Somersault (42 page)

After she said this, Ikuo didn’t hesitate. He took out Morio’s music, which he’d put on a bookshelf, and stood up, grasping it in his huge hand. He strode off outside along the path that, despite the streetlight in the stand of trees, was dark, with Dancer walking in his footsteps as if leaping from one stepping-stone to the next. Following at some distance, Ogi felt as if he were viewing a ballet: a sprite dancing in the shadow of some giant beast.

Ikuo’s playing threw cold water on Ogi’s excitement. After running through the five short pieces, with brief intervals between them, he remained very still in front of the piano, while Dancer stood motionless in the center of the dance floor. Ogi felt the two of them had just shared something very special—something from which he was excluded.

15: Years of Exhaustion

1

A few days after the memorial service, Kizu awoke in the morning to the sound of a feeble sigh—his own voice, he realized—and knew it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Snuggled in his blanket, he felt a balance deep within him collapse, giving rise to this voice that circumvented his consciousness. This time it had come out as a protracted
ahhhh
, and he knew he was shouldering an exhaustion that had hardened and would never dissipate. That sigh, then, echoed with a sense of his own body trying to comfort itself.

After a while he got out of bed to use the bathroom. Before he sat down on the toilet, Kizu looked out the window at the wych elm; strangely enough, it had regained the vivid softness it had had a week or two before, possibly as a result of the drizzle that had fallen all through the night. As he stood up, the large American-style toilet bowl looked—to use the first words that came to him—as if it were dyed a
shining vermilion
that dissolved the large pile of tarlike feces. Had all the energy he’d accumulated in his anus and intestines by exposing them to sunlight last summer now made his feces shine? No. It’s come at last, Kizu thought. A thin sad smile came to his face. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror and flushed away the contents of the bowl.

As he walked back to his bed, Kizu looked out at the wych elm again; though the rain continued, beyond the branches he could spy a patch of light blue sky. But this blue sky, over the soft leaves washed by the rain, didn’t have the usual effect on him. His cancer was back. He had long since come to terms with the fact that it was only a matter of time. And knowing this he’d come to Japan to start a new life. But up till now he’d tried to avoid facing any tangible
signals his body might be sending him. Or at least, he realized, he’d postponed acknowledging them.

But now he could no longer ignore the cancer. For quite some time he’d felt something wrong inside him; was it now going to accelerate? Would he soon be racked with unspeakable pain? What held Kizu’s attention was less the thought of pain—though of course this too was one way to avoid thinking about it—but thoughts of how much, as long as he was able to be up and about, he wanted to continue his physical relationship with Ikuo—at the same time, of course, not doing anything to dampen Ikuo’s enthusiasm for working for Patron. He wanted to be close to the track Ikuo was running along, while still accomplishing his own goals. What was necessary now was getting a sense of how many days he had left to live his new life with Ikuo and Patron, as well as the best ways to cope with the pain once it began.

The director of Kizu’s research institute had written him a letter of introduction to a local doctor, so Kizu telephoned the clinic and made an appointment. What he was really hoping for, though, was less a physical checkup than for the doctor to grasp the principle he’d committed himself to—the decision to live in a symbiotic relationship with his disease. Knowing the director of the institute would be a definite advantage here.

When he went in for his appointment, Kizu spoke to the doctor about his own past illnesses and then about his brother’s cancer, all the details from the first occurrence to his death. He also told the doctor how, from the time his own cancer was first detected, he felt swept along by an unstoppable course of treatment, something he now wanted at all costs to avoid. Could you possibly, he asked, just ascertain that it’s cancer by using traditional methods and then help me live with it at home?

Kizu was full of apprehension as he related his somewhat self-centered desires, but to his surprise the doctor agreed. Or at least he consented to examine him as his patient wanted.

Once the doctor had listened to his hopes, Kizu grew mellow and said, as he got dressed, “I think my dark mood of the last few years may have been a psychological expression of my cancer. It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but for the past six months I’ve felt so utterly positive it’s as if I’m a young man all over again. I want to hold on to that feeling for the time I have left. For a year, if that’s possible. Just to live a normal life for a year—without any operations, taking medicine when the pain gets to be too much, and, if I can, continuing to paint. Even if I can’t do that, I want to live on my own and watch the activities of my young friend. Do you think I have a year left?”

The doctor was evasive, saying that it was possible, as far as today’s checkup showed. But he wasn’t at all indifferent to Kizu’s hopes.

“You are an American citizen, so after the pain starts I can be more free in prescribing medicine for you than I would be with a Japanese,” the doctor said. “I’ll be getting in touch with the surgeon who first operated on you in New Jersey. That’s where I met your friend the professor who introduced you to me.” After saying this, the doctor, who was much younger than Kizu, began addressing him as Professor too. “You may not have a lot of time left, Professor, but you should be able to enjoy it to the fullest. Keep your spirits up! I feel like
you’ve
taught
me
that.”

Kizu wondered about the childish enthusiasm of this statement. If my cancer can be fought through an operation or radiation therapy or medicine, he thought, even if it just means letting the doctor get his way, shouldn’t he have challenged me to put up a good fight against my disease? Isn’t he giving in too easily to my requests, implying—after just a simple examination—that my case is hopeless and the cancer will never go into remission?

“When you palpated my rectum your finger didn’t seem to reach to the place where the cancer is,” Kizu said, in a mischievous, sour-grapes sort of way. “Does this mean that when I have anal sex the penis won’t hit the part that hurts?”

“Well, you can see how long my finger is,” the doctor said, his earlier openness to Kizu now vanished.

In the taxi on the way home, though, Kizu couldn’t forget what he’d said to tease the doctor. Well, he told himself, at least the hospital didn’t grab me in its claws! But then he felt peeved: Was it really all right to announce so casually that he had terminal cancer? Not that he wanted to pin his hopes on some doctor newly returned from America and his latest high-tech machinery who might tell him that no, he didn’t have cancer. Before long his own words came back to haunt him. There was no reason for him to suppress them.

Soon after he started teaching at the university in New Jersey, he had had an affair with a Jewish woman whom he later married. Her name was Naomi, and she’d lived with her former husband in Kobe; when he met her she had moved to New York and was writing her dissertation on the history of comparative art, and Kizu helped her decipher some of the brush writing in an illustrated Muromachi-period book. To celebrate finishing that work they had dinner together, with some wine, and when he was waiting at the bus stop under an enormous hickory tree to see her off on her bus back to New York, they kissed. Kizu took the first step, but she responded enthusiastically. Naomi was a large woman, taller than Kizu, and she held his head to steady it as they kissed intimately—not the other way around.
Kizu was still young and his penis soon rose up and pressed against her belly. As they waited for the bus on the boulevard in front of the university Naomi told him, after giving it a lot of thought, that she wouldn’t mind going back to his apartment again.

He put clean sheets on the bed—not the right size ones, it turned out—and she began to, painfully, kiss his penis; he twisted to one side and began licking her strongly fragrant genitals; then, as he tried kissing her slightly reddish, cute little anus, Naomi called out in a small voice. After intercourse she told him about how her alcoholic ex-husband, when he did want sex, which wasn’t too often, usually wanted anal sex. Taking this as a cue, Kizu tried it himself for the first time. She pulled apart her generous reddish buttocks to help him, and Kizu, although his penis wasn’t quite hard enough, was able to penetrate her. Afterward she told him, happily, that it was all so
intense
she wasn’t even sure if she came or not. After they got married, though, their sex turned more solemn, and never again did they stray like this into forbidden fields.

In the taxi, Kizu remembered the way Naomi’s fingers moved and became possessed by the idea of doing the same thing for Ikuo. He fantasized about being penetrated by Ikuo’s penis in a similarly
intense
way, positive that if the two of them weren’t able to reach that level of feeling, until the day death came to take him he never would.

If such thoughts were motivated by the fact that he had a clear case of cancer, couldn’t this be seen as a positive response to his illness? But Kizu couldn’t help feeling he was being silly about the whole thing and laughed at himself for acting like some doddering old geezer. Still, he couldn’t shake the notion from his mind.

2

Ikuo was kept busy after the memorial service, and it was a week before he was able to return to Kizu’s apartment. He came with Dancer to express their thanks to the building superintendent for allowing them to use the facilities, and the two of them went together with Kizu to the man’s office. The super was in a good mood, since the meeting place had been left so spic-and-span he didn’t have to pay an extra fee to their regular janitorial company to clean up.

Dancer left, so Kizu and Ikuo were able to lounge on the sofa in Kizu’s atelier and talk. Perhaps concerned because they hadn’t seen each other in a week, Ikuo tried to humor Kizu.

“Patron told me what you said to him: that you don’t know what direction his movement will take but as long I stay with it you’ll stick with him.”

“That’s right,” Kizu responded. “I really am interested in his new movement. You’ve helped me enter a new world I never would have found alone.”

“That seems especially true since you came back from America.”

“After all the trouble I’d taken to make a life over there, it wasn’t easy giving up my home. I’d gotten far, I thought, but it didn’t feel as if my life had taken a completely unexpected path. After coming back to Japan I felt really excited; for the first time in my life I didn’t know what to anticipate. At my age, though, such positive emotions are always counterbalanced by a sense of unease. At any rate, I’m not going to back down.”

“I can sense that.”

“Those feelings, though, don’t guarantee I’ll do a good job of succeeding in Guide’s position. He was one of a kind.”

“It’s like there are two people inside Patron,” Ikuo said, “one who has visions, the other who interprets them. Guide’s role was to make that second person inside Patron speak. As I was listening to Patron at the memorial service, it came to me how much he had suffered after Guide’s death. And I wondered whether, as he suffered, the person inside him who interprets the visions may have taken on a different
form
. Taking that a step further, I began to wonder whether Patron might not be able to put his visions into ordinary language now, without any outside help. If he can, maybe Guide’s death was necessary for Patron to begin his new movement.”

Kizu felt something was wrong with this and brought up a point he’d noticed a while back. “It’s logical, what you said. Not that I mean you’ve been illogical up till now, it’s just that the logic you’re using here is different. I’m wondering whether some of the radical faction’s way of thinking has rubbed off on you as you worked with them.”

Ikuo gazed back with a watchful, penetrating gaze, as if staking out some prey he was about to pounce on.

“I’ve learned a lot by talking with them,” he said. “Working with them at the memorial service taught me how capable they are and how strongly they feel their convictions. Patron’s movement has been able to take shape through proposals that the Kansai headquarters has made, and there’s been discussion about including them in the new movement in order to firm up the support base—along with the group of women we visited. It would be hard to make a go of this new church relying solely on the participation of individuals. This will mean, though, that the list Ogi compiled of contributors after the Somersault won’t be of much use—”

Ikuo stopped speaking, no doubt thinking that he’d gotten too far ahead of himself, and stood up.

“I’ve been too busy to take a shower these days, so if you don’t mind—”

Ikuo’s smile seem to be humoring Kizu, as he’d done before. But something welled up within Kizu, a thrill just like the day when, as a child, he’d first walked along the seashore and spotted a manateelike lump on the beach. The same rush of excitement he felt the first time he and Ikuo had sex. His throat felt parched.

Kizu took out the sheets he’d gotten back from the laundry and made up the bed. He went in to take a shower himself, passing Ikuo, who was wearing a dressing gown as he came out of the bathroom. But how should he bring it up to Ikuo? He racked his brain as he thoughtlessly scrubbed himself too hard and felt his body tighten with pain. Since the clear signs of cancer had appeared, Kizu had been careful about touching his belly, but now he’d forgotten.

Broaching the subject turned out to be easier than he had thought. “Let’s try something a little different this time,” Kizu said in an experienced tone, half playfully, and Ikuo, as casually as a chess player making a necessary strategic move, said that he’d already had a bit of experience playing the man, if that’s what Kizu wanted.