"We're getting closer," she says. Or asks-it's hard to tell. "Don't be afraid," I say, compelled to protect her. "I haven't hurt you in there."
"No, it's not that." She looks surprised to discover how poorly I comprehend what is really worrying her now.
I drink some more tea. As I look at her from the side, stealthily, it flashes through my head that she's mature. That's it. That's the change. Perhaps even more than the illness. She is simply a mature person. She is, finally, more mature than I am.
That thought undermines me a little. I sink down for a minute, entangled in myself. Where does this place me now? And it's a little unfair, I think, for it to happen at this point, when there's no time left for me to get used to it and reorganize. How can I relearn, at my age, how to walk, talk, and be?
Suddenly, a memory: When I used to wake up in the mornings, she would already be doing a headstand. Her vest would fall down and cover her face, and her large breasts, which looked so soft, would drop and lengthen toward her neck. I would stand and stare at them as in a continuation of the night's dream-
A sweet drop of memory. Who sent it? And why now?
I serve her the day's last battery of pills. Twenty-one, I count. Almost every pill has a counterpill, intended to cancel out its side effects. "If only," she laughs. "If only it canceled them out, but it doesn't cancel anything. The only thing they're canceling out is me, slowly and thoroughly, but when I die-poof! That'll close down their playground." She whistles her new laugh, delighting in the revenge. Once, she wouldn't even swallow an aspirin, not even when she had a migraine. She would beat any pain she had on her own, through meditation and relaxation.
I give her the pills and glance at the piles in the drawer. There are a few there that I remember from here and there, them and their creative richness of expression: the worms that would crawl deep inside my throat from the Anafranil, or the messed-up feeling in the morning after spending a stormy night with Elavil, and various other episodes. But she doesn't know anything about that chapter of my life, and I am careful, of course, not to demonstrate any knowledge. But my poisoned brain starts investigating the option of whisking away a few of her pills for use in times of trouble, and makes loathsome calculations about the quantities she'll still need and what they'll do with the scandalous leftovers. No matter how hard I try, I can't control these thoughts, and I console myself that this too is one of those survival habits that troubled tourists are apparently unable to be weaned from, but it's clear that I'd never be a good character witness for myself, in all honesty.
"Rotem," she moans softly, "shut the drawer already." She asks me to moisten her lips with a damp cloth. Then she dozes off for a while. Or sinks into her thoughts. I have no way of knowing. She now has long disappearances when she simply is not there. Whisked away. I sit and watch her, and try to recover from the little class reunion I've had here. I see her breaths relaxing, and I breathe along with her, the way she used to relax me when I was little. I try to engrave her on my memory that way, to store up supplies. I know how people get erased from my mind after a while. Even now, a second after we spoke, I can't remember what it's like when her eyes are open and looking at me. And no matter how hard I try, I keep getting pushed out of that look, and that in and of itself is starting to annoy me so much that I almost make the mistake of waking her. But then her breaths do start working on me, and I sit and slowly manage to enjoy the situation, even becoming addicted to some suspicious tranquillity, as if all at once a true calm has prevailed inside. Perhaps it's because when she's sleeping I don't keep feeling as if particles of me are being sucked toward her without any control, and there is a somewhat stolen pleasantness about it, being near her like that, like watching the sun during an eclipse.
I think about what I just read to her, about the doll-people, about the watch she took off his wrist. I turn over my hands and look at the place that should have long ago developed a scar just from the thoughts I've transmitted to it. Nili sighs in her sleep, a thin sigh like a whimper, and I become uncalm again, pins and needles all over my body, and then the whole mess of my thoughts, and I don't seem able to rationally comprehend that in a short while, maybe weeks or days, she will not be. This person will be no more. There will be no such Nili in the world. This entity. My mother. I get up and leave the room, almost running.
In Walter's bathroom I try, unsuccessfully, to compose myself. I sit there on a padded wooden toilet seat, decorated with purple tassels of some sort, and marvel at the advances humanity has made in the field of toilet bowls and their accoutrements while I was wallowing in the latrines of my own income bracket. I think of what my life will be like very soon, after her. For example, a marginal matter- what connection will I have to this country? Will I ever want to come back here, even for a visit? Is it possible that this is my next-to-last time here? My chest starts to feel tight, but I don't leave. It looks as if my fingers have swollen a little on this visit. They look even redder than they normally do. Maybe it's just because of the bordello light in here. Their skin is peeling more than usual, my washerwoman's fingers. During the past few weeks I've gone back to biting my nails like a starved rabbit. I'll calm down soon. I rock myself back and forth, humming something to myself, and it doesn't help. A cigarette would help. A joint would be salvation. This house is driving me mad. With Walter, I don't even have to straighten the little pictures of shepherds hanging in the bathroom.
I think about things that won't exist anymore. There are things that exist only between me and her, and maybe I'll forget them when she's not around. I know I will. My heart suddenly turns sour at the thought that I have only a few times left, for example, to feel that breeze, the exhalation of the little lab animal passing in front of the forbidden cell. That occurrence, which lasts at most for a tenth of a second-her sorrowful sniffle, the little wave that rises in me when I sense her standing at my doorway and know she may take a wrong turn, and then the second wave that swells when she finally obeys and turns to leave submissively, like someone shrugging her shoulders and-what? Giving up? Abandoning? Deserting? A stupid thought goes through my mind: How will my body know how to create those materials on its own from now on? It may turn out that it needs them, that they're essential, that they are the only reason I am able to maintain some degree of balance. But I protest immediately: What is this nonsense? How can you just write yourself off like that as if you have no existence without her? You've been getting along without her for years. But the weakness persists, weakness of body and weakness of mind, and I sit and sob a little, to my surprise. I was hoping to avoid it; this must be a preview of the grief, the opening act for the great orphanhood, and it might actually be a good sign, like my happiness when I found my first gray hair and felt that I was part of their biology after all. But even that encouraging contemplation doesn't get me up off the toilet seat, and I sit there and cry silently, so she won't hear, and scratch my legs all down the back with ten open fingers. That takes me to exactly the right place, plowing me deep with pleasure until I bleed uncontrollably-because of her, and because of what will disappear with her, those materials that only she can produce in me, and also because even now it infuriates me to think of the secondhand things you get used to when you stand in the shade for too long, the way you become accustomed to getting secondhand light because someone else is standing in it, and to being silent and faded while she fills the room, any room, with her voice and her laughter and her colors. And the way you slowly turn this into ideology, espousing the shade, swearing by the faded, abstaining with stupid and pauperish pride from anything that is firsthand, and later-it happens very quickly-forgetting what you are allowed to ask for, forgetting that you even can ask, growing used to photosynthesizing by the light of the moon.