The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  Unfortunately, I could not, and I thought it better to state his wishes candidly than to risk a misunderstanding. The phrasing above is the phrasing we went with, and when we arrived at the hotel, I thought that this criterion had been pretty well met, although this was another area in which I had little expertise. I’d never stayed in a hotel before – I’d only seen them in films – so I didn’t really know what the kind of hotel you’d stay in while waiting to die would look or feel like. All I can say is that our hotel seemed like a very good hotel to me. It had a big lobby with a high ceiling and tall stone columns and a floor that was made either from marble or a convincing marble substitute. The reception desk had a thick counter of dark, polished wood and a golden sign that had been engraved in German, English and French. It read:

  Empfang / Reception / Réception

  But I thought that at least one of these translations was probably superfluous.

  ‘Guten Tag, mein Herr,’ I said to the desk clerk in my brisk, competent German. ‘Wir haben zwei Zimmer reserviert. Der Name ist “Peterson”.’

  He was a small, tidy man wearing a creaseless suit and a thin, professional smile. And he replied in precise, barely accented English: ‘Ah, yes. Mr Peterson. Welcome to the Hotel Seeufer. I trust that your stay with us will be a pleasant one.’

  ‘Ich bin nicht Herr Peterson,’ I corrected him. ‘Herr Peterson ist der Mann im Stuhl.’

  The clerk nodded. ‘Yes, I see. My apologies for the confusion.’

  ‘Das macht nichts. Können Sie uns mit unserem Gepäck helfen?’

  The clerk twitched nervously. ‘Yes, of course. I will have one of our porters attend to you immediately. In the meanwhile, there are just a few forms that perhaps you would be willing to complete?’

  ‘Ja. Das wird kein Problem sein.’

  It was a strange, ping-pong conversation that continued in this vein for some time. The clerk’s refusal to speak German I put down to some obscure facet of hotel etiquette that I was unfamiliar with. His slightly edgy disposition I put down to my over-zealous, war-film accent. But I left the encounter satisfied that I’d at least been able to make myself understood.

  Mr Peterson’s room was on the first floor and was extremely large. It had a tall, arched window and a balcony looking west across the lake, and because it was late in the afternoon, the whole room was flooded with sunlight, like in one of those bad car adverts where the photography’s so overexposed that it hurts your eyes. I had to wait a few moments before I could take proper stock of the interior, but my first impression was that it met all of Mr Peterson’s needs. There were two broad, high-backed chairs, as well as one of those strange sofas with the narrow, stubby legs and only one armrest. The furniture was all separated by ample floor space for ease of access, and there were two up-lighting lamps on metal stands. On one wall was a painting of an unnaturally tall and slender woman with an unnaturally long and thin cigarette, and on another was a mirror constructed from five symmetrically arranged panes of glass – four trapezia and a central pentagon – which looked like the kind of mirror Superman might have in his Fortress of Solitude. All the décor followed this curiously geometrical design, and somehow managed to look very modern and very old-fashioned all at once. Even the chrome handrails in the bathroom looked like freshly sculpted antiques.

  Holy shit, wrote Mr Peterson.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like the kind of place you’d come to die,’ I ventured.

  No, it doesn’t.

  ‘To be honest with you, I think Herr Schäfer’s met the brief pretty well.’

  He must have one hell of a sense of humor, Mr Peterson wrote.

  My room was just across the corridor. It was classified as a ‘standard’ room, but really this was all quite relative. It didn’t have a balcony or a lake view, and it was perhaps only two-thirds the size of Mr Peterson’s disabled room, but otherwise, it was more or less the same. It had one of those blocky, bright red armchairs and an en-suite bathroom and a dark wooden desk with a lamp next to it. It had an old-fashioned telephone with a cradle and a circular dialling mechanism, and a twenty-eight-inch wall-mounted LCD television with lots of German, French and Italian channels as well as MTV and CNN and BBC News. It also had a mini-fridge hidden in the central cabinet of the desk, just below the safe. It contained four twenty-five-centilitre bottles of wine, which I relocated to the wardrobe to make space for six cans of Diet Coke.

  After we’d eaten and I was alone and settled into my room, it was around ten thirty Central European Time. I phoned Ellie, who didn’t deviate from the standard greeting I’d come to expect.

  ‘Fuck, Woods!’ she said. ‘I told you not to call me!’

  ‘You told me not to call until I’d spoken to my mother,’ I pointed out. ‘We spoke earlier.’

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that. I had to hold her hand through the whole fucking ordeal!’

  ‘I told you calling her was a bad idea.’

  ‘That wasn’t the bad idea. You know, she only left about an hour ago. It took her that long to calm down. She didn’t even open the shop today.’

  I took a moment to let this sink in. In a way, it was a more damning indictment than the five minutes of continuous crying I’d experienced earlier. In the past seven years, my mother had closed her shop precisely zero times, and before that, it had taken a meteor impact to get her to take some time off work.

  ‘She hasn’t even been able to use her cards,’ Ellie continued. ‘She tried, but they’ve stopped talking to her.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this. So I said nothing.

  ‘Woods? Are you still there? You’re not gonna hang up on me too?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to talk to me,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That’s not what I said. Just shut up and listen a moment. There’s something else you need to know. The police have been round.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘They were here a few hours ago, asking all sorts of questions. I think you might be in a whole heap of shit.’

  My mind did a strange, clumsy dance. ‘She called the police?’

  ‘Who called the police?’

  ‘My mother?’

  ‘Don’t be retarded!’ I could hear Ellie’s eyes rolling down the phone. ‘Your mum didn’t call the police. Of course she didn’t! Do you really think she’d do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? That’s your problem, right there. Sometimes you’re just completely fucking clueless!’

  ‘Yes, I understand that.’

  ‘The hospital called the police.’

  ‘What did the police say?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think the police said? They asked about your “state of mind”. They wanted to know where you might go or what you might be planning. They made your mum show them that ridiculous note.’

  ‘They’ve seen the note?’

  ‘Stop repeating me! Just listen. They’ve seen the note and they’ve taken it away as “evidence”. They said that the wording gave serious cause for concern, or somesuch shit.’

  ‘It was the best wording I could come up with.’

  ‘Yes, I realize that. And I think at some point your mum might realize that too. But to someone who doesn’t know you . . . Jesus, Woods, it reads like it was written by Hannibal Lecter! There’re some things you really don’t want to appear too cool and casual about.’

  ‘I’m not cool or casual,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I know that. The police don’t. They think you’re made of ice. They wanted to know if you’re the kind of person who can be reasoned with. They want to put out an appeal – you know, like they do when there’s a hit-and-run or some pervert abducts a child. They want your mum to go on the news asking you to come home.’

  ‘Is she going to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think she knows right now. But if she doesn’t, I think the police are gonna go ahead with the appeal anyway. You know what the police are like. They’
re the same as the hospital: they have to cover their arses. They don’t want it to look like they’re doing nothing.’

  I thought about this for a few moments. ‘Would it be okay if I called you back tomorrow?’

  ‘You’d better call me back tomorrow!’ Ellie threatened. ‘If you’re not gonna speak to your mother, you have to speak to someone.’

  And the line went dead. Ellie ended her phone conversations the same way she ended her regular, face-to-face conversations. Abruptly.

  I realized at that moment that I was completely exhausted. Forty hours without sleep didn’t creep up on me. It just hit me: all over my body, all at once. I used the last of my strength to return the phone to its cradle, then fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bed sheets. I did not dream.

  The following morning, Herr Schäfer met us, as arranged, at ten o’clock in the hotel bar. It was, he later told us, his policy to try to meet with every one of his clients in the days before their appointments. Since he’d started in his line of work, around twelve years earlier, he had helped one thousand one hundred and forty-seven foreigners to die in Switzerland (Mr Peterson would be one thousand one hundred and forty-eight), and the only clients he hadn’t met beforehand were those who’d explicitly stated this was against their wishes.

  My first impression of Herr Schäfer was that he was much larger, in all dimensions, than I’d expected. He was a tall, well-built man whom I estimated to be in his early sixties. He had thick-framed glasses, silver-grey hair and very dark, serious eyes. Even when he was talking about something inconsequential, his eyes remained grave. He wore a charcoal-grey suit with a dark blue tie, and his handshake, I noted, was a precise mirror of my own: two solid up-down movements and eye contact throughout. When he spoke, his English was fast and fluent, although his wording of certain phrases was slightly odd, and he had more of an accent than the hotel desk clerk: he elongated and Germanized some of his Ws, and there was a soft buzz that attended about seventy-five per cent of his initial Ss, so that ‘will’ became ‘veal’ and ‘suicide’ ‘zooicide’. You can imagine these sounds if you wish, but for the sake of clarity, I won’t try to transcribe them.

  Beyond saying Guten Morgen, I did not attempt to speak much German with Herr Schäfer. I was okay with subject areas that I’d had time to rehearse, but struggled when I had to improvise, and many of the subjects we’d be discussing with Herr Schäfer were not well covered by the online syllabus I’d been using.

  ‘I hope that you are both finding the hotel to your satisfactions?’ Herr Schäfer asked after the handshakes were over and we’d taken our seats.

  Mr Peterson nodded.

  ‘Mr Peterson finds it difficult to speak,’ I explained. ‘Also he struggles a bit with eye contact because of his condition, so he prefers to communicate in writing.’

  Herr Schäfer gave a reassuring smile. ‘It is of no matter. You must communicate in the way that is the most comfortable for you.’

  Thank you, Mr Peterson wrote. The hotel’s very nice.

  Herr Schäfer nodded thoughtfully. ‘It is not a hotel that I use very often, but it is one of my particular favourites nonetheless. I thought it would be well suited to your requirements. I find that the art deco interiors are very elegant but also very practical.’

  Art deco turned out to be the name of the strange modern-antique style of furniture in the rooms. Herr Schäfer discussed this at some length, telling us that the hotel had first opened in 1919 and for many years had been a popular haunt for Zurich intellectuals. James Joyce had stayed there several times in the 1930s, by which time he no longer lived in Zurich, but visited frequently for appointments with his optometrist. From 1915 to 1917 he’d lived just round the corner, at apartments on Kreuzstrasse and Seefeldstrasse. I told Herr Schäfer that I’d heard of James Joyce, but only because of quarks, which were elementary particles named after a word that James Joyce had invented for some reason. This information seemed to please Herr Schäfer very much.

  ‘But now, I think, we must get down to our business at hand,’ he said, bringing this short diversion to an end. ‘Your first doctor appointment is booked for six o’clock this evening, and the next for seven o’clock tomorrow evening. I hope that you will not find the delay too much of an inconvenience. I know that for some people it is difficult, but we are required by law to have this separation between appointments.’

  We’re not in a rush, Mr Peterson wrote.

  Herr Schäfer smiled, but his eyes remained grave. ‘You understand that this protocol is intended as a safeguard. Only a doctor can prescribe you with the medication that will end your life, and she must be satisfied that these are indeed your wishes and there is just cause to do so.’

  Is there any chance she’ll decide that I don’t have just cause to end my life? Mr Peterson asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Herr Schäfer replied. ‘Doctor Reinhardt is acquainted with your file, and she is a sympathetic woman. She will only need to make certain that you understand the choice you are making and that it is a choice you have given its due consideration. And you must understand that you are free to change your mind at any point. It is never too late to turn back from this path you are walking.’

  Thank you, Mr Peterson wrote. My mind is set.

  Herr Schäfer nodded. ‘Yes, of course. But you understand, I’m sure, why we have to be very clear on this point. You will be asked the same questions many times, today, tomorrow and the next day.’

  I understand. What happens once the doctor has agreed to write a prescription?

  ‘After that, we will be free to proceed the following day. You will sign an authorization for a member of our staff to pick up the prescription on your behalf, and then we will take care of everything. We have a comfortable, private house just outside of the city where you will be met by two of our escorts. They are very experienced and will be able to assist you at every stage of the process. The only thing they cannot help with is the final administering of the medication. They will be present, but the final action that ends your life must be your own. And you must decide when it is time to do this. Our staff will not prompt you. They will not put pressure on you in any way.’

  What about Alex?

  ‘Alex can be there the whole time if that’s what you both want. Our experience has shown that usually it is a great comfort for the friends and family to be there at the end – in fact it is a comfort for everyone involved. But again this is your decision to make.’

  I meant afterwards. What will happen to Alex afterwards?

  ‘Our staff will take good care of him. They have lots of experience in this area. We always have two escorts present so that one can stay with the family while the other deals with the practicalities. The coroner and the police will have to be contacted, as is the case in all suicides, but Alex will not be required to speak with them. Our testimony and the papers you will have signed will be sufficient evidence that everything was done in proper accordance with the law. Don’t worry: we make the protection of our clients and their loved ones our first priority.’

  Thank you, Mr Peterson wrote. That’s what I needed to know.

  This was the point at which I asked Herr Schäfer how many people he’d helped to die. A quick calculation told me that it translated to approximately one person every four days.

  ‘Yes, that sounds correct,’ Herr Schäfer confirmed.

  You’re running an efficient business, Mr Peterson wrote.

  ‘I hope I am to take this as a compliment?’ Herr Schäfer asked.

  Mr Peterson nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ Herr Schäfer said. ‘You should know that many people would not mean that as a compliment. They think, rather strangely, that there should not be this efficiency in the death business – that it shows a lack of compassion. But I hope you can see that this is not the case. Let me put it this way: at your funeral, would you rather have the pall-bearer who keeps a steady hand or the one who is so overcome by grief that he drops the coffin?’ />
  Mr Peterson nodded. Herr Schäfer’s eyes remained serious throughout.

  ‘Good, so I think we are in agreement. We tolerate a certain amount of incompetence in our politicians and public servants, but we should not tolerate it in the death business.

  ‘But now, unless you have any more questions, perhaps we should bring our meeting to a close? Your time is, after all, precious. Have you thought about how you are going to spend the hours between your appointments?’

  ‘We’re going to take a look around Zurich,’ I said.

  Herr Schäfer nodded. ‘Good. It is a city of many charms. And what about tomorrow evening? Do you have plans for dinner? There are many excellent restaurants I can recommend to you if that is something you would like? Alternatively, I cook a rather good boeuf bourguignon and would be happy to offer you my personal hospitality.’

  I looked at Mr Peterson. He shrugged. He had a kind of wry smile on his face. I shrugged too. ‘We’d like to accept your offer,’ I said, ‘but you’ll have to provide us with good directions. Unfortunately, we don’t have satnav.’

  We managed to get all around Zurich without really doing anything in particular. We wandered through the Altstadt, looking at a multitude of squares and churches and clock faces. We crossed and recrossed the Limmat about half a dozen times. I wheeled Mr Peterson on and off the tram and we hunted down the Opernhaus and the Rathaus and the Kunsthaus and the house on Unionstrasse where Einstein had lived as a student. There was a small plaque next to the door, which read: ‘Hier wohnte von 1896–1900 der grosse Physiker und Friedensfreund Albert Einstein.’

  I translated this for Mr Peterson as follows: ‘Here lived from 1896 to 1900 the great physicist and friend of peace Albert Einstein.’

  Friend of peace? Mr Peterson queried.

  ‘Friedensfreund,’ I said. ‘I think that’s an accurate translation. Freund is definitely “friend” and I seem to remember that Frieden is “peace”.’

  Pacifist? Mr Peterson suggested.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s a better translation,’ I conceded.