Somersault (3 page)

Ogi’s main assignment at the time was to escort the doctor and his wife, both from Lyons, to an office at the hotel that had been booked for the conference; the doctor was to deliver the keynote address. After making a longdistance call to Patron’s residence, Ogi escorted the French couple to the mammoth preconference dinner reception, where the head of the Association, a longtime research collaborator of the French doctor’s, sat waiting at the table with his wife to greet them. This accomplished, Ogi explained his situation to the conference staff, rushed by taxi to the Chitóse airport outside Sapporo, and boarded the Tokyo-bound plane. Ogi realized he’d never before
acted so rashly. It made him feel uncomfortable, yet this emotion alternated with a definite delight at having taken such a bold step.

The next morning, the foundation—or rather Ogi, as its representative—was to take the French doctor’s wife around Sapporo by car while her husband was giving his speech. On the way back from the Chitóse airport, Ogi might very well get stuck in traffic and not make it back in time, but still he decided to fly to Tokyo without arranging for someone to fill in for him. Ogi was normally a person with a strong sense of responsibility, and though this word can easily take on a negative connotation, he was even something of a perfectionist. Despite all this, he found skipping the next day’s work profoundly gratifying.

This feeling of satisfaction was certainly in keeping with his youthful innocence, but such behavior couldn’t be measured by the yardstick he’d lived his life by up to this point. A premonition even struck him that this hasty act might end up destroying the self-image he’d so carefully crafted. Why Ogi made such an out-of-character decision at such a critical time, though, was quite simple. It was that gentle whispery voice, that half-open mouth like an eel moving through water. Even over the phone, when he called, Dancer’s breathless and intimate way of speaking had grabbed him. Without letting him get a word in edgewise, she explained the situation.

“Guide was invited to a gathering of former members of the church, and he collapsed there, apparently from a brain aneurysm. Before Guide spoke, while they were still eating, he complained of a headache. After this he felt bad and vomited in the bathroom. Fortunately there was a doctor at the meeting, and he arranged for Guide to be taken right away to a university hospital where a friend of his works. They operated on him for eight hours, and at this point things look promising. But he lost a lot of blood. Patron’s been saying that ever since Guide took on the responsibilities of helping lead the church he’s suffered from chronic collagen disease. Patron was worried that he’s been battling illness for so long his blood vessels may have become weakened. He started crying after he said this. I can’t handle all this alone. I need you to come back!”

Ogi told her he was scheduled the next morning to take the French doctor’s wife, herself a tree specialist with some books to her name, to see the Tokyo University experimental tree farm, but Dancer brushed that aside.

“Don’t wait till tomorrow. Take a plane to Haneda airport tonight and come straight to our headquarters. There’s no one else nearby who can help. Patron’s miserable, like a stonefish shot by a spear gun.”

Ogi pictured Dancer’s slim, muscular shoulders and upper arms, and the imagery she employed made him wonder for a moment if she maintained her physique through a little scuba diving thrown in on top of her dancing. He was convinced, though, of the urgency of the situation.

Arriving at Patron and Guide’s office in Setagaya, Ogi walked through thick trees that gave way to a hedgerow toward the single-story building, all the while gazing up at the night sky. The stars were bright, the sky as clear as it had been in Hokkaido.

Before he could ring the front doorbell, Dancer opened the door from inside and stood there on the brick walkway, as if staring right through him.

“You should always ring the bell at the gate. Sometimes we have the Saint Bernard loose in the garden.” Her always-sweet whisper contained a warning.

Dancer led the way into spacious connected living and dining rooms and, leaving Ogi in the faint glow of a lamp on a low bookshelf between a sofa and an armchair, strode off down the dark corridor leading to Patron’s study-cum-bedroom.

Ogi sat down on the edge of the sofa nearest the entrance and recalled the time he’d delivered smoked turkeys from the foundation at the end of last year. He had had a lot of stops to make, and the chairman had instructed him to finish by Christmas Eve, so it was late at night by the time he reached Patron and Guide’s home. At an intersection two streets away from the house he ran across Patron out walking his dog. Sleet was falling, the streetlights barely illuminating the road, and the short stocky man walking slowly down the street in a rain poncho reminded Ogi of the wooden toy soldier his father had brought back for him as a present from Germany when he was a child. The man was accompanied by a Saint Bernard whose body was as long as the man’s torso. At first Ogi found his gaze drawn solely to the man’s quiet footsteps, the way his body stayed completely level as he walked. The dog walked in exactly the same way. The hood on the man’s poncho covered his face, and the dog’s body was covered in the same material, which lent them a further air of similarity. After he passed them, it took a moment for Ogi to realize that the man was Patron, but he hesitated to turn and call out to him. The majestic and solemn way that Patron and his dog walked, like two brothers, kept him from saying anything.

Ogi recalled all this as he waited in the dimly lit room; he stood up and gazed out through a break in the curtain on the broad glass door at the darkened garden and its dense growth of trees. From behind a stealthy voice, Dancer’s, addressed him.

“Are you checking out the doghouse? Why do that? He’s inside it. You needn’t worry that he’ll attack you.”

Used by now to her chiding, Ogi said nothing and merely looked down at the brick walkway below his feet. On both sides of the room, running the entire length, was a complicated sort of European shutter system, not now being used. Guide had explained why they were there to Ogi not long ago, as he stood on this very spot.

When Patron and Guide first moved into this house they had a terrible persecution complex and believed many people hated them. Fearful that these people would throw rocks at them, they decided to install sturdy shutters for protection. They were afraid that rocks thrown from outside would shatter the windows, so the sensible thing would have been to put the shutters on the
outside
of the fixed glass, but Patron had insisted on having them as close to him as possible as he lay reading on the sofa, so they put up these
interior
ones with their complex system of rails and wooden doors. Eventually the world lost interest in the two men, and once that happened Patron finally was willing to have this strange contraption removed someday. For whatever reason, Guide explained all these details to Ogi. On that day, Patron happened to be in the throes of one of his bouts with depression and did not come out of his room, so it was Guide who dealt with Ogi, visiting as usual on foundation-related business.

“Patron’s awake now, and you can see him by his bedside. But no silly questions, okay?” Dancer continued, in an overbearing manner that made Ogi instinctively recall her entreaties to him over the phone.

Dancer spun around, pivoting from the waist. In the instant as she turned away, and just before following her down the corridor, Ogi was sure he caught a glimpse of a thread of saliva deep in her mouth, glinting silver in the light of the low lamp. But the youth could only grasp in a conceptual way what might be sensual to another.

Patron was lying on his low bed facing them, in a room even darker than the hallway. Dancer led Ogi to a bedside table with a lamp on it; when he saw Patron’s face in the lamplight, Ogi was pierced to the quick. Patron, so much older than he was, lay there looking up at Ogi with tearful imploring eyes, the kind of gaze you just couldn’t hold. Ogi stared off into space and listened to his sad complaints.

“I don’t have all that much goodness in the past to remember,” Patron said, “and now I feel like I’ve lost the future as well. Even if I were to fall into a trance again and go over to the other side, anything I might say about my experiences there would just be so much nonsense. Guide is the only one who can make my words intelligible, so for the first time people on this side can understand me. Without Guide to listen to me, my words are like a feverish delirium, and afterward I have no memory of them
at all. All that remains is the empty husk where the fruit of meaning once resided.

“Without Guide, my words are nonsense. Looking back now on our life together, I see with great clarity how true that is. Even if I were to write my memoirs, without him I couldn’t say a thing. The same holds true for the Somersault. Guide put everything in order and created memories for me. But now that he’s collapsed, what can possibly remain? I’m no better than a corpse.

“Nothing of substance will remain from my life, not even words. This is especially true when it comes to my concept of the future. Only through Guide can the visions I have be put into recognizable words and these concepts made possible. Without him I’m left with no past and no future. If all I have is the present, that’s the same as saying that all I have left is this present hell! Why in the world did this
happen
to me?”

With this pitiful question—Ogi knew he wasn’t really expecting an answer—Patron fell silent. Despite the impassioned words, his long, enervated, deeply still face maintained a passive look, demanding nothing of his listeners. The only relevant thought that passed through Ogi’s mind was that he’d never in his life before encountered such a deeply peaceful yet despairing adult. An aged child with the despairing soul of a youth.

Ogi said nothing. Beside him, also silent, Dancer nodded a couple of times, like a mother soothing her child.
I hear you, things will be fine
, her nods conveyed, not seeking any solutions to the problem. How could she be so calm when she’d pleaded with him to rush back to Tokyo?

While Ogi stood there, unresponsive, Dancer got up and bustled briskly about the room. From the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by the lamp, somewhere over near the wall, she fetched a chair, one lower than a normal chair and the same height as the bed; next to that she placed a cushion for her own use. Ogi sat down in the chair, legs straight out in front of him; he smelled a powdery leather odor as Dancer plopped her rump down on the cushion. This way the two of them were on the same level as Patron, who was leaning in their direction.

Ogi glanced over at Dancer, her half-open mouth glistening faintly in the light, then turned his gaze to Patron, waiting expectantly for his tearful voice to resume its tale of woe. There had to be a special reason why Dancer chose
him
to be her partner here, he thought, trying to compose himself.

In the west corner of the bedroom/study, just outside the curtain and the glass door, there was the movement of some large beast. That had to be where the doghouse was. The Saint Bernard’s restless stirrings overlapped in Ogi’s mind with Patron’s black spacy eyes, and once again the image came to him of that sleety night, man and dog in identical rainwear, out for a walk.

3

Patron didn’t say anything more that night; he fell asleep, and Dancer told Ogi—who ended up spending the night—to go back to the living room. When the housekeeper they’d hired after Guide fell ill arrived the next morning, Ogi left with Dancer to visit Guide in the university hospital in Shinjuku.

Seated behind the wheel of her Mitsubishi Pajero, glaring down on the road as if she were driving a tank, Dancer was a fearless driver. She handled the car like the agile danseuse she was, with a no-nonsense approach to maneuvering it through the maze of city streets.

Until they came out onto Koshu Boulevard, Dancer carefully chose one back road after another, avoiding traffic jams. The highway might take even more time, she said, almost making Ogi carsick each time she skillfully changed lanes. She added, in a burst of self-criticism, “Of course, this might save us ten minutes at most.”

Dancer told him that after their talk Patron had slept soundly the whole night but was still in shock about what had happened to Guide. She said nothing more about Guide’s condition, perhaps feeling she’d already discussed it enough when she called Ogi in Sapporo. Again Ogi sensed Dancer’s matter-of-fact style. There was something about her lithe body and childlike expression with its half-open mouth that made Ogi feel he had to be on his guard, yet her way of speaking was still whispery and vague. Beyond this, though, he sensed a strong reliable core. Even in a business setting, Ogi found it hard to maintain a proper reserve. Once negotiations began, he quickly took an interest in the person he was dealing with, making a real attempt to understand the other’s point of view. All of which might support Dancer’s calling him Innocent Youth, even though they still didn’t know each other all that well. Ogi could equally well be labeled just a straightforward, affable young man. Sometimes, though, he would puzzle his listeners by abruptly denying what they said; this would happen when he decided, while listening in all sincerity, that what he was hearing was a waste of time.

Sitting in the car beside Dancer, listening to her whispery voice, Ogi knew that never once had anything she said been a waste of time. Never once had she upset him with a vapid repetition of the obvious.

Dancer dropped him off at the reception desk of the hospital, parked quickly in the lot in front, and eagerly tripped back inside. In her white Lycra sweater and narrow pair of pink trousers, she radiated youthful efficiency; Ogi wasn’t surprised to see she already had on a visitor’s badge. Getting the badges was such a simple matter it made him worry about how secure the hospital was. Ten years ago Patron and Guide, the latter now lying helpless
in a hospital bed, were the focus of a major dispute within the ranks of their church, and the matter still remained unresolved.