14



Cinnamon's Strange Sign Language

*

The Musical Offering



"Cinnamon stopped talking once and for all just before his sixth birthday," Nutmeg said to
me. "It was the year he should have entered elementary school. All of a sudden, that February,
he stopped talking. And as strange as it may seem, it was night before we noticed that he
hadn't said a word all day. True, he was never much of a talker, but still. When it finally
occurred to me what was happening, I did everything I could to make him speak. I talked to
him, I shook him; nothing worked. He was like a stone. I didn't know whether he had
suddenly lost the power to speak or he had decided on his own that he would stop speaking.
And I still don't know. But he's never said another word-never made another sound. He'll
never scream if he's in pain, and you can tickle him but he'll never laugh out loud."
Nutmeg took her son to several different ear, nose, and throat specialists, but none of them
could locate the cause. All they could determine was that it was not physical. Cinnamon could


hear perfectly well, but he wouldn't speak. All the doctors concluded that it must be psy-
chological in origin. Nutmeg took him to a psychiatrist friend of hers, but he also was unable
to determine a cause for Cinnamon's continued silence. He administered an IQ. test, but there
was no problem there. In fact, he turned out to have an unusually high IQ. The doctor could
find no evidence of emotional problems, either. "Has he experienced some kind of unusual
shock?" the psychiatrist asked Nutmeg. "Try to think. Could he have witnessed something
abnormal or been subjected to violence at home?" But Nutmeg could think of nothing. One
day her son had been normal in every way: he had eaten his meals in the normal way, had
normal conversations with her, gone to bed when he was supposed to, had no trouble falling
asleep. And the next morning he had sunk into a world of deep silence. There had been no
problems in the home. The child was being brought up under the ever watchful gaze of
Nutmeg and her mother, neither of whom had ever raised a hand to him. The doctor
concluded that the only thing they could do was observe him and hope that something would
turn up. Unless they knew the cause, there was no way to treat him. Nutmeg should bring
Cinnamon to see the doctor once a week, in the course of which they might figure out what
had happened. It was possible that he would just start speaking again, like someone waking
from a dream. All they could do was wait. True, the child was not speaking, but there was
nothing else wrong with him....
And so they waited, but Cinnamon never again rose to the surface of his deep ocean of
silence.



Its electric motor producing a low hum, the front gate began to swing inward at nine
o'clock in the morning, and Cinnamon's Mercedes-Benz 500SEL pulled into the driveway.
The car phone's antenna protruded from the back window like a newly sprouted tentacle. I
watched through a crack in the blinds. The car looked like some kind of huge migratory fish,
afraid of nothing. The brand-new black tires traced a silent arc over the concrete surface and
came to a stop in the designated spot. They traced exactly the same arc every morning and
stopped in exactly the same place with probably no more than two inches' variation.
I was drinking the coffee that I had brewed for myself a few minutes earlier. The rain had
stopped, but gray clouds covered the sky, and the ground was still black and cold and wet.
The birds raised sharp cries as they flitted back and forth in search of worms on the ground.
The driver's door opened after a short pause, and Cinnamon stepped out, wearing sunglasses.
After a quick scan of the area, he took the glasses off and slipped them into his breast pocket.
Then he closed the car door. The precise sound of the big Mercedes's door latch was different
from the sounds other car doors made. For me, this sound marked the beginning of another
day at the Residence.
I had been thinking all morning about Ushikawa's visit the night before, wondering
whether I should tell Cinnamon that Ushikawa had been sent by Noboru Wataya to get me to
pull out of the activities conducted at this house. In the end, though, I decided not to tell him-
for the time being, at least. This was something that had to be settled between Noboru Wataya
and me. I didn't want to have any third parties involved.
Cinnamon was stylishly dressed, as always, in a suit. All his suits were of the finest
quality, tailored to fit him perfectly. They tended to be rather conservative in cut, but on him
they looked youthful, as if magically transformed into the latest fashion.
He wore a new tie, of course, one to match that day's suit. His shirt and shoes were
different as well. His mother, Nutmeg, had probably picked everything out for him, in her
usual way. His outfit was as spotless, top to bottom, as the Mercedes he drove. Each time he
showed up in the morning, I found myself admiring him-or, I might even say, moved by him.
What kind of being could possibly lie hidden beneath that perfect exterior?





Cinnamon took two paper shopping bags full of food and other necessities out of the trunk
and held them in his arms as he entered the Residence. Embraced by him, even these ordinary
paper bags from the supermarket looked elegant and artistic. Maybe he had some special way
of holding them. Or possibly it was something more basic than that. His whole face lit up
when he saw me. It was a marvelous smile, as if he had just come out into a bright opening
after a long walk in a deep woods. "Good morning," I said to him. "Good morning," he did
not say to me, though his lips moved. He proceeded to take the groceries out of the bags and
arrange them in the refrigerator like a bright child committing newly acquired knowledge to
memory. The other supplies he arranged in the cupboards. Then he had a cup of coffee with
me. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, just as Kumiko and I had done every
morning long before.



"Cinnamon never spent a day in school, finally," said Nutmeg. "Ordinary schools
wouldn't accept a child who didn't speak, and I felt it would be wrong to send him to a school
with nothing but handicapped children. The reason for his being unable to speak-whatever it
was- I knew was different from other children's reasons. And besides, he never showed any
sign of wanting to go to school. He seemed to like it best to stay home alone, reading or
listening to classical music or playing in the yard with the dog we had then. He would go out
for walks too, sometimes, but not with much enthusiasm, because he didn't like to see
children his own age."
Nutmeg studied sign language and used that to talk with Cinnamon. When sign language
was not enough, they would converse in writing. One day, though, she realized that she and
her son were able to convey their feelings to each other perfectly well without resorting to
such indirect methods. She knew exactly what he was thinking or requesting with only the
slightest gesture or change of expression. From that point on, she ceased to be overly
concerned about Cinnamon's inability to speak. It certainly wasn't obstructing any mental
exchange between mother and son. The absence of spoken language did, of course, give her
an occasional sense of physical inconvenience, but it never went beyond the level of
"inconvenience," and in a sense it was this very inconvenience that purified the quality of the
communication between the two.
During lulls between jobs, Nutmeg would teach Cinnamon how to read and write and do
arithmetic. But in fact, there was not that much that she had to teach him. He liked books, and
he would use them to teach himself what he needed to know. She was less a teacher for him
than the one who chose the books he needed. He liked music and wanted to play the piano,
but after learning the basic finger movements in a few months with a professional piano
teacher, he used only manuals and recorded tapes to bring himself to a high level of technical
accomplishment for one so young. He loved to play Bach and Mozart, and aside from Poulenc
and Bartok, he showed little inclination to play anything beyond the Romantics. During his
first six years of study, his interests were concentrated on music and reading, but from the
time he reached middle school age, he turned to the acquisition of languages, beginning with
English and then French. In both cases, he taught himself enough to read simple books after
six months of study. He had no intention of learning to converse in either language, of course;
he wanted only to be able to read books. Another activity he loved was tinkering with
complicated machinery. He bought a complete collection of professional tools, with which he
was able to build radios and tube amplifiers, and he enjoyed taking clocks apart and fixing
them.


Everyone around him-which is to say, his mother, his father, and his grandmother
(Nutmeg's mother)-became accustomed to the fact that he never spoke, and ceased to think of
it as unnatural or abnormal. After a few years, Nutmeg stopped taking her son to the
psychiatrist. The weekly consultations were doing nothing for his "symptoms," and as the
doctors had noted in the beginning, aside from his not speaking, there was nothing wrong
with him. Indeed, he was a virtually perfect child. Nutmeg could not recall ever having had to
force him to do anything or to scold him for doing anything he shouldn't have done. He
would decide for himself what he had to do and then he would do it, flawlessly, in his own
way. He was so different from other children- ordinary children- that even comparing him
with them was all but meaningless. He was twelve when his grandmother died (an event that
caused him to go on crying, soundlessly, for several days), after which he took it upon himself
to do the cooking, laundry, and cleaning while his mother was at work. Nutmeg wanted to
hire a housekeeper when her mother died, but Cinnamon would not hear of it. He refused to
have a stranger come in and disrupt the order of the household. It was Cinnamon, then, who
ran the house, and he did so with a high degree of precision and discipline.



Cinnamon spoke to me with his hands. He had inherited his mother's slender, well-shaped
fingers. They were long, but not too long. He held them up near his face and moved them
without hesitation, and like some kind of sensible, living creatures they communicated his
messages to me.
<One client will be coming at two o'clock this afternoon. That is all for today. There is
nothing you have to do until she gets here. I will take the next hour to finish my work, and
then I will pick her up and bring her back. The weather report calls for overcast skies all day.
You can spend time in the well while it is still light out without hurting your eyes.>
As Nutmeg had said, I had no trouble understanding the words that his fingers conveyed. I
was unacquainted with sign language, but it was easy for me to follow his complex, fluid
movements. It may have been Cinnamon's skill that brought his meaning out so naturally, just
as a play performed in a foreign language can be moving. Or then again, perhaps it only
seemed to me that I was watching his fingers move but was not actually doing so. The moving
fingers were perhaps no more than a decorative facade, and I was half-consciously watching
some other aspect of the building behind it. I would try to catch sight of the boundary between
the facade and the background whenever we chatted across the breakfast table, but I could
never quite manage to see it, as if any line that might have marked the border between the two
kept moving and changing its shape.
After our short conversations-or communications-Cinnamon would take his suit jacket
off, put it on a hanger, tuck his necktie inside the front of his shirt, and then do the cleaning or
cooking. As he worked, he would listen to music on a compact stereo. One week he would
listen to nothing but Rossini's sacred music, and another week Vivaldi's concertos for wind
instruments, repeating them so often that I ended up memorizing the melodies.
Cinnamon worked with marvelous dexterity and no wasted motion. I used to offer to lend
him a hand at first, but he would only smile and shake his head. Watching how he went about
his chores, I became convinced that things would progress far more smoothly if I left
everything to him. It became my habit after that to avoid getting in his way. I would read a
book on the "fitting room" sofa while he was doing his morning chores.
The Residence was not a big house, and it was minimally furnished. No one actually lived
there, so it never got particularly dirty or untidy. Still, every day Cinnamon would vacuum
every inch of the place, dust the furniture and shelves, clean the windowpanes, wax the table,
wipe the light fixtures, and put everything in the house back where it belonged. He would
arrange the dishes in the china cabinet and line up the pots according to size, align the edges


of the linens and towels, point all coffee cup handles in the same direction, reposition the bar
of soap on the bathroom sink, and change the towels even if they showed no sign of having
been used. Then he would gather the trash into a single bag, cinch it closed, and take it out.
He would adjust the time on the clocks according to his watch (which, I would have been
willing to bet, was no more than three seconds off). If, in the course of his cleaning, he found
anything the slightest bit out of place, he would put it back where it belonged with precise and
elegant movements. I might test him by shifting a clock a half inch to the left on its shelf, and
the next morning he would be sure to move it a half inch back to the right.
In none of this behavior did Cinnamon give the impression of obsessiveness. He seemed
to be doing only what was natural and "right." Perhaps in Cinnamon's mind there was a vivid
imprint of the way this world-or at least this one little world here- was supposed to be, and for
him to keep it that way was as natural as breathing. Perhaps he saw himself as lending just the
slightest hand when things were driven by an intense inner desire to return to their original
forms.
Cinnamon prepared food, stored it in the refrigerator, and indicated to me what I ought to
have for lunch. I thanked him. He then stood before the mirror, straightened his tie, inspected
his shirt, and slipped into his suit coat. Finally, with a smile, he moved his lips to say
goodbye, took one last look around, and went out through the front door. Sitting behind the
wheel of the Mercedes-Benz, he slipped a classical tape into the deck, pressed the remote-
control button to open the front gate, and drove out, tracing back over the same arc he had
made when he arrived. Once the car had passed through, the gate closed. I watched through a
crack in the blind, holding a cup of coffee, as before. The birds were no longer as noisy as
they had been when Cinnamon arrived. I could see where the low clouds had been torn in
spots and carried off by the wind, but above them was yet another, thicker layer of cloud.



I sat at the kitchen table, setting my cup down and surveying the room upon which
Cinnamon's hands had imposed such a beautiful sense of order. It looked like a large, three-
dimensional still life, disturbed only by the quiet ticking of the clock. The clock's hands
showed ten-twenty. Looking at the chair that Cinnamon had occupied earlier, I asked myself
once again whether I had done the right thing by not telling them about Ushikawa's visit the
night before. Might it not impair whatever sense of trust there might be between Cinnamon
and me or Nutmeg and me?
I preferred, though, to watch for a while to see how things would develop. What was it
about my activities here that disturbed Noboru Wataya so? Which of his tails was I stepping
on? And what kind of countermeasures would he adopt? If I could find the answers to these
questions, I might be able to draw a little closer to his secret. And as a result, I might be able
to draw closer to where Kumiko was.
As the hands of the clock were verging on eleven (the clock that Cinnamon had slid a half
inch to the right, back to its proper place), I went out to the yard to climb down into the well.



"I told Cinnamon the story of the submarine and the zoo when he was little-about what I
had seen from the deck of the transport ship in August of 1945 and how the Japanese soldiers
shot the animals in my father's zoo all the while an American submarine was training its
cannon on us and preparing to sink our ship. I had kept that story to myself for a very long
time and never told it to anyone. I had wandered in silence through the gloomy labyrinth that
spread out between illusion and truth. When Cinnamon was born, though, it occurred to me
that he was the only one I could tell my story to. And so, even before he could understand


words, I began telling it to him over and over again, in a near whisper, telling him everything
I could remember, and as I spoke, the scenes would come alive to me, in vivid colors, as if I
had pried off a lid and let them out.
"As he began to understand language, Cinnamon asked me to tell him the story again and
again. I must have told it to him a hundred, two hundred, five hundred times, but not just
repeating the same thing every time. Whenever I told it to him, Cinnamon would ask me to
tell him some other little story contained in the main story. He wanted to know about a
different branch of the same tree. I would follow the branch he asked for and tell him that part
of the story. And so the story grew and grew.
"In this way, the two of us went on to create our own interlocking system of myths. Do
you see what I mean? We would get carried away telling each other the story every day. We
would talk for hours about the names of the animals in the zoo, about the sheen of their fur or
the color of their eyes, about the different smells that hung in the air, about the names and
faces of the individual soldiers, about their birth and childhood, about their rifles and the
weight of their ammunition, about the fears they felt and their thirst, about the shapes of the
clouds floating in the sky....
"I could see all the colors and shapes with perfect clarity as I told the story to Cinnamon,
and I was able to put what I saw into words-the exact words I needed-and convey them all to
him. There was no end to any of this. There were always more details that could be filled in,
and the story kept growing deeper and deeper and bigger and bigger."
Nutmeg smiled as she spoke of those days long ago. I had never seen such a natural smile
on her face before.
"But then one day it ended," she said. "Cinnamon stopped sharing stories with me that
February morning when he stopped talking."
Nutmeg paused to light a cigarette.
"I know now what happened. His words were lost in the labyrinth, swallowed up by the
world of the stories. Something that came out of those stones snatched his tongue away. And a
few years later, the same thing
killed my husband."



The wind grew stronger than it had been in the morning, sending one heavy gray cloud
after another on a straight line east. The clouds looked like silent travelers headed for the edge
of the earth. In the bare branches of the trees in the yard, the wind would give a short,
wordless moan now and then. I stood by the well, looking up at the sky. Kumiko was proba-
bly somewhere looking at them too. The thought crossed my mind for no reason. It was just a
feeling I had.
I climbed down the ladder to the bottom of the well and pulled the rope to close the lid.
After taking two or three deep breaths, I gripped the bat and gently lowered myself to a sitting
position in the darkness. The total darkness. Yes, that was the most important thing. This
unsullied darkness held the key. It was kind of like a TV cooking program. "Everybody got
that now? The secret to this recipe is total darkness. Make sure you use the thickest kind you
can buy." And the strongest bat you can put your hands on, I added, smiling for a moment in
the darkness.
I could feel a certain warmth in the mark on my cheek. It told me that I was drawing a
little closer to the core of things. I closed my eyes. Still echoing in my ears were the strains of
the music that Cinnamon had been listening to repeatedly as he worked that morning. It was
Bach's "Musical Offering," still there in my head like the lingering murmur of a crowd in a
high-ceilinged auditorium. Eventually, though, silence descended and began to burrow its
way into the folds of my brain, one after another, like an insect laying eggs. I opened my eyes,


then closed them again. The darknesses inside and out began to blend, and I began to move
outside of my self, the container that held me.
As always.