The End of Me

by John Gould

  “Lucy,” Shauna said, after she’d confessed to her ruse. I was squatting there by the birth bed, this bizarre sweet beautiful little person in my arms. “Juicy Lucy Goosey. She’s yours.”

  Another lie, of course, since nobody is anybody’s. Like a lot of Shauna’s lies, it was a good one, helpfully half true. How long will I feel the need to believe it?

  Peacemaker

  Roberto says yes, Kunchen says no. Are we moving faster now? Have the fuddles finally got things sorted out, adjusted to the sudden rush? If they have, is that a good thing, should we want to get where we’re going? Roberto says yes, Kunchen says no.

  Sometimes I think they disagree just for the heck of it. All of us are desperate for ways to pass the time, if time is what we’re passing. From behind me Roberto says, “The women are ahead of us.” From ahead of me Kunchen says, “The women are behind us.” Neither of them knows, none of us knows. All we know is that the women aren’t here, that all three of these lines are men’s lines. At first we were able to switch from one to another, strive to get ourselves into the fastest one — or the slowest, depending on what we’d decided to believe about our destination — but then we reached the dividers and had to choose.

  By fuddles we don’t know what we mean. Who or what is in charge here? We haven’t the faintest.

  The dividers are transparent, and go all the way up. I once had a clear plastic thing where you dropped a coin in the top and it found its way to the correct cylinder: penny, nickel, dime, quarter. Perhaps my memories will keep coming back to me in this way.

  We’ve inched forward again.

  “Things are speeding up,” says Roberto.

  “Things are slowing down,” says Kunchen.

  “Things are staying the same,” says Otto. Otto is me.

  Theories get passed up and down the line. The fuddles planned for certain eventualities, but not for all of them. They expected us to arrive faster as things got worse where we came from, but they forgot what might happen all at once. How could they forget such a thing? How could we forget it? Here’s how I think of the situation: there are certain somethings inside you which could destroy you but for some reason don’t, so why should you stew about them? And then they do.

  Roberto says one-third, Kunchen says two-thirds. “Half?” I say. There will be many more — there will be everybody before long — so in a way we were lucky to arrive with the first big group. If lucky is what that makes us.

  Mostly we talk about the women. We don’t have pictures of them — we don’t have anything — so we seek to describe them for one another. This is a challenge, because even in our minds they’ve lost their features, and their names too, as we’ve lost ours. We’ve made up names for them, just as we’ve made up names for ourselves. My wife is Francoise now, just as I’m Otto. I say wife, but could she be my daughter? My sister? My mother? Could she be me?

  Except coconuts, we do have coconuts. Why coconuts? It’s as though the point of all these questions is to have no answers. Roberto says the best part of the coconut is the foul but refreshing water, Kunchen says it’s the sweet flesh. “They’re both superb,” I say. In this as in all things I am the peacemaker, though to be honest I lean towards the sweet flesh.

  We each remember one thing. Roberto remembers the light, Kunchen remembers the sound — an inconceivable roar, he says, though we do conceive it — and I remember the heat. Who remembers the wind? There may have been a moment at which parts of me were being blown off, or I may be making that up. There’s nothing to do here but make things up. Who started it? Who took sides with whom?

  We’ve inched forward again.

  “Hope,” says Roberto.

  “Fear,” says Kunchen.

  “Hope and fear,” I say. “Hope and fear.”

  Rat Dead Wall Disease

  The smell originated in the bathroom and advanced outwards through the little basement suite. Kitchen, living room, bedroom. The odious intensity of it gradually declined with increasing distance from its source. Like waves of Wi-Fi, Trev signed to Hannah, and she nodded. At night in bed they could light a stick of incense and almost forget.

  The scent was presumably emanating upwards too, but they couldn’t confirm this since their landlord, Mr. Dufort, who lived alone above them, was abroad visiting family. Hannah tried emailing him, but no luck. Trev called a plumber, and they had him complete his inspection before confessing that they couldn’t pay. It wasn’t clear why he was so furious, since he hadn’t done anything, simply confirmed that there was nothing he could do. Sampling the air like a dog trained to sniff out heroin or cancer he announced, “Nope. That’s not sewer. Something dead in the wall, be my guess. Just let it dry out.” He gave the lining of the shower stall an exploratory rap. “Got rodents, I’m guessing?” But they didn’t, so far as they knew. This was the first place they’d shared in their four years together that seemed to be vermin free, save the inevitable ants and silverfish. Trev signed the news to Hannah, who said, “Rats here in paradise?” in that voice she’d never heard.

  Truth be told, Trev had detected a scratching in the structure of the house one night the previous week, but he hadn’t yet shared this news with Hannah. That day had been a dismal one, his first and last day of work in many months. As a younger man — he was past thirty now — Trev had toyed briefly with the idea of acting school. This history had emboldened him to apply, one recent caffeine-crazed afternoon, for the position of Standardized Patient Actor. At the interview he’d lied successfully about his lack of relevant training or experience, which seemed to establish that he didn’t need any. What most preoccupied the interviewer was Trev’s memory, since it would be his job to accurately report and mimic, for a series of medical students, various medical conditions. Trev was able to demonstrate the ghastly thoroughness of his recall by rhyming off, in alphabetical order, the titles of the pamphlets in the waiting room. Alcohol and Substance Abuse. Anxiety and Panic Attacks. Depression Dos and Don’ts. At this last Trev winced and emitted a low groan, which the interviewer seemed to take as a good sign, a sign that Trev was empathetic but exempt from these troubles. He offered Trev his hand for a congratulatory shake.

  After three half-days of instruction at the university, Trev was assigned his first role. “Arthur” was a young man who suffered from a sinus infection he believed to be a brain tumour of the kind that had killed his father. Trev nailed the part. He drew on his grief for his own dad, with whom he’d barely spoken since their falling out over Hannah, and more generally over what his father perceived to be the perverse aimlessness of Trev’s life. The first medical student to try her diagnostic skills on Arthur, a chipper young woman named Biyu, struck Trev as oddly unmoved by Arthur’s fraught condition. Improvising, Trev wove in details from his own life. The chest pains, the night terrors. Such was his immersion in the role that he began to sob, and could not be stopped. Biyu stroked his arm, hissed into an intercom. Trev was thanked and sent home.

  He almost fell asleep that night — he rarely did until daylight — but startled at what he imagined to be a scrabbling sound, nails on wood. Wide awake, he could no longer distinguish it. The gentle huff of Hannah’s breath, the irritable click and buzz of the refrigerator, the drone of night traffic, nothing else. Had the scrabbling sound entered him from the apartment? Or was it the other way around, had it spilled out into the apartment from within? Looking back, Trev found himself seriously entertaining this notion. Parts of him had escaped his body, to die and rot in the walls. It felt possible.

  The plumber having angrily departed, Trev and Hannah spent the rest of the afternoon on her phone looking up “rat dead wall disease” and various permutations thereof. After a leftover take-out Thai dinner they binged on closed-captioned reruns of Full House, a saccharine sitcom which reminded neither of them of their youth. Hannah, currently on the morning shift at the Homemade Buns factory, turned in early.

  Trev lay with her awhile, as was his practice, alert to any sign of sleepines
s within himself, anticipating none. A stick of Persephone’s Pomegranate smouldered in a dish by the bed. Hannah twitched, opened her eyes to confirm that he was still there, twitched again and went peaceful.

  Trev eased himself out of bed. As he passed through the living room the stench hit him again, signifying not sewage any longer but corrupted flesh, not life’s shameful byproduct but its shameful end. In the bathroom, boxer-shorted and armed with a scrap of copper pipe from under the sink, he set to work. He drove the pipe through the drywall in a few spots, then whacked away until a chunk came loose. It was loud work, and louder again when the dust set him violently coughing, but no matter. This was the extra loneliness and liberty of living with a deaf woman. Out of sight, everything you did was clandestine, traitorous.

  Halfway down the first stretch of wall Trev’s jabbing encountered resistance. What he eventually worked free of the stud space was a doll, time-capsuled there (he also unearthed a yellowed newspaper from 1970, “Four Students Shot Dead at Kent State Campus”) by whoever had built or renovated the bathroom. A blonde toddler in a party dress, the doll blinked her blue eyes up at Trev when he tipped her over, gamely swung her arms and legs. There was a little ring hanging from the back of her neck. Trev pulled it.

  Please brush my hair, said the doll. Her voice was that of a woman mimicking the voice of a little girl. Trev pulled again.

  I’m hungry.

  Trev caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink, a filthy hooligan clasping a little girl roughly in his arms.

  Where are we going? she asked.

  Trev dusted her off, slapped at his own hair a few times. In the bedroom he found Hannah propped up on her pillow, squinting in the light of the lamp she’d apparently just switched on. So something had reached her after all. A vibration, a waft of drywall dust. Or something from within, a rat dream, a rat vision.

  Trev sat on the edge of the bed, baby doll in his lap. “I found her in the wall,” he explained, and mimed his demolition procedure. He coughed, straightened the little girl’s dress, fluffed up her synthetic hair. He pulled her string.

  May I have a cookie?

  Trev signed it for Hannah, who smiled and apologized that she didn’t have one.

  I hurt myself.

  “Poor dear,” signed Hannah.

  Tell me a story.

  Hannah frowned, then flipped back the bedding, patted the mattress beside her. Trev gave himself another dust off and climbed in, tucking the doll between them.

  “Once upon a time …” Hannah paused, her hands in the air above them, two bats frozen in flight. They began to dart about again. “Once upon a time there was a prince who lost his sight. It was the king, his father, who stole his sight from him. No, not his father. An imposter who’d drowned his father and taken his place.”

  Trev pulled the doll’s string. I love you, she said. Trev translated it.

  Hannah pressed her cheek briefly to the smudgy cheek of the doll, and went on with her story. “Late one night, when he couldn’t sleep, the prince felt his way through the castle up to the very highest tower, the chamber of the royal magician. The prince asked the royal magician, What do I have to do so I can see again?”

  Will you brush my hair? said the little girl. Trev left it untranslated.

  “The royal magician told him, You have to do four things.” Hannah paused once more, pondering. “First, you have to forget your name, and keep it forgotten.”

  Trev nodded, and caused the little girl to nod too.

  “Then you have to remember what your mum used to call you when you were a baby. Way too young to remember.”

  The little girl’s eyes were closed. Trev fought to keep his own eyelids up.

  “Third, you have to do something else. You invent it, Trev, I’m out of ideas.”

  Let’s have a party, said the little girl.

  “Wait, I’ve got it.” Hannah’s hands were in motion again. “You have to picture everything you saw when you could see. You have to picture buildings and beaches.”

  Trev tucked the little girl in tighter.

  “You have to picture hummingbirds. Ceiling fans.”

  Trev’s eyes opened, fluttered shut, briefly opened again.

  “You have to picture every single shade of red, and there are an infinite … of Nelson Mandela where he’s … with jam, and another one with … to picture a polar bear through the bars of … a stem bent but … blue water blue as …”

  It still existed, Hannah’s voice, hovered in the heavy air. You didn’t need to see it to believe it.

  Via Negativa

  I’m writing to follow up on today’s (rather fraught!) family meeting. I apologize if I seemed brusque, which I imagine I did since I was brusque. My gratitude for the care you and your staff give my husband is beyond my ability to articulate it. That’s as close as I’m going to get.

  My husband, too, is clearly overwhelmed by what’s going on inside him, and stymied when he tries to give it expression. You mentioned that yesterday Mario “took a swing” at somebody (I’m guessing it was Mrs. Prendergast?) who showed too much interest in his brownie. Let me assure you that Mario has never taken a swing at anybody in his life, certainly not in the twelve years I’ve known him. He’s a pacifist, tender to a fault. People, including our two young kids, hide their suffering from him in order not to see him suffer.

  Should I put all this in the past tense? Is Mario a different man, since the accident? I see no point entertaining this question.

  You reported, rather puffily it seems to me, that you’ve managed to get Mario to stop swearing. No such luck getting Mr. Wallace to stop shouting “steeeerike!” every minute or so all day long, I notice, or in coaxing the bald lady (can’t think of her name) to quit lecturing us on the evils of teeth. Apart from the plaque by the security keypad, there’s been little overt evidence of the facility’s “healing ministry of Jesus Christ,” and for this I’m grateful. Is there something a little pious, though, about your obsession with profanity?

  As you’re aware, Mario’s go-to curse nowadays is “holy fuck shit.” Am I the only one to admire the efficiency of this transgression against the three big taboos, the religious, the sexual and the excretory? I understand that this phrase, and even more so the recent “mother fuck Christ whore,” must be hard for the more delicate members of your staff. It’s hard for me too, especially if Mario utters nothing else in the course of a visit.

  But, as I argued at the meeting, I believe Mario should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to resume swearing. I apologize for the way I put it (“assface” is a term to which I rarely have recourse), but I feel strongly about this. You’ve argued that his cursing is a “cognitive distortion,” that it has a “catastrophising” impact on him, locking him into an unduly negative and passive relationship with his condition. But this is nonsense. Cursing kills pain. It’s been demonstrated (I looked it up) that softening a curse deprives it of its analgesic power. Replacing Mario’s “fuck” with “fudge” is like replacing his oxycodone with aspirin. I’d take a swing at somebody too.

  What can happen to a person is beyond bearing. Religious types have said it, and now my husband’s saying it, or at least he’s making the attempt. Think of it as a religious path, a via negativa (another thing I looked up). Imagine that Mario’s working his way towards the divine by itemizing all the things that aren’t God. Neti neti, as the people in India apparently say. Fuck this, fuck that.

  Will there be anything left when he’s done? How should I know?

  When I put the older of our two boys to bed tonight he asked me, “How can Mario’s leg still hurt when it isn’t there anymore?” My husband’s never wanted to be “Dad” or “Daddy” to the boys, don’t ask me why. Anyhow, I had no good answer for him, but it’s occurred to me since that phantom pain is almost the paradigm of suffering. Pain is the physical expression of loss. Pain is our absence assembling itself inside us. “His body is lonesome for its leg.” That would’ve been good. Why can
I never think of the right thing to say at the time?

  For instance, rather than telling you to “screw yourself sideways” today I should have said, “Recall that the word ‘excruciating’ comes from the cross, from crucifixion. Recall that even Jesus lashed out after a few hours up there.”

  Yes, lonely. So fucking lonely. Can you feel it, the way that “fucking” expands, releases?

  You’ve had a long tough day, what with people like me. Why not give it a try? Just say it.

  Pulse

  Story about a guy who, inspired by the samurai thing of summing up life in a poem at the moment of death, wants to do that. But not a poem.

  How will he know he’s about to die? Has to assume he always is?

  Symbols of impermanence: cherry blossoms, lightning, moon in a dewdrop. But something better, something contemp.

  Setting?

  “The point of all speech is silence.” He reads this, make up where. He plans to turn it around, let silence speak. Dead Man Talking — title?

  In Japan they used to do a haiku. He’s going to tweet. How does he build up followers?

  He doesn’t want to write anything till he dies, but somehow he has to get people listening so there’s a point. Or does he? Explore.

  Don’t include the death-tweet. Reader should be able to imagine it himself once he’s read the story. Or she — make sure there’s

  A samurai had another samurai behind him to cut off his head when the poem was done. Our guy (name?) has to come up with something.

  Hooks up a heart monitor to headphones so he can hear his pulse every minute of every day.

  Yes, and he sends out his tweet between when his heart stops and when there’s no him. #lastbeat

  His father died suddenly of a heart attack, and his grandfather. What were they thinking, feeling? Idea that we’ll never know.