Oghi wanted to exhale. He wanted to expel all the air until his lungs were completely flat. He wanted to rid his body of every last bit of breath.
“I don’t know how she intends to dig such a huge pond all on her own. She’s going to get hurt overexerting herself like that. When I saw her, she looked like she was in worse shape than you. The elderly can pass away very suddenly, you know.”
The therapist slowly massaged Oghi’s body. Oghi looked down at his old tree of a body and raised his left arm and bit it hard. It didn’t hurt. He bit it some more. He kept biting. No matter how he tried, he could not flex his lower jaw any harder. This time, he struck his left arm against the metal rail on the side of the bed. It hurt. He hit it again harder. If the startled therapist hadn’t stopped him, Oghi might have kept beating his arm against the railing until the bone broke. His forearm was red and swollen. He liked that. His body feeling pain and responding to it. Knowing that was the extent of the pain he could feel.
Afterward, on his way out, the physical therapist spoke with Oghi’s mother-in-law in the garden. The look on his face was polite and cheery, and he kept bowing. Finally he took out the notepad and showed her what Oghi had written. Oghi’s mother-in-law looked at it, and while the therapist was prattling on, she stared up at Oghi’s room.
When he heard his mother-in-law enter the house, Oghi let out a long breath. Soon she was in his room and coming toward him without turning on the light. The darkness made her bigger.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice raspy.
In the low light, the round flesh beneath her marionette lines drooped.
“I didn’t know you were so concerned about me. So you’re worried I’ll overwork myself and go to an early grave? Look at the shape you’re in, and yet you worry about me. Thanks a lot. But you should tell me these things yourself. Then I would be more thankful, wouldn’t I? What’s this you wrote?”
She held the crumpled paper up to his eyes.
“M.I.L. PROBLEM. Right?”
She glared at him quietly in the darkness. Oghi kept repeating the phrase that he’d started muttering to himself some moments before. TasuketekudasaiTasuketekudasaiTasuketekudasai.
“People might misunderstand. They won’t be able to tell from looking at this whether you meant to say that your mother-in-law has a problem or that she is a problem. And if she has a problem, then is it a physical problem or a mental one? There’s no way to tell. I guess you still don’t know. What it is I want, I mean. I want you to get better. What else could I possibly want? That’s what my daughter would’ve wanted. So that’s what I’ll do. What my daughter couldn’t. What she meant to do. What she wanted to do. I have to do it for her. And I will. You know she was all I had.”
His mother-in-law’s rush of words broke off as she burst into tears. She wept loudly like a child. It’d been a long time since he’d seen her cry. He felt sorry. Had he simply misunderstood the ramblings of an elderly woman who’d lost her daughter? Sometimes she looked so frail and unhealthy. So much so that Oghi’s suspicions, his animosity, seemed undeserved. Like right now.
But not always. Most of the time, she acted in ways that made it only natural for Oghi to feel afraid and anxious. She didn’t seem to be wishing solely for Oghi’s recovery. The physical therapist had told him to use a wheelchair. He’d said that if Oghi was to recover functionality in his right arm, not just strengthen the muscles of his left arm, then he had to keep exercising both no matter how hard it got. But Oghi’s mother-in-law had said no to Oghi using a wheelchair. There were too many doorsills in the house that would prevent the chair from entering, and it was physically too difficult for her to put Oghi in the chair herself or to take him outside. So the therapist accepted this, and Oghi did not leave his bed.
His mother-in-law also did not use any of the massage methods the therapist had taught her. They were intended to prevent bedsores and keep his muscles supple, but she said it was impossible for her as her arms were simply too weak and she couldn’t execute the techniques correctly. The therapist said that made sense. He said it was the new caregiver’s job to receive that sort of training. But the new caregiver never came. Perhaps she never would.
His mother-in-law kept forgetting Oghi’s meal times. She hardly ever gave him his medication. There were times when she gave him his formula in the morning and then didn’t look in on him until very late at night. Each time, she muttered loudly under her breath that she had been so busy working all day she hadn’t even realized she was hungry. She clearly meant for him to hear it.
As he watched his mother-in-law’s tears stop, her face turn mean, and her glare return, he regretted having momentarily felt sorry for her.
“My daughter was all I had, and I’m all you have. You better not forget that,” she snapped, and left the room.
Oghi stared up at the ceiling in the dark and wondered whether J would come back. She had promised, and she always kept her promises. In a few days, he would go back to the hospital for his operation. There, with the nurses’ help, he would call J. She would help him. He would consult with a lawyer and appoint a new legal guardian.
But it was never to happen. J did not come back. Oghi spent those days staring out the window, watching for signs that anyone was approaching the gate. But the only person he saw coming or going was his mother-in-law making trips to the supermarket.
Maybe J had misunderstood Oghi. Or maybe she was still deliberating when to come back, who to come back with. Thinking about it that way reassured him. When he imagined J not coming at all, he couldn’t take it.
The day of his scheduled hospital visit came, but the ambulance that was to take Oghi there never arrived. Oghi’s whole day was a repetition of feeling his mood lift when he heard a car pass by out on the road past the gate with its veil of trees, only to be disappointed again when the car kept going. Not one of the cars stopped in front of the house. The clock ticked past midnight, and still no one came. The headlights of passing cars penetrated the dense row of trees now and then, but none of the headlights were coming to get Oghi.
It was well into the afternoon of the next day when Oghi’s mother-in-law came to empty his catheter bottle. He mouthed the word hospital. She stared down at him. He mouthed the word again carefully.
“I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to disappoint you. Your doctor was in an accident. A car crash. I got such a shock, I can’t even tell you. Somehow it never occurred to me that doctors can also get sick or injured. They say doctors can get cancer and Alzheimer’s too. Of course, it makes sense. Working in medicine can’t prevent you from getting sick. But can you imagine? What if a doctor had a stroke? Or imagine a surgeon having a stroke without realizing it while he’s cutting open a patient. Awful. As you know, you can’t switch to a new doctor just like that. But at least he says the accident wasn’t that bad. I assume that means he’s able to walk, unlike you. But he did say he needs treatment. Which means of course that yours has been delayed. He says it’ll take him twelve weeks to recover. Probably means he can’t operate until then. How can he use a scalpel if his hands are shaking? He could kill someone. So I told them that was okay. I suggested we postpone your operation. And anyway, it’s not like your life is hanging in the balance. It’s not like someone is going to die if we don’t get you that surgery immediately. You certainly won’t die without it. You’ll still be alive twelve weeks from now. Won’t you? Imagine that—you’ll still be alive and not dead no matter how far we push back the surgery. How wonderful is that?”
Oghi wanted to argue with her, to say, isn’t that too much of a coincidence? But it went without saying that it was possible. It had happened before. Though it was difficult to believe it was happening to Oghi again.
It had happened a long time ago. Just before their second in vitro procedure, their attending physician was in a car accident. Oghi’s wife had taken the hospital’s advice and changed doctors. She had pushed ahead with the procedure on schedule, but it failed. On
top of which, she’d had a very unpleasant experience. The new doctor got inappropriate with her, and Oghi’s wife took deep offense. Afterward she refused to go through the procedure again. She gave up on having a baby. She had probably told his mother-in-law about it. She would’ve been heartbroken and wanting to say that her infertility was not her fault.
“About your physical therapist. I told him not to come for a while. He talks too much. He gets paid by the hour, and I’ve caught him several times just sitting around talking. We can’t keep putting up with it. He just wants to run up the clock. That won’t do. I guess we’ll have to look for someone who’s more trustworthy.”
She had said the same thing when she fired the caregiver. That she would look for someone new. But no one had come looking for a job, and she hadn’t tried to find anyone.
Oghi had lost his caregiver and now his physical therapist. And that wasn’t all he had lost. He had worked so hard, never knowing he would lose everything.
13
THE MAN OUTSIDE THE WINDOW nearly fell off his ladder when he saw Oghi. He must have thought the room was empty. Oghi watched as the man installed security bars, a standard metal grid that bolted in place. The space between the bars was very narrow. Was his mother-in-law having them installed on the off chance that Oghi might try to escape out the window? The idea bothered him greatly, but he also regretted the fact that it had never even occurred to him to try.
The man went away, and this time Oghi’s mother-in-law appeared. She lifted the vines that trailed every which way below Oghi’s windowsill and wrapped them under and over, through and around each of the iron bars. Given the warmer climate lately, Oghi’s window would soon be covered in vines.
Now that even his view was taken from him, the only thing Oghi had left was this familiar smelling room. As he looked around at it, he noticed that something had been placed on the nightstand where the telephone used to be. There were two lidded vases, tinted a very light blue, sitting side by side. They hadn’t been there yesterday. His mother-in-law must have snuck in sometime in the night and placed them there.
He’d made a mistake before, but this time, the moment he saw the two vases, he knew what they were. He didn’t know if one of them was the same urn that he’d seen at his mother-in-law’s apartment, but the shape was similar. They were made from the same bluish, rounded porcelain.
The other thing, jagi, that’s not jagi. He could still hear his wife’s voice as she teased him, punning on the words for porcelain and sweetheart. He tried saying it out loud. A hollow shriek gusted out. Back when he and his wife still joked with each other, Oghi had felt embarrassed by the idea of calling her jagi as a term of endearment, since the word could also mean oneself. Oghi used to muse about having two jagis—his self and his beloved. His wife had two, as well. Though saying it out loud embarrassed him, each time he called her jagi, he felt like they were blending together. They liked to say, “What’s jagi’s problem?” They said it more in reference to themselves as a couple than to one of them alone. They used it, too, when privately chiding themselves.
When Oghi and his wife set out on their trip, they’d started out speaking politely to each other, but their kind words deteriorated the further they got. She seemed to think that the silence filling the car was his fault. At first she only let her unhappiness show on her face, but gradually she began to vent her anger out loud. Oghi lost his anger too—when she suggested splitting up. Oghi firmly refused. Neither of them would benefit from ending their marriage. Oghi knew it, and so did she.
Was that what his wife had wanted? Had she, simply for the purpose of making Oghi angry enough to end it, started telling him what she knew? She told him her plan was to make him lose everything. She said she would make sure it happened. She was more than capable.
But in the end she didn’t. Oghi did it to himself. Not because of the car crash, and not because of the irreparable damage he suffered in the crash. He might have been losing everything all along, the whole time that he’d been living his life, possibly since long, long before the crash, starting way back when he first had some vague inkling of what life was. He’d sensed it sometimes. A feeling that, despite how hard he had worked at everything, he was continuously missing something. That was why he sometimes clung all the more tenaciously.
Oghi had wanted to make things clear. He insisted at first that nothing had happened between him and J. He still thought his wife might be bluffing. But it turned out there were things she did know. She fired off the names of several hotels, her face a picture of triumph. She seemed to think that would wring a confession from him. She looked ecstatic that her convictions weren’t wrong, that her suspicions were not unfounded. The more excuses he made and the harder he tried to keep looking her in the eye, the more his energy flagged. He was left with no choice but to admit that something had happened, but that it had ended a long time ago. And he swore it would never happen again.
It was depressing to belatedly sort out an old breakup. His affair with J was behind him and he could do nothing about it. Though he didn’t deny what he’d done, Oghi felt like he was paying the price for old mistakes.
His wife had mentioned J several times before, but Oghi had never paid it much mind. He saw no point in letting her know each time he ran into J by chance and they grabbed a bite together, or even when they attended the same academic conference outside of the city. Not because it was a secret, but because he knew that his wife had long been suspicious of J. Though he’d never said anything, his wife had put two and two together. Sometimes he inadvertently mentioned J while talking about someone else. Since she wasn’t a secret, there was nothing to hide. But whenever that happened, his wife gave him the third degree. Was Oghi hiding something else? There was no end to her suspicions. Each time, Oghi felt like he was covering something up and the conversation would turn to topics that were even harder to discuss with his wife.
She’d become more openly suspicious of J after the barbecue. She even insisted that she saw them together in the living room that day. J was drunk, and Oghi was helping her. He didn’t know it at the time, but his wife had followed them into the house to get more alcohol. Unaware that his wife was standing behind them, he had helped J onto the sofa. She and Oghi had the closeness that came from having been friends for a long time. He sometimes confused it for a different emotion, and sometimes got the same impression from her as well. As J closed her eyes, he tugged down her jacket, which had crept up to reveal her stomach. He could have just left the room then, but he stood there a moment and watched her as she slept. A certain emotion washed over him, and though he wanted to say something, he did not. That was all. It had gone no further. He immediately went back out to the yard where everyone else was.
But his wife claimed she’d seen him hug and kiss J. Oghi laughed. That hadn’t happened. When it hit him that his wife’s sudden tyranny, her anger and her mood changes as she randomly showered Oghi with curses and spat out hateful things about his colleagues and about J in particular, all while tearing up their yard, had started from a simple misunderstanding, he turned despondent. His wife’s anger was not justified. It was sudden, uncontrolled, and violent.
Back then his wife had imagined things. Or maybe she’d seen the future. What she insisted she had seen didn’t happen the day she said it did. But it did happen later.
“You were mistaken,” Oghi had told her repeatedly.
He’d told her everything as he remembered it—what happened the day of the barbecue, what he did, what J did. There was no need to lie. Because nothing had happened. But his story felt flimsy. It was obvious to him that he’d done nothing wrong, and yet each time Oghi tried to describe what he remembered in detail or the order in which things had happened, his story changed a little with each retelling. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual. But his wife refused to accept that her memory too might have been faulty.
She did not believe Oghi when he told her nothing happened that day. Only when Oghi was worn
out from talking did she nod and say, Fine. That meant she didn’t so much believe him as that she would be watching him from then on.
Looking back on it, his wife had always been suspicious of him. She thought he was irresponsible, and insisted that he was constantly on the prowl. She would often blindly declare that he had disappointed her, that he had changed. She criticized him for being too caught up in making a name for himself and not taking care of his family. She knit her brows at him, called him a snob. Slapped his hands away, pulled away when he tried to get closer. She had no idea how miserable it made him feel when she did that. Later, after he’d held J in his arms, he inwardly blamed his wife.
Just as she thought, he did start meeting J, but the relationship didn’t last long. He let J down as well, and had only himself to blame. He apologized and clung to her, but it was no use. Oghi was heartbroken. He still loved J. There were things he could bear only because of her. At the same time, it surprised him to feel that way. It was refreshing to find that he could suffer from love at his age, and it made him fantasize that he was younger than he really was. The proof was that he had lost love and been hurt by it.
It was difficult and exhausting, but he quickly accepted the fact that life had to go on without her. He’d lost love, and yet the world was not the slightest bit shaken by his loss. The part of his life that had had J in it went away, leaving behind a cavity, a hollow, and still the world was unmoved. Nothing would ever fill in that empty space. But Oghi’s world would keep on spinning regardless.
To be human was to be saddled with emptiness, and Oghi made use of this idea in his classes and lectures by saying that that might be the ultimate inner truth. He brought it up while explaining Babylonian maps.
The Hole Page 12