Dreams of Speaking

by Gail Jones

  Almost at once a friendly stranger, a woman in her fifties dressed in a smart navy suit, stopped and asked Alice in English if she needed help finding her way. Alice gratefully agreed to be led to her platform. The woman expected no thanks, but bowed slightly and left quickly. Alice boarded the shinkansen to enter a super-woman-speed, to zip like a speeding bullet, on a powerful locomotive, towards Mr Sakamoto, towards Nagasaki.

  Could it be that one of the purposes of the invention of trains is to recover reverie? In the slide of landscapes and cityscapes there is a slide of consciousness, a drift, a pleasure of seamless conjugations. As Honshu flashed by, smudged by motion and the powdery light of industrial pollution, Alice entered the transport of her own random thoughts. The philosopher Henri Michaux once proposed the idea of a train-cinema. Along the route between Paris and Versailles, there would be placed a series of movable sculptures, activated by the speed of the train passing by. A superimposition and fusing of images would occur, so that the passenger would see outside the window a ‘plastic’ cinema, a spectacle of odd beauty and dislocated enchantment. Alice loved this idea. It seemed to her both thoroughly modern and to conjure the archeology of film – the turning of images, the persistence of vision. She settled back in her seat. It was deeply comfortable. The bullet train generated a hum, a kind of just-audible whisper of the friction of air. The passengers around her were asleep, or silently reading. They were all in altered states of being, all drifting somewhere. A child awake, a cute boy in a Yankees cap, stared out of the window, unblinking, as if hypnotised by a magician.

  Alice was remembering a time with Stephen. When they were lovers she had often taken him with her to the movies. Like many philosophers, he began with an attitude of contempt, that this was a minor art form, an opium of the masses, sequences of facile and depthless distraction. ‘Idiot art’, he called it. Gradually, however, Stephen was won over. He forgot to resist and entered the spirit of images. Comedies, art cinema, even westerns – he learned to give himself fluently to screened experience. In the end they were almost undiscriminating. They went to film festivals, retrospectives, mass-release blockbusters.

  It was in the middle of winter – they were both blunted by flu – when they went to see the 1964 Japanese classic Woman of the Dunes. The story was simple: an amateur entomologist from the city is looking for insects in a desert. There are montage shots of dune formations, grains of sand and scampering beetles. Having missed the bus back to the city, the entomologist, Jumpei, accepts hospitality from the locals. He enters a deep sand pit by a long rope ladder, and stays overnight with a woman in her ramshackle house. When Jumpei wakes in the morning he finds that the rope ladder has been removed, and that his hostess is outside, shovelling sand. He has been imprisoned as her ‘helper’. The two are condemned to shovel sand so that they are not engulfed and buried. The other villagers lower water and supplies once a week to the woman and her unending labour is part of a peculiar natural economy – if her house is buried by sand, the other houses too will be lost. Sand leaks through the walls of the shack, it piles in pyramids at the doorstep, it falls in coarse grainy veils and sudden collapses. It has a ruthless incessancy. The man is overcome by anguish when he realises his entrapment. He looks up, but can see only a circle of sky and the taunting faces of the villagers, lined around the pit, waiting to haul up bags of sand. Jumpei must dig, or die. The woman says to him: ‘Last year a storm swallowed up my husband and child. The sand came down like a waterfall.’ This bleak announcement makes Jumpei frantic, but he cannot escape. Inevitably, the man and woman become lovers; there is a bathing scene of riveting eroticism. But overall the tone is hopeless. An indescribable melancholy envelopes the couple. At one point – a moment Alice found particularly affecting – the woman wishes for a radio, so that they might hear the world outside, so that they might know of a life beyond their deadly sand-trap. In the end there is no release, only the grim beauty of the black-and-white cinematography and the weird seduction of so stringent an allegory.

  When they came home from the movie, Alice and Stephen made love. She kissed his chest as the Japanese woman kissed Jumpei, and tried not to think of the sand and the desert and the images that seemed so antisensual and unJapanese. Stephen, too, she could tell, was in some halfway state of the imaginary, some dim zone between the screen and the body. He locked into her with a kind of desperation; he climaxed holding her fiercely, as if he were afraid of dying. Alice was a long time following, delayed by sand. Afterwards they lay side by side, both slightly feverish, both overtaken by the aftershocks of the movie they had seen. In low voices they spoke of it, and analysed its effects. Alice told Stephen about the cave-in in her father’s mine, and his futile attempt to rescue his friends. She thought again and again of the phrase: ‘The sand came down like a waterfall’. Stephen said that the movie was a poor attempt to represent Sisyphus. Eternal struggle, doomed effort, final meaninglessness. It scared him, he said. It was a damn scary movie. He had hated the bathing scene: ‘the man was so passive’, but he thought the actress wonderful.

  Stephen fell asleep and later roused in a nightmare. He was making choking sounds and his arms flailed wildly, so that he accidentally struck Alice across the face.

  ‘Help me!’ he called out.

  Alice switched on the bedside lamp. Stephen’s eyes were open but he was still asleep. She touched his hot face and brushed back his hair. She leaned very close to his ear and whispered, ‘It’s all right, I’m here. I won’t let you go.’

  Stephen’s eyes at last closed. His breathing eased. He slowly descended back into the territory of sleep and Alice was left behind, awake, staring into the black room that was refilling with images.

  In the morning a bruise stretched across her cheek. Stephen did not recall any event in the night, so Alice told him that she had bumped into a door, stumbling, when she rose in the dark. She remembered her scarlet fever, and the hospital, and the nurse who had struck her. She remembered James’s distressed face and the radio broken on the floor, exposing its innards. She thought how curious it was that wounds by intention and accident look just the same. And how the special sadness of illness, its betokening objects, its loneliness, its timeless and fretful desolation, flow back into the present, unbidden, as a swoon before dawn.

  Alice flicked through the notes she had brought with her on her travels. Among the articles and photocopies were several e-mails from Mr Sakamoto, who after departure from Paris had sent regular titbits on technologies and inventions. Since she had no phone, he said, he was obliged to e-mail. He apologised. He said too that he missed hearing her Australian voice. He missed their friendly conversations. Her answering smile.

  Let me tell you, he wrote, about Magnetic Resonance Imaging, radio waves pulsing within the depths of the body.

  The body is everywhere treated as mere surface: the cult of beauty, of youth, the existence of pornography – these are banal reductions, a fetish of surfaces. But the wise and the lunatic, the artist and the child, all know better. Under the skin is a noisy tumultuous space, muscles and organs and substances in concert, complicated goings-on and ingenious processes. Under the skin are the richest colours and a sweltering intensity. The anatomist carves flesh, the X-ray technician finds shadows, but MRI peers into the body without surgery or rays. Into the brain, into the viscera, into secret dark places.

  Think of this: we are mostly water; we are two-thirds ocean. Because of our high water content the body can be exposed to a strong magnetic field and the molecules of our hydrogen atoms respond. When submitted to radio waves, the energy content of the nuclei changes and a resonance wave is emitted when the nuclei return to their previous state. Do you understand? Is this not the simplest of principles? Small differences in the oscillation of nuclei can be detected, so a three-dimensional image of the interior body can be built. The image shows the structure of the tissue, and reveals any pathology. Water, waves, magnetism, image: it is a kind of poetry. A physical haiku. Entering an MR
I is like entering a radio coil; the radio waves cause the nuclei of the body to quiver and respond.

  We are all thus collectors of waves, we are all creatures of hidden oceans.

  The hotel room in Nagasaki was like the hotel room in Tokyo, except that it was smaller. Alice squeezed with her luggage through the door, which would not fully open because of the proximity of the bed, and saw before her an almost identical room – the brown walls, the suspended television, the green plastic slippers wrapped in cellophane. Outside the window was an electric Mitsubishi billboard, which she would discover alternated at night between Japanese and English script in white, orange and pink. The window opened. The hotel was near the railway station. Below her, straining her head out of the window, Alice saw a tram stop, with its arching tracks, what seemed like thousands of taxis, massed in waiting, and the monumental station itself, which incorporated a hotel, cinemas and a shopping centre. One façade of the shopping centre screened perpetual advertisements, like a colossal television, devoted to selling. It was early evening, still watery light, and pedestrians in restless movement filled the spaces between buildings, flowed over a footbridge, cinematically, to and from doors beneath the shiny screen.

  Alice prepared to ring Mr Sakamoto. He had suggested she ring from Tokyo, so that he could meet her at Nagasaki station, and then take her home, but she had decided to surprise him, to ring ‘out of the blue’, with a gift-call for both of them.

  A woman’s voice answered the phone, speaking Japanese.

  ‘Moshi, moshi?’

  ‘May I speak’, said Alice in English, ‘to Mr Sakamoto?’

  There was confused conversation at the other end. Someone was being called to the phone.

  ‘Yes?’ said another woman’s voice, this time in English.

  ‘May I speak to Mr Sakamoto? I am Alice Black, from Australia.’

  There was a silence, then more background Japanese conversation. Alice thought at first she had rung the wrong number; she may have mistranscribed from the e-mail and lost her friend’s details. But then the voice at the other end introduced herself as Haruko, Mr Sakamoto’s daughter, and said that he was ill, and could not come to the phone.

  ‘But I’m ringing’, Alice insisted, ‘from Nagasaki. I have come to visit. Your father invited me.’

  Alice heard Japanese conversation once again and felt troubled by the evident alarm she had caused. There were tones of enquiry, of consternation.

  Haruko’s voice returned. ‘My father is in hospital,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know you were coming.’

  Alice could hear an old man’s voice, a thread she had not detected before.

  ‘Our uncle’, Haruko went on, ‘says you must visit us tomorrow. I will pick you up, if it is convenient, for lunch. One o’clock? Please tell me your address.’

  Alice was reeling. She read out her address from the hotel card.

  ‘In the lobby, then. See you tomorrow.’

  Alice heard a click and the voice was gone. She had not even had a chance to discover what was wrong with Mr Sakamoto, what hospital he was in, how she might reach him. There had been a tremor of anxiety in Haruko’s voice by which Alice construed that her father’s condition was serious.

  Alice stared at the wall. It had been a foolish thing, not to tell Mr Sakamoto the date of her arrival. A girlish fancy. A trouble to everyone.

  The room felt oppressive. Alice undressed and entered the small moulded shower cubicle. Under the warm water she closed her eyes. The sand came down like a waterfall.

  When she was clean and had changed her clothes and dried her hair, Alice stepped into the streets of Nagasaki. They were lively, abundant. Streams of purposeful people parted before her as she walked, and her sense was of entering gusty circuits, all movement and energy. The shops were boxes of light, like television, and she was blown past them, randomly. There were clothes of remarkable elegance, stores of handbags, knick-knacks. Booths selling mobile phones were excessively visible. Alice saw again the baby-phone, with its bumptious smile. She headed away, into smaller, dimmer streets. In restaurants plates of plastic-modelled food ornamented the windows: Alice paused and looked closely at their garish forms. Parted noren curtains above doors, in the brightest indigo, waved customers in. She was hungry, she realised, but did not want to eat alone, conspicuously, in a restaurant. Alice wandered back to the area near the railway station and located a department store. When she entered, shop-girls in stiff uniforms bowed and greeted her with a sing-song chorus of ‘Irashaimase! Irashaimase!’, and then she descended, like Orpheus, level after level, to the food hall she rightly surmised was below. There Alice bought a box of sushi, a capped glass tumbler of sake, and a French pastry sealed in a silver metallic wrap, all of which she took back with her to her hotel room. There, on the bed, beside the technicolour sign, she set out her simple meal and allowed herself at last to worry about her friend, Mr Sakamoto, somewhere else in this city, somewhere beyond the telephone.

  She had been sleeping in awkward shapes. Her body ached when she woke.

  In her rectangle of window Alice saw that the sky was overcast and drizzling, and that large birds, which looked like hawks, were circling above the railway station. The birds surprised her: she had seen their cousins in Australian deserts, but somehow here they appeared ominous and insidiously misplaced. Alice stood at the window, quietly looking down. Hundreds of umbrella shapes moved beneath her, grouping and ungrouping, forming designs, dispersing. Everything was oyster-coloured, dappled. The scene had a grave and unusual beauty. A print might be made of it. A modern-day Hokusai.

  Alice dressed quickly and left the hotel in search of coffee. She was restive and disturbed. Not knowing Mr Sakamoto’s condition had tilted her off balance. Alice drank two cups of strong coffee, then visited the Tourist Information Centre, which she had spotted in the same street as her hotel. She bought a tram pass and picked up pamphlets and a map of the city. She discovered she could visit Christian martyr sites and the Atomic Bomb Museum; she could go to the Peace Park or look at Western-style colonial houses or the reconstruction of an early Dutch settlement. It was still raining gently and the sky looked hazy. Alice returned instead to her hotel, to her small brown room. She lay on her bed, reading a novel by Murakami. Waiting like an impatient schoolgirl for lunchtime.

  When Haruko met her in the lobby, Alice felt instantly relieved. She was dressed casually and had a relaxed and friendly manner; she seemed untroubled. Nothing serious, Alice told herself. Everything, after all, was going to be all right.

  ‘Uncle Tadeo told us all about you,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘He knew you were coming, but wasn’t sure when. My sister, Akiko, is at the hospital. She will join us later.’

  ‘How is he?’ asked Alice.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you on the phone. I had to look up the word in the dictionary. He has had what you call a stroke; he is blind and paralysed and will not recover.’

  Alice simply stood. Haruko sounded brutally conclusive.

  ‘But he was so healthy,’ she said in a weak response.

  ‘It happens, the doctor said. We were told not to hope.’

  Told not to hope. Alice felt shocked and tearful. Haruko only now seemed to notice the measure of Alice’s distress.

  ‘Come to lunch, we will talk.’

  ‘Can I visit him, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry, only family.’

  ‘How long …?’

  ‘About a week ago. He has declined since then.’

  What did she see, in the wreckage of such shattering news? Mr Sakamoto’s city from a watery car window, passing alongside her swiftly, like a ground-zero dream. Old-fashioned-looking trams, new-fashioned-looking shops, steep hills around the outskirts, holding up fragile-looking houses. A goddess statue, very erect, high up on a slope. A glimpse of the harbour, and slow, enormous ships. Haruko drove fast and was trying to point out sites of interest, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was as if her practised cheerfulness had sudden
ly lapsed. They both fell silent for the second half of the journey. The rain grew heavier. Storm clouds in deep purple massed and gathered to the east.

  Mr Sakamoto’s house was in the traditional style; it was on a sheltered spur of the hillside and had survived the bombing, along with a small nearby cluster of other old wooden buildings. Rain darkened the wood. Alice and Haruko shared an umbrella from the car to the front door, and stood at the entrance, damp and dishevelled. Drips spattered in cherry blossom shapes on the floor.

  Uncle Tadeo was there, awaiting Alice’s arrival. He rose from his chair, bowed, and extended his arms widely, in a gesture of welcome. Alice was reminded of her dream of Mr Sakamoto in the Paris Métro. And although she was a stranger and had never seen him before – this wizened pale man, bald and frail and with the trace of a tremble – she walked into his embrace, rested her face on his chest, and began to weep. Uncle Tadeo touched Alice’s hair and said something soothing. Haruko did not translate. It was not necessary. It was understood. Haruko too began to weep, and the three of them, together, were at once bonded in distress.

  13

  Akiko arrived at the family house soon after, looking strained and tired. She was wearing a heavy winter coat, which she did not remove. She said little to Alice, barely acknowledging her presence, and seemed to regard her as an intruder. Unlike Haruko, she was not confident in speaking English and settled as a silent, brooding presence. The small pattern of commiseration that Uncle Tadeo, Haruko and Alice had established was less stable in her company, and less able to be expressed. Alice apologised for her inability to speak Japanese: in this situation she felt blundering, reduced to clumsy gestures.