Katie Kitamura - Gone to the Forest

At nightfall he went mute. He opened his mouth but his voice was gone. His tongue flap-flapped in the air but no sound came out. She stood by the side of the bed. He motioned with his hand for more pills. She told him she had no more. He motioned for the pills again. She asked if he would like some water, some soup, some milk. If he would like her to rub his feet. He opened his mouth but could not scream.

She is glad that they are back. She is very glad. Tom nods and swallows.

“Is he sleeping? How is he now?”

“He is no longer himself.”

“I will go and see him.”

“Yes.”

He hands her the canvas bag.

“There is medicine in there.”

Jose takes the bag from Celeste and looks at Tom.

“You should sit down and recover from the journey. I will give him the morphine.”

He disappears. Now Celeste leads them, Tom and the pregnant girl, into the kitchen. She makes them sit down, she boils some water for tea.

“The old man is no longer himself. You must be prepared.”

“I am sorry we left you alone.”

Celeste makes a cup of tea and Tom drinks it. She finds a piece of cake and brings it to him. Celeste, who does not seem surprised to see the girl, offers her a piece. The girl refuses. She lets the cup of tea cool in front of her. Celeste sits down and eats the girl’s slice of cake. Tom takes a bite of the cake. His eyes are vacant.

The girl watches him. She sees how much he has been changed. She raises the cup of tea to her lips and then abruptly drops it back into the saucer. She stands and leaves the kitchen. She is not going to wait any longer. Whatever has to be faced will be faced now. After all, what does it matter to her — what is the old man to her, what is this place, this boy and this woman, what do they matter to her, of all people—

She goes into the bedroom and it is more or less like a wall swinging into her face and then she remembers. She actually flinches at the sight. Tom comes rushing down the hall behind her and it is too late — she cannot go running, she cannot back out or tell him not to enter, he is literally blocking the door behind her. There is no way to go but forward and so they enter the room together.

And yes. They are aghast. The old man lies on the bed and more than ever he secretes the toxic charisma of the dying. He sprays the air with it like a cat. They cannot look away. They stare instead at the limbs that have collapsed, the face that has gone yellow, the shallow mounds beneath the bed sheets that are now the old man — they are pretty damn sure he is dying at last.

It is plain as anything. The reality of the dying and the reality of the larger situation. Which is equally dire. There is no way around it. The old man is dying and the farm will die with him. Tom has run out of time. He has been running out of time for days and weeks. He is a fool. The world outside is beyond all control but the man in front of him — he sees the body stretched out before him and knows there will never be the time to say, what was it he intended to say? What would he have said, if he had found the time?

He does not know, that is part of the problem. He is crying. The girl is dry-eyed and passes Tom a handkerchief. She tells him to blow his nose and get a grip. He takes the handkerchief and blows his nose. He gives the handkerchief back to the girl but still does not have a grip on the situation. And the girl needs him to hurry up, she needs him to pull himself together, because as it is he is not helping.

The two of them and the world outside and the old man in the bed. The old man, who has lost the power of speech and no longer retains the power of movement, whose limbs lie frozen — the old man is glaring at Tom. It is not their imagination. The old man has had enough. The old man is dying and he is not happy about it. When he glares at Tom it is not a trick of the dying physiognomy. It is the absolute truth of what he is feeling.

It is therefore too much for Tom. Who will never be able to say what he feels. Who would gladly trade ten years of his own life for one of his father’s, for another month, another week or day or hour, but who knows such transactions are impossible. The feeling, his willingness, has never had anywhere to go, and now more than ever he does not know where to put it. Pressing his hands to hide his face, his body heavy with this deadlock, Tom leaves the room.

The girl closes the door behind him. She goes to the side of the bed. She stares down at the old man, dry-eyed. He glares back up at her, dry-eyed. They remain like this until the old man’s eyes empty and his head falls back into the pillow. He closes his eyes. The girl places her palm on his forehead, she grips his wrist between her fingers. He has slipped away again.

She adjusts the covers. She thinks, You wanted to die here and you did not even know that you were dying. You wanted to come home and die. That is more than what they got. The men and women and children who were hacked to their deaths. Also the soldiers. Also the un-soldiers. And now I am here, too, and I am backed into a corner but at least I am still living. Me and the one inside me. For what that is worth.

Not much, she thinks. It is not worth very much. She lets go of the cover. She turns and leaves the room. She does not want to see Tom or the others so she wanders the halls instead. For lack of anything better to do. She enters the wings that have been closed for months. She leaves the zone of dying where they have been sequestered all these weeks. She walks through the wings (closed but not locked). She opens doors and passes through corridors.

Here she finds rooms emptied of their contents. The walls are masked with sheets of plastic and white cloth. She can barely recognize it as the house she used to know. She looks and sees. Here is the room where this happened. Here is the hall where that happened. It looks nothing like what it once was. It looks like it is all ending. Like it has already ended and they are as extraneous as ghosts.

They and everything that happened to them in this place. It is being spirited away. It is not yet past. But it is slipping away. She can see that soon there will be no way of talking about it. That the past is going to be sealed off and the keys to the locks will be lost. It is already happening and she is starting to forget, she has already forgotten, how she got to where she now is.

There is so much empty floor. Once she was drowning in society, suffocating in its antechambers. Now it receded like ice melting in water. She looks up. These vaulted ceilings, these stone floors, these bay windows and chandeliers. It is too good to let go and too good to destroy. They will make it a government building. A department store. A post office or a bank. They will fill the rooms again and the people will talk about the architecture. They will say it is a good relic of the past preserved. It is a question, she believes, of time. Whether it is one year or one decade or one month.

The girl is sitting huddled and cold in the corner of an empty room when she hears the voices. They are both hushed and panicked. She hears a word here and there, following the native dialect with difficulty. She listens closer, concentrating, and hears more:

“We cannot stay any longer.”

“Look around you. He is dying, it is a matter of days.”

“We have run out of time. You do not know how bad it has become. It is spreading like an infection.”

“That is just the mood. It will not last. You will see that it will not last.”

“Listen. They will kill us. It is not just the settlers. They are killing loyalists all across the country. They are making examples of people. And you are a loyalist if you do not take the oath, it has become like that.”

The voices subside. The girl leans her head back and closes her eyes. She is nearly asleep when the voices return: