The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters

Author:Mary Yukari Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Saburo did what he could. He ate well, three meals a day. He cut back drastically on his work hours. He curtailed his social life, although on occasion he lightened his routine by inviting a girl to accompany him to the movie theater. He deliberately chose comedy: Teppan-gumi or foreign films featuring Charlie Chaplin.

Nonetheless, the situation took its toll. The old track-and-field nightmare returned. Unable to fall back asleep, Saburo tossed and turned, seeing before him his father’s glass eye crusted over with yellow mucus, as it had once looked when a nurse forgot to wash it out with eyedrops. Or he saw him wearily close his eyes and whisper, “Thank you,” after a nurse changed his colostomy bag.

By now his father was installed in the recommended Fuji-no hospital for terminally ill patients. He had little strength—he had never quite recovered from the operation—and he fought to sit up, even to shift position on the bed. Still, he courteously attempted conversation. “How are you holding up, Saburo?” he asked each evening, as if his son were the ailing one. To save his father’s energy, Saburo did most of the talking. Then, running out of topics, he took to reading to his father from History of the Cosmos, a book he had found on his father’s desk at home. There was something soothing about reading aloud; all meaning dropped away, and he was borne along on a cadence reminiscent of boyhood, when his father’s voice had washed over him at the dinner table.

One evening the reading lulled his father to sleep. Saburo gazed at the drawn, wasted face. The hospital was silent—it might have been midnight instead of seven o’clock. If Saburo stared long enough in the eerie fluorescence of overhead lights, the pallid face with its sunken eye sockets became that of a corpse.

Above the blanket, his father’s hand twitched in sleep. It was the surreal quality of this moment—a tenuous balance of his father’s unconsciousness, the temporary absence of night nurses, the lingering effects of reading about an impersonal cosmos—that made Saburo reach out with one finger, and touch his father’s hand. Its folds were cold and surprisingly loose, like sea cucumbers he had once poked as a boy in the open-air market. The forearm was warmer, but so much smaller, so much more frail between Saburo’s fingertips, than eyesight had prepared him for. Saburo went on to trace the bony blade of a gowned shoulder. This felt like a violation and it made him nervous: was his father really asleep? Maybe he was conscious behind those closed lids. Maybe the touching bothered him but he was too polite, or too weak, to react. But Saburo couldn’t stop. He couldn’t help himself.

The physical contact dissolved some hard center of logic within him. And Saburo wondered, with sudden urgency, whether his father was really as self-sufficient as he had always assumed him to be. Might his father have hoped for a different reaction the day he talked of suicide? Might

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