Depending on the season, I would focus on one possible illness or another, but the cause of death that I feared the longest was a cerebral embolism. I was obsessed with these lumps, the tumors that appear out of our sight in hibakushas. I started dreading internal tumors or ones that were obstructing an artery in my brain, a blood clot that wasn’t allowing the blood to circulate. I compelled Jim to set the alarm for three or four in the morning, for him to ask me a question he knew I could answer. So the alarm would go off, he would ask me completely obvious things like what my grandmother’s name or my favorite food was, and if I didn’t know the answers, my neurotic supposition was that it was because my brain wasn’t working properly, in which case Jim was supposed to wake me up entirely and make sure I wasn’t at risk of death. Things got so absurd that I’d ask him to test me with questions like “What color is Santiago’s white horse?” or some such with the answer incorporated into the question, meaning Jim should really be alarmed if I couldn’t respond and take immediate measures against the impending catastrophe.
It was a difficult time for Jim, not only for how uncomfortable it was to have his sleep cycles upended, but mostly because the lack of physical and mental rest was having an effect on my moods by day. When Jim received news of an unexpected trip because of an inheritance, the situation only got worse. I didn’t want him to go, but understood the importance of the issue at hand and decided to stay behind, figuring that perhaps being alone for the eight days the trip lasted might shock me into recovery.
The first night I spent on the couch, and it was so dreadful that I couldn’t bear the thought of a second. Even through the fog of my neurosis I was aware of being psychologically unstable and hoped it was just a bad period that eventually would pass. I never felt the need to share my state with a friend, so it was nearly impossible for me to reach out now and ask someone to spend long nights with me on tenterhooks, going through the ceremony of waking me up and asking me some obvious question so I could sleep, even if fitfully. So I spent seven deranged days, each one feeling as though it had lasted ten—hence seventy days consumed without recognizing myself in any of them, because the only way I could reconcile my fear of sleeping alone was by sleeping with a man every day.
It wasn’t hard to do. I hadn’t gussied myself up for a long time, an act that inevitably raised my self-esteem. The neurosis hadn’t affected me physically, despite the signs of panic that like face powder deepen wrinkles, clog pores, and dull the complexion by removing all hints of light. So I spent the days preparing myself for the nightly hunt, then searching out and finally choosing my prey. Back at the apartment, we would drink ourselves tipsy, and I would take him to bed, asking to be awoken in a few hours, promising that at that time, once I was sober enough, I would make him very happy. Same as Scheherazade, who was able to postpone death night after night by keeping Sultan Shahryar’s curiosity piqued with the promise of finishing her story the next day, always the next day, so I postponed my death with a much more vulgar promise of intercourse, the only alarm clock I could improvise under the circumstances of Jim’s unexpected trip. The stranger’s orgasm became the literary technique that gave an element of suspense to my story, what would keep me alive. I felt pleasure, but the indication that I was awake and safe was the moans of the other upon ejaculation, and the sudden contact of liquid on my belly or back, which allowed me to continue sleeping peacefully. My alarm-clock men compensated me for whatever physical rejection I felt over a strange and undesired body. It didn’t matter much to me whether those men recognized the peculiarities of my vagina or not. All I cared about was not dying in my sleep. My terror was real. I was convinced that the way my brain and my heart reacted when I fell asleep was the same as when a person faced death. I would have paid any price for my life, and that sort of prostitution wasn’t even the furthest I was willing to go.
Fifth Month: 1969
A Hell of Ice
While I was walking along the sidewalk the morning of the day Jim was supposed to arrive, reminding myself not to forget to buy his favorite tea, I happened to raise my glance and catch sight of M, our neighbor—it’s still so sharp in my mind—approaching me from about fifty-five yards down the street. I had warned Jim that I was going to disconnect the phone when he left; I was in such a state of anxiety that I didn’t want to add more stress over having to wait for the phone to ring. The instant I saw M’s face, still in the distance, I knew. I hadn’t yet remembered that she was our emergency contact. My reaction was intuitive, prompted perhaps by the mix of gravity and compassion I perceived not in her face—she was still too far away—but in her gestures. So I knew even before knowing. Jim was dead. Before the neighbor reached me, I had fainted. How many times since that day have I wished I could have remained in that limbo of unconsciousness and never had to suffer the news to be confirmed, if only to slumber in the realm of doubt eternally, at least until death came to kiss me awake in its own domain. Had I suspected what was to come, I would have shut my eyes and never cut that little string to the slumbering brain, just let my eyes remain closed. But destiny turned the screw another notch and the string snapped; my eyes opened and I came to. The news was confirmed. He’d been in a car accident with part of his family; they had survived. M offered to accompany me to Jim’s hometown, Minneapolis, so I wouldn’t have to travel alone, though she’d have to get back quickly for work.
So Minneapolis it was, Jim’s birthplace, as if he’d gone back to his hometown to close his circle of life. I thought I’d never return to my birthplace, and even less so to die. These were some of the thoughts I had while in the serene cloud of tranquilizers M gave me to get through the trip. I was so sedated on the plane that I felt a fleeting moment of euphoria and even giggled at my bereavement; it all seemed as trivial as a passing rain shower. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. So this was the pleasure of drugs, I thought, and though I was too overmedicated to hold a conversation, thoughts flew around in my mind that had nothing to do with Jim, future plans I’d made a long time ago, projects; or more mundane things, such as whether I had remembered to pack my face cream. I’d become so disconnected that I suddenly unbuckled my seat belt, imagining I was pregnant again, but now in the ninth month and about to give birth. After that fright, I moved on to a more pleasant hallucination. I’d heard that during the first few months of life, a fetus’s skin is so permeable that it’s no more than amniotic fluid. I found this connection between what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside surprising. My daughter, this daughter I thought of as a solid, was really composed of the liquid in which she was floating, my liquid. And by extension, in the airplane I felt as though I was part of everything around me: passengers, seats, machinery, and mites. I imagined myself as a fetus in the belly of a colossal bird, totally connected with everything taking place in its body. I felt every little crack, smelled every scent, even noticed the exhaustion evidenced by the dark circles under the eyes of the woman looking at herself in the bathroom mirror. Mine too was the sense of humor of the flight attendant who catered to me with a smile I knew was forced because we were one and the same thing, particles floating in a single element passing through us, constituting us. I was screw, turbine, and cables.
I slowly returned to myself again from within the plane’s excess of serenity as the effects of the anxiolytics began to fade. H in pain. Jimless H. Homeless H. I was now detached from the rest, no longer passengers and machinery, plane food. I was back to being me, conscious of the fact that others would interpret anything I said as a sign of madness; they hadn’t experienced what I had, they didn’t know we could be one single thing. So after the narcotics wore off, my house seemed empty, without that ancestral fire that some call family but I would have to call never.
It was thirty degrees below zero in Minneapolis when we deplaned. Residents were given daily updates on how many minutes one could be exposed to the elements before freezing to death. M and I immediately ducked into one of those buildings whose escalato
rs whisk you to an underground tunnel system so you don’t have to walk at street level. Thus I began my descent into the catacombs, which I deem my second descent into hell, a frozen netherworld. The city’s winter was like a prelude to the significance of receiving a beloved’s body gone cold. Passageways that are always inside or underground, an ever-present nip in conversations, chitchat gone chilly and sluggish from frost on the tongue or muffled by clunky parkas—all of it acting as a perfect mirror for the journey to the morgue. All of it a spine-tingling anticipation of what I was about to face. And I wasn’t wrong; when I walked into that frozen room I found nothing strange about it. The city had already prepared me for that moment.
Jim’s family—his parents, sister, and niece—were as indifferent as ever. They allowed me to decide what to do with the body, and in keeping with Jim’s wishes, I chose cremation so that later I could scatter the ashes in a place that had meant something to him, a place I had yet to select or perhaps I had yet to decide on. It all happened so suddenly I hadn’t had time yet to work out the details.
Perhaps to escape the wintriness around me, my mind wandered to a spot engraved in my memory, recourse for when I needed warmth. So while waiting in the hospital for the last administrative details to be ironed out, I recalled a story I had overheard once, which surely lasted only a few minutes, though it felt to me like an eternity. I was recovering in the hospital after the bomb when a man told his story to a patient in a bed a short distance away from me. He had returned home a week after the detonation to find a woman’s pelvis in his yard, the yard being all that was left of the building where he had lived. But it wasn’t the sight of it that had caused him such a commotion, he said. What kept him awake at night, what he had to relive over and over again like torture, was when he picked up the pelvis to throw it in the Dumpster, and it scorched his hand. Seven days later, and it was still blistering hot.
Not only did the idea of that heat send me back to my days convalescing, but also waiting in the hospital with Jim’s family inevitably tied one situation to the other. I thought back to my own recovery period, how I felt my pelvis burning thanks to that man’s story, and it made me wonder if for some reason the pelvic bones, the box around the genitals, conserve heat better than others. But I lost my appetite for sex after the bomb. The only way I had responded to the sexual urge, being so young at the time, was by masturbating. But the last carnal fire I’d experienced in my genitalia was a feverish one, not a sexual one. This was meaningful to me, so much so that I’d shared it with Jim, and I felt gratified to have had the chance to tell him so many things. I’d discussed those first days of semiconsciousness with him, when I experienced states of delirium, when I panicked over the consequences of my new state as it filtered through my healing process: my feelings remained the same, I was still attracted to boys, but my libido had completely vanished. Lost like a leg. Since I was aware of the cases of amputees who’d continued to feel the presence of a severed limb, I expected to experience phantom limb syndrome. I anticipated it for years, not realizing that phantom limb syndrome usually appears shortly after the loss. So I fancied myself fortunate in that one aspect. Feeling a leg that is no longer there doesn’t serve much of a purpose, since the phantom leg can’t step out or supplement the other. In contrast, I liked to tell myself, so full of hope, the perception of an amputated sexual organ just might tickle out an orgasm (for being incorporeal). As I slowly took leave of that hope, I was overcome with the desire for one last go. I suffered many syndromes, but phantom limb was not one of them. In my case it was utterly gone, amputated, like a Greek sculpture that conveys pain in its beauty: the Venus de Milo’s impossible embrace. Years later in the Vatican, on one of the few trips I took for pleasure in my entire life, I stood contemplating the Apollo Belvedere. And it dawned on me that my sorrow wasn’t fixated on the loss of a woman’s arm, but on the absence of a penis, with whose loss came a certain sense of relief.
I slept alone that first night in Minneapolis. I rested deeply, as I hadn’t in weeks. But I would never have slept so hard had I known that Jim’s premature death took with it a fact he would have shared with me, I think, had he lived long enough to figure out a way to do it. Since I didn’t suspect Jim of keeping a crucial secret from me, for the next few days my thoughts continued to revolve around past memories. For some odd reason, everything reminded me of Hiroshima. Even standing with Jim’s family before the cremation furnace took me back to my childhood. It’s hard for me to describe in detail, I was so young at the time, but I had a picture of myself in a hiding place, observing a ritual I wasn’t allowed to attend. My aunt had died a few days earlier, and from my hiding place, I sneaked a look at the post-cremation ceremony, something very different from the Western ritual. The relatives stood in a circle around my aunt’s incinerated body. I recall just a bit of the ceremony, which I corroborated many years later when I was old enough to understand the symbolic rite. The body held its shape; that is to say, even though it was taken from the cremation chamber, the perfect calibration of temperatures maintained the shape of the body in embers without its pulverizing, as when a log in the fireplace holds its form until the moment you nick it, when it disintegrates into dust. I watched each relative, one by one, use chopsticks to pick out little leftover shards of bone and place them in an urn. When I thought back on this, it astonished me to see them passing the shards along, from one set of chopsticks to another, since my mother always insisted that chopsticks are private utensils and nothing ever should be passed with them from one person to another at the table. It was one of my mother’s most zealous rules; Japanese chopsticks are an intimate extension of oneself. If I recall correctly, they started with the foot and moved up to finish with the bones in the head. I would later learn the significance of this: this way the body didn’t enter the urn upside down.
This brings me now to a scene I witnessed a few weeks ago. I was on my way home, waiting for the next subway train, which was running late. There were rats scurrying over the tracks, nosing the trash scattered here and there. I could tell by how carefree they behaved that the train wouldn’t be coming within the next few minutes. So I sneaked a look around, seeing other people waiting, like me, on the platform. My glance was met by a pair of eyes brimming with tears. None had fallen yet, but they were on the verge. The eyes belonged to an adolescent girl who in her sadness was handing something to her mother. The bundle measured about a foot and a half long. I could tell its contents were delicate by how gently the daughter’s hands conveyed the parcel. It was drizzling aboveground, so they had improvised a raincoat for it, using a plastic bag. The mother took the bundle in her trembling hands, but before she could fit the bundle to her chest, the daughter grabbed it back nervously in a gesture that seemed almost violent. The mother snatched it back from her daughter and looked at her defiantly as she hugged the bundle close. Then the daughter cried, and the mother closed her eyes. Mother and daughter, widow and orphan, fighting like animals over the ashes of husband and father.
There I stood now, holding my own urn. Once I had it in my arms, I said goodbye to Jim’s family and called a cab to take me to the airport. We passed by a park blanketed in a layer of snow and I asked the driver to stop the car and wait for me. I felt like I was having a panic attack and needed to breathe some fresh air. I sat on a bench where the driver couldn’t see me. I put on my hat and scarf. It was unbearably cold, so cold that even dressed in thermal gear a person would suffer hypothermia before long. The anxiety, the cold, or both together made it very hard to breathe. I couldn’t detect the scent of my exhaled breath as it collected in my woolen scarf. It dawned on me that this wasn’t new, that I hadn’t been able to smell a thing during those last days I had spent with Jim either. Nothing. I’d somehow wandered into a world without odors. I used to tell Jim that thanks to him I’d learned how to love my own scent. I could smell myself on him and I liked it. But it had become impossible for me to perceive my own scent in this frozen place. But what scent?
Where? On whose skin? It was as if Jim had carted off my olfactory sense without my permission, something he’d helped me develop so I could smell the angles of my own body. I’d now become a sanitized woman, a deodorant against my own self, a nose located eleven yards away from my face. I stared down at the urn on my lap. I held it between the heavy gloves, which were so thick I couldn’t even feel the contours of the urn. So I took one off and touched the ceramic, already dusted with frost.
The Story of H Page 14