Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (25 page)

The doctor loudly assembled his entire staff, and when the young patient had been stretched out on a bare, black leather bed, he gave triumphant instructions that all hands were to help to hold the boy down (the fat man just managed to appropriate for himself the task of securing Eeyore’s head between his arms and pinning his chest beneath the weight of his whole body), and then jumped ahead to the second, unquestionably more complicated, stage of the examination, though it was clear that the first test had not been completed.

With Eeyore secured so firmly to the bed from head to foot that his only freedom was the screaming which wrenched open his mouth and bared his yellow teeth (it was impossible to train Eeyore to brush his teeth: he was terrified of opening his mouth under coercion from no matter who it came; even if you managed to work the toothbrush between his closed lips, he would act as if it
hurt or sometimes tickled him and simply clamp down), the nurse placed at the head of his bed a slender aluminum rod bent into an oblong diamond so as to fashion a kind of forceps. The fat man had only to estimate that the slender, tapered apex of this instrument would be introduced beneath the eyelid and then opened to bare the eyeball for a throbbing pain to spread like fire from his own eyes to the central nerve of his brain. Ignoring him and his panic, the doctor squeezed two kinds of drops into Eeyore’s eyes, which, though tightly closed, continued to spill tears like signals of the boy’s protest. Eeyore renewed his screaming and the fat man shuddered violently. Only then would the doctor say, by way of information:

____This anesthetizes his eyes, so he won’t feel any pain.

When the fat man heard this, the silver shimmer of pain connecting his eyes and the marrow of his brain flickered out. But Eeyore continued to moan, as if he were being strangled to death. The fat man, rubbing the tears out of his own eyes with the back of his hand, just managed to see the doctor insert the slender instrument under Eeyore’s eyelid while the boy’s moaning surged even higher and then completely bare the eyeball only inches away from him. It was truly a large sphere, egg-white in color, and what it felt like to the fat man was the earth itself, the entire world of man. At its center was a brown circle, softly blurred, from which the pupil, lighted with a poor, dull light, blankly and feebly gazed. What it expressed was dumbness and fear and pain, and it was working hard to focus on something, laboring to resolve the blurred whatever-it-was that kept cruelly bringing back the pain. With this eye the fat man identified all of himself. He was not in pain because of the drug, but there
was a numbed sense of terror, of discord, in his heart, and this he had to battle as he gazed up helplessly at the crowd of faces bearing down on him. He nearly began to moan along with his son. But he could not help noticing that the brown blur of the eye conveying only dumbness and fear and pain was including his own face in its scrutiny of the crowd of Eeyore’s unknown tormentors. A jagged fissure opened between himself and his son. And the fat man forced the first finger of his right hand between Eeyore’s yellow, gnashing teeth (not until after his experience above the polar bears’ pool would he recognize that he had done this because he was afraid of that fissure, afraid that if he saw to the bottom of it he would have to confront what certainly would have revealed itself there in its true form, the self-deception impregnating his conscious formulation Eeyore = the fat man), saw wasted blood begin to spurt in the same volume as the tears his son continued to weep, heard the sound of teeth grinding bone and, clamping his eyes shut, began to scream in chorus with his son.

When the fat man had received emergency treatment and descended to the waiting room, his wife reported to him, with Eeyore sitting at her side, still pale and limp but calm again, the little doctor’s diagnosis. Eeyore’s eyes, as with mice, had different fields of vision; like mice again, he was color blind; furthermore, he could not clearly resolve objects farther away than three feet, a condition impossible to correct at present, because, according to the doctor, the child had no desire to see objects in the distance clearly.

____That must be why Eeyore nearly rubs his face against the screen when he watches commercials on TV! The fat man’s wife valued the practice of maintaining the will in
good health at all times, and she spoke with emphasis in her attempt to raise the fat man from his gloom, as if she had discovered even in this hopeless diagnosis an analysis of benefit to herself.

____There are children with normal vision who rub the TV screen with their noses, too, the fat man protested apprehensively. That little doctor didn’t do much of anything, you know, except frighten Eeyore and hurt him and make him cry. In which part of the examination is he supposed to have discovered all that calamity?

____I think it’s true that Eeyore doesn’t see distant objects clearly and doesn’t want to, said the fat man’s wife in a voice that was beginning honestly to reveal her own despondency. When I took him to the zoo, he didn’t get the least bit excited about the real animals, and you know how he loves the animal pictures in this books—he just looked at the railings or the ground in front of him. Aren’t most of the cages at the zoo more than three feet away?

The fat man resolved to take his son to the zoo. With his own eyes and ears for antennae and their clasped hands for a coil, he would broadcast live on their personal band a day at the zoo for Eeyore’s sake.

And so it came about one morning in the winter of 196— that the fat man and his fat son set out for the zoo together. Eeyore’s mother, anxious about the effect of the cold on his asthma, had bundled him into clothing until he couldn’t have worn another scrap; and the fat man himself, who preferred the two of them to be dressed as nearly alike as possible, had outfitted him on their way to the station in a woolen stocking cap identical to the one he had worn out of the house. The result was that, even to his father, the boy looked like an Eskimo child just arrived from the Pole. This meant without question that in other
eyes they must have appeared, not a robust, but simply corpulent, Eskimo father and son. Bundled up like a pair of sausages, they stepped onto the train with their hands clasped tightly and, sweat beading the bridges of their noses and all the skin beneath their clothing, a flush on their moon faces where they were visible between their stocking caps and the high collars of their overcoats, enjoyed its lulling vibrations.

Eeyore loved the thrill, which was why he liked bicycles, of entrusting himself to a sensation of precarious motion. Bu the thrill had to be insulated by the secure feeling that his own never very stable body was being protected by another, ideally his fat father’s. Even when they took a cab, one of Eeyore’s delights, if the fat man tried to remain inside to pay the fare after Eeyore and his mother had stepped into the street, the boy would disintegrate in a manner terrible to see. If ever he got lost from his father in a train, he would probably go mad. For the fat man, riding the train with his son who was so dependent on him, in the face of the strangers all around them, was a frank and unlimited satisfaction. And since, compared to the feelings he normally identified in the course of his life from day to day, this satisfaction was so pure and so dominant, he knew it did not have its source within himself, but was in fact the happiness rising like mist in his son’s turbid, baffled mind, reaching him through their clasped hands and being clarified in his own consciousness. Moreover, by identifying his own satisfaction in this way, he was in turn introducing in Eeyore a new happiness, this time with focus and direction—such was the fat man’s logic.

The doctor had suggested that Eeyore lacked the vision to see distinctly at a distance and apparently he was
right, for Eeyore, unlike other children, was never fascinated by the scenery hurtling by outside. He took his enjoyment purely in the train’s vibration and acceleration, in the sensation of motion. And when they pulled into a station, the opening and closing of the automatic door became the focus of his pleasure. Naturally, Eeyore had to observe this from less than three feet away, so the fat man and his son always stood at the pole in front of the door, even when there were empty seats.

Today, Eeyore was busily concerned with the fit of his new cap. And since his standard was not the cap’s appearance but how it felt against his skin, it was not until, after a long series of adjustments, he finally pulled it down over his ears and even his eyelids that he discovered the final sense of stability and comfort. The fat man followed suit, and felt indeed that a stocking cap could not possibly be worn in greater comfort. At the station where they had to change trains, as they walked along the underground passage and climbed up and down stairs, the fat man often was aware of eyes mocking them as an outlandish pair. But far from feeling cowed, when he saw their squat, bulky image reflected in a show window in the underground arcade, he stopped and shouted hotly, as if they had the place all to themselves,

____Eeyore, look! A fat Eskimo father and son; we look really sharp!

Eeyore’s hand functioned as a wall against other people, turning the fat man, who had to take tranquilizers when he went out alone, into such an extrovert. Holding his son’s hand liberated him, allowing him to feel even in a crowd that they were all alone together and protected by a screen. Much to his father’s relief, as Eeyore shuffled along cautiously, staring down at his feet as if to determine
with his poor eyes whether the checkerboard pattern of the passage continued on a level or rose into a staircase, he repeated civilly,

____Eeyore, we look really sharp!

With the mediation of their hands, which were moist with sweat though it was before noon on a winter day, the fat man and his son were in a state of optimum communication when they reached the zoo at ten-thirty, so the fat man imagined to his satisfaction, exalted by the prospect of the experience still wholly in front of them. So when they approached the special enclosure called the Children’s Zoo, where it was possible to fondle baby goats and lambs and little pigs and ageing geese and turkeys, and saw that it was too crowded with children on a school excursion to permit a sluggish little boy like Eeyore to work his way inside, they were not particularly disappointed. It was the fat man’s wife who had wanted Eeyore to get within three feet of the animals in the first place, so he could observe and touch them. But the fat man had something different in mind. He intended to defy the eye doctor’s diagnosis by functioning as Eeyore’s eyes; he would focus sharply on the beasts in the distance and transmit their image to Eeyore through the coil of their clasped hands, whereupon his son’s own vision, responding to this signal, would begin gradually to resolve its object. It was the realization of this procedure so like a dream that had brought the fat man to the zoo. Accordingly, after one look at the children brandishing bags of popcorn and paper cups of mudfish as they clamored with excitement in their eyes around the pitiful, down-sized animals in the special enclosure, the fat man turned away from the Children’s Zoo and led Eeyore toward the larger, fiercer animal cages.

____Tell me, Eeyore! who comes to the zoo to see wild animals as friendly as cows! We’re here to see the bears and the elephants and especially the lions, wouldn’t you say, Eeyore? We’re here to see the guys who would be our worst enemies if they weren’t in cages! To this felt opinion the fat man’s son did not respond directly, but as they passed the lion cages, like an animal cub born and abandoned in the heart of the jungle scenting the presence of dangerous beasts, he seemed to grow wary, and the fat man thrilled to the feeling that he had been attended and understood.

____Look, Eeyore, a tiger! You see the great big guy with deep black and yellow stripes and a few patches of white, you see him moving over there? Well, that’s a tiger, Eeyore is watching a tiger! said the fat man

____Eeyore is watching a tiger, his son parroted, detecting the presence of something with a sense of smell which was certainly too acute and tightening his grip on his father’s hand while with one poorly focused eye, his flushed moon-face consequently a-tilt, he continued to gaze vacantly at the spot where the bars sank into the concrete floor of the cage.

____Eeyore, look up at the sky You see the black, bushy monster on the round, brown thing; that’s an orangutan, Eeyore’s watching a big ape!

Without letting go his hand the fat man stepped behind his son and with his free arm tilted back the boy’s head and held it against his thigh. Eeyore, required to look obliquely upward, squinted into the glare of the clear winter sky, screwing his face into a scowl of delicate wrinkles which made him look all the more like an Eskimo child. Perhaps it wasn’t a scowl at all but a smile of recognition, perhaps he had verified the orangutan squatting
uneasily on an old car tire with the blue sky at his back, the fat man couldn’t be sure.

____Eeyore’s watching a big ape, the fat little boy intoned, his vocal cords communicating their tremor directly to his father’s hand cupped around his chin.

The fat man maintained his grip on Eeyore’s head, gambling that the orangutan would go into action. It had rained until dawn and there was still a rough wind up high, which gave the blue of the sky a hard brilliance rare for Tokyo. And the orangutan itself was as giant and as black as it could be, its outlines etched vividly into the sky at its back. Furthermore, as the fat man knew from a zoology magazine, this was a lethargic orangutan, for it happened to be afflicted with melancholia so severely that it needed daily stimulants just to stay alive. So this particular orangutan had all the requisites for a suitable object of Eeyore’s vision. But unfortunately it appeared that the monkey’s melancholia was indeed profound, for though it frequently peered down with suspicious eyes at the pair waiting so forbearingly in front of its cage, it gave no indication that it was even preparing to move. Eventually the brilliance of the sky began to tire even the fat man’s eyes, until he was seeing the monkey as a kind of black halo. He finally led his son gloomily away from the orangutan’s cage. He could feel himself beginning to tire already, and he was afraid the feeling might reach his son through the conduit of their clasped hands. Dreamily he considered the quantity of drugs the orangutan would consume in a day, and was badly shaken to remember that he had forgotten to take his own tranquilizers before leaving the house that morning.