Death and the Flower Read online

  There was a nurse call button in the unit that would send one running over as soon as it was pressed. The station on the other side of the glass partition was brightly lit, and three young women on the night shift were chattering with lively, glowing faces. I wondered what they were talking about. Seated around a table, they periodically bended at the waist in fits of irrepressible laughter. Were I to open the door, the clamor and scent of young women would tumble into my world where the respirator’s sound was everything. A single pane of glass severed the two worlds and their polar opposite lights and sounds. Neighbors to death, these women who nevertheless scattered carefree smiles shone and exuded youth.

  Instead of pushing the call button, I knocked on the partition with the back of my hand twice. There was no reaction. Too engrossed in conversation, they couldn’t hear me. I knocked again. Rather than the sound, the sight of me rapping on the glass caught the attention of one of the nurses. She gently touched the shoulder of a chubby colleague who had her back towards the partition. Looking around, the alerted nurse immediately stood up and walked over to the door and turned the knob.

  “Is something the matter?” she asked, poking only her head into the ICU and standing on her toes. The vestiges of lighthearted conversation still lingered on her face, her heart still in that bright world.

  “There seems to be something wrong with the respirator,” I complained, indicating the unit with my chin. The nurse peered into the dark world and strained to listen for a while from where she stood. Then she walked into the ICU, closed the door, and hurried over to the front of the machine.

  She stared at the monitor in silence. Tilting her head in thought, mumbling a few words under her breath, she bent over to check the unit’s back and confirmed that all the cords were connected. Yet, the respirator’s constricted breathing continued to wash over the room. The nurse looked up at the ceiling then moved her gaze to the wall. Her stout figure stood on tiptoe as if she were trying to catch distant echoes. The room still sputtered violent coughs, but her mind seemed to be wandering somewhere far away.

  Striding back to the monitor, she stood facing it. Then, for some reason, she slapped the cuboid top section, the main body of the artificial respirator, with the palm of her hand. And slapped it again. A chill ran down my spine. It felt like she was slapping my wife’s chest. The artificial respirator had stepped in for my wife’s lungs and was a part of her now. I’d lost track of where the machine ended and where her internal organs began. Yet, as if to prove that continuum, the machine gradually started to regain its regular rhythm. The monitor even looked up with hang-dog eyes.

  “How do you feel now?” the nurse asked the machine. She gave a satisfied nod and started making her way back to the bright place where her colleagues waited—with hurried steps, assiduously avoiding eye contact with me, acting as though nothing had happened. The door closed and the room was as it was before.

  I was not convinced. A medical device, supposed to represent the height of precision, getting its act together thanks to a spanking? This wasn’t some TV set with bad reception. Any irregularity directly impinged on my wife’s life. Still, I told myself, they may be young, but the nurses are the pros here. A pro had determined that nothing was amiss so maybe I just needed to relax. The machine was fully back in rhythm and indeed sending a sufficient amount of air to my wife’s lungs. To begin with, the whole time the unit was on the fritz, she hadn’t betrayed any sign of suffering. The irregularities in the machine hadn’t affected my wife in any way.

  I glared at the respirator’s monitor for close to ten minutes. The breathing was regular, maintaining fixed intervals. All clear, it seemed. I thought I’d get some shut-eye and lied down on my cot.

  Before I knew it, my breathing had synched with the respirator. My body must have aligned with the vibrations in the room. Once in sync, it was impossible to break away from that rhythmic spell, just like it was difficult to walk against the beat of a loud marching song. It actually felt comfortable, being one with the room. I was reminded of my wife in Lamaze class learning how to breathe during delivery. She’d been quite humorous conveying to me how all these pregnant women on their backs all moved their stomachs in and out as the midwife called, “Now breathe in, now breathe out …”

  It was ridiculous. We looked like beached seals.

  The image of her smile as she demonstrated floated into my mind.

  I had multiple dreams in succession. It seemed my sleep was still shallow because as soon as the machine’s breathing reached my ears, the dreams would shift course, bubbling up and fading away with no connecting threads. Reverie and lucidity pushed and pulled like waves.

  I awoke for good in the middle of a dream. Vexed over being unable to send any air into my lungs no matter how hard I sucked, I woke up clawing at my chest. For a minute or so, I must actually not have been breathing. In fact, the moment I sprang up, I inhaled a mighty gulp, relishing the taste of air. I tried to remember the dream I’d been having. Maybe I’d been drowning. Yet I couldn’t recall there being any water. Rather, the blue of a clear sky above some highlands clung to the folds of my mind. When I pressed my palm to my chest, I could feel my heart pounding as if I’d swum the full length of a 25-meter pool without surfacing.

  My eyes went straight to the clock. It was a little before three in the morning. My mind was in a fog, and I kept trying to get it into gear. Something was strange. Something was missing. A sound that was supposed to be there …

  My spine froze.

  The respirator’s stopped!

  Kicking off the blanket, I jumped out of bed, knelt by my wife, and placed an ear to her chest. Her steady pulse and gentle breathing reached my ears. I nearly collapsed from relief. I turned around and checked the monitor of the respirator to find that the orange number was unchanged. Numerically, at least, it seemed to be working fine. Only the sound had stopped.

  Still crouched, I reached out a hand toward the main body of the respirator. It was cold to the touch. I tapped it on the side. Then I slapped it a few times with an open palm, watching my wife’s expression as I did so. I’d have to stop the second it started to affect her. When I dealt a fifth blow, strongish, the machine’s breathing suddenly revived. Just as I had upon waking from my dream, the respirator took a few wheezing, devouring breaths. It fell silent again then emitted a moan-like cry. Without thinking, I took my hand off the machine. It seemed to me as though the solid black body had trembled from the intermittent breathing. When I touched it again, the same spot held a bit of warmth. Although I understood that my own body heat had simply transferred to it, the warmth was redolent of the raw presence unique to creatures. The respirator was alive. As proof, it was spewing phlegmatic noises now. My father who’d passed away a year ago had often made such a phlegmy, gurgling sound right before he died. I’d never mistake that peculiar cadence.

  Was my wife’s life force getting sucked out by inorganic machinery? Her breathing was as steady as a machine, while the machine’s exhibited an animal irregularity. I tapped its side a few times with my right hand to calm it down and looked around the room. I was trying to think if a replacement respirator could be set up quickly should the unthinkable happen. There was another column-type unit the same height in the corner of the room, but it was covered with a sheet, perhaps because it hadn’t been used in a while. That meant the person who’d died in this room the morning before had been on the same respirator that was now in use. A number of doubts flickered rapidly through my mind. Had this respirator been beset with the same symptoms, choking, unable to breathe, while that patient was on it? Had its irregular breathing killed the patient?

  An emotion closer to anger than fear welled up in me. Were the nurses intentionally ignoring the machine’s poor condition? They’d have nothing to gain by losing a patient.

  Without hesitation, I pressed the call button. As soon as the same chubby nurse from before rushed into the room, I was on my feet.

  “What the heck is going
on with this thing?”

  I was trying to hold back but ended up practically hollering. The nurse stopped still, gathered her hands in front of her chest, and closed her eyes.

  “Please do something. It’s clearly malfunctioning,” I pressed.

  With a look of sorrow on her face, the nurse knelt in front of the respirator and hit the side of the machine with a loose fist. I was about to ask how long she was planning to stick to such a slapdash method, but then noticed that tears were running down her cheeks.

  “Please have a cup of tea with us in the next room,” she offered, sniffling.

  I couldn’t leave my wife alone in a room where a full-blown machine rebellion seemed imminent.

  “Please don’t worry. It happens all the time.”

  While I hesitated, she stood up and started walking towards the door. There was nothing I could do but to trail after her in silence.

  I followed her into the nurse station and closed the door behind me. With the machine’s moaning perfectly shut out, an altogether distinct world emerged. Partitioned by a simple plate of frosted glass were two realms whose sounds, colors, odors, and even room temperature completely differed, antipodal neighbors across a mere thin membrane.

  Still standing, I cupped the proffered tea in both hands and sipped at it a few times. If the nurse had something to say, I wanted to get it over with. Preoccupied with the world next door, my eyes kept glancing beyond the partition.

  “It was lung cancer,” the nurse began abruptly.

  I could only look at her, stupefied. That use of the passive voice. “Who are we talking about?”

  “Mr. Tadashi Niimura.”

  I had never heard the name before, but I instantly made the connection. “The patient who passed away yesterday morning?”

  “Yes.”

  After that, as if to clear my suspicions one by one, the nurse who had struck the respirator kept on talking. What the irregular breathing that filled the next room signified … What internal organs and each and every cell in them desired … If I weren’t hearing it right there, this was hardly credible talk. Oddly, though, I wasn’t scared. Perhaps any explanation allayed fears better than just letting suspicions fester.

  When the nurse was done speaking, she put her soft palm over the back of my hand and whispered, “Don’t worry, the machine is working fine. It’s just the sound.”

  Her cherubic face looked grown-up for that brief moment. Maybe it was her constantly working under the shadow of death, but her expressions and tone were persuasive beyond her years. That must have been why a preposterous story had come across as realistic.

  I put my empty teacup on the table. “Thank you for the tea.”

  The nurse simply gave a childlike smile in reply.

  I sat for a long while on the cot, resting my chin on my hands. Occasionally I remembered to stretch forward and tap on the chest of the respirator. Every time I did so, the irregular breathing settled and the sounds receded. The echoes would soon fade away as well.

  Tadashi Niimura, 47 years old. He was the one who had died 24 hours ago in this room. His left lung had been riddled with cancer, and he’d undergone a pneumonectomy of his entire left lung last September. He was making good progress for a while, but at the start of the new year his coughing and phlegm production took a turn for the worse. Exams revealed that the area from the carina to the right bronchial tube was getting clogged up by cancer. It was inoperable, so all they could do was make it easier for him to breathe.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the suffering of the patient. His left lung was already gone, and when he tried to breathe in with his remaining one, the airway was mostly blocked. Beyond the intricate branches of the bronchial tube his alveoli awaited in vain. The exchange of gasses between the arteries and veins must also have been stymied. I could almost hear the cells that made up the lung screaming for oxygen. In terrible agony, he’d indicated numerous times, Hit my chest. As hard as you can! When a nurse did as he requested, peace would return to his face just for a moment. Tadashi Niimura had spent three weeks in such a state, in this room, before finally expiring 24 hours ago. The entire time, the respirator had operated continuously as a substitute for his lungs. Why would there not be any residual echoes in the machine? I was leaning towards buying it. The room had an air that made you buy it.

  Dawn was about to break. In the end I’d barely slept a wink. The belabored breathing was now so subdued that I had to listen for it. Wholly unaffected by all the groaning, my wife had slept on with a peaceful countenance, her breathing steady, and I was impressed by her strength. On the one hand were cells that had perished screeching with pain. On the other hand was my wife, within whom cells repeatedly multiplied in the others’ wake, sleeping indifferently through a nightmare of a night as if it had all been someone else’s problem. Cradling, in her belly, cells that were fated to perish too someday, she submerged them in amniotic fluid, provided them with nutrients, presided over their growth. The bodies of a fetus and its mother were connected by various tubes. Just like an ICU.

  I opened the curtains to see heavy clouds moving across the rectangular strip of sky. The rain seemed to have stopped sometime ago, and the cherry leaves were drying off.

  The door opened forcefully, and a nurse came in with a fresh IV bag. I had completely forgotten that it was nearly time to change it. The level on the hanging IV fluid was just about to dip below the final mark. The nurse changed out the bag with practiced hands, checked the monitors, and looked into my wife’s face. Perhaps it was in response to the nurse’s shadow—my wife’s eyelids slowly started to open.

  Key West

  The islands stretched right in the middle of the straits in a column from the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. Steel bands of highway straddled the gaps like rainbows, leaping at each island just as a flat stone might across the surface. The car rose and fell in gentle arcs, sometimes nearly level with the sea and looming far above it the next moment. They’d reveled in this scenery yesterday evening as well before a night in Key West at the very tip of the archipelago. Today they were headed back. They’d return the car to the Miami rental service in the evening, retrieve the missing suitcase at the bus terminal, and then depart for their final destination, New York.

  Tatsuro Atsumi slowed down, reluctant to surrender the pleasurable sensation of flying at low altitude over the ocean’s surface. Just then, he noticed a small island on his left and recalled its dark silhouette against the sunset as they’d driven past last night. Now it was afternoon, and in the bright sunlight the island was a tangle of lush greenery peeking out of the sea. It had a very different aspect at midday than at twilight, but there was no doubt it was the same island. Yesterday, they’d stopped the car to gaze at it, entranced. Now, once again, Tatsuro felt himself strongly drawn to the island and decelerated. As he plumbed his heart for the source of the connection he felt, it dawned on him. Four years ago, he had painted a portrait of his late wife. The island he’d placed in the marine background looked a lot like the one he was passing by at that very moment. One was an imaginary island in a dreamy oil painting, and the other an actual island. Yet, their colors, sizes, and even distance from the shore were strikingly similar. Tatsuro had seen the island for the first time on this round trip, but it was as if a figment of his imagination had sprung forth from inside him and come to life.

  Without bothering to signal, he pulled the Ford rental over and appraised the island with a mind to getting there. It was small, probably a little over a mile in circumference. A dilapidated gray pier was visible on the facing side—but no buildings, let alone any sign that the island might be inhabited. A deserted island … The words held a nostalgic ring. The place was within reach, so close, right before his eyes. It lay about a hundred yards off, only a few minutes’ swim. For a 43 year old, Tatsuro was lean and mean and a confident swimmer thanks to his strict weekly regimen at the gym pool.

  “Might be worth it …” Tatsuro murmured to nobody in parti
cular.

  The remark wasn’t directed at his daughter, Yuko, who sat in the passenger seat beside him; he was simply confirming his intentions by stating them aloud. Yuko, having just turned twelve, wasn’t strong enough to swim that far. She was introverted and not very athletic, much preferring drawing over exercising—a trait possibly inherited from Tatsuro, who was a high school art teacher.

  “Huh?” Yuko said, then fell silent, her face fearful. She offered no further reply. Especially after their misfortune six years ago, she had an aversion to being left alone.

  “I’ll only be twenty, maybe thirty minutes, so could you wait here?” Tatsuro insisted.

  “Hurry back,” Yuko replied curtly without even seeking an explanation for the sudden swim. “Don’t go too far,” she added.

  Tatsuro stood on the shore and looked at the color of the sea he was about to cross. Perhaps due to the ebbing tide, most of it had the hues of the shoals, the sand and undulating seaweed visible under the surface. About midway across was a long, ellipsoid sandbar that ran parallel to the shore. Only in the short stretches between the shore and the sandbar and the sandbar and the island, darker green waters suggestive of depth swirled. He wouldn’t be swimming across so much as wading. Tatsuro told his daughter this to see if she might be willing to come with him after all. She shook her head and said, “Just hurry back.”

  Tatsuro stripped down to his underpants and waded out into the water.

  What had made him want to set out for the piddling island? Sure enough, there was a stretch of water deeper than his height between the shore and the sandbar, and after swimming across the swift current and standing in knee-deep water on the sandbar, Tatsuro had fresh doubts about his whim. Time and again, senseless impulses beset him. Moving to New York with no particular plan in mind a year after finishing art school. Responding to an opening for an art teacher at a private high school upon his return. He’d acted on a whim both times. After the school had implemented a five-day week, he sometimes took his wife and children for aimless drives on Friday nights. That night six years ago was one such occasion. He’d forced his wife and children, who weren’t in the mood, to come along, to satisfy his whim, and driven westward on the Tomei Expressway. It wasn’t raining, but the road started getting wet near Gotenba. Just a while earlier, a sudden downpour had passed through. Oncoming trucks sent up sprays of water across the windshield so Tatsuro turned on his wipers now and then. Thanks to droplets of water dancing in the darkness like a mist, however, visibility was remarkably poor. Their three-year-old boy tried to move from the back seat to his mother, who was riding shotgun, and got wedged in between the front seats. Tatsuro glanced at his son, distracted, and shifted his gaze back to the road to see two red brake lights growing rapidly closer. Blurred by droplets of water and bloated to gigantic proportions, the redness pressed upon his brain as a hideous form. Even now, Tatsuro could remember that color. Whenever that red light, scattering as if through a prism, appeared in his dreams, he stiffened his right leg.