lot better feeling good watching and wondering what might come next. Then someone shouted my name and I could get up. Is that what you are talking about? Wondering about?”
A says, “I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about, thinking about. Is it?”
“That could be it, if I knew what it is we’re seeking.” C answers.
A continues, “Let me tell you about my cat Daisy’s last moments. It’s the most vivid experience I’ve had with death.”
“I think I’m allergic to Daisy,” B says. “But I have no objection to hearing about her last moments. In fact, thinking about her passing has already cleared my nasal passages. So, tell us about her last moments.”
“Daisy’s last moments—perhaps too momentous a listing. —” A muses.
“Maybe, ‘The End of Allergy,’ is a better listing?” B says. “Or maybe, ‘The Daisy Cleanse.’ In the states everybody is mad for ‘cleanse’ or so it seems, that and some strange plant that guarantees weight loss.”
“You show little respect for a favored pet,” A says. “It could be construed as heartless. I’ll punish you by forbidding you from taking the next phone call.”
“Not your choice,” B answers.
“About Daisy’s expiration?” C says.
“It began with vomiting. Not the usual cat upchucking. Hair balls and the like. But rather extensive, continuous vomiting—a signal that something more fundamental was occurring. Enough accumulation and cleanup to signal a trip to Meguro.”
“You’ve ordered new tatami already?” B says.
“Of course,” A replies, “but our vet, Madame Vincouvier, about seventy years old and with an amazing stacked shock of grey and very curly hair, insisted a cleanse would restore Daisy to her peak health for an animal of ‘such advanced age.’”
“What we might ask,” C says, “was a French woman veterinarian doing in Meguro, unless of course, she’d been there for over six decades.”
“Of course, she had. Haven’t we all? Aren’t we all honorary Japanese with annual visas?
“Thank God for Seoul’s proximity,” A says. And for more than a moment conversation ceases as each relives the latest quick round trip to Seoul for a visa renewal. A recalls his miserable night at a Korean yogwan, adjusting his sitting on the fire-hot floor. B remembers the dazzling quickness of Wi-Fi in his five-star hotel, and C recalls his overnight with his wife’s oldest friend, a language teacher living an hour out from the Seoul; her two rambunctious sons, aged five and seven, kept him up well past midnight. C reflected it was such shared discombobulations of seeking permission to live in Japan that kept the group together past all imagining—a kind of desperation of companionship and shared inconvenience. And now, C thought, it is death itself that threads us together. The vaunted red thread A mentioned ties us to Seoul’s visa renewal and the certainty of expiration at some point, perhaps over the Japan Sea, could that be it?
A continues, “Ah Madame Vincouvier, surely the wisest of all the cat vets in Kanto and surely the most thorough. ‘A little cleanse for your Daisy and voila! She’ll be bright as new, as lithe as the lolloping leopards. And if the cleanse doesn’t work, we have lots of options, and we’ll explore them all till she’s as right as rain, as thrilled and thrilling as any kitten in Tokyo.’”
“And how much did the cleanse cost?” B asks.
“Five hundred dollars. Daisy spent two nights in Meguro.” A answers, betraying a miniscule flash of discomfort at the mention of price. “But that was just the start. The flush didn’t work, didn’t sweep into oblivion the shards of innards knotting. In a week I took her back to Meguro and Madame Vincouvier revealed herself to be compassion’s most blossoming agent, with, evidently, a near limitless sympathy for Daisy’s plight. Three more days of intravenous injections and finally a diagnosis that diabetes had complicated Daisy’s intestinal aggravations. But she was responding well to the antibiotics and the loving Meguro evening massages.”
“Massages?” B asks, incredulous.
“Yes. Cat shiatsu, ever heard of it? The gentlest and most expensive conceivable.”
“And Madame Vincouvier spent evening after evening reading about cat digestion in her linoleum-lined room above the clinic in Meguro? Say it isn’t so?” C says. Then answers himself. “Alone with her copy of Proust and her clinical studies while the Yamanote-sen rattles nearby and Daisy rests beneath her manipulating fingers.”
“Not at all. Vincouvier insisted on the best masseuse in Tokyo, a spry elderly Japanese woman named Yamaguchi, who cost only one mahn for each eight-minute treatment. And at the end Daisy, she argued, was purring. But I didn’t hear that ever. On the contrary when I brought poor Daisy home she continued vomiting and lying in the mock leather lounge chair I myself had used to recover after my rotator cuff operation. I remember leaning down toward sleeping Daisy and wanting, ever wanting, to hear the music of her purr, but nothing— only the rasp of uneven breath and an occasional very low moan. Nine mahn into massages and nothing like even a mild improvement.”
“Nine mahn?” B asks, “nine mahn for a cat?”
‘Madame Vincouvier is a very erai sensei, a very, very erai sensei.”
“I don’t give a damn. I’d hesitate to spend nine mahn on my mother, let alone my cat.”
“You have a cat?” C asks
“Am I nuts?” B answers.
“You ought to understand that Daisy has been with us from the very start, right after I met Sanae,” A says.
“Longevity is some kind of exoneration, justification for excessive care?”
“There is no escape from care—even you must sense that. Even you. But the point is extraneous. What is pertinent was Madame Vincouvier’s passion to heal Daisy, to prolong her tired existence on this mortal plain. Her devotion to Daisy’s well-being. That’s what I responded to, what inevitably I bankrolled.”
C says, “You thought, here is something I can care for, something worth devoting my life too? Was that it?”
“Of course, that was it. What else could anyone say?” B says.
A says, “I’m only saying that after a long time caring for Daisy I wasn’t prepared to simply walk away. Who could have? And Madame Vincouvier radiated such concern that anyone would have responded to that. And there was Daisy looking so pathetic and imploring for some relief, some gesture of continuing care.”
“Out of shame or guilt or both,” B says.
“But,” A continues, “even Madame Vincouvier failed to convince her staff, and that failure shifted opinion about Daisy’s future . . . It began with her suggestion that further tests were important, despite the expense already invested in the various rescue procedures—all of which had fallen short. So now she argued that Daisy needed an ambulance trip to Sendai for an MRI, yes, a cat MRI. Cost? Approximately ni jeu mahn yen. Yes, two thousand dollars U.S. to find out that Daisy was dying, had been dying, as do we all, from the moment she was born.” A looks around sheepishly, imagining he has enunciated the most obvious yet most hidden remark.
