Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (7 page)

____Mother, you didn’t knock me flat on my back and rub my humiliation in my face as I lay there, and you weren’t able to make me feel instantly with one of those sidelong glances of yours and nothing more that I would never be free no matter where I ran, so that I lost the energy I needed to make the leap to a new world as a new person, Mother, until after you caught me in the act trying to commit suicide when I was almost out of high school. It was like being caught masturbating, and told Look here! a monkey masturbates just the way you do, and having a monkey that was actually jacking off thrust under your nose, a dirty, dwarf monkey with its fur falling out from age and its body misshapen and only that crippled organ wounded in countless battles for male supremacy retaining its vividness as actual flesh and in consciousness, that was the form of humiliation you chose for me, wasn’t it, Mother! You did everything in your power to make me feel just how low and shameless a thing it would be for me to commit suicide and leave you behind, and then because you were afraid I might not have received the message clearly enough you continued to beat it into me. You stole my will, didn’t you, that they showed you at the police station in the neighboring town Maybe you’ll protest, the way you did before, that, unlike me, you’re no thief, but even assuming the police did release that notebook to you as my “guardian,” it actually belonged to me, which means you stole it from its rightful owner. Then you let yourself into the mimeograph room in the new middle
school in the valley and printed it and sent it to my high school teachers and classmates, didn’t you! And in order to emphasize mercilessly how self-indulgent and unpleasant a high school student about to attempt suicide could be, and how many incorrect characters he could write badly in just a few sentimental pages of a will, so that you could double and triple my humiliation, you wrote
sic
all over the stencil before you ran it off. When I found out and went nearly mad with embarrassment and rage and protested, you didn’t say a word, just listened in silence and darted glances at me, and the next morning you wrote in the margin of a newspaper with a hard pencil that needed sharpening so I had to hold the newspaper at an angle to the light or bend it backward to read it,
“You have neither the right nor the qualifications to do a thing like that, and you lack the conviction!”
until, by the time you were through, you had me so mortified I was nearly epileptic. Now that I think about it, I had only the vaguest notion beforehand of what might have happened if I failed to hang myself and was severely criticized by you. And then I did fail and you devastated me and after that just thinking about suicide was enough to focus my consciousness on my own softness and immaturity, and suicide became the most unnavigable straits for me. You saw that, didn’t you, and you lived your life calmly in the valley all those years supposing you had me bound hand and foot. But now all of a sudden the tables are turned, I don’t have to commit suicide or anything else, all I have to do to liberate myself is lounge in bed here! Because my faithful dog Cancer is working around the clock to transform my liver into a pretty fair-sized rock! And you can’t combat its vigor, not if you roust up the monkey deity, that Japanese amalgam of Buddhism and Taoism on the hill like an isolated island
above the valley that the family has venerated for generations as a private guardian, you’re just no match!

[[Does that mean you’re not only as far as you can be from the possibility of suicide now but also that you’ve never really attempted suicide? Ha!-Ha!-Ha! Please don’t oversimplify. If a little experiment in suicide that I didn’t understand very well myself at the time had succeeded, I would certainly have given my mother the knockout punch she deserves, and almost unconsciously.]]

Since childhood he had ridden a bicycle well, but just once, in his first year at postwar middle school, when he was only barely managing to reach the pedals on a full-size bicycle, he had rammed into the sparkling, flecked-with-mica concrete railing of the large bridge at the valley exit. Because the front wheel wedged itself into a crack in the railing, and because he happened to clasp the bike tightly with his legs at the instant of impact, he only struck his chest and chin against the railing, but if these improbable coincidences had not occurred he would certainly have jumped the bridge head over heels, tumbled down the steep slope through hissing stalks of dog-fig that pushed their leaves and poor, nectarless fruit through cracks in the rocks, and crashed to instant death against the boulders jutting from the quarried river bed below.

Afterward, he stored away in memory a record of the accident which broke it down into details lasting only fractions of a second, like a slow-motion film. At the soft, moist core of the memory was an area of blackness incomprehensible to him at the time but somehow urgent and incalculably sweet, a mood he was able to recreate easily and which led him back to the memory time and time again. And then three years later, when he was a student in high school, he suddenly discovered late one
night that he had been attempting suicide on that speeding bicycle, holding himself in a state of vague, near-sub-consciousness as he carefully pumped the pedals, lest consciousness act to restrain him. As the bike accelerated around the steep, downhill curve that became the approach to the bridge his consciousness was screaming Put on the brakes! Turn the handlebars! but his body was numb, heedless of the warnings, and he had perceived the bicycle crash into the railing with detachment. The real significance of the separation of body and consciousness was a surprising discovery, and once he was aware of the simple beauty of the mechanism, his attempt to hang himself three years later seemed awkward and transparently
fake.

Since he had discovered this all by himself, and just one month after having once again attempted suicide inconclusively, the discovery itself signified his uncoerced endorsement of his mother’s earlier insight about him. When he became clearly conscious of his defeat, the catalog of things his mother had been taunting him with ever since his suicide attempt filled him anew with rage which burned the more hotly and unextinguishably now that he understood how unreasonable it was. When he had emptied a tin measuring cup full of ethyl alcohol he had stolen from the high school science materials room, thinking it was methyl alcohol, he left the storehouse where he slept alone now that
a certain party
was gone, stepped into the heavy shadows of the kitchen in the main house and, knife in hand, stood over the even darker mass that was his mother asleep on the wooden floor with the bedclothes pulled over her head. But from his lips, which felt about to sag heavily as a result of the alcohol, even as the boy drunk thought to himself with a
false
sense of
control to spare
At least my palate is still alive and my tongue still works,
the following words issued,

____Mother, you and I are the sole survivors here, we must marry secretly and have many children and strangle the abnormal fruit of our incestuous marriage while they are still mewling infants and keep only the hale and healthy and provide for the prosperity of our heirs and thus, Mother, we must make amends for having killed
a certain party.

Then he began to spin in a truly fantastic whirlpool of bewilderment and fear unlike anything that had ever happened to him right down to the present day, a hole opened in the bottom of his closely cropped head and the blood drained down through his hollow neck and although his conscious world went quite black, his body, invigorated by this superabundance of fresh blood, began to pulse and then to throb and finally to move with a vitality that was as if an arm were growing from his chest, another leg extending from his belly, and was entirely beyond his control ….

His mother maintained he had actually been mad since he was three, that although his madness may have been exacerbated by
a certain party’s
death, it was important to realize that he had been quite mad since childhood. As he was made to listen again and again to his mother relating, with hatred and contempt, the incident that was “proof” of this, he came to feel that he had stored it away in memory himself, as a very small boy, at the time it had happened. Even now he was able to recall the incident sharply, down to the smallest detail, as something he had experienced personally.

Three years old, he stares at his small hands and stands, not only unable to move but all his fragile muscles
taut, riveted with horror. As he stares now at his hands, large and angry-red from cirrhosis yet resembling the child’s, he recreates, in the high-noon space in that valley in the forest in the depths of his consciousness at thirty-five, the small child that was himself, musing that if he climbed aboard a time machine and returned to the side of that terrified child in the valley and embraced those small, stiffened shoulders his own hands in present time would also lose their angry redness. Needless to say, since he desperately wants to die an agonizing death from cirrhosis caused by cancer and to deal his mother a blow that will last for all eternity, no time machine of any kind will actually be used.

The small child that is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying “things,” and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother, in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley because she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child,

____Look, mine are the same, the same human hands!

At that instant the grotesque, alien, terrifying “things” press in inescapably, and their number has doubled. The child screams, Aah! and chokes. At the same time, the thirty-five-year old screams in a small voice, Aah! and goes limp with a kind of happiness about nothing in particular.

[[What do you mean by “screams in a small voice”? You seem to have a great deal of common sense where semantics is concerned! I was trying to say “he” pretended
to scream, in a small voice! Aah! Aah! Aah! Aah! But what you really wanted to ask was whether I actually went mad at the age of three, am I right? I can tell you this, nobody in that valley would have compared me and my mother and said I was “the crazier,” “he” says.]]

Once he stole a look at an old notebook of his mother’s and found the following poem:

Should some unlikely suitor make his way to me,

Tell him, pray,

That I am gone to the full-bellied sea,

With a cry of grief for the wind in my sails.

As he knew very little at the time he was unable to determine whether the poem had a classical source or had been composed by his mother herself. (Needless to say it would have been frightening and embarrassing if his mother had discovered him reading her notebook, which is why he had peeked only at the page to which it happened to be open.) But underneath the vision that had brought this poem into being he felt he could detect the presence of something somehow gamey and vulgar and exposed, something which might even be called desire: the stimulation of the poem seemed likely to affect whatever blood in his body he had inherited from his mother in such a way that he broke out in hives.

At the time, hoping to escape to the greatest possible distance from his mother’s domination, if only geographically, he was trying to get into a Tokyo university where the entrance fee was a mere few hundred yen and, as soon as matriculation had been completed, it was possible to apply for a tuition waiver and a scholarship. As preparation for the English entrance examination he had been reading paperback who-dunnits. Like the canned asparagus
and canned butter which had also been left behind by the Americans who had come through the forest to the valley in a jeep and stayed briefly in the village in the fall of 1945, these paperbacks were abandoned “issue” of no value whatsoever to anyone in the valley. He had discovered them one day when he had been hired to clean up the storage room at the grange, and had found that he was able to assert himself effectively against their contents with nothing more than the linguistic power he had acquired at high school. In one there was a story about a retired ivory merchant living in London who is murdered by a bee found only in a narrow strip of jungle inland from the Ivory Coast. The first time a person is stung by such a bee he experiences severe pain only, but should he be unfortunate enough to be stung a second time, he must prepare himself for death.

In order to let the blood he had inherited from his mother he had taken every opportunity to rush into battle, and as if that were not enough, had even inflicted wounds upon his own person; but a portion of which he had not been able to purge himself remained, and the sting of his mother’s poem now caused this to quicken in him like the venom of the deadly bee. But he was not himself fully conscious that a long incubation period had been instantly spanned. And, it might be said for precisely that reason, he was never able to escape entirely from the hives of this strange poem. Years later he established a sexual relationship with a movie actress who had returned to Japan from Peking a very young woman at the end of the war, and at that time the hives of the poem burst into full blossom.

[[I suppose you think that’s a pathetic fib about a sexual relationship with an actress. But in this case my partner has to be an actress, and that’s what determines
the reality of the past. Which can also mean that it had to be that way in reality too, don’t you see, “he” elucidates. The “acting executor of the will” appears unmoved.]].

The trouble began one day near the end of their relationship, when the actress said to him reproachfully in the middle of sexual intercourse,

____Is there something lewd about “a cry of grief for the wind in my sails”? Without that battle-cry you can’t even get it up with me anymore, can you! Until the actress had spoken he hadn’t even realized he was whispering the poem, which she now asked him to explain so she could also enjoy its “lewdness.” But at that instant a lightning bolt crashed across the vault of his slackened brain and, judging that considerable toil remained before the time of her orgasm, he descended toward his penis buried in his girlfriend’s genitals and all alone, a vague smile on his lips, ejaculated. Thereafter there was always something oppressive about sexual intercourse with the actress, as if a taboo were being violated, and after intercourse he was not only exhausted but his testicles ached for no good reason, as if they were being squeezed. Since the mere possibility that a man having intercourse with her could experience anything but undiluted sweetness terrified the actress as if she had seen a portent of the end of her career, they had finally separated. A number of years still later she appeared on his television screen in a late night movie playing a woman landlord, and he felt he was seeing a phantom of his mother and looked carefully around the room, his hair standing on end.