"I would like to quote once more from the Bible. This is from the first letter of John: "Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us."
"This particular passage has caused me great pain. In the last trial, you did not leave us, and though you continued to belong to us, neither Guide nor I remained with you. And I became the antichrist-both when I fell into hell, and even now that I have resurfaced. Is there so much misery and pain for mankind that this is the only alternative-that I must be seen as the antichrist?
"Guide was the only other person who agreed that I must tread this path.
Together with me he did the Somersault and accompanied me to hell. This was his choice, I think, because he insisted to the end on the necessity of the Somersault. It was a Somersault where the antichrist appears, which signals the end of the world. That is the way I understand it now."
3
Dancer, her narrow profile tucked in tightly, was whispering in Ogi's ear. As if he'd been waiting for this, Ogi nodded. Both arms thrust out, he held out a sign that said THE FIRST HALF OF THE SERMON IS FINISHED AND THERE WILL NOW BE A COFFEE BREAK… Patron let his arms fall to the sides of the po- dium, and Dancer held her hand out and led him out of the hall for a while.
By the time the audience had risen to their feet, tables had been set up in front and on both sides, with Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and small packets of cream and sugar, all done by the security squad, which had also stood guard- ing both sides of the door through which Patron had entered. The commu- nal women's group helped pass out coffee cups to the rest of the participants.
The tall doctor's widow with the unusual walk directed this operation.
Kizu knew it was now customary in Japan for meetings and seminars to include a coffee break, but still he found it quite a sight to see things go so smoothly at a memorial service, especially one with over three hundred and fifty attendees. He looked around for the young woman with the facial scar and spotted her still sitting with the children, who were waiting patiently as she handed out little cartons of coffee from a large cardboard box.
"They're very well organized, aren't they?" said the newspaper reporter Kizu knew from the press conference as he passed Kizu a Styrofoam container of coffee; standing by the wall, Kizu had been unable to take photogtaphs of the goings-on or squeeze into line for coffee. "It turned out to be a good idea to have former radical-faction members work the security detail," the reporter added, "though I admit I was skeptical when I first heard about it."
"It's a lovely and solemn gathering, isn't it?" said a woman beside him, dressed in subdued clothes and also sipping coffee. She was the woman who had been beside the dark-skinned reporter at the press conference. Today she had pinned to her chest the white flower given to distinguish the twenty people from the media who were in attendance.
"I was quite surprised by how austere Patron was when he spoke," the reporter said,"because during the Somersault he wasn't that way at all. Guide was the gloomy one then, and Patron the clown."
"For a newspaper reporter, you talk too much," the woman said reprov- ingly. "It doesn't give us a chance to hear him speak."
Kizu sensed that she had heard something from her colleague about himself, so before she could ask for his take on the memorial service, he headed off to the door behind which Patron was waiting, receiving a nod from the ladies collecting the coffee cups. The guards standing there recognized Kizu and let him pass.
Kizu cut through the bicycle rack area and went over to the elevators, where he found Ikuo leaning against the door of the elevator to keep it propped open and available. Ogi stood in front of him, showing him a pile of documents, with a pair of scissors on top, and Ikuo seemed to be checking something. Patron was sitting in a round chair next to the wall opposite.
Dancer stood protectively close behind him, so he could lean back against her.
She was telling him some of her ideas about how the second half of the ser- mon should go.
"I understand how important the past is, but haven't you said enough about it? I'd like you to talk about the future, what your plans are. The follow- ers are hanging on your every word. Even the children are listening intently."
Patron didn't directly respond to her, his eyes wide open as if he were attempting to see underwater. As Kizu approached, Patron asked him, "Pro- fessor, what do you think the audience thinks about the Somersault?"
Kizu was at a complete loss. Patron was looking up, waiting for his answer, when Dancer stuck her head next to his shoulder and intervened.
"Let's begin the second half and talk about that later. You have to talk about your future activities now. Speak with confidence."
"Ladies and gentlemen," Patron began again, "with the ideas I mentioned in the first half of my sermon, I'm planning to begin a new movement. Having lost Guide, I feel even more compelled to get started without a moment's delay.
I can only hope and pray that something will take the place of Guide's inter- pretations of my visions-an ability we'll never see again-as things appear to me through this movement.
"No longer will I have a partner who can arrange into words the dark- ness of a human being's soul-my own. I can only reach inside my slit-open belly and yank out something-I have no idea what-and preach the most nonsensical, incoherent ideas.
"However, Guide taught me this: The only way I'll find a path is by stick- ing my hands into that dark place. That memory itself has been lost along with everything else we accumulated, and I can hear him accusing me of being noth- ing but a scarecrow filled with straw, which thoroughly discourages me.
"Speaking of the word straw, when I was quite young, about the age of the children who've come here to remember Guide, I thought about this word.
Since all of you little ones are listening carefully to what I say, I'd like to di- rect this to you. When I was a child, I was told the expression like a drowning man clutching at a straw. And this expression bothered me. To tell the truth, I hated it. It made me feel awful.
"Imagine there's a poor child who's drowning in the river. And for whatever reason there are some adults standing on the bank just casually look- ing on. The child grasps at straws floating by. The adults burst out laughing.
And finally, they step into the river and save the drowning child. That's the scene I imagined. A long time afterward, I told Guide about this and he told me that he imagined it this way: When you open a drowned child's hand you find he was clutching straw. He said he felt as if he'd actually seen this occur when he was a child.
"Ladies and gentlemen, that's the kind of person Guide was. It anything, it made me feel that I was the drowned child he saw, that he saw my cold wet hand clutching the straw and took pity on me. I have decided to restart my movement and build a new church. But if Guide is now like the drowning child, then through our new church I intend to discover the straw his fingers were clutching.
"By unraveling the words of the visions I had in my trances, Guide cre- ated our theology. At the time of the Somersault when I said it was all non- sense, this is what I meant. The basic idea is that God is the totality of nature that created this world. Living a life of faith for us means being accurately and fully aware of this fact. When we achieve this, we realize that our aware- ness itself is, from the very start, made possible by God. What flows from God into us makes this awareness possible, making us able to verbalize it.