Oh, her picture is there all right, whenever they pull out the album of wedding photos, but her image is as cheering as a freshly drowned corpse.
Honey, who’s this woman here, in the second row, with glasses?
Never mind, that’s nobody, says the young husband. Just a poor aunt of mine.
No name. Just a poor aunt.
All names fade away, of course. We can say that much for sure.
But there are many ways for this to happen. First there are those whose names fade the moment they die. They’re the easy ones. We mourn their deaths: “The river ran dry and the fish died out,” or “Flames covered the forest, roasting every bird within it.” Next there are those who go out like an old television, leaving white flickers that play over the face of the tube until suddenly, one day, it burns out completely. These aren’t bad, either: sort of like the footprints of an Indian elephant that’s lost its way. No, definitely not bad. And finally there’s the type whose names fade even before they die—the poor aunts.
I myself fall into this poor aunt state of namelessness now and then. Suddenly, in the bustle of a terminal, my destination, my name, my address will no longer be there in my brain. But this never lasts long: five or ten seconds at most.
And then you have this:
“For the life of me, I can’t remember your name,” someone says.
“Never mind. Don’t let it bother you. It’s not much of a name, anyway.”
Over and over, he points to his mouth. “It’s right here, on the tip of my tongue, I swear…”
I feel as if I’ve been buried in the earth with half my left foot sticking out. People trip over it and start to apologize. “I swear, it’s right here, on the tip of my tongue…”
All right, then, where do the lost names go? The probability of their surviving in this maze of a city must be extremely low. Some are flattened on the road by enormous trucks, some die in the gutter for simple lack of spare change that would get them on a streetcar, while others sink to the bottom of the river, with a pocketful of pride to weigh them down.
Still, there might be some who have survived and found their way to the town of lost names where they have built a quiet, little community. A tiny town, at the entrance to which there would have to be a sign:
NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS
Those who dare to enter without business, of course, receive an appropriately tiny punishment.
Perhaps it was the tiny punishment that had been prepared for me. A poor aunt—a little one—was stuck to my back.
I first realized she was there in the middle of August. Not that anything in particular happened to alert me to her presence. I simply felt it one day: I had a poor aunt there on my back.
It was not an unpleasant sensation. She wasn’t especially heavy. She didn’t puff bad breath across my shoulder. She was just stuck there, on my back, like a bleached shadow. People had to look hard even to realize she was there. True, the cats I shared my apartment with gave her suspicious looks for the first few days, but as soon as they understood that she had no designs on their territory, they got used to her.
She made some of my friends nervous. We’d be sitting at a table with drinks when she’d peek over my shoulder at them.
“Gives me the creeps,” said one friend.
“Don’t let her bother you. She minds her own business. She’s harmless enough.”
“I know, I know. But, I don’t know why, she’s depressing.”
“So try not to look.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Then a sigh. “Where’d you have to go to get something like that on your back?”
“It’s not that I went anywhere. I just kept thinking about some things. That’s all.”
He nodded and sighed again. “I think I get it. It’s your personality. You’ve always been like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
We downed several whiskeys over the next hour without much enthusiasm.
“Tell me,” I said. “What’s so depressing about her?”
“I don’t know, it’s like my mother’s keeping an eye on me.”
“I wonder why?”
“You wonder why?! Hey, that’s probably my mother glued up there on your back.”
Judging from the impressions of a number of people (since I myself was unable to see her), what I had on my back was not a poor aunt with a single fixed form: she was apparently a kind of ether that changed shape in accordance with the mental images of each observer.
For one friend, it was a dog of his, an Akita, that had died the previous fall from cancer of the esophagus.
“She was on her last legs anyway, I guess. Fifteen years old. But what an awful way to die, poor thing.”
“Cancer of the esophagus?”
“Yeah. It’s really painful. I’d rather have anything else. All she did was cry—though she had pretty much lost her voice by then. I wanted to put her to sleep, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”
“Why not?”
“Who the hell knows? Probably would have felt guilty. We kept her alive two months on a feeding tube. Out in the shed. God, what a stink!”
He stayed silent for a while.
“She wasn’t much of a dog. Scared of her own shadow. Barked at everybody who came by. A really useless animal. Noisy, covered with scabs…”
I nodded.
“She’d have been better off born a cicada. Could have screamed her head off and nobody’d give a damn. No cancer of the esophagus, either.”
But there she was, up on my back still, a dog with a plastic tube sticking out of her mouth.
For one real estate agent, it was his old elementary school teacher.
“Must have been 1950, first year of the Korean War,” he said, using a thick towel to wipe the sweat from his face. “I had her two years in a row. It’s like old times seeing her again. Not that I missed her, exactly. I’d kind of forgotten that she even existed.”
The way he offered me a cup of ice-cold barley tea, he seemed to think I must be some kind of relative of his old elementary school teacher.
“She was a sad case, though, come to think of it. Husband got drafted the year they were married. He was on a transport ship and boom! Must have been ’43. She stayed on teaching school after that. Got bad burns in the air raids of ’44. Left side of her face, down to her arm.” He drew an arc from his cheek to his left arm. Then he drained his cup of barley tea and wiped his face again. “Poor thing. She must have been pretty before that happened. Changed her personality, too, they say. Must be near sixty if she’s still alive. Hmmm…1950, huh…?”
And so there took shape all kinds of wedding reception seating charts and neighborhood maps. My back was at the center of the poor aunt’s gradually widening circle.
At the same time, though, one friend and then another and another began to drop away from me, the way a comb loses teeth.
“He’s not a bad guy,” they would say about me, “but I don’t want to have to look at my depressing old mother (or old dog that died of esophageal cancer or the teacher with her burn scars) whenever I see him.”
I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair—hated by no one but avoided by everyone. If I bumped into friends on the street they’d find some reason to disappear as soon as possible. “I don’t know,” one girl confessed to me with difficulty—and honesty, “it’s kind of hard to be around you these days. I wouldn’t mind so much if you had an umbrella stand on your back or something…”
An umbrella stand.
Oh, what the hell, I’d tell myself, I was never much of a social animal anyway. And I certainly didn’t want to have to live with an umbrella stand on my back.
While friends avoided me, the media couldn’t get enough of me. Especially the weekly magazines. Reporters would show up every couple of days, take photos of me and the aunt, complain when her image didn’t come out clearly, and shower me with pointless questions. I kept hoping that my cooperation with the magazines would lead to some new discovery or
development with regard to the poor aunt, but instead all I got was exhaustion.
Once, I appeared on the Morning Show. They dragged me out of bed at six o’clock, drove me to the TV studio, and filled me full of godawful coffee. Incomprehensible people ran all around me doing incomprehensible things. I thought about getting the hell out of there, but before I could bring myself to do it, they said it was my turn. When the cameras weren’t on, the show’s host was a grumpy, arrogant bastard who did nothing but bawl people out, but the second the camera’s red lamp lit, he was all smiles and intelligence: your regulation middle-aged nice guy.
“And now it’s time for our daily feature, ‘Look What Else Is Out There,’” he announced to the camera. “Today’s guest is Mr.——, who suddenly found he had a poor aunt on his back. Not many people have this particular problem, and what I’d like to do today is ask our guest how it happened to him, and what kind of difficulties he’s had to face.” Turning to me, he continued, “Do you find having a poor aunt on your back in any way inconvenient?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t exactly call it inconvenient or difficult. She’s not heavy, and I don’t have to feed her.”
“No lower back pain?”
“No, none at all.”
“When did you find her stuck there?”
I briefly summarized my afternoon by the pond with the bronze unicorns, but he seemed unable to grasp my point.
“In other words,” he said, clearing his throat, “she was lurking in the pond near where you were sitting, and she possessed your back. Is that it?”
No, I said, shaking my head, that was not it. Oh, no! How had I let myself in for this? All they wanted was jokes or horror stories. I couldn’t take much more of this.
“The poor aunt is not a ghost,” I tried to explain. “She doesn’t ‘lurk’ anywhere, and she doesn’t ‘possess’ anybody. The poor aunt is just words,” I said. “Just words.”
No one said a thing. I would have to be more specific.
“A word is like an electrode connected to the mind. If you keep sending the same stimulus through it, there is bound to be some kind of response created, some effect that comes into being. Each individual’s response will be entirely different, of course, and in my case the response is something like a sense of independent existence. It’s the way you’d feel if your tongue swelled into some huge thing inside your mouth. What I have stuck to my back, finally, is the phrase ‘poor aunt’—those very words, without meaning, without form. If I had to give it a label, I’d call it a ‘conceptual sign’ or something like that.”
The host looked confused. “You say it has no meaning or form,” he observed, “but we can clearly see…something…some real image there on your back. And it gives rise to some sort of meaning in each of us…”
I shrugged. “Of course,” I said. “That’s what signs do.”
“So,” interjected the host’s young female assistant, in hopes of breaking up the barren atmosphere that was beginning to congeal around the show, “you could erase this image or this being or whatever it is, by your own free will if you wanted to.”
“No, that I can’t do,” I said. “Once something has come into being, it continues to exist independent of my will. It’s like a memory. You know how a memory can be—especially a memory you wish you could forget but you can’t. It’s just like that.”
She went on, seemingly unconvinced: “This process you mentioned of turning a word into a conceptual sign: is that something even I could do?”
“I can’t say how well it would work, but in principle, at least, you could,” I answered.
Now the host got into the act. “Say if I were to keep repeating the word ‘conceptual’ over and over every day, the image of ‘conceptual’ might appear on my back at some point, is that it?”
“In principle, at least, that could happen,” I repeated myself mechanically.
“So the word ‘conceptual’ will be turned into a conceptual sign.”
“Exactly,” I replied, but the strong lights and bad-smelling air of the studio were beginning to give me a headache. The piercing voices of the other speakers were intensifying the pain as well.
“What would a ‘conceptual’ look like?” ventured the host, drawing laughter from some of the other guests.
I said I didn’t know. It was not something I wanted to think about. My hands were full already with only one poor aunt that had taken on a separate existence. None of them really gave a damn about any of this. All they were concerned about was keeping the patter alive until the next commercial.
The whole world is a farce, needless to say. Who can escape that? From the glare of a TV studio to the gloom of a hermit’s cabin in the woods, it all comes from the same root. Walking through this clownish world with the poor aunt on my back, I was of course the biggest clown of all. Maybe the girl had been right: maybe I’d have been better off with an umbrella stand up there. Maybe then people would have let me into their cliques. I could’ve painted the umbrella stand a new color twice a month and gone with it to all the parties.
“All riiight! Your umbrella stand is pink this week!” somebody says.
“Sure thing,” I answer. “Next week I’m going for British green.”
And maybe there are girls out there eager to get into bed with a guy wearing a pink umbrella stand on his back.
Unfortunately, though, what I had on my back was not an umbrella stand but a poor aunt. As time passed, people’s interest in me and in the poor aunt on my back faded away. My companion had been right: nobody was interested in poor aunts. Once the initial mild curiosity had run its course, all that was left was a silence as deep as at the bottom of the sea, as deep as if the poor aunt and I had become a single entity.
3
“I saw you on TV,” said my companion.
We were sitting by the pond again. I hadn’t seen her for three months. It was now early autumn. The time had shot by. We had never gone so long without seeing each other.
“You looked a little tired.”
“I was wiped out.”
“You weren’t yourself.”
I nodded. It was true: I hadn’t been myself.
She kept folding and unfolding a sweatshirt on her knees. Folding and unfolding. As if she were turning time backward or urging it ahead.
“I guess you finally succeeded in getting your own separate poor aunt.”
“I guess.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like a watermelon at the bottom of a well.”
She smiled, caressing the soft but tightly folded sweatshirt on her knees as if it were a cat.
“Do you understand her better now?”
“A little,” I said. “I think. Maybe.”
“And has it helped you to write something?”
“Nope.” I gave my head a little shake. “Not a thing. The urge to write just isn’t there. Maybe I’ll never be able to do it.”
“Quitter.”
“You yourself once told me I couldn’t save anything at all with my writing. If that’s the case, what’s the point of writing about the poor aunt?”
She bit her lower lip and said nothing for a while.
“I’ve got an idea. Ask me some questions. Maybe I can help out a little.”
“As the poor aunt authority?”
“Uh-huh.” She smiled. “So fire away. This mood might never hit me again, when I feel like answering poor aunt questions.”
It took me a while to know where to start.
“I sometimes wonder what kind of a person becomes a poor aunt. Are they born that way? Or does it take special ‘poor aunt’ conditions—like some kind of huge bug that laps up everybody passing by a certain street corner and turns them into poor aunts?”
She nodded several times as if to say that my questions were very good.
“Both,” she said. “They’re the same thing.”
“The same thing?”
“Uh-huh. Well, look. A poor aunt migh
t have a ‘poor aunt’ childhood or youth. Or she might not. It really doesn’t matter. There are millions of reasons floating around the world for millions of results. Millions of reasons to live, and millions of reasons to die. Millions of reasons for giving reasons. Reasons like that are easy to come by—just a phone call to find out how much a bunch. But what you’re looking for is not one of those, is it?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess not.”
“She exists. That’s all. You have to recognize that fact and accept it. Reasons, causes: these just don’t matter. The poor aunt is there. She exists. And that’s what a poor aunt is. Her existence is her reason. Just like us. We exist here and now, without any particular reason or cause.”
We sat by the pond for a long time, neither of us moving or speaking. The clear autumn sunlight cast little shadows on her profile.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I see on your back?”
“What do you see on my back?”
“Nothing at all,” she said with a smile. “I see only you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally—the way that driver beat his old horse until it died on the road. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.
In a poor aunt, however, we can see the tyranny of time before our eyes, as if through an aquarium window. In the cramped glass case, time has been squeezing the poor aunt like an orange, until there’s not a single drop of juice left to spill. What draws me to her is that completeness of hers, that utter perfection within her.
It’s true—there’s not a drop left to spill!
Yes, perfection. It rests its full weight upon the core of the poor aunt’s being, like a corpse sealed inside a glacier—a magnificent glacier made of ice like stainless steel. Only ten thousand years of sunshine could melt such a glacier. But no poor aunt can live for ten thousand years, of course, and so she will have to live with her perfection, die with her perfection, and be buried with her perfection.