“Why don’t you eat something? You must be hungry.” He answered with a slight nod. As Midori had done, I cranked his bed up and started feeding him, alternating spoonfuls of vegetable jelly and boiled fish. It took an incredibly long time to get through half his food, at which point he gave his head a little shake to signal that he had had enough. The movement was almost imperceptible; it apparently hurt him to make larger movements.
“What about the fruit?” I asked him.
, he said. I wiped the corners of his mouth with a towel and made the bed level again before putting the dishes out in the corridor.
“Was that good?” I asked him.
, he answered.
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “It looked pretty bad.” Midori’s father could not seem to decide whether to open his eyes further or close them as he lay there silently, staring at me. I wondered if he knew who I was. He seemed more relaxed when alone with me than when Midori was present. He might have been mistaking me for someone else. Or at least that was how I preferred to think of it.
“Beautiful day out there,” I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. “It’s autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It’s exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays—wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don’t mind ironing at all. There’s a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I’m pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn’t do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day.
“That’s O.K., though. I’ll wake up early and take care of it tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’ve got nothing else to do on a Sunday.
“After I do my laundry tomorrow morning and hang it out to dry, I’ll go to my ten o’clock class. It’s the one I’m in with Midori, History of Drama. I’m working on Euripides. Are you familiar with Euripides? He was an ancient Greek—one of the ‘Big Three’ of Greek tragedy along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. He supposedly died when a dog bit him in Macedonia, but not everybody buys this. Anyhow, that’s Euripides. I like Sophocles better, but I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I really can’t say which is better.
“What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple—a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him.
“But think about it—what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that? Anyhow, that’s History of Drama. This is more or less the kind of stuff we study at the university.”
Midori’s father said nothing, but he kept his vacant eyes on me the whole time I was talking. Of course, I couldn’t tell from those eyes whether he understood anything at all I was saying.
“Peace,” I said.
After all that talk, I felt starved. I had had next to nothing for breakfast and had eaten only half my lunch. Now I was sorry I hadn’t done a better job on lunch, but feeling sorry wasn’t going to do me any good. I looked in a cabinet for something to eat, but found only a can of nori, some Vicks cough drops, and soy sauce. The paper bag was still there with cucumbers and grapefruit.
“I’m going to eat some cucumbers if you don’t mind,” I said to Midori’s father. He didn’t answer. I washed three cucumbers in the sink and dribbled a little soy sauce into a dish. Then I wrapped a cucumber in nori, dipped it in soy sauce, and gobbled it down.
“Mmm, great!” I said to Midori’s father. “Fresh, simple, smells like life. Really good cucumbers. A far more sensible food than kiwifruit.”
I polished off one cucumber and attacked the next. The sickroom echoed with the lilt of cucumbers crunching. Only after finishing the second whole cucumber was I ready to take a break. I boiled some water on the gas burner in the hall and made myself some tea.
“Would you like something to drink? Water? Juice?” I asked Midori’s father.
, he said.
“Great,” I said with a smile. “With nori?”
He gave a little nod. I cranked the bed up again. Then I cut a bite-size piece of cucumber, wrapped it with a strip of nori, stabbed the combination with a toothpick, dipped it into soy sauce, and delivered it to the patient’s waiting mouth. With almost no change of expression, Midori’s father crunched down on the piece again and again and finally swallowed it.
“How was that? Good, huh?”
, he said
“It’s good when food tastes good,” I said. “It’s kind of like proof you’re alive.”
He ended up eating the entire cucumber. When he had finished it, he wanted water, so I gave him a drink from the bottle. A few minutes later, he said he needed to pee, so I took the urine jar from under the bed and held it by the tip of his penis. Afterward I emptied the jar into the toilet and washed it out. Then I went back to the sickroom and finished my tea.