by Asa Nonami
"Doctor, you know what I've been thinking?"
"No, what?"
"I've been thinking about kurabayapunikuria."
"What's that?"
This flaccid-faced woman, once an ordinary housewife, now pouted unless called by her girlhood name. At Funatsu's question, she looked at him with a smile that bore a discernible touch of triumph.
"I already told you!"
"You did? I forget—what was it again?"
"When I met you in konidera, I told you about it along with merahon."
As Aki spoke, several other patients noticed that the doctor had arrived and began drifting his way. Others continued to shuffle up and down the corridor, their posture tilted forward, oblivious to everything else.
"Don't you even know that, Doctor? I told you about yunmashuin, too... •" Aki continued to chatter.
A patient, about the same age as the woman, came up alongside her and burst into shrill cackles. "Doctor, never mind her! This lady's plumb crazy. Honey, nothing you say makes one bit of sense."
Aki showed no reaction to this; she just stood vacantly still. The cackler was an old-timer on the ward. She had no symptoms of neologism, the coining of new words that was a symptom of schizophrenia. Instead, she was in the grip of a delusion that more than a decade of treatment had done nothing to dissolve: she was convinced her real mother was an American and she herself was a former first lady. She didn't stop there: she had Austrian royal blood, descended from Russian nobility, and had come to Japan on a special mission. For the sake of world peace, she was to explain cosmic principles to select foreign visitors.
"Hey, Doctor, my legs hurt. Below the knees they're stuffed with voices screaming, 'Let me out! Let me out!'"
"Got any cigarettes, Doc?"
As he stepped forward, a swirl of complaints, requests, and pleas poured forth from all sides. Funatsu walked straight down the corridor, making simple replies to everyone, as he headed for his office. Here again, he had to open the door with one of the keys attached to his belt; but the nurses inside had seen him coming and opened the door for him.
"When is it ever going to warm up, huh?" he said with a grin, and the nurses and clinical nurse specialists nodded in agreement: "Not soon enough for me," and the like. Within this limited area, ordinary conversation took place in an ordinary way. Funatsu inquired if there had been any significant change in the patients in his care and asked how the newly committed patients were doing. Then he asked about a sixteen-year-old girl who had had an episode the day before and was now in a special cell.
"It's only been a day. Once she comes to, I'm afraid she might get agitated again," one CNS replied with a sigh. Even a young girl could exhibit ferocious strength if she became agitated and violent. It took two or three grown men working together to subdue her. Funatsu listened to the CNS, thinking that the girl probably ought to stay where she was for another week.
"And Emiko," he said. "She's going home for a week starting tomorrow, no problems there?"
One of the nurses shook her head as she smiled and said, "She's really looking forward to it."
"I wish I could transfer her to an open ward."
"Since she's been able to go for visits home, she's calmed down so much," the nurse said. "It's because that dog means so much to her."
Funatsu remembered the dog that the girl's father always brought with him when he came to pick her up. He himself, along with the other members of the staff, looked forward to seeing the dog again. It had been coming by for a couple of years now, as he recalled, and had won everybody's heart. It was an ideal pet in all respects: handsome looks, gentle disposition, trained superbly. Funatsu had never seen a finer dog. As the nurse suggested, there was no doubt that the dog, whose name was Gale, had a positive influence on Emiko. In the last two years her symptoms had undergone no worsening or complication.
"All day long she's been asking what time her father is coming to pick her up."
"I'll go check on her," Funatsu said as he prepared to return to the ward.
Several patients were waiting outside the door for him, and as he walked down the corridor, they trailed along behind him, with nothing to say, rather like seaweed.
The hospital where Funatsu worked treated many patients, most of them suffering from schizophrenia or alcoholism. Housed in this closed ward were patients whose symptoms were in flux; patients with poor orientation skills; and patients who, if returned to an open ward where they had freedom of movement, would be at risk of running away or engaging in unsafe or antisocial behavior. Their symptoms being severe, many patients were prescribed strong medication that left them semi-conscious all day; most were therefore unaware that they had been forcibly cut off from society and deprived of their freedom. Even so, those who followed Funatsu around were in better shape than the rest. Others stayed in bed all day or sat alone facing the wall or lay motionless, as if dead. What was going on inside their heads, what voices they heard, what visions they saw, all were beyond Funatsu's power to understand—even if the patients frequently confided in him and even if he had spent years observing their behavior.
When he unlocked one of the tatami-mat rooms that accommodated twelve patients, Funatsu observed a patient, with the covers pulled over her head, being repeatedly jabbed by Emiko from the next bed. When Emiko saw the doctor, she moved hastily away from her neighbor, sat up straight, and lowered her head politely. Her gaze wandered, and she appeared suddenly ill at ease.
Funatsu slipped off his sandals and, stepping onto the tatami in his stocking feet, went over to Emiko and knelt down on one knee in front of her. She put her hands behind her and fiddled with the straw matting while twisting her body around.
"Emiko, you know your father's coming for you tomorrow, right?"
"Yeah, I know."
"And you know that this time you'll be away for a whole week?"
"I said I know."
Funatsu could not help but think how Emiko looked like a mollusk, though it was terrible of him to think so. Her body kept wriggling as if without spine while her head swung loosely back and forth.
"Heh-heh-heh," she laughed uncertainly.
"Are you glad? "
"Sure, I'm glad. I can play with Gale. Go to the river, take walks, and stuff."
"Be sure to dress warmly. Don't go and catch a cold."
"Gale's always warm. He's warm and furry!"
Some of her pronunciation was hard to figure out. She was wearing a sweat suit that was pilling almost everywhere. It looked like it hadn't been washed in a while, limp, the ribbing in the collar all stretched out. Her shoulder-length hair, which had been tied back in pigtails, probably by a nurse, was oily, dandruff showing.
"OK, I want you to take a bath today, all right? You want to look your best for your father, don't you?"
This seemed to make Emiko laugh, and she nodded her head. In the next moment, she suddenly turned toward Funatsu and began to bow over and over. "If I take a bath, can I go home?" she asked obsequiously, trying to read his expression with the air of a crafty adult.
"Yes. If you get all clean and fresh, you can go home."
"Goody!" Her body still twisting, Emiko reverted to a laughing child.
Funatsu gently stroked her head, and got up to leave. But just before he got out the door he heard Emiko say, "Hey!" Thinking she was calling him, he turned around, but her attention was on the patient in the next bed, whom she was jabbing all over again.
"Nah-nah-na-nah-nah," she was going on. "Gale's coming tomorrow. I'm going home with him and my dad."
When Funatsu was around, Emiko was on her best behavior, but the second he took his eyes off her, she would pick on other patients, sometimes get a little rough. Her movements, though slow, were jerky and clumsy. She was unable to stick to doing one thing, and would sometimes behave with astonishing coarseness. Even so, compared with nine years before, when she was first hospitalized, her symptoms had eased dramatically. But considering that roughly seventy-five percen
t of all speed addicts required only five or six months of treatment, Emiko's hospitalization had gone on for an exceptionally long time.
She was, what, twenty-six now? thought Funatsu as he unlocked the iron door with a key chained to his waist, went out on the landing, and locked it again. Emiko, whom Funatsu had had charge of since shortly after coming to work here, was once the youngest addict in the ward. At seventeen, her face was paper-white and wasted, and she had suffered from paranoid delusions as well as visual and auditory hallucinations. In addition, she had gonorrhea, and she was pregnant. She looked so frail that if you held her down too hard you worried she would snap in two; and yet she used to howl, "I want shabu. Gimme shabu!" Shabu was the street name for amphetamines, her drug of choice.
Be nice if she could go home permanently.
From the recovery period, when indications first show improvement, through the anchoring period, when progress slows, Emiko had displayed an amazing range of symptoms typical of chronic amphetamine abuse. As a rule, the condition does not cause dimming of consciousness or forgetfulness. It begins with apathy, fatigue, lassitude, inactivity, absence of initiative, and progresses to restlessness, hypokinesia, catalepsy, negativism, tonic hyperactivity, . . . There are also symptoms of pseudo-dementia and paralogia.
Even so, Funatsu and other residents had expected her to be out of the hospital and back functioning in society within six months; she might well drift back into drugs and have to be re-hospitalized, they knew, but that was the kind of life this girl was going to live. Yet, after all this time, she was still here. What should have been the best, most radiant season of her life—a time when, if not for amphetamines, she might fall in love, marry, become a mother—was spent locked away behind iron bars. Time for Emiko flowed differently than it did for others: persistent childishness was definitely one of her behavior patterns. She had not so much reverted to childhood as remained a child; she lived in a dimension removed from the passage of time.
Emiko's father came the next afternoon, arriving in a big station wagon as usual, the dog along for the ride. Funatsu and as many of the nurses who could get away trooped outside, less to see Emiko off than to catch a glimpse of the wonder dog.
"Gale! Gale, Gale, Gale!"
As soon as she stepped out the front door of the hospital, Emiko, whose movements were ordinarily sluggish, started running toward her father, who was standing beside the car. Emiko ran as fast as she could and threw her arms around the bundle of fur sitting patiently next to him. The dog's head, larger than Emiko's, was almost a meter above ground. Clutched and pummeled by Emiko, the dog closed his eyes in seeming bliss.
"Oh, Gale, I missed you so much!"
Normally Emiko's emotions and expressions were flat, her reactions dull; but at times like this, her voice was eager, alive. As if he understood everything Emiko said, the dog licked her face, slowly and tenderly.
"She's been quite stable, so I don't think there's anything to worry about," said Funatsu, going over to the man whose sunburned face had broadened into a smile. "I can't get over the power that dog has over her," he added, thinking how he'd like to pet the animal himself. "No matter what we do, we can't get Emiko to laugh like that."
Emiko's father was a squat, taciturn man with a low center of gravity. Watching his daughter embrace the big dog, he smiled calmly. His profile was chiseled. The days and years flowed by for everyone, Funatsu was given to think, but this man had had a lot to bear.
"Emi, won't this be nice? A whole week with Gale!" a nurse called out.
Emiko nodded happily and answered "Yes!" in a voice even more animated than before. But the concept of a week was something Emiko could not understand. Just because she could carry on a conversation did not mean she comprehended it.
"Emiko, could I pet Gale, too?" another nurse asked.
"Yes, if Gale says yes," said Emiko, who, with this magnificent dog at her command, was the picture of mental health.
"Oh. Well then, would you ask him?" said the nurse, who along with her colleagues, was so taken with the dog that all thought of work seemed forgotten.
At this request, Emiko looked happily up at her father, smiling with an almost theatrical simplicity. With her gaze on him, her father slowly nodded.
"Gale, want to play with the nurses?" whispered Emiko in the dog's ear.
The dog's ears were bigger and thicker than most dogs', and his body fur was dense and rich. He held himself up with a kind of intelligence, shifting his ears continually to gather information from all directions. When Emiko whispered to him, he twitched his ears and tilted his head, then wagged his long, bushy tail.
"It's all right; he's perfectly harmless."
Reassured by Emiko's father, the nurses gathered with delight around Gale, then cautiously began to pet him. Thinking what an apt name "Gale" was, Funatsu strode over with studied ease and stroked the dog's muzzle. When he had first seen the dog, he'd been afraid it would bite; but in striking contrast to its formidable appearance, the creature was extraordinarily gentle and patient.
"You're a great help," he told the dog. "Take good care of Emiko." Whether or not the dog remembered him from previous visits he had no idea, but as those intelligent, contemplative eyes met his, he found himself addressing the dog the same way he would a human being. All the while, Emiko and the nurses continued to stroke Gale on his back and chest. Despite all the people surrounding him, fussing over him, Gale remained utterly calm and unperturbed. He seemed to possess greater composure and maturity than all around him.
"Never fails to amaze me. Teaching a dog such discipline must be awfully hard," Funatsu mused aloud.
"A hell of a lot easier than with people, you might say."
Funatsu was making casual conversation, but the father's reply seemed anything but. He was normally so stolid, but the accumulation of strain seemed to show through today. He had no one else to look after things. No matter how helpful a dog might be, it couldn't keep house. If the father was feeling low, Funatsu thought, maybe it wasn't such a good idea for him to take Emiko home. But even if Funatsu voiced his concern now, the father was hardly likely to call off this long-awaited treat. Besides, Emiko had been counting the days.
Suddenly Emiko looked up at the doctor and asked, "Are you going to talk to my dad some more?"
"A little bit more," Funatsu answered, knowing that it would be a good idea. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw relief cross the father's face.
"Then can we go play over there? Can we?" Emiko jumped up in delight and pointed to the hospital playground. The girl did not always listen, but as long as she was with the dog, Funatsu did not worry. He knew that a single word from his master would be enough to bring Gale rushing back like the wind in the sky. Emiko would not then dally and sulk.
"Dad, Dad, get Gale's toy!"
At his daughter's urging, the father got out a red ball from the back of the station wagon. Emiko took it from him with a happy smile, then tottered off to the playground.
"Gale, go!" her father said, in a voice that sounded almost solemn. The dog, which had until then remained motionless on its haunches, now leaped up and flew after Emiko. However many times he saw it, Funatsu never got over it. The nurses all followed the pair over to the playground.
"Did you have his vocal cords removed?" asked Funatsu, as he watched the dog catch up with Emiko in the blink of an eye and then walk alongside her, tail wagging.
For a moment Emiko's father looked taken aback, but then he understood and shook his head: "No, that's a trait of a wolf-dog. They don't bark needlessly."
"The weaker the dog, the more it barks, they say; maybe it's true after all, then."
"Not many big breeds are noisy. German shepherds are barkers, though."
"But if Gale doesn't bark, he can't be much of a watchdog, can he?"
"No, he isn't. But you've got to realize this isn't a dog that lives to serve people's needs. He makes up his own mind about what he wants to do."
This f
ellow's tongue loosened only when the topic turned to dogs, apparently. Even his face lit up. He comes to see his daughter faithfully, so he can't be faulted there, thought Funatsu; and I'm not in his shoes, so who am I to judge? Still, he had often thought that if only this man had given his daughter half the affection he lavished on that dog, her life might have been different. She had no genetic predisposition to illness, nor had her condition popped up out of nowhere. If Emiko had stayed away from drugs, she would have lived a perfectly normal life.
"Gale is just like Emiko. It's not a question of being useful or not. He's family."
Even from a distance, the wolf-dog romping around in the field chasing the ball looked huge. His athleticism was in a class of its own. Ever since first laying eyes on Gale, Funatsu imagined owning a wolf-dog himself someday. He liked the way Gale had eyes only for this father and daughter, for no one else. The wolf-dog was well trained, and he showed no aggression toward anyone petting him, since his master forbade it. But Funatsu was also well aware that Gale had no ears for commands issued by anyone else.