Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

9

BACK TO THE POT

“Really, the more you look at this toilet, the stranger it is. ” The girl spoke in a nasal whisper that sounded almost deliberately provocative.

I had to agree with her about the toilet, all right. Squatting over it, you were totally unprotected, longing desperately for a cover behind, or just for some way to tell front from back. In a place as vast as this old quarry, the anus developed rejection symptoms even with a wall behind you. When I first started living here, constipation was my bane. I tried all kinds of laxatives, to no avail. After a week my ears were ringing; by the tenth day my vision was clouding over.

I tried enemas, but that only made it worse: they gave me the urge to go, and that’s all. My sphincter remained stubbornly corked. To feel an intense urge to evacuate — a violent one, I should say, as in intestinal catarrh — and to be incapable of doing anything about it is an excruciating form of suffering that must be experienced to be believed.

At the hospital they brushed it off lightly: “If you feel like moving your bowels, that only proves you have a light case, so don’t rush yourself. Just keep sitting on the toilet.” They needn’t have told me that; the moment I got off I would feel the summons of nature, and tear straight back again. For two whole days I sat there leafing through the Family Medical Book, convinced that death was imminent.

The Family Medical Book was written for laymen, as the title suggests, but in the end it provided the solution. At least it gave better advice than the doctors. Mention constipation and generally they’ll ascribe it to one of two causes: desiccation and hardening of the stool, or poor muscle tone. Intestinal malfunction, in short. But in the Family Medical Book, as an example of intestinal hyperfunction the authors mention difficulty in evacuation due to a spastic rectum — a type of constipation not even listed in the constipation section. I felt a flash of light.

Despite my large bulk, I am of surprisingly nervous temperament, and two or three times a year (when I must meet with someone unpleasant, such as my biological father, Inototsu, or when I’m called to traffic court for a violation), I come down with diarrhea. When the symptoms worsen I am attacked by severe pain, as if my bowels were being twisted and wrung. If this constipation had resulted from an especially acute case of diarrhea, I reasoned, then it might pay to try my regular medicine. (In fact, it’s a drug to relieve menstrual cramps, but I find it wonderfully effective for an irritable colon.) The results were dramatic: in minutes, an enormous movement erupted, leaving only a delightful sense of hollowness. Thinking he might be interested, I did mention this to the doctor, but his only reaction was a look of faint annoyance.

That time of suffering did, however, enable me to grow accustomed to the vastness of the quarry. Besides losing my fear of constipation, I became able to straddle the toilet forward, backward, or sideways, from any angle. I even became relaxed enough to contemplate other uses for the thing. More and more frequently, I used it for garbage disposal. Soon I was using the sink and counter to prepare food. Waiting for the contents of a pan to heat, I could seat myself on the toilet in comfort. Even while eating my meals and drinking my coffee, I had no need to go elsewhere. I could do my aerial-photography traveling, or go over the results of the day’s surveying, right while drinking coffee on the pot. And so the toilet came gradually to occupy a central place in my life. Metaphorically speaking, I was beginning to change into a eupcaccia.

The galley was a hollow in the wall, about a meter off the floor; inside, it had been polished to a blue, enamel-like finish that deserved to be set off by a loving cup, if I’d had such a thing. Once, on the ceiling there, I found some bumps that had been puttied over. Prying with a knife, I uncovered a lead pipe whose end was capped. When I unscrewed the cap, water came gushing out. I installed a faucet, electric wiring and a socket. Then I added a small refrigerator and a fluorescent light, a large electric stove, a kitchen cabinet, and a foldout counter. When I wasn’t using it, I kept the area hidden behind accordion curtains. Finally I added a high enclosed shelf you reached by standing on the toilet; rubber sealing made it airtight. Up there is where I keep my camera equipment and travel necessities (i.e., the aerial photos), surveying equipment and so on, protected by drying agents. My safety precautions are airtight too: I set it up so that if you touch the door handle without first flicking a hidden switch, an electric shock will burn your fingers, and tear gas will go off in your face. The spot right next to the camera equipment would be a good place to keep the eupcaccias.

I opened the curtain, which made the lights go on. “How pretty!” she exclaimed. “It’s like marble.”

“Actually it’s something called hydrous shale; as long as it stays moist, it has a nice shine. It’s probably an underwater stone. The only trouble with it is that when it dries out, it gets covered with fine powder. After four or five years, buildings decorated with it look as if they’ve been dusted with confectioner’s sugar. In fact, that probably explains why the quarry closed down.”

“Hmm,” she said. “It certainly lacks a woman’s touch.” She looked at five days’ worth of dirty dishes piled in the sink and laughed.

“Of course it does. What else did you expect?”

“Want me to wash these up for you?”

“That’s all right, I always do it once a week, without fail.” I stuck one of the kamaboko from the insect dealer in my mouth, and gave another to her. “They’re not chilled, but we just bought them a little while ago, so I’m sure they’re all right.”

“Thank you.” Like thin rubber, the girl’s lips expanded and contracted, following the shape of the kamaboko. “These are high in protein and low in fat, so they’re very good for you,” she said.

“Oh, I’m incorrigible. I’ve given up.” Talking openly about my weaknesses, I figured, would make me come across as a frank and likable type. “But this is mostly monosodium glutamate held together with starch. Glutamic acid soda is sodium chloride, so it could be bad for your blood pressure.”

“Can you hear something? Like dogs barking?” the girl said.

“You can hear anything here if you try hard enough,” I answered. “This place is so full of tunnels and caves, it’s like being in the middle of a gigantic trumpet.”

“It’s like one of those foreign movies on TV. There’s always a house — a big stone building with an iron fence, right? — and a big yard and a watchdog. If this were a movie, the story would just be getting under way. All we need is some music.”

“You’re different,” I told her.

“How?”

“I mean different in a nice way. Interesting.”

“Don’t tease me. He’s forever groaning about me — says I have holes in my head.”

“He’s disgusting.”

“Maybe that’s why he is the way he is — because he knows people don’t like him.”

“What do you mean, ‘the way he is’?”

“How many cups’ worth of grounds shall I put in?”

“Five, if you like it strong.” Perhaps because of the peculiar nature of where we were, sandwiched between the kitchen sink and the toilet, I began to feel an excitement attended by visual stricture, like that of a child playing in closets. “I’ll tell you what I don’t like about him. It’s his attitude toward you — he’s so damned overbearing.”

“I know, but he’s sick, so what can I do?”

“Sick? What’s the matter with him?”