The Lake (17 page)

“Apparently my face was expressionless in the beginning, no matter what we were doing, I was always stiff, but that was just because I couldn’t find a way to show what I was feeling. Inside, I was having all kinds of emotions, but it was impossible to let them out. But day by day, slowly, over time, something was warming up in me, thawing. I started to love my mother again, and gradually I went back to being myself. I remember it all very clearly, that whole process.

“And then, after things had settled down somewhat, our doctor suggested that we should go take it easy somewhere, and we went and lived in that house, by the edge of the lake.”

That explains why he’s like this, I thought. It’s because he experienced something so awful himself that he’s determined, more than most people, not to be a burden to anyone, to me, and to take care of himself.

Nakajima continued.

“It’s not like I was being abused the whole time or anything, I was simply being trained by people who wanted to create a race of superhumans, so in a sense they were all very nice, the meals were always good, with lots of seafood, and I had friends I could play with every day, so it was actually pretty fun. But as far as the adults there were concerned, my relationships with them were all the same, homogeneous, there was no emotional involvement like there had been in my relationship with my mother.

“I realized then, in the most physical way, that being logical and clear-headed isn’t at all the same thing as having everything the same, unruffled. When you’re in a state of homogeneity, it means you’ve lost yourself. That’s how you’re able to get that way in the first place.

“All that love my mother sort of forced on me right after I escaped, it was like a soup that was too strong, it penetrated too deep. Her emotions were so intense—they were like gaudy clothes or something, with too many frills. That’s how I saw it.

“In the end, I think it was my fault my mother and father separated, and she died sooner than she should have. That seemed to me like the most natural thing in the world, and I’m not thinking in some weird unscientific way or anything. It happened because she used so much energy; she chose to do that, in return for getting me back. What she put into me was taken away from her. She knew it would be like that, and still she used that energy. I really believe that, even now.

“Of course, I don’t necessarily feel like I have that long to live myself, and so back then it was natural for me to think,
What are you doing, I don’t need this life, Mom, it’s yours!
But I didn’t have the strength to pray for that to happen, really deep down, the way my mother did. I could never compete with her, I realized that. She gave it everything she had, squeezing every last drop of strength in her body into following the tiny thread that led her to me.

“I’ve been broken in all kinds of ways, and so for a long time now I’ve had the sense that I won’t be able to make it through my life in a normal way. But thanks to my mother, somehow or other I’ve been able to balance the books, and things have turned out really well.

“Except it still makes me feel a little sad to think that the whole time she was searching for me, wearing herself out, I was having sashimi and laughing with my friends, and getting my first taste of the joys of sex,” Nakajima said.

“Sorry, I cry when I talk about all this,” he added. And then he really cried.

Nakajima and his mother had spent every day together, like lovers, trying to reclaim their lost time, and that ended up being the best period of his life, and providing his most precious memories. I doubted anything better than that would ever happen to him. He lived knowing that he had already experienced perfection; that, no doubt, was what gave him a certain aura of sadness, and a sense of flexibility.

“Emotions aren’t much, though. I understand that quite well. Just as my memories of living with my mother by the lake are the most precious I have now, in the days after I started living with her I was always thinking of the ocean, how much fun I’d always had there, playing with Mino and Chii.… The waves were always rough at Shimoda, and we would see each other one second, and then the next we’d lose sight of each other. We’d laugh our heads off for no reason, fall down, get sucked in by the waves, and play so hard that we got out of breath.

“When I try to gather up all the
good things
, I get an infinite number of combinations of events that fall under that heading, and if I try to gather up the
painful things
, those memories start coming out, and either way they’ll just keep coming, called up out of my brain or my heart or whatever, and none of it really means very much.

“Just because things turned out badly in the end doesn’t mean that anything has changed in my relationship with my mother. Everything is still there, the same as always: the fact that we walked slowly around that lake together, holding hands, and the way my friends and I laughed in the ocean, the fact that I was looking at a seagull then. None of it has changed. It’s neither good nor bad, as I see it, the scenes are just there inside me, forever, and their mass remains the same. Of course, it’s true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you’re feeling down the landscape seems darker, too—you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don’t change. They existed, and that’s all there is to it.

“Maybe it’s not even accurate to say things turned out badly. Sure, an accumulation of little incidents ended up ripping my life to shreds, and my mother swept all those pieces up with her too-passionate hands and jammed them together again any which way. That turned me into a kind of patchy guy. But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there. And that something is always greater than these emotions of mine.”

Nakajima sounded, the way he murmured these words, as if he had only grudgingly decided to speak them.

It was easy for me to listen, since I’d never been broken like him. That’s how people are, pretty much, wherever in the world you might go. There’s no need to forgive every mistake, to learn to like the bad things, we tell ourselves, and so we forgive just enough, in an easy sort of way.

Take my mom, for instance. She was clumsy and terrible at math, she was nothing but a Mama-san at a bar, she had tons of plastic surgery, she died young, she had a child out of wedlock. Or my totally uncool dad, acting like a dipstick in that cheesy Italian restaurant. You need to have all that stuff, because that’s where it all begins.

I’m sure it’s even harder for Nakajima. Because the scale is so huge.

But who knows, maybe if he can get used to the fact that each day is another dull repetition of the same old thing, being with the same people all the time, nothing but the little leaps of your heart to put a splash of color in the world … if he can get accustomed to that, maybe, little by little, something will start to change.

Not only was the street light shining on the wall, but the nearly full moon was shining pretty brightly, too—we could see the mural fairly well even from a distance. Certainly the colors would have shown up better in the daytime, but there was a kind of mysterious air to it, the way the outermost edges faded off into the darkness.

“See, I painted everyone in over here,” I said, with a certain amount of pride.

“Wow, so this is what it’s like.” Nakajima gazed at the mural for a long time, which was nice. It made me happy to see the same expression on his face that he gets when he’s studying really hard.

I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself.

Clearly I was recovering, too, from all kinds of things.

I wanted to get back on my own two feet first, and then lead him by the hand down the path we would take together. Like the first time we went to see Mino and Chii, drawing instinctively closer to him, without any hidden motives.

Gazing all the while at the picture, very slowly, I explained.

My voice reverberated through the dark, empty yard.

“This is you. You’re taking it easy in the shade of the tree, eating a banana. And this is your mother—she’s always hovering around you, smiling. And here’s the lake, and obviously this is the shrine. And then over here, this is Mino. He’s laughing, making tea. See how small he is? And Chii, sleeping in her canopied bed. A little monkey princess. No one else knows what it means, but that doesn’t matter—it’s a happy world. No one can destroy that happiness. People will see this wall without having any idea what it means, and then eventually it will be knocked down, and it won’t exist anymore. But deep down in people’s subconscious, this happy group of monkeys, all of you, will still be there, just a little. Isn’t that nice?”

Nakajima nodded without speaking.

“Lately I’m always crying,” he said then, snuffling a bit, so I didn’t look at him.
What the hell?
I was thinking, a bit ruefully.
This isn’t love, it’s volunteer work. This should be the scene where the guy is moved and embraces the girl, right? C’mon!

We stood there looking at the wall for ages, so long we started getting cold.

Whenever I think of this mural in the future, I’ll remember this night.

No matter where we may be, or what we’re doing.

“I don’t really know how to ask this, Chihiro, but did they … did they look unhappy to you?”

Nakajima had been walking in silence when he blurted this out, his voice hoarse.

I thought hard.

I had the feeling that if I lied now, everything would turn into a lie.

There’s the surface, and then what we see under the surface. Delicious tea, a dusty room, the lake glittering outside the window …

I tried my best to bring it all together into a single impression, layer upon layer, like a slice of mille-feuille. And then I answered.

“They didn’t seem unhappy to me. Not at all,” I said. “They didn’t seem especially happy, either. They looked like they must have unhappy moments, and happy moments, too.”

“I’m glad.” Nakajima seemed relieved.

Talking with him could be like a battle of wills, but I didn’t mind.

In fact, I kind of liked it.

“You know, Chihiro, it’s true. You’re really extremely unusual,” Nakajima said. “You don’t use emotional violence against people, or hardly ever anyway.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I’ve got scary sides, too, I’m sure. Everyone does.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have any. I’m just saying you’ve got less of that. And that’s good enough for me. I was afraid of losing you, so I didn’t want to get too close. But that didn’t matter, you were still there every day, in your own world, free from worries about other people. There’s nothing uncertain about you, out there painting, moving your hands and your body, and I feel so at ease because of that. Except that you’re
so
optimistic—that kind of worries me. I get afraid, because I can’t trust that. But I’m drawn to you. Sometimes I feel this urge to just go ahead and mess all this up, but I can’t, because I love you.”

Nakajima smiled, just a little.

“It’s great you can talk like that now, isn’t it? That’s progress,” I said truthfully.

“Hmph. I’m not going to Paris with you if you’re going to be like that,” he said, sounding like a child.

“All right.” I laughed. “Why don’t you go by yourself, then?”

“That’s fine with me. I’ll go all alone, and I’ll be waiting. I’ve been thinking, though—sometime do you think you’d come to Shimoda with me? I’d like to go visit that place eventually, and go to that riding club and say thank you to the people there, and above all to the horses. It would still be too hard for me to do that now, though. There’s no way, it’d be totally impossible.”

“Why don’t we go when we come back from Paris for a visit, then, just make it part of the trip? We could go swimming together if we go in the summer.”

Nakajima and I ambled off through the familiar neighborhood, just like always, chatting back and forth—not in a particularly happy way, but not in a sad way, either. There was a real sense of comfort, and yet at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little thing we said, these conversations, at any moment they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now.

Why were we so far apart, even when we were together?

It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.

“But before we do that,” I said, “let’s go back to the lake, to see Mino and Chii. Let’s go see the lake when the cherry trees are in bloom, all around it.”

“You’d go again? Really?” Nakajima said.

“If we go enough, maybe things will be all right,” I said. “All kinds of things.”

Here we were, two ridiculously fragile people, sliding along on a very thin layer of ice all the time, each of us ready to slip and take the other down at any moment, the most unsteady of couples—and yet I believed what I had said. It would be all right.

Going along like that, I felt like we were high above the clouds, shining.

“I’m sure they’d like that, too,” Nakajima said.

“Maybe someday I’ll even be able to see Chii when she’s better, up and about.”

That was unlikely, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can’t warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?

“For the time being, let’s go back home and I’ll make us some tea with some really good water,” I said. “Even if it won’t be as delicious as Mino’s.”