Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (27 page)

Quietly, but firmly, the phone was hung up. The fat man returned, pale with cold and despair, to his bed, pulled the covers over his head and for a long time lay trembling. And he wept furtively, as he had wept that night after his experience above the polar bears’ enclosure. He remembered how long it had been since he had actually heard his mother’s voice. This last time it was through his wife that he had finally managed to learn what she had said about his dead father. When it came to talk of his father in particular, he couldn’t even recall when last he had heard his mother’s voice. When she spoke to his wife, she had apparently referred to his father as “the man.” The Man. The fat man was reminded of a line from a wartime poem by an English poet, actually it resided in him always, as if it were his prayer. Like the Pure Land hymns which had resided in his grandmother until the day she died, it was part of his body and his spirit. And the poem itself happened to be a prayer spoken at the height of the very battle in which his father had lost his Chinese friends one after the other. The voice of Man: “O, teach us to outgrow our madness.” If that voice is the voice of the Man, then “our madness” means the Man’s and mine, the fat man told himself for the first time. In the past, whenever he whispered the poem to himself as though in prayer, “our madness” had always meant his own and his son Eeyore’s. But now he was positive that only himself and
the Man
were included. The Man had deposited his massive body in the barber chair he had installed in a dark
storehouse, covered his eyes and ears, and tirelessly prayed, “Teach us to outgrow our madness, mine and his!” The Man’s madness is my madness, the fat man insisted stubbornly to himself, his son already banished beyond the borders of his consciousness. But what right did his mother have to obstruct the passageway leading from himself toward the Man’s madness? The fat man wasn’t weeping any more, but he was still trembling so that the sheets rustled, not with cold but rage alone.

Once he had adjusted his perspective in this way, the fat man no longer equated himself and Eeyore, even when he considered the hoodlums’ attack above the polar bears’ pool. He was even able to feel, precisely because it had liberated him from bondage to his son, that the experience had been beneficial. What kept his already ignited anger aflame was his knowledge that his own mother had so long prevented him, in danger even now of being hurled to a polar bear of madness, from discovering the true meaning of that appeal to which
the Man
may have been so close to hearing an answer at the end of his life, “Teach us to outgrow our madness.”

The fat man finally fell asleep, but his fury survived even in his dream: his hot hand was clutched in the hand of a hippopotamus of a man sitting with his back to him in a barber chair in a dark storehouse, and fury flowed back and forth between them as rapidly as an electric current. But no matter how long he waited, the fuming giant continued to stare into the darkness and would not turn around to face the fat child who was himself.

When the fat man woke up, he readied himself for a final assault on his mother and swore to begin a new chronicle of the Man’s madness in his last years and to
undertake an investigation into outgrowing “our madness,”
the Man’s
and his own. But once again he was beaten to the offensive. During the night, while he had been weeping and raging and having dreams, his mother had been so prudent as to contrive a strategy of her own, and by dawn had even drafted a new announcement in which she broke a silence of twenty years and spoke of her dead husband. Only two days after his phone call, the notes and incomplete manuscript for the biography in which he had attempted to reconstruct an entire image of his dead father arrived at the fat man’s house, registered mail, special delivery. That same week, delayed by only the number of days it had taken the printer to fill the order but unquestionably written the same night as the fat man’s call, a new announcement also arrived, addressed to the fat man’s wife, registered mail, special delivery:

Recently it was my duty to inform you that my third son had lost his mind. I must now announce that I was mistaken in this, and ask you kindly to forget it. Apropos this season of the year, I am reminded that my late husband, having had an acquaintance with the officers involved in a certain coup d’état, was led upon its failure to the dreadful conclusion that no course of action remained but the assassination of his Imperial Majesty. It was the horror of this which moved him to confine himself in a storehouse, where he remained until his death.

The cause of death, let me conclude, was heart failure; the death certificate is on file at the county office. Begging to inform you of the above, I remain,

Sincerely yours,
Signed

winter, 196—

But who will save the people?
I close my eyes and think:
A world without conspirators!

—Choku

Although she had not appeared much moved by the first announcement, this one jolted the fat man’s wife surprisingly. For most of an evening she read it over to herself and only then, having reached no conclusions of her own, informed the fat man that it had arrived and showed it to him. Only when the fat man had read it over to himself and was simply standing in silence with the announcement in his hand did she speak up and disclose the substance of her agitation:

____You remember your mother asked me not to take you seriously if you started glorifying your father’s last years? Do you think she decided to bring all this to light because you’ve finally made her begin to hate you with your attacks on her? Do you think your mother has made up her mind to renounce you, and this is her way of saying, imitate your father all you want, nothing you do is her responsibility any more?

Since the shock which the fat man had received himself came from an entirely different aspect of the announcement, he could only pursue his own distress in silence. The minute he read it he had sensed that this blow, like the blow he had received through Eeyore, was aimed at something fundamental in himself and could be neither countered nor returned. For several days he tried to discredit his mother’s account of his father by checking it against what he remembered from his childhood and
what he had heard. But among all the details he had collected in order to write the biography, he could find nothing which mortally contradicted the announcement.

His grandmother had said more than once that his father had been attacked by an assassin with a Japanese sword, and that he had managed to escape harm by sitting perfectly still in the dark storehouse without offering any resistance. The assassin was probably one of the band which had been associated with his father through the junior officers in the revolt. And he must have been a man with no more stomach than his father for an actual uprising or for individual action in the next stage of the revolt. He had tracked down a craven like himself to the place where he was living in self-confinement, and brandished his Japanese sword and threatened emptily, but that was all he had ever intended to do.

Then there was the drama commemorating a certain coup d’état, one of the fat man’s reveries since his youth, in which the widows of the junior officers who had been involved, old women now and incarcerated in a rest home, playing themselves as young wives thirty-five years earlier, attacked with drawn daggers a man seated with his back to them in a barber chair, “the highest Authority to have abandoned the insurgents; or—a private citizen who sympathized politically, provided funds, and was generally in league with the junior officers until the day of the revolt, finally betrayed them, dropped out of the uprising, and spent what remained of his life hiding in a storehouse in his country village.” The idea undoubtedly had its distant source in things the fat man had been told as a child, probably in such a way as to hint even that long ago at the contents of his mother’s announcement. At any rate, he must have known vaguely that there was some
connection between his father and that attempted coup, for he had spoken about it to his wife. It was on a stormy night some time ago, and he had been relating a perfectly normal memory which had renewed itself in him, of his father telling him as a child, on another stormy night, that life was like a family emerging from the darkness, coming together for a brief time around a lighted candle, and then disappearing one by one into their own darkness once again.

For a week, the fat man studied his mother’s announcement and pored over the notes and fragments of manuscript which he had written for his dead father’s biography. And then early one morning (he hadn’t been to sleep at all; that entire week he had slept only four or five hours a night and, except for quick meals, had remained in his study) he went into the garden in back of his house and incinerated a sheaf of pages which contained every word he had written about his father. He also burned a picture card which had been thumbtacked above his desk ever since he had brought it back from New York, of a sculpture, a plaster-of-Paris man who resembled his father as he fancied him, about to straddle a plaster-of-Paris bicycle. He then informed his wife, who was out of bed now and getting breakfast ready, that he had changed his mind about a plan which until then he had opposed. It was a plan to get eyeglasses for Eeyore and to place him in an institution for retarded children. The fat man knew that his wife had gone back to that eye doctor without his permission and persuaded him to prescribe a special pair of glasses, probably by groveling in front of the little man, which she was secretly training Eeyore to wear. The fat man had been severed from his son already, they were free of one another. And now he had confirmed that, in
the same way, he had been severed from his dead father and was free. His father had not gone mad, and even if he had, insofar as there was a clear reason for his madness, it was something altogether different from his own. Gradually he had been giving up his habit of bicycling off with Eeyore to eat pork noodles in broth; and although, as he approached the age at which his father had begun his self-confinement, his tastes had inclined toward fatty things such as pigs’ feet Korean style, he was losing once again almost all positive desire for food.

The fat man began taking a sauna bath once a week and sweating his corpulence away. And one bright spring morning he had come out of the sauna and was taking his shower when he discovered a swarthy stranger who was nonetheless of tremendous concern to him standing right in front of his eyes. Perhaps his confusion had to do with the steam fogging the mirror—there was no question that he was looking at himself.

The man peered closely at the figure standing alone in the mirror and identified several portents of madness. Now he had neither a father nor a son with whom to share the madness closing in on him. He had only the freedom to confront it by himself.

The man decided not to write a biography of his dead father. Instead, he sent repeated letters to
the Man,
whose existence nowhere was evident now, “Teach us to outgrow our madness,” and jotted down a few lines which always opened with the words “I begin my retreat from the world because …” And as if he intended these notes to be discovered after his death, he locked them in a drawer and never showed them to anyone.

Alone in my room, I wear a piratical black patch over my right eye. The eye may look all right, but the truth is I have scarcely any sight in it. I say scarcely, it isn’t totally blind. Consequently, when I look at this world with both eyes I see two worlds perfectly superimposed, a vague and shadowy world on top of one that’s bright and vivid. I can be walking down a paved street when a sense of peril and unbalance will stop me like a rat just scurried out of a sewer, dead in my tracks. Or I’ll discover a film of unhappiness and fatigue on the face of a cheerful friend and clog the flow of an easy chat with my stutter. I
suppose I’ll get used to this eventually. If I don’t, I intend to wear my patch not only in my room when I’m alone but on the street and with my friends. Strangers may pass with condescending smiles—what an old-fashioned joke!—but I’m old enough not to be annoyed by every little thing.

The story I intend to tell is about my first experience earning money; I began with my right eye because the memory of that experience ten years ago revived in me abruptly and quite out of context when violence was done to my eye last spring. Remembering, I should add, I was freed from the hatred uncoiling in my heart and beginning to fetter me. At the very end I’ll talk about the accident itself.

Ten years ago I had twenty-twenty vision. Now one of my eyes is ruined.
Time
shifted, launched itself from the springboard of an eyeball squashed by a stone. When I first met that sentimental madman I had only a child’s understanding of
time.
I was yet to have the cruel awareness of
time
drilling its eyes into my back and
time
lying in wait ahead.

Ten years ago I was eighteen, five feet six, one hundred and ten pounds, had just entered college and was looking for a part-time job. Although I still had trouble reading French, I wanted a cloth-bound edition in two volumes of
L’Âme Enchanté.
It was a Moscow edition, with not only a foreword but footnotes and even the colophon in Russian and wispy lines like bits of thread connecting the letters of the French text. A curious edition to be sure, but sturdier and more elegant than the French, and much cheaper. At the time I discovered it in a bookstore specializing in East European publications I had no interest in Romain Rolland, yet I went immediately into action to make the volumes mine. In those days I often
succumbed to some weird passion and it never bothered me, I had the feeling there was nothing to worry about so long as I was sufficiently obsessed.

As I had just entered college and wasn’t registered at the employment center, I looked for work by making the rounds of people I knew. Finally my uncle introduced me to a banker who came up with an offer. “Did you happen to see a movie called
Harvey?”
he asked. I said yes, and tried for a smile of moderate but unmistakable dedication, appropriate for someone about to be employed for the first time.
Harvey
was that Jimmy Stewart film about a man living with an imaginary rabbit as big as a bear; it had made me laugh so hard I thought I would die. “Recently, my son has been having the same sort of delusions about living with a monster.” The banker didn’t return my smile. “He’s stopped working and stays in his room. I’d like him to get out from time to time but of course he’d need a—companion. Would you be interested?”