by Sigrid Nunez
We could have it for a month, she told me over the phone. Not that I think I’ll need that much time.
Would I ever get used to this kind of talk? Even as I wondered what to do about my mail—let it pile up, have the post office forward it or hold it for me—I found it unthinkable to ask how long I should plan to be gone.
It’s not like I’ve picked a date, she said. Though, as I say, I am ready to go. You could even say I’m impatient to go, which comes partly from my having already given so much thought to dying but also from having reached the limits of what I think I can bear. But I don’t know what my body will do.
Though she’d been feeling much better since she went off chemo, her symptoms could change from day to day, and the meds she was taking to suppress them had some side effects too.
In any case, I want things to happen naturally, she said. I feel like I’ll know when it’s time.
But you—well, you won’t know, she said. Obviously I won’t be making a big announcement.
Like the coming of the Lord, she said jokingly: You will not know the day or hour.
She had decided not to tell anyone about our plans. I’ve come this far, I don’t want to risk some stupid intervention, she said, or even a tiny disruption. I want peace.
No one was to know where we were.
And, for your own protection, she told me, you need to play dumb: I never told you what I was going to do, you weren’t even aware that I had the drug.
I had, in fact, already told one other person everything, but I did not say this.
A photo of the colonial-style house had brought to mind the house where she’d grown up. They were both built in the 1880s, she said, though this one’s smaller. She told me how heartbroken she’d been about selling her childhood home. But after her parents died, neither she nor her daughter saw themselves ever living in such a big house in what had by then unfortunately become an overdeveloped suburb. Among other things that she liked about the retirees’ house, she said, was that it had been renovated with the needs of the aging in mind. There was a large bedroom on the ground floor with its own bathroom in which grab bars and a built-in shower seat had been installed. Given how frail she was now and how, some days, she had trouble walking, this was a lucky thing, she said. Also, the original master bedroom, on the second floor, was at the opposite end of the house. So we’ll each have our privacy, she said. (What I would do with all that privacy was, for me, a very big and daunting question.)
The neighboring houses were spaced well apart and one side of the property bordered a nature preserve.
I don’t know the town well, but I have passed through it, she said. I’ve always been fond of New England coastal towns. And I like that there are supposed to be some good restaurants, now that I’ve started being able to enjoy food again.
In fact, she didn’t really need to give it any more thought. This place looks perfect, she said.
Such excitement in her voice—anyone would have thought we were planning a vacation.
I’m sending you photos, she said, and shortly after we hung up they arrived. Half a dozen shots of the house, inside and out. One of the yard at autumn’s red-and-gold peak, another in pristine snow. I stared at them in a kind of stupor. I did not care what house, what town we were in. How much she cared was almost unbearably poignant to me.
She had just a few more things to do at home, she said. A few more drawers to empty, a bit more paperwork, some people to see one last time.
A week had passed since we met in the bar.
Start packing, she texted.
I was mechanically layering clothes in a suitcase when she texted again: Thank you for doing this.
When I had told her the answer was yes, that I would do whatever she needed me to do to help her die, her relief had been so great that she began sobbing.
Seconds later, she texted again: I promise to make it as much fun as possible.
PART TWO
Death is not an artist.
—Jules Renard
The house was as advertised. Gracious, clean, and orderly, with a few special welcome touches: flowers in the bedrooms, the kitchen stocked with coffee and tea, juice, yogurt, bread, and other basics. Extra pillows, extra blankets, wood for the fireplace—everything appeared to have been thought of by the hosts (awarded by Airbnb the status of Superhosts), who before leaving for Europe had sent us directions to the house and the code to unlock the front door.
There were no photographs, we noticed right away—we assumed they’d been put into storage with other private belongings and documents—but the living room was dominated by a painting of a woman who we figured must represent the lady of the house in her youth. A life-size oil that brought to mind John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X. In fact, the painting might have been just that: an imitation of Sargent. A white swan of a woman with an impossibly long neck in a simple black décolleté dress that exposed the top halves of her—to mix bird metaphors—ostrich-egg-like breasts. One hand rests on the back of a chair, and in the other she is holding a lily. A coy mix of the erotic and the austere.
If it really is her, my friend said, I don’t see how she can stand it. How can her husband stand it. I mean, living every day with this glaring reminder of how young and hot she used to be.
I shrugged. You know how it is when you live with something every day, I said. They probably don’t even notice it anymore.
True. But I can imagine how every time someone sees it for the first time they say, Oh, is that you? You know how people always say that to you when they see a flattering old photo: Is that you? And you wince, because they’ve just let you know how much you don’t look like that anymore, it might as well be somebody else. It’s humiliating. It shouldn’t be, but it really is humiliating.
I agreed that it was humiliating. On the other hand, I said, lots of people display their wedding photos from many years ago.
Well, it’s one thing to display a photo of yourself as a bride, but this . . .
Whatever, she said. It’s an eyesore. It throws the whole room off.
We could drape a sheet over it.
My friend laughed. Oh God, no. That would be even more unsettling.
There were other paintings throughout the house, mostly landscapes or seascapes. In the dining room: a large framed black-and-white photograph of the house itself, dated 1930.
I was relieved that, the eyesore aside, the house matched my friend’s expectations.
It reminds me even more of where I grew up, she said. My parents could have had the same decorator. Not that they’d ever in a million years have handed the keys over to a series of total strangers. How much people have changed.
I liked the house too. The arrangement of well-made furniture against just enough polished bareness. Some handsome ceramics but few other household ornaments. That balance of comfort and simplicity that I have heard called Shaker luxe.
It was the middle of the afternoon. Our drive had been delayed by several heavy downpours, but, cheeringly enough, the sun broke through at the very instant the house came into view. On the way, we’d eaten the avocado and tomato sandwiches I’d prepared for us that morning. Now all we wanted was coffee. When we’d made a pot we each took a mug to our room. We had decided that after unpacking we’d go for a quick tour of the town followed by an early dinner. There was a fish restaurant that had been extolled on some foodie website my friend had been browsing. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that this was for my sake. Though her ability to taste—and keep down—food was much better than it had been during her various bouts of chemo, her appetite was anything but robust. I pretended not to notice that it had taken her almost an hour to finish her avocado and tomato sandwich.
I had lurched through the past week like a drunk, all my senses curiously muffled, but now I could not have been more sharply aware of everything: the hot light
pouring through the bedroom windows, the smell and taste of the coffee, the cloud-like pillows against the bed’s sky-blue duvet, the grain of the blond-wood floor where a brilliantly colored kilim rug lay vibrating like a piece of op art. The closet and the bureau drawers smelled of lavender. (Downstairs I’d noticed a different scent: a fruity astringent tang, like a citrus cocktail.)
Under other circumstances, this would have been a fine place to work. But I doubted whether I’d have the concentration even to browse the news. What I’d imagined myself doing instead was streaming movies and binge-watching episodes of all the great TV series I’d missed in recent years and thought I’d never catch up on. I also took it for granted that I’d be responsible for whatever cooking or cleaning or errands needed doing, and which I knew I’d be more than happy to do, concerned only that there wouldn’t be enough such work to keep me busy.
Best try not to anticipate too much was the advice I’d given myself. Though my friend seemed utterly sure of her decision—not once so far had I seen her waver—at the back of my mind was the suspicion that things were not going to happen as planned. Just because we were here now didn’t mean she’d definitely take the drug. She’d come here to think, after all, and thinking might lead to changing her mind. Maybe she’d decide to put off taking it for a while longer. (Most dying patients in possession of a lethal dose of medication, I happened to know, never did take it.) In any case, it was far easier for me to imagine that, after a week or so, we’d be leaving this house together than that I’d be leaving it alone.
I was fully aware, and troubled by my awareness, that a big part of me, while agreeing to help my friend, had not truly accepted—was in fact apparently powerfully resisting—the reason we were here. Why I was here.
A dozen times since agreeing to be with her till the end I had quailed, had told myself I’d made a serious mistake, it was impossible, in fact I couldn’t do it. Then I would think how equally impossible it was for me to back out. I thought that I should at least tell her about these qualms, to which she had responded that she was going to do it anyway.
You want me to do it alone? Because I’ll tell you, I don’t have the time or energy to go down the list of everyone I know. I want peace.
I want peace was something she’d started saying a lot.
Where’s your sense of adventure? As if that could have persuaded me! In fact, the real reason I had agreed to help my friend was that I knew that, in her place, I would have hoped to be able to do exactly what she now wanted to do. And I would have needed someone to help me. (In coming days, there would be moments when I would not be able to escape the feeling that this was all a kind of rehearsal, that my friend was showing me the way.)
It was while I was unpacking that it occurred to me that I should keep a journal. It still felt all wrong to me that my friend’s daughter, her only family, was not involved in what was happening, had not even been informed about it. I understood my friend’s thinking in this regard and could see how she might be right, but it saddened me, and it made me feel guilty, as of a kind of betrayal. Not that it would have done for me to go behind her back and get in touch with her daughter, but at the very least I wanted to have a record to pass on. I thought, when the time came, those who’d been close to my friend would want to know what she was like, what she had said and thought and felt, toward the end. It would be important, then, to be as detailed and as accurate as possible, and certainly memory alone could not be trusted. I thought also that sitting down to write about each day would help—as keeping a journal of other experiences, including some very difficult ones, though perhaps none as singular as this, had helped me to keep my bearings.
An adventure? If so, it was two different adventures we were on, hers completely different from mine, and to whatever extent we might be sharing the days to come, each of us would be very much by herself.
Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.
Othered. Who is more so than the dying?
I should make a list, I thought. I’d made a lot of lists since all this began, endless to-do lists—as Scott Fitzgerald once pointed out people are wont to do when they’re on the verge of a crack-up. My way was to make a list then proceed to ignore it; instead of ever even looking at it again, I’d sit down and make a new one.
But groceries—didn’t we need groceries? Of course we did. Tomorrow I’d go grocery shopping, and for that I should have a list.
When I’d finished unpacking, when I’d sat down at the desk in a wedge of sunlight and written out my grocery list, I was pleased to take my measure and conclude that I was in a reasonable state of calm. In one corner of the room stood a beautiful antique cheval looking glass. I will get through this, I assured it, and—smiling at the serendipitous wordplay—I went downstairs.
Where my calm was shattered by the sight of my friend slumped at the kitchen table in tears.
My first thought was that she had changed her mind. Now that we’d arrived she’d realized that she didn’t want to be here after all. For this, as I’ve said, I was prepared.
You won’t believe what I did, she wailed.
My whole body blazed into panic. Had she, in a wild impulsive moment, taken the drug just this minute? But she couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have.
I forgot them!
What?
The pills, of course. What else. I keep them hidden, you know, in my bedroom, in the back of a drawer, and when I was packing I forgot to take them out.
I nearly staggered from relief.
We have to go back, she said.
Of course! We can go first thing tomorrow.
Not tomorrow. Now.
I didn’t think she could be serious.
I have to be sure I didn’t lose them or misplace them, she said, her voice rising. I have to know they’re there. I have to know that they haven’t been stolen or something. That they haven’t somehow vanished into thin air. That I didn’t just dream them up in the first place.
She was clutching her hair in her fists. I was afraid she’d start tearing it out, like a madwoman.
We have to go, and we have to go now.
Later, with the pills safe in their new hiding place in her room, and the two of us at the end of our meal at the exquisite fish restaurant, where we were dining for the second night in a row, I quietly suggested that maybe her leaving the pills behind meant that she was conflicted about taking them. After all, she had remembered to bring all her other medications—and there were so many of them!
Fuck you, I am not conflicted. And I told you never to say that to me.
I don’t remember you telling me that.
Well, maybe not in so many words. Anyway, you’re wrong. I know exactly what it was that made me forget. Chemo brain.
I knew what chemo brain was, but when I didn’t say anything she went on to explain.
Memory lapses, attention problems, spacing out, trouble processing information. It can happen even after the treatments stop. It can even get worse after the treatments stop. Cognitive dysfunction. It can last for years, in some cases for the rest of a person’s life. I could give you a ton of examples, she said.
Once, mailing a package, she addressed it to herself instead of the person she meant to send it to. She went to buy shoes, and even though she tried them on she ended up buying the wrong size. Then she did the same thing buying pants. She kept losing things: keys, wallet, phone.
Everything I wrote had to be proofread a hundred times, she said, and each time I found at least one error I’d missed before. I couldn’t trust my judgment about anything anymore. Twenty percent to the driver, I’d be thinking. Then in my confusion I’d make it twenty dollars.
I wanted to ask he
r then how she could trust the momentous decision that had brought us here. How did she know that wasn’t chemo brain too?
II
The wonder of certain coincidences.
Checking the time, I tap my phone, which is sitting on top of a book on my desk, which happens to be Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, and see that the time is 10:04.
Reading about a new movie while holding the cat against my shoulder. At the instant I come to the word vampire, the cat, which has never bitten me before, sinks its teeth in my neck.
On Columbus Day I see that my checking account balance is exactly $1,492.
A violent altercation between two men reported in the news. A white man and a black man. The white man’s surname is Black, the black man’s is White.
And here, in this house, on a bookshelf in the living room: A psychological thriller in the tradition of Highsmith and Simenon, set in the seamy noirish world of seventies New York.
Not so wondrous. Lots of people have the same books. What is wondrous is that the book is dog-eared at the very page—the beginning of a new chapter—where, last time, I left off.
The killer is a heavy drinker. His hip new friends share the popular belief that smoking pot is a cure for alcoholism, but he is wary of drugs. One day they get him to eat a brownie without revealing that it contains hash. After this he takes greedily to cannabis but without giving up alcohol, becoming instead a chronic user of both. As his conduct grows increasingly disturbing, the actress begins to regret having ever befriended him—especially after he seduces her best friend, who falls madly in love with him only to find herself abused and abandoned. But it’s the killer’s addictions that are his undoing. Worsening paranoia and lack of self-control lead to erratic behavior that in turn leads to a vague suspicion that he knew the woman found strangled in the park. After she is raped by the killer, the actress takes her suspicions to the police. Later, she calls on all her acting skills to set the killer up, manipulating him into a confession that is recorded on equipment that police have installed in her apartment. At the same time she narrowly escapes being murdered herself.