Irritated by how this was all coming out, Dancer closed her mouth, bit- ing down on her thin lips. Kizu found it pitiful to watch and turned toward the lake, the surface reflecting the white cloudy sky.
"They call it a Sacred Wound, don't they? The kind Saint Francis of Assisi had, just like Jesus' wounds when he was crucified."
Kizu remembered the word stigma, the word he often, for some strange reason, thought of, and the way he'd connected it with the stigma of the deli- cate dark red flower of the slippery elm… Watching the absentminded-looking Kizu, Dancer ignored her own rhetorical question and went on.
"On Patron's left side he has a gaping wound as if he's been pierced with a spear. Technically speaking it's not a wound but more like a hole in his side that never closes up, and at the bottom you can see the color of blood. When he's not feeling well, pus oozes out and dries in yellow strands. Right now, actually, pus is coming out. In the past his doctor would always prescribe antibiotics for him without his having to go to the hospital, and he was able to tough it out that way.
"But when we moved here I didn't think about it, and the day before yesterday I asked Dr. Koga to give us some antibiotics. But he told me that if Patron needed them he'd better examine him. That's what was bothering me and why I was so cross with Ikuo."
"So Dr. Koga doesn't know about Patron's wound?" Kizu asked.
"Guide and I were the only ones who knew. And then Ogi happened to see Patron in the bath once."
"Until the Somersault, though, Dr. Koga took care of Patron, so wouldn't he have noticed this wound?"
"If it's something that appeared after the Somersault, Dr. Koga wouldn't know about it, would he? Guide never told me when the wound first ap- peared, and I couldn't bring myself to ask Patron directly. But now with the church starting up again, pus is coming out and it scares me. The wound shouldn't have appeared after the Somersault, should it? When Patron was relating his visions and calling on people to repent there was no wound, but now, after the Somersault, there it is… Or maybe the wound is God's pun- ishment for the Somersault. That scares me, too."
Her skin flushed, the color so different from before, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Her eyes, glistening with tears, clung to Kizu. Kizu didn't feel like going where the overwrought Dancer's question led. He had to shift to a different question, one with a different answer.
From his experience running seminars, Kizu knew he had to divert Dancer from the question she'd raised. Instead, using some down-to-earth language he knew would sound dubious to this young woman, he said; "Let me ask Dr. Koga about getting some antibiotics. At my age I can't claim it's gonorrhea, but if I say I have some pus coming out of my urethra, I think he should give me the medicine to help Patron without insisting on examining me first."
Dancer looked blank for a moment, but was soon her old self again.
24: VIEWING THE SACRED WOUND
1
Kizu, however, didn't find the time to negotiate with Dr. Koga, for the day after he talked with Dancer the situation changed abruptly. Ogi was tak- ing care of things at the office, and Dancer had gone out to the dining hall for a late lunch when an anxious phone call came from Ms. Tachibana.
It was warm that day, almost summery, and Ms. Tachibana's call was not unconnected with this rise in temperature. Patron had had a fever since morning and couldn't get up, so Ms. Tachibana had brought him breakfast in bed. When she fetched his lunch, he had thrown off his covers because of his fever and the hot weather, and the upper half of his body lay exposed. But what threw her into a panic was Morio, curled up at the side of the bed at Patron's legs, with yellow pus covering both eyes, one ear, and his nose and mouth.
Ms. Tachibana had screamed, and Morio flopped his arms and legs around like a baby turtle but was panicked, unable to open his eyes. Patron was awake and sat up in bed. That's when Ms. Tachibana saw the red hole in his chubby left side, pus oozing out.
By the time Ogi ran over, Patron had fallen asleep again, and Morio's head and face had been wiped clean. Ms. Tachibana, though, was still strug- gling with panic, her shoulders trembling as she insisted that Patron had a wound in his left side. Apparently wanting to take care of Patron, Morio had pressed his face against it and had gotten covered with pus. Ms. Tachibana insisted that Dr. Koga take care of Morio's eyes and his precious ears so that no bacteria invaded them, but insisted even more loudly that he come over right away and treat Patron's wound.
Dr. Koga was in his clinic. Making his excuses to his patients, he promptly boarded the car Ogi had brought around. Ogi reported to him that the wound in Patron's side was festering, and learned that Dr. Koga, Patron's longtime doctor, had no knowledge of this wound, which had not closed up for years.
"So what you're saying is that, since you first saw it, the hole in his side has remained open?" Dr. Koga asked. "And that it's festering and causing the fever? Have you taken his temperature?… Well, that's okay. Dancer's not there. I can imagine how flustered you were and why you raced right over."
When he entered the bedroom where Patron lay, Dancer was back from lunch. Dr. Koga handed her his medical bag and told her to open the win- dow on the forest side to let in some cool air. Morio was up, changed into a fresh shirt and trousers, but still looking thunderstruck. After checking his eyes and ears, Dr. Koga ordered Ms. Tachibana and Ogi, as well as Kizu, who'd been summoned, to escort Morio out to the living room.
For whatever reason, Ms. Tachibana had kept the rooms shut tight while Patron was in bed with his fever, but now they threw all the living room windows wide open. Morio sat directly on the floor, choosing an FM station on the stereo, the sound of a string quartet, or perhaps a sextet, filtering out for a moment before he slipped on the headphones and went into his own little world.
Ogi leaned forward near Kizu and Ms. Tachibana, and they spoke in low voices.
"I had no idea he had that hole in him," Ms. Tachibana explained, "which is why I was so shaken. Dancer just told me about it. I can imagine how unpleasant it must be to have had that for so long! Mrs. Shigeno said that Patron's being in hell was no metaphor, and Fd have to agree."
"I just happened to hear about the wound yesterday from Dancer," Kizu said. "It's much worse than I imagined."
As you'd expect of a craftsman whose eyes are the tools of his trade, Kizu's expression showed that the afterimage of what he'd seen was still fresh in his mind.
The two of them were silent, so Ogi felt obliged to tell his own im- pression of the wound in Patron's side-something that was actually more Dancer's idea than his own. "Well," he said, "I certainly consider his wound rather extraordinary, though I'm not at the point of thinking of it, as Dancer does, as a Sacred Wound. Patron is certainly a man of special gifts, someone who's had great hurdles to overcome in his life. I never imagined I'd be work- ing for a person like him.
"Even so," Ogi went on, "I don't think my devotion to him has any mystical coloring to it. Nothing of Dancer's insistence that the wound in Patron's side is a condition of his sanctification. That's been my attitude toward Patron, and I don't think it's put me at a disadvantage. Dancer, though, has a lot invested emotionally. She feels it's her responsibility that the wound in Patron's side she's been taking care of when she bathes him and so on should have started to fester; this has really upset her."
"Dancer thinks Patron's wound getting worse like this after we've moved to the Hollow might be a premonition that something's going to occur with the new church movement," Ms. Tachibana added.