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Tokyo Popped—page 4
But she wanted to walk. She didn't understand why she couldn't get back on her feet. "Please, pick me up."
All she needed was a hand, she reasoned, someone to lift her from this bed and put her on her feet so she could be on her way. Instead, I shoved another wedge of tangerine into her mouth. She sucked the juice out and expelled the dried pulp.
My mother called again in March. They had moved my grandmother down to Kobe, where one of my uncles, a retired, widowed banker, and his younger brother, a retired Kirin salesman, now live. On the shinkansen, or bullet train, down from Kanagawa, she was talking, my uncle told me, she knew who he was, understood what had happened to her. She asked where she was going. She was being taken to Kobe Kaisei Hospital. I doubt she would have recalled I was born there.
When I arrived at the hospital, just up the hill from Sannomiya Station, I could see the retreating sun making pin-prick dapples in the silver-grey water of Kobe harbor. In a ward on the fourth floor, my uncles and I gathered around what we all assumed would be my grandmother's deathbed. She had rapidly deteriorated since her journey south. Doctors reported that her lungs were too weak to oxygenate her blood, and she was now breathing through a respirator. The skin of her arms had been prodded and pricked; tubes and catheters had been pushed and shoved into nostrils, veins, kidneys. Hanging from the railings of her bed were sacks of some sort of liquid nourishment that was being introduced through a tube and then another sack of evacuated urine that nurses came in at intervals to measure. Air was pumped in through a mask. Her lips and tongue looked dry and chapped. Her smell now was what I can only describe as decay: sour and vaguely fecal.
Deathwatches are tedious. I was surprised to find that my cousin was now working as a cook. Another cousin was an architect. One of my uncles was doing volunteer work at a local nursing home for those even older than he was. Another uncle, the former banker, spent most of his time on various Rotary Club committees. We sat around the bed, periodically checking on Obaasan, adjusting her mask, patting her hair, stroking her forehead, holding her hand. Occasionally, she would open her eyes and moan. The look in her narrow, exhausted, glassy eyes was one of frightened surprise. She no longer knew me or my uncles, but she still knew terror. And for a moment, when my uncles had gone out to make phone calls from the roof balcony, I thought of holding a pillow down over her face to put her out of her misery.
Instead I headed down the hall to the elevators and rode up to the sixth floor. I was looking for the maternity ward. This, I figured, would be where I was born. The nursery was just across from the elevator, a small, hot room with cartoon animals all over the walls. I scanned the bassinets, looking for a bundle of pink or blue. There were no babies.
Walking down the hall, wondering if perhaps the newborns were with their mothers, I was stopped by a nurse wearing a gauze mask asking whom I was looking for.
"I was born here," I explained.
"No," she said.
I told her about my mixed parentage, the year I was born and that my grandmother was now in this same hospital. She looked confused and shook her head again.
"No," she said. "You weren't born here. This floor wasn't added until 16 years ago."
"Where was the maternity ward?" I asked.
"Downstairs, on four," she told me, "the South Wing."
Fourth floor. South Wing. That was my grandmother's ward.
I took the elevator back down and sat again by my grandmother's bed. My uncle read a translation of Rudolph Giuliani's Leadership. My aunt pulled a white sheet tight around my grandmother. Here she was, gasping for life, in the same ward in which I had been born. My relationship with Japan had diminished to just this.
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