In the winter of 196—, an outlandishly fat man came close to being thrown to a polar bear bathing in a filthy pool below him and had the experience of very nearly going mad. As a result, the fat man was released from the fetters of an old obsession, but the minute he found himself free a miserable loneliness rose in him and withered his already slender spirit. Thereupon he resolved, for no logical reason (he was given to fits of sudden agitation), to cast off still another heavy restraint; he vowed to free himself entirely and let the sky tilt if need be, and when he had taken his oath and a reckless courage was boiling in his body, still scaly and stinking of rotten sardines from the splash of the rock which had been thrown into the pool finally in his place, he telephoned his mother in the middle of the night and said to her,
——You give me back the manuscript you stole from me, I’m fed up, do you hear! I’ve known all along what you were up to!
The fat man knew his mother was standing at the other end of the line eight hundred miles away with the old-fashioned receiver in her hand. He even concluded unscientifically that he could hear the whisper of breathing into the other phone as distinctly as he did because no one was near the circuits due to the lateness of the hour, and since this happened to be his mother’s breathing, the fat man felt his chest constrict. As a matter of fact, what he was hearing through the receiver he had pressed against his ear, delicate out of all proportion to the massiveness of his head, was his own breath.
——If you won’t give me back what’s mine, that’s all right too! the fat man shouted in growing anger, having realized his small mistake. I’ll write another biography of Father that’s even more revealing, I’ll tell the whole world how the man went mad and shut himself up all those years and then let out a roar one day and died where he sat in his chair. And you can interfere all you like, it won’t do you any good! Again the fat man stopped and listened for a reaction at the other end of the line, careful this time to cover the phone with his thick hand. When he heard the receiver being replaced, calmly and for that reason the more adamantly, he went pale as a young girl and returned trembling to his bed, curled up in a ball, pulled the covers over his head despite the stench of the pool, which made him gag, and sobbed in rage. It wasn’t only his mother, the loneliness of the freedom he had acquired that morning at the zoo had quite intimidated him, and so he cried in the stinking darkness beneath the covers where he could be certain he was unobserved. It was rage, and terror, and his overwhelming sense of isolation that made the fat man cry, as if the polar bear immersed to its shoulders in brown, icy water had gripped his bulky head in its freezing jaws. Before long the fat man’s tears had wet the sheets all around him, so he rolled over, curled up again, and continued to sob. He was able to enjoy this particular freedom, minor but not to be despised, because for several years he had been sleeping alone in the double bed he once had shared with his wife.
While the fat man cried himself to sleep that night, his mother, in the village of his birth, was steeling herself for a final battle against her son. Thus the fat man had no reason to weep, at least not out of the frustration of having had his challenge ignored yet another time. As a child, whenever he began to question her about his father’s self-confinement and sudden death, his mother had closed the road to communication by pretending to go mad. It reached a point where the fat man would affect madness himself before his mother had a chance, smashing everything in reach and even tumbling backwards off the stone wall at the edge of the garden and down the briary slope. But even at times like these, his sense of victory was tiny and essentially futile: he never managed to make contact. Ever since, for close to twenty years, the tension of a showdown between two gunmen on a movie set had sustained itself between them—who would be first to affect madness and so to win an occult victory?
But late that night, the situation began to change. The very next morning the fat man’s mother, resolved on new battle regulations, took to the printer in a neighboring town an announcement she had drafted during the night and had it mailed, registered mail, to the fat man’s brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives, and all the family relatives. The announcement which arrived care of the fat man’s wife and marked Personal in red ink, but of a nature which obliged her to show it to her husband, read as follows:
Our flirty whore has lost his mind, but it should be known his madness is not hereditary. It pains me to inform you that, while abroad, he contracted the Chinese chancres. In order to avoid infection, it is hoped you will abstain from further commerce with him.
Signed
winter, 196—
But how much gloomier
The garden
Seen from the orphanage toilet—
Age thirty-four!
—Uchida Hyakken
Unfortunately, the significance of this text was clearest to the only member of the family who depended on language for a living, the fat man himself. With her pun on his age (he was thirty-four) his mother had tried to shame him, and by adding the verse about the orphanage toilet (he wasn’t clear if it was really by the poet Hyakken) she had even insinuated that he was not her real son: the announcement was the product of its author’s overriding hatred, a vexatious hatred which no one in the family was equipped so adequately to feel as the fat man himself. One thing was certain, there was no doubting the blood bond between them: like the fat man himself and like his son, her grandson, his mother was fatter than fat. The fat man was confident his wife would not suspect him of carrying a disease he had brought home from the Occident; even so, when he considered that the local printer must have read the announcement and when he pictured it being delivered into the hands of all his friends and relatives, he submerged in a terrible gloom. The effect of which was to impress on him the importance, not to his son perhaps but certainly to his own well-being, of the heavy bond of restraints which (so he had believed) had united himself and the child formerly. The trouble was, ever since his harrowing experience at the zoo, the fat man had doubted the very existence of these restraints and even suspected that his own desire to create and maintain them had led him to repeated feats of self-deception. Besides, once gained, his freedom was like an adhesive tape which could not be peeled away from his hand or heart.
He could not return to what had been. Until that day when it seemed he would be thrown to the polar bear and he was on the verge of losing his mind, the fat man had wandered around, sprawled on the floor, and eaten all his meals together with his son, allowing nothing to separate them. And this permitted him a perfectly concrete sense of the child as primarily a heavy and troublesome restraint which menaced, even as it regulated, his daily life. In truth, he enjoyed thinking of himself as a passive victim quietly enduring a bondage imposed by his son.
The fat man had always liked children; in college he had qualified for three kinds of teaching licenses. And as the time approached for his own child to be born he was unable to sit still for the spasms of anxiety and expectation which rippled through his body. Later, looking back, he had the feeling he had been counting on the birth of his child as a first step toward a new life for himself which would be out of the shadow of his dead father. But when the moment finally arrived and the fat man, painfully thin in those days, nervously questioned the doctor who emerged from the delivery room, he was told in an even voice that his child had been born with a grave defect.
____Even if we operate I’m afraid the infant will either die or be an idiot, one or the other.
That instant, something inside the fat man irreparably broke. And the baby who was either to die or to be an idiot quickly elbowed out the breakage, as cancer destroys and then replaces normal cells. In arranging for the operation the fat man dashed around so frantically that his own in those days still meager body might well have broken down. His nervous system was like a chaos of numbness and hypersensitivity, an inflamed wound which had begun to heal but only in spots: fearfully he would touch places in himself and feel no pain at all; a moment later, when relief had lowered his guard, a scorching pain would make him rattle.
The deadline for registering the new infant arrived, and the fat man went to the ward office. But until the girl at the desk asked what it was to be, he hadn’t even considered a name for his son. At the time the operation was in progress, his baby was in the process of being required to decide whether he would die or be an idiot, one or the other. Could such an existence be given a name?
The fat man (let it be repeated that at the time, exhausted, he was thinner than ever in his life) took the registration form nonetheless and, recalling from the Latin vocabulary he had learned at college a word which should have related both to death and idiocy, wrote down the character for “forest” and named his son Mori. Then he took the form into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls, and began to giggle uncontrollably. This ignoble seizure was due in part to the state of the fat man’s nerves at the time. And yet even as a child there had been something inside him, something fundamental, which now and then impelled him to frivolous derision of his own and others’ lives. And this was something he was obliged to recognize in himself when his son finally left the hospital and came to live at home. Mori!—every time he called the child by name it seemed to him that he could hear, in the profound darkness in his head, his own lewd and unrepentant laughter mocking the entirety of his life. So he proposed giving his son a nickname and using it at home, though he had difficulty satisfying his wife with a reason. It was in this way that the fat man, borrowing the name of the misanthropic donkey in Winnie the Pooh, came to call his son Eeyore.
He moreover concluded, with renewed conviction, that his relationship with his own father, who had died suddenly when he was a child, must be the source of the somehow mistaken, insincere, unbalanced quality he had to recognize in himself, and he undertook somehow to recreate a whole image of the man, whom he remembered only vaguely. This produced a new repetition of collisions with his mother, who had never spoken about his father’s self-confinement and death and had combatted him for years by pretending to go mad whenever he questioned her. Not only did she refuse to cooperate; during a stay at his home while he was traveling abroad she had stolen his notes and incomplete manuscript for a biography of his father and had retained them to this day. For all he knew, she had already burned the manuscript, but since the thought alone made him want to kill his mother, he had no choice but not to think it.
And yet the fat man was dependent on his mother to a degree extraordinary for an adult of his age, another truth he was obliged to recognize. Drunk one night on the whiskey he relied on instead of sleeping pills, he was toying with a clay dog he had brought all the way from Mexico when he discovered a hole beneath the creature’s tail and blew into it hard, as if he were playing on a flute. Unexpectedly, a cloud of fine black dust billowed out of the hole and plastered his eyes. The fat man supposed he had gone blind, and in his distraction and his fear he called out to his mother: Mother, oh, Mother, help me, please! If I should go blind and lose my mind the way Father did, what will become of my son? Teach me, mother, how we can all outgrow our madness!
For no good reason, the fat man had been seized by the suspicion that his mother soon would age and die without having disclosed the explanation she had kept secret all these years, not only for his father’s self-confinement and death but the freakish something which underlay it and must also account for his own instability and for the existence of his idiot son, an existence which, inasmuch as it presented itself in palpable form, he assumed he could never detach from himself.
The fat man’s loneliness that night as he slept in the bed too large for even his bloated body has already been described, but the truth is that still another circumstance can be included as having contributed to it. That the fat man spent all his time in the company of his fat son Mori, called Eeyore, was known to most of the citizens in the neighborhood. What even the most curious of them did not know was that, until the decisive day when he was nearly thrown to a polar bear, the fat man had never failed to sleep with one arm extended toward his son’s crib, which he had installed at the head of his bed. In fact, his wife had quit his bed and secluded herself in another part of the house not so much because of strife between them as a desire of her own not to interfere with this intimacy between father and son. It had always been the fat man’s intention that he was acting on a wholesome parental impulse—if his son should awaken in the middle of the night he would always be able to touch his father’s fleshy hand in the darkness above his head. But now, when he examined them in light of the breakage which had resulted in himself when hoodlums had lifted him by his head and ankles and swung him back and forth as if to hurl him to the polar bear eyeing him curiously from the pool below, the fat man could not help discovering, in even these details of his life, a certain incongruity, as if a few grains of sand had sifted into his socks. Wasn’t it possible that he had slept with his arm outstretched so that the hand with which he groped in the darkness when uneasy dreams threatened him awake at night might encounter at once the comforting warmth of his son’s hand? Once he had recognized the objection being raised inside himself, the details of their life together, which to him had always seemed to represent his bondage to his son, one by one disclosed new faces which added to his confusion. Yet the very simplest details of their life together troubled him only rarely with this disharmony, and in this the fat man took solace as he grew more and more absorbed, feeling very much alone, in the battle with his mother. The fact was, even after his experience at the zoo, that he continued to enact certain of the daily rituals he shared with his son.
Rain or shine, not figuratively but in fact, the fat man and his son bicycled once a day to a Chinese restaurant and ordered pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola. In the days before his son was quite so fat, the fat man would sit him in a light metal seat which he attached to the handlebars. And how often he had been obliged to fight with policemen who held that the metal seat was illegal, not to mention riding double on a bike! The fat man had always protested earnestly, because he had believed his own claim. Now, when he looked back from his new point of view, he had to wonder if he really had believed what he had argued so vehemently, that his son was retarded (precisely because he so loathed the word itself he always used it as a weapon against the police) and that the only pleasure available to him, his only consolation, was climbing into a metal seat attached to the handlebars illegally and bicycling in search of pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola. Sooner or later his son would tire of sitting on a bicycle halted precariously in the middle of the street and would begin to groan in displeasure, whereupon the fat man himself would raise his own hoarse voice in the manner of a groan and increase the fervor of his argument, with the result that the dispute generally ended with the policeman giving way. Then, as if he had been long a victim of police oppression with regard to some matter of grave importance, the fat man would announce to his son, staring at the road ahead with utter indifference to his father’s feverish whisper
____Eeyore, we really showed that cop! We won, boy, that makes eighteen wins in a row! and pedal off triumphantly toward the Chinese restaurant.
Inside, while they waited for their pork noodles in broth, Eeyore drank his Pepsi-Cola and the fat man raptly watched him drinking it. As prepared at the restaurant they frequented, the dish amounted to some noodles in broth garnished with mushrooms and some spinach and a piece of meat from a pork bone fried in a thin batter. When it was finally brought to their table, the fat man would empty two-thirds of the noodles and some of the mushrooms and spinach into a small bowl which he placed in front of his son, carefully watch the boy eating until the food had cooled, and only then begin to eat the pork himself, probing with his tongue for the gristle between the batter and the meat and then disposing of the halved, white spheres, after examining them minutely, in an ashtray out of Eeyore’s reach. Finally, he would eat his share of the noodles, timing himself so the two of them would finish together. Then, as he rode them home on his bike with his face flushed from the steaming noodles and burning in the wind, he would ask repeatedly,
____Eeyore, the pork noodles and the Pepsi-Cola were good? and when his son answered,
____Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good! he would judge that complete communication had been achieved between them and would feel happy. Often he believed sincerely that of all the food he had ever eaten, that day’s pork noodles was the most delicious.
One of the major causes of the fat man’s corpulence and his son’s must have been those pork noodles in broth. From time to time his wife cautioned him about this, but he prevailed in arguments at home with the same reasoning he used against the police. When his son’s buttocks eventually grew too fat to fit into the metal seat, the fat man hunted up a special bicycle with a ridiculously long saddle, and propped Eeyore up in front of him when they rode off for their daily meal.
The fat man had concluded that this bicycle trip in quest of pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola was a procedure to enable his idiot son to feel, in the core of his body, the pleasure of eating. However, after his experience above the polar bears’ pool, it no longer made him profoundly happy to separate the gristle from the pork rib with his tongue and inspect the shiny hemispheres; and the joy of appetite in Eeyore, eating noodles in silence at his side as always, communicated to the core of his own body as but a feeble tremor. He wondered sometimes if Eeyore’s craving for pork noodles and Pepsi might not be a groundless illusion of his own, if his son had grown so fat because, pathetically, he had been eating mechanically whatever had been placed in front of him. One day when doubts like these had ruined the fat man’s appetite and he had left the restaurant without even finishing his pork rib, the Chinese cook, who until then had never emerged from the kitchen, caught up with them on a bicycle which glistened with grease and inquired in a frighteningly emphatic accent whether anything was wrong with the food that day. The fat man, already so deflated that he lacked even the courage to ignore the cook, passed the question on to Eeyore and then shared the Chinaman’s relief when his son intoned his answer in the usual way:
____Eeyore, the pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola were good!
By accumulating numerous procedures of this kind between himself and his son, the fat man had structured a life unique to themselves. And that the structure demanded his bondage to his idiot son long had been his secret belief. But when he reconsidered now, with his experience above the polar bears’ pool behind him, he began to see that the maintenance of this extraordinary structure had been most ardently desired by himself.
Until his son began to peel from his consciousness like a scab, the fat man was convinced that he experienced directly whatever physical pain his son was feeling. When he read somewhere that the male celatius, a deep-sea fish common to Danish waters, lived its life attached like a wart to the larger body of the female, he dreamed that he was the female fish suspended deep in the sea with his son embedded in his body like the smaller male, a dream so sweet that waking up was cruel.
In the beginning no one would believe, even when they saw it happening, that the fat man suffered the same pain as his son. But in time even his most skeptical wife came to accept this as fact. It didn’t begin the minute the child was born; several years had passed when the fat man suddenly awoke to it one day. Until then, for example when his son underwent brain surgery as an infant, although the fat man caused the doctors to wonder about him queasily when he pressed them to extract from his own body for his son’s transfusions a quantity of blood not simply excessive but medically unthinkable, he did not experience faintness while his son was under anesthesia, nor did he share any physical pain. The conduit of pain between the fat man and his fat son was connected unmistakably (or so it seemed, for even now the fat man found it difficult to establish whether the pain he once had felt was real or sham, and had been made to realize that in general nothing was so difficult to recreate as pain remaining only as a memory) when Eeyore scalded his foot in the summer of his third year.
When his son began to raise not simple screams as much as rash shouts of protest, the fat man was sprawled on his living room couch, reading a magazine; and although behind his eyelids, where his tears were beginning to well, he could see with surrealistic clarity, as if he were watching a film in slow motion, the spectacle of the pan filled with boiling water tilting up and tipping over, he did not rise and dash into the kitchen in aid of his son. He lay as he was submerged in a feebleness like the disembodiment that accompanies a high fever, and chorused his son’s shouts with a thick moaning of his own. Yet even then it couldn’t have been said that he had achieved a firm hold on physical pain. He strapped his son’s heavy, thrashing body into a rusty baby carriage which he dragged out of his shed and somehow managed to secure the scalded foot. And although he groaned heavily all the way to the distant clinic as he slowly pushed the carriage past the strangers halted in the street to watch his eery progress, he could not have said with certainty that he was actually feeling Eeyore’s pain in his own flesh.
However, as he bore down against the explosive thrashing of his son’s small projectile of a body so the doctor could bare and treat the blistered foot, the following question coalesced in the fat man’s mind: could any conscious state be so full of fright and hurt as perceiving pain and not its cause, and perceiving pain only, because an idiot infant’s murky brain could not begin to grasp the logic of a situation in which pain persisted and was apparently to go unsoothed and, as if that were not enough, a stranger stepped in officiously to inflict still another pain while even Father cooperated? That instant, the fat man began through clenched teeth to express cries of pain himself which so resembled his son’s screams that they merged with them indistinguishably and could not have shocked the doctor or the nurses. His leg had actually begun to throb (he believed!) with the pain of a burn.
By the time the wound had been bandaged, the fat man himself, at the side of his pale, limp son was too exhausted to speak. His wife, who had been in the examination room helping to hold the patient down, went home with Eeyore in a taxi, leaving the fat man to return alone down the narrow street which paralleled the railroad tracks, the rope he had used to secure his son coiled inside the empty carriage. As he walked along the fat man wondered why his wife had wrested Eeyore away from him and raced away in a taxicab. If he had put his son back in the carriage and they had returned together down this same street, had she been afraid he might have launched himself and the carriage between the used ties which had been newly erected to fence off the tracks and attempted to escape the pain which now gripped them both by throwing himself and the child beneath the filthy wheels of the commuter express? Possibly, for even if his cries had not reached the ears of the doctor and the nurses, merging with his son’s screams, to his wife they must have been clearly audible; for in pinning his son’s shoulders she had leaned so far over the table toward him that her head had nearly touched his own. Although he handled the empty carriage roughly, the fat man made his way down the street with excessive care, as though he were favoring a leg which had been just treated for a burn, and if he had to skip over a small puddle he produced an earnest cry of pain.
From that day on, insofar as the fat man was aware, whatever pain his son was feeling communicated to him through their clasped hands and never failed to produce in his own body a tremor of pain in unison. If the fat man was able to attach positive significance to this phenomenon of pain shared, it was because he managed to believe that his own understanding of the pain resonating sympathetically in himself, for example as resulting from blistered and dead skin being peeled away from a burn with a tweezers, would flow backward like light through his son’s hand, which he held in his own, and impart a certain order to the chaos of fear and pain in the child’s dark, dulled mind. The fat man began to function as a window in his son’s mind, permitting the light from the outside to penetrate to the dark interior which trembled with pain not adequately understood. And so long as Eeyore did not step forward to repudiate his function, there was no reason the fat man should have doubted it. Since now he was able to proclaim to himself that he was accepting painful bondage to his son happily, his new role even permitted him the consolation of feeling like an innocent victim.
Shortly after Eeyore’s fourth birthday, the fat man took him for an eye examination at a certain university hospital. No matter who the eye specialist, examining an idiot child who never spoke at all except to babble something of little relevance in a severely limited vocabulary, or to utter noises in response to pain or simple pleasure, would certainly prove a difficult, vexatious task. And this young patient was not only fat and heavy, and therefore difficult to hold, he was abnormally strong in his arms and legs, so that once fear had risen in him he was as impossible to manage as a frightened animal.
The fat man’s wife, having noticed right away something distinctively abnormal about Eeyore’s sight, and having speculated in a variety of amateur ways on the possible connections to his retardation, long had wanted a specialist to examine his eyes. But at every clinic he had visited, the fat man had been turned away. Finally, he went to see the brain surgeon who had enabled the child whose alternatives were death or idiocy to escape at least from death, and managed to obtain a letter of introduction to the department of opthalmology in the same university hospital.
The family went to the hospital together, but at first his wife left the fat man in the waiting room and went upstairs alone with Eeyore. Half an hour later, dragging her heavy, shrieking son and obviously exhausted, she staggered back. The examination had scarcely begun, and already the doctor, the nurses, even his wife was prostrate, while Eeyore himself presented a picture of such cruel abuse that the other patients were looking on in dismay. The fat man, furious to see his son in such a state, and menaced, understood why his wife had left him in the waiting room and gone upstairs alone with Eeyore. There was no longer room for doubt that a thorough examination of a child’s eyes was an uninterrupted ordeal, rife with some kind of grotesque and virulent terror.
Eeyore was still producing at the back of his throat something like the echo of a feeble scream when the fat man dropped to his knees on the dirty floor and embraced his pudgy body. The hand which Eeyore wound around his neck was moist with the sweat of fear, like the pads on the foot of a cat that had tasted danger. And the touch of his hand infused the fat man with the essence of his son’s entire experience during the thirty minutes past (so he believed at the time). Every hollow and rise of the fat man’s body was possessed by an aching numbness that followed thirty long minutes in the spiney clamps of medical instruments he had never actually seen: had not Eeyore quieted gradually in his arms until now he was only whimpering, he might have raised a terrific scream and begun writhing on the floor himself.
Unique in his household for her excessive leanness, the fat man’s provident wife had taken the precaution of stopping downstairs in hopes of preventing the two of them, himself and his son, from behaving in just this lunatic way.
____They must have been horrible to him, the fat man moaned, sighing hoarsely. What the hell did they think he is, the bastards!
____It was Eeyore who was horrible: he kept kicking the doctors and the nurses away, one after the other, and he broke all kinds of things, said the fat man’s wife. It wasn’t that she always tried for fairness or objectivity so much as that she refused to participate in the fat man’s paranoia. The fat man listened to her sighing now, mournfully angry at her violent son, and felt that he was included in her attack.
____No, there must have been something wrong basically, otherwise Eeyore wouldn’t have been so wild. Think how gentle he always is! And you said the examination had just begun—then how did Eeyore know there was something so bad in store for him that he had to fight that way? There has to be something fundamentally wrong, I mean with the eye department here, and you just missed it, that’s all, the fat man said rapidly, forestalling his wife’s almost certainly accurate rebuttal and beginning to believe, because he was insisting it, that there was indeed something wrong with the hospital. He even established arbitrary grounds for the judgment: his son, who had finished rubbing the back of his neck with his sweaty palm and was simply moaning softly at his side, had communicated it to him telepathically.
____I’m going to take Eeyore back up there. We may not be able to get a diagnosis, but at least I’ll see what they’re doing wrong, the fat man rasped, his round face an angry red. Otherwise it will be the same business all over again, no matter how many times you come back, and Eeyore’s experience here will haunt him like the memory of an awful nightmare without ever making any sense to him!
____It won’t take Eeyore long to forget about it—he’s nearly forgotten already.
____That’s nonsense, Eeyore won’t forget. Do you know that he’s been crying a lot in the middle of the night recently? It’s frightening enough just that Eeyore’s frightened, can you stand to think of him having nightmares he can’t make any sense of?
With this the fat man decisively silenced his wife, who did not sleep in her son’s room at night. He then swung Eeyore on to his shoulders with the same emphaticness and marched up the stairs toward the examination room, the dirt from the floor still on his coat. Being able to parade the truth this way, that the existence essential to his pudgy son was not his mother but himself, inspired the fat man with a courage close to gallantry. At the same time, the prospect of the cruel ordeal the two of them might have to undergo left him pale and dizzy, and at each breathless step he climbed his head flashed hot and his body shook with chill.
____Eeyore! we have to keep a sharp watch, you and I, to see they don’t put anything over on us, said the fat man, lifting his voice in an appeal to the warm and heavy presence on his shoulders which sometimes felt, to his confusion, more like his guardian spirit than his ward.
____Eeyore, if we can finish this up together, we’ll go out for some pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola!
____Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good! his fat son lazily replied, satisfied to be riding on his father’s shoulder and seemingly liberated from the memory of his experience a while ago.
This seemed to testify to the accuracy of his wife’s prediction, and if the fat man had not been spurred by his son’s voice he would certainly have lost his courage at the entrance to the examination room and returned meekly as he had come. For not only was a young nurse bolting the door which she had just closed, with the unmistakable intention of locking further patients out, the clock having struck noon, but when she turned and saw the child riding on the fat man’s shoulders a look of panic and protest came over her face, as if she were re-encountering a ghost she had finally managed to be rid of, and she scurried behind the door to hide. The fat man, counting on the elitism of a university hospital, announced unbidden and as pretentiously as possible that he had been referred by a certain Professor of Medicine, and named the brain surgeon. The nurse didn’t answer him directly; it was unlikely she even considered chasing away by herself the large, fat man who had planted himself in front of the office without even lowering his son from his shoulders. Instead, leaving the door half open, she ran back inside to a dark corner which was curtained off at the rear of the room and began some kind of an appeal.
For just a minute, the fat man hesitated. Then he stepped over the lowered bolt and strode to the back of the room, where he encountered a shrill voice protesting behind the curtain in what sounded like uncontainable anger.
____No, no, no! Absolutely not! It would take every man in the building to hold down that little blimp. What’s that? He’s here already? I don’t care if he is, the answer is No!
This was a point for the fat man’s side. With calm to spare, he slowly lowered Eeyore to the floor. Then he thrust his large head inside the curtain and discovered a doctor so diminutive that he looked in his surgical gown like a child dressed up in grownup clothes, arching backward in the dimness right under his nose a tiny head that recalled a praying mantis as he shouted at the disconcerted nurse. The fat man took a long, brazen look, then said with stunning politeness,
____I was referred here by Professor of Medicine X. Could we possibly try again, perhaps I can help?
So the examination began. How can you refuse when the patient’s enormous parent interrupts you with that deadly politeness in the middle of shrieking at your nurse? seemed to be the question smouldering in the praying mantis’s head as, peevishly ignoring the fat man, he began his examination by shining a pencil light in Eeyore’s eyes. It was to increase the efficiency of this tiny bulb that half the room was kept in shrouded darkness. The fat man crouched uncomfortably in the narrow space behind the swivel chair, his arms locked around Eeyore’s chest. It made him proud to think that the boy was sitting in the chair at all, although his body was straining backward and continued to shudder, because it was himself, who invariably stayed with his son through the night, who was holding him around the chest. Thirty minutes ago, not realizing that Eeyore’s fear of the dark could not be overcome unless it was directed through the conduit between father and son, his wife and the doctor and these nurses must have driven the boy to the desperation of a small animal at bay in this same stage of the examination. But this time, he was able to think with satisfaction, the fat man had observed himself that the darkness in this room was not particularly frightening, and the essence of his judgment had been transmitted to Eeyore through the pressure of his hands and was lowering one by one the danger flags flapping in the boy’s dim mind.
Even so, Eeyore was afraid of the pencil light itself and refused to look in the direction the doctor desired, straight into its tiny beam. By tossing his head from side to side and watching out of the corner of his eye, he continued to evade the agitated pursuit of the pencil light in the little doctor’s hand. Presently, the young nurse stepped in to help, probably hoping to redeem herself with the doctor. Garuk! Garuk! The fat man heard an odious noise and felt Eeyore’s body contract with anxiety, and when he looked up in reproof he saw a hair-raising rubber frog, coated with phosphorescent paint which made it gleam in the dark, dancing back and forth in the nurse’s hand and croaking horribly, garuk, garuk, garuk, as she attempted to attract the patient’s attention. The fat man, more in response to the formidable protest rising from his own bowels than to stop the nurse for his son’s sake, was about to utter something angrily when Eeyore succumbed to total panic, began to rotate around the axis of his father’s arms, and kicked to the floor not only the doctor’s pencil light and the rubber frog in the nurse’s hand but a variety of objects on a small table diagonally in front of him. Even as he gave vent to a moan of rage in secret chorus with his son the fat man saw in a flash that Eeyore had brought clattering to the floor, in addition to several large books, a bowl of rice and fried eel which seemed to be the doctor’s lunch. And from the abnormally rapid pitch of the examination after this, it was impossible to avoid the impression that the little doctor was indeed provoking his intractable patient, and out of anger which derived at least in part from hunger unappeased. This permitted them—the composite of his son and himself—to sample the pleasure of retaliation. At the same time, it was the basis for a very grave fear. Here was a doctor tired and hungry after a full morning of appointments, and now his lunch was in ruins, yet he lacked the courage openly to revile this idiot boy and his corpulent father who flaunted a letter of introduction from Professor of Medicine X—how could the fat man be sure the little man wouldn’t work some subtle vengeance on his son’s eyes? This new terror was accompanied by regret; the fat man withered.
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.
But far from giving up, the fat man renewed his determination to function as a pipeline of vision connecting his son’s brain with the dangerous beasts in the zoo. Possibly he was spurring himself lest he communicate to his son—echoing his father mechanically as he directed his vague, misfocused gaze not at the animals so much as the sparse grass growing between the cages and the railings, or the refuse lying there, or the fat pigeons pecking at the refuse with their silly, blunted beaks—a mood developing in himself of submission to that eye doctor who had performed all manner of cruelties in his soiled, baggy gown, the smoked meat of his insect’s face twitching with tension, only to deliver his disheartening diagnosis. He was also resisting the deeprooted disgust which threatened to stain the twilight of his son’s spirit along with his own head. The truth was that the odor of countless animal bodies and their excrement had nauseated the fat man and given him the beginnings of a migraine headache from the moment before they had entered the zoo. An abnormally sensitive nose was certainly one of the attributes which testified to the blood bond between them. Nonetheless, in defiance of every one of these baleful portents, the fat man continued to wander around the zoo, gripping his son’s hand even tighter, addressing him with more spirit.
____Don’t forget, Eeyore, that seeing means grasping something with your imagination. Even if you were equipped with normal optic nerves you wouldn’t see a thing unless you felt like starting up your imagination about the animals here. Because the characters we’re running into here at the zoo are a different story from the animals we’re used to seeing every day that don’t require any imagination at all to grasp. Take those hard, brown boards with all the sharp ridges that are jammed up in that muddy water over there. Eeyore! how would anybody without an imagination know those boards were crocodiles? Or those two sheets of yellow metal slowly swaying back and forth down there next to that mound of straw and dung, how would you know that was the head and part of the back of a rhinoceros? Eeyore! you got a good look at that large, gray, tree-stump of a thing, well that happened to be one of an elephant’s ankles, but it’s perfectly natural that looking at it didn’t give you much of an impression that you’d seen an elephant—tell me, Eeyore, why should a little boy in an island country in Asia be born with an imagination for African elephants? Now if you should be asked when we get home whether you saw an elephant, just forget about that ridiculous hunk of tree-strump and think of the nice, accessible elephants like cartoons that you see in your picture books. And then go ahead and say, Eeyore saw an elephant! Not that the gray tree-stump back there isn’t the real thing, it is, that’s what they mean by a real elephant. But none of the normal children crowding this zoo is using genuine imagination to construct a real elephant from what he observes about that tree-stump; no, he’s just replacing what he sees with the cartoon elephants in his head, so no one has any reason to be disappointed because you weren’t so impressed when you encountered a real elephant!
While the fat man continued in this vein, speaking sometimes to himself and sometimes to his son, they made their way gradually up a sloping walk and wandered into a narrow passage which had been built to look like a rock canyon. The fat man talked on, but he was aware of a precarious balance being maintained at the outer edge of his consciousness, now directed inwardly and sealed, by jubilation at having escaped the crowds, and anxiety of a kind that somehow tightened his chest. And all of a sudden there sprang up from the ground, where they had been sitting in a circle, a group of men dressed like laborers, shouting incomprehensibly, and the fat man discovered that he and his son had been surrounded. Even as panic mushroomed in the fat man, he wrested his consciousness away from Eeyore, where it wanted to remain, and cast it outward—not only had they left the crowds behind, they had wandered into a cul-de-sac like a small, stifling valley. It was the back of the polar bears’ enclosure; far below, on the other side of a cliff of natural stones piled up to look like mountain rock, was a steep ice-wall for the bears to roam and a pool for them to sport in. To someone looking up from the other side, this place would seem to be the peak of a high and unknown mountain beyond an ice-wall and a sea: the fat man and his son had wandered behind the set of a glacial mountain. This secret passageway was probably used by the keepers to gain entrance to the artificial Antarctic below when they wanted to feed the bears or to clean the pool and the icy slope, though it was hard to believe, judging from the stench, that much cleaning was done. Now that the fat man had his bearings, the stench emanating from the back of the zoo, the animals’ side, a very nearly antihuman stench, was assaulting his body like an army of ants.
But who were these men? What were they doing squatting at the back of this passageway? And why had they surrounded the fat man and his son with such fierce hostility for simply wandering in on them? The fat man quickly concluded that they were young laborers who had hidden themselves back here to gamble. From the private room of his one-sided dialogue with Eeyore in which it had been locked, he had only to expand his consciousness outward to discover at once the signs of an interrupted game, so openly had they been playing. In the course of a dialogue entirely personal to themselves, a dialogue which turned about the axis of their clasped hands, the fat man and his son had already invaded too deeply their den, in animal terms, their territory, to avoid a confrontation with the gamblers.
Still gripping his son’s hand, the fat man began to back off, at a loss for the words he needed on the spur of the moment. But one of the men was already in position behind him, and another was pommeling him even while he attempted the move. A severe interrogation began, while several pairs of rough arms poked and pushed the fat man around. Are you a cop? An informer? Were you doing all that talking into a hidden mike so all your copper friends could hear you? As he was kicked and punched around, the fat man tried to explain, but what he said only angered the men. You were blabbing a mile a minute just now, and serious too, that’s the way you talk to a kid like this? The fat man protested that his son was nearly blind in addition to being retarded, so that he had to explain their surroundings in detail or nothing made any sense. But how could a little idiot make sense of all those big words, and this kid really is an idiot, look at him, he don’t look as if he understands a word we’re saying! The fat man started to say that they communicated through their clasped hands, then simply closed his punched and swollen mouth with a feeling of futility. How could he hope to make these hoodlums understand the unique relationship he shared with his son! Instead of trying, he drew Eeyore protectively to himself, started to, when suddenly his hand had been wrenched away from the boy’s hot, sweaty hand and he had been seized by the wrists and the ankles and hoisted into the air by several of the men, who continued to shower him with threats as they began to swing him back and forth as if to hurl him down to the polar bears. The fat man saw himself being swung back and forth as passively as a sack of flour at this outrageous height, saw clearly, if intermittently, the revolving sky and ground, the distant city, trees, and, directly beneath him, now at the hellishly deep bottom of a sheer drop, the polar bears’ enclosure and pool. His panic and reflexive fear were buried under an avalanche of despair more grotesque and fundamental; he began to scream in a voice which was unfamiliar even to his own ears, screams that seemed to him must move all the animals in the zoo to begin howling in response. As he was swung out over the pool on the hoodlums’ arms and reeled in and cast out again (the vigor of this seemed to anticipate hurling him all the way down to the polar bear submerged to its muddy yellow shoulders in the pool below), the fat man perceived, with the vividness of a mandala in which, like revelation itself, time and space are intermingled in a variety of ways, the despair gripping him as a compound of the following three sentiments: a) Even if these hoodlums understood that I’m not an informer, they could easily throw me to the polar bear for the sake of a little fun, just to protract their excitement. The fact is, they’re capable of that; b) I’ll either be devoured by a polar bear whose anger will be justified because its territory really will have been invaded, or I’ll be wounded and drown in that filthy water, too weak to swim. Even if I escape all that, I’ll probably go mad in thirty seconds or so—if it was madness that drove my father to confine himself for all those years until he died, how can I escape madness myself when his blood runs in me? c) Eeyore has always had to go through me to reach his only window of understanding on the outside world; when madness converts the passageway itself into a ruined maze, he’ll have to back up into a state of idiocy even darker than before, he’ll become a kind of abused animal cub and never recover; in other words, two people are about to be destroyed.
The tangle of these emotions confronted the fat man with a bottomless darkness of grief and futile rage and he allowed himself to tumble screaming and shouting into its depths and as he tumbled, screaming into the darkness, he saw his own eye, an eye laid bare, the pupil which filled its brown, blurred center expressing fear and pain only: an animal eye. There was a heavy splash, the fat man was soaked in filthy spray, the claws and heavy paws of maddened, headlong polar bears rasped and thudded around him. But it was a piece of rock broken from the cliff which had been dropped, the fat man was still aloft in the hoodlums’ arms. He was becoming a single, colossal eye being lofted into the air, the egg-white sphere was the entirety of the world he had lived, the entirety of himself, and within its softly blurred, brown center, fear and pain and the stupor of madness were whirling around and around in a tangle like the pattern inside a colored glass bead. The fat man no longer had the presence of mind to trouble himself about his son. No longer was he even the fat man. He was an egg-white eye, a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound, enormous eye.…
Night had fallen on the zoo when the fat man completed his gradual return from a giant eye to himself (he assumed from the savage odor of his skin and clothing, which was like a dirty finger probing in his chest, that he had actually fallen into the pool, and learned only later that he had been splashed by a rock), and began to enquire frantically about his son, who, for all he knew, having become a kind of animal cub, was already dead of frenzy. But the veterinarian (!) taking care of him at first insisted there had been no talk about a small boy, and then tried to use the subject to make the fat man remember what had happened to himself. According to this animal doctor, he had been discovered after closing time when the zoo was being cleaned, weeping in a public toilet in roughly the opposite direction from the polar bears’ enclosure, and for several hours thereafter had only mumbled deliriously about his son. The fat man insisted he had no memory of his movements during the nine or so hours of his madness. Then he grabbed the veterinarian and begged him to find the little boy either dead of frenzy already or soon to be dead. Presently an employee came in to the office where the fat man had been stretched out on a cot (there were several kinds of stuffed animals in evidence), and reported that he had himself taken a stray child to the police. His panic unabated, the fat man went to the police station and there re-encountered Eeyore. His fat son had just finished a late supper with some young policemen and was thanking them individually:
____Eeyore, the pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola were good! Asked for proof that he was the child’s guardian, the fat man finally had to telephone his wife and then wait in the police station until she arrived to take them home.
It was in this manner that a cruel freedom was enforced on the fat man. It came his way just four years and two months after the abnormal birth of Mori, his son.
The fat man’s this-time conscious battle for yet another freedom did elicit a printed notice from his mother, but beyond that the front did not advance; for she would not respond further, and continued to ignore her son’s repeated letters and phone calls. She refused to accept the letters, and would not come to the phone when he called.
Late one night after several weeks of this, the fat man renewed his determination and once again telephoned his mother. The village operator took the phone call in standard, formal Japanese, but when she came back on the line after a minute of silence, she addressed the fat man directly by name (since he was the only Tokyo resident to place long-distance calls to this little valley, the operator knew from whom and to whom the call came as soon as she heard the number being called, and would probably eavesdrop, something which occurred to the fat man but which he was too distracted to pursue), and then apologized to him in excessively familiar dialect which conveyed her sympathy and confusion:
____There’s no answer again tonight, no matter how many times I ring. She (meaning the fat man’s mother, living alone in the family house) never goes anywhere, and it’s the middle of the night besides—she doesn’t come to the phone on purpose every time you call! That isn’t right, you want me to hop over on my bike and wake her up?
So the fat man asked this special favor of the operator and before long the phone was answered. Not that his mother said anything, merely lifted the receiver and held it in silence. As soon as he had cleared his mind of the friendly operator, who had probably hurried back to the switchboard on her bicycle (professional duty!) and was listening in, the fat man began a somehow persuasive, somehow threatening speech to his silent mother:
____Who did you think was going to believe the lies in that announcement? And sending it to my wife’s relatives! Mother, if I’m crazy from a disease I picked up abroad and if the baby was born abnormal as a result, then the baby’s mother has to be infected too, isn’t that so? But you sent your announcement directly to my wife, the baby’s mother, Mother! Now that’s all I need to tell me that you don’t even believe yourself what you insinuated about my disease and my madness.… Or have you gone into that old act about being mad yourself? Well that routine is too old, you won’t fool anybody that way. And let me tell you something, if you can pretend to be mad well enough to fool someone again then you’re not pretending anymore, you really have gone mad! … Mother, why won’t you speak? You’re hiding my notes because you’re afraid if I publish something about Father every one who knows the family will think he was mad, and that his blood runs in all the children, and that my son is the living proof of that, isn’t that so? And you’re afraid of the humiliation that would be to my brothers and sisters, isn’t that so? But don’t you realize that pretending to be crazy and advertising that an evil disease has made me mad is going to result in something even worse? … Mother, I haven’t made up my mind that Father died of madness, I just want to know what really happened. My older brothers were in the army and the others were just kids, so I’m the only one of the children who remembers Father letting out a scream all of a sudden and then dying in that storehouse he’d locked himself in, that’s why I want to know what that was all about. You ask why it’s only me, only me of all the children who keeps worrying about Father’s last years and death, I’ll tell you why, Mother, because I really have to know. You used to say to me when you brushed me aside, “The other boys have important things on their minds, and you ask questions like that!” but to me it is important to know what really happened.… Mother, if I don’t find out, I have a feeling that sooner or later I’ll confine myself in a storehouse of my own, and one day I’ll scream all of a sudden and the next morning my wife will be telling Eeyore just what you once told me and nothing more, “Your father has passed away, you mustn’t cry or spit or make big or little business thoughtlessly, especially when you’re facing West!” … Mother, you must remember a lot about Father…. Didn’t you ask my wife not to take “sonny boy” seriously if he started glorifying his father’s behavior during his last years? My father happens to have spent his last years sitting in a storehouse without moving, with his eyes and ears covered—didn’t you tell my wife not to believe for a minute that he’d done that as a protest against the times, because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on the China he revered? Didn’t you tell her it was simply madness that made him do what he did? Didn’t you even say that Father had been as fat as a pig when he died because he’d been stuffing himself with everything he could lay hands on without moving anything but his mouth, and then insinuate that he had hidden himself in that storehouse because he was ashamed of being the only fat man around at a time when food was so scarce? You tell my wife all that and you won’t talk to me at all, you even steal the notes I’ve made about things I’ve managed to remember by myself, how can you do that Mother? … That morning my wife had the illusion I was about to hang myself, you told her my father was never in earnest; that he knew everything he did was fake, because he told himself he was not in earnest whenever he began something, but he didn’t notice the effect it was actually having on him however little at a time, wasn’t conscious of it, and that it was too late when he did notice. Tell me, Mother, what is it my father did that was not in earnest? What was too late? … Mother, if you intend to continue ignoring me, I have some thoughts of my own: I’ll sit down in a dark room just as Father did, with sunglasses on and plugs in my ears, and I’ll show you what fat can really be, I’m already a tub of lard, you know, and when I eventually let out my big scream and die, what do you intend to do, Mother, console my wife by telling her again that “sonny boy” and his father noticed whatever it is they noticed too late? Do you intend to say Foolishness! again, and play the Grand Lady? … I’ve only learned this recently, but it seems my son can get along without me, as an idiot in an idiot’s way, and that means I’m free now, I’m as good as liberated from my son, so from now on I can concentrate exclusively on my Father; I’m free to sit myself in a barber’s chair in a dark storehouse until the day I die just as Father did…. Mother, why do you keep repudiating me with silence? I keep telling you, I only want to get at the truth about my Father’s last years…. I don’t really care about writing his biography, even if I do write something I’ll promise never to have it published if that’s what you want, do you still refuse to talk to me? … If you won’t be convinced that I’m telling the truth when I say I only want to know what really happened, then let me tell you something, Mother, I can write up a biography of Father that chronicles his madness and ends in suicide any time I want, and I can have it published, too. And if I did that, you could spend every penny of your estate on paper and printing and mailing announcements, and people in numbers you couldn’t possibly match would believe what I had to say and not you! What I’m telling you is that I don’t care so much about getting back my manuscript, I just want to hear the truth from you, because I have to have it, Mother, I need it…. Believe me, there’d be no problem if it were the manuscript I needed, I can probably recite it for you right now, listen: “My father began his retreat from the world because …”
Quietly, but firmly, the phone was hung up. The fat man returned, pale with cold and despair, to his bed, pulled the covers over his head and for a long time lay trembling. And he wept furtively, as he had wept that night after his experience above the polar bears’ enclosure. He remembered how long it had been since he had actually heard his mother’s voice. This last time it was through his wife that he had finally managed to learn what she had said about his dead father. When it came to talk of his father in particular, he couldn’t even recall when last he had heard his mother’s voice. When she spoke to his wife, she had apparently referred to his father as “the man.” The Man. The fat man was reminded of a line from a wartime poem by an English poet, actually it resided in him always, as if it were his prayer. Like the Pure Land hymns which had resided in his grandmother until the day she died, it was part of his body and his spirit. And the poem itself happened to be a prayer spoken at the height of the very battle in which his father had lost his Chinese friends one after the other. The voice of Man: “O, teach us to outgrow our madness.” If that voice is the voice of the Man, then “our madness” means the Man’s and mine, the fat man told himself for the first time. In the past, whenever he whispered the poem to himself as though in prayer, “our madness” had always meant his own and his son Eeyore’s. But now he was positive that only himself and the Man were included. The Man had deposited his massive body in the barber chair he had installed in a dark storehouse, covered his eyes and ears, and tirelessly prayed, “Teach us to outgrow our madness, mine and his!” The Man’s madness is my madness, the fat man insisted stubbornly to himself, his son already banished beyond the borders of his consciousness. But what right did his mother have to obstruct the passageway leading from himself toward the Man’s madness? The fat man wasn’t weeping any more, but he was still trembling so that the sheets rustled, not with cold but rage alone.
Once he had adjusted his perspective in this way, the fat man no longer equated himself and Eeyore, even when he considered the hoodlums’ attack above the polar bears’ pool. He was even able to feel, precisely because it had liberated him from bondage to his son, that the experience had been beneficial. What kept his already ignited anger aflame was his knowledge that his own mother had so long prevented him, in danger even now of being hurled to a polar bear of madness, from discovering the true meaning of that appeal to which the Man may have been so close to hearing an answer at the end of his life, “Teach us to outgrow our madness.”
The fat man finally fell asleep, but his fury survived even in his dream: his hot hand was clutched in the hand of a hippopotamus of a man sitting with his back to him in a barber chair in a dark storehouse, and fury flowed back and forth between them as rapidly as an electric current. But no matter how long he waited, the fuming giant continued to stare into the darkness and would not turn around to face the fat child who was himself.
When the fat man woke up, he readied himself for a final assault on his mother and swore to begin a new chronicle of the Man’s madness in his last years and to undertake an investigation into outgrowing “our madness,” the Man’s and his own. But once again he was beaten to the offensive. During the night, while he had been weeping and raging and having dreams, his mother had been so prudent as to contrive a strategy of her own, and by dawn had even drafted a new announcement in which she broke a silence of twenty years and spoke of her dead husband. Only two days after his phone call, the notes and incomplete manuscript for the biography in which he had attempted to reconstruct an entire image of his dead father arrived at the fat man’s house, registered mail, special delivery. That same week, delayed by only the number of days it had taken the printer to fill the order but unquestionably written the same night as the fat man’s call, a new announcement also arrived, addressed to the fat man’s wife, registered mail, special delivery:
Recently it was my duty to inform you that my third son had lost his mind. I must now announce that I was mistaken in this, and ask you kindly to forget it. Apropos this season of the year, I am reminded that my late husband, having had an acquaintance with the officers involved in a certain coup d’état, was led upon its failure to the dreadful conclusion that no course of action remained but the assassination of his Imperial Majesty. It was the horror of this which moved him to confine himself in a storehouse, where he remained until his death.
The cause of death, let me conclude, was heart failure; the death certificate is on file at the county office. Begging to inform you of the above, I remain,
Sincerely yours,
Signed
But who will save the people?
I close my eyes and think:
A world without conspirators!
—Choku
Although she had not appeared much moved by the first announcement, this one jolted the fat man’s wife surprisingly. For most of an evening she read it over to herself and only then, having reached no conclusions of her own, informed the fat man that it had arrived and showed it to him. Only when the fat man had read it over to himself and was simply standing in silence with the announcement in his hand did she speak up and disclose the substance of her agitation:
____You remember your mother asked me not to take you seriously if you started glorifying your father’s last years? Do you think she decided to bring all this to light because you’ve finally made her begin to hate you with your attacks on her? Do you think your mother has made up her mind to renounce you, and this is her way of saying, imitate your father all you want, nothing you do is her responsibility any more?
Since the shock which the fat man had received himself came from an entirely different aspect of the announcement, he could only pursue his own distress in silence. The minute he read it he had sensed that this blow, like the blow he had received through Eeyore, was aimed at something fundamental in himself and could be neither countered nor returned. For several days he tried to discredit his mother’s account of his father by checking it against what he remembered from his childhood and what he had heard. But among all the details he had collected in order to write the biography, he could find nothing which mortally contradicted the announcement.
His grandmother had said more than once that his father had been attacked by an assassin with a Japanese sword, and that he had managed to escape harm by sitting perfectly still in the dark storehouse without offering any resistance. The assassin was probably one of the band which had been associated with his father through the junior officers in the revolt. And he must have been a man with no more stomach than his father for an actual uprising or for individual action in the next stage of the revolt. He had tracked down a craven like himself to the place where he was living in self-confinement, and brandished his Japanese sword and threatened emptily, but that was all he had ever intended to do.
Then there was the drama commemorating a certain coup d’état, one of the fat man’s reveries since his youth, in which the widows of the junior officers who had been involved, old women now and incarcerated in a rest home, playing themselves as young wives thirty-five years earlier, attacked with drawn daggers a man seated with his back to them in a barber chair, “the highest Authority to have abandoned the insurgents; or—a private citizen who sympathized politically, provided funds, and was generally in league with the junior officers until the day of the revolt, finally betrayed them, dropped out of the uprising, and spent what remained of his life hiding in a storehouse in his country village.” The idea undoubtedly had its distant source in things the fat man had been told as a child, probably in such a way as to hint even that long ago at the contents of his mother’s announcement. At any rate, he must have known vaguely that there was some connection between his father and that attempted coup, for he had spoken about it to his wife. It was on a stormy night some time ago, and he had been relating a perfectly normal memory which had renewed itself in him, of his father telling him as a child, on another stormy night, that life was like a family emerging from the darkness, coming together for a brief time around a lighted candle, and then disappearing one by one into their own darkness once again.
For a week, the fat man studied his mother’s announcement and pored over the notes and fragments of manuscript which he had written for his dead father’s biography. And then early one morning (he hadn’t been to sleep at all; that entire week he had slept only four or five hours a night and, except for quick meals, had remained in his study) he went into the garden in back of his house and incinerated a sheaf of pages which contained every word he had written about his father. He also burned a picture card which had been thumbtacked above his desk ever since he had brought it back from New York, of a sculpture, a plaster-of-Paris man who resembled his father as he fancied him, about to straddle a plaster-of-Paris bicycle. He then informed his wife, who was out of bed now and getting breakfast ready, that he had changed his mind about a plan which until then he had opposed. It was a plan to get eyeglasses for Eeyore and to place him in an institution for retarded children. The fat man knew that his wife had gone back to that eye doctor without his permission and persuaded him to prescribe a special pair of glasses, probably by groveling in front of the little man, which she was secretly training Eeyore to wear. The fat man had been severed from his son already, they were free of one another. And now he had confirmed that, in the same way, he had been severed from his dead father and was free. His father had not gone mad, and even if he had, insofar as there was a clear reason for his madness, it was something altogether different from his own. Gradually he had been giving up his habit of bicycling off with Eeyore to eat pork noodles in broth; and although, as he approached the age at which his father had begun his self-confinement, his tastes had inclined toward fatty things such as pigs’ feet Korean style, he was losing once again almost all positive desire for food.
The fat man began taking a sauna bath once a week and sweating his corpulence away. And one bright spring morning he had come out of the sauna and was taking his shower when he discovered a swarthy stranger who was nonetheless of tremendous concern to him standing right in front of his eyes. Perhaps his confusion had to do with the steam fogging the mirror—there was no question that he was looking at himself.
The man peered closely at the figure standing alone in the mirror and identified several portents of madness. Now he had neither a father nor a son with whom to share the madness closing in on him. He had only the freedom to confront it by himself.
The man decided not to write a biography of his dead father. Instead, he sent repeated letters to the Man, whose existence nowhere was evident now, “Teach us to outgrow our madness,” and jotted down a few lines which always opened with the words “I begin my retreat from the world because …” And as if he intended these notes to be discovered after his death, he locked them in a drawer and never showed them to anyone.