The Night Listener and Others (25 page)

Lattimore stuffed his pockets with stones from the walkway, and moved stealthily toward the Jizô-dô. To be caught would be at the least embarrassing, so he tried to stay off the paths and in the shadows of the trees and shrubbery. The moon was nearly full, lighting his way to the outside of the small hall. He looked about and listened intently before he stepped out of the shadows.

There, on a long flat ledge beneath an ancient shade tree and surrounded by ranks of the tiny statues, was a larger statue of the Bodhisattva. It was seated, one hand raised as if in blessing. Lattimore got on his knees in front of it, and took the stones from his pocket. With them he started to build a small cairn, setting a first, flat layer and then adding to the pile until at last he had a small pyramid.

The simple act of making the cairn focused his mind on his self-chosen loss, and filled his heart with the tears he would not allow himself to cry. When he had finished, he looked into the stone face of Jizô and whispered, “Please take care of him.”

It made sense for it to be a son that they had never had. He had a daughter, so it had to have been a son. Now, as he knelt before this Bodhisattva, this Enlightened One who declined Nirvana so that he could remain and teach others, he felt foolish and sad and frightened. Most of all he felt confused. He had never been a superstitious person, so why was he kneeling before this statue, this idol in whom he could not bring himself to believe? Why had he gotten up in the middle of the night and risked arrest and scandal to pile pebbles in a temple?

Oh yes, the Jizô-dô was a tragic place, but it was primarily a superstitious place, a place where ignorance rather than grief was the strongest characteristic. It had swept up Lattimore in its raw emotions and he had in turn reacted emotionally and irrationally.

The thought irritated him so that he reached out his hands and swept the pebbles away. They skittered across the ledge and fell onto the path, and he blanched at the sound. It was over, it was done and had been done years before, and piling up a few stones and whispering entreaties to a false god would accomplish nothing. He had been a foolish romantic, trying to expiate himself for an old act that should have been forgotten with bellbottom pants and love beads.

Lattimore pushed himself to his feet and walked down the steps, hoping that he could find a way to get out of the complex as easily as he had gotten in. The trees grew more thickly further away from the main gate. Perhaps he could find one to climb and then get over the wall again.

As he passed the entrance to the grotto he heard a sound that made him freeze. At first he thought it was just a cat, but as he listened more closely he knew that it was a human voice. It sounded like a baby crying, and he tried to determine where the wailing was coming from. To his surprise, the source seemed to be the dark opening into the grotto itself, and he walked toward it.

As he drew near, he saw that it wasn’t dark after all. There was a dim light inside, and he wondered who was foolish enough to take a baby into that cave in the middle of the night. It would be impossible for him to fetch a watchman, but perhaps he could check to make certain that at least the child was with someone and not alone, having somehow been lost there when the temple closed.

It was a scenario he was spinning from moonlight, and he was sure of it when he heard the other voices. Try to deny it as he might, it was not the sound of one baby now, but several of them, and the closer he came to the mouth of the cave the more they grew in number, so that when he stood in the irregularly shaped doorway, he heard a multitude of babies all wailing as though in great pain. Part of his brain warned him to go back, but he was drawn into the cave. No warning, no threats of harm could have kept him outside. He knew that what he was hearing was impossible, that it was either a delusion or manifestation of something in which he did not believe, but his senses told him that it was real, and he followed them.

He did not know how the cave was lit, only that it was just bright enough for him to see as he followed the sound. The grotto was different from when they had visited it during the day. He did not remember so many winding passages, nor did he recall the rock paths going ever downward the way they did now. He pressed on as though he were walking through a dream, ever following the sounds of crying, and those sounds grew until they seemed to be all around him, and at times he had to clear his throat to assure himself that it was not him who was making the noises.

He went on and downward for what seemed like hours, and he knew that another chamber must have been opened in the cave, one that he had not seen earlier. But at last the passage leveled out and the walls widened, and he came into a great open place, all of rock. The cave in which he stood and in which the babies toiled was impossibly wide, but not high, perhaps the height of three men, so that it seemed claustrophobic and oppressive.

Here the wailing was so great that he had to put his hands over his ears. It was even worse than the sight itself. There was nothing but babies, untold thousands, maybe millions of them, as far as he could see, lying in a depression as wide as the stone bed of some subterranean river long dried to dust. They were pitiful, hairless and naked and crawling like worms, none of them over six inches in length. Some had large hydrocephalic heads, others only rudimentary arms and legs, more like flippers than limbs. Their flesh was every color from deepest black to the white of ivory, and many seemed blind, their eyes no more than slits in the oversized globes of their heads. Others, however, had eyes that bulged fishlike from the sockets.

Most of them moved like fish would do on dry land, flopping, pushed by barely formed arms and legs. What they were doing with what limbs they had was what Lattimore had been doing at the Jizô-dô, pushing stones into piles, some with their arms, some with their heads. Only a few were able to grasp the individual pebbles with their hands and place them on others. The piles formed could scarcely be called such. Once any height was attained, the movement of their fellows in their own attempts to construct their own cairns would knock others down, and the task would start again. It was, Lattimore thought, like a day care…

In hell, yes. That’s where he was, wasn’t he, in the particular hell that accompanied this particular belief ? And wasn’t it also, he wondered, born of his own particular mindset on this particular night?

Whether figment or delusion or dream or reality, it was hideous. It was unbearable. The sounds of the babies, children, stillborn creatures, damned hairless mice, whatever they were, bored through his skull like a drill, and although he kept his hands pressed over his ears, the tortuous keening went through them as though they were paper. How could such unformed, fragile beings make such a powerful sound?

Then he recalled that there were millions, billions of them, squirming, glistening little maggots, all screaming at once, and the pain of it cut into and mingled with his own pain until he roared, and shook his hands in the air, and found his right fist to be wrapped around the handle of a heavy iron club. Though he could not imagine how he had found the strength to hold it, his pain made him strong, and he ran toward the mewling slugs in the dead riverbed, swinging the great club at them to make them stop their noise, the agony of which was killing him.

They parted before him like water streaming to either side of his path, and his swinging club touched only the small piles of stones, scattering the pebbles everywhere, undoing the work of the unformed hands, the brains that knew only pain. Lattimore ran down the riverbed, his head a fist of white fire, raining down blows at the tiny things that swept themselves from his path, so that his club struck only the rocks on which they had labored.

At last Lattimore stopped, panting. The pain in his head had grown no less, but something was different. He could see no more of the children ahead, nor to the side of him. They seemed to have swept around him and to his rear, and when he turned back in the direction he had come, he saw them not at all, but instead the Bodhisattva Jizô.

He was standing only a few yards away from Lattimore, and was wearing a long robe with full sleeves. His hands were in front of him, and the features on the round face beneath the bald head seemed to be a combination of those on the statues that Lattimore had seen earlier and those that graced the countenance of his own wife.

Jizô smiled Carolyn’s smile and shook his head slowly, then spread his arms wide so that Lattimore could see into the full, hanging sleeves, the sleeves that sheltered the thousands and millions and billions of creatures who strove every second to be free of their hell by drawing the compassion of the Buddha, but so far had only earned the sympathy and protection of a Bodhisattva.

Then Jizô walked slowly toward Lattimore, whose sudden fear was greater than the pain caused by the children’s voices. He backed away, dragging his great club, but the Bodhisattva stopped, and so did Lattimore, trembling. Though Jizô’s mouth did not move, he heard the words in his head, like cool water upon the fire there.

Did you think that I wished it as well?

Lattimore didn’t understand, but his mouth felt incapable of forming questions. He listened to the words, in the voice of Jizô, in the voice of his wife.

I did it for love of you. I did it for love.

One of the long sleeves turned over, and from it one of the tiniest creatures of all floated down like a blossom and lay on the rock floor, its small white body twitching.

The wisest. The most compassionate.

Like unto Buddha.

Lattimore knew. The words which had fallen like droplets of cool rain had turned to pellets of hot lead, and he ran, ran past the Bodhisattva, ran through the bed of the dead Sai-no-Kawara, ran to the mouth of the cave that had brought him into hell. The tunnel no longer led up, but down, and his heavy legs of spiked hide pounded the unyielding stone. He dragged his iron club behind him with his clawed talons, and sweat ran down the thick, wiry hair of his face.

The voices of the children rang in his ears, and that of his own higher and louder and more piercing than them all, and though he plunged deeper into the caves, the wailing grew no softer. Soon he would have to turn and ascend and try to stop them once more, and so it would be, over and over again.

He would hear them enter and wait and pass away, and though they spent eternities there, he would still remain when all were gone, and their cries would stay with him when not one stone sat upon another.

A Father’s Tears

I remember my father crying only twice in his life. The first time was when I got married. The second was when my own son died. Both times he cried because he lost a son. Whether or not they stayed lost is open to conjecture.

I had always been somewhat close to my father, but never to the point where he was my best friend, where I entrusted him with the secrets and dreams that I held most privately and most guardedly. But, since there was never a friend to whom I unveiled those dark corners, there was never any jealousy on my father’s part.

Sometimes I think he turned to me so possessively because his relationship with my mother had deteriorated into little more than necessary questions and strained answers. Over a period of years he had dominated her gradually, until near the end of her life she had slunk through her own house like a beaten cur, but with a touch of meanness that showed the spirit was not totally destroyed, and a feeling that the dog could still snap, though the gums were toothless. It was this tiny spark of rebellion, perhaps hatred, that made it impossible for my father to repair the twenty-five years of slow, gentle humiliations, once he realized the magnitude of his crime. Try as he would, there was no way for him to be kind to my mother. She had forgotten many years before how to accept kindness.

As a result, although I suppose I had to have loved my mother, I never really
liked
her. When a dog skulks by cowering, teeth bared in fear and expectation that it will be kicked, a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs. I “kicked” my mother many times as I was growing up, mostly because she invited it, and often in revulsion at her spinelessness in the face of my father’s barbs. She took even good-natured joking seriously, no longer able to tell the difference, and as a result our house became a somber one.

My mother died of cancer when I was sixteen, and neither my father nor myself felt the loss until several months later, when we both went through a period of deep depression that lasted several weeks. I had felt no obligation to mourn before then, and I think my depression stemmed more from a lingering nostalgia for the days when I was very young, and my mother was not yet cowed and embittered by the force of my father’s personality, than by any sense of loss of a loved one.

My father’s depression, on the other hand, was heavily tinged with regret at what he had done to my mother and had then been unable to undo. But neither he nor I had cried over the loss, nor have we since.

The death brought us closer together. We no longer had to speak softly in fear of offending Mother’s overly sensitive feelings, and soon the house trembled to masculine jokes and laughter, more like a deer camp than a home, but without the drunken bawdiness. My father did not drink, not ever, and he was very taciturn when it came to dirty jokes or even serious discussions of sex. His own father had had a drinking problem that had led to several clandestine affairs that had shattered my grandmother, making her sharp, suspicious, and aggressive. Although age and a rotting liver had made my grandfather reform himself, she had still hounded him to his grave, smelling for liquor on his breath, and checking for semen stains on his underwear long past the time when he was capable of drinking the one or producing the other.

Those events marked my father with indelible memories that made him avoid both alcohol and licentiousness like a puritan, which was not hard to do, as he was not a particularly social creature. He belonged to no clubs or lodges, and his few social contacts were with other members of his hunting camp, a group informally restricted to five men, most of whom were loners like my father.