Silence Once Begun (22 page)

As you may now suspect, the matter of the card game, as played with Oda Sotatsu, was similarly rotten. Joo and I got him to the bar; we got him drunk. Joo flirted with him. I complimented him. He was a man in a difficult situation. His life was difficult, bleak. He had little, and little to look forward to. In this way he was entirely typical, yet he was not typical in his nature. In his nature, he was proud, he was unrelenting. I knew what I had in Oda Sotatsu.

That he lost the card game, that he signed the confession: it was all inevitable. I had created the situation in my mind while sitting in a room in Sakai, a year before. I had moved shapes, edged like paper, in the stanzas of my head, and now I was watching as Sotatsu wrote on a sheet of paper. He wrote, Oda Sotatsu, and wrote the date, and he looked up at me, and I was looking at him from far away. I knew then that I had done it.

He left the bar, went away, it didn’t matter where. The farther the better. If they had had to hunt for him, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. I took Joo by the arm, I went home with her. We slept together. I read the confession like a poet reads a poem he has written, a poem which he feels will change his fortunes. But like a poet, it is not his own fortune that his poems change.

I had noticed that Sotatsu was watching Joo, was looking at her. I knew her to be what she was—not only pretty, not only a pretty girl, a girl one wanted, but also a smart girl, a girl whose opinion was worthwhile. She would say sharp things and make people look stupid. She had, in fact, done this to Sotatsu. She had done it to me. Shall I say, most of the other girls we had ever met weren’t like that? I knew Sotatsu thought much of her, and so the thought crept into my mind, as I lay there, knowing that elsewhere in the town, Sotatsu lay, awaiting the arrival of the police, the thought crept in: should I send her to him? Could Jito Joo be the method for holding Sotatsu to his pledge? I looked at her where she lay naked beside me, and I felt completely sure. I felt not only that it would work, but that she would do it. Despite the fact that she need not do it, that she could claim it went beyond anything agreed to, it remained true. Our very helplessness in the face of our lives, the fact that we wanted to be drastic, and that we wanted to force that drasticness on others—it meant she would throw herself willingly off this cliff. She would let me tell her to go to him, and she would go to him, and she would hold him to his pledge.

Joo
, I said, when I woke her,
take this confession
.

She stood and dressed while I watched her, and I thought, this is the essence of my life—not before or after will I have so many fine things at such fullness: the love of a girl, the plight of a friend, the grand opening of a conspiracy. I felt it all. And now, later, I can tell you—I was not wrong. There has been nothing to compare that moment to, and I expect there will not be. I expect very little now.

If I am explaining how it went, I should explain it all, I guess. Friends in Sakai had an uncle. He owned a farm. He was a hateful man. The farm was an old place, etched out of a hillside. Nothing was near it, just a mostly abandoned shrine. He wasn’t even a very good farmer. The sort of man who could live on sawdust, who perhaps was made of sawdust. I met him; I traveled there with the express purpose of meeting him. I met him, and we got along well. He was a converted anarchist. He was an anarchist in a non-political sense. He was a sort of poverty-stricken miscreant who didn’t at all have a bad time of it. He enjoyed sitting outside in the morning time, and that was about it. I won him over by confessing how much I hated people. This surprised him: you hate people too? Yes, I do. I hate people. Well, we have that in common, then. So, we sat together in the morning time, and I described to him this fantastic plot I had come up with. It was a huge insult, I told him, we were throwing a huge insult in the face of the society. They would have to bear it. There was no way they could do anything else but bear it. He found the whole thing very funny. He agreed.

And so it became my lot: to travel in a borrowed car from place to place, finding old people with odd views, and convincing them,
Go away for a while. I have a place for you
.

In my defense, I explained the whole thing to each one. I explained to each one what it was that I was doing. I told them they might have to stay away for a year or two, or three, for five years even, ten. Who could say? I spoke for a long time, a very long time, and I did it again and again and again. In every case, when I had finished, the person got up,
leaving everything just as it was. In every case, when I had finished, the person got up, and we walked out to the car. We got into the car, and we drove away.

One by one, I drove each person to the farm, where the old man took them in. There they lived together, a little boardinghouse of the oddest folk you’ve ever seen. The funny thing is, they got along very well together. I believe the time when they were disappeared was the happiest time most of those people had seen in many years.

When I’d driven the last one there, I didn’t go back, not until the whole thing was over. I didn’t even send a message. That was part of the bargain. I’d explained it all to the old man. I’d explained it to each of them. We were all of one mind.

Joo fell into it. I didn’t know it would go that way. She fell into it like an actress. You would never have known she didn’t care at all about Sotatsu. I said to her sometimes,
Joo, Joo
. I shook her, I woke her up, I said,
Joo, go there, visit him now. You have to keep it up
. She’d say, no, no. She’d curl into me, into the blankets. I want to stay here, she’d say. But, I would push her off. I’d pull off the blanket. She’d stand up, shake herself off. Go on, I’d say. She would nod, and change, and go off. Remember, I would tell her, as she looked back at me: I don’t exist. Nothing exists except Sotatsu’s resolve. Make him know it. Make him know he can hold out.

For the most part, it went well. There was trouble when Sotatsu’s brother came, but Joo fixed it. She was quick. I told you she was. She undid whatever the brother did. She kept Sotatsu to himself, to his own resolve, to what he had decided. I couldn’t have imagined a better handler. She got so I didn’t even have to tell her to go. She would just go on her own. I would wake up and she would be gone. Then I’d be working, I’d take a breath during the day and think:

There on the farm, my disappeared people are standing in a line, looking down the mountain. There in the prison, Sotatsu is standing, looking at the wall. There in the bus, Jito Joo is sitting, looking at her feet. I am no one. No one knows that I am anyone, but my plan is inevitable. The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.

I was worried often. I can’t pretend I didn’t wake in a sweat most nights, afraid that something had gone wrong. Sometimes Joo would tease me, too. She’d arrive crying, saying he had recanted, he had confessed, only to break into laughter when she saw my horrified face. It’s not a joke, I would tell her, and she would laugh. Joo, Joo, I would say. You are a hard one.

But when the sentence had gone through, and when he was on death row, I felt more secure. That much, at least, had been secured. I was afraid too that some of my disappeared people would die. They were old! People die sometimes—yet it would not be easy to account for. I had nothing to do but wait, and I could not even learn how things were at the farm.

Several months into his stay on death row, Sotatsu started behaving strangely. He started writing odd things on paper. He started talking to the guards. I was worried that he was breaking down. That’s when I told Joo: I wanted her to go there and sleep with him, if it could be managed. I wanted her to bind him to her that way.

She broke into tears. She didn’t want to. I said you have to. You don’t have any choice. She said she wouldn’t do it. I said you will. You need to. She got her things and went out. She never came back. Whether she did go or not, to the prison, I can’t say. I never saw her again.

The next day, I heard the news on the radio.