to him, but his exterior, which rejected everyone and everything, hid something quite extraordinary. Even though they were lovers the hard armor that was very much a part of Ikuo was still in place. But now, with Kizu’s acceptance of the role of new Guide, came that faint smile, that unexpected softness. He remembered that Dancer had looked displeased at Patron’s proposal, but later, after Kizu had emerged from the bedroom study, both she and Ogi accepted the idea.

Kizu considered again what it would mean to be the new Guide. And when he recalled something Patron had said, it was almost enough to revive the faint smile Ikuo said he’d never seen before:
You don’t need to say a thing. You can be a Guide who just paints!
But hadn’t Patron said Guide was a man of language, who fulfilled his role by
speaking?
How could Kizu possibly convey Patron’s visions to others through
painting?

Kizu tried to imagine serving as the new Guide, but he couldn’t imagine himself taking a proactive stance. He’d follow Patron’s lead and do what he could as a painter. But painting what? Surely Patron didn’t think he would do
kamishibai
illustrations for a storytelling session, did he?