"Patron's wound has come out in the open, and all the groups of believ- ers are excited about it. And for the first time in my life I have real friends with whom to do things. And all of a sudden this vivid memory's hit me of when I stayed in that hotel in Austria, how it was so rainy that the manager lamented how un-Salzburg-like the weather was. I remember how the elec- tricity built up until it had to explode. I feel the same electricity here as the power of the land, the power of the place.
"Professor, are you still awake?"
Kizu wasn't asleep. He just couldn't find the words to respond to such a confession.
"Guess he is asleep."
From out of his summer covers, Ikuo reached out a soft palm and rested it on Kizu's lower abdomen, careful to not put too much weight on it. He stayed like that for a long time. Warmth from his palm seeped into Kizu's abdomen. Kizu could sense Ikuo's tongue moving around inside his closed mouth. Finally Ikuo withdrew his arm, drew nearer to him in the darkness, and went out into the narrow space separating the two rooms. He left the lights off, but Kizu could sense him crawling into his boxlike bed.
As Kizu listened to Ikuo's monologue he'd learned one surprising thing after another. Yet somehow, as if he'd already known all this, it didn't shock him. From the first time he'd laid eyes on the boy with the beautiful doglike eyes, hadn't he felt both a connection with something higher and yet, unpara- doxically, something mysteriously low and mean? Even after they'd started to live together, that sense that they were not really close continued, something Kizu had put down to Ikuo's basic personality.
After Kizu had him model for the painting of Jonah, he discovered something special in Ikuo. Kizu discovered a person who responded to God's call at the same time that heprotested to God, a person who had a brutal streak, even. Putting together all these pieces, he didn't find it strange that Ikuo had heard a voice from heaven as a child and took a life because of it.
Kizu knew Ikuo was his better in one area-the fact that in their sexual relationship he was the novice, not Ikuo. Soon after they started to sleep together Ikuo had mentioned he'd had some experience playing the man, but despite this Kizu had carried around with him for a long time a mix- ture of pride and guilt at having initiated a young man into this abnormal form of sex.
After he finally fell asleep, Kizu once again dreamt of himself as nearly completing the triptych. Though he found it strange that he could do this, since his weakened condition should make working on the tableau too tir- ing, in the dream he overcame this obstacle and was overjoyed at being able to progress with his work on the third panel-whose composition in reality he still hadn't decided on.
In his dream, the details of the first panel, too, the one showing the in- side of the whale's belly, were crystal clear. Before a backdrop of a scene from a Salzburg hillside hotel, beyond the city streets, beyond the river and a castle- topped mountain, and beyond a ravine at the entrance to the Alps, Ikuo-as- Jonah was in the process of murdering a middle-aged man. Every nook and cranny of the background-which Kizu had painted merely as the dark laby- rinth of the whale's innards-was now entirely clear, and he felt a sense of artistic completion.
In the middle of the third panel he was in reality now working on, Patron, the wound showing on his side, stood next to Ikuo/Jonah. Patron was a preliminary sketch done from memory, distinguishable by the Sacred Wound, while Ikuo/Jonah was no longer an innocent youth. Surrounding the two of them was the Hollow as an abstract opera set: the huge cypress tower- ing darkly, with the cylindrical chapel and the fortresslike monastery bor- dered, top and bottom, by the moonlit surface of the lake reflecting the forest and the fog.
The next morning Kizu woke up late, and as he went out into the corridor from the still-dark bedroom he saw, in a corner of the atelier, smaller now because of the new partition, Ikuo sitting on top of his boxlike bed, unmov- ing as a stone statue. Kizu thought he might be asleep, but when he returned from urinating, the stone statue looked up and greeted him in a gentle voice.
"Good morning! Did you sleep well? Why don't you have breakfast in bed? I'll go get it."
Kizu drew back the curtains-the sun was high in a whitish sky, yet fog and dew still clung to the lake and the huge cypress-got into bed, and pulled the wooden tray toward him as Ikuo brought in canned grapefruit juice, tea, and toast. The young man stood watching him eat, his expression more cheerful than it had been in quite some time, with no traces of the pre- vious night's confessions.
"Individual believers have been arriving since last week," Ikuo told him, "and they'll be assigned to stay in the closed elementary school in the outskirts or in some unoccupied private homes. Ms. Asuka is among them, and she'll be taking turns helping me here. You're able to use the toilet yourself, so you don't mind having a woman take care of you, do you?"
"I suppose not," Kizu said. "I'm thinking of starting work again today on the triptych. Have you eaten?"
"I'll bring my food in here." Ikuo started out toward the kitchen, stopped, and turned around. "I got a little carried away in the moonlight last night, and I apologize for talking for so long. It was stupid of me to do that with you just out of your sickbed. It's just that when you were staying at the clinic I decided I had to tell you."
He seemed to be trying to sound out Kizu as to how far he'd managed to stay awake and what he'd heard, but Kizu gave nothing away, and they began to eat a mostly silent meal. Ikuo lined up on the tray the various medi- cines Kizu had to take, along with a clean cup of water, and then went off to make some coffee. Ms. Asuka had already been given a key, which she used now to open the door and stick her head in the bedroom.
"How have you been, Professor? It must have been very hard on you," she said, in her usually diffident way. "I'll be taking care of you starting to- day. Ikuo-san has so many other places he needs to be. Everybody on the south shore is quite energized. Quite a stir, I can tell you. The Sacred Wound has had a remarkable effect on everyone."
26: PEOPLE LIKE UNEDITED VIDEOS
1
It was a bit too much for Ms. Asuka, after she started taking care of Kizu, to carry food for them both from the dining hall, so she would go down as soon as it opened and, after finishing her own meal, bring back a tray for Kizu.
The days were getting longer so she didn't need a flashlight even after dinner.
Ms. Asuka and the other individual followers who'd moved there had been assigned rooms temporarily, in the monastery along with the Techni- cians or with the Quiet Women, until their own lodgings were decided, but even so she didn't run across Ikuo in the dining hall. The three of them met in Kizu's bedroom, however. When she collected Kizu's dinner tray and sat down at a window seat facing the lake, there across from her sat Ikuo.
The first thing Ikuo said was that since tonight would be her first night staying over with Kizu, if she wanted he would stay over as well. Since she'd worked in the trade, Ms. Asuka replied, sharing a room overnight with a man certainly didn't faze her.
Kizu felt sorry for Ikuo and how flustered this must have made him.
Ikuo's face turned red as a devil's, and he got a little overbearing, telling her that lots of different people would be calling on Kizu to see how he was do- ing, and they were bound to talk about all sorts of things, so she had to prom- ise to keep whatever she heard strictly confidential.
Ms. Asuka couldn't figure out exactly what he was getting at. Gazing back at the clearly irritated Ikuo in silence for a while, she said that video cameras had become even smaller and easier to use than the stories you used to hear about French fountain-pen cameras and the like. "When I use them," she said, "I find I don't have any particular feelings one way or another about the person I'm videotaping. So I've ended up with reels of unedited material.