Somersault (38 page)

Resting both arms on the podium, Patron leaned backward, his face to the surprisingly large space above the underground lounge, and vehemently shouted this out. The windows facing the lawn were bright, and with the lights on at the other side of the room it felt to the participants as if an opaque membrane was hanging over them. The children sitting right in front of Patron all tucked in their chins as if something quite scary was about to happen.

“I would like to quote once more from the Bible. This is from the first letter of John:

“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”

“This particular passage has caused me great pain. In the last trial, you did not leave us, and though you continued to belong to us, neither Guide nor I remained with you. And I became the antichrist—both when I fell into hell, and even now that I have resurfaced. Is there so much misery and pain for mankind that this is the only alternative—that I must be seen as the antichrist?

“Guide was the only other person who agreed that I must tread this path. Together with me he did the Somersault and accompanied me to hell. This was his choice, I think, because he insisted to the end on the necessity of the Somersault. It was a Somersault where the antichrist appears, which signals the end of the world. That is the way I understand it now.”

3

Dancer, her narrow profile tucked in tightly, was whispering in Ogi’s ear. As if he’d been waiting for this, Ogi nodded. Both arms thrust out, he held out a sign that said
THE FIRST HALF OF THE SERMON IS FINISHED AND THERE WILL NOW BE A COFFEE BREAK
. Patron let his arms fall to the sides of the podium, and Dancer held her hand out and led him out of the hall for a while. By the time the audience had risen to their feet, tables had been set up in front and on both sides, with Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and small packets of cream and sugar, all done by the security squad, which had also stood guarding both sides of the door through which Patron had entered. The communal
women’s group helped pass out coffee cups to the rest of the participants. The tall doctor’s widow with the unusual walk directed this operation.

Kizu knew it was now customary in Japan for meetings and seminars to include a coffee break, but still he found it quite a sight to see things go so smoothly at a memorial service, especially one with over three hundred and fifty attendees. He looked around for the young woman with the facial scar and spotted her still sitting with the children, who were waiting patiently as she handed out little cartons of coffee from a large cardboard box.

“They’re very well organized, aren’t they?” said the newspaper reporter Kizu knew from the press conference as he passed Kizu a Styrofoam container of coffee; standing by the wall, Kizu had been unable to take photographs of the goings-on or squeeze into line for coffee. “It turned out to be a good idea to have former radical-faction members work the security detail,” the reporter added, “though I admit I was skeptical when I first heard about it.”

“It’s a lovely and solemn gathering, isn’t it?” said a woman beside him, dressed in subdued clothes and also sipping coffee. She was the woman who had been beside the dark-skinned reporter at the press conference. Today she had pinned to her chest the white flower given to distinguish the twenty people from the media who were in attendance.

“I was quite surprised by how austere Patron was when he spoke,” the reporter said, “because during the Somersault he wasn’t that way at all. Guide was the gloomy one then, and Patron the clown.”

“For a newspaper reporter, you talk too much,” the woman said reprovingly. “It doesn’t give us a chance to hear him speak.”

Kizu sensed that she had heard something from her colleague about himself, so before she could ask for his take on the memorial service, he headed off to the door behind which Patron was waiting, receiving a nod from the ladies collecting the coffee cups. The guards standing there recognized Kizu and let him pass.

Kizu cut through the bicycle rack area and went over to the elevators, where he found Ikuo leaning against the door of the elevator to keep it propped open and available. Ogi stood in front of him, showing him a pile of documents, with a pair of scissors on top, and Ikuo seemed to be checking something. Patron was sitting in a round chair next to the wall opposite. Dancer stood protectively close behind him, so he could lean back against her. She was telling him some of her ideas about how the second half of the sermon should go.

“I understand how important the past is, but haven’t you said enough about it? I’d like you to talk about the
future
, what your plans are. The followers are hanging on your every word. Even the children are listening intently.”

Patron didn’t directly respond to her, his eyes wide open as if he were attempting to see underwater. As Kizu approached, Patron asked him, “Professor, what do you think the audience thinks about the Somersault?”

Kizu was at a complete loss. Patron was looking up, waiting for his answer, when Dancer stuck her head next to his shoulder and intervened.

“Let’s begin the second half and talk about that later. You have to talk about your future activities now. Speak with confidence.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Patron began again, “with the ideas I mentioned in the first half of my sermon, I’m planning to begin a new movement. Having lost Guide, I feel even more compelled to get started without a moment’s delay. I can only hope and pray that something will take the place of Guide’s interpretations of my visions—an ability we’ll never see again—as things appear to me through this movement.

“No longer will I have a partner who can arrange into words the darkness of a human being’s soul—my own. I can only reach inside my slit-open belly and yank out something—I have no idea what—and preach the most nonsensical, incoherent ideas.

“However, Guide taught me this: The only way I’ll find a path is by sticking my hands into that: dark place. That memory itself has been lost along with everything else we accumulated, and I can hear him accusing me of being nothing but a scarecrow filled with straw, which thoroughly discourages me.

“Speaking of the word
straw
, when I was quite young, about the age of the children who’ve come here to remember Guide, I thought about this word. Since all of you little ones are listening carefully to what I say, I’d like to direct this to you. When I was a child, I was told the expression
like a drowning man clutching at a straw
. And this expression bothered me. To tell the truth, I hated it. It made me feel awful.

“Imagine there’s a poor child who’s drowning in the river. And for whatever reason there are some adults standing on the bank just casually looking on. The child grasps at straws floating by. The adults burst out laughing. And finally, they step into the river and save the drowning child. That’s the scene I imagined. A long time afterward, I told Guide about this and he told me that he imagined it this way: When you open a drowned child’s hand you find he was clutching straw. He said he felt as if he’d actually seen this occur when he was a child.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the kind of person Guide was. If anything, it made me feel that I was the drowned child he saw, that he saw my cold wet hand clutching the straw and took pity on me. I have decided to restart my
movement and build a new church. But if Guide is now like the drowning child, then through our new church I intend to discover the straw
his
fingers were clutching.

“By unraveling the words of the visions I had in my trances, Guide created our theology. At the time of the Somersault when I said it was all nonsense, this is what I meant. The basic idea is that God is the totality of nature that created this world. Living a life of faith for us means being accurately and fully aware of this fact. When we achieve this, we realize that our awareness itself is, from the very start, made possible by God. What flows from God into us makes this awareness possible, making us able to verbalize it.

“At the time of the Somersault, what was at work inside me when I said that our theology was nonsense was another theology just starting to sprout, a miserable theology that toyed with the first. Nature, which makes up the totality of this planet—the environment we humans live in, in other words—is steadily falling apart. We’ve gone beyond the point of no return. God as the totality of nature—including human beings—is decaying bit by bit. God is terminally ill.

“Moreover, our awareness of God as being destroyed, of God with an incurable illness, is itself a part of God. Our crumbling God, our God who’s sick, is the one who makes us aware—just like a mother teaching her baby to speak: a mother who is falling apart, who’s dying from an incurable disease and is talking to her baby, who is fading away along with her, telling the baby what she knew from the start would happen.

“What I’d like to say right now, based on my new theology at the time of the Somersault, is this: From our viewpoint, as infants whose fate is to die around the same time as our mother, we have the right to stand up to God and say that this wasn’t part of his plan! The dying mother hears the nonsensical words of the feverish baby, puts them in the proper context, and returns them to the baby’s mouth. It is in that mother–child dialogue that we should find mankind’s true repentance, because the ones who made this happen, who destroyed the natural world, who destroyed God and gave him an incurable disease, are none other than
mankind itself
. Isn’t this how the church of the one who will lead them to repentance, the church of the antichrist, should be constructed: through protesting to God?

“Having lost Guide I’ve lost the way to interpret my visions, and now—dragging the Somersault along with me—here I stand. And I have decided to restart my movement focusing on leading people to this kind of repentance.

“Just as there is no doubt that Christ’s humiliating death had meaning, there must be meaning in the desperate struggle of the antichrist who has stepped into hell. Otherwise, in that first consciousness of God as He created the world, why did He structure it so that there would appear so many
antichrists at the end? God is the very one who, among all the things of creation, cannot be dismissed by a joke, the one existence that has absolutely no reason ever to turn a Somersault.”

After finishing, Patron propped his hands on the podium, and let his shoulders relax and his head hang down as he looked absently around the audience. Dancer approached and spoke to him, but Patron shook his head and pointed listlessly with his left hand at Ogi. Ogi responded to this, and looked at Dancer, who nodded back at him. Ogi went over to stand between Dancer and Patron. Calling forth all his strength, Patron leaned forward and, looking straight ahead toward the assembled multitude, cried out, “Ladies and gentlemen, please pray for Guide.
Hallelujah!”

4

Patron hung his large head down and began silently praying, and Dancer and Ogi closed their eyes and followed suit. The people in the audience shifted in their seats and began to pray silently; the sound of this mass movement of bodies was surprisingly peaceful. Kizu closed his eyes, too, and prayed. Filtered through an image of Guide in his mind, he prayed for Patron.
Lord, please help this person. And give me strength
.

Just as at the farm along the Odakyu Line, Kizu found the lengthy prayer a little too much to take, and he opened his eyes to find Ikuo standing by the door Patron had used. Ikuo stood with legs apart as if he were about to start a fight, facing the quiet, praying crowd, all them with their eyes closed.

If intruders had wanted to throw the service into chaos, it would have been easy and now would have been the time. So Ikuo had a very good reason for not joining them in prayer. Kizu could sense in Ikuo, standing there like a rock that could at any moment swing into action, something menacing that outweighed the usual affinity he felt for him.

Please help this young man too, Kizu thought; I don’t really know much about who he is, but he’s in the grip of something that took hold of him when he was a child, that propels him forward—toward
something
. Kizu bowed his head and resumed his fervent prayers. I don’t know what Ikuo is so fired up about, he prayed, but if this is, as Patron said, a small part of Your consciousness of the world, isn’t that something to smile about? I pray that You help this young man so busily moving in that direction.

Here I am calling out to You, Kizu prayed, yet truthfully I’m not sure about You. But through this young man I am leaving my whole life up to You. I know that I have, inside me, an incurable illness that’s fairly common for
someone my age. But as long as this doesn’t come to the surface and steal away my ability to participate in the movement, please help me contribute in some fashion—for the sake of this young man who doesn’t care what means he uses to realize this strange idea of his. I suspect the physical love he allows me might just be one more means to an end for him, though even my suspicion is sweet.

When Ogi announced the end of the silent prayer time, several hands shot up in the row of reporters—a show of hands from those who wanted to question Patron about his sermon. Patron was standing behind the podium, gathering himself together, and Dancer leaned toward him to ask for instructions. Patron gave a short reply. Reconfirming this, Dancer told Ogi what Patron had said.

“This is the time when we’d like to hear your responses to the sermon,” Ogi said in a high voice, “and Patron said he would like to select the speakers. The person Patron has selected is Mrs. Shigeno, from the women’s group that during these ten years was independent of the church and organized a communal life of faith. Mrs. Shigeno is also the person who, on the death of her husband, contributed the large hospital her family ran, as well as the land, to the church, as a special contribution to commemorate the church’s becoming a religious corporation.