The Lake (7 page)

“But why would you want to pick something so difficult?” I said. “Did you know someone around you who did the same kind of thing?”

He paused awkwardly again before he continued. “Well, yeah. When I was away from my parents, the one adult I felt close to had graduated from a department like that with a degree in genetics, and hearing about the topic from him made me think it might be interesting to learn more. And then after my mother died, I was all alone and I was depressed, and since I had nothing else to do I studied constantly. I was totally obsessed. Of course, it was all focused on passing the entrance exams for university. I didn’t want to deal with people, so I didn’t go to cram school or anything, I just did it all myself.”

He went on to explain his methods in detail, at great length.

I wanted to ask why he’d been separated from his parents, but I didn’t. I just listened.

He said he taught himself to concentrate really fiercely, to cut his mind off from his body. He found that it wasn’t all that hard, but he also discovered that it was a dangerous thing to do in the real world.

The story was as strange as his tone was bland.

By the time he got into the university he was aiming for, he weighed forty-five pounds less than he had before he started. He had stopped being able to eat at all, and he collapsed on a road somewhere and found himself in the hospital. They had to feed him through an intravenous drip—otherwise he wouldn’t have survived.

“Sounds like the wrong way to go about becoming a doctor,” I said.

He laughed like crazy at that. It’s true he’s in the graduate school of medicine at his university, but he said none of the students in his program are training to become doctors. It’s a program for future researchers.

Once Nakajima started studying he couldn’t stop, and his grades got even better when he figured out how to detach his mind from his body; he got so engrossed in what he was doing that he felt as if he could have forgotten about his body altogether.

“The only thing was,” he said, “I realized then, in a pretty painful way, that there’s always a lag before the body responds to the orders the mind sends out.”

“A lag? What do you mean?”

“It was fairly easy in the beginning, when I’d do this self-hypnosis thing, setting it up so that my body would function at the absolute minimum and all the energy would get routed to my mind instead. That much was no problem, and I guess that made me overconfident. The catch was—I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s like the process accelerated once it got underway, and even if I sent out the order to my body to engage again so that I could get some nutrition and move my limbs and stuff, even when I was really trying, it was like a merry-go-round, the way it can only stop very gradually, by spinning slower and slower. I hadn’t taken that into account, and I had ignored my body too long, and so I stopped the merry-go-round too late. I almost died.”

“All right,” I said, “I realize that you
can
do that. But don’t, not anymore, okay? It puts too much of a strain on your body. You end up paying for it later on, right?”

“That’s why I don’t study like that anymore. I do just enough to keep up.”

Nakajima smiled.

Wow, I thought. This guy says he’s doing just enough to keep up, and he can still succeed in grad school, not to mention that whenever he’s not studying he’s writing another article or doing some sort of preliminary research, surveying the literature or something.… He must be really good at this academic stuff. I was impressed.

“I studied my ass off all that time, and then one day, just like that, it hit me. I’m on track to finish my coursework, there’s no question about that, and as long as I keep at it with the articles I’ll definitely get my Ph.D. And then I can go on the market in Japan, and the chances are that there will be a good match somewhere, and I’ll find a position at some institute. Only I’m not sure that the future will be all that bright if I just go on like this—if I stay here in Japan, I mean. So I’ve been mulling things over. I kind of think it might be good to go somewhere else. That never occurred to me before. Until now, it was all I could do just to stay alive.”

All along, Nakajima’s tone had remained measured and easy.

“That’s not anything I’d know about,” I said, “but if you’ve been able to manage this much, I’m sure you can do anything. I mean it—anything. You just have to put your mind to it.”

Somewhere else. I.e., somewhere outside Japan. I.e.… we split up?

So as far as he’s concerned, my apartment is just one step in the great escape?

I had the feeling that it wasn’t yet time to talk about that.

Nakajima had said he wanted to go see his friends, and yet whenever he talked about it his expression got incredibly gloomy. So I asked him about it.

“Do you feel a
need
to see these friends of yours now?”

“No, it’s not that,” he said. “I feel like maybe now I can.”

“If I come along, you mean?” I asked.

“Exactly … I mean, you’re so cheerful,” Nakajima said.

“Maybe I’m not as cheerful as you think,” I replied.

It wasn’t that I was annoyed; I just didn’t want to let him down.

I had the feeling that Nakajima was taking one aspect of me—the straightforward, easy-going part that emerged when I was with him, the cheerful surface that I had inherited from my mom—and blowing it all out of proportion. If so, he might feel terribly betrayed when my dark, somber side eventually showed its face.

“No, I know that, it’s just … I know I can’t express it very well, no matter how I phrase it, but
you’re just right
. This sounds kind of odd, but your proportions are just right.”

I sort of knew what he was trying to say.

Considering how smart Nakajima was, I bet he could have found a way to express more precisely what it was like to push his body to the limit while studying, or his perspective on the way my emotions were structured inside me. He was just being nice, communicating on my level. That’s what made it sound vague.

Still, I had the sense that right then it helped for him to be talking about something, and so I decided to draw him out. I intentionally cocked my head slightly, feigning puzzlement.

“I mean, for you love is more important than anything else, right, Chihiro?” Nakajima said. “But you don’t try to control other people, do you?”

“I guess that’s pretty true,” I replied.

“And you cherish the memory of your mother? Of course, everyone has little knots in their hearts, no matter what their families are like—but wouldn’t you say that in your case you feel love and hate in ordinary, healthy amounts? Even if one may seem a bit stronger at times?”

“Yeah, I’d agree with that.”

“And you don’t hate your father, do you?”

“No, I don’t. If anything I think he’s kind of lovable. The environment we lived in wasn’t ideal, but I suspect that it actually made it easier for us to express our love than in your average family. We didn’t fit into any ready category, so we all had to work that much harder.”

“Exactly—you don’t have that sense that you can take your family for granted, that’s why I feel so comfortable with you. You see your family members for what they are, and you look at me in an ordinary way, without wishing that I was somehow different,” Nakajima said, his tone very level. “That’s what I like about you. I’m extremely, almost pathologically sensitive to violence, and I pick up on it immediately when something violent is happening. Most people are constantly perpetrating little acts of violence on others, even when they don’t mean to. You almost never do that, Chihiro.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“I’ve never been able to discuss this before,” Nakajima said, “but honestly, I felt oppressed the whole time until my mother died, because of the way she was always fretting over me—no one else mattered. She became so focused on me that ultimately my father got fed up and left. It really weighed down on me, but at the same time certain things had happened to keep us apart for a long time, and during that whole period I’d yearned to see her so badly. But then when we were finally reunited, when she was actually there, in person, her love completely overwhelmed me.… Like, if I was going out for a while, she couldn’t rest easy unless she’d checked to see when I’d be coming home, and if I was even a minute late she would be waiting up, crying, you know? That’s the kind of woman she was.

“And to make matters even worse, she died before we’d had time to live together as long as most mothers and sons do, and so I felt even more confused. I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me—obsessive, feminine love.

“The ideal side of her, though—that part of her was so extraordinary, it just blew me away, and I felt so small beside her, and I know that if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t even be here today. I’m so grateful to her that if she were still alive, I could spend my whole life trying to pay her back and it would never be enough.

“There was one time in particular when things got really terrible. There was a period when we were like a couple in love, lost in our own maze with no way out. We were both going regularly to the hospital then, and we were in such bad shape that our doctor suggested we go and spend some time in a small house that belonged to some relatives of ours. It was a run-down shack way out in the country with nothing around it, and we did stay there for a while, living a quiet life. It was cool in the summer, but in the winter it got incredibly cold, we were always freezing, but the scenery was gorgeous, you could always see the lake, and it was lonely, and beautiful.

“And now those friends of mine, the people I’ve been talking about, they live there now, and I want to go see them, I’ve been trying, but whenever I think about it—just look at me, you can see how it makes me sweat. I’ve thought about going any number of times these past few years, but every time I end up making all sorts of excuses to myself, and in the end I decide not to go. No matter how hard I try, I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is that makes me break out in a sweat like this—my memories of my mother, or the memories I share with my friends.”

“If it brings back such painful memories, maybe you don’t need to go,” I said. “Why don’t you just wait until it starts to feel right? Don’t force it. Go when you’re ready.”

Nakajima looked miserable when I said this.

“If I do that, I won’t ever get to see them. I’ll never see my friends again.”

“When’s the last time you met?” I asked.

“I haven’t been out since before my mother died, she and I visited together … it’s been about ten years, I guess. Maybe longer. Though occasionally I call,” Nakajima said.

“You really want to see them?”

“I really do, more than anything else in the world,” Nakajima said. “I want to see them so badly I can’t stand it. All the time. Lately, now that I’m with you, I’ve been feeling more desperate than ever to see them, like I can’t hold myself back anymore.”

“And how many friends are we talking about?” I asked.

“Two,” Nakajima said. “They’re brother and sister, both old friends.”

I had no idea where Nakajima wanted to take me, but I trusted him implicitly. I trusted him with my whole body, even with my skin. When you’re with someone every day, if there’s even the tiniest glimmer of a contradiction inside them, you pick up on it. Nakajima was an uneven sort of character, it was true, but he always struck me as totally sincere.

“All right, then, let’s go. Is it far?”

“About three hours, including changing trains.”

“Will it be expensive?”

“I’ll pay. I’m the one dragging you along, after all.”

“That’s okay. I’ll enjoy the trip, too.”

“No, I should get the tickets and everything.”

“Really, I’m in pretty good financial shape now.” I laughed. “I’ve got a job.”

“Why are you so willing to go with me, anyway?” Nakajima said, looking a bit surprised. “You don’t even know where it is. I’d never be able to go on a trip like that.”

“It’s someplace you really want to go, right, even though it hurts?” I said. “It’s only natural that I come along, if I’m the only person who’s able to help you do that. After all, you’re here in my apartment every day. We see each other all the time, and we’re together because we like being together, not because we have to be.”

If I were
really
in love, I don’t think I could have said that. I probably would have tried to toy with his feelings a bit more, or maybe I would have had trouble finding the words. But all I felt then was a desire to help. And while I didn’t yet know the reason, it frightened me much more to think of him getting hurt than it did to think of someone else getting hurt. Just the idea made me shudder, and left me feeling as if a heavy stone had lodged in my chest.

“Thank you,” Nakajima said quietly.

The next day, we took a train headed north.

We got off at a small station and started walking. There was still a chill in the air—it was the sort of weather that makes your face feel cold, but doesn’t do anything more than that.

From time to time, a cool ray of sunlight shone through the clouds.

There were trees everywhere, their new leaves just beginning to appear. Even the greenest branches were dotted, here and there, with sensuous, round buds, clenched but swelling, vibrant in the haze of fresh growth. The air was clear; I could feel it coursing through my body. Soon we had left behind the kernel of activity around the small-town station, and after that it was just Nakajima and me ambling along nondescript streets. The mountains in the distance were still capped with snow. That white and the brown of the trees rolled on and on under the blue sky, a dry pairing of colors.

Then, at last, we came to a small lake.

It was a weekday, so there was no one around. The water was so still you almost felt like it would absorb any sounds that reached it. The surface might have been a mirror. Then a wind blew up and sent small waves drifting across it. The only sound was the chirping of birds that whirled around us, high and low.