The Boys' Farm
Preceding episodes at http://michaelhoffman.squarespace.com/the-boys-farm-part-i/
Birnbaum: A Novel of Inner Space http://imcbook.net/MoreFiction/FICTION1.html
Bend Your Proud Neck http://michaelhoffman.squarespace.com/bend-your-proud-neck/?SSScrollPosition=0
***
IV
The simplicity of Dr. Arai's appearance belied the complexity of his character. His face, though blandly pleasing, was so unremarkable, left so vague an impression, that even people who had known him for many years would have been at a loss if asked to describe him. His one distinguishing feature was a tiny wart in the middle of his forehead, and Keiko had once joked to her husband that if not for it she would not know him if she chanced to meet him outside his office. "It's his third eye," Ryunosuke had quipped in reply.
When he first knew him Ryunosuke had thought of him as "a man of about fifty," and now, nearly twenty years later, he still thought of him that way. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, rather soft from lack of exercise, neither elegant nor slovenly. His thin graying hair did not make him look old, any more than his fresh, unwrinkled face made him look young. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, which in the course of an interview he would take off and put on any number of times, seemingly unconsciously. He said little, and when he did speak it was in a low, murmuring voice that made his words difficult to make out. He cleared his throat frequently.
And yet as a therapist he was remarkably successful. Something about him put people at ease. They would spend fifteen minutes with him and leave feeling better. They didn't know why. Neither did the therapist himself, who did not conceal the fact that his success puzzled him. It even unsettled him. He knew only too well that he did not have the wisdom people attributed to him, and one of these days, he thought, whatever inexplicable power he possessed would desert him, and then his downfall would be abrupt and awful.
Dr. Arai was a bachelor. He lived alone. He had always lived alone. His younger sister, who he loved and who adored him, begged him to move in with her after her husband left her, but he was not to be persuaded. "A man's home is his shell," he liked to say, accompanying the mild witticism, one of his very few, with a timid smile. He could no more conceive of having someone live in the same house with him than he could imagine someone joining him inside his shirt or his trousers.
"Don't you ever get... you know, lonely?" Noguchi had once asked him.
"No."
"Don't you ever" - they had had a few drinks; otherwise he would never have dreamed of putting the question - "don't you ever feel the need for a woman?"
"No. Never. It's a peculiarity of my nature, I suppose."
"Very peculiar indeed."
"Once..."
"Yes? Once?"
"Once I did desire someone..."
"And?"
"She died."
"Oh! I'm sorry."
"I was eight. She was seven."
Without his expression changing in the slightest, Arai's face seemed to close, seemed to say, "Let's not pursue this, if you don't mind." Later, recalling the scene, Noguchi could not be sure how much of it had actually occurred and how much he had imagined.
***
Was the failure Arai had so long dreaded finally upon him? What made it worse was that it concerned Susumu Noguchi, the son of a man he might almost call his friend, and a boy, moreover, whose progress through life he had watched with a more than professional - with an almost paternal - interest.
To him, in the end, had fallen the responsibility of telling Susumu what it seemed he would have to know sooner or later, preferably sooner. Ryunosuke had emerged from his talk with the boy's teacher so overwhelmed by the enormity of it all that, clutching the "Black Rainbow" rolled up in his right hand, he staggered rather than walked home, and then, when Susumu met him at the door with the news that Keiko had called to say she wouldn't be home for dinner after all, his sense of being alone against circumstances that were simply too much for him was such, though only for a moment, that - as he later confessed to Arai - "If at that moment there had been a gun within reach I think I would have grabbed it and blown my brains out."
"What's that?" asked Susumu, pointing to the drawing, and Ryunosuke rallied sufficiently to explain that Mr. Obara had liked his picture very much and thought he had real potential as an artist. "What do you think?" he asked the boy. "Would you like to take drawing lessons?"
"I don't know."
"Well, think about it. Mr. Obara thinks you're really good."
He said nothing about the other matter, but on the pretext of having some work to attend to before supper slipped into his study and, sinking into his chair, dialed Arai's number.
"Keiko's forgotten the kid's existence altogether. I'm all alone with this. I have no idea... no idea... My God..."
"Calm down." It was the only unequivocal advice Arai ever gave, perhaps the only unequivocal advice he had it in him to give; he seemed to feel that calm was the one thing missing from the world, and that all would be well if only it could be restored. Oddly enough, his vacuous exhortation was effective; it actually did seem to calm people down.
"I'm sorry, I'm hysterical," said Ryunosuke with a forced laugh. "I don't know what came over me."
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, thank you. I'll tell him tonight."
"If there's anything I can do..."
"What you've done for us already is more than I will ever, ever be able to... to... " There were tears in his eyes. "Goodbye. I'll call you tomorrow."
He did call the next day, but not, as he had planned, to tell the therapist how his talk with Susumu had gone but to confess that he had been unable to broach the subject after all. "I can't, I - I just can't do it!" He realized now, he said, what a colossal mistake it had been to name the child Susumu - "I should have listened to you." How could he possibly explain to the boy an impulse he himself no longer understood? Would Susumu think of himself as some sort of grotesque reincarnation of the tortured and murdered older brother whose existence he (presumably) did not so much as suspect? How would a child of nine assimilate all that? When Keiko came home around midnight, slightly drunk and so pleased with herself over some business triumph she had scored that it was hopeless to try and distract her, he felt a stab of something almost like hatred for her. How could she carry on as if nothing had happened? Did she ever think of the dead child? She never mentioned him. Neither did he, of course, but the child was never, not for a moment, absent from his waking thoughts, and at night, not every night but often, he dreamed of him. And where was the murderer now? He had been twelve at the time; he'd be a man of twenty-five now, "rehabilitated." He imagined himself seeking him out, confronting him, reminding him of his crime in case he'd forgotten it, in case the rehabilitators had rearranged his neurons and synapses to make him forget. Perhaps he had a child of his own... Just the other night Keiko had shaken him awake. "You screamed," she said. His body was soaked in sweat. "What were you dreaming?" "I don't remember.” In fact he remembered all too well: in his dream he inflicted the same tortures on the murderer's child that the murderer had inflicted on Susumu.
"What should I say to him, doctor? For God's sake, tell me what to say!"
"Perhaps I should have a word with him..."
Ryunosuke sensed the weariness in the therapist's voice, the reluctance to take upon himself a responsibility that properly belonged to the parents, the contempt - no, contempt was too strong a word, Arai was too familiar with human inadequacy to be seriously contemptuous of it, but mingled with his sympathy was the perception that people tended to resign themselves a little too easily to their own helplessness; of Noguchi in particular, more might have been expected. "No, no, I'll do it, I'm his father..." That, Ryunosuke knew, is what he should have said; it was on the tip of his tongue; but in a surge of emotion he heard himself say instead, "Oh, doctor, would you?"
***
The next segment will appear Sunday August 24
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