The End of Me

by John Gould

  How far up the Ladder of Being, though, could one thought take you? How far down? The outhouse here at Claire’s dad’s cabin is disgusting, so Ruth didn’t stick around to find out. The book was absent its cover, and absent its first fifty or so pages too. Could people really be wiping themselves with it? The TP was low today, and had clearly been nibbled by mice — Ruth herself thought of using the sacred text, which had English on one side of the page, Sanskrit or something on the other. There were Archie comics too, but these were intact. Out of bounds, apparently.

  “Ahh-oh, ah-ohh.” What’s tricky with Claire is that her real noises sound so fake. If there were an orgasm ringtone it would sound like Claire cooshing, or in this case Claire thinking about maybe possibly cooshing sometime in the future. Ruth’s losing ground. How about a little more … yeah, like that. Tasty, Claire after a dunk in Clear Lake.

  Justin? Jason? Claire’s only mentioned her last boyfriend once, but she described him as “intense” and “spiritual” (implying the quotation marks, perhaps for Ruth’s benefit), so the book may well be his. Why should this bother Ruth? Why should she care if Claire brought some guy here to her “heart-place” (as she described it on their way up this morning), if she sat with him on Reading Rock, jumped hand-in-hand with him off Silly Buggers Bridge? Why would it upset her to think of Jason in this same bed, his big ugly schlong between these same beautiful legs?

  Hm. How far down the Ladder would that thought drop her? And it’s true, Ruth could die right now, of course she could, not la petite mort but the big one. She’s got that iffy valve in her heart, and she frets all the time about how much she frets, and about everything else too. So yeah, she could die, or she could fall asleep. That’s always the most nervous part for Ruth, not the sex but the drifting off afterwards, which she’s been able to avoid with Claire so far, claiming various early morning appointments as a reason not to stay over at Claire’s place in town. But now the swim, the snack, the sex — how can a snooze not follow? And what will she blurt, once she’s not awake to stop herself blurting it? Alia, Ruth’s last lover, took to jotting things down and confronting her with them in the morning. “Close it!” she apparently cried out one night, “It’s too yellow!” Alia wanted to know what was so yellow, and why Ruth was so keen to conceal it. But how could Ruth know that? How could she be held responsible for what went on in her own head?

  Veronica. No, Betty. Which of them did Archie finally propose to, only then it turns out to be a fantasy and it’s really the other way around?

  Claire wriggles a bit, the more completely to reveal herself. “Ahhhh. Ohhhh.” Better. More of that.

  Yes. Betty and Veronica around back of Riverdale High, French kissing and feeling each other up — that may have been Ruth’s very last fantasy before she jammed her tweezers into the outlet for the first time. Her little brother came along with their parents to be with her in emerg, and brought a stack of comics. Reggie and Betty, Archie and Veronica, boy-girl, boy-girl, how much time did she waste trying to have that fantasy instead? She’s twenty-eight now, and it’s just five years since the night she waded topless to the centre of the fountain at city hall and screamed “Pussyyyyy!” till her voice gave out. And here’s Claire, stammering her way towards the same eruption at about the same age.

  “Ah. Ah. Ah.” Staccato, a promising sign. Ruth ups her intensity a touch, even as the drowsiness continues to build in her.

  “Red rubber chicken, chrissake!” — Alia had to have been making that one up. But what will come out of Ruth today? And why is she worrying about Claire’s reaction? A few weeks, can she really be this far gone?

  “Ah-oh-ah-oh.”

  A good thought. How would you settle on one? How would you make yourself have it just as you drifted off, just as you died?

  “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ohhh… .”

  Not I love you yet but something even simpler, purer. Just you? Yes, and as she thinks it she speaks it too, deep into this delicious mouth, just you you you.

  From the Journal of Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Mass.

  October 18, 1906

  Dispatched another dog upon the scale in the barn this morning, a mangy creature that had been molesting the Carleton flock. Got the dosage just right this time, such that the mutt was swiftly freed from its urge to struggle. Once again, the scale remained still at the moment of death.

  It is virtually confirmed that a dog possesses no soul substance, which does not of course disburden me from the responsibility of seeing to its burial. Had I not a conscience of my own, I would rely on the figure of Mary lurking behind the muslin to supply that conscience for me.

  Mutton for dinner, slightly overdone but tolerable.

  October 19, 1906

  Down to Dorchester to see the ranking physician at the sanitarium again, requesting just one more consumptive. He is unmoved.

  Have elected to discard the results of Subject #4, the diabetic coma, because of the problem with the scales, and because of the actions of those meddlers who chanced to be present when he finally expired. Subject #6 also, the tubercular who passed before we were ready for him. This leaves four good subjects, though the first is still the most sound experimentally, and his loss of three fourths of an ounce at the moment of death our most reliable estimate of the weight of a soul.

  October 20, 1906

  Trouble with my lumbago again. Freed from the body, are we still capable of pain? So many questions yet.

  October 21, 1906

  Further to yesterday’s thoughts, by what mechanism does the soul depart the body? Through what orifice, or by means of what emanation? What experiment might be designed to trace it?

  Was offered a litter of puppies by the Johanson boy, but declined. My scale is, sadly, not sufficiently precise to register such a tiny soul. Besides, even a creature devoid of soul substance deserves its time upon the earth.

  Lamb chops and the last of Mary’s excellent mint jelly.

  October 22, 1906

  That the soul is not constituted of ether, and therefore weightless, can be deduced from the fact that the ether is continuous and not separable into discrete parcels, whereas the human being has separateness and aloneness as its most fundamental characteristic.

  One more dog today, to firm up my results. A retriever, possibly purebred, with so-called “soulful” eyes. Ill, but not ill enough — injections were required. Again, the scale registered no alteration as the creature succumbed.

  October 23, 1906

  Patience, patience. Dr. L. has written to observe that at the moment of death the sphincter and the muscles of the pelvic floor relax, and that the sudden change in weight might therefore be explained by evacuations of urine and faeces. I have pointed out, with all due courtesy, that in none of my six cases was there motion of the bowels, and that anyway such evacuations would still be present upon the scale, as was the dram or two of urine each subject released.

  October 24, 1906

  “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance.” Mary scoffs at my proposed title, as she scoffs at every manifestation of my research. It is not ignorance that holds her back, so it must be the greater flaw of stubbornness.

  October 25, 1906

  Presuming for a moment that a soul is the size of the body it inhabits, then at three fourths of an ounce a man-sized soul is less dense than the atmosphere which surrounds the earth, and will ascend without interruption.

  Final draft off to the Society in today’s mail.

  October 26, 1906

  The dream again, Subject #1 but somehow Mary too this time. Odd, because Subject #1 was of a far more phlegmatic temper than is my melancholic Mary. Where he took four hours to die she took but a minute, not long enough for me to convince her of the veracity of my theory, and thus to assure her that her death would not be a death. Awoke weeping for no reason.

  October 27, 1906

  Had another go at Mary after breakfast this morni
ng. If a soul has not substance, what will transport a man from his dying body? Can emptiness bear upon itself a personality? Can nothing be something? Mary turned, silent, back to the kitchen sink, but I permit myself to believe I have made progress.

  Back bacon from one of Carleton’s hogs.

  Centrifuge

  Will pinched up his eyes as though to peer into his own head. “Cynth came to the door,” he said. “No, it was a flap, I was in a tent. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t herself either. She was … she was a raccoon.”

  Jorie made a listening face. It wasn’t exactly a lie, she really was trying to listen. She tore open another packet of sugar and dumped it into her glass of water.

  “Except more like an oil painting of a raccoon.”

  Jorie made her eyes go big.

  Cynth had been gone two months. An overdose, probably accidental, though who really knew. This was the first time Jorie and Will had been together since the funeral, which Will described as the most depressing thing he’d ever experienced. Cynth’s parents were Buddhist or something, sickeningly serene. They weren’t Indigenous, but this didn’t stop them smudging everybody as they filed into the church. A guy with a piccolo played Beatles tunes as they filed back out. Will flipped him the bird.

  “She opened her mouth,” he went on, “and there was this choppy lake in there and suddenly I was swimming.” His knee rhythmically hammered the underside of the table, corrugating the liquid in their glasses. “Then I remembered I can’t swim, but actually I can, and I sank down into this pit that was a parking garage.”

  They’d agreed to meet at Cynth’s favourite coffee shop, a scones-and-doilies sort of deal way out in the suburb where Cynth had grown up. Before she died, Cynth had worked out a way of sitting in this place that was so ironic that you couldn’t even tell, she just seemed to be sitting there like an ordinary person. By the time Jorie arrived today, after a two-hour walk, Will had installed himself next to the only other customers in the place. He was kind of a prick that way — he was always trying to shake people up, mess with their notion of personal space, the whole idea that they got to set themselves apart. A prick, and a hero. His eye was still black and yellow from the time he took the urinal beside another dude when there were other urinals free.

  “The garage had wallpaper with chipmunks sitting on branches,” said Will. He ran his fingers over the scab on his forearm. Jorie tried to imagine that the scab was in the shape of something, but she couldn’t think what. “Only instead of chipmunks there was something else. Organs, hearts. Like human hearts, at least I think they were human.”

  Jorie made the hummingbird tattoo on the back of her hand dart and dip. She and Will had slept together once. His beard was gross, and he shook like a scolded dog the whole time, but he was oddly patient and kind. And of course they were both friends with Cynth, and believed her to be the best person they’d ever met. What else did they have in common? They both lived with their dads, there was that. Both dads wanted them out.

  “The priest told us to turn to the hymn on page seventy-three.” Will used his teeth to tear open a packet of crackers and set about smearing them with ketchup. “But my copy didn’t have a page seventy-three so I had to come up with something.”

  After the funeral, Jorie had gone around back of the church and cried until she almost passed out. What had gutted her was a poem recited by Cynth’s mother during the service. The poem was beautiful, and seemed to be known to everyone else. Not to Jorie. This fact brought on a sadness that went beyond what she could contain.

  “The thing I thought of,” said Will, “was that song from when we were little, ‘Skiddy-mer-rink-a-doo.’ ”

  He sang a bit of it, though the tune sounded wrong to Jorie. Then he went back to his monologue, pausing now and again to reconstruct another element of his dream. The people at the next table, a sniffy middle-aged couple who could hardly be imagined speaking to one another, were clearly failing not to follow along. Jorie couldn’t sort out the headline on the man’s newspaper because of the way he had it folded. “… Within Decade … -ists Warn.” Physicists? Dentists? Pianists?

  “But the baby whale was bigger than the mother whale,” Will was saying, “and it kept whistling and groaning in this lonely sort of —”

  “Me too,” said Jorie. “I had that dream too.”

  “What?” said Will. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope.” Imagine, if life actually worked that way. “I mean, not every detail. Like there was no centrifuge in mine. And Cynth was never Celine Dion. But mostly, yeah.”

  “Crazy. Just … crazy.”

  In the coming months, it became clear that Will was investing more and more significance in the shared dream. Whenever Jorie ran into him he expressed the belief that it linked the two of them to Cynth and to each other at a “sublingual” level. Not the right word, and Jorie felt good about leaving it be. She felt good, too, about the sense of communion she’d imparted to Will, though not so good that she’d done so with a lie. Did it matter?

  Without exactly meaning to, she started to avoid Will, steer clear of his hangouts. She never did dream about Cynth, but when Will died, another overdose, she dreamed about him. She wrote the dream down, the bits of it she could remember — a spaceship made of stone, a room in which you had to keep counting all the corners or your hair would fall out — and tucked the slip of paper into the same old metal tea box in which she kept a bird bone and a photo of her mum and a few other things.

  Sodom

  Lot’s daughter — the younger of the two virgins, she’s about my age — says to me, “Why do you have to be so negative all the time?”

  Our usual quarrel. Lot’s daughter and I have been seeing each other on the sly for a while now (Lot would hit the roof), and she’s annoyed by my bleak moods. Girls are drawn to brooding guys, but once they’ve got them they expect them to cheer up. This has been my experience.

  I take another sip of goat’s milk from my clay vessel. “It’s the whole point of thought,” I say. “Thought is inherently negative. Its whole purpose is to foresee catastrophe. That’s why we started to think in the first place, so we’d be ready for what’s about to go wrong.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “See?” I say.

  “See what? Oh, ha ha.” She tears off a bit of unleavened bread, gnaws at it. Even this, even gnawing unleavened bread, is sublime when done by Lot’s daughter. No one in his right mind would ever break up with this girl for any reason.

  “Like I say,” I say, “there’s going to be fire and brimstone. Here in Sodom, and maybe in Gomorrah too. Raining, and I mean raining down on us. For one thing, we live in a serious earthquake zone. For another thing, the rocks around here are laced with flammable sulphur and bitumen. For one more thing, our sin is grievous.”

  Lot’s daughter has been rolling her eyes the whole time, her beautiful tar-dark eyes. “You really are a gloomy gus, aren’t you?” she says. She allows the back of her hand to brush my arm where it’s bare beneath the sleeve of my tunic. I wish it were me with whom she’d one day stop being a virgin. I’m ready to stop being a virgin with her right here, right now, on the dirt floor of this hewn-stone building. My every desire is an abomination.

  “God’s angry,” I say. “Why wouldn’t he be? Here’s what’s going to happen. God’s going to get angrier and angrier, and eventually He’ll decide to destroy us. He’ll send down men who’ll turn out to be angels, probably two of them. Your dad will take them in, but a mob will surround the house and demand to be allowed to rape the angels.”

  “Rape the angels?” says Lot’s daughter. “Yup, you’re a laugh riot.”

  “But your dad won’t give them the angels, he’ll offer you and your sister to the mob instead. Two virgins in place of two angels. The mob will turn him down, but the angels will strike the mob blind so you and your sister and your parents can slip away before the rest of us burn to death. You’ll escape, but you may wish you hadn�
��t. Your mum will turn around and look back at the burning cities, which for some reason God will have told you not to do, and she’ll turn into a pillar of salt.”

  “Pillar of salt,” says Lot’s daughter. She once called me a poet, but almost in a nice way.

  “Pillar of salt,” I say. I try to say it like poetry. “You and your sister and your dad will make it to a cave where you’ll hide out together, imagining you’re the only people left in all creation, and you’ll get your dad drunk and have sex with him so you can be fruitful. Or that’ll be the official version, but obviously the incest will be your dad’s idea. You’ll have a son by your father and name him Ben-Ammi, from whom will arise the Ammonites, a nomadic people who’ll worship the god Moloch.”

  “Is this really the kind of stuff you think about all the time?” says Lot’s daughter.

  “Pretty much.”

  “What if you didn’t?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Who says we have to think all the time? What if we didn’t?”

  “Didn’t think?” I say. “You mean, like animals?” I have no idea whether or not animals think. Abisha, our ass, sometimes gets a look on his face you could call pensive, but what’s really going on in there?

  “Thinking and then not thinking is completely different than not thinking in the first place,” says Lot’s daughter.

  “Interesting point.” I refill our clay vessels.

  “And hey, what if you came along with us?” She seems to have believed me, my tale. “I’ll tell Dad I won’t flee with him unless you can come too.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I say. “I really appreciate it.” Lot’s uncle happens to be Abraham, the patriarch with whom God made the Covenant. Like he’s going to marry his daughter off to me, the iniquitous son of some scribe.

  Lot’s daughter dips a piece of unleavened bread into her goat’s milk. I want to be with her for the rest of my life, short and vain as it may be, watching her do little things like this.