Somersault (4 page)

They rode the elevator to the intensive care unit on the fifth floor, where the door opened inward after Dancer, her efficiency unfailing, used a phone high on the wall beside the entrance to phone for permission to enter.

Once inside the ICU they washed their hands with a liquid disinfectant soap, Dancer instructing Ogi not to wipe his hands on anything. Following her lead, Ogi held his hands in front of him, watching as the volatile soap dried before his very eyes; they came to a second set of automatic doors and entered the inner recesses of the ICU. On the floor was a three-yard strip of sticky tape spanning the width of the hallway, and again, following Dancer, Ogi stepped heavily on the strip, letting it grab his shoes. He was a large fly caught on a huge piece of flypaper, a typically shallow metaphor he came up with as the grip on his shoes tightened.

They passed by the nurses’ station and, in the first of the row of private rooms, ran across a depleted, dejected patient clad in a robe lying there staring vacantly into space. Ogi understood quickly this wasn’t Guide’s room, but it was still a shock. Guide’s room turned out to be a large one at the end of the corridor, a room with three or four beds partitioned off with white curtains; Guide lay in the nearest one, even worse off than the patient Ogi’d just seen. He was hooked up to IV tubes, and a larger pleated tube was joined to an artificial respirator, his arms and legs restrained by sturdy rope. An electric monitoring system the size of a medium-sized TV was set up at the head of the bed, with green, red, and yellow lines flashing parabolas across the screen.

Even lying flat, Guide was obviously a big-boned man; the bed was a bit too short for him. His head was covered with a white hood, his eyes were closed, and the upper lid of his closed right eye was darkly congested with blood. His breathing was labored, hence the respirator tube running out of his mouth. His magnificently sturdy face was red, like an overly robust child’s.

A nurse led Dancer and Ogi to his bedside, briefly checked the drip on the IV, and left without a word. As soon as she was gone, Dancer, standing with Ogi alongside the bed, where Guide’s rough legs stuck out beyond the blanket, swiftly occupied the spot the nurse had vacated. She began rubbing Guide, from one shoulder, the top of which was outside his robe, down to his muscular chest.

“His nostrils are nicely formed, don’t you think? He was able to breathe on his own until yesterday. And he had enough strength to kick off his covers.... They’ve intentionally lowered his body temperature. Touch his hand and see; it’s strange how cold it is.”

Ogi did as she asked. The hand was far colder than his own. It didn’t
possess the strength to squeeze back, but its heft and feeling still made him feel like Guide was moving it.

Dancer stroked all of Guide’s exposed skin so intently that it seemed like she might crush the tubes strung out of him. Leaning over the bed, she cast an upward glance at Ogi, disappointed, it seemed, that he hadn’t denied her observation. Then, as if to lift her own spirits before she strode off to the nursing station, Dancer said, “I’m going to find the physician in charge and get the latest update. You stay here, and if Guide comes around, be gentle with him, okay? If he were to regain consciousness surrounded by people he doesn’t know well, he might have a fit and burst another blood vessel. And that would be the end.”

Left alone, Ogi’s mind wandered. Whenever Ogi had looked in on the three of them—Dancer, Patron, and Guide—Dancer always seemed to be paying sole attention to Patron and was even cold to Guide. With Guide, too, you could detect an occasional sense of reverence toward Patron, but whenever Dancer tried to enter the scene he unhesitatingly ignored Patron’s wishes and shooed her away. But now that Guide had collapsed, wasn’t there a distinctly sexual undertone in the way she caressed his skin?

These thoughts began to take him in a different direction, and in order to crush out the stirrings they provoked, he considered again the way Dancer was nursing Guide. Ogi had, half jokingly, gone along with the name Patron when referring to him, but was this man really mankind’s Patron? And Guide—this man he both respected and felt a strong aversion to—could he really be the one to guide all the world? And was it only now, with Guide’s suffering an aneurysm and losing consciousness—indeed, being on the verge of death—that Ogi came to this realization?

By the time Dancer returned, Ogi was sunk in a state of sad self-pity. She had a sullen look on her face and her upturned nose wrinkled as she gave Ogi a cool glance and turned without a word for the ICU’s exit. Experiencing again the uncomfortable sensation of the adhesive tape sucking at his heels, Ogi came to a halt at the double doors that should have opened in toward them; he froze for a moment, unable to think, as Dancer roughly reached out and punched the automatic button.

“What a grouch that doctor is. He’s so pessimistic. He talked about brain death,” Dancer said, unable to hide her displeasure, as she came to a halt in front of the bank of elevators. “Guide’s brain is still swelling, he told me. At this rate the dark opening you could see in the middle of his brain in the CT scan might very well burst. I asked if they were taking any steps to reduce the swelling, but he didn’t say a thing.”

Dancer drove her Pajero out toward the intersection of Koshu Boulevard, and Ogi glanced at his watch; he should be able to make it over to the
foundation’s headquarters before it closed for the day, he thought. He didn’t have the courage to tell Dancer to turn left and take him to Shinjuku Station; instead, he just asked her to stop the car up ahead somewhere. But Dancer’s reaction was convulsively severe; she was furious. “Where do you think you’re
going?
You’re going to run away? You see what shape he’s in, and you want to leave me to take care of him
all by myself?”

Just before the intersection the Pajero came to a stop, horns blasting behind it; the engine had stalled, quaking like a person with something stuck in his throat. Her face downturned, barbs of hatred shooting out in all directions, Dancer struggled to get the car moving again and managed to pull onto the shoulder. Ogi realized with a start that she was crying, her shoulders under her white sweater quivering as she sobbed. Ogi didn’t know what to do, so he just sat tight, as he usually did in cases like this. Then he got out and, more horns blaring at him, eased around to the other side of the car and got in on the driver’s side. Dancer obediently moved over and, sinking back in her seat, covered her face with her lovely fingers, as Ogi started the car and moved into the traffic.

A mere ten minutes later, though, she had pulled herself together, wiped away her tears, and faced straight ahead. In her usual whispery voice, now a bit husky, she told Ogi the following, the whole thing striking him as a bit overly logical.

When Dancer had made up her mind to leave Asahikawa for Tokyo to pursue dancing, her father introduced her to his good friend Guide, who’d been his classmate in the science department in college. Her father was aware that Guide and Patron had been founders of a religious group but saw no reason to change his opinion that Guide was a trustworthy person. Dancer had seen TV reports on the religious group and was a little anxious, but she also decided to trust Guide and moved to Tokyo. Guide and Patron gave her a room in the office where they lived—albeit an inactive office—and in return she did housework for them. Around the time they started calling her Dancer, her duties smoothly shifted over to also being their personal secretary.

While she still lived in Hokkaido, Dancer had held her own recital, and a newspaper reporter in Sapporo had written a glowing review of it that had, in fact, been the push she needed to come to Tokyo. When she told the reporter where she was now living, he wrote to tell her that not only had Patron and Guide renounced their church, they had made their whole religious doctrine a laughingstock. They’d sold out to the authorities the radical faction in the church that had moved away from religious to political activities.

Dancer wasn’t fazed. She didn’t care what philosophy or beliefs the two might have had or what had become of it all; instead, she cherished the warm feelings she had for these two elderly men who welcomed her into their home and allowed her the freedom to do as she pleased. And when she listened to them talk to her about religious matters—either the doctrines they’d renounced or some entirely new ideas; she had no idea which—she found herself drawn to them even more.

At this point Dancer was still unaware that Patron used to fall into unusual, deep trances. One time Patron fell into a deep melancholy, the first time it had happened since she’d moved into their office, and those few dark days left a lasting impression on her, as did the general relief when this central figure in their lives was finally able to shake free of his melancholy. After this episode, when Patron was excitedly talking with Guide, Dancer overheard what he said as she did some ironing on the divider separating the living and dining rooms.

“What I just went through,” Patron told Guide, “wasn’t like the trances I used to have. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now, but I will say this: If only we had insisted from the beginning that our church was trying to accomplish something a hundred years in the future—in other words, that we were preparing for events that would occur at the end of the twenty-first century—we wouldn’t have had to go through that unfortunate confrontation with the radical faction. Anybody can see that a hundred years from now all mankind will be forced to repent. It’s obvious that mankind won’t be able to avoid a total deadlock. And yet here we are, the advanced countries with their booming consumer culture and third-world countries lusting after the same, like something straight out of the Old Testament—pleasure-seeking cities like Sodom and Gomorrah on the eve of destruction.

“What we
should
have done was emphasize the need for mankind to repent in the face of this ultimate trial awaiting us a hundred years from now.
That’s
the foundation on which we should have built our church and prepared for the battles ahead. We should have preached that people should prepare
over the next hundred years
for the total repentance and salvation of mankind. ‘When you consider the two thousand years since Jesus, a hundred years isn’t such a long time. During the next hundred years we’ll see new technology that will dominate over the next millennium. We have to begin now, not slack off; we have to continue our efforts.’
That’s
what we should have said.”

Guide impressed Dancer as a decisive person, but she’d never seen him speak his mind clearly, and though he was always kind to her she found him taciturn and hard to approach. But now he responded promptly, and Dancer could understand how very apt his name was.

“A hundred years, though,
is
a long time,” Guide said. “I agree we should preach that a mere century separates us from inevitable destruction; nevertheless, if you actually live through a hundred years, it
is
a long time. I’m always reminded of the group of women who viewed our Somersault as a descent into hell. They will face the next hundred years ever mindful of our fall. In the commune they live in, they’re keeping the faith, patiently striving to make it through one year after another toward the hundred. But how do they instill this in their members—a way of living a hundred years one year at a time? How to keep the faith and not be taken advantage of by the radical faction?”

After this, Dancer began to pay close attention to Patron and Guide’s conversations, she told Ogi, and even now, when they weren’t engaged in religious activities, just working in their office helped her find the kind of happiness a true believer must feel. But now, just when she sensed that Patron was about to revive his religious activities for the first time in a decade, Guide collapses with a brain aneurysm and loses consciousness, and Patron goes into shock. Other than myself and Guide, who’s ill, she told him, you’re the one person who’s closest to Patron. How can you abandon him and go back to your job?

4

Ogi would never forget the strange event that took place when he had introduced Patron to the chairman of the board of directors of the foundation he worked for. As the two men exchanged business cards, Patron hit the Chairman sharply on top of the head. The Chairman had Caucasian-like skin, and after receiving this blow to his right temple, most likely the first time in his more than seventy years that someone had hit him on the head, his large, oxen eyes looked on the verge of tears. As for the perpetrator of this blow, he himself maintained a stolid wooden expression.

On this particular day, Ogi had accompanied Patron to the Kansai area factory of the pharmaceutical company that was the Chairman’s main business. It was autumn, and as they left the Osaka Station and headed out of the city, they followed a course that took them through a tunnel dug out at the base of the mountain pass that formed a shortcut connecting two parts of the old highway. The autumn foliage was magnificent. Patron was already clothed for winter, dressed in an overcoat with a rounded collar, buttoned all the way to his throat, and a pear-shaped fedora, altogether like a dubious imitation of the Tohoku poet Kenji Miyazawa.

The factory and research facility were housed in a chalkstone building in the midst of rustic surroundings. As you went inside from the imposing façade there was a large entrance hall, and below the vaulted ceiling an ancient-looking marble statue of Hermes. The jovial Chairman came out to greet them. Patron was barely able to mumble a greeting, and right after this came the startling blow to the head. Afterward Ogi read a book translated into Japanese about the god Hermes and found out that he was both the god of medicine—fitting for the research center of a pharmaceutical company—and also the god of commerce, as well as a Trickster symbol. These memories came back to him now that he’d decided to leave the International Cultural Exchange Foundation to work for Patron’s religious organization and was on his way to report to the Chairman, who was attending a meeting at the headquarters of the foundation.