K spent the next month in bed following the amputation. The slightest movement made the pain worse. The hemorrhages were so abundant she became anemic. She panicked every time she had to urinate, the pain was so excruciating; as a result her bladder swelled to the point of bursting. The more details S and K gave, the more I realized K’s experiences mirror my own painful ones. Both of us suffered the extirpation of the organ that originates as a hermaphroditic core and defines itself around the seventh week of gestation as either a penis or a clitoris, a procedure that goes beyond what a young girl can bear physically, beyond what an adult can bear psychologically. Though I had writhed in pain in Hiroshima and she in Bamako, we both shared the same dearth of care. Nothing for the pain. Nothing for the scarring. Nothing to alleviate the dread. Not even the fact that her town was at peace and her family and neighbors safe differentiated our experiences because when you are facing affliction on that scale, it’s hard to take stock of what’s happening outside of you. It’s not that it didn’t matter to me whether my family was alive or dead, it’s that at the time I was nothing more than a throbbing piece of skin covered in sores, pus, and burns and burning up with fever. The absolute pain, when it comes, was the only family that matters; pain that is my mother, my father, my siblings, my whole country. Only when the pain was alleviated could I think about all of them, the real ones, the blood of my blood, about whether they were alive or dead. And they were. Forever dead.
Meeting K in A Thousand Bloods made me consider the importance of blood, since she was so connected with it. Not in the sense of the blood that spills as a result of an amputated organ, but of the blood that transmits, that circulates or flows to carry a message. It reminded me of your bout of malaria in Burma. I would get so worried whenever your fever spiked over something as simple as a cold, thinking it was a new episode. And I’d begin trembling as if I were the sick person and not you. I imagined the guilty mosquito had to be a female anopheles, because only the females suck blood in order to hatch their eggs. I cursed that female who could activate the illness in your liver, circulate it throughout your body, messenger it through the bloodstream.
S and K were talking about something—I can’t remember what. I had taken a seat and was just watching them. I fixated on K’s corneas. I could see they were red from exhaustion or maybe from another urinary tract infection. Blood in her corneas too. Yoro, Yoro, Yoro, goddamn it forever. The blood of your blood that has bled out of me over so many years of searching. Can there be any greater waste of time than looking for something? Love, yes, of course, one looks out of love, but in the meantime you don’t love anything else but what is not there. Which is absurd. Looking for love, instead of simply loving the person who is present, who is not hiding away, who doesn’t require that you waste years following her trail. That’s why if I could jump from blood to blood, Jim, if I could live in other people’s lives, I would be faithful to you. I would be unfaithful (again). I would get bored like the thick blood of a slothful man. I would bleed wood and not think of anything but the material of the trees. A carpenter. I would be a carpenter, and then I’d be the bird that bleeds the bark. I would also be the bullet of a hunter that slices through a deer. Fleeting. The blood of gunpowder shot by someone else’s hand. Sliding smoothly through hair, skin, flesh—my last destiny, warm body, animal, burying me in its middle, distancing me from the loneliness of a cold grave. I would drip in a grove. I get to know you anew. I would close like your glottis that hinders my blood from dripping down your throat. I would open it like I used to open my glottis to swallow your germinating saliva. I imagine now how it works on my organism. Your saliva germinates reeds that wave in the currents inside of me, in my esophagus, my guts, the soft walls of my stomach. Fields of tails like elongated blossoms in the springtime of a body that gets its light through your saliva. Photosynthesis. Erosynthesis. While you sleep, I would trap insects with my tongue to spread over your wound. I would forget you. I would believe in peace. I would make war. I would make love in wartime. I would be the index finger that pokes an eggshell to learn the taste of yellow. I would live crouched in the ghostly pyramid only for the pleasure of relaxing my muscles—strong, red—when that beam of light illuminates it for thirty seconds each year. And every once in a while—and I mean once in a while—I would be me again, same as I could be anyone else. Me now, me then, and me in my remote past, inhabiting the simultaneity of my infant’s crawl, my first steps, with the search, always the search for your blood: Yoro. Goddamn you forever, Yoro.
I don’t curse Yoro when I feel her inside of me. Because then she’s also blood of my blood, this blood that instantly transmits the message that I’m pregnant, and it doesn’t matter much whether I am or am not, because the message is repeated for weeks in each and every beat of my heart, tirelessly, over and over again, reverberating in me like Morse code in a submarine. Certainly this is our first inner call of life. There it is, connecting. I suppose these signals are felt most clearly in pregnancy, this perpetual repetition notifying of a transformation in course, which doesn’t originate in a person’s own body, but in someone else’s, one that is invading you, the blood of your blood that nonetheless inhabits you as a different being.
Everyone around a pregnant woman caters to her and cares for her as if they were protecting their own mother’s fetus. How odd. It’s a type of invasion felt by few men, unless they experience a metamorphosis themselves. Anyone who’s written about metamorphosis wrote about pregnancy. A cockroach, a swan, a bull, golden rain. If I had lived my entire life in isolation, and one day someone told me that another body would sprout from my own, I might find the idea of turning into a cockroach far more plausible. We clutch our heads when they talk about magic, but we’ve normalized pregnancy to the point of making it banal. Not me. I say: this can only be magical, and because it is, I’m often overwhelmed by the same fear as the person who woke up one day transformed into a cockroach. I find myself controlling my thoughts from time to time as if this blood transmitted information through the internal communication system to the still-premature brain that would allow it to pick up on what I’m thinking.
What happens when I doubt my daughter’s existence? Would her DNA somehow register it as contempt, as if I didn’t believe in her or want her? What happens when I don’t care to live, not even for her? How unbearable it would be to not have secrets. At times I’ve felt hatred, thinking she’s a kind of vigilante, a spy. But then I feel guilty, worried that my scorn might somehow impede her growth. And again I think about your blood. The blood of your father, now circulating through me. And the blood of your family too. That sister of yours, whom I’ve never liked very much, is also my sister as long as you are circulating inside of me. The blood that raises the alarm when something is wrong, though only when I believe I’m pregnant, of course; the daily scrutiny for blood after each pee. I go back to thinking it doesn’t really matter if my pregnancy is a lie, because that fear is there, the fear of bleeding. Perhaps the fear of bleeding is the fear of accepting the fact that my little girl doesn’t really exist, and the blood is then the sign of the termination of my fantasy. And then there’s the blood flowing through the umbilical cord as my belly button begins fading away. Me, who was always stuck to my mother’s skirts, I feel as though I’m cutting the umbilical cord that ties me to my mother every time I glance at my belly button. Maybe the last trace of cord that ties us to our mothers is cut in order to make the new cord that ties us to our daughter. You see, the cord that tied me to my mother, the cord that even her death in Hiroshima couldn’t cut, is now being severed by life. Life is by far the strongest explosion. Will I feel my body spit out the plug of blood that signals an approaching birth? I imagine it would be released like a clot, like a plug, like what happens in the morning during a period when the blood’s been retained all night, thickening, getting darker from the pressure. I wanted to feel that release so badly. And I was so afraid that it was never going to happen.