Excerpt of Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan
(Page 2 of 15)
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The worst part about all of this is that I don't remember how
I died. In those last moments, what was I doing? Whom did I see wielding the
instrument of death? Was it painful? Perhaps it was so awful that I blocked it
from my memory. It's human nature to do that. And am I not still human, even
if I'm dead?
The autopsy concluded that I was not strangled but had drowned
in my own blood. It was ghastly to hear. So far none of this information has
been of any use whatsoever. A little rake in my throat, a rope around my neck—this
was an accident? You'd have to be brainless to think so, as more than a few
evidently were.
At the postmortem, photos were taken, especially of the awful
part of my neck. My body was tucked into a metal drawer for future study. There
I lay for several days, and then samples of me were removed—a swab of this, a
sliver of that, hair follicles, blood, and gastric juices. Then two more days
went by, because the chief medical examiner went on vacation in Maui, and since
I was an illustrious person, of particular renown in the art world—and no, not
just the retail community, as the San Francisco Chronicle suggested—he wanted
to see me personally, as did esteemed people in the professions of crime and
forensic medicine. They dropped by on their lunch hour to make ghoulish guesses
as to what had happened to cause my premature demise. For days, they slid me in,
they slid me out, and said brutish things about the contents of my stomach, the
integrity of the vessels in my brain, my personal habits, and past records of my
health, some being rather indelicate matters one would rather not hear discussed
so openly among strangers eating their sack lunches.
In that refrigerated land, I thought I had fallen into the
underworld, truly I did. The most dejected people were there—an angry woman
who had dashed across Van Ness Avenue to scare her boyfriend, a young man who
jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and changed his mind halfway down, an
alcoholic war vet who had passed out on a nude beach. Tragedies, mortal
embarrassments, unhappy endings, all of them. But why was I there?
I was stuck in these thoughts, unable to leave my breathless
body, until I realized that my breath was not gone but surrounding me, buoying
me upward. It was quite amazing, really—every single breath, the sustenance I
took and expelled out of both habit and effort over sixty-three years had
accumulated like a savings account. And everyone else's as well, it seemed,
inhalations of hopes, exhalations of disappointment. Anger, love, pleasure, hate—they
were all there, the bursts, puffs, sighs, and screams. The air I had breathed, I
now knew, was composed not of gases but of the density and perfume of emotions.
The body had been merely a filter, a censor. I knew this at once, without
question, and I found myself released, free to feel and do whatever I pleased.
That was the advantage of being dead: no fear of future consequences. Or so I
thought.
When the funeral finally happened on December 11th, it was
nearly ten days after I died, and without preservation I would have been
compost. Nonetheless, many came to see and mourn me. A modest guess would be,
oh, eight hundred, though I am not strictly counting. To begin, there was my
Yorkshire terrier, Poochini, in the front row, prostrate, head over paws,
sighing through the numerous eulogies. Beside him was my good friend Harry
Bailley, giving him the occasional piece of desiccated liver. Harry had offered
to adopt Poochini, and my executor readily agreed, since Harry is, as everyone
knows, that famous British dog trainer on television. Perhaps you've seen his
show—The Fido Files? Number-one ratings, and many, many Emmy Awards. Lucky
little Poochini.
And the mayor came—did I mention?—and stayed at least ten
minutes, which may not sound long, but he goes to many places in a day and
spends far less time at most. The board members and staff of the Asian Art
Museum also came to pay respects, nearly all of them, as did the docents I
trained, years' and years' worth, plus the people who had signed up for the
Burma Road trip. There were also my three tenants—the troublesome one, as well—and
my darling repeat customers and the daily browsers, plus Roger, my FedEx man;
Thieu, my Vietnamese manicurist; Luc, my gay haircolorist; Bobo, my gay
Brazilian housekeeper; and most surprising to say, Najib, the Lebanese grocer
from my corner market on Russian Hill, who called me "dearie" for twenty-seven
years but never gave me a discount, not even when the fruit had gone overripe.
By the way, I am not mentioning people in any order of importance. This is
simply how it is coming to me.
From Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan. Copyright Amy Tan 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Putnam Publishing. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
