Ikuo's playing threw cold water on Ogi's excitement. After running through the five short pieces, with brief intervals between them, he remained very still in front of the piano, while Dancer stood motionless in the center of the dance floor. Ogi felt the two of them had just shared something very special-something from which he was excluded.

15: YEARS OF EXHAUSTION

1

A few days after the memorial service, Kizu awoke in the morning to the sound of a feeble sigh-his own voice, he realized-and knew it wasn't the first time this had happened. Snuggled in his blanket, he felt a balance deep within him collapse, giving rise to this voice that circumvented his con- sciousness. This time it had come out as a protracted ahhhh, and he knew he was shouldering an exhaustion that had hardened and would never dissipate.

That sigh, then, echoed with a sense of his own body trying to comfort itself Alter a while he got out of bed to use the bathroom. Before he sat down on the toilet, Kizu looked out the window at the wych elm; strangely enough, it had regained the vivid softness it had had a week or two before, possibly as a result of the drizzle that had fallen all through the night. As he stood up, the large American-style toilet bowl looked-to use the first words that came to him-as if it were dyed a shining vermilion that dissolved the large pile of tarlike feces. Had all the energy he'd accumulated in his anus and intestines by exposing them to sunlight last summer now made his feces shine? No. It's come at last, Kizu thought. A thin sad smile came to his face. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror and flushed away the contents of the bowl.

As he walked back to his bed, Kizu looked out at the wych elm again; though the rain continued, beyond the branches he could spy a patch of light blue sky. But this blue sky, over the soft leaves washed by the rain, didn't have the usual effect on him. His cancer was back. He had long since come to terms with the fact that it was only a matter of time. And knowing this he'd come to Japan to start a new life. But up till now he'd tried to avoid facing any tan- gible signals his body might be sending him. Or at least, he realized, he'd postponed acknowledging them.

But now he could no longer ignore the cancer. For quite some time he'd felt something wrong inside him; was it now going to accelerate? Would he soon be racked with unspeakable pain? What held Kizu's attention was less the thought of pain-though of course this too was one way to avoid think- ing about it-but thoughts of how much, as long as he was able to be up and about, he wanted to continue his physical relationship with Ikuo-at the same time, of course, not doing anything to dampen Ikuo's enthusiasm for work- ing for Patron. He wanted to be close to the track Ikuo was running along, while still accomplishing his own goals. What was necessary now was get- ting a sense of how many days he had left to live his new life with Ikuo and Patron, as well as the best ways to cope with the pain once it began.

The director of Kizu's research institute had written him a letter of introduction to a local doctor, so Kizu telephoned the clinic and made an appointment. What he was really hoping for, though, was less a physical checkup than for the doctor to grasp the principle he'd committed himself to-the decision to live in a symbiotic relationship with his disease. Know- ing the director of the institute would be a definite advantage here.

When he went in for his appointment, Kizu spoke to the doctor about his own past illnesses and then about his brother's cancer, all the details from the first occurrence to his death. He also told the doctor how, from the time his own cancer was first detected, he felt swept along by an unstoppable course of treatment, something he now wanted at all costs to avoid. Could you pos- sibly, he asked, just ascertain that it's cancer by using traditional methods and then help me live with it at home?

Kizu was full of apprehension as he related his somewhat self-centered desires, but to his surprise the doctor agreed. Or at least he consented to ex- amine him as his patient wanted.

Once the doctor had listened to his hopes, Kizu grew mellow and said, as he got dressed, "I think my dark mood of the last few years may have been a psychological expression of my cancer. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but for the past six months I've felt so utterly positive it's as if I'm a young man all over again. I want to hold on to that feeling for the time I have left.

For a year, if that's possible. Just to live a normal life for a year-without any operations, taking medicine when the pain gets to be too much, and, if I can, continuing to paint. Even if I can't do that, I want to live on my own and watch the activities of my young friend. Do you think I have a year left?"

The doctor was evasive, saying that it was possible, as far as today's checkup showed. But he wasn't at all indifferent to Kizu's hopes.

"You are an American citizen, so after the pain starts I can be more free in prescribing medicine for you than I would be with a Japanese," the doctor said. "I'll be getting in touch with the surgeon who first operated on you in New Jersey. That's where I met your friend the professor who introduced you to me." After saying this, the doctor, who was much younger than Kizu, be- gan addressing him as Professor too. "You may not have a lot of time left, Professor, but you should be able to enjoy it to the fullest. Keep your spirits up! I feel like you've taught me that."

Kizu wondered about the childish enthusiasm of this statement. If my cancer can be fought through an operation or radiation therapy or medicine, he thought, even if it just means letting the doctor get his way, shouldn't he have challenged me to put up a good fight against my disease? Isn't he giving in too easily to my requests, implying-after just a simple examination--that my case is hopeless and the cancer will never go into remission?

"When you palpated my rectum your finger didn't seem to reach to the place where the cancer is," Kizu said, in a mischievous, sour-grapes sort of way. "Does this mean that when I have anal sex the penis won't hit the part that hurts?"

"Well, you can see how long my finger is," the doctor said, his earlier openness to Kizu now vanished.

In the taxi on the way home, though, Kizu couldn't forget what he'd said to tease the doctor. Well, he told himself, at least the hospital didn't grab me in its claws! But then he felt peeved: Was it really all right to announce so casually that he had terminal cancer? Not that he wanted to pin his hopes on some doctor newly returned from America and his latest high-tech machin- ery who might tell him that no, he didn't have cancer. Before long his own words came back to haunt him. There was no reason for him to suppress them.

Soon after he started teaching at the university in New Jersey, he had had an affair with a Jewish woman whom he later married. Her name was Naomi, and she'd lived with her former husband in Kobe; when he met her she had moved to New York and was writing her dissertation on the his- tory of comparative art, and Kizu helped her decipher some of the brush writing in an illustrated Muromachi-period book. To celebrate finishing that work they had dinner together, with some wine, and when he was waiting at the bus stop under an enormous hickory tree to see her off on her bus back to New York, they kissed. Kizu took the first step, but she responded enthusiastically. Naomi was a large woman, taller than Kizu, and she held his head to steady it as they kissed intimately-not the other way around.

Kizu was still young and his penis soon rose up and pressed against her belly.

As they waited for the bus on the boulevard in front of the university Naomi told him, after giving it a lot of thought, that she wouldn't mind going back to his apartment again.