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.

"At the time of the Somersault, what was at work inside me when I said that our theology was nonsense was another theology just starting to sprout, a miserable theology that toyed with the first. Nature, which makes up the totality of this planet-the environment we humans live in, in other words-is steadily falling apart. We've gone beyond the point of no return. God as the totality of nature-including human beings-is decaying bit by bit. God is terminally ill.

"Moreover, our awareness of God as being destroyed, of God with an incurable illness, is itself a part of God. Our crumbling God, our God who's sick, is the one who makes us aware-just like a mother teaching her baby to speak: a mother who is falling apart, who's dying from an incurable disease and is talking to her baby, who is fading away along with her, telling the baby what she knew from the start would happen.

"What I'd like to say right now, based on my new theology at the time of the Somersault, is this: From our viewpoint, as infants whose fate is to die around the same time as our mother, we have the right to stand up to God and say that this wasn't part of his plan! The dying mother hears the nonsen- sical words of the feverish baby, puts them in the proper context, and returns them to the baby's mouth. It is in that mother-child dialogue that we should find mankind's true repentance, because the ones who made this happen, who destroyed the natural world, who destroyed God and gave him an incurable disease, are none other than mankind itself. Isn't this how the church of the one who will lead them to repentance, the church of the antichrist, should be constructed: through protesting to God?

"Having lost Guide I've lost the way to interpret my visions, and now- dragging the Somersault along with me-here I stand. And I have decided to restart my movement focusing on leading people to this kind of repentance.

"Just as there is no doubt that Christ's humiliating death had meaning, there must be meaning in the desperate struggle of the antichrist who has stepped into hell. Otherwise, in that first consciousness of God as He created the world, why did He structure it so that there would appear so many antichrists at the end? God is the very one who, among all the things of cre- ation, cannot be dismissed by a joke, the one existence that has absolutely no reason ever to turn a Somersault."

After finishing, Patron propped his hands on the podium, and let his shoulders relax and his head hang down as he looked absently around the audience. Dancer approached and spoke to him, but Patron shook his head and pointed listlessly with his left hand at Ogi. Ogi responded to this, and looked at Dancer, who nodded back at him. Ogi went over to stand between Dancer and Patron. Calling forth all his strength, Patron leaned forward and, looking straight ahead toward the assembled multitude, cried out, "Ladies and gentlemen, please pray for Guide. Hallelujah!"