Untitled
from The Coat that Covers Him & Other Stories
"Mother, you're not to go out. I had a dream."
The old lady tightened her hold on her handbag, as if her son's words threatened her possession of it. "You and your dreams. What dream?"
"A dream. You were walking down the street and suddenly you vanished. When you didn't come home I called the police. They came to the door, dozens of them, hundreds, all in uniform. Like flies. Like maggots. 'Come with us,' they said. I had no choice but to follow them. We walked and walked. At last we came to an open manhole. 'That's where your mother is,' said one of the officers."
The old lady shuddered. "There are no open manholes in Osaka."
"No."
"Ask fifty people what a dream means, you'll get fifty different answers."
"Don't leave me. When you leave... strange thoughts come to me."
"What strange thoughts?"
"I can't describe them. Like my mind is not my own but someone else's."
"If you slept at night instead of roaming the apartment at all hours - "
"I'd sleep if I could."
"If you don't sleep when do you dream?"
"It's my dreams that keep me awake."
"I won't be late."
Left to himself, Osamu wandered from the hall into the kitchen. Something in his demeanor suggested someone not altogether familiar with his surroundings. He was a big, shambling man, fleshy and red-faced, his arms and legs seeming too long for his trunk, just as his shapeless nose seemed to large, and his lips too thick, for his narrow face. His tank-top undershirt, more a rag than a garment, left most of his chest exposed, revealing all too plainly the ruin that results when a well-toned muscular body is allowed to deteriorate. Leaning over the sink and gazing through squinting eyes out the window, he took in a whole panorama of apartment blocks just like his own, shabby, factory-like buildings - remnants, one might have said, of an earlier, now vanished, and not particularly distinguished civilization.
"I'm not sick. It's all nonsense," he said aloud. He turned away from the window. The bright sunshine hurt his eyes. "Only May, and already as hot as mid-summer. What'll it be like in July?"
He opened the refrigerator door, closed it almost immediately, and quitted the kitchen. For a moment he stood irresolute in the hall before proceeding into his room. Though quite alone in the house, he shut the door behind him. The blind was down, but even in the semi-darkness one could see that its occupant had no regard for neatness - or else, overwhelmed by circumstances, had lost control over even the most intimate aspects of his environment. He lay down on the unmade bed and, hands folded under his head, stared up at the ceiling.
***
What was the nature of the illness that had so undermined Osamu Isobe? If his late father could see him now! What hopes the elder Isobe had had for his son! "You," he said, on more than one occasion, "are that rare individual who can be anything he wants to be. Not like me. My fate was sealed the day I was born. The eldest son of a pharmacist, I took over the family pharmacy. I was born for it, bred for it, never so much as questioned it - until it was too late, by which time I had been so maimed, shrunken and misshapen by my upbringing that I was absolutely unsuited for anything else. Well, never mind me, the question is you. Is there anything the higher powers have denied you? All right, you're not the handsomest young man the gods ever fashioned, it's hardly likely a son of mine would be, ha ha! - but with your brains and your athletic grace you can do without good looks! Think big, son, think big, that's my advice to you, don't settle for less than the best - and don't give less than your best!"
Perhaps if his father had lived, things would have been different. But he died just when Osamu, at eighteen, needed a father's guidance more than ever. "Think big" is good advice, valuable encouragement, but big thoughts need a focus, and this Osamu on his own seemed incapable of giving them. Soon after winning admission to Osaka University's pre-med program, he decided he didn't want to be a doctor after all. He switched to philosophy and then, in pursuit of Hegel's "world spirit," to history. He left university without taking a degree. He traveled, hitch-hiking from one end of Europe to the other. Back in Japan, he joined the Self-Defense Forces, and in 1993 was assigned to Cambodia as part of the peace-keeping mission there. A Khmer girl he had an affair with got pregnant and insisted he was the father. It was possible, but hardly certain. When his tour of duty ended he gave the girl money - a fortune, by local standards - and left, vaguely promising to return someday.
He quit the Self-Defense Forces and went back to university, this time as an engineering student. He had seen poverty close up, and wanted to help, but to really make a contribution he would need practical skills. The Third World needed roads, bridges, infrastructure. Six months into his studies he realized he had made a bad choice. Engineering was not for him. He read about a pioneering anti-poverty program in Bangladesh, in which small, unsecured loans were advanced to village women who used the money to start small businesses. Its philosophy was intriguing, and its early success most promising. Perhaps he should study economics. But by then he had begun to feel the first symptoms of his mysterious illness.
He senses were assailed by strange smells, strange sounds, strange sights. They were indescribable, utterly beyond his experience and his vocabulary, not horrible or overpowering, but distracting, puzzling. What were they? Could they be intimations of other worlds? But if so why should he, Osamu Isobe, have been singled out to receive them?
One night he had a dream in which a plane crashed into a mountain. Five days later, to his astonishment, he saw his dream on NHK News. The crash scene - in Switzerland, as it happened - was identical to the dream scene. Not long afterwards he dreamed of a child's severed head, and within a week the news had produced that too: a murdered and decapitated boy in Kobe. Then he dreamed his mother was ill. For years he had had only the most sporadic contact with her. He telephoned. Sure enough, she had pneumonia, "as if anybody cares." "I'll be right over." He moved in with her, nursed her through her illness, and stayed because to be alone with his unearthly powers, or perceptions, or whatever they were, terrified him.
He thought now of his Khmer girl and the child who might be his. How odd that these powers of his should be beyond his command. They intimated to him what they wanted him to know, not what he wanted to know; he could not interrogate them, and on the subject of the girl, they were silent - defiantly so, he thought. Mockingly so.
He flew to Phnom Penh and trekked to her native village. She had vanished without a trace. There were people in the village who remembered him, but none who could give him a clue to her whereabouts. Probably whoring in some Phnom Penh alley, they said, if not dead of AIDS. The child, he learned, was a boy.
***
"Why don't you work?" demanded his mother. "What's the matter with you?"
For two years after his return from Cambodia he bounced from one odd job to another - convenience store clerk, security guard, hospital orderly, construction worker. His last job was at a gas station. When the station went self-serve, he was cut.
"I'm sick."
"What's wrong with you?"
"My head's not right."
"What do you expect us to live on? My pension? It's barely enough for me."
"All right, I'll leave."
"Stay. We'll manage."
He dreamed of an earthquake. Should he contact the authorities? A prior evacuation would save lives - hundreds, thousands. But who would believe him? Besides, his dream did not pinpoint the location. A grim, dusty place where they spoke a language unknown to him. That hardly narrowed it down. Why were the higher powers tormenting him like this? Three days later a city in Iran was leveled. Thirty thousand dead.
***
He awoke from a shallow doze. Was that the phone ringing? Impossible - the phone never rang. It must be a neighbor's, or a dream. But it rang and rang, demanding that he rouse himself. Heavily, wearily, he got to his feet and stumbled to the kitchen, where the phone was. His head ached. He raised a hand to his forehead, then lowered it to his unshaven cheek. "Hello." The line was dead. He replaced the receiver, and the ringing began all over again. "Hello."
"Isobe-san?"
"Yes."
"This is Captain Fujiwara of the Osaka police, Tennoji precinct. I'm sorry to trouble you. It's about your mother. She - "
"My mother! Is she hurt?"
"No, no, she's fine. That is... Hm. I wonder if we could trouble you to come to the station."
"But what is it? What's happened to her?"
"Please come to the station. It is... hm!... difficult to discuss on the telephone. Please don't worry. Your mother is healthy and safe."
"All right, I'll be right over. Where are you?"
The directions given, Osamu hung up, threw a jacket over his ragged undershirt, and raced out of the apartment, all traces of his shambling somnolence gone.
His mother at the police station! What could she have done? He remembered his dream about the manhole. He had warned her not to go out, and here she was in trouble. "As soon as this is over," he said to himself, "I'm leaving. Where? I don't know. To do what?" The elevator deposited him in the lobby, and he strode rapidly out the front door into the glaring May sunshine.
The police station was just across Tennoji Park, a ten-minute walk.
"Isobe-san. Please come in. Thank you for -"
"Where is she? What is this all about?"
"Please don't upset yourself." Captain Fujiwara was a balding, nondescript man of perhaps Osamu's age. "Sit down. Your mother is resting on a couch in the inner office. A lady officer is with her."
"Lady officer?"
"Your mother," said Captain Fujiwara, reddening slightly, "was taken into custody for... well... I don't quite know how to tell you this... she..." The captain lowered his eyes. "She propositioned an undercover police officer."
"She propo - " Osamu gaped at the captain in blank astonishment. A telephone rang shrilly. Osamu started. The telephone was on the desk. Fujiwara snatched the receiver. "Fujiwara. Yes. Yes. I see. All right, that's fine." By the time he hung up, Osamu had recovered a measure of self-possession. "What do you mean, she propositioned an undercover police officer?"
"I mean she... propositioned him. Solicited him. You know... for sex."
"For sex," Osamu echoed stupidly.
"She offered to take him to a love hotel. For 6000 yen."
"To a love hotel. To a love hotel! Officer, my mother is seventy-one years old!"
"I know," murmured Fujiwara, hanging his head, as embarrassed as though the shame were as much his as anyone's. "I know. But it is as I say. And... well, it's not the first time."
"Not the first time?"
"She is... I am sorry to cause you pain... she is known in the neighborhood." Neither man seemed to know what to say. Fujiwara at last broke the silence. "Shall I take you to her?"
"Yes, please. But officer... Captain Fujiwara... please, understand. This is... if what you say is true - my God! - it's all my fault. How can I have been so blind? She had me on her hands, I've been ill and couldn't work... well, I could have, I could have worked, but my illness... a strange illness! And she, my mother, had only her pension. She warned me repeatedly it wasn't enough. She went out, I never knew where, I never asked, I didn't want to know. Do you know, officer, that in my dreams I foresee the future? I dreamed of the Iranian earthquake three days before it happened. Only I didn't know it was in Iran. Other events too, I've foreseen. The Kobe boy's murder. The plane crash in Switzerland. It's a mysterious power I have, God knows where it comes from - God knows I didn't ask for it! - but what's going on right in front of my eyes, that I don't see!"
Captain Fujiwara nodded. "Your condition," he said, "is commoner than you might suppose."
"Don't be hard on her, please. It's all my fault."
***
The phone rang. Three days had passed since Osamu took his mother home from the police station. During that time, mother and son had exchanged scarcely a word. They had scarcely seen each other, the old woman shutting herself up in her room and Osamu rarely stirring from his.
What was he to do? He must get some sort of job, that was plain; their physical survival depended on it; just see what his sulking withdrawal from the world had led to! He hated the thought of going out as much as he hated the thought of staying in - but go out he must. First, though, he must have a word with his mother. To Captain Fujiwara he had confessed that the fault was his; he now owed his mother, whose shame must be killing her by inches, a similar confession. Why had he not made it already? What was he waiting for?
The ringing phone seemed to throw him back three days in time, to that awful summons to the police station. Repressing nausea, he pushed open his door and fought his way, as though through air that had thickened on purpose to oppose his progress, to the kitchen.
"Yes."
"Is this Mr. Osamu Isobe?"
"Yes."
Her name, the caller said in a brisk, businesslike voice, was Fusako Otani, she was a producer for OBS-TV, and was it true, as Captain Fujiwara of the Tennoji police station had told her, that he foretold the future? Without waiting for an answer she proceeded to explain why she was calling: she wanted him as a guest for Setsuko's Den, hosted by that most famous of TV talk show celebrity-hostesses, Setsuko Mori. Had Osamu been more alert to such nuances, he would have been struck by the woman's tone: she was not so much extending an invitation as notifying him of his selection. His acceptance seemed, as far as she was concerned, a foregone conclusion.
"Who was it?"
His mother stood before him. She looked ghastly. With makeup on, she looked ten years younger than her age; now, not only not made up but having scarcely touched food in three days, she looked ten years older. And men paid to have sex with her!
The phone rang again. "Yes."
"Isobe-san? This is Fujiwara of the Tennoji police. Listen, I may have solved your employment problem! Do you know Setsuko's Den, the TV show? Who doesn't know it, eh? Ha ha!" He seemed immensely pleased with himself, hardly the same man as the modestly grave and self-effacing officer of three days before. "The producer, Fusako Otani, called, as she sometimes does, to ask if I'd come across anybody interesting for the program, and I gave her your name. Your dreams - that's right up their alley! They'll pay you good money, and you never know what it could lead to! An appearance on a show like that can launch your career! Anyway, she should be calling you sometime within the next few days."
"She already called."
"She already called! Well! She lost no time. Take that as a measure of her interest. When do you appear?"
"Never."
"Pardon?"
"Never. Goodbye."
"Who was that?" asked his mother.
"Nobody. Listen, mother, about what happened - "
"How else were we to live? You weren't working - "
"I know. It was all my fault."
"And what are we to do now? What are we to do?"
Osamu closed his eyes and bowed his head. "I don't know."