A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  “Where will you go now?” Reina wanted to know. “Do you have any plans?”

  I wasn’t showing enough spirit to reassure her that she was well within her rights to give a tenant six weeks’ notice to vacate. I should have been vigorous and cheerful. She would have known exactly how to respond.

  “I have to get started on the nursery,” she reminded me. “I can’t have Monya thinking that it won’t be done.”

  “I have friends,” I pointed out, trying to be dignified.

  My former landlady gave me a hard, grateful hug. It was not the least bit grandmotherly.

  “WHY DON’T YOU move in here?” Fiona suggested. It made perfect sense. “My back is in really bad shape right now, and that other girl . . . well. I think she got into some goddess-y stuff when she was living in Sebastopol. D’you know what I mean? She’s been giving me a bit of the fishy eye.”

  She gazed off into the long-legged weeds as she said this, as if she preferred to be absent while unpleasant inferences were being made. I felt so much more tolerant than that other part-time girl; or, more to the point, as if my ability to endure had been taken up and noticed. So I left the hardwood marble fantasy of Foxglove. I packed my bright red suitcase full of yellow German volumes and moved into the sewing room, in the back of a house where a woman of enormous appetite lay thinking only of her death.

  IT WAS LIKE she was waiting for me to get there. It did not occur to me at the time that Mariana Blanchefleur could have been made to wait. But then, I never really knew the dying woman, with her name like a troubadour’s love and the scar on the left side of her chest where the breast used to be. I just happened to be there as the life was fighting its way out of her body. I only knew her like a squatter knows the layout of a house, with special attention to exits and weaknesses.

  If I had known her, I don’t think I would have liked her. She had a commanding, performative quality that tugged on several memories but failed to evoke any pleasant feelings of nostalgia. She would fix her eyes on her captive—and that’s what it felt like, when she told a story—like she needed, right now, to inflict this particular narrative on me and no one else.

  Not that they were boring stories. But listening to them was a little like being force-fed a fine meal in a small room with no windows. For example: when she was eighteen years old, she worked as an interpreter on an American air force base in Germany. Her name at that time was Nicki, because her boss had very particular ideas about what was American and what was not. So a woman whose name was infused with a long and ancient history was christened with a nickname that wasn’t short for anything: not Nicola, not Veronica, not Dominique or Annika. She was Nicki, because a spunky female military contractor thought it sounded American in 1943.

  Mariana always began the tale of how she got her alias by explaining why she’d never reveal that boss’ name. “I will not tell you,” she’d declare, as if she saw me preparing to make a record of it, “because she was sleeping with a priest!” Every time she broke the news, she watched me very closely, as if she could find out who I really was by how I responded. I always feel like people are digging into me when they examine me with such open shrewdness, as if they don’t know that I can see them, too.

  Fiona, on the other hand, seemed to think it would be vulgar to show that she was paying attention to anyone, ever. When I arrived at Mariana’s Hof with my suitcase and my books, Fiona was lounging on the bed she had assigned me. She looked like she’d been there some time, gazing in perplexity at a point on the opposite wall. I was embarrassed by the stains on the mattress, though I hadn’t even used it and no one could attribute them to me.

  “I haven’t used that mattress,” I said. I frowned at it, as if I found it highly indiscreet.

  “That information isn’t really useful to me,” Fiona murmured coolly.

  And then, in one of those moments that people spend the rest of their lives trying to explain, I was seized with the absolute conviction that I must not ever, under any circumstances, be honest with Fiona. It was a certainty that slipped over me like a net, like a chain link fence. I would guard my thoughts and feelings like a silent junkyard dog, slinking and grinning and always unsure. It was a terrible submission to a haughty, skinny woman who referred to a living human being as His Holiness; who believed that the inner leaves of a head of lettuce cause cancer; and who did not even know that the past participle of the verb “to lie” has nothing to do with the present.

  As I embarked on my campaign of secrecy with this dangerous, trivial woman, I had the sense of something slow and irretrievable beginning to move. The moment I became a liar, I began to feel like I was always running downhill, losing my footing; that the only way to avoid falling was to keep running faster. It enhanced my sense of myself as agile, leaping from rock to rock, missing ditches, dodging trees. If I was not in control of my situation, at least I could take it as it came, with grace and wit and what my mother might refer to as a certain je ne sais quoi.

  I began to arrange my books, as if I simply could not rest until I’d brought some order to my surroundings.

  “I’d like to share something with you,” said the woman who was preventing me from lying down on my bed. “Is it okay if I do that.”

  She looked at me as if securing my consent might be of passing interest to her. I remembered that in the old demon stories I used to read as a wholesome alternative to watching television, vampires could never enter a mortal’s home without permission. I do not recall what measure of consent, if any, was necessary from those who had no home except the one the demon offered.

  “Of course,” I said, abandoning any pretense at bringing order to a room that was not, after all, my own.

  “Mariana hasn’t taken any food today,” she said evenly. I noticed that she had begun to say “Mariana” in a solemn, worshipful tone, the way she said “His Holiness.”

  “Well,” I began, nudging forward with extreme caution, “there have been a few days like that. Haven’t there?”

  She took a moment to remind herself that I couldn’t help it if I lacked a few refinements. “This is it, Isobel. She’s told me her intention. I don’t think you know this, but I have a real connection with her. I’ve been here a year and a half, and we’ve developed quite a bond. When I first got here, she was wearing this awful plaid night dress and there was all this chaos going on, the television at top volume and dogs running in and out and people shouting at one another. I’ve really worked with her. I don’t think you understand what that means. I called Reuben and I told him, I’m just in pain all the time. We’ve got to do something about this. So he gave me permission to try the headphones, so I wouldn’t have to hear that dreadful television all the time, and I worked hard. I worked really hard, to bring the level of this place up. I worked my ass off.” The abrupt vulgarity was stabbed into the monologue with what sounded like reckless delight.

  “I don’t think you know how bad my back is,” she went on, beginning to sound rather fierce; “but I worked terribly hard. I said, I can’t live here if there’s not going to be peace and quiet. I think Mariana wanted that, too,” she added, like a woman who is ready with her evidence. “People don’t like to live like that, in squalor and, and, I don’t know, in chaos. I focused on nutrition,” she went on, as if I’d asked her to enumerate the things she’d done for the woman who lay before the television, watching manatees at play in a vast and photogenic sea. “I don’t think I’ve told you this, but that’s one of the ways we express our intention at the Center. It’s really quite powerful. I’ve weaned her, very gradually, you know, off those awful anti-depressants. The ones that just flatten you. I have some very strong feelings about that. I’d like to talk to you more about it later. I’ve brought her back from a lot of confusion and anger and I really do think there might still be time for some breakthroughs.” Her eyes were sparkling with such intensity they could have been the headlights on the spaceship in her brain.

  In the popular imagining of t
he brain’s topography, there are mountains and valleys and culverts; cities that light up in the night-time of our consciousness. One of these features is the uncanny valley, a scary little sweet spot tucked into the shadow of those two very similar neighbors, the mountains called empathy and revulsion. The effect of that valley is what people feel in the presence of clowns, androids, and human beings who have something terribly wrong with them. I began to feel very gentle toward Fiona Jones.

  “Has the hospice nurse been here yet?” I asked, as if the dying could not possibly begin without official sanction.

  “The nurse was here,” Fiona admitted. “She checked her vitals. So”—she flashed an experimental, conspiratorial grin—“we know she’s not dead yet. Right? But tomorrow”—and now she became grave again—“the spiritual care advisor is going to pay us a visit. I guess that’s what they call the chaplain, or the vicar, or whatever.” Again, I caught a flash of something experimental, a probe for anything with a molecular structure resembling sympathy. “His name is Randall,” she went on, with a peculiar trancelike calm that was beginning to look a lot like its exact opposite. “I think he just wants to make sure we’re not completely crazy out here in the woods, all by ourselves.” She tossed off this possibility with a breeziness that could only mean it was tormenting her. “I think he’ll be impressed.”

  She Tells it One More Time

  THE SPIRITUAL CARE advisor from hospice was not impressed. He was enraptured. Mariana was a raconteur, remember: theatrical and war-torn, with a damned good story to tell. Fiona smiled like a stage mum as the dying woman told her story, one last time.

  Randall was a tall, soft-bellied man. He had an air of gentleness so elaborate, I thought he must know what it was to frighten someone who was dying; someone who would never understand that he was only living; only shedding particles of excess life like all of us who have more strength than we can save.

  “I built this house,” Mariana began, when Randall had seated himself with the tenderest possible regard for the dying woman’s furniture. “I have lived here twenty-seven years. Which is a long time. Even when you are eighty-something years old.”

  Randall nodded with more kindness than anyone has ever brought to bear on such complete neutrality of agreement. Something about him seemed to expand. And then he said softly, without a trace of malice or sadness, “And it’s the house where you’re going to die.”

  The old lady looked startled, but only for the briefest spasm of her helpless claws on the comforter that no longer comforted. She was the boldest thing I ever saw.

  “You wanted to know my spiritual history,” she began.

  Anyone could see that she was gathering the remnants of a strength that had once been unstoppable. It was like the rumble of subterranean forces, slowly bringing sightless eyes to bear on one last telling of a story that was almost done.

  “I was born in Germany, in a lovely little country place. My mother Carlota was not French, but because her maiden name was Blanchefleur, she loved to have everything—so.” She covered this inadequate description with one of the expressive gestures that will always be part of an immigrant’s vocabulary.

  “Mama wanted her home to be a salon,” she explained, charming the spiritual care advisor as she examined him with the secular eyes of a hawker at a fair. “She always had dancers and painters at our house—sometimes for months. And there was always an uproar. Always, with artists. But my father: my father whose name was Rudolf—much too much like Adolf, so he always went by Rudy, after the war. But he was very German. He was a von, which means, you know, sehr arisotokratisch.” She gave a thin ironic smile to let everyone know this simple cognate had not left her aged mind. “He said, to Mama’s favorite painter (he was a pet of hers. Ladies did that in those days): if you are going to be here, drinking my wine, you can work. So he made him paint portraits of my mother and me.” She drew our attention to a pair of highly competent likenesses, one of a simpering blond child and another of a woman with luminous skin, gazing thoughtfully at something lovely, just outside the frame. She looked exactly like the gentle Francophile wife of a German country squire.

  “When I went to work for the Americans, I used my mother’s maiden name, because, well!” And she allowed a great angry laugh to rumble up from her tremendous depths. “I do not think she would have minded,” she declared, enunciating the conditional perfect form with the deftness that belongs to scrupulous practice, not natural-born talent.

  “She died when I was eight years old. Carlota, like the Empress.” She flashed the ghost of a grin at Randall from hospice, to see if he knew which German-speaking Empress she meant; if he was ready, perhaps, to joke with her about the loneliness of exile in a country far warmer than where she was born. But he only made a sympathetic noise, which seemed to disappoint her.

  “Yes. Well,” she replied, briskly, as if he should have known better than to comment on a linear narrative with sympathetic noises. “She missed the war. Not the first war, you understand. ‘The war to end all wars.’ Oh, no! She missed the war. Oh, God! Hitler! Worse than, who is this? In Libya? Gaddafi,” she breathed. “Only let me cut off his head. Oh, God. And why? What for? Let me tell you something. My father was in Adolf’s army. My father, who was only strict with painters. And me, because I was so much older than my sister. But by German standards, let me tell you, he was most indulgent. Most indulgent. But let me tell you something now. He was a widower. With two little girls. So they were very good to him, considering they were Nazis.” This was a joke, but nobody laughed. It may have been kinder, in that moment, to choke out a laugh at the goodness of Nazis. “He only marched around and around in his uniform, looking very fierce, and I want you to know something.” Her strength was leaving her, and she paused as she surveyed the terrain before her.

  “He used to take us into the woods. Germans are always walking in the woods, you see, so no one would think. And he led us deep into the woods, and he explained things to us, very quietly. So no one would hear, because if they did—” she drew a close-clipped nail across her throat. “He wanted us to know they were all murderers, that no one had a right. And soon the whole world would know, and we should never be ashamed, because we knew, too.”

  Randall from hospice was utterly transfixed.

  “And so I went to work for the Americans.” She was hauling herself along now, rushing past the sights along the way, the unnamed boss who was sleeping with a priest, the horse that kicked her when she was thirteen, her habit of always riding coach when she traveled so she could pick up the local language.

  “I married very young, and I was disappointed in love.” She said it like it was a formal diagnosis; but she did not tell this kind, soft-bellied man that her husband had his teenaged bride committed to an insane asylum in Nazi Germany. I began to believe that I knew her, because I knew so many biographical details that Randall who was not a priest did not.

  “So I came to America.” She made it sound like it was a logical sequence of events. “It was easy, because I worked as an interpreter for so many years. I married again. Another disappointment. But I had two sons, and they are both married now. I made my younger son marry that girl . . . Kathy, I think her name is. I said, do you like her? And he said, yes, I do. So I said, well, let’s get you married. And now he has someone to take care of him. So, I feel my work is done. I have never done anyone any harm.”

  She watched her visitor like he was a customs official, some petty bureaucrat she had to convince in order to get on with her man-chasing, her languages, her appetites and trying to forget. She had left out quite a lot; but she showed no sign of disappointment, only the anticipatory contentment of someone who has always had her passport stamped.

  “What a life you’ve led,” Randall finally managed.

  “Yes.” The lady laughed shortly. “It has been a life. A very long life.”

  “Do you feel you’ve left anything undone?” Randall inquired. His compassion was almost indifferent.


  “I have two good sons. They are both married. They are not criminals.” Even with her fading powers, she was gauging her audience and keeping him enthralled. “This house,” she relented, judging that he would not be satisfied without some minor misery. “I built it. But it is not a home.” At sundown, when she grew restless and confused, she always spoke of going home. The metaphors of death are unsubtle in the extreme.

  “But it is the house you will die in,” Randall persisted, with the soft persistence of someone determined to lead a stranger to the very banks of the river Styx and urge her into the boat.

  “Yes.” The dying woman looked around and sighed, as if this were a matter of unfortunate décor and there was nothing to be done about it now. “I got that beautiful bathtub put in,” she said suddenly. “And now I am the only one who cannot use it.” She looked at Fiona and me with good-natured hostility. It was a badly-kept secret that we’d been using her bathtub while she lay in the unsatisfying cleanliness of twice-weekly sponge baths.

  Randall sat patiently, alert and soft and very much alive. I thought of all the thousands of corpuscles swarming like red-hot ants through a living person’s body; of the pumps like oil wells, constantly pumping away at the juices that never stop squirting through an intricate system of canals and irrigation ditches. It struck me then that there was something, not quite obscene, but highly inappropriate, about all this business of being alive; all this industrious clench and release; this self-perpetuating frenzy that sends us hurtling along no matter what the needless horror.

  Mariana plucked at the comforter, as if its freshly laundered warmth had suddenly become impossible to endure. Her eyes wandered, as if she were in search of an answer to a question she’d forgotten. Randall stood with heavy-bodied grace.