Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (15 page)

[[When the person who has climbed onto his bed suddenly yanks his underwater goggles up to his hairline “he” is quick to shut his eyes against the painful glare, but already they have teared. I thought he might be talking that nonsense because he was delirious with fever, but his eyes are normal! The voice that has come from the foot of the bed until now speaks in the darkness above his head, and before “he” can adjust his goggles two thin, scratchy thumbs expertly wipe away the tears in the corners of his closed eyes. His face is so thin, he looks just the way he did when he was a child, it’s like his face as a little boy at the end of the war when there wasn’t enough to eat, yessir! In the darkness overhead from where the voice falls “he” distinguishes a single after-image, like a photo printed with a flashlight. Coal-black hair, eyes bulging from eyelids like gray grapes, narrow, egg-shaped face trimmed of flesh, expressionless, dry skin. In his imagination the image merges swiftly with the negative of the last photograph
taken of____before his execution. Though he was only twenty-six, the brutal trial and death sentence were said to have turned the young monk’s hair white. If he was in his right mind when he did all that talking, why, he’s got to be challenged! says the person wedged down close to the floor again beyond the foot of his bed.
To see what must be seen
—my real father found that line in the
Tale of the Heike
when he read it in prison and sent it to relatives that were about to be bereaved, yessir! Can you imagine
a certain party
turning to a pitiful little child and speaking to him in classical Japanese? This child made that preposterous conversation up because he hoped it would excuse him from responsibility for that incident on August sixteenth, yessir! If I’d known it was going to hold his mind prisoner all those years I would never have let him set out that morning all determined like a silly fool and his bayonet a-clanking! It was a cruel business, yessir!
A certain party
did a lot of mean and low things with his little rising sun flag in his headband and his chrysanthemum crest on his back, in China and Manchuria, but the lowest thing he ever did was drag this child along on that make-believe uprising! He knew it was a
fake
that would fail, he even wanted it to fail, and he took the child along because he was afraid of the rumor after the fiasco that he never had been in earnest. He took the ridiculous, transparent, mean-and-low precaution of having——’s grandson along with him, because he figured that would make it easier to convince people he really had been prepared to bomb the palace. And young as he was, this child must have understood that perfectly well. Because while
a certain party
and the officers were in the bank transacting business, before anything had happened, he got scared to death and jumped out of that army truck where he’d been
told to wait and ran off! He must have, otherwise he’d have been killed as soon as the shooting started! Not only the driver but all the soldiers who stayed with that truck were shot to death right away! This child didn’t run off
after
the shooting began, he had the feeling he was being used to give credibility to the entire
fake
uprising, and that’s when he ran off. Down inside he’d been frightened right along about the blood of a traitor running in his veins, wondering when that blood would start to work in him, and when he was told he was actually on his way to bomb the palace he decided the responsibility was all his, because the blood flowing in his body led to the kind of action that turned the country’s history upside-down, and that made him want to run and run as far away as he could go, even from his own body, yessir! And when
a certain party
was shot to death as they pushed his wooden wagon out of the bank it was probably this child who was more relieved than anyone! When the police who brought the news drove me to the scene of the crime later that day, that wooden box with wooden wheels like large pulleys was standing in a bombed-out lot next to the bank, all spattered with blood, and
a certain party’s
stiff corpse was sticking out at an angle like a fountain pen somebody had stuck into the box, but this child wasn’t watching over him, he was squatting down in the shadow of a truck with the air raid crew that had carried away the soldiers’ bodies, and every once in a while he’d steal a quick look in the direction of the box, peering through the dusk. And no one had any idea he was the son of the dead man in that wooden box! He deceived everyone that day, the air raid crew, the police, the soldiers, and he’s been deceiving without a minute’s rest ever since. I never said a word to him about the blood flowing in his veins until now, he
managed to dig that up himself and he began fearing it by himself. Neither
a certain party
or this child were serious about bombing the palace, just playing with the idea had them both so horrified they began scrambling around for a way out. There’s no point in speaking ill of
a certain party
after all these years. But I still can’t understand where he found the gall to tell a person who wasn’t able to live anywhere on these islands just because she was the daughter of a man who had been implicated in grand treason, and who just barely managed to survive overseas by becoming the foster daughter of an agitator who was a socialist and an ultra-nationalist at the same time,
We will accomplish what your father tried and failed to do—now
if that wasn’t gall I don’t know what is! Especially when he wasn’t even serious about it, just trying to get money out of me! At the time I didn’t have the energy to find out whether the stocks had been sold or not, but assuming they hadn’t and were still worth something, we would have had an easy time after the war. But
a certain party
made sure this child and I would have hard times after the war, and then he tells me
We’ll accomplish what your father tried and failed to do
—that’s how mean and low he was, yessir! Of course this child is just as mean and low, he’s afraid there may even be an emperor in the Japanese world after death, and if the emperor
over yonder
said to him You may not have rebelled against the emperor in the world of the living, but you escaped by committing suicide, which means you weren’t truly a subject, either, he’s terrified he wouldn’t have an answer, and that’s why he won’t commit suicide, but he tries to blame it on me. Which seems pretty rude, impertinent too, wouldn’t you say, considering I’m——’s daughter! And now the child can hardly wait to die of cancer, the day and hour of his
death is all he can think about and it makes him so excited he can’t help singing a happy song, and do you know why? Because he reckons he’s finally going to be able to run away and not be responsible, yessir! YOU’RE RIGHT! YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! shouts the “acting executor of the will,” who has been silent for some time. Do you know he’s made me promise over and over again that I’ll take our child and marry an American when he dies! He even went out and found an American deserter. We kept him at home for a long time as a member of the family, and a number of times he pretended to get drunk and started carrying on, trying to make me seduce the American. He hopes that if his child becomes an American citizen his own blood will be freed from both the emperor and the ghost of the name of____. Abruptly “he” shouts in a voice like a cracked bell, his underwater goggles bouncing on the bridge of his nose, I RELIEVE YOU OF YOUR POSITION AS “ACTING EXECUTOR OF THE WILL”! Listen to him still carrying on, mean and low as he is! The voice crawls up from beyond the foot of his bed. I’ll take the child back to the forest, and you come along, dear, and we’ll live together. This time I’ll make right sure to tell the child about his great-grandfather____. Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir! THIS IS THE DREAM. THIS
MUST
BE THE DREAM! I’ve figured out the dream that’s been making me scream and weep! “he” shouts, and bursts into tears, writhing on his bed. It is a dream, truly. When he was a child he used to have cruel dreams and sob, and he’s still dreaming and weeping uselessly! The mild, flat voice from below the foot of the bed is comforting now. And here he is thirty-five years old, it’s a cruel business! When he was a child
he’d dream the teacher at elementary school was asking him
If the emperor ordered you to die, would you die?
and he’d sob and repeat the cruel answer in his sleep,
Yes, I would die, I would die happily!
and here he is thirty-five years old and still weeping away as if the teacher was asking him that same question, it’s a cruel business, yessir!]]

[[Clamping to his head a set of newly purchased earphones in addition to the underwater goggles covered with cellophane, which “he” continues to wear as usual, “he” listens all the day long to a repeating tape recording of Fischer-Dieskau singing the Bach cantata. Already “he” rejects all overtures to contact from the outside, except those over which “he” has no conscious control, like the medical treatment applied to his body. The person who has been relieved of duty as “acting executor of the will” has ceased to exist in his consciousness. Still, there are times when “he” resumes his “history of the age,” as if the tape recorder endlessly playing the Bach tape could record at the same time, or a newly-employed amanuensis were waiting at his bedside. “He” also sings his beloved song of
Happy Days.
To be sure, since the Bach cantata continues to reach him through the earphones, the melody and rhythm of the song “he” hums are frequently affected by it. If “he” understood German, the words “he” mouths would also be deranged.]]

The night a madman with beard all over his face very like
a certain party
had invaded his hospital room, he had thrown his Rotex rotary nostril clipper and cut an arabesque pattern in the fellow’s beard which he supposed would permit him to track him down, but for someone as
prudent as himself he had been hasty and careless. For the bearded intruder was actually no madman at all but a madwoman! Undoubtedly she had thrown away the false beard that had been clippered, and with that the only clue had been lost forever. With abnormal alertness, he had seen through the madwoman to the bearded man the minute he had discovered, in the creature’s style as she spoke to him from, curiously,
below
the foot of his bed, probably squatting, something identical, though the words were different, to the voice that had shouted that night, foaming, What in god’s name are you?
What? WHAT?
To repulse the old woman whose madness was plain to see in the abnormal expressionlessness of her thin, egg-shaped face beneath her white hair, he should have screamed at her, just as he had screamed back at the bearded man, I’m cancer,
cancer,
the spirit and soul of liver cancer is
ME!
and instantly have put an end to the matter.

[[Having been thus shouted at, the other party can have had little to protest. To expand upon a line by an English playwright-actor, “Just as there is abundance in the world of the living, so there is abundance in the world of the dead,” so, to be sure, did the abundance of the world of the cancer-man actually exist in this world, and in the case of his own body in particular, in which cancer is proliferating at supersonic speed, his abundance is in fact cancer’s! “He” doubts not that his custom-made cancer has already spread to all his lymph glands and mucous membranes, or that cancer cells cover his body layer upon layer, like a detailed road map. On the other side, cancer’s side, of the pain “he” feels at present, before his transformation into cancer-man is complete, there is surely pleasure of equal value; the feeling of pressure on the surrounding organs “he” suffers as his liver enlarges, if
“he” became the liver itself, would undoubtedly be rich with the joy of proliferating cancer’s vigor and vitality. “He” hopes somehow to sample however small a taste of that pleasure before “he” completes his transformation into cancer-man.

Covering his eyes with the cylinder-type underwater goggles and plugging his ears with the headphones, his mouth stretched open, “he” approximates the instant of death when at last the transformation will be completed. The most vital substance in his body until that instant, cancer, as death arrives, undergoes a subtle change of great interest, goes into motion placid and self-generated in the direction of decay and dissolution. It is a motion like the first bubble of methane gas rising to the surface of the water, a premonition of decay, and as “he” savors the sensation at the very core of his physical body, “he” strokes his withered arms and chest. Restlessly, hoping to verify the existence of as much skin as “he” can touch in the brief moment remaining, and as much of the wasted muscle just beneath. Nothing can move him so deeply or nourish him so richly now as the joy of experiencing the premonition of decay of his own body as the sensation of existence itself. So far as “he” is aware, his feelings toward the cancer that has overtaken more than half of his body-and-soul are his feelings toward a true brother. The instant his beloved brother has completed its enormous job, ineluctably, they will begin to decay together. Cancer, radiant and fresh compared to the body “he” has used for thirty-five years, will begin to decay in the bloom of its youth. “He” concedes that his attempt to reconstruct his own life has been defeated by the appearance of an unexpected sniper, but that no longer troubles him. Because, with cancer’s destructive help, “he” has stripped
away the excess flesh that was loaded on his real body over the past twenty-five years and is now already reduced all the way to his body at three in the afternoon on August sixteenth, 1945. In all that madwoman’s tedious talking the only thing she said of even slight significance was that “he” had become so thin “he” had regained his face as a child at the end of the war. Lifting his voice shrilly in an imitation of a boy soprano, “he” sings
Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again!
Admittedly, the melody is transformed, by the music resounding incessantly through the earphones, into a melody appropriate to the shout
da wischt mir die Tr
ä
nen mein Heiland selbst ab
, to the prayerful shout understood by him to mean
His Majesty the Emperor, with his own hands, shall wipe my tears away.
At times, instead of
Happy days are here again,
“he” even sings
Come, Oh Death, thou brother of sleep, Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder.
Before long, without fail, cancer will eat away the useless outer layers of body-and-soul which have concealed his true essence ever since August sixteenth, 1945, and will whisper, in a voice that pierces all the way from the root of his body to his soul,
Now then, this is you, there was no need for you to have become any you other than this, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again!
At that moment, the clear, midsummer afternoon in 1945 will unfurl before him as a truly elastic “now” whose shape can be selected at will. Seconds before “he” completes his transformation into cancer-man, “he” will joyfully enter the vastness of that “now.”]]