Somersault (12 page)

Kizu, of course, had himself originally learned of the savior and the prophet of the end time through an interesting article in
The New York Times
. The leaders’ renunciation, their Somersault, he imagined, must have left an indelible impression on the two thousand or more followers they left behind, but even now, after meeting the young woman who worked for them, he couldn’t shake the notion that it was all rather comical.

After hearing this reporter’s story of how the abandoned followers had worked hard to collect enough money to buy and add on to the building, however, the story of this church took on a sharpened sense of reality. These leaders must really be something extraordinary, to motivate their followers so highly after they’d abandoned them.

And the followers who came to the building to pray, with great awe and sadness, insisted that the two leaders, after their Somersault, suffered so much that the souls of the two men took leave of their bodies and floated beside them as they prayed.

“Who knows?” Kizu said to the American reporter. “Maybe the souls of those two men really
do
fly all the way to those woods and into that modern building.” And he sighed.

4: Reading R. S. Thomas

1

On the day Ikuo phoned the office in Seijo, the young woman’s reaction was different from when he met her in the restaurant. Sounding tense, she asked him to come alone.

During the morning of the Saturday awards ceremony Kizu attended, Ikuo had moved his things into Kizu’s spare bedroom. He whiled away the rest of the morning without unpacking and then drove Kizu’s car over to the young woman’s office.

At four in the afternoon, Ikuo had phoned Kizu and told him the girl had had a car accident the day before yesterday at the entrance to the parking area of the hospital when she went to pay Guide a visit. She wanted badly to go see Guide that evening, but the young man she worked with was busy with preparations for starting Patron’s new movement. With her car still in the repair shop she’d have to rely on Ikuo driving her in Kizu’s car. Kizu still had to get ready to go to the architect’s reception—and get the tuxedo prepared he’d convinced himself he had to wear—so he had ended up calling a cab.

Ikuo returned home late that night and told Kizu that the young woman wanted him to work as their official driver. His first assignment would be to pick up her car when the repairs were finished the beginning of next week. He’d already quit his job at the athletic club, and the office would pay him a salary, so Ikuo was enthusiastic about the idea. The working hours were open-ended, he said—though later on they proved not to be—he’d just go over whenever they needed a driver. It shouldn’t interfere with his modeling for
Kizu. One more reason Ikuo was so drawn to this job offer was that driving for Patron would give Ikuo the opportunity to talk with him—although Patron had yet to say a word to him of any spiritual matters.

Ikuo began to go every day for a full day’s worth of training at the office. Guide had still not regained consciousness, Ikuo reported, but in other respects was recovering nicely. Patron mostly stayed in his room; Ikuo had only been able to speak directly with him a couple of times but found him fascinating. “And the girl is called Dancer at the office,” Ikuo added, “so that’s what I’m going to call her.”

A week passed, and word came that Patron wanted to meet Kizu, so he and Ikuo left for the office together. Kizu could sense Dancer at work behind the scenes to make this invitation possible. Ikuo had not yet had a good long talk with Patron, but starting on this day Kizu was able to.

Patron’s voice was low but resonant. “I hear you’re an artist,” he said right off, skipping the usual formalities. “Even if I hadn’t known that, I could have guessed.” Patron was sunk deep into an unusually low armchair, his chubby, round face full of childlike curiosity. “It feels like you’re tracing the outlines of my face and body with a pencil.”

Kizu was flustered and didn’t know how to respond. He and Ikuo had first been escorted to Patron’s combination study and bedroom by Dancer. Patron was still in bed. Dancer helped him over to the armchair and brought over a chair to face Patron for Kizu to use; Ikuo glided smoothly out of the room as if by previous arrangement. Kizu was introduced by Dancer to Ogi, “whom Patron calls our Innocent Youth,” she said, who was working in the office at the front of the house.

“While you’re observing me using your professional skills,” Patron went on, “I’ve been doing the same. I sense you’re undergoing a major change in your life right now, on a scale you’ve seldom experienced before.”

Kizu found it comical that Patron would adopt the strategies of a fortuneteller on a crowded street, yet confronted with this man’s dark eyes—steady, surprised-looking beady eyes, the whites showing above and below almond-shaped lids—the thought occurred to him that he might very well end up kneeling before him to confess his innermost thoughts. Considering his cancer relapse and his emotional and physical relationship with Ikuo, Patron’s fortune-telling was right on target.

At any rate, to distance himself and give a neutral reply, Kizu relied on the skills he’d acquired teaching in an American university and brought up a poet he was familiar with.

“When you reach my age,” he said, “the sort of change you’ve mentioned is inevitably linked with death, though I try not to think about it. In this regard I’ve
grown fond of a certain Welsh poet. I hope I can face death with the attitude found in his poetry.”

Kizu went on spontaneously to translate a verse he’d memorized in the original:

“‘As virtuous men pass mildly away/ and whisper to their souls to go,’ the poet writes, showing dying humans calling out to their souls as they are left with just the physical body. I think this fits me to a T.”

“Usually it’s the opposite, isn’t it?” Patron said. “If one could make such a clean break with the soul, imagine how soundly the body would sleep. I’ve read John Donne myself. One of his other poems goes like this, doesn’t it? ‘But name not Winter-faces, whose skin’s slack; / Lank, as an unthrift’s purse; but a soul’s sack.’ If an elderly person’s body is like a withered sack, it should be easy for the soul to make its exit, I imagine.”

Kizu was embarrassed at having his superficial knowledge exposed. Instead of reproving him, though, Patron seemed to want only to show Kizu that he too was enamored of poetry.

“I haven’t read any poetry for years, Japanese or foreign,” Patron said. “You’ve recently run across a new poet who has impressed you, have you?”

“It seems like everything about me is coming to light, bit by bit. But you’re right,” Kizu answered honestly. “Last summer I attended a symposium on art education in a town called Swansea in Wales. The organizer of the seminar presented me with a volume of poetry by a local poet. That evening, as I leafed through it in our cliffside hotel it encouraged me so much—physically and mentally—that I couldn’t stay lying down.” (As he said this, Kizu realized that he’d always associated this restlessness with the relapse of his cancer; now he was pleased to interpret it as presaging his relationship with Ikuo.)

“Despite my age, my face grew red and I paced back and forth in the small hotel room. Even if I were to meet this poet, I almost moaned, I don’t have the energy or time left to respond to him, do I? You might suppose this marked some major change in my life, but I’m afraid I’m too wishy-washy a person for that.”

“You said it was Wales, but the poet wasn’t Dylan Thomas, I assume? Since you said you’ve just recently discovered him.” Patron asked this quickly, like some teasing child.

“The poet’s name is R. S. Thomas.”

“What kind of poems were they? Can you remember a verse, any at all?” Patron asked, even more impatiently.

“I’m afraid I can’t memorize verses like I used to.… About his themes, though, maybe because his name is Thomas, he wrote several poems about
Doubting Thomas. He wrote from Thomas’s viewpoint, discussing the reasons why he had to touch Jesus’ bloody wounds before he believed in the resurrection.”

Patron’s almond-shaped eyes were unusually intense as he listened.

“I wonder if you would read to me from his poetry collection?” he asked, making it clear this was not a passing wish. “Even if just once a week. Ikuo will be working in our office, and he’s told me you have an interest in our activities too. For the past ten years I’ve needed to do this kind of study but haven’t been able to.”

Thus Kizu’s meeting with Patron was so successful they decided that once a week Kizu would come and give Patron lectures on R. S. Thomas—something that, considering his art background, was way outside his field of expertise. As they drove home, Kizu found it strange that things had turned out the way they did, but Ikuo seemed to have expected it all along.

Kizu already had a paperback edition of Thomas’s poems, the one he received in Wales, but he bought a volume of his collected works at the university co-op, along with a reference work on his poetry, and had them delivered to his apartment. His own copy was filled with notes, and he wanted to present Patron with a clean and complete edition.

Instead of giving private lectures to Patron, Kizu planned just to read the poems together and discuss them, though two or three days later, when he was up far into the night, preparing, Dancer called him, and he headed off to their office despite the late hour. She explained to him that Patron’s depression was back and he was staying up late and sleeping through the mornings. Kizu was led into the bedroom study; Ikuo, who’d driven him over, stayed out in the office beside Dancer and Ogi.

Kizu had selected as their first poem one from the collection
Between Here and Now
that was written when the poet was about the same age as Kizu and Patron:

“You ask why I don’t write.
But what is there to say?
The salt current swings in and out
of the bay, as it has done
time out of mind. How does that help?
It leaves illegible writing
on the shore. If you were here,
we would quarrel about it.
People file past this seascape
as ignorantly as through a gallery
of great art. I keep searching for meaning.
The waves are a moving staircase
to climb, but in thought only.
The fall from the top is as sheer
as ever. Younger I deemed truth
was to come at beyond the horizon.
Older I stay still and am
as far off as before. These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.”

Patron had a lot to say about the poem. It occurred to Kizu that Patron’s insomnia was due less to depression than to the recent intellectual stimulation that had entered his life and was cutting down on his hours of sleep. Patron’s large, moist eyes reminded Kizu of a photo he’d seen of a nocturnal marsupial from Tasmania.

“‘You ask why I don’t write./ But what is there to say?’
That line makes me recall a very pressing matter,” Patron blurted out, for all the world like a bright yet rash child. “I’ve never written a thing, ever since I was young. In a way, though, I guess what I did up to the Somersault was a kind of writing. Guide helped me in this, of course. The things I experienced in my trances I couldn’t put into clear words, but I told them to Guide and he’d translate them into something intelligible.

“After the Somersault, I wasn’t able to fall into any major trances, which Guide was aware of. This last half year, though, I could tell Guide wanted to say something to me, something like the first two lines of the poem. ‘Why don’t you fall into any trances? And why don’t you tell me your visions?’ But if, for instance, I were to fall into a trance now, I know I wouldn’t come into contact with anything transcendental. Which is why I don’t make the effort. That’s all I can say, if
‘you ask why
.…’

“‘But what is there to say?’”
he continued. “I’m holed up in this place as in a hideout, not looking at the tides in the bay every day. But for a long time I have been letting time flow from my heart—the movement the poet compares to the tides. These past ten years I’ve been doing nothing, merely observing the flow of the tides in my own heart.

“Time. . . the flow of the tides move indeed.
‘How does that help
?’ That’s exactly right.
‘It leaves illegible writing/ on the shore. If you were here,/ we would quarrel about it.’
Guide was by my side, but I never spoke to him of that writing. When it flows out of my heart, what does time inscribe? Even if it could
be deciphered, I know it would be meaningless. There would be nothing to quarrel about.

“But people live their lives for all they’re worth, knowing nothing.
‘I keep searching for meaning.’
That’s the truth. I didn’t expect that everything would be thrilling in life. If someone accused me of just sitting on the beach, staring vacantly before me, I couldn’t deny it. Sometimes when I feel in good spirits, that is still
‘in thought only,’
just climbing the stairs of waves.

“That’s so painfully true!
‘The fall from the top is as sheer/ as ever.’
It’s true. Every single day and night, all I’ve thought about is what happened ten years ago. The way I fell then, I continue to fall, moment after moment, in my mind.

“The next stanza expresses exactly how I feel right now.
‘Younger I deemed truth/ was to come at beyond the horizon./ Older I stay still and am/ as far off as before.’
What does
‘these nail-parings’
really point to? At any rate, here I am, sitting here blankly staring at the horizon. It’s no wonder Guide got angry and asked
why
.

“This is what I should have said to him:
‘They explain my silence./ I wish there were as simple/ an explanation for the silence of God!
That hits it right on the head.”

Patron’s dark glistening eyes were no longer aimed at Kizu but were fixed steadily on an invisible companion only he could see.