The Hole Read online

  “The pastor is here. He’s come to pray for you. I bet if you knew where these kind folks were from, you would hop right out of this bed from surprise.”

  The people in black laughed uproariously, as if she’d just told some wonderful joke.

  “Now, now, you mustn’t let surprise lift you,” one of the visitors said. “You must let the Lord lift you.”

  The visitor was a short man whose unnaturally wide grin never once let up. Oghi’s mother-in-law explained that he was the pastor.

  The pastor held Oghi’s right hand, the one that still lacked sensation. He had grabbed his left hand first, but when Oghi’s mother-in-law corrected him, he hurriedly switched. At his signal, the people flanking the bed all held hands. His mother-in-law offered them both of her hands as well.

  The pastor closed his eyes and began to pray. It was strange. Oghi had never met this pastor before, but he gave a very long prayer, as if he’d known Oghi forever. The pastor spoke of how Oghi had devoted himself to earnest and proper research and education over the years. He said no child of the Lord was kinder, a better family man, or a stronger role model than Oghi. He said the misfortunes that had befallen Oghi were indeed his greatest trial. He said he prayed that Oghi would overcome this ordeal, return to the classroom, foster outstanding students, undertake great academic research, and serve the development and spirit of the country, and in so doing the Lord would use this small but precious nation.

  Oghi couldn’t take any more and opened his eyes. They were all muttering to themselves or wagging their heads as they participated in this ridiculous prayer to national development. The church people kept blurting out “Father!” as they prayed, and though Oghi knew they weren’t talking about his own father, it still bothered him. Had his father been there, he would have laughed at Oghi and said, That’s what you get for acting all high and mighty. The pastor’s prayer kept going, and Oghi coughed to signal that he should stop already. The pastor ignored him and prayed to his heart’s content.

  As the pastor closed the prayer with an amen, the circle of people chanted amen in unison and opened their eyes. Oghi mouthed his own amen. He had prayed too. Prayed that they’d hurry up and get the hell out. But Oghi’s simple prayer was not answered. They held hands again, and this time, they swayed their hands back and forth as they sang. It was a hymn Oghi had never heard before.

  His mother-in-law sang along with them. Oghi was flummoxed. He wondered if she had always been this enthusiastic about religion or if it was a recent thing. She might have started going to church when his father-in-law passed away a few years ago. She’d become clingier after he was gone, and Oghi’s wife had sometimes struggled with it and sometimes ignored it. He had often overheard his wife on the phone with her, his wife’s side of the conversation studded with please don’ts or with flat refusals of whatever his mother-in-law was proposing. She’d called so often that sometimes Oghi’s wife wouldn’t answer the phone at all. Why hadn’t she told Oghi more about his mother-in-law back then?

  The hymn continued on for four verses. Oghi closed his eyes. He missed his wife. He missed her more than he could put into words. She was the only person who could have made it all stop. But she wasn’t there.

  At last the hymn ended and they let go of one another’s hands. Maybe it was all the black clothes, but they looked like they were there to deliver a requiem. And maybe they actually were. Maybe they had started early because they were there not for Oghi but for his deceased wife. The singing he’d heard when he woke up was probably a hymn honoring her.

  The pastor cracked open his Bible and read from it. Everyone nodded or closed their eyes as they listened. Then they held hands for a third time, swung them back and forth, and sang yet another hymn. Afterward, the pastor took Oghi’s hand and gave a short prayer. As soon as he heard the pastor say amen, Oghi’s heart was filled with gratitude. It was finally over.

  As they filed out the door, Oghi’s mother-in-law stuffed a white envelope into the pastor’s hand. It was probably an offering. Oghi took a good long look at it. For the first time he wondered where she had gotten the money to pay for his hospital bills and all of the medical equipment he’d needed. How had she gotten access to his and his wife’s bank account, and if that wasn’t where she’d gotten the money, then how was she affording all of this? She might have received money from his wife’s life insurance and Oghi’s accident insurance. But even so, how did his mother-in-law collect on insurance that listed Oghi as the beneficiary?

  When she stepped outside to see off the visitors, Oghi’s caregiver stepped in and began straightening up his room.

  “Shoot, that was a lot of money,” she said. She removed Oghi’s catheter bottle, which was full from the night before, and added, “Am I right? That was all cash. Seems like a waste to me, but I guess it’s better than calling in a shaman. Last house I worked at, the shaman came once a month on the dot. And what a mess each time! We had to steam piles of rice cake, buy crates of fruit, find a severed pig’s head… The walls of that room were plastered with talismans, I tell you. And every one of those talismans costs money. I watched it all. Watched that shaman walk on the blades of a straw cutter, scatter rice grains, pretend to be possessed by some spirit. You know, walking on blades is no big thing. Anyone can do it with practice. But compared to that, I’d say churches and temples are better. At least pastors and monks are tidy, you know. You don’t have to cook ’em a bunch of food, no one crowds in to watch, it’s quiet.”

  The second the door opened, the caregiver ceased her tirade. Oghi’s mother-in-law’s face was still flushed. She looked happy.

  “My daughter was so blessed. She was such a good person. To think that a pastor as busy and important as him would come all this way to personally pray for her. This is truly a blessing.”

  “Is he very famous?” the caregiver asked loudly as she washed out the catheter bottle.

  “You have no idea!” his mother-in-law replied just as loudly. “He’s a miracle worker. It wasn’t easy bringing him here. He’s cured a lot of cancer patients with his laying on of hands.”

  Oghi had guessed correctly. The pastor was from one of those cults or prayer center type places. Not from any proper denomination.

  “He agreed to come back often. To pray for you and my daughter.”

  Oghi blinked at his mother-in-law.

  Please don’t. Today was enough.

  “I know, I know. You don’t have to thank me. It’s the least I can do.”

  Oghi opened his eyes as wide as he could. He wanted to tell her he was angry. He wanted to tell her to knock it off, to stop pissing in the wind. What he needed wasn’t prayer but steady rehabilitation. Or to just give up now.

  “Where is he from?” the caregiver asked.

  His mother-in-law answered loudly, excited at the chance to talk about the pastor. She said the pastor’s prayer center was not part of any particular denomination but was a kind of Bible reading group for people who “shared the same heart.” Oghi had to press down hard on the urge to ask exactly what kind of “heart” those people were sharing. His mother-in-law would not have understood him, and even if he could have gotten the words out, he wasn’t confident he could have endured the long, quiet explanation that would’ve surely ensued.

  He found it a shame that they’d had to pay an enormous donation to listen to prayers and hymns from some unidentified religious group. His mother-in-law had not said anything for certain, but it was obvious it was Oghi’s money. It irked him to no end to think that the money he’d saved over the years was slowly trickling over to some religious nutjobs, the intentions of whom were murky, via his mother-in-law’s hands and without his consent.

  Oghi had been a regular sponsor for a long time of third world children through organizations like UNICEF and Save The World. Whenever he heard the occasional news story about the directors of such organizations embezzling or misappropriating funds, he questioned the utility of that sort of indirect philanthropy, but
it didn’t stop him from donating. He refused to help finance religious or political organizations or individual politicians. He had zero desire to give his money to some baby-kisser or Bible thumper who’d never gone hungry a day in their life or known what it was to be poor or illiterate.

  The only person he could talk to at times like this was his wife. Who else would understand the suffering his mother-in-law was putting him through? But naturally his wife was not there, and all Oghi could do was picture her. His wife had always imagined the worst possible scenarios for herself. As far as Oghi was concerned, she was just anxious and overly convinced that the hypothetical sufferings conjured up by her imagination had a chance of actually happening. He blamed it on the fact that, after failing at everything she’d set out to do, she had lost all trace of her cool and laid-back personality, had grown too obsessive in her care of the garden. But not even she could have guessed what future lay in store for them.

  After his mother-in-law’s morning visits, Oghi spent the rest of his days alone with the caregiver. His mother-in-law had fixed up the spare room next to the kitchen for her. It was a bit far from Oghi’s room, which must have been why she didn’t always hear him summoning her, no matter how hard he blew on his whistle. Or maybe she pretended not to hear. Either way, she was slow and tactless. It didn’t seem like she’d had any formal schooling. His mother-in-law said she’d hired the woman after several rounds of interviews, but she wasn’t very reliable. In fact, she was completely unskilled. He had a feeling she was really just a run-of-the-mill housekeeper.

  She talked a lot and would chatter away at Oghi, and though she knew he could not respond at all, she would blatantly poke fun at him. “I guess the big bossman has nothing to say to that,” or “Bossman’s awful quiet today,” she would say.

  When she grew tired of making fun of him and wearied of being the only one talking, she made phone calls. Oghi could hear every word all the way in his room whether she was on the house phone in the living room or using her own cell phone. He learned a lot about her that way. He knew how much money she contributed each month to the gye, or rotating savings group, that she’d joined, how she got along with the person in charge of that group, and what type of gift she was planning to take to her relative’s baby’s first birthday party, which was coming up soon.

  But most of all, he knew all about her grown son. How bright and clever he was when he was younger (where had he gone wrong?), how much time he was wasting just loafing around, how late he stayed up each night playing those computer games. Her voice changed completely when she talked to him. It sounded pleading, and she said things like, Please don’t. Sometimes she added a hint of childish coquetry as she said, Please think of your poor mother. And sometimes she threw her hands up and snapped viciously, I don’t care if you starve to death, you’re not getting any more money from me!

  Whenever her calls dragged on for too long, he blew on his whistle. His mother-in-law was the one who’d decided on the whistle. She’d given it to him. Blowing on it twice summoned the caregiver.

  She never came the first time he called. He had to whistle several times before she’d finally bother to check on him. He blew it whenever he needed to pee or his head or back itched or his legs ached or he couldn’t bear the sweat on his back. He blew it even when that wasn’t the case. He blew it when her phone calls seemed to be getting too long and when she cursed at or pleaded with her son over the phone. When he couldn’t figure out what on earth she was doing in the other room, and when he heard her eating by herself, he whistled. Because that was what the whistle was for, and she was his live-in caregiver, after all.

  The situation was always the same. She would drag her feet down the hallway, but once she’d stepped into the room, she would chuckle, say something like, “Bossman sure likes to toot on that whistle,” and then undo the front of Oghi’s barely closed pants. Without even bothering to consider why he might have called her in there, she would first wipe down Oghi’s crotch with the damp towel she carried. It was always lukewarm. He wasn’t sure if it was the temperature of the damp cloth or the fact that she used it to wipe down everything she saw as she walked around the house, but he cringed each time.

  Whenever Oghi had a bowel movement on cue right after she had slid the flat bedpan under his buttocks, she praised him and said things like, “Aigo, well done!” When he finished swallowing another liquid meal, she patted him on the head. Oghi hated this very much. He was angry at the meanness of the caregiver who treated him like a child.

  Twice a day, she turned Oghi on his stomach to wipe his back. To keep bedsores from forming, she spread oil on his skin and gave him a long massage. From the nape of his neck, down his back, past his buttocks, to the ends of his legs. As she massaged his body, she laughed insidiously. The exact opposite of treating him like a child. Sometimes she gave him a smack on the buttocks, and sometimes she toyed with his darkened, shriveled penis. She did it on purpose. Oghi voiced his protests with long, indecipherable sounds.

  After the massage, she bent her fleshy body over his to straighten the blankets. It would have been easier for her to just walk around to the opposite side of the bed and do it, but she never did. She leaned over very far each time, and when she did, her pendulous breasts brushed against Oghi. Sometimes she did it while wearing a tank top with no bra underneath and her nipples visible through the fabric. When she wore that shirt, the thick patches of dark hair in her underarms showed as she reached over him. They gave off the damp, musty odor of sweat. She seemed indifferent to the smell of her own body or to the smells coming off of Oghi.

  At first Oghi suppressed his anger. Later, he didn’t have to. It had been a long time since anyone’s flesh had touched his like that, and Oghi found himself overcoming his disgust. That occasional fleeting brush against his body, if he could have touched it, grasped the flesh in his hand, it would have felt plush beneath his fingers and he would have sensed the heat of the blood vessels below the surface, and if he did touch it, it would have twitched and responded—he liked that. Oghi had never been entranced by fleshier body types, but he liked that meaty weight pressing against him.

  But that was all. He did not touch the caregiver or caress her. Of course he didn’t. He enjoyed it simply because it was another living person, not the body of an alluring woman. The only thing Oghi could do was smell her. Hair laced with sweat, faint traces of shampoo, sour underarms, the lingering of laundry detergent. The scents given off by a living human being. They were completely different from the odors of sweat and urine that came from his own body.

  That was all it took to excite him. Seeing her large, erect nipples. Feeling her press gently against him. Catching glimpses of the pale skin at the nape of her neck or the sweat beading along the side of her throat just below the bottom of her curly, thinning hair.

  This was not what used to turn him on in the past. The women he’d slept with were all small and slight. Of all the organic parts that made up a body, Oghi especially liked protruding joints and slender, frail-looking bones. When he stroked the silhouette of a bone through its thin layer of flesh, he felt like he was embracing the woman in her entirety.

  It made him sad to be enticed by something so different from before. To be turned on not by the scent of a woman but by the familiar smells of everyday life, to be excited not by taut, bare skin but by the sagging, bloated, thickened meat of a person. That was sad. He had never before been tempted by a body like this.

  8

  HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW’S VISITS GREW MORE frequent. Before long she was dropping in on him like she lived there. Naturally most of her visits were unannounced. That day was no different. He heard the sound of his mother-in-law opening the front door and stepping inside, followed by the sound of the caregiver coming out of her room then hastily shutting her door and rushing into the living room.

  Oghi had not said anything about her to his mother-in-law. He could, with effort, have used his left hand to write a note criticizing the woman�
�s behavior, but that would’ve been below the belt.

  The truth was that he didn’t mind any of it. All except for the woman’s son, that is, who’d lately been showing up at Oghi’s house as well. It was possible the boy had dropped by before then without his knowing about it. He might have come to bum some cash off his mother and eat some food she prepared for him, and then slipped out again quietly. Certainly there would have been times when he’d lingered, but at least he would have tried not to make a sound, to keep his presence secret from Oghi.

  But he was young, and immature and brash and rude. Maybe he viewed behaving himself as damaging to his pride. At some point, he talked loudly enough to be heard, and barged into Oghi’s room.

  When Oghi awoke from his light nap, he was startled and let out a shriek. A young man with darkly bronzed skin and closely cropped hair was standing stock-still and staring down at him with a blank look on his face. His jeans sagged at the hips, and he wore a black T-shirt that read I AM YOUR FATHER.

  The caregiver’s son laughed at Oghi’s reaction. He held his finger up to his mouth as if to swear Oghi to secrecy and left. Oghi heard the caregiver scold her son and ask what he was doing in his room. He heard the boy say, “That guy can’t talk?” and the caregiver continue with her quiet nagging.

  Oghi was angry and blew on his whistle. Two whistles meant the caregiver had to come. As usual, she didn’t. He whistled again. He whistled several times. He kept on whistling. He refused to put up with this. He wanted her to know just how angry he was.