To be more precise, I’m rich, and it actually is odd that I don’t splurge on myself, ever. But when you’re alone, you know that money is the one thing that can keep you safe. Safe from what? Safe from being hauled away in the middle of the night and baked into protein wafer cookies to feed people who are in relationships. Safe from worrying about being eighty and entering a rest-home bidding war with some other rich person over who’s going to change my diaper that afternoon. A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money. I said, “Actually, I do use my money—to keep my family in check.”
“How?”
“To be blunt, who’s in my will and who isn’t. It’s cheesy and low-class, but it’s power, and I do like it. If I was whacked by a bus tomorrow, there’d be a minimum of fuss followed by a gleeful reading of my will.”
“You’re being too harsh on yourself.”
“The one exception would be Mother. She has no financial interest in me, but she’d be itching to see who snagged what.”
There was a silence.
I said, “Needless to say, my son, your arrival has altered things.”
“Ralph Lauren makes iron lungs?”
* * *
Back to a week ago. Back to me walking into my living room, deep in the night, checking my e-mail and seeing Herr Bayer’s message with an icon telling me of an attachment. Back to me breathing in and out a few times before clicking the download button.
I knew what I was going to see, and after twenty endless seconds what I saw was the Viennese person of interest, Klaus Kertesz, the obvious father of Jeremy—older, hairier and more European-looking in that way you can’t ever really articulate—but it was him. I must have been very drunk indeed that night at the Roman nightclub to forget that face. On seeing it, I felt like I’d fallen and bumped my head on the butcher block. My ears stung.
I’m not even sure if it was good news or bad news to see the face of Klaus Kertesz before me. He’s Jeremy’s father, and yet he’s—well, a rapist or molester or who knows what. The only thing that made sense to me was to go fetch my lucky meteorite, my message from above; and I’ve been holding it ever since.
Indeed, a week has now passed, and I haven’t yet phoned Herr Bayer, nor have I e-mailed him a proper reply. I’ve skipped work, and I’ve been sitting by my computer, writing these words while toying with the face of Klaus Kertesz, making him thinner, younger, more like Jeremy. I keep looking at framed photos of my son—it’s so hard to see my own face in there somewhere. I feel like that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it. I’m a Styrofoam puff used in packaging. I’m a napkin at McDonald’s. I’m invisible tape. Lucky Prince William, to be able to see his mother so clearly in his own face.
* * *
I’ve not mentioned my family’s involvement in Jeremy’s care—or Donna’s. I thought they’d be at the condo often, but once the novelty wore off, the pace of their visits slowed. There was one funny moment with William, on the phone, when he said, “I have to do due diligence here, Lizzie: any chance Junior is a gold digger?”
“He’s going to stick my head in a plastic Wonder Bread bag for my cheesy condo? Please.”
“You can never tell.”
“William, a new BMW isn’t going to happen. Maybe a shiny bauble or a trinket. I don’t know. I’ve never had someone to spend money on before. It’s new territory for me.”
An hour later, the phone rang. It was Leslie. “What’s this I hear about you buying expensive jewellery for Jeremy?”
Mother was a terrible caregiver. “Whenever you kids were sick, I’d lock you outside for a few hours and you’d be good as new. Just stick him in some cold fresh air.” She meant well, but she had no tolerance for the ever-worsening, intractable manifestations of the disease. She did want desperately to introduce Jeremy to her friends, but was slow in doing so as it meant revealing my shameful teen pregnancy. She toyed with the idea of “the long-lost nephew,” but William, Leslie and I scotched the notion.
In the end she brought along her easily bullied friend Sheila. During her visit, the woman asked no questions about Jeremy’s past; I can only imagine the sugar-coated version of the truth Mother fed her. Jeremy, of course, was charming, and for the first time I felt that Mother might be proud of me. The sensation was so new and jarring that I had to go into my bedroom, close the door, and sit there to both analyze and savour the novelty. When I returned to the living room, Jeremy was opening some of the boxloads of gifts Mother had brought him—pricey designer stuff. Mother’s not a cheap woman, but nor is she extravagant. I suspect she was trying to buy her way out of guilt, but I kept that to myself, and Jeremy was no dummy—he would have figured that out in a blink.
Later, he asked, “Growing up, was your mother cheap with you?”
“No. Not really.” Actually, Mother may have taken some sort of pride in my perceived virginity, but she was also always trying to tart me up in overpriced designer gear and makeup—anything to boost my sex appeal. Make the boys interested in taking you down off the shelf for a look. If I’d shown even a sneeze worth of interest, a leather dominatrix outfit and a set of handcuffs could have been mine—anything for a show of interest in sex. And if you forced her to choose between Liz as virgin and Liz as tramp, my hunch is that she’d have chosen the latter. Fortunately, Leslie was a far more enthusiastic participant in Mother’s campaign of sex.
* * *
Jeremy was right about Donna: in a brief time she was all over the condo like a teenager lining up for concert tickets. Not to disparage her intentions, but she converted one afternoon of bowling into a life partnership with the man. I’d taken a leave of absence from work and so extra help wasn’t needed. Some conversation might have been nice, but when Donna visited, her focus on Jeremy was so intense it reminded me of stalker movies.
“He’s suffering.”
“He’s just sleeping.”
“Imagine the pain.”
“It’s actually the opposite. He goes numb.”
In her eyes I was branded a witch.
After a week of this, Jeremy said, “This is going to get sexual really soon, trust me. She’s a control freak, and I’m a control freak’s dream date—to be more precise, I’m her prisoner. She has to go. What can we do about it?”
“Best we simply tell her to stop.”
“You be the one to do it. She’ll go ballistic.”
And she did. It was ugly and boring, and I was accused of being unappreciative, and Jeremy was accused of faking his illness for attention, and … Even thinking about her gets my blood to boiling. Once you see a person go psycho, you can never look at him or her the same way again. You hear that so-and-so’s crazy and it’s cute and funny, but once you’ve seen it for real, it’s over.
The day after the outburst, Liam visited around dinnertime. “Donna was very upset.”
Jeremy said, “She’s psycho.” It was a good health day for Jeremy, and to look in from the outside you’d never know he was falling apart.
Liam knew enough to leave the Donna issue alone. “I’ve got three of my choir friends in the car downstairs. Can I invite them up to hear Jeremy sing?”
This was such a shameless and unexpected request, we were happy to have them up, two women and a man. They were polite and quiet, and for once I had things to serve guests besides pudding cups and ouzo. One of the women had brought a tape recorder with her, and she was timid about using it, but she had no need to be. She asked Jeremy, “Can you sing classically?”
“I can, but I don’t know any of the theory behind it—just the sounds.”
“That’s okay.”
“What would you like me to sing backwards? Remember, I max out at around thirty seconds.”
“Actually, we’ve made a list …” Indeed they had. We spent two hours recording music. For a few of the pieces, Liam asked us to speak during Jeremy’s singing, only to prove to listeners that this wasn’t a stunt.
The fo
ur of them left, and that was that.
* * *
Some scraps of paper I just found …
A new order, cold- white lights that burn and die.
A tornado with a halo
A guy throwing a thrashing body in the trunk of a Chevy
A 747 the size and- shape of a hotel, flying to Jerusalem,
with stacking chairs instead of seats
* * *
The police ultimately learned who it was who chopped the man in half in the 1970s. It was the conductor, Ben, the one who’d been so upset about seeing the body—as well as the man who gave me a ride home from the PGE station. Who could possibly seem more innocent than the guy who found him? It was some sort of sex thing that went horribly wrong, but then with Ben it turned out things had gone horribly wrong with three other unlucky souls. He was serial material.
The reason Ben was so annoyed with me that afternoon, he confessed, is that he wanted the body to be a bit more far gone before it was discovered. Stupid man. If he wanted nobody to find the body, he should have carried the bits into the tunnel a quarter-mile or so away.
I thought of the body, and I thought of Jeremy when I first saw him in the hospital—the sense of miraculousness that coloured both experiences. I decided to visit the tracks again. Maybe the aura of the place would trigger something inside me, make me remember that night on the Roman roof. It couldn’t hurt.
I drove out to Horseshoe Bay—it was a gorgeous day—parked and then climbed up onto the railway tracks. They looked and smelled exactly as I remembered. I liked that timelessness. I picked a switch of baby alder, just like the one I used to probe the corpse. I walked to the spot where the corpse had been, but there was nothing there to mark the end of the man’s life, not even a sun-faded plastic daisy or two sticks made into a cross.
I walked along a bit further. The blackberries were out and the birds were making the most of them. There seemed to be less litter along the tracks than in the old days, but other than that, it could easily have been the 1970s.
I tried, but no memories of that night in Rome came back to me. No gangbang. No molestation. I was as honest with myself as I could be; if I could deny an entire pregnancy, denying a rape might be equally as plausible. But no.
I heard a noise, which I knew was one of those tiny speeder cars the railway uses for small errands. I moved off the tracks and stood in a small patch of sun-baked plantain and native geranium. The speeder slowed down and the man driving it said something into his mobile communication device, and then said to me, “Hey, you can’t walk here. It’s private property.”
“Really?”
“Haven’t you heard of September eleventh?”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’ll call the cops.”
“You do that.”
We both knew this conversation was doomed. He left and I walked back to the car. Something about the exchange made me make up my mind. Here’s what I’m going to do: I’ve booked a flight to Vienna for tomorrow, via Frankfurt, first class—moneybags me. I’ve also forwarded my arrival time to Herr Bayer. My stomach feels fizzy; my head feels like mist. My heart is heavy, with either gold or lead—I can’t really tell which.
A final thought before I leave: A few years ago I decided that I was going to make a list of all the things I’m not very good at, and then stop doing them—fixing the paper jams in the office; trying to understand how my car works; the logic behind Miss America pageants. I thought this decision would streamline my life, make it better—and up to a point it did. But I realize now that by deciding not to do things, I’ve lost millions of threads of chance and opportunity to have new experiences, to meet new people—to be alive, really. So I’m going to start doing things I’m bad at again. Heck, I’m going to do things I’ve never even tried.
* * *
Okay.
I’m writing these words from a German prison cell, located, I think, in the town of Morfelden, somewhere outside of Frankfurt. On the way here somebody opened the door of the van, and that’s what I saw on the road sign outside. I’ve spent the past three hours in solitary confinement, which must surely be some sort of cosmic joke, as I’ve spent most of my life in solitary confinement. How, one might ask, did this happen?
The prison isn’t as bad as I’d imagined prisons to be—no tattooed prisoners slashing their wrists and spritzing blood at guards, no squalid cell with built-up layers of puke, shit, pornography and razor blades. It’s actually white and spotless in here, maybe the size of my bedroom back home. There’s no easy way of knowing what time of day it is, and it’s wonderfully quiet. I can think of far worse punishments than a German solitary prison cell. Even the food isn’t too bad—three hours and they’ve already fed me cabbage, wurst, green vegetables—and the staff here are quite friendly to me.
I’ll here recount the steps to my prison cell. After I’d booked my flight to Vienna, calmness fell over my life, the kind that descends after making a huge decision, the calm that’s the opposite of remorse. The Dwarf and all the ditherers at the offices of Landover Communication Systems were offhandedly cheerful when I told them I was going to Austria. While I’ve only been gone a short while, I’m sure that my work cubicle has already been absorbed into all the others, leaving no traces of my existence there. Had my co-workers known the odd circumstances of my trip, about this Klaus Kertesz, the gossip factor would have been higher, but my secret was like my meteorite: sharing it with others would devalue it.
I also didn’t tell my family the true reason for my trip. Why would I? Me doing something out of the ordinary would be interesting to them for about two minutes and then be just another piece of noise in their lives. But my secret isn’t part of that noise—it’s all mine.
I’ll admit it, once the shock of buying my ticket subsided, I drove across town and spent a fair whack on an image makeover at one of the city’s more expensive salons. All to no good. Even as they saw me approach, I could tell they were scurrying into the back room, where they drew straws to see who would have to work on me. To their credit, they did try, but I am beauty-proof. My efforts at renovating my wardrobe years ago with Jeremy never went far; there’s just no point. I’m a nice, clean, well-shod, well-dressed blank. I’m not even someone in a crowd scene in a movie. The director would yell, “Stop! Haul that woman out of there! She’s too blank even for a crowd scene!”
I must also here comment on the difference between flying to Europe on a 747 charter in 1976 and flying there in 2004 in first class on Lufthansa’s craft the Schleswig-Holstein. Me, climbing up that little staircase into the bubble—endless leg room, delicious foods and a wide selection of film, TV and documentaries. I can see why the ruling class wants to keep the underclass far away. The proles would rampage if they saw how dishy life is up in the bubble. My one complaint is the little map they displayed overhead that showed us exactly where the plane was, the outside temperature, the estimated time of arrival. It made me feel like my life was in miniature. It was like watching the seconds tick by until, as Jeremy and Pink Floyd both pointed out to me, I was shorter of breath and one day closer to death. Or, as Jeremy said, “Well, at least when you sing it backwards, it’s one day closer to being born.”
* * *
A Ms. Greenaway from the Canadian government was just here, asking if conditions in the prison are adequate. She’s the only person I’ve been able to speak with so far.
“Adequate? I could happily live here.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm, Ms. Dunn. My job is to ensure you’re being treated properly.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. This place is okay.” I didn’t mention my lifelong belief that we, as humans, are a wretched species indeed, and deserving of harsh punishments for the crimes we casually get away with in our daily lives.
The quality of Ms. Greenaway’s silence assured me she knew I wasn’t joking. We were seated in a cubic white room with a window the size of a playing card, and I could tell it was night outside. I scanne
d the floor for scuffing or stains or anything remotely biological, but found nothing.
“Ms. Greenaway, could you please tell me why it is I’m in jail here?”
“Oh please.”
“Really.”
Her eyes told me she considered me an idiot. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
After more telltale silence Ms. Greenaway said, “Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell you. It isn’t my role.”
“That’s okay.”
She was huffy. “You mean you truly have no idea why you’re here?”
“Do I have to repeat myself? No, I don’t.”
Ms. Greenaway was losing patience. “I need names of people to contact. Family. Friends.”
“I don’t have any friends.” I considered my family. If my family members were to be contacted, there’d be a scene, a bad one, one that could easily be prevented. “I have a brother, William. He travels for a living. Contact him on his cellphone. His wife is an idiot. Neither you nor I want her involved in this.” I gave her William’s number and asked her what happens next.
She shrugged. She was obviously considering her best interest here. “Someone will be here in the morning to work with you.”
“Will they tell me why I’m here?”
“I can’t say that.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ms. Greenaway, I’m not a pin-head. You know exactly what I went through in the terminal, and so does everybody there. There has to have been a good reason for it.”
“It’s not my place to discuss this. I’m sorry. Goodbye.” With Donna-like efficiency she vanished, and I’m happy to report I felt no fear or worry at her vanishing. To have all ifs and buts of life stripped away—to have everything thought out for you every day and minute of your life—prison is the opposite of freedom, and, as such, is almost as liberating. I can’t tell you.
Eleanor Rigby Page 15
