Patron went into the kitchen to start washing up, and Kizu followed after him.
There was a huge pile of dirty dishes. At the beginning of the week Guide had taken a turn for the worse and been put in a private room, and Dancer, who'd been with him the whole time, had returned in the late after- noon for the first time to report on his condition. After dinner with Ogi, Ikuo, and Ms. Tachibana, the young people set off for the hospital. Ms. Tachibana, living with her younger brother, had to be home by a fixed time, so it was left to Kizu and Patron to clean up.
With his long years living alone in New Jersey, and now in his Tokyo apartment, Kizu was used to cooking and cleaning up on his own, but Patron was a compete novice when it came to washing dishes. It might have been easier if Kizu had done it alone. Patron, though, seemed genuinely afraid of withdrawing to his bedroom study. At Dancer's insistence there were no chemical cleansers in the kitchen, so it took quite some time to wash the filthy dishes the young people had left using only a large bar of coconut oil soap rubbed into a sponge. Kizu soon took over washing the dishes, Patron the drying. As he dried one dish after another, Patron began a long monologue.
"A while ago I told you how I came to know Guide, and how I was making a living as a fortune-teller. Guide's wife and autistic son ran out on him. His wife had left a note. She said he worried so much and was so overly solicitous toward their son she felt stifled, and they couldn't take it anymore.
'If you come after us and try to get us to come home,' she said, 'we'll kill our- selves. Just leave us alone.'
"When Guide brought this letter to me he was beside himself. A woman whose son was going to night classes at the high school equivalency school felt she just couldn't stand by without doing anything and brought Guide to one of our meetings. He wasn't hoping his wife and son would come back, he just wanted to know they were all right. Instead of trying to search for them, he thought I should read the letter, go into a trance, and tell him how they were. I had two different types of trances, and this required the shallow kind, which I could go into and out of at will.
"The scene I saw in my trance was clear enough but hard to pin down.
A middle-aged woman was sitting on a bus, a bulky bag beside her. From the shadows a young man leaped into the picture, and when he reached the front row of seats he rested his hand on the shoulder of a man sitting there and, in a quiet voice, asked him if he was getting off at the next stop.
"When I'd said this much, Guide began to tremble. 'That's definitely my wife and son,' he said. What he said next was the very first of his inter- pretations of my visions, one might say. 'My son likes buses,' he said, 'espe- cially the front row. My wife or I tell him not to, but he always sidles up to the front and asks whoever's sitting there that question. My wife's people live in Boso and earn their living farming and fishing, so they must be carrying fish and vegetables into Tokyo to sell. Seeing as how they make a round trip every day into the city on trains and buses, my son must be happy.'
"Even after Guide had determined where his family was, he still came sometimes to our meetings; before long his wife filed for divorce. His wife was afraid of him and didn't show up in family court, so the divorce wasn't finalized, but Guide just left it at that. He said the reason he didn't get di- vorced was like the idea you had, Professor Kizu, of you and Ikuo grasping hands and heading off to the other side. When his autistic son was to head off to the other side, Guide wanted to be there to help him. Guide had been over- zealous in educating his son so the boy had rebelled. When Guide had tried to suppress the rebellion, the mother felt sorry for the boy and the two of them ran away from home.
"Still, though, Guide's dream was to be able to help his son on the other side, to mediate between his son's soul and God. He couldn't give up this idea.
Guide was able to interpret my visions, and finally that became his full-time role. But behind his becoming a pillar of the church lay these personal emo- tional motives.
"And now Guide is unconscious, his body reacting only mechanically.
On the one hand is the brain of the autistic son, closed to the world outside; on the other, the brain of the father, struck down by an aneurysm. I'm haunted by a scene of endless sky and far-off horizon, with two oval-shaped dishes like these lying there. And a human brain on each one."
Patron held a large plate to the lacy apron at his chest, and while Kizu pictured what was happening in a far-off building surrounded by snow, he almost burst out laughing. With Patron's combination of the tragic and the comic, his solemn seriousness and his occasional doubtfulness, Kizu couldn't help but know he was in the presence of someone quite special.
"What really hurts most when I think of Guide is what he told me after he had his first attack, when he recovered and came home from the hospital.
When the blood vessel in his forehead burst, he said, he didn't get confused right away. He felt bad, got up go to the rest room to try to throw up, and was halfway there when he suddenly found himself not inside a building but standing in a wilderness at twilight. And with a great noise, this whole wil- derness was rolling up from the edges at the horizon. And then he lost con- sciousness. Guide used this expression, which makes it seem that the vision I had that I just told you about was something he told me. That's how strong a relationship we'd built up over such a long time.
"What comes to me now is that during his second attack there must have been a short period when his mind was still clear. Guide knew what was going on. How frightened he must have been, wondering whether the group that took him captive was hoping he'd collapse. He must have felt a terrible sad- ness too, knowing he'd lost forever his chance to find his son and escort him to the other side.
"That's how I imagined Guide's experience. And the conclusion I came to, Professor, is that although Guide wanted to be a mediator for his autistic son, in fact it was the son who was his railing, his lifeline."
Patron ran out of words. His spiritless face, poised between his bent left hand, about to grasp a plate, and his right, holding out a dish towel, fairly glinted with sorrow.
As he had never done before to anyone, Kizu placed his arm around Patron's apron-wrapped shoulder and led him out of the kitchen. The cur- tains were still open, and in the darkness of the garden the snow began to swirl silently. The two elderly men, in their loud aprons, faintly reflected in the windowpane, looked just like two children in a nursery school Christmas pageant who had stood rooted to one spot until, years later, they'd grown old.
2
Kizu planned to take Patron to his bedroom study and then wait in the office in case there was an emergency call from the hospital. But as they rounded the corner in the hallway Patron came to a halt and refused to go farther. Reluctantly, Kizu led him to the living room sofa, but again he pro- tested wordlessly and sat down in the armchair facing away from the glass door leading to the garden.
"Would you like to listen to Bach again?" Kizu asked.
Looking back at him, Patron shook his head.
"Well, then," Kizu said, "maybe I can use this opportunity to ask you something Ikuo wants me to ask."
"Dancer already told me," Patron said. "She came to me all excited and said Ikuo had just asked you to put this question to me: Whether false savior or genuine, how did you start thinking you were the savior? Isn't this what he wanted you to ask?" Kizu nodded. "Since he used these exact words with Dancer, I think that even before Ikuo talked to you he knew exactly what he wanted to say.