MAST

I tried another’s eyes before. Maybe two years ago now. The last time he came.

I hear his weight shifting from foot to foot. So long accustomed to enduring stoically, he is unsure how to breach or even address the cocoon of silence I have woven. I imagine it glowing, absorbing his words and deflecting his phrases, throbbing with soundless energy fuelled by his rising frustration. I don’t resent him, just who he is. As a father, he is probably no better or worse than other trapped fathers, doing his best to enthuse about the affection he is supposed to show at school baseball games and weekend excursions. He is a two-sevenths father. I am his part-time project, no rival for the position of man of the house, a role he fills well enough. It’s not like there were any other applicants. His greatest failing is in the ‘god’ function: his national duty to mould me in his image, reactive and malleable, duty-bound and unquestioning, a robot with the ability to bleed. I have made myself bleed, does that void the manufacturer’s warranty. What can he do? Return me to the manufacturer? That poses certain physiological difficulties.

‘Your grandfather took me to the mountains when I was twelve. His hometown was there, a small village sunk into a valley that used to have a river. Just outside Matsumoto was a peak, I can’t remember the name now. I’m not even sure he told me what the name was anyway. It doesn’t matter. We stood at the bottom looking up; it must have been summer because I remember the sweat stinging my eyes. He pulled two white towels out of his pack. He tied one around my head like a labourer does when they are outside. He tied the other around his own. My towel was too tight, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. He was smiling, so pleased with himself for having thought of this eventuality. He had two metal water bottles tied to his belt, and with every step he took they clunked together. The sound became sharper every time we drank. There was a gravel path leading up to the top. There were boulders to climb over, tree branches to duck under. He made me hold his hand in the places where the path skirted cliff tops. He warned me not to tell my mother about those parts, because she would be so very worried. She thought it was just a walk. He never said anything to her about a mountain. So we followed this path, and it was so long because it was never very steep. Winding around and around the mountain until I was dizzy. I wanted to cut up the slope to get to the top faster, but he told me stories of other little boys who had done the same thing. He pointed far down into the valley, where the rocks danced in the heat haze, surrounded by pebbles bleached white by the sun.

“See those pebbles down there?”
“Yes, father.”
“They aren’t pebbles. That’s where the boys who cut the path wait. They have been waiting a long time.”
I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t believe him and I am sure you wouldn’t either. The valley of bone pebbles was a warning; his father probably told it to him as well.

We stayed on the path all the way to the top. It took us three hours in the shimmering sun, light from above and heat reflecting from the stones of the path below. A direct route would not have taken much more than an hour, most of it shaded by trees and overhangs. Just before the summit there was a false crest, and we stopped to drink flasks of green tea and eat somen from plastic bowls he dug out of his pack. We were on the mountain side, and there was nothing in front of us but peaks and slopes, with the highest capped permanently by snow. Tufts of greenery stuck in the valleys like an old man’s nostril hair, sparse and resilient. Veins of dark rock slithering up the slopes. Hidden blood pulsing through the shadows and defiles. Weakening by the thin air; struggling to reach the head. I asked him why we had stopped there, so close to the true summit, but he shook his head and said nothing. We finished our noodles, tipping up the bowls so the salty liquid would not be wasted. He flicked them with his wrist before replacing them in the pack. Like he was tempted to throw them off the mountain just to see how far they would float but checked himself at the last minute. The last few drops flew from the plastic, staining the boulder we had been sitting on like the first drops of rain.

We reached the summit in less than five minutes. It was guarded by a white and orange radio antenna, towering over the bare peak with no sign of how it got there. The wire mesh fence around it was rusting in places, as was the once clear sign warning in both English and Japanese that any interference with the antenna would be punished.

“They built the path after the war, when everyone was desperate for work and didn’t mind what they were being paid for. The Americans wanted a network of radio masts down the spine of the country to relay their military signals. The war was over. Money meant more than pride by then. Your grandfather helped make the path. The local men spent six months digging and cutting and carrying sacks of gravel up from the valley floor. Six months to build, all so they could put a radio mast up here. When the trucks arrived with the parts, the American officer took one look at the mountain and called for a helicopter. He and his men never even set foot on the path. The radio network was never finished because technology made it redundant. The tower has been sitting up there ever since because no-one wants to take responsibility for bringing it back down.”


Looking out from that side of the mountain, the rocky arteries in the distance were disrupted by houses and even factories, replaced by highways to nowhere populated by day-trippers too lazy to climb. Off to the north, the wall of the dam seemed to bulge in the heat, threatening the toy towns downriver. But the disaster will never happen, not while the concrete holds.’

I wait for more, for the moral, the hidden message, the meaningful truth I am supposed to derive from this marathon telling. If you can call one person talking at another a conversation, then it is the longest he and I have ever had. The material of his suit pants shimmies as he bends, the light through the slot disrupted by the shadow of his hand and its contents. He pushes an envelope into the darkness and walks away. The timing of his footsteps is irregular.

The white envelope is stuffed with ten thousand yen bills, clean and crisp as if brought direct from a bank. I count them out to one hundred, a million yen in a pile by my toes. A small white card is stapled to the envelope. I tear it off, snakebite holes in its top right corner. He always had neat handwriting. The characters are aligned like tiny black soldiers, clear against the white card even in this gloom.

“You chose your own path, Masayuki. I cannot follow you. Goodbye.”
He won’t approach the door again, not even on birthdays or during O-bon. Mother brings a bowl of udon at dinner time, sniffling as she pushes it under the door. Thick white noodles cords adrift in a fishy broth. This night’s serve is too salty. My sense of triumph vanishes. She can’t be bought off that easily.