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 going 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.