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.
There was nothing random about being flooded with memories of my early childhood. Watching the dog give birth may have triggered it, or perhaps being so utterly isolated sparked the maternal instinct as a means of new companionship, but what matters is that for the first time since Jim died, I could feel the heft of my pregnancy again, and I could pick back up where my mind had left off, at the five-month mark. Yet there was something different this time. What was growing inside of me had a name, a familiar presence, a perfectly defined identity: it was Yoro. And whenever I felt the need to talk to my belly I would use that name, knowing that a fetus’s tiny eardrums are already formed by the fifth month. Thus Yoro could hear what those other than Jim hadn’t cared to listen to—both my heart and me, my voice, H, the mute letter who decided then and there to speak to Jim’s daughter, to mine, to Yoro, who I was sure was listening with her tiny ears, and maybe even sucking her thumb.