The Lake (6 page)

When there’s a plus, there’s always a minus. If there’s a powerful light, the darkness that is its opposite will be just as strong. To me, Nakajima seemed like a creature in a legend, unable to control the forces raging within him.

“In this line of work, I come into contact with kids who have all sorts of troubles,” Sayuri said. “Some are just cruel by nature, and some have mental problems, but other than that I get the sense that usually it’s the parents who are the problem. When something happens with the parent of a really young child, something seems to get paralyzed inside, or broken, and even if it’s a really tiny part, it has to be built up again. I see that pretty often. It’s really true, there’s something huge in people like that that can’t be whitewashed over. It’s like, you’re at a loss for what to do, because they’ve been broken in so many different ways, so subtly. I’m just a piano teacher so I don’t actually have to deal with that stuff, but if you’re a preschool teacher or something, you have to interact with the parents a lot more, and I just think that would be so hard. There are so many messed-up families these days, too many. Screwed-up parents.”

I nodded. Even out by the wall, where I was painting the mural, I could tell. There were parents and children of a sort you never would have seen before, mixed in among all the rest. I didn’t think Nakajima was one of them, though. His problem was different.

“I know something happened to him, that much is clear, and it obviously wasn’t a subtle sort of thing. There must have been some really big event in his past. Only in his case—well, from what I can tell, his parents were divorced, but I don’t have the sense it was particularly acrimonious, you know, and I know his mother loved him really deeply, and it doesn’t seem like anything happened with her, so I don’t think it was a problem with his parents. That’s the impression I get, judging from the bits and pieces I’ve heard. Above all, Nakajima himself is just such a nice person.… I know I keep repeating myself, but really the only thing I can be sure of is that something appalling happened.”

“Appalling? Like how?”

“Like he was kidnapped, or sexually abused, though not by his parents.”

The moment I heard myself saying that, something clicked.

Every so often, that happens. I say it, and I realize it’s true. Something close to an answer lay in the words I’d just spoken. I was convinced of it. But I decided just to keep talking.

“Anyway, he’s not like other people at all, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it, like he’s living in the clouds, maybe. Like when people talk about someone having transcended it all—he’s like that, I guess. So part of me thinks it’s just in his makeup, and he would have been this way even if nothing had happened. For the time being I’ll just keep watching, I won’t rush it. He and I are the kind of people who need to take things slow anyway. Getting to know each other, talking things through, everything has to go nice and slow,” I said.

At some point, as I was talking, it hit me how deeply concerned about Nakajima I was. That I wanted to know, sort of, except that at the same time I didn’t.

That was why I felt this way. As if maybe, maybe, I was starting to commit.

Maybe I’d begun to love him, maybe at some point I’d actually fallen for him in a big way. For the first time in my life I seemed to be in love, not just playing—a woman loving a man.

I could tell because I was cautious, the way my mom had been with my dad.

That’s how she was: the deeper she loved, the more hesitant she was.

“How about money? Does he have his own?”

“Yes. He says his father will keep supporting him until he finishes his Ph.D., and I guess he has whatever his mother left, too. He still has his own apartment, but since he spends nights at my place he puts money in my account for food and utilities and stuff. Every month. And he calculates it all incredibly precisely. Down to the hour, down to the yen.”

“He’s good about those things, then.”

“You’re pretty down-to-earth yourself, huh, asking about that?”

“Well, anyway, it sounds to me like everything’s fine. You can go on living together like you are for the rest of your lives. It’s kind of weird, but then so are you.”

“Yeah, I guess I’ll just let things progress this way for a while,” I said. Thinking to myself,
Assuming there’s any progress
. “But enough about that. You came out because you had something to talk about, right?”

“Right. I wanted to apologize. For making you go on TV, about the mural.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I don’t mind.”

“You’re really famous now, huh?” Sayuri said. “Features on TV and everything.”

I laughed. “I’m certainly not
really
famous.”

“In this part of town, that’s enough to make you a celebrity. And a lot of people are hoping that now that you’re painting this mural, if your work attracts attention, maybe the building won’t be torn down after all.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you involved.”

“Which side are you on?”

“Oh, I don’t want them to tear it down—of course not!” Sayuri said. “I live for this center. Lots of my students have been coming here for years. That’s not why I suggested you, though. I just wanted to have one of your pictures here, a huge one, where I work. That’s the truth. I had no intention of using you, or of making you create something only to have it destroyed.”

I knew Sayuri meant it. That’s the kind of person she is.

She was staring at the ground. I gazed at the fine hairs around her ears, her thick eyebrows, and I could feel how serious she was. No doubt all kinds of people had been pressing her to do all kinds of things, but she kept it all to herself, protecting me.

“Really, I’m happy to do any number of interviews about the mural. Only, when it comes to these other things, I don’t really understand the issues,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Thanks for being so willing to help. And on the off chance that this place should happen to be torn down sometime soon, and this wall goes with it, I’m really sorry,” Sayuri said. “I’ll do everything I can to protect it, as long as I’m here.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t paint for the future. Besides, it’s not your fault.”

“Either way, I’m planning to take a lot of pictures,” Sayuri said. “And I’ll have them keep copies in the district document center. That’s something I’m definitely going to do.”

I would have been lying if I’d said I didn’t care at all whether the mural survived. But it’d be an even bigger lie to say I wanted it to survive forever. I just liked coming here and feeling things each day, and recording those feelings in a kind of big way in a picture. That was how I saw what I was doing. I guess my attitude was sort of casual.

When I compared myself to Sayuri, who was so incredibly dedicated and so earnest in her dealings with the kids, I felt sort of bad.

The truth was, it didn’t make any difference to me whether my mural was knocked down or admired or whatever. And if the Infant Development Center closed, as long as the people there were good and smart, I felt sure they would carry on their work somewhere else.

Maybe I was afraid of seeing anything as absolute. I wanted to keep moving, like a stream, and I wanted to go on watching everything from a distance.

That’s how I was. I felt close to people, but I didn’t have any friends I could really share my life with, our hearts melting together. Something always failed to communicate.

Nakajima was the first true friend I’d ever had, in my whole life … I really believed that. He was extremely frail, and yet there was something in him I could trust.

I saw myself reflected in our relationship, as if in a mirror. And I knew that I wasn’t wrong. And I was at peace.

All along, just because I lived away from my mom, I thought I’d achieved independence, but now that she was gone I finally realized how much, in my heart, I had depended on her.

I never asked my mom for advice, but whenever I was going through an unsettled period like I was now, I’d call her up to talk, or go back to visit, just to see her face. Now that she was gone, I realized these little things had given me a core to hold on to—or maybe brought me back, for better or worse, to the place I came from. I wasn’t even sure what that meant … whether that place was something that had existed before I was born, or not.

When I was young, I used to turn and look back at my mother’s face to make sure I knew where I was in relation to her; now, I had to take stock of my situation by myself. Sure, I could see myself through Nakajima, but the second I glanced away I lost it. Parents are absolute; he wasn’t.

I’d watched my mother dying for so long that now I could hardly remember how, back when she was healthy, her spirit used to shine. All that came to me now was the agonizing sound of her final breaths, the smell of her dying body that had filled the hospital room, things like that. The sense of powerlessness, knowing that my mom was suffering alone, and that in her universe I was no help at all—I could recapture that feeling, but nothing else.

I read in some book that if you try to hold people back too much when they’re dying it keeps them from being reborn as a Buddha, and that had stuck with me, somehow, maybe more than it should have, so I tried hard not to cry too much, and kept telling my mom how much I appreciated all she had done for me. Now all I can do is think how stupid I was to act like that. I should have cried my eyes out. I should have thrown myself wailing at the coffin the way my dad did, and made a huge commotion. Forgotten everyone watching, the mourners and what they’d think, and just been myself.

If I had done that, I bet my mom wouldn’t have come in my dream the way she did that night, worried because she saw that part of me was holding back, unwilling to fall completely in love with Nakajima.

About two weeks after Nakajima first stayed over, he asked me for a favor.

“I want to go see some old friends, but I’m scared to go alone. Will you come?”

We hadn’t had sex again since that first time, but he’d been staying over at my apartment every night. He always made sure to remind me that he’d recalculate the utility bills.

My mural-painting days wouldn’t start until the following week, so the timing was perfect.

Since I had so much time on my hands, I’d been cooking all kinds of dishes using a huge package of imported gourmet ham that my dad had sent. Fried rice with pineapple and ham, ham and steak, steamed rice with ham, and so on.

I tried so many different ham recipes that finally even Nakajima, who really wasn’t particular about what he ate and generally was fine with anything, blurted out, “Can we have something besides ham tonight?”

Other than that, all I did was go with the guy I’d hired to help me work on the mural—a guy I knew from art school, younger than me—to buy the paints and assemble the various brushes I’d need, and then I sat at my desk working on preliminary sketches. It was a pleasant time.

I love sitting at my desk drawing—it’s like painting in miniature. Since I never simply transfer my sketches to a wall, it’s all about getting a sense of the partially formed image I have in mind—I’m just doodling, basically. But drawing on a small scale has its own particular pleasures. It’s like when I used to play house as a kid. Tiny little utensils, tiny little people. And yet everything is blown up to actual size in my mind. That’s the kind of pleasure I get out of drawing.

The wall I’d be painting was long and low, so I planned to do something bold with a lot of monkeys linked in a kind of flow, but I was having a hard time envisioning a design for it, something that would look good and fit well with the site. I couldn’t believe how poorly my imagination was serving me, and I started wondering if maybe it would be best to just go and start painting, or maybe take a survey of the kids. I was coming to the end of my rope.

If I were just going to paint the sort of design an amateur could come up with, they might as well call in a bureaucrat from city hall to do the job. There needed to be a touch of eeriness in it, something private. But what? What sort of memories involving monkeys did I have—when, come to think of it, was the last time I had even seen a monkey? Should I go to the zoo to see some? Those are the kinds of issues I was grappling with. So when Nakajima asked if I would accompany him, it sounded like a great way to get my mind out of its rut.

“Sure,” I said, eyeing a magazine. “Maybe we can have a picnic on the way!”

But when I glanced up and saw the expression on Nakajima’s face, the lighthearted feeling with which I’d replied withered. I could see this was important to him.

Until then, things had been going along the same as always, without any trace of progress. We had gotten up that morning, shared an omelet that I’d made with our last eggs (and ham, needless to say); just then, I was sitting in a rather shocking pose, in the middle of doing my toenails, and Nakajima was tapping away on his PowerBook, working on a report. I’d just been thinking that when he got to a stopping place maybe I’d make some tea when he mentioned his friends and wanting to go see them.

Sayuri had been right: Nakajima wasn’t like us. She and I had gone to an art school that wasn’t very prestigious; he went to a university one district over that only people who are really, really good in school can get into.

Naturally, I asked him about it. “How did you get so good at studying? Did you like studying from the time you were little? Was that it?”

Nakajima sat thinking for a while without moving. Then he said, “One day, all of a sudden, I felt this powerful urge to study, as if I were trying to get something back that I’d lost.”

“Was that … after your mom died?” I asked.

“Yes. You see, during the time when I was away, my mother and father started arguing about all kinds of things, and then they started living apart, and in the end they divorced. Since then I’ve been in a situation sort of similar to the one you’re in now—I still get living expenses and tuition and stuff, and I still go visit my father from time to time, and … well, anyway, the point is that I was in high school when my mother died, and I decided I didn’t want to go live with my dad. I mean, he’d been living up in Gunma since the divorce—that’s the prefecture he grew up in—and I didn’t really feel like moving to a new place, just like that. He had remarried, too, and they had kids. So I decided I’d live on my own, and then, well, I had enough money so it wasn’t like I had to work like mad to make ends meet or anything, and I’m certainly not a big spender, so all of a sudden I found myself with lots of time on my hands. I thought a lot about what I should do. I wanted something where I wouldn’t have to deal with people too much, and where I could keep my involvement to a minimum, so I’d be able to do my own stuff, and ideally I thought it’d be nice if I could make people’s lives better—that’s the life I wanted. And after looking into various options, I settled on genetic research.”