These experiences carved into my life a fundamental definition of violence that reading Blake has made me acutely aware of. There is something inside the body that resembles a condenser. When the electrical charge exceeds its capacity, the mechanism begins to warp and, as the strain increases, breaks apart from the inside out. The only way to control the distortion is to find some means of discharging the violence to the outside from time to time. I wondered whether the behavior I still referred to as “leap,” using my name for it as a child, wasn't a sort of drill or exercise that anticipated the future while my own charge was still relatively low? So far, I had done nothing even close to removing the hatchet at my hip and shouting back at the governor and his party as my father might have done that day. Did that mean that I was heading for the moment when I, too, would relinquish my body's mechanism to destruction from the inside following a scream of indignation? I was, after all, only one year older than my father's age when he died. Not long ago, as Eeyore lay on the couch recovering from a seizure, his face darkened with exhaustion and fever, I discovered something in his face that reminded me of my father. I was drawn to examine my own face in the mirror; I had always felt that I alone among my brothers didn't look like my father, but with my image of Eeyore's face as a guide I was able to see a resemblance to a photograph taken shortly after the governor's tour, the last photo of my father's life.
But that summer when the war ended, alone and away from the eyes of the other children, in the river in what may have been a dream, I had resolved in my imagination an approach to dealing with violence that was neither being destroyed by it internally nor releasing it savagely to the outside world. If I had to express in words the passions that live in my memory of that moment, I could hardly do better than the Blake verse I have already quoted:
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out—.
And then:
—his chains are loose his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the oppressors scourge
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning.
Eeyore continued to commute between home and the occupational therapy center and presently he was put to work assembling the paper boxes used by the Nakamura-ya restaurant in Shinjuku for take-out picnic lunches. When spoken to by one of the teachers or a handicapped adult he replied politely, forming his words with deliberate care. At recess, he listened carefully and applauded when one of the little girls played the piano or sang a song in the rumpus room. Sometimes he even corrected her fingering or showed her a chord to play with the melody until before long she and the others were relying on him. Observing this side of Eeyore's behavior, the teacher in charge summoned my wife for a conference. Eeyore was considerate of his comrades and worked hard at his job, but at the end of the day, when it was time to clean up, he would seize a broom or a mop as if he were eager to get started and then stand there doing nothing. Was he lazy, or was this kind of work simply too much for him?
Shocked, my wife immediately began training Eeyore to clean at home. My son was by this time a large man, tall and hulkingly built, yet I observed him puzzling over fallen leaves on the stepping stones in the garden, or scattering leaves he had swept carefully into a corner. Now that it had been noticed by someone on the outside, it was impossible not to see that something was lacking in the competency training we had given Eeyore at home.
One day when my wife was groaning with a cold and a toothache, I went in her place to wait for Eeyore at the bus stop in front of the therapy center. I got there early, and began walking up and down the street to keep warm in the chill wind that was blowing as the sun went down. There was another reason I preferred not to linger at the sign in front of the bus stop. A woman fifteen or so years younger than I was already standing there; her corpulent body was wrapped in a bulky overcoat buttoned up to her chin, her face was sallow, and she gave off an air of enclosed, unapproachable melancholy that told me right away she must be a mother with a child at the facility.
Recently, there had been two deaths at Eeyore's special school. One of the children had gone with his father to watch the parade of portable shrines at a neighborhood festival, eaten some grilled beef, and gone to sleep with his father lying at his side. The next morning he had appeared to sleep late, and when his father had gone in to wake him just before it was time to leave for school, he was already cold. Reading the principal's announcement, I was moved by the quiet time the boy had spent with his father on his last evening, and by what felt to me like the merest whisper that was his death, like a faint light going out at a great distance. The other child, who wore his hair in a Mohawk that looked as though he had been his own barber, I remember with a smile; having reached a point where he was able to bathe himself, he had suffered an epileptic seizure when he was alone in the tub and had drowned.
When news of one or the other of these deaths reached the school my wife happened to be there, getting ready for the annual bazaar. The discussion turned to organizing a consolation visit to the family and a young mother had said, “Let's make that on a volunteer basis—what happened was a blessing!”
When my wife reported the young mother's words to me she communicated not so much disapproval as a feeling of misery she shared with the younger woman. I suggested to her, as she appeared to be turning the words over in her mind, that the young mother had spoken in that instant out of the despair that repeatedly renews itself and is always unexpected; if she hadn't cared about the community of handicapped children why would she have volunteered to work at the bazaar? What she had said was better forgotten if possible—no doubt the speaker would remember the line longer than anyone who had heard it.
For no good reason, I had the feeling that the woman leaning despondently against the bus stop sign in her bulky overcoat was that same young mother. As I walked past the entrance to the center for the second or third time, I ran into three even younger women peering in at the main building through the gate. They appeared to be a team and were dressed alike, in suede coats and reddish-brown boots, a fashion choice designed to accent the reddish tint they all wore in their hair—stylish, vivacious girls. As I passed them they were commenting emphatically, as though speaking among themselves but clearly with the intent of influencing passersby, “Do you believe how fancy it is!” “Like a palace or something!”
As I returned along the same course, past the center to the crosswalk at the intersection and across the street, I thought idly about the curious remarks I had just heard. Then I realized there was nothing curious about them, or the least bit unclear. The young women's observations about the building being too fancy had seemed strange to me because I had assumed they were here as parents intending to enroll their own handicapped children. On the contrary, they were almost certainly critical of municipal policy on welfare facilities and were reconnoitering the center before organizing a protest. If that were the case, the remarks they were grandstanding to anyone within earshot made perfect sense: my wife in particular had been thrilled the first time she had seen the welfare center; it was a beautiful building.
At just this moment, Eeyore happened to appear at the front gate and, as I watched from across the street, was surrounded by the three young women and began responding to them with what appeared from his gestures to be his customary politeness. I continued on my circle past the school to the corner, across the street and back again without even quickening my step, observing the scene from a distance. Eeyore was talking, shaking his head slowly as he spoke, and then he stopped: hunching his shoulders and thrusting out his chest he appeared to stiffen into something as implacable as a wall and went silent
, his head hanging. As if they hadn't noticed, the three women went on talking at him, preventing him from moving away. By now, other children had emerged from the center, but the women continued to direct their inquiry at Eeyore alone.
I quickened my step, but before I could reach Eeyore the doleful mother who had been waiting at the bus stop had rushed up the street to where he stood with the other women. During the short argument that ensued, the mother in the bulky overcoat had her arm around Eeyore's shoulder like a giant bird and appeared to be pulling at him as if to deliver him from the women. At that point I arrived and the young women hurried away at the sight of me. With one arm around Eeyore and the other around a girl who had also emerged from the center, her face darkly blotched in agitation, the mother glared at me and said, “You just stood there and watched! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Eeyore returned my gaze with a look of prim superiority that made it appear he agreed with his friend's mother wholeheartedly. I bowed and expressed my thanks and felt as if my son were being entrusted to me reluctantly.
On the bus I tried to learn what Eeyore had been asked by the women but he remained grimly silent. The mother who had hurried to his aid had taken the same bus and, in a tone of voice that had every passenger listening, offered me an explanation: “Those women are fighting to stop a welfare center from being built next to the town houses where they live. They were here today to reconnoiter. They interfere with construction, they write letters to the paper about depriving their children of space to play, a while ago they offered to donate seventy-five thousand dollars and to volunteer their own time to care for the handicapped. They promise to do all that and more in return for not having a welfare center in their neighborhood! They treat our children as if they were unclean!”
My wife joined me in questioning Eeyore at home but he declined to say a word about what he had been asked. It wasn't even clear that the women were part of the movement to stop a welfare center. Four or five days later we saw the construction site in question on the evening news. As work resumed, a bell was rung to alert the protesters in the neighboring apartment building, and housewives hurried down the fire escapes. As they shouted protests at the city workers on the other side of a chain-link fence with their children joining in beside them, their standard of living was plain to see in their expressions, their gestures, their grooming—clearly, the three young women in suede coats and leather boots had not “dressed up” when they had come to see the center. Listening to the commentary, Eeyore had exclaimed, “Gosh! Are they against building a new center? That's terrible!” I took the opportunity to ask him yet again what the three women in front of the center had asked him or said to him that had made him hang his head in anger or maybe embarrassment. “That's enough! Let's stop!” he said emphatically, and looked away. My wife had been watching, and when she spoke she also seemed to be subtly avoiding my eye: “The parent who helped Eeyore said they saw our children as unclean, but I think they feel they're being attacked by something frightening. I think they feel their lives are being invaded by something that terrifies them. And I think their feelings will infect their children. From what we just saw it looks as though it's already happened. What if it gets to the point where terrified children start throwing stones. I'm worried about the plastic plate in Eeyore's head. He may have to start going to the center in a helmet the way he did ten years ago. When he graduates this time, he'll be going to that building they're trying to stop… .”
In my novel The Pinch Runner Memorandum, an accident in the special education class at elementary school launches the protagonist on a campaign to train his and others’ disabled children to defend themselves. The hyperbole of the speech he delivers is in keeping with the “grotesque realism” that underlies the novel's comic tone:
The only real help a teacher can give to children venturing out into the world is to hold society up for them to see and to show them, “Here it is, kiddies, and here are the places to watch out for!” Is that possible? And will our teachers deign to do that for our children? Because all they're being taught here now is how to keep their arms and legs out of harm's way—they're being prepared to survive in some corner of future society as imbeciles that require only minimal looking after! And who knows, maybe the society of the future will adapt our approach to suit its own priorities and teach them how to take care of their whole bodies instead of just their arms and legs, to keep them out of the way, you get my drift, by killing themselves, yes! Yes! Yes! Wouldn't that be something! So if we're truly concerned about our children, we must teach them how to arm themselves against the force in future society that will seek to relegate them to that outlying corner. And this will become ever more critical because the number of children like ours is bound to increase in quantum leaps so long as this planet continues to be contaminated, and when children like our children multiply throughout the population until they are everywhere you look, they will be seen as symbols of everything negative about the future and become the focus of mass hatred! The hatred of the enfeebled and the discriminated against who have had to survive the threat represented by our children! And some of that weakened and excluded race will eventually rise up—what are we doing about showing our children how to defend themselves when that happens!
In the opening of the novel, which is similarly overwritten, a handicapped child gets lost in Tokyo Station; in describing the father's franticness as he tries to find his son I quoted lines from Blake. As he searches for his lost child in the throng of people at the station the father feels that he is the one who has been abandoned:
“Father! Where in the world did you go when you abandoned me?” I whispered the words to myself, and the next thing I knew I was speaking as though in a prayer for that occasion only, as if I were an atheist seeking help from someone whose identity was unknown to me (from my Father, perhaps?—just joking!): Father! Father! Where are you going? O do not walk so fast / Speak, father, speak to your little boy. / Or else I shall be lost. I walked all over that station in circles, faster and faster until I was out of breath and almost running, chasing the person who was trying to abandon me, in pursuit of my father maybe?—just joking!
At the time I was writing this book, two or three years before it was actually published, in the winter of Eeyore's tenth year, something similar to the incident I have just described actually happened to us. Except that Eeyore didn't simply wander off: a certain party took him from us and then left him stranded. I chose not to use the incident in the novel in just the way it had happened because I was afraid, paranoid perhaps, that it might inspire some reader to try the same thing. Wishing to avoid coverage in the press for the same reason, I did not go to the police. To be sure, my wife would have reported the incident if we hadn't located Eeyore by the end of the first day. And I wouldn't have tried to stop her.
At the time, my wife lived in fear that my paranoia might drive me to defend myself with a degree of violence that would have to be considered unjustified even though the other party was the aggressor. I'm not trying to shift responsibility for my paranoia at the time toward someone else. What I will say in fairness is that it was triggered by a tenacious campaign against me in the form of letters and telephone calls that had been going on for four or five years already and was a long way from being over. In the beginning, I had assumed that the letter writer, whose name and address I knew, and the telephone caller at the other end of the silent line when I answered his calls five or six times a day, were different people. As I also assumed the phone calls were the work of more than one person, I even felt that they were an expression of hostility directed at me by society in general. Later, I learned that the silent phone calls, not all of them perhaps but most, were from the letter writer.
I prefer not to go into details of what was already a nightmare of long duration. I will say that the person behind the letters and calls was a student in the commerce department at a well-known university who wrote to me requesting that I facilitate his debut as
a professional critic, and suggested I might begin by helping him free his pen from the writer's block that kept him at his desk from morning to night without producing a single line. The arrogance of his letters, which never faltered from beginning to end, was possibly their only merit. Before long, he was addressing them not only to me but also to my wife and fulminating against us for attending to the needs of a handicapped child while dismissing the request of a healthy person. Our thoughts were frequently occupied by the letters and phone calls for days at a time, yet the student demanded to know as he maintained his attack on the family why he should be the only one to suffer. When he began hinting at suicide, I wrote him a letter suggesting that whether he planned to continue his studies or find a job, his first priority must be to regain his mental health, and urged him to see a psychiatrist. This resulted in a new pattern of phone calls that made it clear to me that the caller and the letter writer were one and the same person: the phone would ring from morning to early evening—while the student's parents were out of the house, I assumed—and when I answered, a voice would whisper, before the line went dead, “Take your own sick ass to a mental hospital!” When my wife answered and reported that I was not at home, the voice would ask her questions, for example, had she read in the papers about the man whose head was bashed in with a blunt weapon by a stranger sitting next to him on the train? It got to the point where my wife and I would steel ourselves every time the phone rang; the situation reminded me of another telephone attack more than ten years earlier, and reviving memories of that politically motivated assault drove me even deeper into paranoia.