She worried all the time that I was losing my Korean. When I was in my teens, she’d get attacks of despair and urgency and say she was going to send me back to Korea for the next few summers to learn the language again. What she didn’t know was that it had been whole years since I had lost the language, had left it somewhere for good, perhaps from the time I won a prize in the first grade for reading the most books in my class. I must have read fifty books. She had helped me then, pushed me to read and then read more to exhaustion until I fell asleep, because she warned me that if I didn’t learn English I wouldn’t be anybody and couldn’t really live here like a true American. Look at me, she’d say, offering herself as a sad example, look how hard it is for me to shop for food or speak to your teachers, look how shameful I am, how embarrassing.
Her words frightened me. But I was so proud of myself and my prolific reading, particularly since the whole year before in kindergarten I could barely speak a word of English. I simply listened. We played mostly, anyway, or drew pictures. When the class sang songs I’d hum along with the melody and silently mouth the strange and difficult words. My best friend was another boy in the class who also knew no English, a boy named Tommy. He was Japanese. Of course, we couldn’t speak to each other but it didn’t matter; somehow we found a way to communicate through gestures and funny faces and laughter, and we became friends. I think we both sensed we were the smartest kids in the class. We’d sit off by ourselves with this one American girl who liked us best and play house around a wooden toy oven. I’ve forgotten her name. She’d hug us when we “came home from work,” her two mute husbands, and she would sit us down at the little table and work a pan at the stove and bring it over and feed us. We pretended to eat her food until we were full and then she’d pull the two of us sheepish and cackling over to the shaggy remnants of carpet that she’d laid down, and we’d all go to sleep, the girl nestled snuggly between Tommy and me, hotly whispering in our ears the tones of a night music she must have heard echoing through her own house.
Later that year, after a parents’ visiting day at school, my mother told me that Tommy and his family were moving away. I didn’t know how she’d found that out, but we went to his house one day, and Tommy and his mother greeted us at the door. They had already begun packing, and there were neatly stacked boxes and piles of newspapers pushed to a corner of their living room. Tommy immediately led me outside to his swing set and we horsed about for an hour before coming back in, and I looked at my mother and Tommy’s mother sitting upright and formally in the living room, a tea set and plate of rice cookies between them on the coffee table. The two of them weren’t really talking, more smiling and waiting for us. And then from Tommy’s room full of toys, I began to hear a conversation, half of it in profoundly broken English, the other half in what must have been Japanese, at once breathy and staccato, my mother’s version of it in such shreds and remnants that the odd sounds she made seemed to hurt her throat as they were called up. After we said goodbye and drove away in the car, I thought she seemed quiet and sad for me, and so I felt sadder still, though now I think that it was she who was moved and saddened by the visit, perhaps by her own act. For the momentary sake of her only son and his departing friend, she was willing to endure those two tongues of her shame, one present, one past. Language, sacrifice, the story never ends.
Inside our house (wherever it was, for we moved several times when I was young) she was strong and decisive and proud; even my father deferred to her in most matters, and when he didn’t it seemed that she’d arranged it that way. Her commandments were stiff, direct. When I didn’t listen to her, I understood that the disagreement was my burden, my problem. But outside, in the land of always-talking strangers and other Americans, my mother would lower her steadfast eyes, she’d grow mute, even her supremely solemn and sometimes severe face would dwindle with uncertainty; I would have to speak to a mechanic for her, I had to call the school myself when I was sick, I would write out notes to neighbors, the postman, the paper carrier. Do the work of voice. Negotiate us, with this here, now. I remember often fuming because of it, this one of the recurring pangs of my adolescence, feeling frustrated with her inabilities, her misplacement, and when she asked me one morning to call up the bank for her I told her I wouldn’t do it and suggested that she needed “to practice” the language anyway.
Gracious god. I wished right then for her to slap me. She didn’t. Couldn’t. She wanted to scream something, I could tell, but bit down on her lip as she did and hurried upstairs to my parents’ bedroom where I knew she found none of this trouble with her words. There she could not fail, nor could I. In that land, her words sang for her, they did good work, they pleaded for my life, shouted entreaties, ecstasies, they could draw blood if they wanted, and they could offer grace, and they could kiss.
BUT NOW—AND I think, right now (I am discovering several present tenses)—she is barely conscious, silent.
Her eyes are very small and black. They are only half-opened. I cannot call up their former kind shade of brown. Not because I am forgetting, but because it is impossible to remember. I think I cannot remember the first thing about her. I am not amnesiac because despite all this I know everything about her. But the memories are like words I cannot call up, the hidden vocabularies of our life together. I cannot remember, as I will in a later narrative time, her bright red woolen dress with the looming black buttons that rub knobbly and rough against my infant face; I cannot remember, as I will soon dream it, the way her dark clean hair falls on me like a cloak when she lifts me from the ground; I cannot remember—if I could ever truly forget—the look of those soft Korean words as they play on her face when she speaks to me of honor and respect and devotion.
This is a maddening state, maybe even horrifying, mostly because I think I must do anything but reside in this very place and time and moment, that to be able to remember her now—something of her, anything—would be to forget the present collection of memories, this inexorable gathering of future remembrances. I want to disband this accumulation, break it apart before its bonds become forever certain.
She wears only a striped pajama top. Her catheter tube snakes out from between the top buttons. We know she is slipping away, going fast now, so someone, not me, disconnects the line to her food and water. The tube is in her way. These last moments will not depend on it. Her line to the morphine, though, is kept open and clear and running.
This comforts me. I have always feared her pain and I will to the end. Before she received the automatic pump that gives her a regular dosage of the drug I would shoot her with a needle at least five times a day.
For some reason I wish I could do it now:
I will have turned her over gently. She will moan. Every movement except the one mimicking death is painful. I fit the narrow white syringe with a small needle, twisting it on tight. I then pull off the needle’s protective plastic sheath. (Once, I will accidently jab myself deep in the ring finger and while I hold gauze to the bloody wound she begins to cry. I am more careful after that.) Now I fill the syringe to the prescribed line, and then I go several lines past it; I always give her a little more than what the doctors tell us, and she knows of this transgression, my little gift to her, to myself. I say I am ready and then she lifts her hips so I can pull down her underwear to reveal her buttocks.
I know her body. The cancer in her stomach is draining her, hungrily sucking the life out of her, but the liquid food she gets through the tube has so many calories that it bloats her, giving her figure the appearance of a young girl who likes sweets too well. Her rump is full, fleshy, almost healthy-looking except for the hundreds of needlemarks. There is almost no space left. I do not think it strange anymore that I see her naked like this. Even the sight of her pubic hair, darkly coursing out from under her, is now, if anything, of a certain more universal reminiscence, a kind of metonymic reminder that not long before she was truly in the world, one of its own, a woman, fully alive, historical, a mother, a bearer of l
ife.
I feel around for unseeable bruises until I find a spot we can both agree on.
“Are you ready?” I say. “I’m going to poke.”
“Gu-rhaeh,” she answers, which, in this context, means some cross between “That’s right” and “Go ahead, damn it.”
I jab and she sucks in air between her teeth, wincing.
“Ay, ah-po.” It hurts.
“A lot?” I ask, pulling the needle out as straight as I can, to avoid bruising her. We have the same exchange each time; but each time there arises a renewed urgency, and then I know I know nothing of her pains.
I NEVER DREAMED of them. Imagined them. I remember writing short stories in high school with narrators or chief characters of unidentified race and ethnicity. Of course this meant they were white, everything in my stories was some kind of white, though I always avoided physical descriptions of them or passages on their lineage and they always had cryptic first names like Garlo or Kram.
Mostly, though, they were figures who (I thought) could appear in an authentic short story, belong to one, that no reader would notice anything amiss in them, as if they’d inhabited forever those visionary landscapes of tales and telling, where a snow still falls faintly and faintly falls over all of Joyce’s Ireland, that great muting descent, all over Hemingway’s Spain, and Cheever’s Suburbia, and Bellow’s City of Big Shoulders.
I was to breach that various land, become its finest citizen and furiously speak its dialects. And it was only with one story that I wrote back then, in which the character is still unidentified but his mother is Asian (maybe even Korean), that a cleaving happened. That the land broke open at my feet. At the end of the story, the protagonist returns to his parents’ home after a long journey; he is ill, feverish, and his mother tends to him, offers him cool drink, compresses, and she doesn’t care where he’s been in the strange wide country. They do not speak; she simply knows that he is home.
NOW I DAB the pinpoint of blood. I’m trying to be careful.
“Gaen-cha-na,” she says. It is fine.
“Do you need anything?”
“Ggah,” she says, flitting her hand, “kul suh.” Go, go and write.
“What do you want? Anything, anything.”
“In-jeh na jal-leh.” Now I want to sleep.
“Okay, sleep. Rest. What?”
“Boep-bo.” Kiss.
“Kiss.”
Kiss.
This will be our language always. To me she speaks in a child’s Korean, and for her I speak that same child’s English. We use only the simplest words. I think it strange that throughout this dire period we necessarily speak like this. Neither of us has ever grown up or out of this language; by virtue of speech I am forever her perfect little boy, she my eternal righteous guide. We are locked in a time. I love her, and I cannot grow up. And if all mothers and sons converse this way I think the communication must remain for the most part unconscious; for us, however, this speaking is everything we possess. And although I wonder if our union is handicapped by it I see also the minute discoveries in the mining of the words. I will say to her as naturally as I can—as I could speak only years before as a child—I love you, Mother, and then this thing will happen, the diction will take us back, bridge this moment with the others, remake this time so full and real. And in our life together, our strange language is the bridge and all that surrounds it; language is the brook streaming through it; it is the mossy stones, the bank, the blooming canopy above, the ceaseless sound, the sky. It is the last earthly thing we have.
MY MOTHER, NO longer connected to her machine, lies on the bed on the floor. Over the last few hours she suffers brief fits and spasms as if she is chilled. She stirs when we try to cover her with the blanket. She kicks her legs to get it off. Something in her desires to be liberated. Finally we take it away. Let her be, we think. And now, too, you can begin to hear the indelicate sound of her breathing; it is audible, strangely demonstrative. Her breath resonates in this house, begins its final cadence. She sounds as though she were inhaling and exhaling for the very first time. Her body shudders with that breath. My sister tries to comfort her by stroking her arms. My mother groans something unintelligible, though strangely I say to myself for her, Leave me alone, all of you. I am dying. At last I am dying. But then I stroke her, too. She keeps shuddering, but it is right.
What am I thinking? Yes. It is that clear. The closer she slips away, down into the core of her being, what I think of as an origin, a once-starting point, the more her body begins to protest the happening, to try to hold down, as I am, the burgeoning, blooming truth of the moment.
For we think we know how this moment will be. Each of us in this room has been elaborating upon it from the very moment we gained knowledge of her illness. This is the way it comes to me, but I think we have written, each of us, the somber epic novel of her death. It has taken two and one-half years and we are all nearly done. I do not exactly know of the others’ endings. Eunei, my sister (if I may take this liberty), perhaps envisioning her mother gently falling asleep, never really leaving us, simply dreams of us and her life for the rest of ever. I like that one.
My father, a physician, may write that he finally saves her, that he spreads his hands on her belly where the cancer is mighty and lifts it out from her with one ultimate, sovereign effort. Sometimes (and this ought not be attributed to him) I think that his entire life has come down to this struggle against the palpable fear growing inside of his wife. And after she dies, he will cry out in a register I have never heard from his throat as he pounds his hand on the hardwood above her colorless head, “Eeh-guh-moy-yah? Eeh-guh-moy-yah?” What is this? What is this? It—the cancer, the fear—spites him, mocks him, this doctor who is afraid of blood. It—this cancer, this happening, this time—is the shape of our tragedy, the cruel sculpture of our life and family.
In the ending to my own story, my mother and I are alone. We are always alone. And one thing is certain; she needs to say something only to me. That is why I am there. Then she speaks to me, secretly. What she says exactly is unclear; it is enough, somehow, that she and I are together, alone, apart from everything else, while we share this as yet unborn and momentary speech. The words are neither in Korean nor in English, languages which in the end we cannot understand. I hear her anyway. But now we can smile and weep and laugh. We can say goodbye to each other. We can kiss, unflinching, on our mouths.
Then she asks if I might carry her to the window that she might see the new blossoms of our cherry tree. I lift her. She is amazingly light, barely there, barely physical, and while I hold her up she reaches around my neck and leans her head against my shoulder. I walk with her to the window and then turn so that she faces the tree. I gaze longingly at it myself, marveling at the gaudy flowers, and then I turn back upon her face, where the light is shining, and I can see that her eyes have now shut, and she is gone.
But here in this room we are not alone. I think she is probably glad for this, as am I. Her breathing, the doctor says, is becoming labored. He kneels and listens to her heart. “I think we should be ready,” he says. “Your mother is close.” He steps back. He is a good doctor, a good friend. I think he can see the whole picture of the time. And I think about what he is saying: Your mother is close. Yes. Close to us, close to life, close to death. She is close to everything, I think; she is attaining an irrevocable nearness of being, a proximity to everything that has been spoken or written or thought, in every land and language on earth. How did we get to this place? Why are we here in this room, assembled as we are, as if arrayed in some ancient haunted painting whose grave semblance must be known in every mind and heart of man?
I count a full five between her breaths. The color is leaving her face. The mask is forming. Her hand in mine is cold, already dead. I think it is now that I must speak to her. I understand that I am not here to listen; that must be for another narrative. I am not here to bear her in my arms towards bright windows. I am not here to be strong. I am not her
e to exchange goodbyes. I am not here to recount old stories. I am not here to acknowledge the dead.
I am here to speak. Say the words. Her nearness has delivered me to this moment, an ever-lengthening moment between her breaths, that I might finally speak the words turning inward, for the first time, in my own beginning and lonely language: Do not be afraid. It is all right, so do not be afraid. You are not really alone. You may die, but you will have been heard. Keep speaking—it is real. You have a voice.
Biographies
MIA ALVAR’s collection of short stories, In the Country, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Alvar has been a writer-in-residence at the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in One Story, the Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain and the United States, she lives in New York City.
GINA APOSTOL’s third novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan C. Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City.
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