Katie Kitamura - Gone to the Forest

Tom points to the land surrounding their square.

“They haven’t allocated our land.”

“Not yet.”

“When will they do it?”

“Soon, I think.”

“And what were we doing with it?”

“Nothing.”

Tom nods. That cannot strictly speaking be true and yet he understands what Jose means. The old man left things fallow more often than not, his own son included. Until the time came to harvest at will. Tom looked down across the valley. At the land, which has been the only frame for his vision. He thought: the old man had liked a picture. He had liked a vista. An empty legacy, a stupid one, now that time had come to an end.

It will not be recovered. Soon these fields would also be covered in fence and barbed wire. Like a million cages set upon their land. They would be surrounded and there would be nothing to be done about it. Tom draws his breath in through his nose.

“Is it all like this?”

Jose nods.

“Everywhere?”

He shrugs. They turn and ride back to the house.

When they arrive, the girl is nowhere to be seen. She has vanished. Her bags have been packed and the drawers of the dresser in her room are empty. Tom stands in the stable and wipes the horses down. The mare had not been untacked. They had found her standing in the stable yard, the reins hastily thrown over a post. Tom unbuckles the harness and the horse exhales in relief. He rubs her down and the muzzle is soft as felt.

The house sits empty without the girl. Meanwhile the old man is much worse. He has gone into free fall. It is official. There is a measurable difference each day. Every change is a bad one. His limbs are swollen with the sickness. His skin is slick and glossy and his eyes have grown cloudy — his eyes are so cloudy it is impossible to believe they contain vision.

He cannot walk. He cannot sit up. Now he can only lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and call for more morphine. He says that he cannot breathe, I am having difficulty breathing. He tries to describe it to them. It is like someone is stealing my air. Like someone — he claws at his chest and throat. Like this. It is like this. He asks for more morphine.

Tom brings him the bottle. The old man’s eyes glitter as he looks at it. His eyes do not move as he watches Tom tap out one, two pills and then set the bottle down.

The old man grabs Tom’s arm. He lifts three fingers.

“Two.”

The old man shakes his head. He lifts three fingers again.

“I can only give you two.”

The old man shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His voice spent by frustration. Tom reaches for the glass of water.

“Open.”

The old man nods and opens his mouth and sticks his tongue out. Lips quivering. Tongue dry as dust. Tom drops the pills onto his tongue and raises the glass to his mouth. Gently he presses the old man’s jaw shut. He watches him swallow and close his eyes. His face becomes calm.

“Sleep. Until the medicine takes effect.”

The old man nods. He is covered to the neck and only his head protrudes above the edge of the quilt. Tom raises his hand to check his temperature. He stands up, bottle and glass in hand. His father does not open his eyes again.

Tom goes into the kitchen. Celeste takes the glass from his hand. She doesn’t look at him as she returns to the stove.

“I will take the meal in to him.”

He nods. His father no longer cares who serves him. He is not able to see much beyond the pain. It has got to that point. And Tom no longer cares to take the meal in himself. He is happy for Celeste to do this. She stirs a pot vigorously then sets down the spoon.

“He is not well.”

“We are running out of morphine.”

“This morning, when I went into his room—”

“There is enough for another week. If we do not up the dosage, and we may need to. The medicine does not last as long as it did even a couple days ago.”

“—he was calling out.”

“It was six hours and now it is only four. Tomorrow it will be only three.”

“And he was in distress. He had fouled himself.”

“Celeste, listen—”

“The shit was everywhere. All over the sheets. Some of it dripping onto the floor. He had shat right through his pajamas. He was crying and crying and I do not know how long he had been lying there like this, in his own shit and nobody listening. Nobody knowing.”

Tom falls silent. He sits down. He cannot look at Celeste. She is crying. A tear, another, one by one. Falling into the soup.

“The smell was terrible. I opened the door and I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know how he lay there all that time. And the shit — the shit was black as tar. Sticky like pitch.”

Tom does not want to hear this. He is stumbling, his legs are buckling, beneath the weight of the situation. The girl has gone. The old man sits in a pile of his own shit. And there is the rebellion. Will it come to them? Despite himself, he asks the question. It is impossible. Surely it is impossible. He looks at Celeste. He cannot discuss the matter with her. She has her own emotions to tend to, it is better that they keep to themselves.

He rises to his feet and asks her to look after the old man’s cleanliness. To make certain that he has not soiled himself. He is not entirely himself anymore, he says to her. He says this to her and also to himself. The old man is himself and he is also something very, very different.

Tom goes outside and sits down on the stoop. His day is filled with tasks. He feeds the old man. He checks his temperature. He changes the bed sheets. He counts the hours between pills. The days will disappear in the counting — all his time will go and then the old man will be dead and Tom will not even know where to begin. He knows only this: that when the old man dies, there will be no place for him to put all his feeling.

He is aware of a deep and growing numbness, which is spreading through his body. He can no longer think, his brain sits beneath a heavy mass of unexplored emotion. While the numbness inches across his body. Soon he will not be able to move, he thinks. Soon it will be just like he has been paralyzed, from the waist down, from the neck down, from the top of his head down to the floor.

Yes, he is tired, it is like they warned him. Tom tries to imagine the farm with the old man dead, he tries to imagine what that will mean. But without the girl and the inheritance he has no way of understanding the old man’s death. Without the girl there is nothing but the old man lying in the bed, and the old man stops all acts of imagination. He freezes the son in the present tense. Although he himself continues to die, and soon will be gone.

Tom gets up from the stoop. He goes back into the house and to the old man’s room. He hopes he will be asleep. The old man asleep and dying is easier than the old man awake and dying. The old man awake is becoming more than Tom can handle. Every interaction is increasingly strange. Each interaction is becoming a horror show.

He is not asleep. He is awake and staring at the ceiling and smiling. His eyes crawling across the wall. His hands petting and patting the covers. He looks at Tom when he comes in. It takes a moment. He motions for him to sit down.

Cautiously, Tom sits down. The old man motions for him to come closer. Which Tom does, a little. The old man motions for him to come closer still. Tom hesitates and then moves forward until he can smell the sour odor rising from the old man’s mouth. The residue of shit from the floorboards. Something new, something he has not noticed before — a sweet smell, the sweet smell of the sickness, like confectionery, seeping out of the old man’s skin. He sniffs and pushes his nose closer while his father’s eyes roam the ceiling and down the wall.