Viaticum

by Natelle Fitzgerald

  Ron slid the papers in front of him. “Do you have any questions, Mr. Campbell?”

  “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Ron handed him a pen, frowning slightly as he did so. “You are aware that once you sign, the bank will take over all of your investments?”

  Matt thought of Annika and the lonely cottage by the sea. His face began to burn. He couldn’t be free of it fast enough. “I just want out.” He signed his name.

  He’d read on websites that it would make him feel lighter. He’d read stories about people who, after declaring bankruptcy, had literally danced out of the bank but he didn’t feel that way. Instead, he felt hollowed out inside. The bright, busy world of the street came at him in high relief; every detail, every sound, every smell so sharp and clean and real that he knew the fault, the trembling weakness he felt inside was entirely his own. His failure. His weakness. All he wanted was to be alone.

  When he got back to the house, he closed the blinds on the bright, quick world with all the bright, keen people and their busy, successful lives. He sat on the couch and watched TV and waited for the eviction notice, the divorce papers, whatever came next. Jen wasn’t coming back, he knew. She’d cleared out all her stuff and wouldn’t return his calls, and, if he was being honest with himself, she was probably better off with her parents anyway. She’d never wanted to be his wife, never wanted to be pregnant at 19, to be a young suburban mom at 23. It had been a mistake. He was her big mistake. Nothing he could do now would change that.

  He drank beer and watched a show called Interventions, reflecting that rock bottom was bullshit for it seemed that each time you came to a place where you thought, this is the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, you simply crashed through to another layer of bad that made your former self seem like a naïve asshole, and then, just when you thought, okay, now this, this is suffering, you crashed through again and life was just a series of rotten layers with a man-shaped hole torn through.

  When the beer was gone he drank tequila, the last of a bottle he’d purchased in Mexico. With whom had he gone there? He couldn’t remember. Maybe even Ron, the cowboy banker. How was it that one ended up with a head full of memories and no friends to call? He held the dregs up to the blue light of the television and watched the shriveled worm rock back and forth. The worm with John Stewart behind it. The worm with Obama behind it. The worm with Stephen Colbert. It was like one of those things from the Little Mermaid, the skleem, once proud mermen and mermaids reduced to wormlike creatures by an evil witch. He brought the bottle to his mouth. The worm with Matt Campbell behind it.

  He kept drinking. He got very drunk. The empty house felt like a dare: how far would he slide? How drunk could he get? To what new level of depravity would he sink? He opened a bottle of scotch he’d been saving for a special occasion and with every sip, he found himself wishing for someone to stop him, to come to the house and find him here in this state and tell him to stop. He wished for Jen. For Ron. For Ken. For Annika. But no one came. He pissed in a houseplant because he could, then started to cry.

  When he woke the next morning, he was on the living room floor in his clothes. The sun was streaming in the windows and he felt curiously coherent and alive considering how much he’d drank. Part of him knew the feeling wouldn’t last, that it was only a short window before the horrendous hangover; still he allowed himself to hope. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he’d be okay. He struggled up from the couch, then he put on shoes and went outside.

  It was so bright out that he had to squint to see. He could smell the wet Earth warming, the grass on the lawns coming up. In the flowerbeds, daffodils and tulips were beginning to unfold, tight and pale, just on the cusp of revealing themselves. He blinked, then started walking. He walked passed the houses on his street. There were cars in most of the driveways and people were out in the yards, gardening. A man said hello to him as he passed. There were women with baby strollers and people out walking their dogs, their faces flushed with exercise and fresh air. He continued on, passed the playground where Jen took Jacob in the afternoons; there were children playing on the monkey bars, laughing and shouting; a toddler being coaxed down the slide. Little birds twittered in the green space behind the park. He kept walking. How was it that the neighbourhood seemed so different today, so friendly?

  Eventually, he left Sandy Hills and walked through an older more established neighbourhood with smaller houses and larger trees, their swollen buds glowing in the sun, their over-hanging branches throwing a delicate lace of shadow onto the pavement. He kept walking to a set of lights. Traffic was heavier here. He passed a diner and a convenience store, then he came to a Church where he stopped and stared longingly at the people in the parking lot.

  The People’s Pentecostal Assembly was a great, octagonal structure with a sprawling asphalt roof and a steeple that ramped up at one end like a launch pad into heaven. Jen always called it the mothership whenever they drove passed. She called the Pentecostals zealots and holy rollers but they looked like normal people to him.

  A service must have just been ending because the parking lot was full of cars and there were families walking back to their vehicles. A crowd was gathered near the front doors, talking and laughing with one another. He kept staring, envying their belonging, their togetherness. They all looked so clean and fresh in their suits and dresses; he could see the preacher in his robes with everyone clustering around him . . . and he thought that he would like to be part of it, that he would like to join something like that, something wholesome and good, then quickly he remembered the monk in France and how everyone had made fun of him. Matty the Carthusian Brotherfucker, they’d said like this feeling he’d felt had been nothing at all, as if a guy like him wasn’t even capable of having that kind of experience. It was all just drinking and fucking, Jen had said about his trips and the things that he had seen and experienced, that was what she said about their marriage too, about his love and their struggles and all that it had created; she said that it had just been about fucking, that all he’d wanted was to fuck her like it was the only thing a man could feel.

  A woman with two small children was walking towards him on the way back to her car and he smiled at them, tentatively, with the corners of his mouth as they passed him on the sidewalk. “Nice day,” he offered, but the woman pulled the children close and hurried away, the children looking back over their shoulders with worried blueberry eyes. He must smell bad, he realized. He must look terrible.

  Despair rose in him. “Doesn’t it bother you,” Jen had snarled before she left, “that you’re waiting for someone to die?” and yes!yes!yes! it bothered him, all of it bothered him, it was all so fucked up and he was sorry but how? How did you get back? How did you make it okay? You ruined my life, she’d said when she found out she was pregnant. My life is fucking ruined and he’d said I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry but she’d said that sorry wasn’t good enough. She’d said sorry doesn’t change things. His head began to pound. He turned away from the Church and started walking. He’d go back to the house, he decided. He’d go back and finish it all off, all of it, he’d draw the blinds and clear the liquor cabinet of everything because what was the point? What was the point of trying if you’ve already been condemned?

  Then his phone rang. He fished it out of his pants pocket. Annika.

  “Hello?”

  “Matt. Michael,” she said. Her voice sounded small and muffled, like she was talking through water.

  “Annika? Is that you, Annika?”

  “Yes, it’s me. How are you?”

  He felt confused. Why was she calling him? She’d been so angry before. He’d yelled at her, insinuated that she should die. He stood on the sunny sidewalk with his head pounding. “Good. I’m super-good,” he heard himself say. “And you? How are you?”

  There was a long silence. He thought he could hear the sea in the background, then there were strange
muffled noises. “Hey, are you alright? What’s going on?” She was crying, he realized. Crying and struggling to speak.

  “I’m sick,” she managed. “I don’t feel well. Ooooo I really don’t feel well at all.” Her voice rose with every word in such a way that there was no mistaking the realness, the deadly seriousness of her panic. He felt his scalp crawl, the ceiling of the world pulling upwards. He remembered her kindness, how terribly vulnerable she’d been. “What’s going on? Do you need a doctor? I can call a doctor for you.” He hadn’t meant to harm her.

  “No, I can’t . . . I screwed up. I made the wrong choice. I made all the wrong choices. I can’t go back to the doctor . . .”

  He wanted to help her; he could feel her panic through the phone. He wracked his brain. “Barry. What about Barry? I could call him; he could come over.”

  “No. no.” She was sobbing now. “Why did you come here? Why did you pretend to like me? You didn’t have to pretend to like me.”

  “Annika,” he said. His heart was bursting, overflowing, the tidal wave crashing, crashing down. “Look, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I feel terrible about what I did. I did like you, very much, I do like you, that part of it was real, you have to know that. I didn’t mean for it to . . . happen like that. I just . . .” He was crying too now, tears falling down his face.

  “I’m dying. I think I’m dying.”

  “Oh no. No no no.”

  There was a long pause. “I guess you’ll get your money after all,” she said with a short laugh, like she was trying to make light.

  “I don’t care about the money. The money doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

  “It’s over anyways. There’s no point in keeping on. Some things are better quick, you know. Hamish used to say that pain is better quick, like ripping a Band-Aid.”

  He felt cold. Her voice was different now, strange and hard. “Hey, Annika? Don’t do anything crazy, okay? I can . . . Look, I’m going to come down there and we can talk. Annika? Annika? I’m going to come and see you, okay?”

  She was gone. He stood there with the phone in his hand. What did she mean ripping a Band-Aid? Then he knew. He started to run. All his life, all his stupid dumb life he’d just let things happen; he’d just sort of slid along, afraid of choosing, of being guilty, but this was too much, this was too far: he would not, he could not let this happen. He sprinted through the streets like a wild man and was surprised by how strong he felt, how suddenly alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Why had she called why had she called why had she called? She had called Matt Campbell. Matt Campbell was coming. She wanted him to come and did not want him to come and was full of hatred and hopeful all at once. Her insides hurt badly now and she lay for a while curled up on the couch. Her thoughts drifted in and out. I’m dying dying dying she thought death is on its way but she couldn’t die yet because there was something she still had to do. What was it? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. She managed to stand and went to the window where she stared out at the flat grey sea and then the sea seemed to blur, the shoreline blended together with the sky and it was all a palette of grey light and she let her mind go into it and she wandered over fields and firescapes and city streets and thought she might rest, she felt an overwhelming urge to rest and then D’Arcy, her foreman when she’d been firefighting, was there clapping his hands with a whistle around his neck, egging her on: Up! Up! Up! You’re a fighter, Anni! and she was a fighter even though no one wanted her to be and D’Arcy winked and disappeared in a hole in the ground and she clenched her guts like she knew how and pried herself from the window.

  He was coming here. Matt Campbell was coming here to get the money after causing the cancer to come back. He was coming down here to protect his big payout because he was afraid that she would do it, afraid that she would make the final choice. That was the only way out of the contract, she remembered, to make the final choice like a bullet to the brain. If Matt Campbell wanted the money than the viator had to go naturally, the viator had to drift away like sea ice, docile, like a little lamb; the viator couldn’t choose, no, the viator couldn’t go out with a bang and she was sick of all these pricks running around making life complicated and miserable when all she’d ever wanted was peace.

  She labored up the stairs. Her footsteps on the floor were hollow, decisive. Yes. Decisive. A decision had been made, she thought. A choice had been made and she remembered her brother Jonathan full of righteous fire in the parking lot of the forest service compound trying to get her to come home. A choice, Anni! Your choice! he’d hissed and her whole life was a scattering of choices like genes like seeds and Sasha had said there was peace but she didn’t feel it because Matt Campbell had come here and ruined it and now she was trapped in the momentum of the choices like someone in a current is trapped, she was in the river of the choices now and in the river one must stay the course.

  She shook her head. Focus, she told herself. Matt Campbell was coming. Michael was on his way. This was what was happening. She had to be ready.

  She went into the bedroom and went to the drawer where the gun was. She took it out and held it like a toy a deadly serious toy. He wouldn’t get the money; she wouldn’t let him get it. She remembered the man with the quick blue eyes and the way the air had quickened right before she’d signed and how she’d known he was a crook by the quickening and the heartbeat in her fingers on the pen and his sharp little intake of breath right before she’d signed.

  He would get nothing. Not a cent. She would make sure of it.

  She took the sheets from the bed and stood before the mirror. The person there was yellow. The skin, the whites of the eyes all yellow and sunken and sexless with the ghost of a beautiful woman in the cut of the cheeks. She hung the sheet over the mirror and the image went away. There, she thought. There. Her mother would be happy. She wished she had gone back to see her mother; she wished she’d gone back and told her parents that she loved them and seen her brother and his children she’d heard he had children but had never met them and she wished there’d been catharsis and atonement and a rightness and the people in her life all around her and her lying in bed in the clean bright air lying in the clean bright sheets but she was out of time and she’d chosen wrong and they could not forgive it and this was the consequence and one had to live with the consequences of one’s actions like seeds in the poison ground. Matt Campbell needed to be made to understand, one way or another to understand, but she wasn’t about to damn anyone because the last thing the world needed was another soul flapping about like a crazed bird. There, mother. There. This is for you. She thought of purple fireweed blowing on a burned-out hillside and her mother in the yard with her skirts whipping up around her and her father, tight-lipped and angry, turning away and Michael, sweet Michael, she remembered, stroking her hair saying forgive me forgive me forgive me.

  Matt Campbell would be here soon if he was coming at all and there were still choices to be made and she didn’t want to be caught inside the cottage before she could make them so she took the gun and went back downstairs where she covered the mirror in the bathroom with a blanket from the couch, then she poured dried cat food for Zebedee and placed multiple bowls around the cottage. She did the same for water. Zebedee placed a paw on her shin and meowed. “I’m sorry little friend,” she said, “Barry will be a good Dad.” She bent though it hurt her and kissed him on the head.

  She went outside and locked the door behind her. Leaving the cat wrenched her guts and she sobbed so hard her vision tunneled and she had to sit down on the porch and she sat there ­sobbing.

  Sasha had said there would be peace and that it came for everyone but it wasn’t coming because he’d ruined it, because Matt Campbell had come down here and ruined it just waltzing in pretending he cared and then expecting her to just let go, just let go like ripping a Band-Aid, Hamish said: just! just! just! Always just as if life were just so easy
and he would be made to see it wasn’t just anything, it wasn’t just go out and make some friends and it wasn’t just be positive and it wasn’t just get over it and it wasn’t just accept that a little poking and prodding was necessary because she was a fighter a FIGHTER and God had spoken in her heart she swore it was true and when her head was on his chest his voice had rumbled like thunder and the words didn’t matter only his arms around her and he had called it letting go.

  She struggled to her feet. Focus. Focus, she said out loud. There was something she had to do. She took the gun and walked into the woods near the drive where the arbutus trees stretched and twisted above her in surreal arches spanning grey light. Their old leaves littered the forest floor, the yellows and browns scattering like genes or choices or seeds. Salal scraped against her legs, then she lay down behind a log. From here she could see the cottage and the beach. He would be a while still, but she didn’t want to get caught at the cottage and then have him arrive. Barry and Susan had been snooping lately because they were worried about her. Even Helmut was snooping, Helmut who said he’d never judge kept coming around and asking if she needed anything. They might come here and stop her before she had a chance to choose, before she could make the right choice and then it would be over.

  Cold came up from the ground and went into her body. She lay on her back and stared up at the light through the branches and her eyelids grew heavy and the edges of the world began to blur then she shook her head. A fighter. Boo-yah. She’d done the hose carry in under five minutes, she remembered.

  Time passed.