Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (26 page)

But far from giving up, the fat man renewed his determination to function as a pipeline of vision connecting
his son’s brain with the dangerous beasts in the zoo. Possibly he was spurring himself lest he communicate to his son—echoing his father mechanically as he directed his vague, misfocused gaze not at the animals so much as the sparse grass growing between the cages and the railings, or the refuse lying there, or the fat pigeons pecking at the refuse with their silly, blunted beaks—a mood developing in himself of submission to that eye doctor who had performed all manner of cruelties in his soiled, baggy gown, the smoked meat of his insect’s face twitching with tension, only to deliver his disheartening diagnosis. He was also resisting the deeprooted disgust which threatened to stain the twilight of his son’s spirit along with his own head. The truth was that the odor of countless animal bodies and their excrement had nauseated the fat man and given him the beginnings of a migraine headache from the moment before they had entered the zoo. An abnormally sensitive nose was certainly one of the attributes which testified to the blood bond between them. Nonetheless, in defiance of every one of these baleful portents, the fat man continued to wander around the zoo, gripping his son’s hand even tighter, addressing him with more spirit.

____Don’t forget, Eeyore, that seeing means grasping something with your imagination. Even if you were equipped with normal optic nerves you wouldn’t see a thing unless you felt like starting up your imagination about the animals here. Because the characters we’re running into here at the zoo are a different story from the animals we’re used to seeing every day that don’t require any imagination at all to grasp. Take those hard, brown boards with all the sharp ridges that are jammed up in that muddy water over there. Eeyore! how would anybody without an imagination know those boards were crocodiles?
Or those two sheets of yellow metal slowly swaying back and forth down there next to that mound of straw and dung, how would you know that was the head and part of the back of a rhinoceros? Eeyore! you got a good look at that large, gray, tree-stump of a thing, well that happened to be one of an elephant’s ankles, but it’s perfectly natural that looking at it didn’t give you much of an impression that you’d seen an elephant—tell me, Eeyore, why should a little boy in an island country in Asia be born with an imagination for African elephants? Now if you should be asked when we get home whether you saw an elephant, just forget about that ridiculous hunk of tree-strump and think of the nice, accessible elephants like cartoons that you see in your picture books. And then go ahead and say, Eeyore saw an elephant! Not that the gray tree-stump back there isn’t the real thing, it is, that’s what they mean by a real elephant. But none of the normal children crowding this zoo is using genuine imagination to construct a real elephant from what he observes about that tree-stump; no, he’s just replacing what he sees with the cartoon elephants in his head, so no one has any reason to be disappointed because you weren’t so impressed when you encountered a real elephant!

While the fat man continued in this vein, speaking sometimes to himself and sometimes to his son, they made their way gradually up a sloping walk and wandered into a narrow passage which had been built to look like a rock canyon. The fat man talked on, but he was aware of a precarious balance being maintained at the outer edge of his consciousness, now directed inwardly and sealed, by jubilation at having escaped the crowds, and anxiety of a kind that somehow tightened his chest. And all of a
sudden there sprang up from the ground, where they had been sitting in a circle, a group of men dressed like laborers, shouting incomprehensibly, and the fat man discovered that he and his son had been surrounded. Even as panic mushroomed in the fat man, he wrested his consciousness away from Eeyore, where it wanted to remain, and cast it outward—not only had they left the crowds behind, they had wandered into a cul-de-sac like a small, stifling valley. It was the back of the polar bears’ enclosure; far below, on the other side of a cliff of natural stones piled up to look like mountain rock, was a steep ice-wall for the bears to roam and a pool for them to sport in. To someone looking up from the other side, this place would seem to be the peak of a high and unknown mountain beyond an ice-wall and a sea: the fat man and his son had wandered behind the set of a glacial mountain. This secret passageway was probably used by the keepers to gain entrance to the artificial Antarctic below when they wanted to feed the bears or to clean the pool and the icy slope, though it was hard to believe, judging from the stench, that much cleaning was done. Now that the fat man had his bearings, the stench emanating from the back of the zoo, the animals’ side, a very nearly antihuman stench, was assaulting his body like an army of ants.

But who were these men? What were they doing squatting at the back of this passageway? And why had they surrounded the fat man and his son with such fierce hostility for simply wandering in on them? The fat man quickly concluded that they were young laborers who had hidden themselves back here to gamble. From the private room of his one-sided dialogue with Eeyore in which it had been locked, he had only to expand his consciousness outward to discover at once the signs of an interrupted
game, so openly had they been playing. In the course of a dialogue entirely personal to themselves, a dialogue which turned about the axis of their clasped hands, the fat man and his son had already invaded too deeply their den, in animal terms, their territory, to avoid a confrontation with the gamblers.

Still gripping his son’s hand, the fat man began to back off, at a loss for the words he needed on the spur of the moment. But one of the men was already in position behind him, and another was pommeling him even while he attempted the move. A severe interrogation began, while several pairs of rough arms poked and pushed the fat man around. Are you a cop? An informer? Were you doing all that talking into a hidden mike so all your copper friends could hear you? As he was kicked and punched around, the fat man tried to explain, but what he said only angered the men. You were blabbing a mile a minute just now, and serious too, that’s the way you talk to a kid like this? The fat man protested that his son was nearly blind in addition to being retarded, so that he had to explain their surroundings in detail or nothing made any sense. But how could a little idiot make sense of all those big words, and this kid really is an idiot, look at him, he don’t look as if he understands a word we’re saying! The fat man started to say that they communicated through their clasped hands, then simply closed his punched and swollen mouth with a feeling of futility. How could he hope to make these hoodlums understand the unique relationship he shared with his son! Instead of trying, he drew Eeyore protectively to himself, started to, when suddenly his hand had been wrenched away from the boy’s hot, sweaty hand and he had been seized by the wrists and the ankles and hoisted into the air by several of
the men, who continued to shower him with threats as they began to swing him back and forth as if to hurl him down to the polar bears. The fat man saw himself being swung back and forth as passively as a sack of flour at this outrageous height, saw clearly, if intermittently, the revolving sky and ground, the distant city, trees, and, directly beneath him, now at the hellishly deep bottom of a sheer drop, the polar bears’ enclosure and pool. His panic and reflexive fear were buried under an avalanche of despair more grotesque and fundamental; he began to scream in a voice which was unfamiliar even to his own ears, screams that seemed to him must move all the animals in the zoo to begin howling in response. As he was swung out over the pool on the hoodlums’ arms and reeled in and cast out again (the vigor of this seemed to anticipate hurling him all the way down to the polar bear submerged to its muddy yellow shoulders in the pool below), the fat man perceived, with the vividness of a mandala in which, like revelation itself, time and space are intermingled in a variety of ways, the despair gripping him as a compound of the following three sentiments: a) Even if these hoodlums understood that I’m not an informer, they could easily throw me to the polar bear for the sake of a little fun, just to protract their excitement. The fact is, they’re capable of that; b) I’ll either be devoured by a polar bear whose anger will be justified because its territory really will have been invaded, or I’ll be wounded and drown in that filthy water, too weak to swim. Even if I escape all that, I’ll probably go mad in thirty seconds or so—if it was madness that drove my father to confine himself for all those years until he died, how can I escape madness myself when his blood runs in me? c) Eeyore has always had to go through me to reach his only window of
understanding on the outside world; when madness converts the passageway itself into a ruined maze, he’ll have to back up into a state of idiocy even darker than before, he’ll become a kind of abused animal cub and never recover; in other words, two people are about to be destroyed.

The tangle of these emotions confronted the fat man with a bottomless darkness of grief and futile rage and he allowed himself to tumble screaming and shouting into its depths and as he tumbled, screaming into the darkness, he saw his own eye, an eye laid bare, the pupil which filled its brown, blurred center expressing fear and pain only: an animal eye. There was a heavy splash, the fat man was soaked in filthy spray, the claws and heavy paws of maddened, headlong polar bears rasped and thudded around him. But it was a piece of rock broken from the cliff which had been dropped, the fat man was still aloft in the hoodlums’ arms. He was becoming a single, colossal eye being lofted into the air, the egg-white sphere was the entirety of the world he had lived, the entirety of himself, and within its softly blurred, brown center, fear and pain and the stupor of madness were whirling around and around in a tangle like the pattern inside a colored glass bead. The fat man no longer had the presence of mind to trouble himself about his son. No longer was he even the fat man. He was an egg-white eye, a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound, enormous eye.…

Night had fallen on the zoo when the fat man completed his gradual return from a giant eye to himself (he assumed from the savage odor of his skin and clothing, which was like a dirty finger probing in his chest, that he had actually fallen into the pool, and learned only later that he had been splashed by a rock), and began to
enquire frantically about his son, who, for all he knew, having become a kind of animal cub, was already dead of frenzy. But the veterinarian (!) taking care of him at first insisted there had been no talk about a small boy, and then tried to use the subject to make the fat man remember what had happened to himself. According to this animal doctor, he had been discovered after closing time when the zoo was being cleaned, weeping in a public toilet in roughly the opposite direction from the polar bears’ enclosure, and for several hours thereafter had only mumbled deliriously about his son. The fat man insisted he had no memory of his movements during the nine or so hours of his madness. Then he grabbed the veterinarian and begged him to find the little boy either dead of frenzy already or soon to be dead. Presently an employee came in to the office where the fat man had been stretched out on a cot (there were several kinds of stuffed animals in evidence), and reported that he had himself taken a stray child to the police. His panic unabated, the fat man went to the police station and there re-encountered Eeyore. His fat son had just finished a late supper with some young policemen and was thanking them individually:

____Eeyore, the pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola were good! Asked for proof that he was the child’s guardian, the fat man finally had to telephone his wife and then wait in the police station until she arrived to take them home.

It was in this manner that a cruel freedom was enforced on the fat man. It came his way just four years and two months after the abnormal birth of Mori, his son.

The fat man’s this-time conscious battle for yet another freedom did elicit a printed notice from his
mother, but beyond that the front did not advance; for she would not respond further, and continued to ignore her son’s repeated letters and phone calls. She refused to accept the letters, and would not come to the phone when he called.

Late one night after several weeks of this, the fat man renewed his determination and once again telephoned his mother. The village operator took the phone call in standard, formal Japanese, but when she came back on the line after a minute of silence, she addressed the fat man directly by name (since he was the only Tokyo resident to place long-distance calls to this little valley, the operator knew from whom and to whom the call came as soon as she heard the number being called, and would probably eavesdrop, something which occurred to the fat man but which he was too distracted to pursue), and then apologized to him in excessively familiar dialect which conveyed her sympathy and confusion:

____There’s no answer again tonight, no matter how many times I ring. She (meaning the fat man’s mother, living alone in the family house) never goes anywhere, and it’s the middle of the night besides—she doesn’t come to the phone on purpose every time you call! That isn’t right, you want me to hop over on my bike and wake her up?

So the fat man asked this special favor of the operator and before long the phone was answered. Not that his mother said anything, merely lifted the receiver and held it in silence. As soon as he had cleared his mind of the friendly operator, who had probably hurried back to the switchboard on her bicycle (professional duty!) and was listening in, the fat man began a somehow persuasive, somehow threatening speech to his silent mother:

____Who did you think was going to believe the lies in that announcement? And sending it to my wife’s relatives!
Mother, if I’m crazy from a disease I picked up abroad and if the baby was born abnormal as a result, then the baby’s mother has to be infected too, isn’t that so? But you sent your announcement directly to my wife, the baby’s mother, Mother! Now that’s all I need to tell me that you don’t even believe yourself what you insinuated about my disease and my madness.… Or have you gone into that old act about being mad yourself? Well that routine is too old, you won’t fool anybody that way. And let me tell you something, if you can pretend to be mad well enough to fool someone again then you’re not pretending anymore, you really have gone mad! … Mother, why won’t you speak? You’re hiding my notes because you’re afraid if I publish something about Father every one who knows the family will think he was mad, and that his blood runs in all the children, and that my son is the living proof of that, isn’t that so? And you’re afraid of the humiliation that would be to my brothers and sisters, isn’t that so? But don’t you realize that pretending to be crazy and advertising that an evil disease has made me mad is going to result in something even worse? … Mother, I haven’t made up my mind that Father died of madness, I just want to know what really happened. My older brothers were in the army and the others were just kids, so I’m the only one of the children who remembers Father letting out a scream all of a sudden and then dying in that storehouse he’d locked himself in, that’s why I want to know what that was all about. You ask why it’s only me, only me of all the children who keeps worrying about Father’s last years and death, I’ll tell you why, Mother, because I really have to know. You used to say to me when you brushed me aside, “The other boys have important things on their minds, and you ask questions like that!” but to me it is important
to know what really happened.… Mother, if I don’t find out, I have a feeling that sooner or later I’ll confine myself in a storehouse of my own, and one day I’ll scream all of a sudden and the next morning my wife will be telling Eeyore just what you once told me and nothing more, “Your father has passed away, you mustn’t cry or spit or make big or little business thoughtlessly, especially when you’re facing West!” … Mother, you must remember a lot about Father…. Didn’t you ask my wife not to take “sonny boy” seriously if he started glorifying his father’s behavior during his last years? My father happens to have spent his last years sitting in a storehouse without moving, with his eyes and ears covered—didn’t you tell my wife not to believe for a minute that he’d done that as a protest against the times, because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on the China he revered? Didn’t you tell her it was simply madness that made him do what he did? Didn’t you even say that Father had been as fat as a pig when he died because he’d been stuffing himself with everything he could lay hands on without moving anything but his mouth, and then insinuate that he had hidden himself in that storehouse because he was ashamed of being the only fat man around at a time when food was so scarce? You tell my wife all that and you won’t talk to me at all, you even steal the notes I’ve made about things I’ve managed to remember by myself, how can you do that Mother? … That morning my wife had the illusion I was about to hang myself, you told her my father was never in earnest; that he knew everything he did was fake, because he told himself he was not in earnest whenever he began something, but he didn’t notice the effect it was actually having on him however little at a time, wasn’t conscious of it, and that it
was too late when he did notice. Tell me, Mother, what is it my father did that was not in earnest? What was too late? … Mother, if you intend to continue ignoring me, I have some thoughts of my own: I’ll sit down in a dark room just as Father did, with sunglasses on and plugs in my ears, and I’ll show you what fat can really be, I’m already a tub of lard, you know, and when I eventually let out my big scream and die, what do you intend to do, Mother, console my wife by telling her again that “sonny boy” and his father noticed whatever it is they noticed too late? Do you intend to say Foolishness! again, and play the Grand Lady? … I’ve only learned this recently, but it seems my son can get along without me, as an idiot in an idiot’s way, and that means I’m free now, I’m as good as liberated from my son, so from now on I can concentrate exclusively on my Father; I’m free to sit myself in a barber’s chair in a dark storehouse until the day I die just as Father did…. Mother, why do you keep repudiating me with silence? I keep telling you, I only want to get at the truth about my Father’s last years…. I don’t really care about writing his biography, even if I do write something I’ll promise never to have it published if that’s what you want, do you still refuse to talk to me? … If you won’t be convinced that I’m telling the truth when I say I only want to know what really happened, then let me tell you something, Mother, I can write up a biography of Father that chronicles his madness and ends in suicide any time I want, and I can have it published, too. And if I did that, you could spend every penny of your estate on paper and printing and mailing announcements, and people in numbers you couldn’t possibly match would believe what I had to say and not you! What I’m telling you is that I don’t care so much about getting back my manuscript, I
just want to hear the truth from you, because I have to have it, Mother, I need it…. Believe me, there’d be no problem if it were the manuscript I needed, I can probably recite it for you right now, listen: “My father began his retreat from the world because …”