Somersault (21 page)

Dancer had clearly had her say; she began to walk more quickly in order to shorten the distance between herself and Patron. Urged on, Ogi and Ikuo picked up the pace. It was a simple matter for the young men and Dancer, with her gymnastic training, to catch up with Patron. He had stopped at the side of the road where raised earth marked the boundary of the older residential section of the area; across from him was a paved road and a slope running
downhill and, even farther down the slope, a newer residential area that he was now gazing at. Dancer may have cut her conversation with Ikuo short because she noticed where Patron was standing.

A broad deep expanse of snow-covered mountains lay before them. On this side ran the line of woods that this morning had seemed desolate; bathed in the faint sunlight, the woods now had a gentle reddish-yellow tinge. The whole scene gave the impression that both people and trees had finished their preparations for the day, fast approaching, when snow would blanket ground and woods, and the far-off mountains would become one continuous stretch of white.

As the three of them reached the bundled-up Patron, he turned gracefully toward them in his expensive boots at the sound of Dancer’s voice and she briskly helped him into the wheelchair. Standing at the tip of that old road sloping down, their backs to it, they could feel the wind whipping up the slope, carrying with it a hint of cold air from the snow-covered mountains in the distance. At this season this was an appropriate spot to end their walk, and all of them understood it was the proper time to begin pushing Patron back up the hill. With her quick, unsparing way of working, Dancer was the perfect attendant.

4

By six it was already dark. Patron had slept during the day and then eaten dinner in bed, and Dancer urged him to stay in bed for the time being. Their group discussion, then, began at little after seven. The young people lit the wood in the fireplace, set an armchair in front of it for Patron, and settled down directly on an electric blanket they placed on the rug. They didn’t face Patron directly, and as he stared into the fireplace, they followed suit, listening intently and gazing at the flames. Ikuo had used a saw to cut up some of the pine, light brown birches, and cherry trees that had toppled over in the typhoon into six-foot-long logs, but couldn’t find a hatchet to chop them into smaller pieces.

“I understand Guide suggested that you talk directly with me, Ikuo,” Patron began. “He phoned me from his annex to tell me this. The fact that he didn’t come to see me directly is a sign that he has something in mind. Professor Kizu, too, sent me a letter outlining the background to your questions, that your motivation for getting close to Guide and me can be traced to a desire you’ve had ever since you were a young boy. He wrote that you’re a young man with something very special inside, and that if talking with
me is needed to bring that to the surface, he wants to do what he can to help out.

“So it’s obvious that Professor Kizu thinks you’re a pretty special person. Dancer tells me that my answers to you shouldn’t be for you alone, but for all of you, Dancer and Ogi included. In other words, whatever I say is connected to the movement I’m about to launch. In Guide’s case, however, there’s a separate issue at stake. Guide sympathizes with you, Ikuo, and the difficult questions you have, which is why he’s advising you. I know him very well, though, and I know that can’t be all there is to it.

“Guide is making the following proposal to me
through
you, Ikuo:
In the past, God called to this young man. And I want you, for the sake of this young man, to act as intermediary to revive God’s call to him
.

“Guide is throwing up a challenge to me. He’s also proposing that we try once more to do an important job that he and I weren’t able to complete in the past. How this will come about, he’s leaving up to me. According to Professor Kizu’s letter, the God that appeared to you, Ikuo, told you to
do
something, and though you were still a child then, you waited with all your might to see what God wanted you to
do
. But you waited in vain.

“This is similar to the time before our Somersault, when Guide wanted me to act as intermediary between God and the radical sect he created. Around the time our church was getting established and really beginning to grow, he gathered a group of elite young people and created a place where they could freely conduct their research—his own special vanguard, in other words. Doesn’t it seem now as if he’s singling you out, hoping to raise you up as a firm believer, as a kind of replacement for the sect? What I need to know is what fundamental difference Guide sees between then and now, between you and the radical faction in Izu.

“In the past we used to have these kinds of heavy discussions as he tried to grasp the vision I saw in my trance. Right now I’ve come back from an unsuccessful attempt to enter into a deep trance—my first in a decade. Guide tells me this is a preliminary to the return of those trances of old.

“I don’t know yet what form it will take, but I’ve taken the first steps toward starting a new movement. Guide is essential to this, but you young people are also crucial. This is why I responded to Ikuo’s appeal and asked you three to travel with me.

“I’d like to tell you young people about what Guide and I used to do in the old days and how our Somersault came about. Until we abandoned our movement, what was it I preached to our followers? In a nutshell, it was my hope that the world be filled with people who repent what’s happened to our world, because that is the only way for life to be restored to our planet. In the
visions I had in my trances, I grasped how to do this. The sect that Guide created came up with tactics for accomplishing this, tactics that would forcibly drag people with us until everyone realized the kind of future mankind was facing.

“I can’t deny that that’s the direction in which I led the church.
Those who can envision the end of the world, the end time, will, in the near future, create an actual crisis that will be a productive opportunity for repentance; those people are out there
, I said in my sermons. This is the point at which the sect Guide created rose to prominence within the church—working to bring about a crisis that would lead everyone to immediate repentance and preparing the methods and shock troops to carry it out.

“Up till the stage where the ideology behind this young elite sect in Izu was set, Guide and I worked in harmony. Once the whole body of believers accepted the Izu sect’s ideas, and the shock troops that would initiate a crisis grew until they had the power to destroy an entire city, then my sermons anticipating a crisis would take on a real sense of power. Guide wasn’t the only one who believed this; I did too.

“The reason I preached about making my visions of the end of the world a reality is that I wanted the people who live on this planet to have the courage to face that crisis, while they still had the energy to be restored to life out of the ruins that, even then, were already appearing. What would be the point of having the human race repent en masse if they didn’t have the courage or energy to
do
anything about it? That was my doctrine, and this was supposed to be the source of the orders for whatever actions the church was about to take.”

This is a sermon in itself, Ogi thought. The sense of emotional tension that came across struck him as incongruous, so much so that he felt like interrupting Patron to say,
Hey! I’m not one of your believers, I just work here!
Though he was, of course, up to his ears in helping Patron restart his religious activities. What did Dancer think about all this? Just as this thought occurred to Ogi, Dancer interrupted Patron, though what she said didn’t answer Ogi’s unspoken question.

“Ogi and I have heard all this before from Guide,” she said. “He painted a vivid picture of what the end of the world looks like in visions. Isn’t that right?” Ogi, suddenly urged to agree, nodded but felt uneasy about how Patron would interpret his assent. “We’ve all read newspaper articles about overpopulation, our lack of resources, and the destruction of the environment, but the images that Guide painted for us really struck us to the core. They were heartrending. Guide told us you have profound visions, which you describe in a torrent of words. He also told us he feels a great anxiety as he interprets these visions, anxiety about whether or not he’s getting them right.”

“It’s not that I
see
visions,” Patron said, “but rather that I’m
assaulted
by them, and the question then is how to convey this to people. The only way I could put them into some sort of logical language was through Guide’s help. He’s the one who understands better than I—at the linguistic level—what my visions are all about.”

“But it seems to me
you’re
the one who established the basic system of the church,” Dancer said. “Guide told me, too, that it might be impossible to convey the whole of your visions in language people can understand. Mankind faces a cruel future, is at a dead end, staring at a wall; as long as people don’t have a way to scale that wall, they’ll never understand the depths of the crisis they’re in. People are really good at ignoring danger. The task for your church was to bring the end of the world closer, to let people actually
see
it. How was this supposed to happen? The only alternative was to present a model of this crisis to force people to repent. The tactics of the Izu radical faction were to precipitate this crisis, radically and concretely. That’s what Guide said. Patron has just spoken of this, but the point I’m trying to make is that the two of them were in agreement at that time.”

Ogi decided that Dancer’s long interruption was a tactic of her own to give Patron a break from doing all the talking. But it also worked to encourage the others to speak up, and now Ikuo raised a question.

“Setting aside the issue of the Izu radical faction and their gaining power in the church, if Patron’s visions were the basis for the church’s teachings, wasn’t that doctrine correct and isn’t
it still
correct? I mean, during the past ten years this crisis hasn’t been resolved, has it? So why was it necessary at the time of the Somersault to deny these teachings? You and Guide announced that it was all nonsense, right?”

Sitting in a faded purple chair that Ogi remembered from childhood, Patron shifted to face Ikuo. As if to put a stop to this, Dancer spoke up.

“If you’re going to talk about Patron’s state of mind at the time of the Somersault, then all of us—since we weren’t present at the time—need to consider the background. Don’t you agree, Ikuo? The elite group that Guide created was already acting on its own, trying to bring ordinary people face-to-face with what Patron envisioned in his trances. When they got the idea to move the whole church body in that direction, the radical sect went ahead and took action, attempting to get the entire church implicated. Although the church’s attitude wasn’t yet set, the radical faction went ahead with its adventurist schemes.”

Ikuo still didn’t give up trying to speak directly to Patron. “I was still basically a child,” he said, “when I saw the whole Somersault affair on TV. Your announcement seemed like one more in a long string of jokes. This was
right after Chernobyl, and I remember being upset, thinking it was absolutely insane to intentionally try to cause an accident like that. But I was also agitated by the thought that God had told the radical faction to
Do it.”

“If it was really God telling the radical faction to act, they wouldn’t have collapsed so easily,” Dancer said, not giving Patron a chance to respond. “With the information that Patron and Guide gave the authorities at the time of their Somersault, the radical faction’s shock troops were arrested on their way to the nuclear power facility at Mount Fuji and their intentions for the plant came to light; the authorities, though, downplayed the scale of what they were planning. Once power was brought to bear on the situation, in other words, the whole thing was treated as a farce. Guide told me that since it would have been too much for the government to admit the existence of a sophisticated plan to blow up nuclear power plants, they treated it as a crude, childish idea as a way of defusing any concerns the public might have. And what was particularly effective in this effort to downplay and mock the plans—as you are well aware, Ikuo—was Patron and Guide’s Somersault, that comical TV performance.”

As Ogi saw it, Ikuo’s question to Patron was at the heart of what really concerned the young man. He didn’t think Patron, having undertaken this short trip to the cottage, could very well refuse to answer, nor could he understand why Dancer insisted so strongly on blocking Patron’s reply. Ogi was just about to summon up his courage and tell Dancer to let them hear what Patron had to say when the phone rang.

The phone was in the dining room, next to the spacious living room with its fireplace; to keep the heat in during the winter the glass door between the two rooms was kept closed. The ringing startled them. It was not yet 9
P.M
., but all the surrounding houses were shut up and the silence of the high plain was more like the middle of the night. Ogi stood up to answer the phone and noticed that Patron looked particularly tense.

The caller wasn’t unexpected—Ms. Tachibana, who was taking care of things back at the office—but what she had to say
was
. Several former members of the church were scheduled to visit Guide that evening, and he’d told Ms. Tachibana not to prepare any meal for them but to just serve tea; if they showed up after she went home she should lay out the tea things before leaving. He also told her that if Dancer called on their way to Nasu Plateau, Ms. Tachibana wasn’t to say anything about Guide’s having visitors.

The visitors didn’t come while Ms. Tachibana was at the office, so she went ahead and followed the recipes Dancer left her and made dinner for Guide, whose diet had been restricted ever since he fell ill. After arranging the dinner on the dining table, Ms. Tachibana left to return to the college town
where her brother was waiting in their apartment. Around eight o’clock she began to worry about the visitors and phoned the annex to tell Guide to leave the dirty cups and dishes for her to wash later, but there was no response. She called the office in the main building, but still no answer. She was so worried she thought she would go back to Seijo, despite the late hour.