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“There once was a sphinx who fell in love with a man.” That’s what she had said when she set the old, battered notebook down in front of him. They had been in their kitchen, at the table: him sitting, her standing. She was short enough that they were almost eye level. A week ago, in this same sun-lit kitchen, he had proposed. She had grinned, she had cried, she had said yes and thrown her arms around him – then immediately withdrawn. For a week, he had tiptoed around her darkening mood. Now, the rain and thunder had abated, but clouds still covered the sun even as she talked.
What Eto had said, that evening in the kitchen, a week after accepting Kaneki’s proposal:
“Every night, the man would request, Let me sleep beside you, safely, in the sand. Of course, the sphinx could not grant this unless he answered her riddle. At first she made them hard, made him think. If he answered correctly, so be it, no skin off her back. If not, she got to bite his head off. In return, the man devoted his days to studying. He met her riddles with answers of his own, and every night he slept next to her in the warm sand.
But the man grew old, and forgetful. The sphinx moderated her riddles, making them easier, making multiple correct answers possible. She knew it was the beginning of the end when she had to spend all night thinking about how his answer could be correct. Ironic, isn’t it? The man, struggling so hard to keep up with her in his youth, and her, struggling to find riddles he can’t fail in his old age.” Eto gave him a wan smile. “Slowly, the man faded away from the sphinx. His mind left for somewhere she could not follow. Her riddles turned tragically simple: Where are we? What am I? Who are you? ”
Eto finally opened her eyes and looked at him. She let out a long breath. Kaneki said nothing, knew she would continue speaking when she could bear it.
“I used to fancy myself the sphinx.”
Yes, Kaneki thought. I’d risk your riddles every night just to sleep beside you.
“But the story of the sphinx and her lover haunts me because I am the man. I am doomed, my love, and you have to understand that if you want to marry me.”
The book she had set in front of him had been her mother’s journal. Eto explained, her voice grave but eyes simmering, that it contained a sort of chronology of her mother’s relationship with her father. Her father had been much older than her mother, and, upon deciding they wanted to have a child, had had some genetic testing done to make sure he was still viable . Eto spit the word.
The tests came back: he was a carrier of a certain genetic marker for a condition that slowly removed the brain’s function with age. However, it would only be a problem if the mother of his child carried the marker too.
Kaneki’s heart, previously in his throat, sank to his stomach at this point. He could guess what was coming. He laid a hand over his fiancee's where it shook gripping the table.
“It’s all in here.” She gestured to the book, nearly hitting Kaneki’s face in the process. He wanted to reach up and wipe the tears that flowed silently over the flush of her cheeks, but he knew it wouldn’t be welcome. Not yet.
“It’s all in my mother’s journal: the conversations with the doctors; the test orders; the test results. My father’s and my mother’s. She was tested too.” Eto’s voice broke – sadness or rage, he couldn’t tell –but she plowed on. “They were both carriers. They knew it. They knew the probability I would be afflicted with the condition was disgustingly high.
They had me anyway.”
She told him flat out that yes, she wanted to marry him. She loved him; she knew he loved her. That they were both at a point in their lives where they could admit that without fear of pain or abandonment was only proof of how well they were together. But she told him that her conditions were this: They would never have a child – she would not condemn another life the way her parents had her – and he would fully understand that he was consigning himself to watching her decline.
Kaneki’s reply, that evening in the kitchen, a week after he had proposed: “All I want is to lie next to you every night, in the warm sand, safely. We all have to go at some point, Eto: At least wherever you go, I will follow some day.”
***
The first thing that went was her motor control. When she could barely make it up the stairs, they tried downsizing to a smaller, ground floor house. But eventually, when her hands shook too much to hold a cup or manage chopsticks, and the spasms could no long be managed with diet and exercise, and Kaneki – the years had not been kind to him, either – could no longer give her the care she needed, they acknowledged that it was time.
The nursing home was one of the higher end ones. Takatsuki Sen had left Eto quite well off, after all. They shared a neatly appointed room with two vintage armchairs positioned by a small electric fireplace. The staff were kind, and fresh flowers always graced the windowsill. Upon starting their search, both Kaneki and Eto had agreed the place must have a library.
They even made friends there. Another older couple, one gentleman a cop, the other the mob boss he had spent his career chasing. Those two were always arguing and fighting, fucking and causing trouble. Eto had paid off the administration board three times to allow them to come back, simply because she got a kick out of them.
***
The next thing to go was her sense of taste. She hadn’t told Kaneki when it happened, but for weeks he had observed her growing apathy toward food.
“It could be human flesh, for all I care,” she had remarked when she finally told him, pushing potato around her plate. Then she had gone to take a sip of water and spilled it down the front of her blouse. They were silent the rest of the meal.
***
The embarrassing things went, bowels and bladder, and Kaneki was forced to watch the woman who in her youth had crusaded against the Washuu lobbyists and their shady employ of hitmen, suffer the indignity of a diaper change.
***
Kaneki knew it was the beginning of the end when her eyes went.
“You look like a wizened old owl,” he had murmured into her hair back when the Cokebottle lenses had still allowed her to see.
Eto’s salvation her entire life had been stories, Kaneki knew. Even once her brain had given up on her hands, she had continued to write, plowing through the tics and twitches and tremors using a tablet that had large buttons and a dictionary of characters. When she could no longer see the words, Kaneki read to her. His eyes were only a sight better than hers, and his voice was raspy with dry coughs, but he refused to let her go without. Refused to leave her alone in that darkness.
Every night, he lay beside her and stroked her shoulder until they fell asleep, letting her know he was there.
***
“Do you remember our wedding?” Kaneki asked one day near the end. He sat beside his wife in their twin armchairs. He ran his gnarled fingers gently over the smudged glass of a framed photograph.
“Of course,” Eto said softly. Lately it seemed like she was becoming more and more forgetful, but the void hadn’t come for her past yet. “You looked like a dork.”
Kaneki laughed his gurgling old man laugh. “Aah~” he sighed.
She appended, the look on her face still as mischievous as it had been thirty years ago, “A sexy dork.”
“Dear, we are old now. We’re not allowed to say sexy or dork.” Kaneki caught her hand as she reached out for him. She gripped as gently as she could, aware of the arthritis that had settled into his joints.
“I’ll say what I damn well want!” Eto declared.
“As you always have,” Kaneki said, hoping that even if she couldn’t see, she knew there was fondness in his eyes as he looked at her.
They were silent for a bit. Eto battled a violent shiver that wracked her body, grunting softly. Kaneki stroked the photo again. She had been so beautiful that day, he remembered. Feathers had adorned the bodice, overlapping across her chest and shoulders, brushing her collarbone. She had walked herself up the aisle toward him, proud and unfettered. When she had reached him, he’d been afraid to touch her. She was a free, wild thing; if held too tightly, she might fly away. Or worse, forget how to fly at all.
Kaneki spoke, “I’m looking at our picture right now. From our wedding day.”
“Describe it to me.”
He obliged. “You’re right there. Front and centre. Even in heels the top of your head only comes to my chin. You’re smiling with your eyes open, the way you do when you’re truly happy. I’m next to you, but I don’t look nearly as good as you. In fact, I look constipated.” Kaneki squinted. Eto laughed. “I’m holding your waist and you have your arms thrown in the air. I think you had just thrown your bouquet. On your other side is your maid of honour-”
“Hinami.”
“And behind me trying to give me bunny ears is my best man-”
“Hi-” She stopped. “Hi-”
Kaneki’s heart sank. “Hide,” he supplied.
“Hide,” she whispered.
***
Finally, her mind went.
It was agony for Kaneki to watch. It was everything he knew she’d feared since that day she’d told him the story of the sphinx and her lover.
She was angry and violent one moment, sad and weeping the next. She talked to people who were long dead. It upset her when she couldn’t remember a name, or a noun, or something that had been said.
She became afraid.
Kaneki watched as her mind consumed itself, turning inside out and spilling the monsters she had written into the ravaged cavity of her head. Her stories came back to haunt her. The mother from The Black Goat’s Egg . The prisoners of The Hanged Man’s MacGuffin . They surrounded her, mocking her, beating her down until she was left sobbing on her bed, screaming.
They sedated her and she slept. Kaneki, his eyes bad but still serviceable, prowled her written works. He found each monster's weakness, and when she woke again, he was able to help her fight them off.
But still they came back, and still she got worse.
In what was becoming a rare moment of lucidity, Eto’s grip on his arm was vice-like. “Help me,” she gasped from the bed. “Don’t leave. Keep me sane. Tell me riddles. Like the sphinx. Keep me sharp. Like the sphinx ,” she repeated.
Kaneki did. He lay beside her day and night and asked:
“What colour are the walls?”
“What’s your favourite book?”
“What was your pseudonym?”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Do you know who you are?”
“Do you know that I love you?”