The Lake Page 5

  “In this part of town, that’s enough to make you a celebrity. And a lot of people are hoping that now that you’re painting this mural, if your work attracts attention, maybe the building won’t be torn down after all.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you involved.”

  “Which side are you on?”

  “Oh, I don’t want them to tear it down—of course not!” Sayuri said. “I live for this center. Lots of my students have been coming here for years. That’s not why I suggested you, though. I just wanted to have one of your pictures here, a huge one, where I work. That’s the truth. I had no intention of using you, or of making you create something only to have it destroyed.”

  I knew Sayuri meant it. That’s the kind of person she is.

  She was staring at the ground. I gazed at the fine hairs around her ears, her thick eyebrows, and I could feel how serious she was. No doubt all kinds of people had been pressing her to do all kinds of things, but she kept it all to herself, protecting me.

  “Really, I’m happy to do any number of interviews about the mural. Only, when it comes to these other things, I don’t really understand the issues,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks for being so willing to help. And on the off chance that this place should happen to be torn down sometime soon, and this wall goes with it, I’m really sorry,” Sayuri said. “I’ll do everything I can to protect it, as long as I’m here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t paint for the future. Besides, it’s not your fault.”

  “Either way, I’m planning to take a lot of pictures,” Sayuri said. “And I’ll have them keep copies in the district document center. That’s something I’m definitely going to do.”

  I would have been lying if I’d said I didn’t care at all whether the mural survived. But it’d be an even bigger lie to say I wanted it to survive forever. I just liked coming here and feeling things each day, and recording those feelings in a kind of big way in a picture. That was how I saw what I was doing. I guess my attitude was sort of casual.

  When I compared myself to Sayuri, who was so incredibly dedicated and so earnest in her dealings with the kids, I felt sort of bad.

  The truth was, it didn’t make any difference to me whether my mural was knocked down or admired or whatever. And if the Infant Development Center closed, as long as the people there were good and smart, I felt sure they would carry on their work somewhere else.

  Maybe I was afraid of seeing anything as absolute. I wanted to keep moving, like a stream, and I wanted to go on watching everything from a distance.

  That’s how I was. I felt close to people, but I didn’t have any friends I could really share my life with, our hearts melting together. Something always failed to communicate.

  Nakajima was the first true friend I’d ever had, in my whole life … I really believed that. He was extremely frail, and yet there was something in him I could trust.

  I saw myself reflected in our relationship, as if in a mirror. And I knew that I wasn’t wrong. And I was at peace.

  All along, just because I lived away from my mom, I thought I’d achieved independence, but now that she was gone I finally realized how much, in my heart, I had depended on her.

  I never asked my mom for advice, but whenever I was going through an unsettled period like I was now, I’d call her up to talk, or go back to visit, just to see her face. Now that she was gone, I realized these little things had given me a core to hold on to—or maybe brought me back, for better or worse, to the place I came from. I wasn’t even sure what that meant … whether that place was something that had existed before I was born, or not.

  When I was young, I used to turn and look back at my mother’s face to make sure I knew where I was in relation to her; now, I had to take stock of my situation by myself. Sure, I could see myself through Nakajima, but the second I glanced away I lost it. Parents are absolute; he wasn’t.

  I’d watched my mother dying for so long that now I could hardly remember how, back when she was healthy, her spirit used to shine. All that came to me now was the agonizing sound of her final breaths, the smell of her dying body that had filled the hospital room, things like that. The sense of powerlessness, knowing that my mom was suffering alone, and that in her universe I was no help at all—I could recapture that feeling, but nothing else.

  I read in some book that if you try to hold people back too much when they’re dying it keeps them from being reborn as a Buddha, and that had stuck with me, somehow, maybe more than it should have, so I tried hard not to cry too much, and kept telling my mom how much I appreciated all she had done for me. Now all I can do is think how stupid I was to act like that. I should have cried my eyes out. I should have thrown myself wailing at the coffin the way my dad did, and made a huge commotion. Forgotten everyone watching, the mourners and what they’d think, and just been myself.

  If I had done that, I bet my mom wouldn’t have come in my dream the way she did that night, worried because she saw that part of me was holding back, unwilling to fall completely in love with Nakajima.

  About two weeks after Nakajima first stayed over, he asked me for a favor.

  “I want to go see some old friends, but I’m scared to go alone. Will you come?”

  We hadn’t had sex again since that first time, but he’d been staying over at my apartment every night. He always made sure to remind me that he’d recalculate the utility bills.

  My mural-painting days wouldn’t start until the following week, so the timing was perfect.

  Since I had so much time on my hands, I’d been cooking all kinds of dishes using a huge package of imported gourmet ham that my dad had sent. Fried rice with pineapple and ham, ham and steak, steamed rice with ham, and so on.

  I tried so many different ham recipes that finally even Nakajima, who really wasn’t particular about what he ate and generally was fine with anything, blurted out, “Can we have something besides ham tonight?”

  Other than that, all I did was go with the guy I’d hired to help me work on the mural—a guy I knew from art school, younger than me—to buy the paints and assemble the various brushes I’d need, and then I sat at my desk working on preliminary sketches. It was a pleasant time.

  I love sitting at my desk drawing—it’s like painting in miniature. Since I never simply transfer my sketches to a wall, it’s all about getting a sense of the partially formed image I have in mind—I’m just doodling, basically. But drawing on a small scale has its own particular pleasures. It’s like when I used to play house as a kid. Tiny little utensils, tiny little people. And yet everything is blown up to actual size in my mind. That’s the kind of pleasure I get out of drawing.

  The wall I’d be painting was long and low, so I planned to do something bold with a lot of monkeys linked in a kind of flow, but I was having a hard time envisioning a design for it, something that would look good and fit well with the site. I couldn’t believe how poorly my imagination was serving me, and I started wondering if maybe it would be best to just go and start painting, or maybe take a survey of the kids. I was coming to the end of my rope.

  If I were just going to paint the sort of design an amateur could come up with, they might as well call in a bureaucrat from city hall to do the job. There needed to be a touch of eeriness in it, something private. But what? What sort of memories involving monkeys did I have—when, come to think of it, was the last time I had even seen a monkey? Should I go to the zoo to see some? Those are the kinds of issues I was grappling with. So when Nakajima asked if I would accompany him, it sounded like a great way to get my mind out of its rut.

  “Sure,” I said, eyeing a magazine. “Maybe we can have a picnic on the way!”

  But when I glanced up and saw the expression on Nakajima’s face, the lighthearted feeling with which I’d replied withered. I could see this was important to him.

  Until then, things had been going along the same as always, without any trace of p
rogress. We had gotten up that morning, shared an omelet that I’d made with our last eggs (and ham, needless to say); just then, I was sitting in a rather shocking pose, in the middle of doing my toenails, and Nakajima was tapping away on his PowerBook, working on a report. I’d just been thinking that when he got to a stopping place maybe I’d make some tea when he mentioned his friends and wanting to go see them.

  Sayuri had been right: Nakajima wasn’t like us. She and I had gone to an art school that wasn’t very prestigious; he went to a university one district over that only people who are really, really good in school can get into.

  Naturally, I asked him about it. “How did you get so good at studying? Did you like studying from the time you were little? Was that it?”

  Nakajima sat thinking for a while without moving. Then he said, “One day, all of a sudden, I felt this powerful urge to study, as if I were trying to get something back that I’d lost.”

  “Was that … after your mom died?” I asked.

  “Yes. You see, during the time when I was away, my mother and father started arguing about all kinds of things, and then they started living apart, and in the end they divorced. Since then I’ve been in a situation sort of similar to the one you’re in now—I still get living expenses and tuition and stuff, and I still go visit my father from time to time, and … well, anyway, the point is that I was in high school when my mother died, and I decided I didn’t want to go live with my dad. I mean, he’d been living up in Gunma since the divorce—that’s the prefecture he grew up in—and I didn’t really feel like moving to a new place, just like that. He had remarried, too, and they had kids. So I decided I’d live on my own, and then, well, I had enough money so it wasn’t like I had to work like mad to make ends meet or anything, and I’m certainly not a big spender, so all of a sudden I found myself with lots of time on my hands. I thought a lot about what I should do. I wanted something where I wouldn’t have to deal with people too much, and where I could keep my involvement to a minimum, so I’d be able to do my own stuff, and ideally I thought it’d be nice if I could make people’s lives better—that’s the life I wanted. And after looking into various options, I settled on genetic research.”

  “But why would you want to pick something so difficult?” I said. “Did you know someone around you who did the same kind of thing?”

  He paused awkwardly again before he continued. “Well, yeah. When I was away from my parents, the one adult I felt close to had graduated from a department like that with a degree in genetics, and hearing about the topic from him made me think it might be interesting to learn more. And then after my mother died, I was all alone and I was depressed, and since I had nothing else to do I studied constantly. I was totally obsessed. Of course, it was all focused on passing the entrance exams for university. I didn’t want to deal with people, so I didn’t go to cram school or anything, I just did it all myself.”

  He went on to explain his methods in detail, at great length.

  I wanted to ask why he’d been separated from his parents, but I didn’t. I just listened.

  He said he taught himself to concentrate really fiercely, to cut his mind off from his body. He found that it wasn’t all that hard, but he also discovered that it was a dangerous thing to do in the real world.

  The story was as strange as his tone was bland.

  By the time he got into the university he was aiming for, he weighed forty-five pounds less than he had before he started. He had stopped being able to eat at all, and he collapsed on a road somewhere and found himself in the hospital. They had to feed him through an intravenous drip—otherwise he wouldn’t have survived.

  “Sounds like the wrong way to go about becoming a doctor,” I said.

  He laughed like crazy at that. It’s true he’s in the graduate school of medicine at his university, but he said none of the students in his program are training to become doctors. It’s a program for future researchers.

  Once Nakajima started studying he couldn’t stop, and his grades got even better when he figured out how to detach his mind from his body; he got so engrossed in what he was doing that he felt as if he could have forgotten about his body altogether.

  “The only thing was,” he said, “I realized then, in a pretty painful way, that there’s always a lag before the body responds to the orders the mind sends out.”

  “A lag? What do you mean?”

  “It was fairly easy in the beginning, when I’d do this self-hypnosis thing, setting it up so that my body would function at the absolute minimum and all the energy would get routed to my mind instead. That much was no problem, and I guess that made me overconfident. The catch was—I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s like the process accelerated once it got underway, and even if I sent out the order to my body to engage again so that I could get some nutrition and move my limbs and stuff, even when I was really trying, it was like a merry-go-round, the way it can only stop very gradually, by spinning slower and slower. I hadn’t taken that into account, and I had ignored my body too long, and so I stopped the merry-go-round too late. I almost died.”

  “All right,” I said, “I realize that you can do that. But don’t, not anymore, okay? It puts too much of a strain on your body. You end up paying for it later on, right?”

  “That’s why I don’t study like that anymore. I do just enough to keep up.”

  Nakajima smiled.

  Wow, I thought. This guy says he’s doing just enough to keep up, and he can still succeed in grad school, not to mention that whenever he’s not studying he’s writing another article or doing some sort of preliminary research, surveying the literature or something.… He must be really good at this academic stuff. I was impressed.

  “I studied my ass off all that time, and then one day, just like that, it hit me. I’m on track to finish my coursework, there’s no question about that, and as long as I keep at it with the articles I’ll definitely get my Ph.D. And then I can go on the market in Japan, and the chances are that there will be a good match somewhere, and I’ll find a position at some institute. Only I’m not sure that the future will be all that bright if I just go on like this—if I stay here in Japan, I mean. So I’ve been mulling things over. I kind of think it might be good to go somewhere else. That never occurred to me before. Until now, it was all I could do just to stay alive.”

  All along, Nakajima’s tone had remained measured and easy.

  “That’s not anything I’d know about,” I said, “but if you’ve been able to manage this much, I’m sure you can do anything. I mean it—anything. You just have to put your mind to it.”

  Somewhere else. I.e., somewhere outside Japan. I.e.… we split up?

  So as far as he’s concerned, my apartment is just one step in the great escape?

  I had the feeling that it wasn’t yet time to talk about that.

  Nakajima had said he wanted to go see his friends, and yet whenever he talked about it his expression got incredibly gloomy. So I asked him about it.

  “Do you feel a need to see these friends of yours now?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. “I feel like maybe now I can.”

  “If I come along, you mean?” I asked.

  “Exactly … I mean, you’re so cheerful,” Nakajima said.

  “Maybe I’m not as cheerful as you think,” I replied.

  It wasn’t that I was annoyed; I just didn’t want to let him down.

  I had the feeling that Nakajima was taking one aspect of me—the straightforward, easy-going part that emerged when I was with him, the cheerful surface that I had inherited from my mom—and blowing it all out of proportion. If so, he might feel terribly betrayed when my dark, somber side eventually showed its face.

  “No, I know that, it’s just … I know I can’t express it very well, no matter how I phrase it, but you’re just right. This sounds kind of odd, but your proportions are just right.”

  I sort of knew what he was trying to say.

  Consideri
ng how smart Nakajima was, I bet he could have found a way to express more precisely what it was like to push his body to the limit while studying, or his perspective on the way my emotions were structured inside me. He was just being nice, communicating on my level. That’s what made it sound vague.

  Still, I had the sense that right then it helped for him to be talking about something, and so I decided to draw him out. I intentionally cocked my head slightly, feigning puzzlement.

  “I mean, for you love is more important than anything else, right, Chihiro?” Nakajima said. “But you don’t try to control other people, do you?”

  “I guess that’s pretty true,” I replied.

  “And you cherish the memory of your mother? Of course, everyone has little knots in their hearts, no matter what their families are like—but wouldn’t you say that in your case you feel love and hate in ordinary, healthy amounts? Even if one may seem a bit stronger at times?”

  “Yeah, I’d agree with that.”

  “And you don’t hate your father, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. If anything I think he’s kind of lovable. The environment we lived in wasn’t ideal, but I suspect that it actually made it easier for us to express our love than in your average family. We didn’t fit into any ready category, so we all had to work that much harder.”

  “Exactly—you don’t have that sense that you can take your family for granted, that’s why I feel so comfortable with you. You see your family members for what they are, and you look at me in an ordinary way, without wishing that I was somehow different,” Nakajima said, his tone very level. “That’s what I like about you. I’m extremely, almost pathologically sensitive to violence, and I pick up on it immediately when something violent is happening. Most people are constantly perpetrating little acts of violence on others, even when they don’t mean to. You almost never do that, Chihiro.”

  “How about you?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been able to discuss this before,” Nakajima said, “but honestly, I felt oppressed the whole time until my mother died, because of the way she was always fretting over me—no one else mattered. She became so focused on me that ultimately my father got fed up and left. It really weighed down on me, but at the same time certain things had happened to keep us apart for a long time, and during that whole period I’d yearned to see her so badly. But then when we were finally reunited, when she was actually there, in person, her love completely overwhelmed me.… Like, if I was going out for a while, she couldn’t rest easy unless she’d checked to see when I’d be coming home, and if I was even a minute late she would be waiting up, crying, you know? That’s the kind of woman she was.