Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (8 page)

In the past, I had always assumed I knew everything that was happening inside him. But I had been unable to discover a single thing about the panorama that must have unfurled as he lay there slapping the floor with his eyes rolled up. (When he had fallen asleep and begun to snore it was as if he were exhausted from having worked on a great project that included beholding a momentous vision. I even fantasized, as when I had peered into Carp Cave long ago, that his vision had included a glimpse into eternity.) And now I was similarly lost, with no basis for even guessing at the thoughts about death that could have produced that heartrending cry of grief and loss. Where had such strong feelings about death come from?

I was to be given an answer soon enough. That same spring break, still wrapped in the gloominess that was an aftereffect of his seizure, my son was listening to an FM broadcast with the volume turned way up. This had continued for hours until everyone in the family was out of patience. Finally, Eeyore's sister, half his size, had requested him to turn the volume down a little and he had made her cower with a menacing gesture.

“Eeyore! You know better than that!” my wife said. “After Papa and I are dead, your brother and sister will have to look after you. If you behave this way no one will like you. What will you do then? How are you going to get along after we're dead?”

So that was it, I acknowledged to myself with a feeling of regret. In this way, repeatedly, we had been introducing my son to the issue of death. But this time his response to our refrain was something new. “
It's all right! Because I'll die. I'll be dying soon, so it's all right!
”

For an instant there was a pause like an intake of breath—my wife had been thrown by this subdued assertion no less than it had dazed me—and then she continued, speaking now in a tone of voice that was more soothing than reproachful:

“Of course you're not going to die, Eeyore. What makes you think you're going to die? Who told you that?”

“
I'll be dying right away, because I had a seizure! It's all right, because I'll be dying!
”

I moved to my wife's side where she stood at the couch and looked down at my son: he was covering his face resolutely with both hands, his dark eyebrows and the sharply raised bridge of his nose, which resembled his movie-actor uncle's, visible between his fingers. New words to say seemed to stick in our throats, as if we both felt how futile they would be. His voice had been so forceful just now, yet already he was perfectly still, not a muscle moving.

Thirty minutes later, as my wife and I sat in silence and for some reason facing each other across the table in our dining room, my son shuffled past us on his way to the bathroom. He was still covering his face with both hands. His sister, feeling responsible for the situation before, was at his side, clinging to him as she spoke: “Eeyore, be careful! If you cover your face while you walk, you'll bump into stuff. You could trip and hit your head!” Probably, this was also intended as a criticism of her mother's approach to scolding earlier. Eeyore's younger brother fell into step and moved off with him to the bathroom. Through the unclosed door came the sound of copious urinating. Finished, Eeyore seemed to go straight into his mother's bedroom across the hall.

“I think it's bad to talk like that,” my daughter said when she returned. “It makes Eeyore feel lonely when he thinks of the future.” Her face seemed pinched and small, as though covered in goose pimples.

Standing side by side with his sister, her younger brother spoke, revealing that he, too, had evolved a position that was independent of his parents’: “Eeyore was wiping his tears with his forefinger straight out and horizontal, like he was slicing across his eye with a knife. That's the proper way of wiping tears. Even though nobody else does it that way.”

Forlornly, ashamed of ourselves, my wife and I were recalling the words we had repeated endlessly until now—"After we die, Eeyore! What will become of you? What will you do!” For my own part, I was also realizing that, inasmuch as I had never considered carefully how these crucial words might echo deep in my son's heart, I had not yet arrived at a definition of death, not even at a definition of what it meant to
me
let alone to him!

Like an earthquake, the epileptic seizure had produced tremors beneath the surface of Eeyore's body and emotions. As he recovered from its aftereffects and, when spring break ended, returned to special class at middle school, he also seemed to regain his psychological well-being. Following the seizure, there was a time when even the way he listened to music had seemed abnormally off balance, but now his rapt attention conveyed once again an impression of unclouded pleasure.

Nevertheless, there was no room for doubt that a concept of death, whatever its nature, had taken root in him. Every morning, when he finished dressing himself properly to go to school, Eeyore sat down on the rug in the living room. Spreading his plump thighs and dropping his rear heavily to the floor, he hunkered down and opened the morning paper. To read the obituaries. Encountering the name of a new illness, he would hold his breath as he deciphered the Chinese characters he had learned by showing them to my wife and me, and would then recite with feeling: “
Ah, there was lots of dying again this morning! Pernicious pneumonia, age eighty-nine, coronary infarction, age sixty-nine, bronchial pneumonia, aged eighty-three. Ah! This gentleman was the founder of fugu-fish poisoning research, venal thrombosis, age seventy-four, lung cancer, age eighty-six. Ah! There was plenty of dying again!
”

“People are always dying, Eeyore, but many more new people are born every day! Now off to school you go and don't worry! Be careful at the railroad crossing, otherwise—”

Otherwise, you might die yourself—my wife had choked back the second half of her warning with a shudder.

Eeyore became sensitive to reports of food poisoning on the evening news. Beginning in early June in the rainy season and into summer, there were a number of incidents. Each time, he would rush to the television set and parrot the newscaster at the top of his lungs, for example: “
Ah! An entire party at the Nippon outdoor market got food poisoning from their box lunches, the lunches were the tea-shop variety!'‘

A week or two later, summer vacation having begun, we took a train to Gumma prefecture where we have a cabin in the mountains, and Eeyore wouldn't touch the box lunch they sold at the station that he looked forward to eagerly in a normal year. We repeatedly urged him to eat. Before long his eyes became severely crossed, and covering his mouth with one hand he thrust the other out in front of him defensively. This rejection was so emphatic that strangers turned to eye us suspiciously, as if we were imposing a cruel punishment on our child. That summer, my son also stopped eating sushi, one of his favorites until then. Basically, he refused to put any raw fish in his mouth. Pigs’ feet, which he had always liked, became another of the dishes he declined to touch after overeating gave him diarrhea. The result was that he lost twenty-two pounds in just under a year. It seemed this was also a reaction to having been told by the school doctor that he would develop problems if he became obese.

Because he has learned to take his medicine religiously, Eeyore hasn't suffered another major seizure like the one that terrified me, but there have been a number of episodes during the past two years that were like harbingers of a seizure. Whenever this happened and he had to stay home from school and spend the day on the couch, my son would mournfully announce a new abnormality in some organ of his body: “
Ah! There's not a sound coming from my heart! I think I'm dying! My heart isn't making a sound!
”

My wife and I would fashion a stethoscope from a rubber tube and hold it to my son's chest and ear. Or provide an amateur consultation about coronary seizure, choosing words my son could handle, struggling somehow to ease his concern about death. At the same time, I would probe to discover, using the pain or the anxiety he was experiencing now as a bridge, the form in which he had been aware of these same feelings at the time of his first seizure. But in the end, I was never able to uncover any substantial information.

I did manage in the process, indirectly, to extract Eeyore's assessment of certain behavior of his own that had baffled me until then. If I were to re-create the conversation that took place between us—actually, I made numerous inquiries over time, but if I were to summarize—our dialogue was as follows. My son's reply, obscure as it was, had about it a strange ring that did put me and my wife in mind of something.

“Eeyore, a while before you had your seizure you remember pulling out your hair? You pulled out the hair above the plastic flap in your head, little by little, remember, and you made a round bald spot? You kept it up every day. Was that because it was itchy? Was the skin on top of the flap pulling? Did it hurt? Did it feel so bad inside your head you couldn't stand it if you didn't pull your hair out? You must remember? What was going on?”

“
That was an interesting time! The old days were interesting!
” My son's smile was absent as he spoke, as though he had sent his thoughts to a distant place.

As the rainy season ended and summer began in earnest, we took my son to Nihon University Hospital. I have described his violence while I was away in Europe, and assuming this had a physical cause he would have to be examined by a specialist. My wife went to the reception desk at brain surgery to present the usual card requesting an examination by Dr. M, and when she returned to the couch in one corner of the waiting room where I sat with my son she seemed dejected. “Dr. M turned sixty-five and had to retire. He's still here a few times a week and apparently he'll see patients who request a special appointment.”

My son was in high spirits at the prospect of meeting Dr. M for the first time in a long while. Grasping right away that for some reason the doctor was not waiting in the examination room beyond the curtain—he was always swift to comprehend matters concerning himself—his vitality ebbed. My wife and I were stymied; it was as if we had never doubted that, so long as we showed up at the hospital, Dr. M would be there—eternally!—to give us reliable instructions about our son. Now we realized, looking back over those nineteen years, that while Dr. M's examination room and white smock, and his decisiveness and the well-bred humor beneath it, had never changed, his posture and appearance had been moving year by year toward old age. Images of the doctor played across our minds like flashbacks as we sat there in silence. But I was the most disheartened. When my son's name came over the speaker and my wife took him in to see the new doctor, I stayed behind on the pretext of looking after our belongings.

Ten minutes later, he emerged from the examination room with his bright mood restored. My wife also seemed encouraged, but beneath her excitement I could sense that her mind was still wheeling, and her interior agitation prompted me to steel myself for the next revelation of difficulty. She reported that Eeyore had to have a number of tests; we were to do blood and urine first and then go to radiology.

On our way to the lab, my wife told me that the new doctor had been assisting Dr. M ever since he had first operated on Eeyore nineteen years ago. And he had expressed doubt that the symptoms of recent years were related to epilepsy. As far as he could remember, Eeyore had been born with two brains separated by the defect in his skull. Having determined that the external brain was not functioning, Dr. M had excised it, but the portion of the living brain nearest the site of the surgery controlled the optic nerve. If the brain had been traumatized there, Eeyore might well suffer a loss of sight for brief periods of time, and the symptoms we had interpreted as epilepsy could be related to the same problem—

I interrupted: “Two brains? They cut away the brain on the outside that wasn't working?”

“The doctor said you definitely knew about it—and I finally understood what they meant when they put down ‘brain separation syndrome.’”

Two brains: that would make clear beyond any possibility of misunderstanding the meaning of the deformity my son had brought into the world with him, of that glistening, flesh-colored lump large enough to be mistaken for a second head—but it was impossible that I could have learned this from Dr. M at the time of the operation and concealed it from my wife.

“You know that pen drawing of a brain on the wall above the desk in your study?” my wife said. “There's a single eye in the middle of it, and judging from the size of that eye, the brain seems a little smaller than normal. I wonder if that isn't a sketch of the other brain?”

I did prize that sketch of a brain. It had been used as the frontispiece in a collection of essays that Professor W had published just after the war,
On Madness and Other Matters,
But, as far as I was consciously aware, I had placed the illustration in a wooden frame and hung it on the wall because I had been profoundly influenced by the following passage in that book: “There are those who say that great achievements are impossible in the absence of madness. That is untrue! Achievements enabled by madness are invariably accompanied by desolation and sacrifice. Truly great achievements are attained by humanistic individuals laboring honestly, tirelessly, humbly while acutely conscious, far more so than others, that they are susceptible to madness.”

After the operation, when Dr. M had told me about the object like a Ping-Pong ball, I had pictured it, because of the association with a defect in the skull, as a sort of bone; now my wife seemed to suspect that my description to her, of a lump that contained bonelike material, had been intentionally misleading. As though I were under the influence of my wife's suspicion, I was having second thoughts of my own. Perhaps Dr. M had informed me about the two brains right away and I had prevented myself protectively from registering the information. And perhaps it had been my subconscious understanding that had drawn me so powerfully to Professor W's ink drawing of a brain that, based on the proportion of the single eye, was clearly smaller than normal.