Afterword
During the hypnogogic phase we begin to lose touch with the surrounding world. Images form inside our heads like still photographs, and although they go unnoticed, they are there.
My grandfather sleeps on a chair facing the ocean, dentures floating in the bathroom, his glasses on, his shoes on. “Fu-Yen,” she would hiss, “look at your ugly feet. Keep your shoes on.” His old hands folded in his lap, under a beach towel that has never touched the sand.
I hear his shoes, the sticky sound of their tread against the footrest of his chair – the sound of my grandfather sleeping.
Goong never volunteers his dreams. He tells me only to say 1/5th of what I’m thinking to people I don’t know. “Never want anything,” he says, “this is my golden rule.”
These images are my dams and floods.
I feel like one whiff of my mother is enough to send me looking over my shoulder.
I see her in a dream, and I know not to wait.
He sleeps on one side of the bed but makes it for two. Says goodnight to wife and daughter. Touching the picture frames on the dresser. I touch the small black and white photos in his albums – photos the size of postage stamps, and sometimes I enlarge them.
I look at the pig – dead now – a happy head floating in mud and wet grass.
OMNIA MORS POSCIT; LEX EST, NON POENA PERIRE
“Death demands all; to die is law, not punishment.”
Each time, in different ways, I have watched the slaughter of these animals, only half conscious, thinking they might help me believe that death demands all, hoping that this might comfort me.
And now I see Goong in the pig,
And I see the pig in the wobbly kites,
And I see us all together,
Tick ticking ticked.