David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide and Other Stories

by D. D. Miller

  “What’s the matter, dear?”

  He hates it when she uses the word “dear.” It sounds unnatural and condescending. He wants to tell her she can take her Tupperware and shove it, and she can take back these shoes too, or give them to some homeless person or just throw them in the trash for all he cares. “Nothing,” he finally says. “I’m just hot, that’s all.”

  “You shouldn’t’ve ordered coffee.”

  Over her shoulder he can see the girl from behind the counter. She’s come outside to clean off tables. Her back is turned and he can see her tattoo.

  “Next time you should order an iced latte,” his wife says. “It’s quite good.”

  He watches the wings of the butterfly move as the girl wipes a table. Her quick motions make it seem as though it’s struggling to take off. One bead of sweat forms like a teardrop on its turquoise body. It runs down the girl’s back and disappears under the waistband of her skirt.

  e’s sitting on the ground in the middle of the parking lot at the ferry terminal, leaning back against the base of a streetlight. Even from where I am standing, I can see that it’s Peter Estabrooks, a guy who lived down the hall from me in residence during the first year of my undergrad degree at Simon Fraser. I am so certain it’s him I have to move to get a better look.

  He’s decked out in the kind of clothing I see worn by the street kids downtown: faded, heavily patched pants; a huge wool sweater that is dirt stained and stretched beyond form; and a pair of combat boots that are dull, cracked and sag around his ankles. He has the same dirty blond hair and patchy beard that he had during that first winter of our undergrad lives. I remember it so vividly, my first year away from home: the quick dissolution of my parent’s marriage after I’d left, the fast friendships that you think will last forever but often don’t even make it through first semester.

  “Dude!” he yells. “Suit-dude, spare some change man, help me get some ferry money to get to Vancouver.” Peter and I didn’t see each other much beyond first year. He’d gone on to an undergrad career of popularity and bar-hopping, while I’d gone on to one of trying to maintain the kind of marks that would get me into law school.

  A few people shuffle around me with their heads down, ignoring this situation. I walk toward Peter, waiting for him to stop looking like a guy I’d briefly known fifteen years ago. He has these piercing blue eyes and a greyish, toothy smile that are both so familiar. When I am nearer, I see that this guy really is fifteen years younger than me and therefore can’t be Peter Estabrooks. Though even up close the resemblance is striking.

  “Change? Please. Can you help me out?”

  My shadow swallows him as I near.

  “Buddy, you all right?” he asks.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. I dig through my pockets and come up with a toonie, a loonie and some change. My suit suddenly feels tight. “Here,” I say and hand him the money.

  “Hey, thanks, man!” He fondles the coins in his calloused hands; there is dirt under his thick yellowing nails. He looks up and smiles at me, and I turn to make my way toward the ferry. It’s only as I follow the last person onto the deck of the boat that I remember that it’s free to take the ferry off of the Gulf Islands. I look back in time to see the guy trudging up the parking lot toward the road, no doubt to hitch a ride somewhere. But where? I wonder. Where would a homeless man go on an island as small and quaint as this one?

  I eventually lose sight of him as the ferry pulls away from the Mayne Island Terminal. Mayne Island is one of BC’s Gulf Islands. I’d just spent the day with a client who – in one of his numerous eccentricities – refuses to come to Victoria. But because his wife left him for another woman awhile back, and he’s now living in their tiny, uninsulated cottage in some remote corner of this remote island, we cut him some slack. Secretly I enjoy it because I love the ferry. There’s just something about it. The Gulf Island ferries are small and still quaint in their overused ruggedness and salt spray–rusting kind of way. For us Vancouver Islanders, riding the ferry is the one reminder that we are actually surrounded by the ocean; you just don’t get that same sense of isolation and separation when you’re on a big island.

  Being on a ferry and seeing this Peter Estabrooks look-alike has reminded me of a story my mother told me before she died.

  After my parents divorced, my mother started to vacation at Caribbean resorts or exotic locations in Europe, which was a stark departure from the highway-motel road trips we used to take around Canada with my dad.

  A little more than a year before she passed, she’d gone to Spain and had been on a ferry out to Majorca in the Mediterranean, when she saw this woman who she claimed looked just like her. It had been some loud and obnoxious Midwestern American tourist who’d talked brazenly to one of her companions the whole ferry ride. She’d apparently gone on about how her friend just had to go to Spain for the lovely young men and proceeded to describe how easy they were to pick up at the bars, especially in Barcelona and especially when you were an attractive middle-aged American divorcee on an extended vacation with enough cash to buy the guy a few meals and a few more drinks.

  My mother told me all this in a hospital room during a particularly lucid period near the end. She told me lots of things when she was all hopped up on painkillers and feeling nostalgic for a life that was fading before her eyes.

  “I regret seeing that woman,” she said.

  “Regret? Why?” I asked, thinking maybe she’d used the wrong word, which often happened when she was all drugged up.

  “She was a version of me that could have been. She had the same hairstyle, dressed the same way, everything. It was uncanny. Like looking in a mirror. And I thought, that’s how people see me. Just another middle-class divorcee prancing around Europe trying to hold on to something that’s gone.”

  “You said she was loud and annoying,” I blurted, trying to sound positive, even jokey.

  But she looked away from me and out the window. “You know how they say everyone has a double in the world? Well, I don’t think we’re supposed to see our own. We have this image in our head that’s like the perfect version of ourselves.” She glanced back at me. She even reached out and took my hand. “Then when you see your double you realize it was all wrong, that image. All wrong.” She looked away again. And it was terrible. Any moment of sadness, even the most abstract moment of sadness, etched into the face of someone who is dying is a horrible thing to witness. And I wish I’d told my mother she was beautiful even then (though she wasn’t, really), but I didn’t. I don’t even remember what I said.

  I look around the ferry and wonder about what she said about us all having a double. I see a woman standing alone by the railing. Her hair and the way she’s dressed, even the way she is standing, reminds me of my wife. My wife is beautiful, and I don’t mind saying so. She’s thin in a muscular, run-five-K-a-day kind of way and has this straight, reddish-blond hair that she wears at about shoulder length and that is complemented by a sprinkle of the faintest freckles imaginable across the bridge of her nose. Also, she wears reading glasses at work and pins her hair up in a bun. She’s a librarian, and, even though she won’t admit it, I think she plays up the look because she likes to know that she can whip off her glasses and let down her hair when she walks away from work and turn into someone else.

  The woman at the railing turns, and I see that she doesn’t look like my wife: her nose is all wrong; plus, she’s got too many freckles and her cheeks have too much flesh. Behind her, I see Swartz Bay and the Vancouver Island ferry terminal nearing. I stand and follow the woman to the front of the boat and line up behind her as we pull into the dock.

  When I get to the office, I file the appropriate files, get a law clerk to fax off the appropriate documents, and putter around uselessly until I slip out a little early knowing full well I am incapable of getting anything else done. I just want to go home, order Korean food, sit down with my wife and watch a movie on Netflix that we’ve seen a million times so that halfway th
rough we’ll be so bored we’ll start to fool around and have just-good-enough sex on the couch (no condom because we plan on having kids someday anyway) before we shower together and go to bed.

  My wife is almost always home before me. She works for the Greater Victoria Public Library system and gets to leave at a regular hour every day. She rarely complains, seems generally content about her work and seeing her so content in her profession often makes me wonder why anyone would choose to become a lawyer. I did because my father was a lawyer and his father was a lawyer. As far as I could tell, neither was a particularly happy man: overworked, my father would come home at all hours distant and exhausted and capable of launching into a petty and useless argument with my mother at the drop of a hat. I like to think I’ve learned from some of my father’s mistakes. I try my best not to work ten-hour days, and rarely ever work on the weekends unless it’s something I can do quickly on my BlackBerry.

  When I walk in the front door of our condo, my wife calls my name from the bedroom and rushes out, fumbling with an earring and dressed in a manner not befitting a lazy evening at home. Her hair is down and she is wearing a black dress that isn’t too fancy, but certainly not casual. Her bare feet slap on the hardwood as she hurries toward me.

  “Hey, honey.” She pauses only long enough to brush her glossy, lipsticky lips across mine and keeps right on going. “Sorry, I’m running late.”

  “What’s up?” There is something going on, and I feel like I should know, but I don’t and it confuses me. The fact that she is going out hurts me way more than it should.

  “I’ve got that Literacy Association thing, remember?” She opens up the hall closet and pulls out a pair of black shoes. “There’s a Facebook event.”

  I remember something about an invitation now.

  “I didn’t realise you were going to be home so early,” she says, finally getting the earring on and then bending over to put on her shoes. “You’d told me you wouldn’t be able to make it.”

  “Right. I had a weird day and left early.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She comes toward me, a distracted look of faux concern on her face. “Everything okay?”

  I nod. “Fine, I was just hoping to relax tonight.”

  “Relax away!” she says as she heads back into the bedroom. “I’ll join you when I get back.”

  I stand dumbfounded in the hall.

  “Hey! I almost forgot!” I hear her yell from the bedroom. “I saw you today.” Her voice is muffled, and I can tell she is in the closet.

  “Really?” I yell back.

  “Yeah.” She emerges from the room with a shawl around her shoulders. “Around noon, you were going into Blends on Douglas Street. I yelled but I guess you didn’t hear me. By the time I crossed the street, you were gone.” She stands right in front of me, and I can almost smell her shampoo though I think it might be masked by hairspray or something. “How do I look?” She spreads her arms and holds the ends of the shawl. “Will I be warm enough, you think?”

  “You look great. It’s nice out.” I try to remember if I went into the coffee shop at all during the day. But of course, I couldn’t have. “Wait, you couldn’t have seen me. I was on Mayne Island until, like, three o’clock.”

  “Really?” She tilts her head and frowns a bit. “I was certain it was you. Same suit too.” She grabs the lapel of that same suit and leans in for a kiss. “I’ve really got to run.” She kisses me again, but I don’t kiss her back.

  “Of course I’m sure. I caught the nine-thirty ferry.” I’m almost angry.

  “Well, he looked just like you.” She backs away and tugs at the shawl to straighten it. “Anyway, I won’t be late. You sure you’re okay?” she asks.

  I shrug. “It’s just been a strange day.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it when I get home.” She kisses me yet again, on the cheek this time, and then opens the door. “Love you,” she calls on the way out, and I manage to mumble the same thing back.

  Since my plans are ruined, I decide to hop in the shower and wash away the day’s weirdness. I run the shower hot, almost scaldingly so. Standing naked, I stare at my torso in the mirror, watching my image disappear as the bathroom steams up, and I can’t help but think of the oddly coincidental conversation I’ve just had with my wife and how it reminds me of yet another similar event that had occurred when I was a teenager.

  The last summer vacation I took with my parents turned out to be our last summer together as a family unit. I was sixteen going on seventeen and my father decided we were going to drive across the country and – much to me and my mother’s horror – camp while we did it. Thankfully, my mother managed to convince my dad to stay in those generic roadside motels when the weather was bad. In many ways, I think this trip, which my mother abhorred even more than I did, may have been the final nail in the coffin for my parents’ relationship. What is really sad is that, in retrospect, I think it was actually conceived as a last ditch effort to save their marriage.

  About a week or so into our trip, we made it to Canada’s Wonderland, the roller coaster–heavy theme park north of Toronto. We were waiting in line to go on a stand-up roller coaster when my father gasped and pointed at a kid standing by a hot dog vendor about a hundred metres away.

  “Holy shit!” he said. I remember that he swore. “That kid looks just like you!”

  I was already embarrassed about going on a roller coaster with my dad and now people began to shift in front of and behind us to stare. Some even glanced over at the other kid. “No, he doesn’t,” I said back quietly.

  My father just kept looking back and forth between me and this kid. I was getting angry. The kid had the same haircut and colour, was about my height and just a little plump, not fat or anything and not exactly soft, just a little late in shedding all of his baby fat, as I’d been.

  “You just think all teenagers look the same because you’re old,” I told my father, who was thirty-seven at the time.

  He laughed. “No, really. I can’t get over it. I wish your mother was here with the camera.” It was terrible to think your father capable of mistaking you for someone else, and I remember wanting him to say, “Yeah, you’re right,” or “Except you’re taller,” or anything that would have shown there was some sort of father-son bond that transcended physical appearance. I remember eventually starting to think the kid did look a little like me. But I also remember thinking, quite specifically, that I was somehow better looking than he was, more stylish and cool.

  My image in the mirror has completely disappeared behind the steam, and I wonder what my wife thought of that guy she saw coming out of the coffee shop earlier in the day. Was he more attractive than I was? Did he look like what she wanted me to look like?

  Suddenly, I want nothing more than to see this man.

  Wrapped in a towel, I head to the bedroom to get dressed. It’s been hours since my wife would have seen him at the coffee shop on Douglas Street, but maybe – just maybe – if I go there and grab a coffee and walk out onto the street, I’ll feel compelled to head in a specific direction, maybe even feel pulled somewhere. Or maybe he frequents that coffee shop on a regular basis and will walk in while I’m ordering.

  I drop my towel and grab a fresh pair of underwear. I pull them up over my damp legs, and, suddenly, I can’t help but wonder whether or not I will even be able to recognize him.

  eyond my backyard, the city ends. The sprawl comes to a sudden halt, and then there is forest. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m on the edge of the Western world.

  It’s eleven in the morning. I’ve been up for thirty minutes, and my ears are still ringing from the band last night. I’m hungover and my hands are crammed into a sink full of a week’s worth of dishes. There’s a little window above my sink that looks out over my backyard. I stare out at the trees, knowing that there are already construction crews somewhere out there in the forest working to expand the subdivision.

  Suddenly there is movement in the trees. A
rustling of green that grows more violent until eventually my neighbour, Tom Fisher, stumbles out of the brush, flailing at cobwebs and branches. He’s wearing plaid pyjama bottoms, a white undershirt and black leather sandals. And, best of all, he’s carrying a gun.

  Tom lives in the other half of my duplex with his wife and son. Most of my contact with him has come from the chats we’ve had while out in the backyard barbecuing and sipping beer, so I don’t know much about him and his family. I know he’s in his forties, has a beer gut like a massive ulcer and still has his hair (though it’s thinning). I also know that he hasn’t worked a stitch in at least a year, his wife may be the most unhappy woman I’ve ever met and his son is so painfully awkward that, despite being a similar age, he and my son have barely spoken.

  And now I know he owns a shotgun.

  As he staggers into the yard, he swats at the twigs and leaves that remain stuck to his shirt. His left slipper is half off and he’s mumbling to himself. I probably have an hour or two, tops, to finish cleaning up, but I dry my hands and head to the back door.

  Outside, the humidity hits me hard. It’s late June and turning out to be a hot summer. I begin to sweat almost immediately, and I can smell it on my clothes, the same clothes I wore last night. The sun is to my right, and the shadow of the house is disappearing in its shift to the front. Tom is between the light and shadow, hopping on one foot, gun tucked under his arm. His left slipper is in his hand, and he’s shaking it wildly.

  “Tom,” I say quietly so as not to startle him. “Tom? Everything all right?”

  He puts his bare foot down on the grass. His thinning hair is all askew, eyes wide open. He glances down at his foot, surprised, then drops his slipper and slides his foot back into it.

  “You all right?” I ask again.

  “You didn’t hear?”