I Am a Cat (59 page)

“Oh dear, oh dear. Look, it’s because men like you lend a sympathetic ear to his ravings that he keeps on raving away. But just consider the man. His family name suggests that he’s descended from goats, and that straggly beard, a billy’s goatee even in college days, confirms his blood-stock. And his own name too, is singular beyond the point of simple idiosyncrasy. Now let me tell you a story. One day some years ago he came to visit me and, as usual, lectured me at length on the marvels of his mental training and his consequent passive discipline. He went on and on. All the same old tripe and he simply wouldn’t stop talking.

Eventually I suggested it was getting late, but he wouldn’t take the hint.

He said he didn’t feel at all sleepy and, to my intense annoyance, rattled ever on about his cranky notions. He became so much of a nuisance that I finally told him that, however wakeful he might feel, I was dead tired.

I begged and coaxed him to go to bed, and at long last he went. So far, so good. But in the middle of the night there was a major disturbance.

A rat, I’m almost sorry to say, came and bit him on the nose. Now, although he’d worn my ears off with his repetitive accounts of his spiritual enlightenment, of the way his training had lifted him above all concern with merely mundane matters, as soon as the rat had nipped his nose he displayed a tremendous interest in worldly realities. He was even worried lest his life should be in danger. What, he demanded, if the rat’s teeth were infected? The poison, he whimpered, would be spreading through his system while we wasted time in idle talk. Do something, he pestered me, do something and do it quickly. Well, I didn’t know what to do. But, after racking my brains, I staggered off into the kitchen and pressed some grains of boiled rice onto a piece of paper, and that did the trick.”

“How can boiled rice grains cure a rat bite?”

“I told him that the gooey mash was an imported ointment recently invented by a famous German doctor and that it had proved an immediate and sovereign cure when applied, in, I think, the State of Hyderabad, to persons fanged by venomous serpents. Provided you clap this on, your life, I told him from the bottom of my heart, will be entirely safe.”

“So even in those early days you had a knack for bamboozlement.”

“Well, it set Kidd’s precious mind at rest. The simpleton believed me and dropped off, smiling, into sleepy-byland. When I woke next morning, I was particularly delighted to notice that a trickle from my ointment had dried into a thread and solidified among the darker threads of his daft goatee.”

“I see your point. But he was younger then. It seems to me that he has matured into a man of serious worth.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“He was here about a week ago, and spoke for some long time.”

“Ah, that explains why you’ve been so actively brandishing the childish negativities of the Kidd School.”

“It so happens that I was much impressed by his ideas, and I am currently considering whether I myself should make the effort demanded by his mental discipline.”

“Making an effort is always a good thing. But you’ll only make a fool of yourself if you persist in swallowing every tinseled tale that’s flashed in front of you. The trouble with you is that you believe anything and everything that anyone says. Though Kidd talks loftily about freeing himself from coarse realities by the disciplined power of his mind, the truth is that, in a real crisis, he’d be no different from the rest of us. You remember that big earthquake about nine years ago? The only person who jumped from an upstairs window and so broke his leg was your imperturbable Kidd.”

“But, as I recall it, he has his own explanation of that incident.”

“Of course he has. And a wonderful explanation naturally it is! Kidd’s version of that scaredy-cat reality is that the working of the Zen-trained mind is so sharp that, when faced with an emergency, it reacts with the terrifying speed of a bullet fired from a rifle. While all the others, he says, were fleeing helter-skelter during the earthquake, he simply leapt down from an upstairs window. This pleased him very much, for it was a proof that his training had resulted in a truly fantastic immediacy of reaction. Kidd was thus pleased but limping. He refuses to admit defeat.

As a matter of fact, you may have noticed that those who make the greatest fuss about the unworldliness bestowed upon them by Zen practices and even by ordinary Buddhism are always the least reliable of men.”

“Do you really think so?” asks my master who is patently beginning to wobble.

“When Kidd was here the other day I’ll bet he said all sorts of things which you’d only expect from a Zen priest babbling in his sleep. Well, didn’t he?”

“In a way, yes. He emphasized the particular significance of a phrase which went something like, ‘As a Bash of lightning, the sword cuts through the spring wind.’”

“That same old flash of lightning. It’s pitiful to think upon, but that’s been his pet stock phrase throughout the last ten years. Not his own phrase, of course. He lifted it from the sayings of Wu Hsüeh, who thought it up in China more than a thousand years ago. We even nicknamed Kidd with an appropriate pun on the sound in Japanese of Wu Hsüeh’s Chinese name; and I do assure you that the Reverend No-perception left scarcely one of his fellow lodgers in our student boarding house unstruck by his tedious lightning. We used to tease him into a frenzy because he then got his patter so properly mixed up that he became quite funny. ‘As a flash of spring,’ he would shout at us, ‘the sword cuts through the lightning.’ Try it on him the next time he calls around. When he sits there calmly propounding nonsense, interrupt and contradict him. Keep it up until he gets rattled and in no time at all he’ll start spouting the most amazing balderdash you’ve ever heard.”

“Nobody’s safe with a tricky rascal like you around.”

“I wonder who, really, is the trickster. As a rational man, I very much dislike Zen priests and all that riff-raff with their preposterous claims to intuitive enlightenment. Living in a temple near my house there’s an old retired priest, maybe eighty-years-old. The other day when we had a heavy shower, a thunderbolt fell in the temple yard, where it splintered a pine tree in the old man’s garden. People were at pains to tell me how calm, how unperturbed throughout that frightful happening the good, old man had been, how in his spiritual strength he had shown himself serenely indifferent to a terrifying act of nature, which had scared everyone else clean out of their wits. But I found out later that this spiritual colossus was in fact stone deaf. Naturally, he wasn’t shaken by the fall of a thunderbolt of which he was totally unaware. And all too often that’s how it really is. I’d have no quarrel with Kidd if he did no more than derange himself in his efforts to find enlightenment, but the trouble is that he goes around involving other people. I know of at least two persons who, thanks to Kidd, are now stark raving mad.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Who? One was Rino Tōzen. Thanks to Kidd, he became a fanatic Zen believer, and went to the Zen center at Kamakura and there became a lunatic. As you may know, there’s a railway crossing in Kamakura right in front of the Engaku Temple. Well, one day poor old Rino went and sat down there to do his meditation. He made a thorough nuisance of himself telling everyone not to worry because, such were his spiritual powers, he could bring to a halt any train that dared to approach him. In the event, since the train stopped of itself, his stupid life was spared, but he then went around saying that he had a holy body of immortal strength which could neither be burnt with fire nor drowned in water. He actually went so far as to submerge himself in the temple’s lotus pond where he bubbled about below the water for quite some time.”

“Did he drown?”

“Again he was lucky. He was hauled out by a student priest who happened to be passing. After that he returned to Tokyo and eventually died of peritonitis. It is true, as I’ve just said, that he died of peritonitis, but the cause of his sickness was that he ate nothing but boiled barley and pickles throughout his time at the temple. Thus, though at several removes, it was Kidd who killed him.”

“Overenthusiasm is not, it seems, an unmixed blessing,” said my master looking as if he suddenly felt a bit creepy.

“Yes, indeed. And there is yet another of my classmates whom Kidd’s meddlesome ministrations brought to an unhappy end.”

“How terrible! Who was that?”

“Poor old Pelham Flap. He, too, was egged on into intemperate enthusiasms by that cranky Kidd, and used to come out with pronouncements such as ‘The eels are going up to Heaven’; in a sense, they eventually did.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Well, he was obsessed by food, the most gluttonous man I’ve ever met. So when his gluttony became linked with the Zen perversities he learnt from Kidd, there wasn’t much hope for him so far as this world is concerned. At first, we didn’t notice anything, but, now that I come to think back upon it, he was, even from the beginning, given to saying the strangest things. For instance, on one occasion when he was visiting me at home, he warned me somewhat ponderously that beef cutlets might soon be coming to roost in my pine trees. On another occasion he mentioned that in the country district where his people lived it was not uncommon for boiled fish-paste to come floating down the river on little wooden boards. It was still all right when he contented himself with mere bizarre remarks, but when one day he urged me to join him in digging for sugared chestnuts and mashed potatoes in a ditch that ran in front of the house, then I reckoned things had gone too far. A few days later they carted him off to the loony bin at Colney Hatch and he’s been there ever since. To tell the truth, an earth-bound, greedy pig like Flap wasn’t entitled to rise so high in the spiritual hierarchy as even to qualify to become a lunatic, so l suppose he ought to thank Kidd for that ludicrous measure of advancement. Yes, indeed, the influence of Singleman Kidd is quite something.”

“Well, well. So Flap is still confined in an asylum?”

“Oh yes; he’s very much at home in there. He’s now become a megalomaniac, and finds full scope in that institution for the exercise of his latest bent. He recently came to the conclusion that Pelham Flap was an unimpressive name; so, in the conviction that he is an incarnation of Divine Providence, he’s now decided to call himself Mr. Providence Fair. He’s really putting on a terrific performance. You ought to go and see him one of these days.”

“Did you say ‘Providence Fair?’”

“Yes, that’s his latest moniker. I must say that, considering he’s a certified lunatic, he’s picked on a clever name. Anyway, his fancy is that we are all living in darkness, a condition from which he yearns to rescue us.

Accordingly, he fires off enlightening letters to his friends or, in fact, to just anyone. I myself have several of his demented encyclicals. Some are extremely long, so long that I’ve even found myself obliged to pay postage due.”

“Then the letter I’ve just received must have come from this unbalanced Flap!”

“Ah, so you’ve heard from him, too. That’s odd. I bet it came in a scarlet envelope.”

“Red in the center and white on both sides, a rather unusual looking envelope.”

“D’you know, I’m told he has them specially imported from China.

The color scheme is supposed to symbolize one of his pottier maxims: that Heaven’s way is white, Earth’s way is white, and that the human way turns red between them.”

“I see. Even the envelope is pregnant with transcendental meaning.”

“Being that of a lunatic, his symbolism is incredibly elaborate. But the quaint thing is that, even though he’s gone completely out of his mind, his stomach seems to have maintained its gluttonous appetites. All his letters somewhere mention food. Did he refer to food in his letter to you?”

“Well, yes, he did say something about sea slugs.”

“Quite. He was very partial to sea slugs. It’s only natural he still should think about them. Anything else?”

“The letter did contain some passing references to blowfish and Korean ginseng.”

“That combination is rather clever. Perhaps in his lunatic way he’s trying to advise you to take infusions of ginseng when you poison yourself by eating blowfish.”

“I don’t think that was quite what he meant.”

“Never mind if he didn’t. He’s a lunatic anyway. Nothing more?”

“One thing more. There was a bit toward the end of his letter where he advised me, most respectfully, to drink tea.”

“That’s amusing. Advising you to drink tea, eh? Pretty tough talk, that, at least when it comes from Flap. I imagine he sees himself as having snubbed you. Well done, Providence Fair!!” Goodness knows what Waverhouse finds so funny, but it certainly makes him laugh.

My master, having now realized that the writer of that letter which he had read and re-read with such immense respect is a notorious maniac feels distinctly annoyed with himself not least because his recent enthusiasm and his spiritual endeavourings have all been a waste of time.

He is also somewhat ashamed of himself for having, after assiduous study of the material, so strongly admired the scribblings of an insane person.

And to top off his discomforture, he harbors a sneaking suspicion that anyone so impressed by a madman’s work is himself likely to be not altogether right in the head. He consequently sits there looking decidedly upset in a mixed condition of anger, humiliation and worry.