I never reported his disappearance. If they’d found his cadaver, they would have looked for a weapon, and I’m afraid the weapon had been me, the excessive encumbrance of my body’s 110 pounds. What weighs more—my father asked me when I was young—a pound of straw or a pound of iron? I always answered straw. There was no way that he could make me see how a pound weighs a pound regardless of the material. I realize he was right now, because even as a child I intuited my destiny or my chastisement: to lug around a sack full of iron strands when everyone else saw straw. Since nobody could see or suspect that I was carrying a satchel full of iron, nobody could relieve me. Your death, Jim, added more iron to my satchel. Exhausted, I ended up imposing it on Irrational Number. But in the end he couldn’t take the added weight. My colossal man of lead was gone, my heavy horse. The shape of him left in the curve of my two lonely thighs, I’m writing you now a little livelier perhaps, but not too much.
Once I’d lost all my trust in psychology and its servant, psychiatry, I had to get over my agoraphobia, Jim, without anyone else’s help. I went back to our apartment. Since I had to walk my dog, little by little I started going farther away from home, just as I had before with its mother. So two generations of dogs had become familiar with my depression, though this last bout now appears to be allowing me to rise above the surface and breathe a little fresh air, after breathing the same stale air for so long, my lungs being like those fountains that recycle water over and over again, with a sign that reads NOT POTABLE WATER. DO NOT DRINK. That’s how I’ve been breathing over these years, a closed circuit of air recirculating in my lungs without ever renewing itself. TOXIC AIR. DO NOT BREATHE. So that’s what I decided: I needed to learn how to stop breathing so that little by little I could open up to some fresh air. That’s how this new phase began.
I don’t know if you recall, from wherever you are now, the sports center between the apartment and the park where they were constructing an Olympic pool just when you left for Minneapolis. When I passed by the other day, I noticed the poster announcing open registration for apnea school. Nobody I asked knew what the sport of apnea is, but I remember the legends my mother used to tell me about women in my country who would dive down deep into the sea to hunt for pearls, tankless, using only their lungs. I’ve always known there was one thing I could count on since I was orphaned early in life and had to survive on my own, as you know, first as a boy and then as a girl. One thing never failed me, even gave me the audacity to question my gender, my sexual identity—the first marker people use to distinguish between individuals. This one tool I trusted so much is my intuition, which is connected to the wellness of my body and to pleasure, and is what drives my natural predilection for things that are not only pleasant but also good for me. By the same token, this intuition is what guided me to giving the sport a try.
I consulted with our general practitioner. I hadn’t wanted to see him again after losing you. So I had changed doctors. I couldn’t bear to give him the news. But when I walked into his clinic, he saw me and approached me to say that he had already heard the news. He seemed sorry and sad, but also visibly happy to see me again. You know? People think it’s better not to raise the subject with the loved ones of the deceased. When I lost you, people stopped talking to me about you. After the first days passed, there were days, even weeks, when it felt like you died all over again; that you died every day, over and over. At first I wasn’t sure where the feeling was coming from, but soon enough I figured it out. You were being killed on a daily basis, Jim, by the silence that had absorbed the place of your name. All the chitchat about everyday things was lost on me at that time. Your death brought absolute depth to any conversation, like apnea, and that obliged me either to talk plainly about your death or else about topics that involved nonexistence, perhaps subjects that many people find painful to discuss, but it was in them that I could see the representation of your emptiness. I needed to talk about you as much as I needed to use your toothbrush—which by the way, you forgot at home—brushing until my gums would bleed. You see? All that nonsense about not mentioning the noose in the house of a hanged man is a big lie. I needed to talk about the noose and its texture, who manufactured it, how the neighbor hanged himself in exactly the same way. More than anything else, I needed to talk about the hanged person. I wanted to talk about my departed one, and if I couldn’t talk about my own, at least let me talk about other deceased people or about death itself, any subject that really allowed me to talk about you. I would have loved for everyone who knew you to come over, not to keep quiet or to see me in grief, but to say your name. I would have been grateful if the fireman who removed you from the tangle of the car’s steel had described your last look to me. But it didn’t happen that way.
Only one person actually brought you up to me. It was our neighbor M’s youngest daughter. One afternoon as we were having a snack in one of the few get-togethers with friends I participated in, the girl asked if she could play with one of the toy soldiers in your collection. I saw her mother shoot her a glance that said, Lower your eyes and be quiet. That’s when I broke down and started to cry and told them all to leave. I’m sure that even today they all think it was because of the girl, that she’d hurt my feelings without meaning to, when they were really at fault, treating me as if you’d never existed, burning the memory of you—which is the soul—and tossing away before my very eyes the ashes that are your soul in the urn where your body’s ashes already were. That’s what people who won’t talk about the dead achieve: they cremate the soul. So that’s why, as I was saying, the day I walked into our doctor’s office, I was happy that he brought up an anecdote about you before even asking me what I needed. He loves you a lot, our doctor, and surely that’s why he also needs to continue talking about you. Yet in view of my ongoing panic attacks, he suggested that I not try to practice apnea, since he thinks being underwater and holding my breath will only exacerbate the moments of angst. But I told him that I have this intuition, which holds the same weight for me as the word knowledge, that this sport will help me control a key piece of the always confusing puzzle of mechanisms that trigger a panic attack: breathing.
That’s right. Apnea, the voluntary cessation of breathing whose primordial objective is to allow us to reach the great depths of the ocean, is an exceptional means for relaxation. The goal is to spend a maximum amount of time submerged in water, and you learn a series of techniques that help you consume the least amount of oxygen possible. Oxygen is precisely what I have too much of, because when I’m feeling afraid, anxious, or panicked, I hyperventilate, which produces vertigo and intensifies the unease. Let me explain in the present tense what I learned today, the first day, because apnea is lived in present time or, what is the same thing, indefinite time. The minutes before immersion are vital. It’s when you begin the controlled breathing and expansion of all parts of the body. Once you’re in the water, you have to avoid attaching to any single thought. They tell you it’s very important, and I wonder how am I not going to think if I live tangled in your net? Apparently, the more complex the thought, the more oxygen it consumes in the brain. Thinking drains you. That’s why it’s good to allow mental images to pass by, similar to when you’re a passenger in a moving car. The landscape goes by without your having to hold on to a single tree or a mountain or a church. Everything gets a little easier. That’s it. I find my own mechanism. I close my eyes and see your image: you’re greeting me like in one of those books that you can thumb through quickly to animate the illustration. I keep flipping. I can’t stop, because if I do, you become static again, which is death. I don’t pay attention to details. I don’t have time to stare at your eyes, your mouth, your arms, because the pages flit by so quickly, but I see your motion, intangible but alive. After watching you greet me, I show up in the book too. You kiss me, you take off my clothes, you caress me, suck me, penetrate me, hug me, pick me up. We’re in the shower: you soap me, rinse me off, dry me. We get dressed and walk out the door. To have suppe
r. Not to die. To have oysters and wine. It’s not a bad way to begin the first day: not grabbing on to you, but to your movement.
I continue listening carefully to the trainer, sitting beside my companions around a small pool next to the main one. The water in the little pool is somewhat warmer, which allows you to last longer because the cold also makes the body use more oxygen. We’re a group of twelve, counting me. After the trainer’s brief presentation, we get in the waist-deep water. He asks us to form a circle, holding hands. We’re supposed to relax and take a deep breath of air before floating facedown on the surface. So I take in as much air as I can and float facedown, following his instructions. I know the world record is seven minutes. How I envy those seven minutes of peace. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the first day. Except for another friend, all the rest are still submerged when I come up for breath. Following the security protocol, I don’t break the circle and I squeeze my two companions’ hands every thirty seconds, the left hand of one and the right of the other. They respond by squeezing my hands the same way. They’re fine. They’re still floating facedown and they’re fine. I think I’ll never forget the image of them floating like that, in a circle, completely relaxed and in a brotherhood of suspension, there in the same liquid. For the first time in a very long while I am dread-free, happy, and serene, and in good company, a circle of strangers. And for the first time in many months, Yoro kicks again. Here she is, resuming the pregnancy today, the same day I’m learning how to breathe less. I think Yoro will be like me, a woman accustomed to making fish from bread, wine from water. These weren’t divine miracles; they were the work of a good man who, like us, did the best he could with the little he had.
I touch my belly while in the water. There, I feel her move. I know that by this point, Yoro inhabits the larger part of the uterus and there’s less amniotic fluid, so I think it’s peculiar that the pregnancy should show again just when I’m submerged in water. As my internal liquid decreases, the external liquid, all the water in the pool, surrounds me and contains me; while I learn how to moderate the need to breathe, my baby’s lungs are almost prepared to learn about air. I think back to my cousin’s pregnancy after the bomb, her belly shrinking after the sixth month, as if from remorse, as if saying, “I refuse to be in this world,” walking backward down the path from fetus to sperm, from sperm back into the nothing. Something to the contrary takes place in the pool, as if I am the one who is walking backward, who moves from being a woman to becoming an embryo, while our Yoro foists herself on the world, gets stronger, expands, and goes in search of the boundless waters that extend beyond the walls of my uterus. Exactly like reliving one’s own gestation. I’ve never stopped cursing the terrible moment when the embryo who became me decided to choose both sexes, but I feel as though for the first time I’m reconciling with my own self; I now realize that the life without form that I was months before I was born shared the same beating heart with the one that has been doing all the judging. So now I understand how silly it is for me to be cursing my own seed’s indecisiveness at the forking path between male and female because the person didn’t make the decision, the decision was made for the person. Slipping into that prenatal unconscious allows me to take responsibility for my own nature, the same way I eventually took responsibility for choosing my sexual identity, which has never changed.
It still takes me about three times longer to follow the route from my apartment to the pool, because every once in a while I have to sit down on the first stair I can find to allow my anxiety to ebb. But it never happens when I get out of the pool, when I take a step and breathe normally. These return trips remind me of my previous life, how regardless of the pain I could think freely without that sticky mass of disquietude clouding my judgment, making me think, mistakenly, as I had a thousand times, that I was going to die right there in the middle of the street.
The exercises in the pool allow me to experience new sensations with my body. For example, when I’m underwater, holding a companion’s hand in keeping with the safety rules, I can feel his or her pulse in my fingertips. First it’s a normal pulse, and little by little I can feel it slow down and enter the stage of extreme relaxation. The heartbeat decelerates, like a tiny flame going out little by little. And now I’m discovering the definitive cure for my fear of death, because when the heart abates and there’s more space between beats, I’m the one who decides whether to breathe and, in spite of it all, choose the surface. By raising my head above water I’m confirming my commitment to life, overcoming death with every immersion. The sea magnifies that feeling; the water pressure in the deep feels like an embrace, a physical manifestation of someone welcoming me down there, someone who would welcome me forever if that’s what I would want. But I don’t anymore, and with each breath when I break the surface, I am giving birth to myself again. So I return to the stories my mother told me as a child, about those women from our land who dove without tanks, looking for mollusks, abalone, algae, sponges, octopuses, and if they got very lucky, pearls.
I wonder if this natural penchant for deep-sea diving doesn’t have its origin in those stories, or maybe it’s because of my grandmothers, who were born in the village of Wagu on the Shima Peninsula in Mie Prefecture, a place known over the centuries for its female divers, who still today use the same techniques as two thousand years ago, the first recorded activity, which have been passed down from mothers to daughters over the generations. When I imagine those women descending, naked, into the cold waters of the Pacific, it makes me feel as though my training is a canard, almost an act of snobbery, and because of my roots I think I have a right to travel to Wagu one day, once I’ve recovered, to put faces, voices, and movement to the legends that my mother used to tell.
Apnea may not have freed me of heartache, but it did help lighten the load of what terrified me so much. The sea and the outdoors had already begun to cure me during my time with Irrational Number, and now those years of dysfunction were coming to an end. Being in nature protected me from the swindling psychologists and precluded the machinations of society, allowing me the chance to turn over a new leaf. My addiction to pseudoscience ended. Now I know for a fact that people survive many deaths, and whenever I hear a homeless person shouting in the street, disturbed, it’s as if that person is using my same voice.
Now that I’m back on my feet, I want to go somewhere for pleasure; it’ll be the first trip since you died, Jim. It’s an odd notion, going somewhere that has nothing do with finding Yoro. Somehow it feels like a betrayal of the promise I made to you to continue looking for her, and the certainty that I carry her inside me doesn’t really alleviate the feeling that I am not keeping my word. After all, in the end I’m not breaking my water or anything of the sort because (yes, from time to time I’m aware of it) I’m not really pregnant. It’s only in fleeting moments of optimism that I tell myself perhaps this interminable gestation is real, that maybe it got its start with the radiation sickness I’ve always been on the lookout for, as a kind of positive sickness that doesn’t end in death but in birth. If as they say, there are still three-headed rabbits, why couldn’t my situation be just another nuclear anomaly? Wouldn’t it be a nice radioactive aftereffect? My desire made the flesh of my flesh, my baby. So I prepared my trip, allowing myself to play around with the notion that at any given moment I could go into labor.
It’s August 1977. I arrive in the village of Wagu during the women’s fishing season, which runs from March to September. My dog is with me. There must be something in her genes because this animal, like her mother, had puppies late in life. She suckled for such a long time that her nipples are sizable. It’s a little strange to see such a clear mark of suckling in a dog obviously up there in age. I thought about that when I saw the amas—that’s what the divers are called—going in and coming out of the sea, always naked, regardless of age, the very youthful amas—apprentices who begin diving at thirteen, called kachido—keeping closer to the shore and the veteran divers, called funado, reach
ing depths of close to a hundred feet with a single breath.
Perched on a rock in Wagu, I observed a group of amas on the sand, warming themselves in the sun before going back into the sea. It’s the first time I saw for myself that these women actually exist. I strolled along the streets of the fishing village before catching this scene. There wasn’t a single car. The way they speak, the way they walk, it all seems so much more relaxed than Hiroshima, my hometown. It’s as if everything is marked by a natural clock from dawn to dusk, and though they are strict about all things that have to do with their labor in the sea, life is still much more flexible and easygoing and in touch with the natural course of a day and not built on a work schedule that hides people from the sun, in an office, a factory, or at home. One woman in a corner caught my attention. She was sitting on a small bench scarfing down raw clams and seemed to invite me to initiate a conversation, so I asked if she sold the seafood she was eating. She must have been around thirty years old, and said she was just recovering strength from the morning dive to be ready again for the afternoon. She was an ama who had separated herself from the group to eat in peace, missing out this once on the news they share during these times of rest, when the town’s women come out to help them restore their strength like a great big family where the sea—despite the danger, the cold, and all the effort—is almost like a man shared among them. It was that clam-devouring woman who pointed out their diving spot along the coast, and a great rock on which a few minutes later I would watch her cohort lying in the sun.
The Story of H Page 20