Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (9 page)

With a word of thanks spoken in the tone of a radio announcement, Eeyore emerged from the X-ray room into the corridor. Tests were a major undertaking for him: though he worked hard at following the doctor's instructions, his clumsiness was so extreme it made me wonder whether his bone structure might be abnormal. The X rays had been the last test, and as we climbed into a taxi my son said earnestly but with elation in his voice, “It
was extremely painful, but I did my best!
”

Something was troubling me. “That condition you mentioned,” I said to my wife. “Did the doctor explain it in a way that Eeyore could understand?”

“I think so—he seemed very interested. He said, ‘Oh boy! Two of them, two brains!’ Something like that.”

“
Exactlyl I had two brains! But now I have one. Mama, I wonder where in the world my other brain went?
”

A laugh burst from the cabdriver, who had been listening; he flushed from his cheeks to his ears and seemed angry at himself for his gaffe. Some drivers who make hospitals the hub of their business have what might be called a mission to make a show of sympathy for patients and their families. Our driver's solicitude had backfired, and he seemed to be punishing himself. But when my son was in a good mood he enjoyed punning and word play, even now he had been mimicking a television commercial, so if anything the driver's laugh would have flattered him. Riding the wave of the moment, I said, “Eeyore, your other brain died. But there's a fine, living brain doing its very best inside your head! But you had two brains, that's really something!”

“
You bet it is
—
really something!
”

How to handle this new information, that there had been a pair of brains? I sat vacantly, unable to resolve my feelings, and Eeyore's cheerful surprise at learning the truth, his exultation, provided me with a hint. What reason did I have not to be as encouraged as he was by this new knowledge? My son had come into the world burdened with two brains, but he had survived surgery and the aftereffects—doing his best though it was extremely painful—and he was standing on his own two feet.

“Eeyore, you're alive because that other brain died. You need to take good care of the brain you have and do your best to live to a ripe old age!”

“
Exactly! Let's do our best and live to a ripe old age! Sibelius was ninety-two, Scarlatti was ninety-nine, Eduardo Di Capua lived until he was one hundred and twelve! Oh boy, that was really something!
”

“Does the young gentleman like music?” the cabbie asked in an attempt to recover lost ground, his eyes on the road ahead. “What kind of a musician was that Mr. Eduardo?”

“He wrote ‘O Sole Mio'!”

“You don't say! Isn't that something! You take good care of yourself!”

“
Thank you very kindly, I'm going to do my best!
”

I was picturing a desert landscape. A cold babe—a babe who was only a small-sized brain with a single eye opened in it—stands in the furious air. It screams, the kind of scream a babe who is only brain matter can scream:…
the children of six thousand years / Who died in infancy rage furious a mighty multitude rage furious / Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.

3
: Down, Down thro' the Immense, with Outcry

A
bout two years ago, when my son was still in the special class at middle school, there was a period when I was trying to teach him to swim. For several months in the autumn and winter of that year, I took him with me to my swimming club at least once and sometimes three times a week. I was prompted by a remark the physical education teacher made to my wife at Parents’ Day, about how difficult Eeyore was to handle during swimming drills. Apparently, the teacher had expressed his view that my son lacked the will to float, even the body's instinctive will to float—“It was a little like training a cup.” These thoughts were disturbing to my wife, but when she reported them to me I knew immediately what the teacher was talking about. And when I took my son to the pool, the nature of the poor fellow's distress became so clear to me that I had to laugh out loud. There was no question that this was going to be harder than teaching a cup to swim.

If you put a cup down on the water's surface, it will fill and sink. But if a cup had ears you might at least say, “C'mon! Let's try to stay afloat!” In my son's case, while it was clear that he did not float, it wasn't so easy to say with any finality that he sank. Standing in the pool I would give him instructions, and it appeared that he was doing his best to follow them obediently; at the same time he also appeared oblivious. Gradually, I stopped imagining the part-time phys ed teacher's irritation and began feeling my own.

“Again, Eeyore! Head in the water, arms out in front, and let's kick those feet as hard as we can!”

My son wasn't afraid of the water. He didn't hesitate for an instant. And he moved just as I told him to. It was just that he moved at a pace that had nothing to do with the standard I was vaguely expecting. Slowly. Like a viscous liquid sinking into a blotter, or a bivalve burrowing into the sand.

Lowering his head peacefully to the water and extending both arms in front of him, he lifts his feet from the bottom. He moves his arms in a manner that suggests he is picturing himself not only floating but swimming the crawl, but the motion is so thoroughgoingly gentle that his arms seem to encounter no resistance from the water. Meanwhile, his body gradually descends toward the depths. And at a certain point in the process, in an entirely natural move, Eeyore stands on the bottom again. He doesn't panic on the way down, there is no writhing or swallowing lungfuls of water. Since in the course of this series of actions he has advanced two or three feet, repeating the series will carry him, very slowly to be sure, from one end of the pool to the other. It appears he may even be thinking secretly that this is his way of swimming in the pool.

I called out to him constantly, “Dig your hands into the water” or “Try pushing forward with your feet,” and each time he responded in the same amiable way, “
That's an excellent idea!
”

But the minute he lowered his head to the water he began to move like a swimmer in a dream or an image in a slow-motion film and showed no sign of improving. Sometimes I put my goggles on and swam alongside to coach him along: underwater, his movements were calm, so very calm that I could see his deep-set, oval eyes wide open in an expression of quiet wonder and could see each bubble from his nose and mouth as it rose glintingly toward the surface. I found myself wondering whether this might not be the manner in which nature intended a person to behave underwater.

Though I took my son with me to the pool twice a week and sometimes more, there was no indication that his swimming style was changing. Since the swimmer himself appeared to be having a good time, there was nothing wrong with that; but on days when the pool was crowded, we had a problem. The club had two pools for competitive swimming and three deeper pools for diving and scuba training, but Eeyore could use only the twenty-five-meter main pool when a lane had been reserved for “leisure swimming.” When the main pool was occupied by swimmers from the swimming school or those practicing in the training lanes, the only other place available for him to swim was the twenty-meter pool reserved for club members.

But since mid-autumn, there had been times when the doors in the glass partition around the Members Pool had all been locked. It had been reserved, in other words, by a special group. Since they were never there for more than two hours, I would let Eeyore swim in a training lane in the twenty-five-meter pool when one happened to be open, or, failing that, we would wait for the group in the Members Pool to finish. Once Eeyore had put on his bathing suit and gone downstairs to the pools, there was no point in even mentioning that swimming might not be possible that day. On the other hand, if it came to waiting, my son would sit on the bench at poolside for as long as necessary without saying a word.

The group that had chartered the Members Pool was unique to the club, and had its own unique pattern of activity. It consisted of fifteen young men in their late twenties. I can be definite about their number because we could hear them counting off before and after practice on the other side of the glass partition. For reasons I shall explain, the counting was in Spanish—
uno, dos, tres, cuatro
—and always ended with
quince.

The young men were of course Japanese, and everything about them, from their bodies to the expressions on their faces to their most trivial movements, made it appear that they were being trained in the manner of our former military. Their roll call in Spanish was unmistakably military in style. Some time ago, I spent several months in Mexico City; and I remember waking on a Sunday or holiday morning to children outside the apartment shouting back and forth in a Spanish round with vowels that was so familiar it took me back in a flash to the Shikoku village of my boyhood and churned my dreams as I awakened—the Spanish of this roll call had nothing in common with the language of my youth; there was a growling coarseness to it that was the sound of a Japanese soldier.

There were other things about these young men that smacked of the military: their short crew cuts, the khaki bathing suits like short pants they wore when they came downstairs to the pool—when I ran into them as they were getting off the midsize bus like a patrol wagon that brought them to and from the club, they were wearing dark- and light-green-striped camouflage suits—and the identical look of their bodies. The swimmers from the university swimming club who worked out in the weight room on the third floor had skin and muscles that were the product of bringing excessive nourishment under control in the course of a pampered life of luxury. Theirs were privileged bodies, supple and abundant to a degree that was almost wanton. When they weren't exercising, their spoiled, juvenile faces had a way of looking slack and foolish. The military young men, partly because they were ten years older as a group, were another physical type entirely. Their bodies were also developed, but there was something hungry and reckless about them, as if they had earned their muscles doing hard labor like digging ditches. When they trained in the pool, they swam like amateurs, flailing the water powerfully but ineffectively with their hands and feet; and their leader, a man named Shumuta who had a national reputation as a swimming coach, seemed disinclined to correct them.

When the young men arrived in their lockup of a bus with its windows narrowed by wooden frames, they filed into the club through the employees’ entrance and changed in a corner of the swimming-school locker room that was reserved for their exclusive use when they were in the building. While they were swimming in the Members Pool, the glass partition was kept locked, and when they were finished they showered and drove away in the bus without ever using the steam room or the sauna. In other words, the sphere of their activity isolated them from the rest of the club, but some of the women members were openly resentful nevertheless: “It's like they come here to swim from prison. They don't even talk to each other, and those grim faces! Those guys aren't living in the same age as we are!” I remembered this last remark in particular because I had received the same impression; it felt to me as if the golden years of Japan's postwar resurgence would fit nicely into the gap in time that separated the college swimmers and the young men's group. Their leader, on the other hand, Mr. Shumuta, was a sunny, vivacious individual who seemed very much in the present, and while the young men were in the pool he would sit in the steam room or soak in the hot tub and strike up cheerful conversations with anyone in earshot. In fact, the contrast between Mr. Shumuta and the young men he led was so extreme it pointed in the direction of something almost grotesque about their relationship.

Although I didn't ask about details—Mr. Shumuta's background was apparently common knowledge among the regulars at the club and making outright inquiries felt awkward—there was no question that he had been an Olympic-class athlete in track and field. At the height of his career, several of his toes had been severed in an accident. The pink stubs seemed raw even now; when he sat soaking in the cold-water tub with his meaty but firm legs thrown out carelessly in front of him, it was impossible not to notice them. After the accident, he had apparently given up competition and built a successful career as a personal trainer to athletes, traveling as a regular member of the Japanese team to one Olympics after another. Until recently, he had also taught physical education at Keio University. The director of the athletic club at Keio had been his prize student during his college days, and as a result of that connection it seemed that Mr. Shumuta had been an adviser to our swimming club ever since it had been founded. Undoubtedly, it was this history that had persuaded the club, in a radical departure from its own policies, to allow private use of the Members Pool, albeit for limited periods of time.

His high, jutting forehead and two cheeks like three opposing hillocks in the face of a huge baby, Mr. Shumuta would install his large body in the sauna or the hot tub and fill the room with hearty laughter that echoed off the tile wall, yet when you actually spoke with him it was immediately clear that this was not a man who was characterized by youthful innocence. Notwithstanding that glistening face of a happy giant baby, the narrow eyes like wrinkles beneath wispy eyebrows made you wonder if a smile had ever crinkled them before.

“
Sensei
”—on his lips the word didn't sound like the standard salutation used among faculty colleagues to address each other; there was contempt in his emphasis, as though he were a day laborer with something gnawing at him speaking down to a man who earned his living in his study. When I went into the steam room alone, having left my son soaking in the tepid hot tub, Mr. Shumuta had called out as though he had been waiting for me.

“I heard about you from a friend in Mexico City. I've been going down there since the Mexico Olympics. Someone else I know, a Japanese, he owns a pretty big truck farm and I'll be taking some young fellas down there and moving in. The Mexicans are making a fuss about importing labor into the country but I expect that'll go away—as soon as I get them trained a little on the farm we'll take off for the wilderness. Anyways,
Sensei,
I was hoping you'd give my boys a talk about Mexico—it would be great if you could do it in Spanish!”