Vaseline Buddha (23 page)

Nevertheless, I instructed him to practice more so that he could shoot a flying magpie for real, and feeling triumphant, he practiced till the sun went down, not to do as I instructed but, it seemed, to shoot a flying magpie for real. But he didn't practice for that long, because the sun soon went down. He could have kept practicing after dark, but he gave up. He took after me and lacked perseverance.

I thought that I wasn't sure what I could do for him, but that I wasn't sure, either, if I could do anything and everything if it were for him, and regardless of that thought, I thought of things I should teach him as a father, and taught him how to swim. For some reason, I thought that I had to make sure to teach him how to float on water, how not sink when you fell in water. But he gave up soon after swallowing a few gulps of water, and was reluctant to do anything that involved the possibility of having to swallow water. So I taught him how to jump ropes and do sit-ups, which didn't involve drinking water, and although he couldn't jump the rope even once, he could do sit-ups quite well, as if he'd been doing it for a long time, ever since he was born, even though it was his first time, and did thirty sit-ups at once the night I taught him, possessed with a strange enthusiasm, as if he took great pleasure in it, and didn't listen to me when I told him to stop, and did thirty more, and in the end, reached a hundred, sounding out of breath—he made me kneel down and hold his ankles, and count to a hundred, and I thought about stopping him but I stopped myself from stopping him and watched as he, too, counted the numbers, folding his body in half and unfolding it, and gasping for breath, and as I did I felt something like the sorrow of a father who has a son, not too severely, but mildly, no, severely and mildly at the same time—and at last fell asleep, utterly exhausted, which seems appropriate only for a child, but is somewhat strange even for a child.

And once I taught him how to spin a top, but he didn't have an
easy time learning it, and we were both beset with great difficulty until he could spin a top properly. But once he learned how to spin a top he became hooked, and buried himself in spinning a top both at home and outside. As a result, I had to feel a dizziness that was different from my usual dizziness, watching the top he was spinning, which spun around in a circle that was a vivid black and red and blue, so I tried, much too hard, to focus on the red at the center so that the other two colors next to it would disappear and no longer be seen, which made the dizziness grow worse.

There really was quite a strange side to him, which I confirmed one day when I finally woke up around four in the afternoon because I'd drunk too much the night before to find him sitting quietly on the edge of the bed with his back to me. He sat by himself without waking me up till that hour, only drinking water like someone fasting, and at that moment he seemed not just strange, but a little scary as well. Next to me, on the bed, there was some kind of a castle he'd built with Lego blocks. He never told me if he hadn't completed it or if he'd torn it down after completing it because I never asked him about it. That day, I had the ridiculous idea that perhaps I could take him, or make him take me on a journey, and start a true life of wandering as Molloy did, not just go on a trip.

I asked him what he was thinking, and he, with a look of severe reproof on his face, told me that he couldn't tell me that, and so I was able to conclude that he was once again thinking negative thoughts about me. It seemed to me that he was thinking about ordering me around and making me do something when I woke up, condemning me in his young heart.

Fortunately, his anger soon subsided when I bought him a pinwheel. For some reason I wanted to see the pinwheel, which spun quickly when he ran toward me, holding it in his hand, spin more quickly and frantically, so I told him to run faster, and watching him run frantically toward me several times, I thought that we could be good friends someday. But a thought I'd had earlier, that taking after me, he might follow in my ways, came to my mind again and worried me, but I concluded that he would live a life of his own. And when he grew older and life felt unbearable, he would blame me at times, but there was still time before that happened, and it wasn't something inevitable, so it was possible that things wouldn't turn out that way. I had trouble falling asleep that night, watching my son sleeping, and thinking about the first romantic relationship and sexual intercourse he would experience, and the many dreams he would have and then give up, and thinking that for now, he could just keep up with doing what he wanted to do, doing sit-ups, for instance.

Sometimes when we went to the mountain together, he would run around playing, but then sit down on a tree stump and become quietly lost in thought, and when I saw him sitting like that, I would recall my own childhood, when I spent countless hours quietly sitting like that.

It's midwinter now. I'm sitting in the afternoon sun, drinking tea, in front of the table by the window on the second floor of the house I live in. The tea is ginger. The doctor told me that it would help with my dizziness. I do some things as the doctor instructs, but not others. The doctor has banned me from caffeine, but it
seems boring somehow to do everything as the doctor ordered, so sometimes, I wake up in the morning and have three cups of strong coffee, and when I do, I grow severely dizzy. But being in that state brings me a strange pleasure. I've now come to think that there's something in my dizziness that has to do with something fundamental in my being, and that dizziness may be something at the root of existence. And dizziness is addictive. It seems that there's something of a religious experience in losing consciousness when dizziness reaches its extreme, or saturation, or freezing point of sorts, which is demonstrated in cases in which people lose consciousness with the help of charms or medicines in certain religious ceremonies. (Sometimes, people make a deliberate attempt to lose consciousness. People on an island in a tropical region dry up the roots of a plant of the pepper family called kava and mix it with water and drink it before performing a ceremony, and then walk on hot stones, and it is said that the drink makes you hallucinate a little and grow averse to light, and that the origin of the ceremony of walking on stones while your senses are paralyzed has to do with eels.)

In the meantime, I ended up going to an ear, nose, and throat clinic. The third floor office of the clinic specializing in symptoms of dizziness was full of people suffering from symptoms of dizziness. Some of them were sitting with their head against the back of the sofa, or leaning on the person next to them, who had come as their guardian. I wanted to put my head on someone's shoulder, and felt a sense of fellowship with them, but I couldn't tell if they felt the same way (perhaps people suffering from the same illness feel a stronger sense of fellowship than that felt among any others).
An old man sitting to my right said to a young man sitting to my left, skipping over me, as if I weren't sitting between them—they didn't know each other—that he'd passed out a few days earlier and passed out twice the day before he came to the clinic, and he sounded as if he were bragging in a way, and I didn't dare say a word in front of him about my own swooning.

I was able to see the doctor at last after waiting for over an hour. He asked me specifically how I was dizzy, but I had difficulty describing my dizziness specifically, so I wanted to tell him that it felt similar to an LSD trip but didn't. I'd never experienced an LSD trip, and knew only through a book that there was something similar between LSD trips and my dizziness. The treatment involved making me dizzy through artificial means to find out the cause of the symptoms of dizziness. I had to put up with the ridiculous tests the doctor conducted on me, the process of which seemed so inadequate that I wondered if the cause could be determined through the tests.

After the checkup, the doctor showed me an anatomical chart of the ear, and told me that there was something wrong with the blood vessel connecting the vestibular organ in one of my ears to the brain, and I thought about my blood vessel that wasn't functioning properly. And I looked at the three semicircular canals and the cochlea connected to the vestibular organ in the anatomical chart. I looked at them with great curiosity, as I always do when I see body organs in an anatomical chart, and they looked amazing and beautiful, like complex mechanisms. The doctor told me that unlike other organs in the body that were connected to each other through many blood vessels, which propelled other blood vessels into action when one of the blood vessels stopped functioning properly, there was only one blood vessel there, and that a surgery was almost impossible, and I realized that I would be living with some kind of a chronic disease, and felt that another problem had been added to the chronic problems I had.

After prescribing some medicine, the doctor banned me from cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee. All three were very difficult things for me to give up. And he taught me several physical movements that would be helpful in overcoming symptoms of dizziness. Most of them involved moving your head to make yourself dizzy on purpose, in order to develop tolerance to dizziness. Very much like an idiot, I shook my head obediently as instructed, from left to right, and up and down.

Feeling dizzy as a result, I left the doctor's office and accidentally made my way to the opposite side of the entrance on the first floor of the clinic, and when I opened the door and went outside, there was a neglected plot of land with weeds growing on it, which looked like the site for a new building. I walked among the weeds, and as I always did when I made a visit to the hospital and learned the cause of my symptoms, I felt both happy and sad to have learned the cause for my dizziness.

And I found something white among the weeds that looked like the backbone of some kind of a vertebrate. It was possible that the thing, which had several joints and looked like the backbone of an animal, wasn't a backbone. Nevertheless, looking at the thing, shining white in the sun, I felt a certain sadness, and felt tempted to make a story out of it, as I'd made a story about false teeth out of a teeth-marked apple sitting on a bench covered in snow in a royal palace in Budapest. But there are some things that are better left alone and kept from developing into a story, which I felt was the case for the thing. Still, I picked up the bone and kept it in a drawer.

For the past several days, in quite a vague state, I spent time making vague or elaborate plans, or making vague plans in an elaborate way, about things I would never do or end up doing. It occurred to me that I was spending each day without any plans as to how I would live in the days to come, with no confidence as to how I would face the very next day, but I thought that it shouldn't be a problem.

Now I'm listening to a monotonic yet strange and beautiful music played on a shamisen. The album was something I bought when I went to Japan after going to the site of the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, Belgium, where Napoleon's army and the Prussian allies fought a fierce battle—until then, I didn't know that Waterloo was in Belgium, and in the war memorial where there was a room filled with huge panorama pictures (panorama pictures, a forerunner of movies, touch you in a different way than movies, and I feel like a child when I look at them) depicting the war, there was a statement, proudly written, saying that the Belgians devoted themselves to taking care of the wounded on both sides during the Battle of Waterloo, as if that were all that the Belgians, who handed over their land, did—and then returned to Brussels and had a meal at a Japanese restaurant, during which I heard some shamisen music—I ate in the restaurant alone in the afternoon, and the music, monotonous yet intense, touched me in a mysterious way that left an unforgettable impression on me.
Immersing myself in the music, I think that I could write a story with a circular structure in which I somehow extricate myself from the story in which I'm lost and then get lost again entering a story, where my life seems to be.

The story I began to write around the beginning of summer and planned to finish during summer continued into winter, and I seek to end the story as I greet winter, talking about winter in the story. The pumpkin vines in the garden outside the window, which had been thick in summer, and had made a kitten tremble in fear one very bright morning, were nipped by frost and the leaves have withered, but the stems are still intact.

I'm sitting in the sun like a cat. There's nothing but a few withered trees in the garden outside the window. I once had a dream that the landlady of the house I was renting appeared in an empty garden, no, it's possible that it wasn't a garden, but a place I was sure was a garden, or used to be a garden, and suddenly for some reason, took off her pants and paced up and down in her underwear, and then quietly disappeared. No, that's not true. I say that I dreamt it, but it actually happened. I don't know why she did such a thing. Before she went off somewhere, she glanced in the direction of the window where I was, and our gazes met for a very brief moment. I saw two cats playing around at the back, slapping each other with their front paws. It was May then, and there was a thick growth of small leaves that looked like duck feet on the sycamore trees in the garden. The landlady was a bit off in the head, and one day, I saw her walking up and down on a patch of various vegetables on one side of her garden. Once, she brought me an armful of persimmon that I just couldn't eat and I took them to a nearby woods and wondered what her intention was as I hurled them one by one, counting them—there were twenty-seven in all—but I couldn't be sure.

Generally, a garden is nice to spend time in, and nice to look at through a window. Around the beginning of winter, I went to Brussels for some time to attend a dull literary event, then to Berlin to gauge the publication of a book of mine that was being translated into German (it was fruitless, as expected), and spent most of the time staring at the garden outside the window in a room on the fourth floor of a building that was in a residential area in the city. Being quite dizzy, I had no choice but to stay cooped up in the room most of the time. I had barely managed, in fact, to get to the room in Berlin. I was faced with the greatest crisis at Brussels Airport, when I felt so dizzy after the long flight that I had difficulty just making it to the transfer ramp, so I sat down in a chair with my hands on the cart, and was going to ask someone around me, someone kind looking, to put me in the cart and take me just up to the transfer ramp, but I couldn't bring myself to ask a stranger to do such a thing, and in the end, I made it to the departure gate, pushing the cart and leaning on it, after resting for over an hour.