The Last Leaves Falling (4 page)

I stare hard at the bonsai. It is almost bare now, only a few leaves clinging to the branches, and the yellow curls that spread across the desk at our last meeting have gone, swept into a garbage can somewhere.

She tries again. “How have things been since our last appointment?”

I do not answer. For a while she sits, studying me, then she breaks the silence. “Your hand is shaking.”

I want to turn away, to hide my hands in the folds of my sweatshirt. To deny it. But there’s no denying what is in plain sight. I nod. She cannot gather anything from one small gesture, right?

“That’s new. I’m . . . It must be difficult.”

I’ve heard those two words so often these past few months that it surprises me when she does not say them. And I’m grateful. “Sorry” does nothing.

I nod. “Sometimes.”

A tiny flicker of a smile crosses her face, and she waits, expectant.

I wish I could retract my words, suck the sound back into my mouth and stay silent. But now it’s out there, and she’s waiting for more.

And she didn’t say those two terrible words.

“Sometimes I . . .” and then I stop, because I don’t know what to say. I take a deep breath. “What will happen to me?”

“You mean your symptoms? Didn’t your neurologist explain all that?”

I blink the Google images away, of end-stage patients, all pillows and trachea tubes and desperate eyes. Trapped.

I shake my head. “No, I mean—”

What
do
I mean?

She watches me, waits, but I do not have the words.

“Life is full of mysteries,” she says sadly, “things that are only answered in the doing. I cannot tell you what it will be like, only that many have gone before you.”

We sit, neither of us saying anything, but it’s different now.

I listen to my breath, strong, unlabored. I let the instinctive rise and fall of it calm me. I do not have to think about that yet; in, out, in, it happens automatically.

The clock ticks by, counting the seconds, and I breathe, letting myself just
be
.

Is this what it will be like?

Not if the textbooks and search pages are right. It will be ugly.

“It’s not dignified.” The words are out before I hear them in my head, and they sound bitter.

“No,” she says. “The body rarely is . . . the
mind
, however,
that
you can control. That’s where you keep your dignity.”

She sounds so sure. Profound. And yet . . .

“I don’t know how.”

The clock is fast approaching the hour; two minutes left, but Doctor Kobayashi does not hurry. She sits, watching me, and for a moment there’s a question in her eyes, then she shakes it away, apparently satisfied. “Okay.”

She stands, crosses over to the bookshelves behind her desk, and pulls down a slender volume.

“Here.” She presses the book into my hands. “I want you to borrow this.”

•  •  •  •

Making sure my bedroom door is firmly closed first, I pull the book from my backpack. The deep gray paper of the cover is soft and warm. Inviting. Calm.

I hold it for a moment before my eyes slide across the title.
Death Poems: Last Words of the Samurai.

6

I blink, surprised for a moment at the bold, black print, no different from any other book. These are words of age and wisdom from the best of men, not written with a delicate brush, but typed onto a screen so long after they were first formed. Still wanted.

I skip over the long introduction; I will read it later, but right now I want
their
words, I need the stillness and the gravity of men who knew The Way. At the first poem I stop, let my fingers glide over the page to feel the words before I raise the book to read.

I cannot mourn, for I have lived

a life

of mountain air and cherry blossoms, steel,

and honor.

(Tadamichi, 1874)

I feel the words float around me, settle on my skin, and then sink slowly into me. It is a while before I turn the page.

On journey long

I stop to rest and watch

the end of days

(Kaida, 1825)

I imagine leaning on the gate at the end of days, looking back, the sun warming my face.

I turn the page.

The whistle of the sword, sings;

smiles ’neath silver sun,

frees me with a final kiss.

(Okimoto, 1902)

I feel a breath of cool, fresh air across my arms, gentle and welcome.

I read and I read, one after the other until the words and feelings tumble through me, indistinct and beautiful.

And then my fingers rest upon the final page.

Words

are mere distraction—

Death is death.

(Tokaido 1795)

7

All through dinner I’m distracted by the echoes of the samurai and I barely hear my mother’s attempts at conversation. Finally, she sets down her bowl and, reaching out to me, asks, “Are you all right?”

I nod. “I was just thinking about something I read, that’s all. I’m sorry.” She smiles her bemused, proud smile, and I want to be with her instead of with those words. I try to push them aside and focus on the last of our meal.

“This is delicious,” I say, slurping down the last of the salty prawn broth.

She bows her head, an almost invisible movement, accepting the compliment. Almost invisible, but I see it, just as I see the sadness just beneath that smile.

I’m sorry,
I want to say,
I’m sorry.

•  •  •  •

I almost show my mother the poems that night. I want to. I want to place them in her hands the way Doctor Kobayashi put them into mine. I want the words to swirl around her head and quiet the storm. But that would mean explaining where they came from. It would mean broaching that awful phrase,
I am going to die,
and I don’t think I am ready.

8

The words of the samurai hang in the air like the memory of heavy rain. I feel different somehow, as though the poetry has washed away a layer of pity and despair. But there is one poem that rises above the others, whining like a summertime mosquito:

The orange tea moth;

only witness to my faultless

victories.

I sit with a history book open but ignored, trying to make sense of it.

The orange tea moth;

And then I realize. All I am now is a failing body; a boy without an ending, who will not achieve. And even if I did, who would see it?

Not even the moth.

Soon after I was diagnosed, I heard my grandfather, distant and distorted, talking to my mother on the phone. “It is not right, a boy sitting alone all day. He should be out catching the world.”

I thought him foolish then. The world is difficult to catch if you cannot run after it. But maybe he’s right after all.

With his voice in my head, my fingers move the cursor across my screen and click open the web browser, they sift through recent pages until I find myself logging in to the KyoToTeenz network and staring at the profile I created days before.

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