The Hole

by Hye-young Pyun

  As her tears fell, his mother-in-law patted his numb hand. He couldn’t tell whether her hand was dry or damp from wiping her eyes. Every now and then when she took his hand, he felt something like a tiny jolt of electricity. He stared hard at her when that happened, but she was so lost in her own grief that she never noticed. He couldn’t tell whether the jolt was a sign that he was regaining sensation, or just friction from the many cables connecting him to machines.

  4

  FOR THE OLD OGHI, THE word disabled had made him picture a veteran of some long-ago war coming home minus an arm or a leg. It denoted the tragedy produced by a questionable mix of chromosomes at the time of conception or by some bruised genes passed down through the family. None of which applied to him. That word and Oghi lived in completely different worlds.

  Each time he was transported, prone in his bed, to the examination room or the treatment room, other people stared openly at him, or struggled not to stare. Adults usually made a conscious effort not to. They would examine him when they thought he wasn’t looking and then feign indifference. Children were the opposite. They stared. They tugged at their mother’s hands and urged them to look too, or made faces like they were scared, or actually said out loud that they were scared. They trailed after Oghi and asked, “How did that man get hurt?” or “What’s wrong with his face?”

  What Oghi hated even more than their innocence was their parents’ pity. They pulled their children away by the hand and scolded them to watch their mouths. When they quietly whispered, “He had an accident, that poor man,” he felt angry.

  Some of them looked afraid. Couples grabbed each other’s hands, people in conversation stopped mid-sentence. They paused whatever they were doing until his gurney had passed. Oghi wondered if they thought that by avoiding him, they would keep themselves safe from his fate. Of course, they could’ve had other reasons. They might have simply been reacting to the ugliness of his damaged face.

  Even after several months in the hospital, Oghi struggled to accept that this was his body now. He found it hard to acknowledge that he would never again be in control of his own limbs. He did not know how to handle the disconnect between the old him and the new him. All he could do was foresee that nothing would be as it was, and he could not even begin to guess at how many things would be different in the future and how those things would change him.

  He had to learn a whole new way of living than before. His meals were not brought to him as he sat in a restaurant. He did not get to savor dishes prepared with minimal artificial flavorings and assembled from organic ingredients selected not only for their nutritional value but for the flavor, ambience, and dignity that such food imparted. Instead he ingested uniform amounts of liquefied food through a rubber tube. He did not have to chew or move his jaw or work his tongue. The slippery mouthfeel and bland flavor of the formula was second only to the unpleasant sensation of having the tube inserted. Before, he’d been scrupulous about including probiotics in his diet regularly, and his intestines had worked smoothly, never relegating him to the suffering of constipation. That was all useless now. Having lost the ability to control his large intestine and sphincter, he was forced over and over to relive the grief of putting on a ghastly show for the nurse.

  When would he get to wear the two suits he had bought during a trip to Italy with his wife to celebrate becoming a full professor? Now his choice of outfit came down to choosing which pair of hospital pajamas, printed with the name of the hospital and designed for easy opening and closing, smelled less strongly of antiseptic. Oghi spent his days prone in bed. The nurse propped his legs and ankles up on a pillow to keep his heels from touching the mattress. To prevent bedsores, she turned him on his side twice a day. Morning and evening, once to the left, once to the right. She groaned each time she turned him.

  Even after waking from his coma, it was some time before Oghi saw his own face. It had been a long time since he’d studied himself in the mirror. Now and then he caught a glimpse of his reflection in glass. When he was moved to the examination room, he saw himself reflected in the walls or ceiling of the elevator. He spotted his reflection in the nurse’s oversized wristwatch.

  There were a number of things Oghi had never doubted in his forty-seven years, and his own face was one. After the lines and contours had settled into maturity, his face had only changed a tiny bit whenever he gained or lost weight. The elasticity and color of his youth vanished, and gravity had been gradually tugging at the flesh beneath his chin. He had acne and milia, and his skin was growing darker, along with other continual small changes. But even with those changes, his face had remained a constant. The bridge of his nose, not very high but not too flat either. The roundish apples of his cheeks. The bushy eyebrows that needed a proper trimming whenever he went for a haircut. His eyes with their long, sharply creased lids. It was all gone. Now he saw patches of skin grafted on to protect the flesh underneath, the prosthetic attached to his jaw to stabilize the muscles.

  The person in the mirror was a stranger. The only thing confirming it was really him was the name tag at the foot of his bed. Oghi was more shocked than when he first learned he was paralyzed. He asked himself the same question he had when he first recovered consciousness—was waking up really a good thing?

  He couldn’t shake the urge to give up. His doctor’s continuous attempts at psychological therapy were not exactly filling him with hope. If he’d never woken from his coma, they could have given him a merciful death instead. It angered him that even that opportunity was lost. It was his wife’s fault. The night he’d started to regain consciousness, she had stared down at him from the ceiling. She was the reason he woke.

  At night, before sleeping, he prayed. For the world to end. For his symptoms to suddenly worsen. For him to have an adverse reaction to the medications. For his breathing to stop. Of course he knew, even as he prayed, that none of that would happen. The sun would rise the next day as it always did and wake Oghi from sleep. The world would coolly start its day without him in it. And Oghi would exhale the foul-smelling breath that had pooled in his mouth overnight and begin another day in his hospital bed.

  His mother-in-law stopped by once a day to visit him. Each time, she fixed him with a look of deep concern and asked the nurse about his condition, and then asked Oghi as well, who was clearly not okay, if he was okay. Probably she didn’t know what else to ask. After staring worriedly at him for a bit, she would do things she really didn’t have to do, such as tuck his blanket around him or tidy the area around his bed. Then she would exchange a few more quiet words with the nurse and leave.

  One day, she stayed longer than usual. Even after her brief conversation with the nurse, and even after straightening his sheets, she just sat there blankly on the chair beside his bed. Oghi gazed at her. She wasn’t much company, but she was polite and always well put together. As he looked at her, he wondered if his wife would have looked the same at that age. When he pictured his wife as an old woman, he saw his mother-in-law’s face.

  The nurse stepped out of the room for a moment, and Oghi’s mother-in-law got up and shuffled closer. She looked shier than usual. After a long hesitation, she took out a small velvet pouch. She stood there quietly, the pouch clutched tightly in her hand. People walked past outside the door just then, startling her, and she shoved it back into her bag. After a brief moment, she calmed herself and took it out again.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

  It was a ring, with a diamond about five millimeters in diameter.

  Oghi didn’t blink. He knew it was a ring but he figured that wasn’t what she was asking.

  “My daughter was wearing it.”

  Oghi had no memory of his wife ever owning that ring.

  “The police gave it to me.”

  She covered her face, the ring still clutched tightly in her hand. She looked like she’d started crying again. Oghi waited. She wasn’t being untoward. Maybe she missed her daughter and wanted to talk about her,
or maybe she just wanted to touch an object that reminded her of her daughter and talk about it.

  The nurse opened the door but quietly closed it again when she saw that Oghi’s mother-in-law was crying. It wasn’t the first time. She cried easily, and pointlessly. But something was different this time.

  “Can I keep it?” she asked through tears. “It’s the only thing I have of hers.”

  Oghi hurriedly blinked once. It would’ve been better if he could have voiced his answer: Of course, you must keep it, it’s only natural that you do, it belongs with you. He would have said the words over and over, to keep his mother-in-law from feeling embarrassed about proffering such an expensive ring, to say that of course she had a right to keep the ring.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not mine to take.”

  It’s okay, of course you should keep it, was what he wanted to tell her. But unable to speak, all he could do was blink once.

  “I can keep it?” she asked again shyly. She kept her eyes fixed on Oghi, as if she absolutely had to have his permission.

  It’s already yours, Oghi blinked. He moved the muscles of his wobbling jaw and tried to smile.

  “Thank you. I knew I should ask first. It’s not right to just take something, even if the owner has passed away. It’s just not done. Especially not something so valuable. But this ring… I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  His mother-in-law squeezed Oghi’s hand. She cried. Oghi wanted to squeeze her hand back. To keep his honest and sensible mother-in-law from feeling embarrassed. To let her know that if anyone should keep his wife’s last effects, it was her.

  His mother-in-law’s quiet tears suddenly stopped. Her eyes widened and she stared at Oghi. He understood why, he’d felt it too. She hurriedly called in the nurse, who studied Oghi for a moment and then paged the doctor. After a few checks, the doctor informed Oghi that his left hand was recovering motor function.

  So this was what it felt like to survive. Oghi sensed it fully now. It had been so long since he’d felt this alive. Like he could do anything. First, his brain had awakened. It had suffered a shock and was sluggish, but it was slowly recovering. Aside from opening and closing his eyes, his body had refused to bend to Oghi’s will, but not anymore. He could move his left arm; the nerves had healed. Maybe, after having gone to the brink of death, he was slowly stumbling his way back toward life one step at a time.

  For Oghi, who’d found little reassurance in his doctor’s attempts at pep talk, his willpower was returning on its own. Thanks to his left arm, he became aware of what he still had, what made life worth clinging to. There were so many things. He felt like he could grasp all of those things with his left arm alone.

  The mood in the hospital room lifted. His nurse started talking to him a little more. Though his mother-in-law had never been the demonstrative type, she cheered Oghi on by saying, “Keep it up! You’ve got to go home on your own two feet.”

  Oghi began physical therapy in earnest. A schedule was drawn up, and for several hours each day he worked on his rehabilitation. At one point he worked so hard that he burst a blood vessel in his thigh and had to take a break for two weeks. After all the effort, he felt confused and depressed and refused any further therapy.

  “It happens to everyone,” his doctor said with a shrug. “Whenever there’s a physical injury, it’s only natural to experience a period of chaos. The accident dulled your nerves and numbed you. So of course you would feel this way. You can’t help but wonder, ‘Why did this happen to me? How did I end up like this?’ Who wouldn’t wonder that? But it’s also natural for you to keep hoping. Because you’re a human being. First you get stable, then you throw yourself into therapy. But you don’t get far. Because the harder you work at your rehabilitation the worse the pain gets. Meanwhile, recovery takes a long time, and when you realize it doesn’t happen overnight, you get depressed and anxious. But that’s okay. Because you’re alive. Because you can do whatever you set your mind to.”

  The doctor explained in a kind voice that Oghi’s case was not unusual and that it was simply what any person would experience.

  Oghi was reassured. It comforted him to know that he was treading a path that many others had taken. He couldn’t bear the idea that he was different now. That his being different was just another word for being disabled.

  5

  TWO ORDERLIES CARRIED OGHI CAREFULLY through the iron gate on a stretcher. Oghi’s prone position gave him an unusual angle on his house. Each time the stretcher dipped, the gabled roof seemed to warp and twist and cast out a long shadow. The dark exterior walls of the house pitched and swayed, and the camphor tree stretched its overgrown branches down toward Oghi’s body. Then the porch loomed over and closed in on him.

  It took a long time for Oghi to enter the room he would be staying in, the bedroom that he had once shared with his wife. The orderlies had not made a mistake nor had Oghi insisted on dragging his broken body into the room himself. He was in no shape to try. Despite three months of intensive physical therapy, there’d been little improvement. He was able to use his left arm and to turn his head slightly from side to side, but that was all. His left arm that had once filled him with the will to live now only made him despair at how little progress he’d made. Even after concerted effort, none of his other limbs had recovered. When he overused his left arm, he got cramps and the muscles ached afterward. The difference from his atrophied right arm was stark. Only the one arm had recovered, leaving his body out of balance.

  What prevented Oghi and the two orderlies from entering the house was Oghi’s mother-in-law. She clung to the side of the stretcher and wept. He’d never seen her cry like this before, wailing loudly like a child, her face twisted up in a terrible grimace. She’d cried frequently in the hospital but they were soundless tears. A mannered cry, quiet and cold. Even in her silences she’d seemed as if she were constantly crying. But in front of others, she tried to avoid revealing a single tear and behaved as if she had come to terms with her daughter’s death.

  It took forever for Oghi to be laid down in his own room. Instead of his Ethan Allen rosewood bed, the room held a low, narrow hospital bed, the kind that could be easily raised and lowered. The bed he had shared with his wife was too big and high now for Oghi. It was the only piece of furniture that had changed, and yet the room had the chilly, desolate look of a convalescent facility.

  His mother-in-law had taken care of everything, from having him discharged to getting the house ready. She’d met with Oghi’s doctor and scheduled his next operation, asked about his prognosis and told him everything that the doctor told her, made arrangements for an ambulance to pick him up for his regular checkups at the hospital, consulted with the physical therapists there about how his rehabilitation would proceed and hired one who made house calls to help with his muscles and joints. She had even purchased the hospital bed and all of his physical therapy equipment.

  Other than his mother-in-law, he had no one else to do this for him. She was his only family and his legal guardian.

  She had also hired his caregiver. She’d placed a help wanted ad online with the assistance of a nurse at the hospital. Since it was a live-in position, there weren’t many applicants. She met each of them in turn and interviewed them, asking about their work experience and qualifications, and then selected one and negotiated the wages and working conditions.

  She told Oghi that the caregiver she’d hired dressed like a country bumpkin, but what mattered was that she had plenty of experience.

  “She said the last person she cared for was on the verge of death but she brought him back to life.”

  Oghi smiled. If he could have made any sound, he would have laughed out loud. His mother-in-law was not the type to exaggerate or make a big deal out of things. The caregiver must have talked herself up.

  She told him something similar about the physical therapist who made house calls. That his current patient had made a full recovery.

  “He said it took just one year for
the patient to walk again. He must be very skilled.”

  If there was one thing Oghi hated, it was tales of miraculous recoveries. Back before his accident, he would have poked fun at her for it. He would have said that people will do and eat all sorts of stupid things just to survive. But this time Oghi wanted to chime in, to say he was paying attention. Because he could not, he blinked instead.

  Oghi was still only capable of producing words that sounded like a moan or muttering things that no one could make out, but according to his doctor, his speech would get much better after his next surgery. The doctor said that the muscles of Oghi’s shattered jaw were moving back into place, and his badly damaged vocal cords were likewise on the mend.

  “Yes, yes, you don’t have to thank me. I’m only doing what I must.”

  His mother-in-law responded as she saw fit. Oghi blinked, as if to say, sure, that was what he’d wanted to say.

  “Who else would do all this for you?” She let out a low sigh and asked, “So, how does it feel to be home again?”

  Oghi looked up at the familiar square ceiling lamp. It was so much dimmer than the glaring lights of the hospital room that he briefly wondered if one of the bulbs had gone out. It was cozy. The light made him feel safe.

  “Does it feel good?” she pressed.