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 escalators 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.