Surprised by my unexpected resilience, I got off at the stop where Enwai touched the sky: where the head resided. It’s festooned with garlands of flowers and a river. It too was given a name: the New York Botanical Garden. You can see the whole thing from an airplane, or from the eye of the falcon who has nested there for several years now. But I saw the whole thing on foot that day. The bare-leafed trees were covered in hundreds of buds in all stages, from being invisible to blossoming. The garden is equipped with a laboratory that specializes in plant chemistry; samples of the DNA of all the plants growing there are stored in case one day they should succumb. So Enwai is wearing a tiara that is like its own planet, an arched natural reserve where the most unassuming life-forms find refuge, from oaks to lichens. Freezers there store the genetic information of extinct species. But Enwai never displays these icy chambers. Quite the contrary, she keeps them hidden in the tiara where virgin nature protects the machinery of her survival. If I live long enough to see Yoro born and growing up, I thought, I’ll comb her hair in the same tender manner this garden is cared for every day, a garden whose existence could be the key to New York’s reforestation.
This is how Enwai’s metamorphosis was taking place, whose quickening I could sense in myself at the time, and spring was undoubtedly in the air, because I found her head inside her lungs. I was in Central Park, where Enwai’s organic system was fighting to gain ground from the mechanical system. Here Enwai thinks as she breathes in and remembers as she breathes out. The main neuron spins and spins at the center of the park, around Sixty-fifth Street: a carousel with fifty-seven wooden horses. I perched atop a white one. The organ music played for three and a half minutes, the time it takes for the merry-go-round to twirl around seven times. The black horse rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Its mouth was open, as if it were whinnying with glee at the pleasure of copulating with the flesh-and-blood mule who a hundred years ago, beneath these very wooden horses, spent her life tugging the carousel around, huffing and puffing, ever more exhausted, round and round in so many circles: the carousel’s, the memories of Jim, my life.
Enwai’s development didn’t end there with that walk, because year after year she continues to manifest signs of biological regeneration. More proof: expansion, Enwai’s colonization of live cells, what the city of New York considers its most recent urban acquisition. The High Line, the unused raised train tracks that are now a panoramic garden. One’s view pierces between the buildings all the way to the port as easily as the sea receiving a tongue of land jutting into it. The vegetation is lush now that the tracks are completely hidden. The stone-eyed mayor thinks this is a garden, but it’s skin. Just as skin dresses bone, so meadow grows over iron. First, the greenery covered Fourteenth to Twentieth Streets—Enwai’s left humerus—and then from Twentieth to Thirtieth Streets—the ulna and the radius. When the hand appears, what were once rails will be fresh green skin from shoulder to fingertips. Maybe then I’ll be able to see my girl, not only me but everyone else too; maybe right now, laid out like a grassy blanket soft enough that anyone strolling across might feel called to caress it, kick off their shoes, showing the respect of a good shepherd toward pastureland. These are merely images; don’t think I confuse signified and signifier. Today Yoro is a woman you will know in time. The pasture, the prairie, they aren’t Yoro, but if Yoro had an ideogram, it would be something garden fresh and good for all humankind.
That whole day I thought wandering around and dying were one and the same thing. But I lived in Enwai, I resisted there, and now I felt spring arrive with Yoro’s first little kicks. The sun was still warm in the late afternoon. I found an out-of-the-way corner of that green lung, wriggled out of my dress, and lay down. I could smell it. I smelled the green. Grass was growing in Enwai, and for the first time since the bomb in Hiroshima, my hair was beginning to grow. A few months later, at forty-two, I could feel the weight of my own hair. A little while later I learned that during this stage of pregnancy, a fine soft down grows to protect the fetus’s skin, which still lacks fatty tissue. It’s called lanugo. That day the same brownish grass sprouted over Yoro and me, like a new down.
Seventh Month:
But spring ended for me the same day it began. And three years would go by before I ever saw it again. I quit looking outside of myself during that time, because Yoro was developing inside of me, though I felt very bad for having put off the search that had been so important to the man I’d loved more than anything. But it didn’t upset me enough, because my despair carried me to the heights of selfishness.
Let me try to summarize the most important events in my life during those three wintry years. My dog died, but I kept one of her puppies. I mention it because you’ll soon see how holding on to that puppy’s leash is what nudged me toward a brighter period. But it took three years of winter first, and though I would never have believed it possible, my agoraphobia intensified. That’s when I met a man I’ll call Irrational Number. The name suits him because to this day I still can’t figure how many decimals he had. He was like an infinite man; all the subtle features that make up a person’s individual character, in his case, were hidden from me. It’s impossible to choose a word or two or even one hundred words that could possibly portray him. That’s why I use the analogy of irrational numbers, an allusion to that one Greek who discovered them and in return was drowned at sea, as the legend goes. My man, my Irrational Number, had also been tossed from a boat, or more precisely from society. In the manner of Hippasus of Metapontum, he had committed an audacious act of equivalent magnitude.
First let me tell you the story of Hippasus, in case you aren’t familiar with it, so you understand the association. The plucky Greek dared to measure the diagonal of a simple square, each side 1 unit long—that is, the square root of 2—and show that the result was not a natural number, nor rational, but in fact a number with apparently infinite and random decimals. He’d effectively discovered incommensurability, deemed heretical by Pythagoras, he who had defined the perfection of the universe, music, and harmony in whole numbers or fractions. Hippasus confronted the Pythagoreans with the difficulty of measuring the universe. It was a blow to the mathematical ego. How to measure the geometry of the world if you can’t even measure the diagonal of a square?
The audacity of my Irrational Number—an eminent white ex-professor of English literature who taught in his home state of Georgia, who had just been released from prison a few months earlier—was to beat a white man to a pulp for trying to stop a black woman from entering a public bathroom. It’s true the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation had been declared unconstitutional a decade earlier, but the white population in the southern states took a long time to accede to the rationale of a universe that had been built on black foundations. That year several black and Hispanic women filed legal complaints after visiting their doctors because they couldn’t seem to get pregnant, only to find that their infertility was due to surgeons who had taken advantage of earlier procedures to tie their Fallopian tubes without their consent. The United States was practicing eugenics some forty years before the Nazis, the regime the Americans had denounced for, among other reasons, carrying out certain practices to better the race, practices which the great father had been developing. So my man wasn’t simply punching another white man, but the state itself. And that meant expulsion from the university, and what to him was much more serious, an end to his sincere vocation of teaching.