The Withdrawal Method

by Pasha Malla

  "Why do they call it a knife, anyway? It's not a knife, exactly, is it?"

  "No, they -" She collapses, coughing. I spring out of my chair to help her but end up just sort of hovering while she hacks and retches. When it's over, she picks her sentence up where she left it. "do it with a laser sort of thing. You don't feel any pain or anything, and you're usually back to normal within a day. If I was healthy enough I wouldn't even have to stay over. There's some literature there on the side table. Give it a read if you're interested."

  My cellphone rings as I pick up one of the pamphlets. It's Giselle. I hit Silence and pocket the phone. "Work," I say.

  "On a Saturday?"

  "Yeah, Sonya needs me to come in to cover someone's shift tomorrow. And she knows you're her. It's retarded. I should fucking quit."

  "I'm 'her'? Who's her?"

  "Here."

  "You said her."

  "No I didn't. Here."

  Lee waves the argument away. "You're not allowed cellphones in the hospital anyway."

  "It's fine."

  "It's not. It messes with the machinery."

  "How?"

  "I don't know, it just does."

  I pick up the newspaper lying at the foot of her bed. She's done about half the crossword.

  "Don't do any clues," she says. "I'm going to do it."

  "I wasn't."

  "Yeah, right. You always come in here and do them."

  "Since when? I hate crossword puzzles."

  "You're always doing them. You always come in here and wreck it."

  She gets to coughing again. I watch her and try to summon some inkling of compassion, but I can't. All I feel is impatient. I think about waking up that morning in Giselle's bed feeling no guilt, just inconvenienced at having to come to the hospital. When Lee's done coughing I sit there saying nothing. I want to leave.

  "Can you get me a coffee?" she says.

  "Are you supposed to have coffee?"

  "I always have coffee. Just get me one. And don't put cream in it this time; you always put too much in. Just bring me a creamer and let me do it."

  I look at her for a minute: the bald head, the gaunt face, the wreck of a body. But in the eyes is something very much alive. It's anger - not anger at me, specifically; I just happen to be in its path. Lee's not supposed to have coffee, especially less than twenty-four hours before surgery. She knows it and she knows I know it. Her wanting one now is not about coffee. She's letting me know she's given up, she's letting go. She doesn't care any more. And she wants me to be complicit in that.

  So I get up and go get Lee a coffee.

  "YOU REMEMBER Buster?" I ask Giselle that evening on the phone.

  "Oh, right - your parents' dog? You brought him round once. He was cute."

  "Yeah. We had to put him down last year."

  "Aw."

  "He was about sixteen. By the end he got to the point where he was pissing himself, falling down the stairs. So after like six months of him getting worse and worse eventually my mom decided it was time to put the poor guy down - which was, you know, pretty sad. But I guess she let him into the backyard to take a shit before the appointment and he just went for it, bounding around like a puppy. Like,'Hey, don't kill me! Look, I'm still happy, I can have a good time!"'

  I trail off then, trying to remember where this story came from or where it might lead. I'm just lying there on the couch, Lee's Gamma Knife pamphlet unfolded on my chest. "But, you know," I say, "she took him in anyway. My mom's a heartless bitch like that."

  Giselle laughs. "I never met your mom, I don't think."

  "She'd like you," I say, and then actually wonder if she would. She never liked Lee.

  Giselle's quiet. Then, "I want to see you," she says.

  "Yeah. Me too."

  "I'll come over."

  I look around the apartment, at the tastefully framed art, the symmetrical placement of furniture, the knick-knacks. Even if I took the photos of Lee and her family down, it'd be obvious I didn't live here alone. This isn't a single guy's place. "That's okay. Let me come see you," I say.

  "Okay."

  "Should I come now?"

  "Yeah, hurry," says Giselle, and I do.

  "I'LL COME BY right after work, okay? It sucks I got called in."

  "Hey, someone's got to bring home the bacon," Lee says. But then there's only breathing on the other end of the line, hollow and raspy. She doesn't say anything else.

  I hang up the phone and Sonya's standing there staring at me. She's been managing the store since well before I started, a trundling garbage truck of a woman who thinks she's worldly because she works in an airport, despite never actually having been anywhere herself.

  "How's Lee?" asks Sonya.

  "Oh, you know. Same."

  "Sorry, Pasha."

  I try to make my face look however it's supposed to. "Thanks," I say.

  It's been months since I worked a Sunday. I've forgotten how quiet the terminal gets. The few customers we get are just trying to kill time before their flights, idly browsing the hardcover bestsellers, the magazine racks, the Sudoku books, the travel guides, rarely buying anything. We carry this series of classics bound in fake leather that always draws interest (although few sales). They're classy-looking editions, but expensive, and printed on paper that reminds me of Bibles.

  Burying my face in anything is more appealing than dealing with Sonya, so I join the browsers. After a quick pass down the newspaper aisle, in the fiction section I've exhausted most of our selection (from Albom to Sheldon) when I notice one of those fake leather classics called Adventures in the Skin Trade. It's up on the top shelf and definitely not one I've seen before.

  I reach up for it, but stop. My hand sort of hovers there over the spine while I imagine this skin trade business: people emerging from their outer casings, sloughing them off into rubbery piles at their feet, then donning new ones and heading out into the world. I don't take the book down. Back at the register, Sonya looks at me funny, but her face quickly folds into some puppy-eyed approximation of sympathy.

  "You doing okay, bud?" she says, and wraps one of those flabby arms around my shoulder. A customer looks awkwardly up from the copy of Time he's reading, then back down at the page. Sonya's so close I can smell the cat odour on her. "Need a hug?" she says and, before I can respond, swallows me into one.

  "WHO'S LEE?"

  Giselle and I have just got our food when this happens. It's like she's pulled a severed head from underneath the table and dumped it onto my plate.

  "Lee," I say. I don't know what is expected of me. I wait.

  Except Giselle is waiting too.

  "Lee is my girlfriend."

  Across the table, Giselle sits staring at me with a clump of salad on the end of her fork. Elsewhere around the restaurant is the tinkle of silverware, the burble of conversation. But between us the air's gone silent and thick.

  "She's sick. She's in the hospital." I glance around, then back at Giselle. "Last year she got melanoma. They've given her a few months to live. But you probably know this. Who told you?"

  "I'm assuming she doesn't know about me. She'd be okay with you fucking other people?"

  "It's ... I don't know if it's okay. It's not okay. But we were done months before this happened." I realize that I need to seem more helpless. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing," I say, and look into Giselle's eyes in what I hope seems a pleading way.

  I'm stunned when she shrugs. "Well, whatever. You're in a shitty spot for sure. But if you just need someone to be with, I get it. I just never thought I'd ever be `the other woman' - should I feel honoured or something?"

  Apparently Giselle doesn't care for an answer. She rifles through her salad for tomatoes, spears two on her fork, pops them in her mouth. I sit in silence, my food untouched in front of me, watching her eat. When the salad's gone she wipes her mouth with her napkin and flips her phone open.

  "Shit, quarter to seven. I have to get going. I've got a date tomorr
ow night, but if you want to hook up later, text me. We're just going to an early movie."

  She tries to chip in some money for the bill. I wave it away. And then she's past me, out the door of the restaurant. Through the window I watch her on the sidewalk, flipping her phone open again, checking her messages, moving off down the street.

  AFTER DINNER I GO for a walk in the park, down the path to the pond. It's busy there on Sundays usually, but the evening is overcast and gloomy and there are only a few ambitious folks out, young couples pushing strollers or middle-aged women being dragged around by dogs.

  I sit on a bench overlooking the pond. There are ducks, a few geese, and a swan. Lee and I used to come for walks down here, back when there used to be two swans. I'm not sure what happened to the other one. No one seems to know. One day it was just gone. We used to joke that the other one had eaten it in a fit of jealous rage, vengeance for a big avian orgy with a couple of the ducks and a horned-up goose.

  It was funny because the other birds are such idiots: the ducks flap quacking around and the geese hop about on the shore, pecking at the ground and scattering their bullet-shaped shit. The swan, meanwhile, just glides serenely over the surface of the water, neck like a question mark. A kid chucks a rock at it, shattering the reflection, although the swan looks unperturbed. I check my phone for messages. None.

  Behind the swan the water fans out in a rippling V as it swims around and around. I watch it trace its graceful laps and think about taking that neck in my hands, the feathery cord of it, and just twisting. What would it feel like? I imagine the head flopping down, the vertebrae snapping, the swan crumpling and then sinking to the bottom of the pond.

  AN HOUR LATER I'm standing in the hallway outside Lee's hospital room, listening to her and Mauricio talking. Olivier is in there too; I can hear him whispering. I picture the three of them, Lee and Mauricio huddled together, Olivier fixing lines and checking levels, soft and calm. I wonder for a moment if he lets Mauricio stay when he pulls the curtain. Maybe right now the three of them are back there behind it babbling at one another in foreign languages. But I don't poke my head into the room to check. I just listen.

  My brain registers only the murmur of voices; if it is English they're speaking, the volume is too low to make out what's being said. Even so, I wait with a weird mix of dread and anticipation for my name, and at the mention of it for the tone of the conversation to shift from neutral and hushed to something else. But it never happens, and instead of going in I head back down the hall toward the elevators, their conversation fading behind me.

  On the way down to the lobby I try to assure myself that Lee's doing fine after her surgery, that it was better not to bust up her little party. The pamphlet made it out to be such a minor thing. She's already back in her room, so she must be okay. But then, thinking this, imagining her lying up there in her hospital bed while I make my way healthily home to our apartment, I feel my stomach turn and the bile rise in my throat. I'm actually going to throw up.

  Once the elevator reaches the ground floor I race to the bathroom, stumble into one of the stalls, and fall to my knees. But nothing comes up. I don't even heave, just gasp a little and catch my breath while my stomach settles back down. After a few minutes I lower the toilet lid and sit on it. And I'm like that, perched there on the toilet in the stall in the bathroom, when the announcement comes over the hospital PA that visiting hours are over.

  When I see Mauricio leaving the hospital my first thought isn't to follow him. Initially I just hope he doesn't see me, so I duck behind a pillar at the entrance and wait until he's gone past. But once he moves off I let him get about fifty feet ahead and then start trailing him - along the sidewalk, down into the subway, and back up in a part of town frequented mostly by white people with dreadlocks. Once we're at street level I lose him for a moment before I see him through a shop window buying something at the counter. I blow into my hands to warm them, watching from a distance. Then he's away again and I'm back on track, skulking through the shadows of the closed storefronts, off the main strip and down an alleyway lit only by the occasional motion sensor tocking on as he moves past.

  At the door to what I assume is his apartment, he stops. I duck under an awning maybe six doors down. The street is otherwise empty. It's so quiet that I can hear the jangle of his keys and the grating sound of one sliding into the lock.

  Before he moves inside, his voice comes singing through the silence. "You want to come in, or will you wait there until the shops open tomorrow morning?"

  Taking my shoes off inside Mauricio's front door, I don't give an excuse, just act like he's invited me over - and here I am. The place is immaculate, smelling vaguely of omelettes. He doesn't say anything, just hangs his coat and pushes his way through saloon-style doors into the kitchen, whatever he's just bought in his hand.

  "Do you want mate?" he asks. "It is like tea. I am making some."

  "Sure," I say, and go sit down on the folded futon in the living room - which, I realize, is also his bedroom. The futon is his bed.

  While Mauricio clanks around in the kitchen, I look around. Everywhere are musical instruments: guitars, a banjo, little hand-held drums, a keyboard propped in the corner. The only decoration on the walls is a watercolour painting tacked above the futon. Two M-shaped birds flap over a zigzag mountain range snowcapped in white; the perfect red half-circle of a setting sun washes the page in stripes: fuchsia, gold, crimson. It's a terrible painting, something the mother of a proud but untalented child might display only out of parental obligation.

  After a while Mauricio emerges from the kitchen carrying a silver tray. On it is a clay teapot and a single, ornately designed, egg-shaped cup with a silver wand sticking out of it. Mauricio sits down cross-legged on the floor and places the tray on the coffee table between us. Without saying anything, he pours hot water slowly into the cup.

  "Aren't you having any?" I ask him.

  "Yes," he says, and then sits back. "We must let it brew."

  A minute passes, maybe two. I watch the steam rise from the cup. Then he takes it in his hands. "At home we would have loose mate," he says. "Here are only teabags."

  I watch as he takes a sip from the wand - it's apparently a straw. He sips, then sips again. I wonder if he's going to leave me any. I guess he sees my face, because he laughs. "You have never taken mate before," he says.

  "No, I guess not."

  "It is like a ceremony. I take the first cup to make sure it is okay for the guest. Maybe it is strange. But, you know, you are away from home and these things become important."

  He fills the cup again with hot water and passes it to me. "Do you want sugar?"

  I shake my head and put my lips on the straw. The taste is bitter and smoky - somewhere between green tea and eating a cigarette - but not unpleasant. I sip again. There's not much in the little egg-shaped cup, and soon I'm done. "Thanks," I say, placing the cup back on the tray. "This is the life, eh? Couple of dudes, sharing a pot of tea."

  Mauricio's looking at me in a funny way. I avoid his eyes. He sighs, so long and heavy that it feels as though he's doing it for both of us, then fills the cup a second time and passes it to me, saying, "You did not come in to see her today." From his tone - not reproachful or accusatory, more restrained - it's obvious that he saw me at the hospital.

  "Yeah, I was at work. I've got the day off tomorrow so I'll go by then."

  "She thought you were coming. Everyone did." Mauricio pauses for a moment, and when he speaks the words are slow and direct. "But Lee is so strong, isn't she? You of all people must know that."

  I don't have an answer for him, so I twist to have a look at the painting above the futon, all Ms and Vs. When I turn back his eyes are trained on me like a pair of high beams. "How did it go?" I ask. "Today, I mean. With the surgery."

  "Good. She is doing fine." He gestures at the painting. "This was by my sister. She died in a car accident. I take it everywhere I go."

  "Oh," I say. I take a
sip from the metal straw. The taste is mellower now, more potable. "That's sad about your sister."

  ,,of course, she was very small; it is very sad. It has been four years, but still I think of her every day. It is nice to have something of her with me, you know? Some memory. And I like to have a painting because I can think of her making it, putting herself into it. Art is the opposite of death because it is always alive. No?"

  Jesus, is he really saying this? But, whatever, I nod. "Yeah, it sure is."

  "And what about you?" he asks. "What will you do, after?"

  "After what? After Lee's ... gone?"

  "Yes."

  I think.

  "I will go back to Argentina," he says.

  "You will?"

  "Yes," he says, and nods. "Unless you need me here."

  "Mauricio, just go home."

  I catch myself and look over. Kneeling there on the other side of the coffee table, his mouth hangs half open as though he's about to say something. But then he closes it.

  "I mean," I add, "you've already done so much. We're really grateful. But you must have your own life to get back to."

  Mauricio just lies down, right there on the floor. He doesn't say anything.

  I finish what's left in the cup, slurping up the last few drops a little too loudly. Then the room descends back into silence. Mauricio seems to be meditating, or sleeping, his eyes closed, body supine. Meanwhile - and maybe it's the mate - I'm feeling anxious and buzzy. I find myself having to consciously stop my feet from tapping.

  After a while, I say, "Well, it's pretty late," and Mauricio jerks to his feet as though he's forgotten I'm there. He walks me to the door, holds it open as I make my way outside. With me standing in the street and him in his apartment, we shake hands, right over the doorstep. It becomes one of those extended shakes - held there, unmoving - that feel like they're going to end with the other guy pulling you in for a hug. Mauricio's face is tired and drawn. I wonder if I look the same way.