Patient X

by David Peace

  Mag did not reply, did not take his eyes off the corpse of the poet sprawled at his feet.

  I tapped him on the shoulder again. ‘Mag, I’m going now …’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mag, turning to face me. ‘I was just thinking …’

  His voice trailed off, so I asked, ‘Thinking what?’

  ‘Well,’ he said in an embarrassed, hesitant whisper, ‘you know, just thinking about this life of the Kappa …’

  ‘What about it, Mag?’

  His eyes left mine, drifting back to the body before us, and then, barely audibly, he said, ‘Well, when all is said and done, at the end of the day … We Kappa, whatever we may say … If we want to fulfil our Kappa lives … Well, it seems to me, I have to say … We need to believe in a power other than Kappa … Above and beyond us … Some “thing” more than ourselves.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but not only you Kappa.’

  *

  Ten days after our evening together, and the long night I had spent reading his manuscript, Akutagawa ascended into Paradise.

  Now over twenty years have passed since that night, and I am sitting again in a sweet parlour as I write these words. I have ordered two bowls of sweet-bean soup, and I give one to your soul, Sensei –

  For Saint Kappa, in Paradise,

  a bowl of shiruko, I offer.

  *

  Another author’s note:

  After the war, Tokutarō Nagami went missing in Atami, a city by the sea on the Izu Peninsula. He was never seen again, his body never found. When his wife passed away, her grave was made for two, sharing its stone and the date of her death with her husband: October 23, 1950 / Shōwa 25 –

  Some men go mad, some men go missing, some men do both.

  The Spectres of Christ

  I am living now in the most unimaginable unhappy happiness –

  yet strangely, without regret.

  I just feel sorry for those who had me as

  a bad husband, father and son.

  And so goodbye –

  I have tried – at least, consciously – not to justify myself here;

  … and so please, go ahead and laugh –

  at the fool in this manuscript.

  ‘To My Friend, Masao Kume’,

  Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, June 20, 1927

  1. ‘Black & White’

  In the summer, this endless summer, in the cottage at Kugenuma, this cottage by the sea, in its study, at my desk, I gather up my Bible and my books, the sheaf of manuscript papers and my pens, put them in my bag and stand up, I stand up …

  Unsteady on my feet, I come out of the house and get into the waiting taxi. I tell the driver to take me to the station on the Tōkaidō line. The driver sets off, but we are not likely to make the Tokyo-bound train for we are going so slowly. Thick pine woods line both sides of the road. The old driver says, ‘You know, so many strange things have been happening around here these days. I hear people have been seeing a ghost, even in the daytime …’

  ‘Really? Even in the daytime,’ I reply in a half-hearted manner, staring into the passing pine woods, searching for a trace of sunlight.

  ‘What I heard,’ says the driver. ‘But only when it rains.’

  ‘Maybe the ghost likes to get wet,’ I say.

  ‘That’s funny,’ says the driver. ‘But I hear he wears a raincoat.’

  We pull up outside the station just as the Tokyo train pulls out. I get out of the cab and go into the waiting room. There is only one other person sat inside: a man of about my age, blankly staring into space, wearing a raincoat. I realise I am wearing a raincoat, too, and wonder if that was why the taxi driver had said what he said. I look across at the other man again and I decide to wait for the next train in the café opposite the station.

  I sit down in a corner at a table covered in white oilcloth with a border of red flowers, the coating worn away in places, revealing a grubby canvas. I order a cup of cocoa, but it smells of fish, and a layer of grease floats on the surface. I push it away, light a cigarette and stare down at the flowers in the border.

  A pack of cigarettes later, I board the train for Tokyo. I usually ride in second class, but I decide to sit in third class. The carriage is crowded with a group of elementary-school girls and their teachers, on their way back from some outing. They talk without a break as I smoke.

  Unfortunately, at one of the last stations before Tokyo, a woman I know boards the train with a young child. The woman has a reputation as a tanka poet and is married to a well-known cartoonist. Fortunately, she does not see me until we are about to pull into Shimbashi, but then, when I stand up to get off at this station, she exclaims to the whole carriage, ‘Akutagawa-sensei! I didn’t realise it was you, can hardly recognise you … you’ve lost so much weight, look so pale … I thought you must be …’

  ‘A ghost! A ghost,’ shouts the child at her side, pointing up at me.

  I feign a smile and, as she quietens the child, I make my apologies and quickly get off the train, escaping from the woman and the child.

  Bag in hand, I walk from the station to the Imperial Hotel. Tall buildings line both sides of the street, as dark and as thick as the pine woods this morning. But now, as I look at the passing buildings, I realise my vision is strange again; I am seeing sets of translucent, spinning, turning gears and wheels. This is not the first time this has happened, and it is always the same: the number of gears and wheels gradually increases until they block out half my field of vision. It only lasts a few moments but, when they disappear, the gears and wheels are replaced by an excruciating, searing headache. My eye doctor blamed cigarettes, or the amount I smoke, but I didn’t believe him. All I can do now is to use only my left eye, which is thankfully always fine. But as I stumble towards the hotel with one eye closed, I can still see the gears and wheels behind the lid of my right eye.

  By the time I enter the Imperial, the gears and wheels are gone, but the headache is here now. I check in as quickly as I can and head upstairs to the room. I walk down a deserted corridor and go into my room. I sit down at the desk in the window and close both eyes now, massaging my temples. Immediately, I start to feel a little better, but then there is a banging on the door, and a bellboy brings in my bag with my hat and coat. He hangs the hat and coat from a hook on the wall and then leaves. I glance up at the hat and the coat hanging on the wall; they look like my own standing figure. Worse, I remember my brother-in-law had been wearing a raincoat when he threw himself in front of the train. I jump up from the desk, throw the hat and the coat into a corner of the room, and go into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink and recoil; I can see only the bones of my skull. I step back from the mirror, out of the bathroom, out of the room, and into the corridor. The corridor is still deserted but looks like that of a prison. I walk down the corridor to the landing at the top of the stairs. In a corner stands a tall lamp, its green shade reflecting in the glass fittings. The light gives me a peaceful sensation, at last, and I sit down in one of the chairs on the landing. I take out a cigarette from my pocket and am about to light it when I notice something dangling over the back of the nearby sofa: a raincoat. Quickly, I get up from the chair and go back down the corridor to the door of my room. I steel myself, I open the door, I step inside, avoid the bathroom and its mirror, and sit down at the desk in the window. The seat is an armchair done in a reptilian green Moroccan leather. But at least my headache seems to be subsiding, so I open my bag, take out the sheaf of manuscript paper, dip my pen in the ink and try to get it moving, to work on the story I have been writing. But the pen will hardly move at all and, if and when it does, it just keeps writing the same word over and over again: ‘Ghost … Ghost … Ghost … Ghost …’

  I can’t bear it, can’t bear anything, especially myself, myself in this room. I am sure I can hear the scratching of rats in the walls, hear the beating of wings in other rooms. I need some fresh air. I get up from the desk, pick up my hat and coa
t from the corner, put them on and leave the room. The corridor is still as depressing as a prison. I walk down the stairs to the lobby. A man in a raincoat is arguing with a bellboy. I ignore them and go out through the hotel doors to the street and start to walk. All the branches and leaves of the park trees along the street have a blackish look again, just like the pine woods by the coast this morning. But each tree has a front and a back, just as we human beings do; I remember the souls in Dante’s Inferno who had been turned into trees and I decide to walk on the other side of the road, across the streetcar line, away from the park, where only buildings edge the street, heading as fast as I can towards the Ginza.

  When I reach the Ginza, the sun is already beginning to set, but the shops lining both sides of the streets and the dizzying flow of people only make me more depressed; all the people casually strolling along as if they have never known the existence of sin. I walk on northwards, through the confusion of the day’s fading brightness and the light of the electric lamps. I pass mannequin after mannequin in the windows of the Western tailor shops. A bookstore piled high with magazines and such catches my eye and I cannot resist. I walk in and let my eyes wander upwards over several shelves of books. I pick out one volume from the collected works of Dostoevsky to browse through. But the page I chance to open almost knocks me over: it’s the title page of the novella Dvoynik. In horror, I put it straight back on the shelf, grabbing another book, any book to break the spell. But when I look down at the yellow cover in my hands, I see this is a volume of Greek myths, apparently aimed at children. And once again, the page I chance to open, the line I chance to read, nearly knocks me over –

  ‘Even the greatest of the gods, Zeus himself, was no match for those goddesses of vengeance, the Furies.’

  I drop the book, flee the bookstore and plunge back into the crowd. But as I walk along, I feel a relentless gaze on my back, on my raincoat back, the relentless gaze of the Furies –

  When did this start?

  But still I walk on, on and on through the twilight, until I come to Nihonbashi. Out of habit, I suppose, I enter Maruzen and go up to the second floor. Again out of habit, I skim through Strindberg’s Legender a few pages at a time; it describes an experience not much different from my own. Not only that, this edition has a yellow cover. I put it back on the shelf and then, at random, I pull down another thick volume and flick through its pages. This, too, has something for me: one of its illustrations shows rows of gears and wheels with human eyes and noses; I turn to the title page and find it is a German compilation of drawings by mental patients. I feel consumed by a sudden spirit of defiance and, with the reckless abandon and desperation of a compulsive gambler, I start to pull book after book from the shelves, opening page after page, and every page, every single page, conceals some kind of needle to stab me, whether it be a sentence or an illustration. Every single one, you ask? Well, even in Madame Bovary I can see and sense myself as the bourgeois Monsieur Bovary.

  It is almost closing time now, and I seem to be the very last customer. I turn my back on the big bookcases and stride into the small display room. The first thing I see is a poster of St George running his sword through a winged dragon, and the caption is written with the same ‘Dragon’ character I use in my own name. To make matters worse, the grimacing face of the saint half hidden beneath his knight’s helmet resembles the face of one of my many enemies. I have had enough; I can’t bear it any more. I leave the exhibition, go down the broad stairway and out of the store.

  Night has now fallen in Nihonbashi and, as I walk down the dark street, I think again and again about this story I am trying to write; I’ d hoped to make it more autobiographical, but it has not come as easily as I’ d imagined. I know this is because of my own pride and scepticism, and I despise these traits in myself. At the same time, I cannot help feeling that when we ‘remove a layer of skin, everybody is the same’. I am planning to call the story ‘Night of Sodom’, or maybe ‘Night of Tokyo’, or perhaps simply ‘Night’; as always, these days, I just can’t decide. Equally, I do believe that Goethe’s title Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit would suit anybody’s autobiography. But now more than ever, I also know not everyone is moved by literature and that, in particular, my own works are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not like me, has luckily not lived a life like this –

  I come to a second-hand shop and stop. In the window is a stuffed swan. It stands with its neck erect, but its wings are yellowed and moth-eaten. Both laughter and tears well up inside me; all that lies before me is either madness or suicide. I turn away from the stuffed swan and the shop window. I look up at the sky, thinking how small the earth truly is – how much, much smaller then am I – among the light of limitless, numberless stars. But the sky, which has been so clear all day, has clouded over now and, all of a sudden, I feel as though ‘something’ is determined to get me, and I decide to seek refuge in a basement restaurant across the streetcar tracks.

  At the bar, I order a glass of whisky.

  ‘All we have is Black & White, sir.’

  I pour the whisky into soda water, take a sip, light a cigarette and look around the room. To my left, I notice a portrait of Napoleon hanging on the wall and I feel anxious, uneasy again. When he was still a student, on the last page of his geography notebook, Napoleon had written: ‘Saint Helena, a small island.’ Most people would say it was pure coincidence, but it must have surely filled Napoleon with sheer terror in his last days. And staring at the portrait of Napoleon, thinking back on my own works, certain phrases drift up to haunt me: ‘Life is more hellish than Hell itself,’ I had written in Words of a Dwarf; there was the fate of the artist Yoshihide, the protagonist of my Hell Screen; and then poor Yasukichi …

  I take another sip of whisky, light another cigarette, and then glance to my right, trying to escape my own thoughts and words. But sat at the bar next to me there are two men in their late twenties or early thirties. They seem to be newspaper reporters, conversing in low voices, and in French, for some reason. I keep my back turned to them but I can still feel them looking me over, up and down, from head to toe, actually feel their gazes through my raincoat, onto my flesh, and they know my name, seem to be talking about me: ‘Bien … très mauvais … pourquoi?’

  ‘Pourquoi? Le diable est mort!’

  ‘Oui, oui … d’enfer …’

  I throw my last silver coin down on the bar and flee from this underground chamber, back up onto the street, into the night and its wind. But the electric-lit streets are still full of people. I cannot bear the thought of running into any acquaintances by chance, so I choose only the darkest streets, slinking along like a thief or a murderer, thinking of Raskolnikov, imagining I am Raskolnikov, desperately wanting to confess all I have done. But I know my confessions would only bring tragedy for others, besides even my immediate family. And I’m far from certain my desire to confess is even genuine. If only my nerves could be as steady as those of ordinary people.

  I walk down another dark street, this one alongside a canal, and I’m reminded of my adoptive parents’ home in the suburbs, the two of them waiting there each day for my return. My children, too, perhaps. But I dread the power that would naturally bind me if I go home to them all. I pass a barge moored at the embankment, upon the choppy waters of the canal, a dim glow seeping from within. Even in a place like this, families are living, men and women hating each other in order to love each other …

  Perhaps buoyed by the whisky, I decide to go back to the hotel, to try to write, to salvage something from this day, this life …

  In the hotel room, I light a cigarette and stare down at the blank sheaf of manuscript paper. I turn to my bag and take out a pile of books. On the top is The Collected Letters of Prosper Mérimée; letters which give me the strength to go on living. But as I read, I learn the author had become a Protestant at the end of his life and, for the first time, I see the face behind the mask: he, too, was one of us, condemned to walk through the darkness –
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  As Sainte-Beuve said, ‘Mérimée does not believe that God exists, but he is not altogether sure that the Devil does not …’

  In the middle of the night, there should be no one in the corridor outside my room. Yet I can still sometimes hear the sound of wings outside my door; who could be keeping birds in their room?

  Unable to stand anything more, especially the blank pages of manuscript paper, I go over to the bed. I lie down and open up A Dark Night’s Passing again; everything about the protagonist’s spiritual struggle is painfully familiar to me. Yet compared to him, I feel such an idiot. Tears well in my eyes and I let them fall, sobbing on the bed, feeling at peace at last. But not for long, never for long; again I begin to see those translucent, spinning, turning gears and wheels in my right eye, and again they gradually increase until they occupy and blind half my field of vision. I know the headache is not far behind. And now I can hear the rats in the walls again, maybe even closer, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the wardrobe, maybe under the bed, and the beating of wings, too, the beating of wings becoming louder and louder, the gears and the wheels spinning, turning, faster and faster. Enough is enough; I throw the book to one side, go over to my bag and take eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, just wanting to knock myself out …

  In my dream, that dream again, in a deserted, ruined and wasted garden, there is an iron castle with iron grilles on its narrow windows. Inside the iron castle, there is only one room. In the room, there is only one desk. At that desk, a creature who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot read a long poem about a creature who in another room is writing a poem about another creature who in another room is writing a poem. Yet still I try to read the words the creature is writing, but now it turns to look at me and shrieks, ‘Quack! Quack …’