Somersault (78 page)

When the next wave of pain hit him, the cancer had gathered in one place and came out in the bloody stool! Kizu knew this was an audacious fantasy, yet his insides retained a firm memory that this fantasy had actually happened.

Kizu proceeded to tell his story to the “high-spirited young doctor,” as Dr. Koga called him, who was named Dr. Ino.

“I’m not saying this is how it happened,” Kizu said. “But if you think about it, the relationship between what happened to my body and the power I received from Patron can explain it.”

The doctor’s face was round and fat, but the skin looked dirty. A nasty-little-boy smile came to his lips and he rejected this suggestion out of hand.

“If the doctor tells you it’s colon or rectal cancer, well, if you’re going to have cancer those are good places to have it.… At any rate, that’s a sweet fantasy for a terminal cancer patient. I suggest you confirm this with Dr. Koga.”

Kizu felt the smile of pity was directed toward him because of his chronic immaturity, and he accepted the doctor’s designation of it as a fantasy. Still, he had to raise a mild protest at the way the young doctor treated Dr. Koga as an accomplice in the misdiagnosis.

“I’m overjoyed, of course, that I
don’t
have cancer,” Kizu said, “but my doctor in Tokyo was quite sure he’d discovered cancer, and Dr. Koga based his treatment on what the doctor passed along to him. Not noticing that the cancer has disappeared, though, perhaps is a slipup on his part as my attending physician—”

“What?
Cancer doesn’t just
disappear!
” Dr. Ino said, his expression even more spirited. “If a sample of a person’s cells are taken to a diagnostic lab and they discover cancer, then he’s a cancer patient pure and simple. You’d resigned yourself to being killed by those cancerous cells, and now, finding out that you aren’t going to die, of course you feel great. But aren’t you forgetting how you suffered when you were told you had incurable cancer?”

Every time Dr. Ino visited Kizu—as follow-up care after his routine gallbladder operation—he asked him when and how he’d started to suspect that his cancer was recurring. Kizu told him he’d grown aware that his physical condition was getting worse over the past three or four years but had put
it down to his body’s slowing down as it aged. After he’d talked with a renowned diagnostician he no longer doubted—on an emotional level—that his cancer was back, and so he’d returned to his native land.

As if this weren’t enough, Dr. Ino prepared a questionnaire for Kizu.

What tests did the doctor in Tokyo run before he concluded it was cancer?

What words did he use to explain his findings, and how did you react?

After you were told you had cancer, didn’t you refuse not just an operation but also radiation treatment and anticancer medicine because, in the back of your mind, you had doubts about whether you really had cancer or not?

If you did have doubts, what prompted them?

Or, on a more positive note, did you think maybe the diagnosis of cancer was a misdiagnosis?

If so, what did you base this on?

Why didn’t you discuss these doubts with your present attending physician, who also happens to be a friend of yours?

Most of the questions were irrelevant because Kizu had never had any doubts. Still, Dr. Ino read the entire list of questions aloud. Some of them
were
relevant, however. When asked:
Thinking that you had cancer and that death was not far off, did you put your affairs in order?
Kizu just answered truthfully.

The final questions were different from the others, which made them all the more interesting:
When you told your friends and colleagues that you had cancer, was there a change in their attitude toward you and in your attitude toward them? Did your attitude change toward yourself
.

Kizu had done his best to respond honestly. And afterward, as he lay alone in bed, he mentally reviewed his responses.

What kind of examinations had the doctor in Tokyo done to arrive at the conclusion that he had terminal cancer? What Kizu remembered—it was only six months ago but the details were so fuzzy it seemed a lifetime, which only irritated Dr. Ino, and the more Kizu tried to recall the vaguer it all became—was that when the doctor in Tokyo questioned him about his condition before examining him, Kizu reported his bloody stool, but this didn’t cause the doctor’s mood to sour. They’d taken X-rays in Tokyo and done a CT scan and ultrasound. And drew blood. With the bad experience he had before with a fiberscope, Kizu didn’t feel much like having it done again. But he couldn’t recall whether the doctor asked him if he wanted to go through that procedure. Perhaps by this time the doctor wasn’t under any illusions? Whether you’re talking about the stomach or the intestines, if the patient’s
the type who doesn’t like examinations, what’s the point of making him suffer only to discover cancer in yet another part of his body?

After he was told he had cancer, the most important person he talked to about it had to be Ikuo, and this had been the spark that led to a deepening of their sexual relationship, a private preserve he wasn’t about to get into. Instead he had told Dr. Ino how Patron had told him that as long as Kizu had life within him he would clarify his own mission as a religious leader, and how after Kizu accepted his role Dr. Koga began to show greater interest in him. Further, he talked about how everyone here in this area knew he was a terminal cancer patient, but it didn’t seem to make people any more or less interested in him and he was able to lead a happy life and get along well with others.

After all these questions, Dr. Ino had asked him this: In weekly magazines and on TV shows you often see reports of how patients everyone has given up on were cured by such folk medicine as Chinese chi therapy or eating mushrooms from South America, right? Do you understand your own cure as the effects of Patron’s mystical powers?

“When Patron’s longtime companion fell ill,” Kizu had replied, “not just Patron but everyone around him hoped he could save him through some mystical forces. But it didn’t happen. So I don’t believe Patron has mystical healing powers. However, while I was drawing the wound in Patron’s side, what members of the church call the Sacred Wound, I felt a tremendous life force welling up within me, so powerful I wondered whether I’d be able to get through the session all right. The second time I was drawing was when I collapsed, but the terrible pain I felt came from that tremendous life force.

“As I usually do when I’m drawing, and as I sketched Patron with his side exposed, my eyes and hands functioned to connect up the inner and outer worlds of my model, and it was as if I suddenly got plugged into Patron’s soul. This touched off a kind of uncontrollable life force that welled up in me, a force was so overwhelming that I thought, If this is a display of Patron’s mystical healing power, it might very well lead to that
thud
I was talking about and kill me. But I accepted that.

“After my first operation, my cancer—assuming for the moment that what I don’t have now I
did
have then—having lain dormant until then, started to be active again, and who knows but maybe this too was due to the stimulus I got from encountering Patron. At least that’s the way I’d like to think of it.

“When it was discovered I had a relapse of my cancer—and I was told there was no chance of recovery—I surprised myself by how industrious I became. I got deeply into things I’d never done before, gave up the teaching
position I’d held for years in America, and moved here to the woods of Shikoku. Understand that I wasn’t thinking of my relapse of cancer as a negative thing. I knew I’d die before too long, but that didn’t frighten me or make me feel regretful. I recognized that the
basis
for my life had changed. Isn’t that what happens? I didn’t see it as a terrible
end
to my life.”

“Now that you know you
don’t
have terminal cancer,” Dr. Ino ventured, “do things seem new to you in any way?”

“The symptoms I noticed myself haven’t changed,” Kizu said, “except that the dull pain I had for a long while is gone. I don’t feel the overflowing life force that filled me while I was drawing Patron. I don’t think this is just postoperation weakness.

“If there
is
something new, it’s a sense of anxiety. I came here with Ikuo, who wanted to be with Patron. To me, Patron is a special person, of course, but so is Ikuo. Wasn’t it the knowledge that I had cancer and didn’t have long to live that led me to be with them without worrying in the slightest? On an unconscious level, wasn’t I hoping I’d spend the short time left to me for their sake, without thinking about anything else? With my crisis past, how can an unexceptional person like me possibly associate with the likes of
them
? Frankly speaking, it frightens me.”

Once more a faint smile came to Dr. Ino’s face, and Kizu was left feeling there was something he didn’t get, something that had nothing to do with the young physician’s usual high spirits but reflected an ulterior motive at work.

A week after this conversation, on the day before Kizu was to be released from the hospital, a special scoop appeared in a weekly magazine—the magazine itself wasn’t to be found in Matsuyama so they were relying only on the ads in the newspapers—that was based on the exclusive account of his attending physician. The headline ran:
RELIGIOUS LEADER WITH SACRED WOUND CURES TERMINAL CANCER WITH HIS HEALING POWER! CANCER THROUGHOUT THE BODY EXPELLED IN ONE LUMP
!

3

Kizu left the hospital accompanied by Ms. Asuka, with Ikuo doing the driving. A minivan was to follow them with his belongings, with Mayumi at the wheel until they reached the mountain pass, after which Gii was to take over driving. Several members of the Fireflies were with them.

Escorted by Ms. Asuka, Kizu walked out to the carport at the front of the hospital and waited for Ikuo to bring the car around. As they passed by
the elevator hall and front desk, Kizu sensed a flurry of activity around him, but Ms. Asuka didn’t slacken her pace. As they walked by they heard a woman call out “Mr.
Kizu!”
in a thicker dialect that that used by the residents of the Old Town in Maki Township, but before he could respond, Ms. Asuka gently pushed him out the door and they were outside in the summery sunshine. The car pulled right up, Ikuo opened the door from the inside, and Kizu and Ms. Asuka climbed in.

Nobody mentioned the woman calling out to them, but after they’d wended their way through heavy city traffic for forty or fifty minutes and had begun to climb the slope up to the pass that formed a major crossroads for all of Shikoku, Ikuo turned to glance at the minivan following them and said, “I’m glad we could get rid of those pests. It would have been more trouble than it’s worth if the Fireflies had come to blows with them right there in front of everybody.”

“I was more worried that those boys would get in a quarrel after you and the TV reporter clashed,” Ms. Asuka said to Ikuo. “Seems all those marches through the woods have made them respect your physical prowess.”

“Was all that something to do with me?” Kizu asked.

“The TV and newspaper reporters have been trying to get near you since last night, and the Fireflies have been standing guard.”

“Ikuo’s role in the summer conference is crucial,” Ms. Asuka said, “so we can’t have him getting detained for disturbing the peace.”

“It’s not the weekend, and summer vacation hasn’t begun yet, so is it really okay to have the Fireflies helping out like this?” Kizu asked.

“The boys in Gii’s van are new members, older than the others,” Ikuo said, “young men who are going to take over their families’ businesses in shops along the river in the Old Town. One of them has a job in Matsuyama and took time off from work. Once the Fireflies started getting noticed more they asked if they could join. At first Gii hesitated, but since one was the older brother of a guy who was already a Firefly he gave in.”

“The Fireflies is an association with a plan for the future, correct?” Kizu asked. “Which should make it especially meaningful to include boys in this age group, I would think.”

“They’ll all work together,” Ikuo said, “to help prepare for the summer conference. I imagine Gii will consider afterward whether or not to reorganize them.… First the news got out about Patron’s Sacred Wound, plus a sense that the Church of the New Man was finally organized. And now come reports that your cancer, Professor, has disappeared. People way beyond our little valley are starting to show an interest in our church.”

Their car headed up the increasingly treacherous and windy slope, the
foliage on the hillside across the deep valley now a luxuriant dark hazy green. The large greenhouses on the slope, as well as the remains of the local construction projects, all had a calm, antique look to them. Kizu felt he was returning to an imposing and stable land.

“The news that my cancer, or what all the doctors thought was cancer, has disappeared was in a weekly magazine, apparently. Have people also been talking about it in the Hollow and in Maki Town?”

“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Ikuo said.

“While we were checking you out of the hospital, Ikuo went over to a large stationery store to have a copy of the magazine article faxed from a friend in Tokyo,” Ms. Asuka said, turning around in the passenger seat. She’d put a pillow and blanket on the backseat and told Kizu to lie down if he felt tired. “I ate alone in the hospital cafeteria,” she went on. “At the next table was a group from one of the afternoon talk shows who’d come to do a story on you, Professor. I couldn’t believe some of the things they were saying. They were even talking about how Ikuo had hit Gii.”

Ikuo shifted in the driver’s seat, his body language sending out a message to cease and desist, but strong-willed Ms. Asuka, not about to be deterred by any man trying to restrain her, brushed this aside.