by Miriam Toews
I guess he is, I said. I just don’t know how.
How? said my mom. How are you holding up?
I guess, I said again. How are you holding up?
We laughed at ourselves, then stopped. Breath, energy, emotion, self-control, all too valuable right now to squander. My cellphone rang and my mom picked it up and said questions without answers, how may we help you? (She may have been a little drunk.) It was Jason, her mechanic at River City Auto, and he said he’d have the car towed to the garage and figure out what was wrong.
We walked back to my mom’s apartment hand in hand. She taught me the military way of synchronizing our strides. It’s a little skip, see? she said. She showed me. Then when we’re out of sync, you do it again. She made me try it. When we got back to her apartment she talked to people on the phone about Elf and Tina (Yes, they’re both in the hospital. The same hospital, yes) while I researched Nembutal online. If you “erase history” does that mean the police can’t see it?
Jason called me back on my cell and said the transmission was fatally compromised and that there was no point in saving the car, it wasn’t worth it. He suggested that an organization of “youth at risk” teens be allowed to pick up the car to use as a guinea pig in their classroom at a school that tried to help them pick a career other than petty criminal. They’d pay fifty bucks for the car and haul it away for good. I told him to hang on for a sec and asked my mom if she was prepared to say goodbye to her car forever. She was on the phone and nodded and shrugged yeah, whatever. I told Jason fine, let them keep the cash. He asked me to come and get the stuff that was in the car before he called up the troubled teens.
I sat on the balcony with my laptop and read that pentobarbital is Nembutal and that the brand names are Sedal-Vet, Sedalphorte and Barbithal. They’re used to put animals to sleep and you have to go to Mexico to buy them but not to the border towns like Tijuana because the cops are suspicious now of these “death tourists” as they’re called. You have to go deep into Mexico, into the interior, to out-of-the-way places. And then you just find the nearest pet store and go in and ask for it. I thought it was funny that some of the people writing about their efforts to purchase the drug were warning readers to avoid dangerous back streets. What’s the worst that could happen? I wondered. You’d be killed?
A dose of Nembutal is about thirty bucks and you need two one-hundred-millilitre bottles to ensure speed and death with absolute certainty. And you have to take some anti-nausea pills beforehand, “travel sickness” pills, so that you don’t throw up when you take the Nembutal. They’re anti-emetics. You take one every hour for twelve hours before taking the Nembutal. They’re sold over the counter and have brand names like Compazine or Dramamine. After you take the Nembutal you’ll die in half an hour, unless you’re a large person in which case it might take forty-five minutes to an hour. It will be painless. You’ll fall asleep quickly and there will be no time for speeches or to finish your drink.
The problem, I read online, was not getting the drug but bringing it back over the border. So then, I thought, I had to get Elf to Mexico rather than the drug to Elf. Also, just opening the bottle for Elf would make me guilty of manslaughter. Some of the anonymous writers said that even a suggestion to the person wanting to die—all right, well how about we get that bottle now—could make you an accessory to manslaughter.
I switched off my computer and closed my eyes. I heard sirens on the Osborne bridge but I imagined a beach, a thatched roof hut, palm leaves gently undulating in a Caribbean breeze, my sister finally getting her wish, Nic, my mother (my father too, even though he’s dead, because this was a fantasy and I could have dead people in it if I wanted), me, my kids, holding her, touching her, smiling, kissing, saying goodbye, saying Elfie, you, you have made an incredible difference to our lives, you have filled us up with joy and kept our secrets and made us laugh so hard and we will miss you terribly, adios, CIAO! saying it properly, together, and Elf drifting off so peacefully on a soft cloud of eternal love.
I phoned Nic but when he answered I lost my nerve entirely. I had been planning to ask him if he’d be interested in a trip to Mexico whereby we kill his wife. Instead I asked him if my mom and I could borrow his car for a few days because hers had broken down for good. He said she could keep it for as long as she needed to get to the hospital and all that, because he preferred to ride his bike. I asked him if he was still at the hospital. He said yeah.
And? I said.
Same, he said. She had some dinner. Her throat is better. And Tina’s asleep in her ward. All quiet on the western front. He asked me if I was okay and suddenly I was choking. Yoli? he said. I’m okay, I said, sorry about that.
Then he told me that he was planning to go to Spain after all. I hadn’t known that he’d been planning to go to Spain at all. He said he hadn’t known if he should cancel or not but now he was definitely going to go—tomorrow.
Tomorrow? That’s soon.
I know, he said. Elf said I should go. She said I had to go. Just for … you know.
Yeah, no, you should …
And I can’t get a refund on the ticket now. I’m going with my dad, you know, he had this idea for years to go to the …
For how long?
Ten days.
Well, cool, okay …
I know, the timing is weird. But it’s his dream. And she’s not coming home before that, the doctor was clear on that.
Well …
You’re planning to stay in the city for at least that long though, right, Yoli? I mean, so you’ll be here—
Yes, I am. No, you should definitely go. God knows, you need a break.
You do too, everyone does, but …
No, go! Definitely! Definitely.
Though it just seems absurd to me to be wandering around Barcelona taking pictures of Gaudí stuff while Elf is in the hospital.
I know but everything is absurd right now and if you don’t get a break soon you’ll crack right up, my friend.
Well, he said. I suppose.
I mean it’s not just you, it’s all of us, I said. It’s like how we’re told to give ourselves oxygen first on planes and then give it to our kids.
I guess … he said.
You have to go, for the same reason we forced my mom to go on the cruise. We have to tag off periodically or we’ll all end up in psych in bed with Elf.
I’d like that, said Nic. Did you see the paper today? There was a thing in the arts section about Elf bailing from her tour due to exhaustion. It said her family has asked for privacy.
We did? I said. Is anyone talking to them?
The press? said Nic. No, not as far as I know. Claudio’s the only one dealing with it. He’s the one who told them she was exhausted. His press release.
He had to tell them something. Nic, you really should go. Seriously. You have to go.
But that guy, Danislov or whatever, that Slovakian oboe guy who lives in Winnipeg … he went to the hospital yesterday to visit her.
Oh, so everyone’s gonna know now, I said. Did he talk to her?
It doesn’t really matter, said Nic. I mean the truth is the truth. I just want … I was hoping to protect her.
You have been, I said. You’ve been protecting her. You’ve always protected her. He was crying now. He was crying like a man, gulping everything back.
It’s okay. I was trying not to cry too—we have to take turns breaking down or everything is lost. It’s okay, I said. I drove my fists into my eyes.
It could be anywhere, he said. I don’t care about Spain. I could go to Montana or something right now, just about anywhere. Sometimes I want to be four again, in Bristol, walking down the high street with my mudder.
That was how Nic said mother. When he said it I was lost too. We just hung up finally without saying goodbye.
TWELVE
JASON HAD SUGGESTED I COME to the garage that evening before they closed at nine p.m. I waved goodbye to my mother who was still on the phone and she blew me a
kiss. I walked the three blocks to the garage and found a man peering into my mother’s car. All I could see was his curved back and some thinning brown hair. I said hi and he stood up. He was wearing a T-shirt that had an old copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans emblazoned on the front of it. Then I realized that he was the Jason I’d known in first-year university at the University of Manitoba, the guy from my CanLit class who borrowed my notes all the time and wore yellow cords and gave me pot as payment. We called him Sad Jason then because his girlfriend had broken up with him and he couldn’t concentrate on anything.
I thought it might be you when you said your name was Yolandi on the phone, he said. It’s not like there’s a plethora of them around.
And then all I could think of was my younger self, the person I was before I’d become all of these other selves: a soon-to-be-divorced woman in her forties who’d clumsily left her husband even if for reasons I’d thought were valid at the time, a grotesquely undiscerning lover, an adult daughter who nagged her elderly mother about the use of clichés, a sister who couldn’t say the right things to save a life and thereby was flipping over to becoming homicidal, a writer who bogusly claimed to know about ocean freighters and a “death tourist.” I stood there in Sad Jason’s garage and wept until he awkwardly came over to where I was standing and gingerly put his greasy arms around me and said hey, it’s okay, don’t cry. It’s just a car.
Jason was in the process of getting a divorce from his wife who had stopped seeing him in a romantic light and he was currently sort of dating a clown who worked for the Calgary Stampede luring bulls away from fallen cowboys. I told him that I’d been involved in rodeos too, in a way, and that I was also divorced, almost, living in Toronto, here to see family and things weren’t going too well at the moment but you know, tomorrow and tomorrow and … He suggested we pick up a six of something and drive out to the floodway to catch up and to watch the river rise and the northern lights that the CBC had said were happening tonight at the edge of town. Well, they’d be happening elsewhere, he acknowledged, but we had to get away from the lights of the city in order to see them.
Jason and I had within a moment become something we hadn’t foreseen back in that CanLit class a hundred years ago. We were so old. The word no flooded my senses and all of my better instincts and I said yeah, sounds good. In his car I asked him if he still smoked pot and he said no, not so much. Well, lately, because of the relationship thing, but otherwise not really. We drove into the darkness of southeastern Manitoba.
We parked by the floodway, under the stars, and drank beer and talked about the past. Does it all kind of kill you? he said. It does, I agreed. We tried but failed to see the northern lights. I sat back in the passenger seat and put my legs up on his dashboard and I closed my eyes. It smelled like vanilla in his car. He had a million air fresheners hanging from his rear-view mirror. He told me he was sorry about all the dog hair in the car. It was really dark. We weren’t listening to music. He sat with his hands on his thighs and peered out the windshield. He rolled down the window and then asked if it was too cold. I asked him if he’d ever been to a port city like Rotterdam. He said yeah, actually, he had, good times, good times.
I apologized for being strange. He told me it was okay, it’s how he remembered me. He kissed me very softly on my cheek. I kept my eyes closed and smiled. I took his hand and put it on my leg and he asked me about my boyfriend or my husband or you know. He stroked my leg. Same as you, I said, this is nothing. He stopped touching me and kissing me. I opened my eyes and apologized again for saying the wrong thing, a stupid thing. I told him it was nice to talk. He didn’t say anything but he nodded and then I started kissing him and he didn’t stop me. I asked him if he remembered coming over to my squalid apartment in Osborne Village with a suitcase full of knives. He said oh, was I planning to carve you up? I said no, you were cooking! Oh, yeah, he said, he remembered. We were clumsy and straightforward. I sat on his lap and then felt around for the lever on the side of the seat and pulled it up so that he fell backwards fast, horizontal now, and the moon lit up one corner of his face. Sorry, sorry, I said. I imagined that we were young and horny and very happy.
Afterwards he asked me why I’d asked him about Rotterdam. I told him that I was trying to write a book in which, at the end, one person was marooned at sea, helpless, and the other person was standing on the shore, hurt and mad. He told me that sounded really good, interesting, and I thanked him. Then, driving back into the city, he said no offence but wouldn’t he be able to explain to her that he was trapped on this boat? In these times with technology and stuff? A text or whatever? I know, I said, but for some reason he can’t. Okay, said Jason, but what reason? I told him that I was having structural problems and he said he told me he thought my structure was amazing and worked really well and I said ha ha, thanks, yours too. (Oh boy.)
I think the main thing, he said, is that it should really rock.
What should rock? I asked him.
The story, he said, it should just move really fast, like pedal to the metal, so it doesn’t get boring. Plus, it’s hard to write, right? You want to go in, get the job done, and get out. Like when I worked for Renee’s septic tank cleaning.
I considered this and realized that it was the best writing advice I’d received in years. In all my life. When he dropped me off and asked if maybe we could see each other again while I was in the city, grab a coffee or something, a movie, I told him I wasn’t sure how long I’d be there. I hadn’t told him about Elf. Cool, he said, let’s keep in touch. We kissed. I went into the lobby and waved goodbye to him through the tinted window, smiling and letting out a barely whispered monosyllabic admonishment to myself. Stop.
I took the stairs two at a time all the way up to my mom’s place, repeating my incantation—stop, stop, stop—with every angry footfall and trying to remember what my friend in Toronto had told me recently: that in ten years time shame will be all the rage, talking about it, dissecting it and banishing it. We’d had a bit of an argument then because I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too. But now, as I climbed these concrete steps holding my hands and fingers to my nose to check if I reeked of sex or motor oil, I longed for a life without shame.
I found my mother playing online Scrabble with a woman from Romania whose code name was Mankiller. The games are timed and she had to make a move quickly. But Yoyo, she said as I moved past her, Nic’s going to Spain tomorrow. I nodded and told her I knew that.
I went to my room and googled purchasing Nembutal in Spain but only found references to injectable Viagra. Then I googled euthanasia for mentally ill and found out that in Switzerland it’s legal but hasn’t been exercised that much. It’s legal to help a person kill herself in Switzerland if there isn’t any selfish motivation behind it. And you don’t have to be a Swiss citizen to be protected under the law. Aha! Now I understood why Elf had begged me to take her there.
I weighed my options. They were heavy. Get Elf to Mexico and buy Nembutal in a pet store on a dusty side street of a sleepy, non-touristy town and then make sure she opens the bottle herself and that I don’t encourage her in any way. Although the definition of encouragement might be cloudy under these circumstances. Get Nic and my mom to agree to this plan. Or: Take Elf to Zurich and do it all legally except that it might not work if the doctors decide that her pain is not great enough to warrant a mercy killing. Get Nic and my mom to agree to this plan. Suddenly I was feeling hopeful. But I wasn’t sure if I should be he
dging my bets, telling Elf that I was thinking of going with her to Switzerland or Mexico but also encouraging her to live. If I told her about the Nembutal plan she’d have only one thing on her mind, and even if there had been only tiny amoeba-sized hopes inside her, of wanting to live, they’d disappear immediately in the light of this new possibility. Also, there was nothing stopping her, when she was released from the hospital, from going to Switzerland or Mexico on her own, except that it would defeat the purpose of not being alone in her last moments of life and if Nic wasn’t on board he’d notice she was gone and that money was missing from the account and he would try to stop her. What would she do?
I heard the trumpets sound the end of my mom’s game with Mankiller and the slap of her laptop computer closing. Then she was there, standing in the doorway. How are you, sweetheart? she asked. What have you been up to? Having unprotected sex with your mechanic and researching ways to kill your daughter. Not much, I said, got the stuff from the car. Doing some work.
My mother talked to me about Canadian mines in Honduras, the travesty of it all, her rage against the world having found this particular nook to make itself at home in tonight. Tomorrow it would be something else, Muslim gardeners from Oshawa being held without trial in Guantanamo and languishing in solitary confinement, or any situation that was either randomly awful or awful but entirely outside the ability of an ordinary mortal to stop it from happening. The mines are destroying these villages, she said. Destroying these communities. And stripping the land of all its resources. Prime Minister Harper condones it and the wealthy owners of the mines just fly over from time to time in their helicopters laughing. I know, I said, it’s unbelievable. It’s horrible.
It is! she said. Our tax dollars are being spent on a sanctioned and systematic destruction of the Honduran people and nobody—