I entered a period of neurosis unlike any I’d ever experienced before, which manifested mostly in the guise of thanatophobia (I’d come to know this word well), or fear of death. By day I took tip-top care of myself as always, without developing any special kind of hypochondria or self-protecting habits, but at night the fear would become night terrors, fear of death in my sleep. At first I would wake up in a sweat and shake Jim until his voice, like a mother’s gentle pinch, let me know I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t dead. I recalled what Jim told me about his time on the Death Ship, Oryoku Maru, how madness showed itself in the prisoners’ obsession with touching the bodies of others in the darkness, desperately, as a means for grabbing on to life, on to any life, if not their own, at least whichever one they could feel. The lack of sleep kept me drowsy by day, and when the afternoon arrived with the threat of another night of non-absence, I would load myself up with coffee to keep sleep at bay and stay awake as long as I could. Then I began altering my schedule. I started to sleep by day and stay awake at night. Since everyone else slept at night, nobody would come to my aid if my life began slipping discreetly through the cracks while I was asleep. Of course I felt terribly lonely, but I could believe in things like my pulse, my breath. They were a small part of New York’s beating heart, the throb of its inhabitants, and if that pulse, that breath should fail me, some other person, some other piece of the huge puzzle would come to my rescue; as long as that person, of course, wasn’t lethargic, hands tied by that simulacrum of death that is sleep. But all my remedies morphed according to the logic of my illness, and after weeks trying to avoid the night, I figured my best bet was going back to sleeping with Jim, since if there was anyone on the face of this earth who loved me, it was him, and if anyone was capable of feeling, even in sleep, that I was slipping away, it would also be him. So before I resigned myself to slumber, we would hug each other, though it always took me hours to finally nod off. At first I would remain motionless so as not to bother him; but then I’d toss and turn, so afraid of losing life.
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
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.