“I’m a large woman, Klaus. It’s a fact.”
“Yes, well—I asked you about yourself. You said you were from Vancouver, and that you were the loneliest girl in the world. You said you were so tired of being lonely. You said that your favourite thing was to enter the houses of strangers and sit there and do nothing—just sit in their houses. I thought that was the saddest thing I’d ever heard.”
I bit my upper lip.
“You were kind of crazy, and it was this side of you I don’t think people see very often. Do you drink?”
Rainer raised an eyebrow at this question, but I knew what Klaus was driving at. “No, I don’t. Because you know exactly what happens to me if I do.”
“Okay. So you were being somewhat wild, and you asked me to kiss you, so I did. You said it was your first kiss ever, and I felt happy that I could be such a nice memory for someone. But then you wanted to go beyond kissing, and we were on the roof, and the Colosseum was right there, and we were in Rome, and—we did what we did. It was nice. I think you had a good time. It wasn’t my first time, but I wish it was. It was romantic. I’m sorry you don’t remember it.”
“So am I.”
There was nothing more to say on the matter. It was case closed, both for me and for Rainer. Of all things, I yawned, breaking the silence. I apologized to the men. “Sorry, it’s not you. It’s fallout from that godawful airport in Frankfurt.”
Klaus asked, “You were caught in that too?”
“You might say so.”
It turned out Klaus was one of the two million or so people who were inconvenienced when Frankfurt’s airport discovered the space junk in my suitcase. He’d been waiting to pick up his mother, who was routing through Frankfurt on her way back from a botanical expedition in Iceland—lichens and moss. Klaus had driven back to the airport three times before her flight came in.
He looked at my face and Rainer’s, and knew something larger had happened than merely being stuck at an airport. So we told him about the meteorite and everything that followed. Klaus was horrified. He’s a dentist—he knows about alpha, beta and gamma rays. “The radiation—it could have been toxic. What numbers did they give you? What sort of documentation?”
“None.”
“That’s not possible. They must have given you something.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Klaus looked at Rainer. “This is astonishing. Who can I call to locate numbers on this?”
Rainer agreed, and the two men then went through indexes and computer files and compiled a list of names and numbers. As they did, I went into a happy trance, knowing that there wasn’t just crap parked away in my subconscious, but also a big and happy memory somewhere too.
When the men had what they needed, they had to snap me out of my trance. “Yes—hello—”
Rainer said, “I’ll drive you back to your hotel, Liz.”
I suddenly went into a panic. I was going to be alone and lonely in a suite of rooms in a foreign city. My Viennese mission had been accomplished, and I was merely me again, no other mysteries hidden within, and with nothing but my condo and Landover Communication Systems awaiting my return.
Klaus said, “Let me take you to dinner tonight, Liz. It would make me happy.”
I said yes, and the panic stopped.
* * *
When I came out of the bathroom and found Jeremy dead, I sat on a chair beside the bed that I’d bought him the month before. I held his hand, looked at his face and made a squeaking noise. I thought to myself, Imagine that—somebody is making a squeaking noise. Outside the window lay a boring, overcast mid-morning—a Tuesday. I heard the sounds of other people’s lives continuing as always, and I felt as if I were from another galaxy. I thought of bodies, and I remembered Father’s memorial service. He’d been cremated, so there’d been no body to contemplate. His ashes arrived from Honolulu in a courier’s box, and that seemed so unfair, not to see the body first. I remembered how I once enjoyed looking at dead bodies on TV. No more of that for me.
I knew I had to phone somebody, but who? William, Nancy and the kids were in Disneyland. Leslie and her family were in Disney World. Mother wasn’t in when I called, so in the end I phoned Dr. Tyson, and she arranged for the bureaucratic things—taking Jeremy away, and the paperwork.
On hanging up, I went to sit beside Jeremy again. I have to say that I felt like a space alien in a little UFO hovering about a foot over the shoulder of this woman called Liz. I sat for about an hour, looking at Jeremy amid his still life of empty pill bottles, uneaten plastic tubs of rocky road pudding, a stack of Modern Farmer magazines, piles of blankets, two bedpans, a TV remote control, a feeding machine—and then the ambulance arrived and took him away. Once he was gone, the sensation of detachment fled. I was fully me again, and I looked around my condo at The World’s Emptiest Room and I knew I had to escape. I grabbed a white plastic shopping bag and stuffed it with a few bathroom things, a dress and some shirts, and drove to Mother’s. She was returning from grocery shopping. As I pulled in, she knew what was up.
Mother’s way of coping with things is to find some sort of medium-sized task and then hang on to it for dear life, which in this case was Jeremy’s funeral service. It helped her through Father’s death, and would allow her to cope with this too. The rest of the family wasn’t slated to return from their Sunbelt pleasure domes until after Christmas. Mother, on the phone, was a lioness: “Your nephew, my grandson, is not going to sit in a deep-freeze just so you and Leslie can stand in line for Magic Mountain or Tinkerbell’s frigging Jacuzzi. They can stay, but you, William, you, Leslie, are coming home for this. And yes, your sister will pay.” In the end, Leslie and William returned for the service, on December 27.
Mother arranged the funeral and for the obituary notice in the Vancouver Sun. We both wondered whom this notice might flush out—possibly some of Jeremy’s people from his earlier lives, some foster family members. We would have called Kayla from Social Services, but they were closed.
Mother bought a casket that was like some sort of dying pimp’s final wish: a metal-flaked maroon job with oak mouldings, chrome grilles, leather trim and a hood ornament. It was a kind gesture, if an odd one. “At your birthday party last month I was drinking red wine, and he said what a pretty colour it made with the kitchen lights shining through it. So I wanted to find one in that colour. I think it’s quite close.” And it was.
Christmas didn’t happen that year. No point. On Boxing Day, I was thawing a little and getting a better grasp on things. Nonetheless, the thought of my condo made my head go black. Mother had to go in and fetch my things, which irked her. We were approaching the condo in Mother’s car when she entered her sermon mode: “You know, Elizabeth, there’s much to be said for simply hanging in there. Being in your own place will make you feel slightly normal again.”
“I don’t want to feel normal. And my place gives me the creeps. Don’t even park on the same street.”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
Mother turned left onto my street, and the sight of my building made my stomach clench.
“Elizabeth, come up and help me get your things.”
“No.”
“As usual, I’ll have to be the one to get things done.”
“Okay, Mother, you do that.” I stayed in the car and glared into the rhododendron shrubs across the street, where a marmalade cat was slinking toward unknown prey.
My apartment reminded me of everything I didn’t want my life to be. I thought back to the time when I had a twin bed, not a queen or king. What sort of message would that have sent out to anybody, should I ever have brought anybody home?
I was sitting there thinking of this advice from my dead son when Mother rapped on the window. “I’m going to return your place to normal.”
“What?”
“Somebody has to do it.”
“Why now?”
“Because it’s something to do, and if I leave it to you, it won’t happen.”
“I don’t care.”
Mother was trying hard not to lose it. “I’m going to be here for several hours, so either sit in the car or do what you will.”
She burned back into the building. I stepped out of the car, walked down the block and took a bus to Mother’s.
It doesn’t take brains to infer that my fear of my apartment was, in reality, a fear of being lonely again. I’d entirely forgotten about loneliness until Jeremy’s body was removed. I’d forgotten the thing I detest more than anything, the bile taste in my throat when I realize that it’s nearing dinner and I have no evening plans. I’d also forgotten waking up on Saturday morning and realizing that I have two days to kill until work begins—the cold little chink of light between the curtain and the window frame that tells me I have no life. No matter how hard I tried coping—or how well I sometimes seemed to be doing—loneliness was still the dominant mood that tinted and diminished everything.
And I was aging.
I suspect that all human beings have a point where they realize that what they have is the most they’re ever going to have, be it love, money or power. You have to make peace with who you are, and what you’ve become. I’d thought that a decision to choose peace instead of predictability was a simple bookkeeping decision that would easily reconcile me with my life. That was foolish. What it took was a taste of life on the other side of the mirror, with Jeremy, caring and being cared for. During his illness I told myself that his death was still a long way away, so loneliness wasn’t something I had to deal with. What was I thinking? What sort of sicko person would find hope in the suffering of somebody else? Was I no better than Donna?
As I walked to the bus stop, I felt weak and sick, missing Jeremy and dreading the prospect of three more decades alone here on earth. I wanted the bus doors to open and the bus to fall down a deep hole in the earth where it would pancake into oblivion.
When I got back to Mother’s, all I felt was relief that I was in a place where there would now be two people living, not one. How had she managed all these years on her own? She never seemed to care one way or the other. I mulled this over and felt even worse. But no—with Mother, what you see is all there is.
She walked in the door around seven, saying, “All done.”
“How ‘all’ do you mean?”
“Everything. I even had your landlord move the bed down into the storage locker along with Jeremy’s things. I stuck anything medical in a U-Haul box and dropped it off at the hospital. To walk in, you’d never know there’d been another person in there all this time but you.”
* * *
“That must have felt awful.”
“Probably the worst thing she could have said to me at that moment.”
Klaus and I were walking beside a body of water containing swans. In Europe one never knows if water is a lake, a canal, a river, a pond, or some other thing we don’t have in North America. It was sunny out, as glorious as a 1968 Come Visit Vienna! pamphlet.
“Was the funeral the next day?”
“It was.”
“What was that like?”
“A disaster.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“No, I mean it was literally a disaster. We thought it was only going to be maybe five or six people at the service—us, The Dwarf and an old girlfriend of Jeremy’s, Jane. Yet when we arrived, there were about six other trashy-looking people already in the pews—three married couples, older, dressed in a way that seemed a bit … agricultural.
“We didn’t know if they were Jeremy’s foster parents or what, so we had to ask, which was awkward, and it turned out they were foster parents, and all I could do was stand there and hate them. I suppose the women were nice enough, and it was hard to imagine them being as grim as Jeremy had made them out to be, but the husbands were total jerks. I mean, these people knew each other.
“The men kept on talking and whispering throughout the service, and when we went to the cemetery, they continued talking, even while the minister was speaking. It was the end of December and the rain was pounding down like iron rods, and the dirt surrounding the casket was chocolate milk. My role in the service was to sing, so I did ‘Amazing Grace’ backwards. The guys snickered, so William asked them to be quiet, and they gave him louder, trashier snickering. William asked them again to be quiet, and they became huffy, like at closing time at a cocktail bar. Then one of the guys slipped and fell into the grave. He landed on his back.”
“Gott!”
“It was really something. An ornament on the casket handle punctured his lung—you didn’t have to be a genius to tell. Jane phoned 911, and the wife of the guy jumped into the hole along with Leslie. Leslie used to hand out Band-Aids for the ski team, so she got to play nurse, and she was shouting, ‘Don’t move him! If you do, then the handle will come out and let in dirt, his lung will collapse and he won’t be able to breathe.’ She was making things much worse.
“I’d stopped singing, of course, and the mud filled the grave’s bottom like pig slops. It reminded me of the end of a horror movie when the dead emerge cackling from beneath the tombstones. William promptly landed in a fight with one of the two other guys, I don’t even know what over. The buddy kept goading them on, so Mother went over to try to stop it, and as she approached them, she bumped into the buddy and he went into the grave too.”
“Did your mother push him?”
“I’ll never know.”
“What happened next?”
“There were tears and … it was so ugly. Jeremy would have loved it.”
“Did it go to the courts?”
“No. It was all just accident—rudeness and human stupidity.”
“What happened after the funeral?”
“William and Leslie returned to their respective Disneyplaces, and I moved into Mother’s.”
“You couldn’t go back to your apartment, could you?”
“No.”
“That seems reasonable.”
It was strange strolling through this slice of urban perfection, thinking about my little cube on the other end of the world. So many shop windows bursting with beauty and seduction and chocolates.
Klaus asked, “What then?”
“The Dwarf To Whom I Report gave me my job back, so I had my days filled. I was the office’s official object of pity for a few weeks, but I soon lost that status. Donna had quit by then, so I didn’t have to deal with her. It took me three months to be able to go back into my condo, and even then I had to go with William. He went in before me to turn on the lights, and then called me in.”
“And?”
“I walked around, but I wouldn’t touch anything. The air was stale and too hot—the heat was on high and I never lowered it, I wanted to bake something bad from the rooms. I grabbed a few things I needed—pantyhose, blouses and cosmetics—and then bolted. William and I went there every day for weeks, until I was able to stay there the night and make peace with my fate. It took almost a year before going home stopped giving me the creeps. It’s been six years since then.”
* * *
What struck me with Klaus was how I went from one man in my life who’d lost his guiding visions to another suffering the same fate. “Klaus, you mean you’d never consider reverting to the man you were before this new OCD-controlling pill?”
Klaus seemed startled by the question. “Good God, no.”
“Why not?” We were at our third meal. That’s all people in Vienna seem to do—eat, and put in time between meals. That’s not a complaint. I had some time on my hands to kill until Dr. Vogel forwarded all of the meteorite radiation data from Germany.
“Liz, I look at the man who I was even a month ago and I am depressed and sick to my soul.”
Klaus was eating thymus glands (yes, sweetbreads) in a rooftop restaurant that was well concealed from anybody non-Austrian. It was a young and warm night, and the seating area was lit by hundreds of little white Christmas lights that covered the trees and the ai
r above us.
Klaus said, “Because of my obsessive disorder, I never had a proper girlfriend, let alone a wife. Because of it, I never made long-lasting friendships. I feel like I’m starting my life over from the beginning.”
“It can’t be as extreme as all that.”
He lowered his fork. “As of today, what do I have in my life?” He flashed me his winning smile. “Teeth. Thousands of teeth every day. The good thing about teeth is that they kept me sane. You’ve heard of people with Tourette’s syndrome? Some of them become doctors and perform twelve-hour surgeries, but the moment they take off the gloves, the fucks and shits start right up. A man’s life is thrown away because of too much or too little of some stupid molecule in his frontal cortex or his hypothalamus. Molecules. That’s all it ever was—molecules.”
I asked, “What was it you felt was so important to tell all these women in the street?”
“Those poor women. Ach—the embarrassment. I’d buy them all flowers and thank-you cards, but they’d take it the wrong way. They should all be allowed to boot me in the testicles. I deserve it.”
“Klaus, be reasonable. You couldn’t control yourself. Yes, you did all that crazy stuff, but at the same time it wasn’t you.”
“I accept no excuses.”
“If I were you, I’d blame all those Freudian therapists who sucked in your money for all those years. I’m shocked that not once in all that time did they send you to a certified psychiatrist who could prescribe medications.”
“Liz, Vienna has much history invested in Freudian—”
“Klaus, shut up. Just shut up.” I was suddenly in a foul mood. Me, having dinner with the handsomest man in Europe at a chic rooftop restaurant, and I was in a foul mood. “You never said what it was that was so important that you had to badger all of those women.”
Eleanor Rigby (v5) (epub) Page 20