The curve of the urn was like the contour of a pregnancy and I pressed it as tightly as I could against my belly. For a split second it felt as though they weren’t Jim’s ashes in my hands, but Jim himself in the period of gestation. Jim inside that urn, rounded like a five-month belly. Jim’s first kicks. His baby teeth aren’t visible yet, but they’re in place, just beneath his gums. His skin is still pink because of the absence of fatty tissue. Jim in my womb, doing a little somersault in response to the last times someone other than him had penetrated me.
I could have frozen to death in the cold, but he roused me. I looked at the ring Jim had given me on my finger. We never actually married, but he gave me a ruby about a year after we met, a symbol of new blood, of rebirth. I never knew whether Jim was alluding to our shared luck at having found each other, or the newness of my life with him, now that I’d finally achieved my sexuality. And I realized there in that frozen park that I would never know the answer, never could I be sure whether the ruby was a symbol for both of us or only me alone, always alone, despite all Jim had done to make me feel that he was and always would be my companion. I was about to put my glove back on and return to the cab when I noticed how red my hand had become from the cold, and how it was beginning to swell, in part because of my circulatory problems. I touched the ring. I hesitated a bit and my hand swelled a bit more, enough that the finger now felt the pressure of the ring. I had my answer. The ring hugged my flesh and told me that the red stone was a symbol for life, his and mine. At least that’s what I chose to believe then. I was sorry I hadn’t ever shared the news of my pregnancy with him, even if he might have interpreted it as a sign of instability, or what it surely was, the physical materialization of my desire to become a mother. Take it as he would, it was me, this was me and my desire, and I should have told him. I put my glove on and returned to the cab.
WHEN I GOT BACK TO NEW YORK, I was able to sleep a second time without panicking. Though despair filled every nook and cranny of my bed, Jim’s absence now acted as a substitute for my death phobia. If each one of the days he had been away had seemed like ten days to me then, now after his death, each day felt equivalent to ten weeks. Life now transpired in a kind of slow motion. And it finally dawned on me one night that the last penis to enter my body wasn’t Jim’s. Not even one of the last seven of them had been Jim’s. I felt like puking. I ran to the shower, soaped up, and scrubbed my whole body, as if so many days later, there could still have been some trace of unwelcome skin left. But everything dragged, everything moved so slowly. Those men’s tongues licked my skin at a snail’s pace, and left deliberate trails of saliva. I clutched a vase Jim had given me. I felt like smashing it against the wall. But I couldn’t. The rage bubbling up inside me didn’t show itself with sufficient energy. Even my anger was numbed. It was a submissive rage, cowardly, incapable of gathering even the ferocity to destroy a simple vase and provide a moment’s respite.
AND SO BEGAN A PERIOD of loneliness similar only to the loneliness I felt being shut up in the body that had been imposed on me. My life with Jim had taught me what great love could be, but I’d also become relatively comfortable, had stopped struggling with the question of whether I should be alone or if I should find someone for whom my past and my present were supportable. During ten years at Jim’s side I had enjoyed near completeness, but it had produced a kind of collateral damage, such as what happens when a person who has experienced turbulent times finally relaxes and lets herself go with the flow. Thinking back on how hard I struggled in the distant past as compared with these latter times with Jim, I realized I had become someone else entirely, someone much cozier, more on the side of those against whom I used to have to raise my voice to be heard. In the end, I guess, it came down to my collusion with the strong, the putative conventional people who led heterosexual lifestyles in plain sight. In that process I’d lost one of the defining structures of my life, feeling empathy for the weak, a sisterly tie to those invisible men and women. After Jim died, my condition began to collapse again. I was back to debating whether to remain single or otherwise be forced to explain until I couldn’t stand to hear myself speak about who I was and what could be expected of my wounds.
These feelings were of themselves difficult to process, but in Jim’s absence the real challenge was the feeling that Yoro, the daughter I’d taken as my own after spending so many years searching for her, was also dead to me now. It’s true I still had my own secret unspecified or imaginary daughter, but for a time I felt as though my belly had stopped growing too. Just as I had impregnated myself, I was now dis-impregnated. I wonder what you call those creatures, if they exist, who don’t need a partner to reproduce, and don’t need one to undo it either. I’m not talking about abortion but about going backward to the time before gestation. Jim’s death triggered a double abortion all at once. I felt hollow. Empty inside and out, with nothing to give and no desire to receive a thing. Logically, Jim had made it very clear on several occasions that his only wish, should anything happen to him, was that I continue looking for Yoro. But for the first time in all these years I felt disconnected. It’s not that I didn’t love her; it’s that she felt dead to me, or unborn. I was sterile again, cut off from that girl as if the scissors that had cut off Jim’s life had snipped the umbilical cord that tied me to her too, or perhaps Jim and the umbilical cord had been one and the same thing. For a very long time I reneged on my promise to continue looking for his girl and on my second promise too: that I would never allow anything or anybody to devastate me again. Jim had insisted on this over and over again, made me promise him constantly, almost like an obsession. Or maybe he simply saw what I couldn’t: my utter and continuing state of vulnerability, as if I was dangling from the end of an unraveling rope that could snap me into the void at any given moment. And that’s precisely where I fell, into the void.
For several months I did absolutely nothing. I slept most of the day away and spent the rest of my time on the couch. Even the most commonplace tasks of my daily routine became epic challenges. Basic needs were an uphill struggle; a simple shower took the whole day. I couldn’t get food down my throat. I forced myself to swallow purees because anything solid made me gag, the tiniest pieces stuck; my angst contracted the muscles in my throat. I was so isolated I was succumbing to agoraphobia and unable even to go shopping. F, an old friend of Jim’s, picked things up for me once a week.
One day when F came to deliver my weekly supplies, I opened the door to find her standing there with a dog in her arms. She told me someone had abandoned it at the entrance to the supermarket with a note on its collar saying the dog had been vaccinated, that she was a good dog, but the owners could no longer take care of her. The note also gave her age: twelve years old. She was a very old dog. F figured some company might do me good, though I think her true purpose was to force me out of the house in the guise of a daily walk with the dog. To F’s surprise, as she eyed me skeptically from the doorway, I accepted. I hadn’t yet considered the matter of daily walks, and the reason I decided to keep the dog came from something I’d been mulling over for some time. I was convinced that my life was coming to a quick end. I’d lost my desire to live, I felt irrelevant, and in some way I recognized myself in that old dog. Jim’s death had aged me so much despite my relative youth. So I kept the dog on the assumption that neither one of us had much time left, which is also why I told F never to buy family-sized items, only enough to last seven days. Why spend money on food that was going to outlast me? Of course I never laid it out to F in those terms, but that was nevertheless my rationale.
In fact, the whole notion of an expiration date really caught my fancy. On my last birthday, just after Jim died, S sent me a beautiful plant by courier. It was gigantic. The trunk was so thick it looked more like a small tree. I loved the thoughtfulness of her gesture, but the plant quickly turned into a source of anxiety. I had a bit of a green thumb and began to worry that if I cared for the plant the way I knew I should, it too was goin
g to outlive me. I obsessed over what would happen to the plant when I was gone, who was going to water it. F was already such a big help; I didn’t want to add things to her list, like the ridiculous inheritance of caring for a plant.
So I accepted the dog because she was old. I tried to ration the purchase of one food item more carefully than the rest: eggs. I ordered them only three at a time because if something was to happen to me, which I was beginning to foresee, I didn’t want anyone to encounter the stink of a rotten egg before they found my body. The matter consumed me so fully that every once in a while I would jump out of bed to make sure I hadn’t left an egg outside the refrigerator. There was no logic to the obsession, which is usually the case. I knew perfectly well that the eggs were in the fridge, but the overwhelming fear obliged me to get out of bed and check once, twice, even three or four times. That’s how much I fretted over the idea that someone might confuse the odor of a rotten egg with that of my dead body. Rotten eggs were the overt symbol of my dysfunctional ovaries, and I couldn’t abide that someone’s last image of me could be linked in any way to that deficiency, which made me feel as much distress throughout my life as the penis I could never bury.
Though, as it happened, the little dog liked eggs, so my order increased from three to six per week. Someone told me eggs were good for a dog’s coat, so I fed them to her raw, though I never noticed any difference; the animal’s fur was simply not very pleasant. She kept me company, though it took us a while to get used to each other. She was a little cranky and claimed areas of the apartment I wasn’t allowed to cross without her growling at me. The bathroom was her favorite spot of all, which she turned into a sort of lair. I figured maybe it was the humidity that attracted her; she seemed to be a water-loving dog. But there came a point when she started to spend all her time in the bathroom, and her growling intensified whenever I tried to enter it. I imagine her previous owners mustn’t have fed her very well, because within a few days she had begun to gain weight. I concluded it was due to eating all those eggs.
From time to time I’d admire my little tree, which continued to produce flowers, and had to admit I had a way with plants. The blossoms were reddish pink, like a cherry tree. It made me think back to the springs of my childhood, when my parents used to take me to the cherry blossom festival in April. All of that seemed so distant now. Another life. And seeing those flowers on my tree also made me gloomy. I worried that whoever kept the plant might find it a nuisance to constantly have to sweep the floor of fallen leaves. I felt like I was raising something only to abandon it in its youth, when it was healthy and in full bloom. But with the dog I sensed exactly the opposite. The dog’s weariness—exhaustion like mine—and the boundless need for sleep that accompanies the end of all our lives, her quirkiness, even her smell (I grew up in a rural area and knew that youthful things, whether flesh or stone, always have a different smell) told me that I would outlive her, that I wasn’t caring for this animal to abandon her, but to bury her. It’s the least one can do for the elderly, I thought. I’ll place cherry blossoms on her grave. I prepared myself mentally. It was a joyful thought. Following Jim’s death, all acts seemed definitive to me now, and emotion was limited to either sorrow or joy, thinking the experience might never come again. An elderly person’s die contains only two ciphers: sorrow and joy. Once tossed and scrutinized, the die presents only a single option; the die of dotage makes no allowance for indecision, offers no time to question whether one is happy or sad, no lull in the process of development, such as at other periods in a person’s life when a radical emotion can be cultivated.
One day the dog started to bark. It was the first time she’d ever barked at me; till then all she had done was growl. She was in the bathroom and seemed to want to be lifted into the bathtub. Idiosyncrasies of old age, I thought. Since she was so hefty now, I built her a little stack of books to get some purchase and jump in herself. It was hard to know what she wanted, but I opened the faucet for her and took care to adjust the water temperature to lukewarm, since it was chilly in the apartment. I plugged up the drain, and soon the water covered her paws. She seemed to like it. She lay down in the water. Then I shut off the faucet and sat down to observe her. She looked even bigger wet, resting there on her side. I figured she was enjoying it and maybe it wasn’t just a peculiarity, but something her previous owners did and that she’d grown accustomed to, which made me think how little it would amuse me to put up with the idiosyncrasies of strangers.
But something was happening. The expression in the dog’s eyes had altered. She was observing things differently. It seemed as though she was finally welcoming me into my own home for the first time. And her belly began shifting. I didn’t want to understand, but I did. She licked her vulva, which was underwater, but I didn’t dare remove the plug. Finally a little sac was expelled, and she bit into it with her teeth. The first puppy was born. It blew raspberries with its muzzle and agitated its tiny paws in the water. It looked like a little hedgehog in a lake. I picked the puppy up and wrapped it in a towel; I could feel it trembling and wasn’t sure whether it was because of my hands or because the newborn was cold. Three more puppies emerged. Identical. Or at least it seemed that way. I waited a few minutes after the last one came. The bathwater was red. The placentas were floating, broken into segments like the frayed membrane of a giant egg. The dog wanted out of the bathtub. It was difficult for her to move. But the puppies were in the towel outside the tub, and that seemed to give her strength enough to jump out. She started licking them. It seemed so odd to me that an old dog like her could have puppies. For a second, the idea of my maternity fluttered through my head, even though I had sworn never to go back there. It passed quickly and I asked the dog something. I don’t remember exactly how I said it, but I was worried about who would take care of the litter and the tree when I was no longer around.
AS F HAD CALCULATED, the responsibility of walking the dog fell on me. I’d been so engrossed in this idea of expiration that such a basic task as that hadn’t occurred to me immediately, and the first times out were hellish. After Jim’s death, I became utterly consumed by agoraphobia. I had no alternative, and the way my body reacted when I went outside gave me a good sense of what must happen in a person’s heart when she is facing the experience of her death. The day I die, the final beats of my heart, the last syllables of the muscle as it takes leave of me won’t sound foreign to my ear; they’ll be the echoes that reverberate from the scars left by the cardiac lesions of that period of time. When I opened the door and stepped out on the sidewalk, the buildings on either side of the street seemed to bow and then meet up high, creating a kind of dome blocking out the sky. It was like stepping through a cylinder. I had to walk very slowly, clutching at the curved facades so as not to fall. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those circles or wheels in an amusement park that you walk through while the rest of the contraption continues rotating. Well, it was something like that, only this time the circle wasn’t three feet long, but a cylinder of indefinite length. In spite of my psychological and physical malaise, and regardless of whether that spatial curve was actually there or not, I knew somehow that none of it was real, or at least I wasn’t experiencing the same reality shared by other pedestrians around me. What I mean is that I could tell the difference between what I was seeing and what others around me were seeing, what was real for me and what was real for everyone else.
This awareness had positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, since I was aware that all of this was taking place in my own head, I wasn’t completely bonkers, thinking everyone else but me was wrong. It helped to know that I was still sane enough to realize I had a problem. But the symptoms, the suffering, and the adrenaline were so overwhelming that it felt like being locked in a cage with a hungry tiger. Let’s say I could feel its breath on the nape of my neck, its teeth breaking my skin, the wound now bleeding, and though I didn’t see the tiger, that didn’t mean it wasn’t crouching there, just behind
me. My perception, emotions, and body were off-balance, but the neuronal network was healthy, which had a negative effect too: I was living in a world that was uniquely mine, a world that only I could see, so the loneliness became excruciating. But above and beyond the loneliness was my knowledge that other people couldn’t see the streets curving as I did, which only heightened my unease because it obliged me to conceal what was happening to me. Anyone can appreciate how hard it is to stay vertical on a sloping sidewalk, struggling to avoid falling flat on your face, without giving yourself away to other people who do not have this problem.
My new pal forced me outside to face these difficulties, which I knew might be beneficial in the long run, and I felt safer having a leash to grab on to in the meantime. The leash gave me stability; it was like a flexible walking stick. After months without stepping across the threshold of the front door, I felt fortified by this extra bit of support. My mother used to love telling her friends how when I was little, the first year I was able to walk, I needed a newspaper to do it. With the newspaper in my hand I could walk, I could go down the stairs, I could run, but as soon as they took it away, I’d fall. Who could have imagined that so many years later I’d need to learn to walk again, this time with a dog’s leash and my sense of sight? Who could’ve imagined I’d end up with an aversion to newspapers because, as you know, war isn’t visible without them? If one country is preparing to bomb another one and they want the media to cover it, they go to the newspapers to find out what day will give them the maximum audience, which is the best to launch the first projectile. The press organizes the calendar of massacres; it contributes the opening shot for the marathon of war. What made me feel safe as a baby now makes me embarrassed.
The Story of H Page 15