The Hole Page 14
After a long pause, the therapist told him that his legs had changed. He didn’t mean that Oghi could now move them, he meant they were dangerously atrophied. Though it was common for patients’ bodies to become imbalanced, in Oghi’s case, it was progressing at an exceptionally rapid pace. He used up the remaining appointment time trying to convince Oghi that it would be difficult to recover mobility in his legs and that they couldn’t be optimistic.
On his way out of the house, the therapist appeared to stop and discuss the problem at length with Oghi’s mother-in-law. Naturally, not long after he’d gone through the front gate, she came to Oghi’s room.
“Why are you still lying there?” she said, holding her hand out to him. “Come take a walk in the garden with me.”
It wasn’t too dark for Oghi to make out his mother-in-law’s wide grin.
15
HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW RARELY WENT OUT, but he knew she couldn’t stay in the house forever. Oghi kept exercising his arms, including the right arm that had just recently begun to recover sensation.
The physical therapist had told him he was hallucinating. His mother-in-law had laughed at him. But his right arm was getting better. He could move whichever finger he wanted, and he could pinch his left arm with his right hand. No one knew more precisely than Oghi that his body was on the mend. He was determined to prove it to himself. If he could make it out of the house, he would find help and get to a doctor.
Oghi concentrated on the sounds outside. He heard his mother-in-law walk out the front gate and shut it behind her. A moment passed, and the gate did not reopen. He rushed into action. He grabbed the edge of the mattress with his left hand and pulled as hard as he could to try to drag his body over. His body would not budge. It was as stiff and heavy as a fallen tree. He flexed his legs again. The veins popped out on his arms. He’d been favoring his left arm for so long that the difference in his right arm became obvious. Though he could move the right arm, he still relied heavily on the left.
After a great deal of sweat, he managed to reach the edge of the bed. He grabbed the rail with his left hand and the headboard with his right and pulled until his legs dropped to the floor. They landed with a thump, his upper body slithering after them. He wrapped his arms around his head as he fell. Even after the rest of him hit the floor, he felt no pain in his lower half. His legs were useless. Oghi finally believed what the physical therapist had been trying to tell him.
Using only his arms, he dragged himself across the floor. The first crisis came in front of the tightly shut bedroom door. He lifted both arms but to no avail. Oghi crawled back and grabbed the back scratcher that had fallen off of the bed with him. He reached up with his left arm and hooked the scratcher over the horizontal doorknob. It slipped. It wasn’t going to work. His whole body was drenched with sweat. The cold floor did nothing to mitigate his fever. He hooked the back scratcher over the doorknob again and tugged, over and over. The light in the room had dimmed by the time he was able to get the knob open.
The living room was even darker than his bedroom. Heavy curtains covered the wide front window. Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he realized that the living room was completely changed. It didn’t look like anyone lived there. As if everyone had moved out long ago.
Their sofa, upholstered in a Danish designer fabric, that his wife had so carefully chosen and waited three whole months to have delivered, was gone. In its place was a large leather couch. It looked like it had come from his mother-in-law’s apartment. But more surprising than the couch were the piles of household goods stacked every which way in the center of the living room. There was no order to any of it, as if it hadn’t been placed there for organizing but rather had been tossed together prior to being thrown out. Many of the items were from Oghi’s study. The green, retro-style lamp that had illuminated Oghi’s desk late at night was shoved upside-down into a big cardboard box, and the plaque of appreciation from the mapmakers association was tossed in there as well.
Oghi dragged himself to the front door. He had no idea when his mother-in-law was coming back or how much longer his strength would hold out, but he had to keep going. Opening the front door would be easier than opening his bedroom door. All he had to do was push the green button at the bottom of the digital door lock.
He tried pressing it with the other end of the back scratcher, but it wasn’t heavy enough. He knocked over the umbrella stand next to the front door and selected a long umbrella, then tried to use the tip to press the unlock button on the door. The strength in his hand gave out, and the umbrella fell, smacking him on the head and shoulders. He didn’t know what else to do and just kept tapping the digital lock with the tip of the umbrella. By the time he got the door open, the cold tile beneath him had turned hot.
Oghi sucked in the cold, fresh air. It was the exact opposite of the stuffy, musty air that filled the house. The air outside smelled and felt so good that he felt like crying.
The garden looked like a vacant lot. Other than the tight row of trees along the low iron fence next to the front gate, there was not a single growing, sprouting, blooming, living thing. The shrubs had all been uprooted and stacked to one side like firewood. There were circles of darkness all over the place. Each one was a small pit. They didn’t look like they’d been dug in order to plant something new but were the holes left behind from yanking living plants out of the earth by their roots.
In the middle of the garden, slightly diagonal and to the right of where Oghi lay, the darkness pooled, slick-black and enormous. It was the part of the yard that Oghi could not see from his room. The pool of darkness must have been the huge pit that everyone had talked about.
Soft, loose dirt was piled up around the sides. He assumed that after digging the hole his mother-in-law had lined the bottom with a tarp, so the rain or dew could pool there. Once it filled up enough, she would probably use the loose soil for planting and release carp into the water. Perhaps once Oghi was gone, those carp would be the only living thing at the house along with her. She would raise living creatures, just as she’d said she would.
But on second thought, maybe his mother-in-law wasn’t raising carp in order to see something live. Maybe she wanted them so she could watch them die. Even carp in a pond will die eventually. And when they do, their mouths gape and they roll and float to the surface, their bodies as stiff and unmoving as Oghi’s.
The gray paving stones that he and his wife had spent so much time discussing and had such a hard time selecting scratched mercilessly at his body. A sour odor, unlike anything he’d smelled before, wafted off of him. It might have been the smell of blood. Blood flowed from a deep scrape on his left arm. But he kept going. Other than his arms, he felt no pain anywhere else. He was, for once, grateful to his heavy, stone-like body. It enabled him to endure this.
Oghi paused on the paving stones and looked up at the iron gate. It didn’t look like he would be able to open it using an umbrella or a back scratcher. After trying and failing, he decided it would be better to crawl to the fence and get help from a neighbor. Fortunately, his neighbors often went for walks on nights like these, when a fresh breeze was blowing. There were enough people around that, if he had to, he could just stick his hand through the fence and someone would help him.
Slowly, slowly, he made his way across the garden. Whenever yellow headlights came toward the house, he stopped, and when they passed, he leaned into his arms again. Several times, headlights approached and scanned over his body like a searchlight before moving on. Once more, he waited for a pair of lights to pass, but this time they stayed in one spot and did not move. All he could do was make himself as flat as possible and hope that the dark would hide him.
The gate opened with a soft sound. Slowly his mother-in-law entered. He thought it was over, but there was still a chance. She hadn’t seen him. She walked along the paving stones and into the house. The darkness helped, along with the fact that she wouldn’t be expecting to see him in the garden.
His mother-in-law rushed back out. It hadn’t taken her long to discover his door sitting open. He stared at her as she stood stock-still before the front door. Her long shadow forked in front of her. He lay still and did not move. The shadow of his mother-in-law’s body, made bigger by the darkness, stepped down onto the paving stones.
He knew she wasn’t strong enough to drag him. Just as no one had helped him to get out of the house, no one was going to help her to get him back in. He could choose whether to go back, or to keep crawling along the fence until he found help. He didn’t have to ponder it long. Ignoring his mother-in-law as she slowly walked toward him where he lay flat in the garden, Oghi chose to keep going.
There was one thing Oghi hadn’t considered. Though his mother-in-law did not have the strength to pick him up, she did have enough strength to get in his way.
She blocked his path. She did it with her two thick, sturdy legs, planting them just out of reach of his arms. He tried in vain to grab her legs and then had no choice but to change direction to avoid those trunk-like limbs. Too late he realized that she was steering him exactly where she wanted him to go.
Oghi stopped not on flat land but at the low ridge of loose dirt. On the other side was an enormous pool of darkness. The darkness gave off a chill. His body shook. The dirt lining the round sides of the hole felt different from the type of dirt he’d spent his life walking on. It was subsoil, not topsoil. The particles were very fine. It was the same soil he had touched long ago, when he’d helped his wife to till the yard.
Oghi turned to avoid the pit, but he couldn’t avoid his mother-in-law’s stubbornly planted legs. Each time he went around her, he ended up closer to the soft soil.
His mother-in-law brought her foot up threateningly. Fearful that she was about to stomp on his spine, he turned. The loosely piled dirt collapsed beneath him, and his body tipped downward. He tried to stop himself from falling but only pressed down harder on the loose, shifting dirt. He lost his balance and tumbled helplessly.
Pain. He felt pain. It was completely different from what he’d felt when he thought his legs were moving. He couldn’t tell if the pain was a sign of survival or the agony that came with dying. It made him happy, even if he did have no way out now. It had been a long time since he’d felt even this kind of pain. His arms, of course, but also his lower back and his bony legs were sending him pain messages. It was identical to the pain he’d felt when the car carrying him and his wife tumbled down the hill.
He was certain it wouldn’t be long now before he saw his wife again. Once the overwhelming pain passed, he would at last float up out of his body. He would ascend into the air and look down at himself sprawled miserably at the bottom of the pit. It surprised him that it had been less than a year since his wife had looked down on him like that. Those intervening months had felt so very, very long.
The person looking down on Oghi now was not his wife. It was his mother-in-law. Her arms were crossed, and she stood as still as a statue as she stared down at him trapped at the bottom. The distance was immense. He could tell how far away he was from the fact that her face looked just like his wife’s.
The pain continued and worsened each time he touched some part of himself. But as he did so, he realized he could no longer feel the dirt and pebbles beneath him. His body stiffened, and his breath grew light. The pain passed. After a moment, it vanished completely and he felt instantly at peace.
While looking up at the dark sky from the bottom of the hole, he remembered that he’d been here before. Not here, as in the bottom of a pit, but here in the yard, sitting in this same spot at the picnic table, talking to his wife. A day when they’d shared a light dinner and gone for a walk in the neighborhood. An evening spent looking for the place where a cat had once startled them both by bolting out from under a parked car, so they could set some food out and wait at a distance to see if the cat would reappear. A day when they had watched the cat appear from out of nowhere, eat all the food, and then crawl back under the car, after which they returned home and talked for a long time about random, silly things. An evening when they ended their long day by reading together outside until they were both drowsy. A night spent talking about the book before lying down on freshly laundered sheets and drifting into sleep. A day when simple, leisurely tasks repeated themselves like the squares on a baduk board. The kind of perfectly peaceful day found in any given life. One day from among many days entirely different from now.
His wife had looked up from her book and her face had gone suddenly slack. Oghi knew all of his wife’s expressions, and this one was no different.
“Sleepy? Shall we turn in?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m sad…”
“Huh?”
His wife slowly recited the part she’d just read in her book. It was the story of a man who narrowly escapes death. One day as he’s walking past a construction site, a beam falls and lands right in front of him. Though he isn’t injured, he realizes how close he has come to dying and comes up with an idea.
“Why is that sad? That’s lucky.”
“He disappears. He leaves everything behind, even his savings, and takes off without bothering to quit his job or cancel any of his appointments. He doesn’t leave any clues for his friends or family or colleagues either, but just vanishes completely. Just like that. His wife hires a detective to look for him. She worries that he could be hurt or in a coma somewhere or wandering around with amnesia, not knowing who his family is. That’s the only way she can accept his disappearance. After a while, the detective tracks him down. He’s alive and safe and living in another city where he has changed his name and found a new job. With his new family.”
“I guess his wife wasn’t too happy about that.”
“I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s what she learns from it.”
“What?”
Instead of answering, she’d stared at him.
Oghi quickly asked, “That he can have a good life somewhere else without her?”
That time as well she simply stared at him. Oghi had grown impatient and tried a different tack.
“So then what happens?”
“That’s the end.”
“He doesn’t go back to his family?”
“It says they get a divorce.”
“That’s pretty mean. Do they at least end up happy?”
She’d started crying. At first he thought she was just tearing up a little, but soon she was sobbing loudly. Why? Because of a man lucky enough to survive a freak accident? Because of a man who leaves one day? Because of a man who makes a new life for himself that’s hardly any different from his old life? Was that why she was crying?
Oghi looked at his crying wife and laughed. How was that a sad story? What a thing to cry over. Had his wife always been this emotional? It made no sense to him, but he was amused by her sentimentality and wanted to make her feel better. We’ll always be together, he told her, no matter what happens, I won’t cross over into the great beyond without you. It wasn’t until much later that he realized how much better it would’ve been if he’d let her find her own way out of this grief, slowly, without any empty promises or hasty conclusions. Oghi had quietly held his wife, who seemed to be experiencing some future grief that had not yet taken place, and watched as her tears slowed and then stopped.
The fact that he was now lying at the bottom of a deep, dark hole did not mean that Oghi finally understood his wife’s grief. But it did make him realize how completely he had failed at comforting her. His wife’s tears had stopped not because she was no longer sad, but because th
e time had come to stop crying.
And at last, Oghi cried. Not because of his wife. But because his time for crying had come.