Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  Fortune rends a family tree; cracks in the ice are frequent.

  Dew is nerves of the earth, and petal skin, and woman’s breath.

  They say reembodiment of the soul is for the best. They say it proves the benevolence of God. It’s not that humans are born unequal—some fated to misery while others succeed—but that each embodiment is but a rung on the ladder of growth. Some souls are more advanced than others, but only because they’ve been climbing longer. We are all possessed of latent gifts; our goal is to rouse our talents, one incarnation at a time. The handbook says the interval between carnal moments is about five hundred years, depending on how much information the spirit needs to assimilate post-corpus. Conceivably, you can tour the ether for millennia before reentry. This has its boons. There is much debauchery in the ether. Much cribbage, too.

  First law of thermodynamics: Energy is conserved. It is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes forms. We do not know of anything in nature that violates this law, including the process of reincarnation. Nothing is lost. The imperishable soul alights on the brain until the brain is no more. Then it moves on to the next. Let me address myself to the skeptics: Do you say of a musician that he dies when his instrument fails? Or is it rather that this musician is compelled to find a new instrument? To play better and more passionately than ever before? What greater stimulus to ambition than the promise that the goals of which we dream, the nobility of spirit to which we aspire, the indwelling of gods and the radiance of their power, are but waiting to be discovered in the consciousness of man? Play the harp enough times, an angel you become.

  This, at any rate, is what the handbook says.

  My father’s crew, returned from Paris, are detained at Bergen. A pestilence has felled half the seamen. Of the incident, it is written: The buccaneers were struck down by divine judgment with either blindness or insanity.

  In short: the rest of us have been stranded on Man for weeks. To pass the time, I have been reading a Viking romance, penned by a bouffant drag queen from Connecticut. She might not be a drag queen, but I like to speculate. She enjoys words like tawny and buttocks. Delayed gratification is her pleasure. Reeling from the terrors of night, her bosom heavy with milk, Thora plunged into the sea. Syntax is a marvel. And I admire a clause in the right hands. The opening-gambit clause. Who’s reeling? Whose bosom? Thora. Thora Meaty Thighs.

  It is not by chance that I like language and books and the oral tradition. Read up on us: In pagan mythology, he who is best with words also knows most about the hierarchy of the universe. Our poets are revered. We vaunt the most bloodthirsty among us, but it’s really the learned who steal the show. In the sagas, it is told of men who spar with their wits, whose facility with language produces the right word at the right time. Le mot juste. Think about it: What conjures a spirit, the witch or the witchcraft? The latter of course, the incantation. I recently saw a movie about an orphaned child who finds a book of spells. The girl is a tomboy, red hair, pretty tough but hurting awful. At some point, she trots out a spell and, booyah, her Special Ops doll turns real. So now she has a friend and a bodyguard. In short, her life is saved. The girl cannot multiply in her head, but she can inspirit. All because of the right words in the right sequence. So yes, we love verse and we love poets.

  In my circle, they call plague pestilenti flatu, which roughly means fatal anal breath. The gas of a dragon who can’t digest. I find this rich with story, and many stories have there been. Certainly it’s preferable to gram-negative obligate pathogen, from which good luck plumbing a saga. I’ll take Ragnarook over zoonotic contagion any day. And so, of course, would Isifrid.

  Posterity has yet to claim my Viking bones. They have found armbands in Anglesey and my brother at Repton. They may well find me. I was speared in the head thrice. Disemboweled and castrated. My kin buried me with a boar’s tusk in lieu of my sex so that I might be whole for the trip to Valhalla. So this is Valhalla? Of course not. This is shepherd’s pie with family.

  My father’s name was Ragnar Lodbrok, literally, Ragnar Shaggy Trews, because he wore goatskin breeches. So do I, but did I get Knut the Hirsute? Noooo, it’s Knut the Soft for me. A sequence of words can change everything. I could have been a contender.

  Six

  “Mrs. Monsen, thank you for having me over today.”

  “Call me Agneth.”

  “Mrs. Clark, it’s a pleasure.”

  “Call me Isifrid.”

  Blech, pleasantries. We were sitting with a journalist who was profiling the family for a glossy magazine. No idea why we had agreed to this. Or rather, why Izzy had agreed on our behalf.

  We were in the yellow room, seated across from the journalist, whose name was Alfred. He wanted to interview us en masse and then one by one. We were four generations of Norse women who orbited around the loss of Dad. Not much of an article topic, which turned out to be the point. Apparently, we’d been duped. Alfred was not interested in us, he wanted to know about the guy who died of superplague in Minnesota.

  The guy died? Oh jeez, he knew about the guy. How’d he know about the guy?

  “Ah,” he said. The seat of the couch was so deep it broke well beyond the knee if you sat back. This made everyone look a little Alice in Wonderland. In particular, it made Alfred look like a dwarf. Also, he lacked for hair on the pate, which left what coverage he had horseshoeing around the sides.

  “Ah,” he said again. “It’s being kept close to the vest.”

  I noticed he was missing a button on his shirt. And that he had the shakes. His teacup rattled against the saucer. I felt like telling him to ditch the saucer, only it was catching spillage from the cup.

  “This is bad,” Hannah said. “Really bad. Someone actually died?”

  And suddenly Alfred looked bereft. And I felt for him. It must be hard having to straddle human feelings which are fear and grief, and reporter feelings which are, Yay, this is the best scoop ever!

  He had cashew sacks beneath each eye, and lids whose cant suggested Asian pedigree, though really he was just old. I offered him a biscuit.

  He told us the man died within nine hours of getting sick. A spiral the likes of which no one had ever seen. He’d complained of fever at midnight, was vomiting quarts of blood by dawn, and essentially had drained his own body as a tire lets air.

  In secret, the CDC had dispatched several agents to the area, but none could determine how he’d gotten the superplague. Thus far, it was an isolated event, though the paramedics who answered the call, two nurses, and the man’s wife were all put on antibiotics. Not that it would help, but just to feel like they tried.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “This is bad,” Hannah said.

  Izzy came to life. “Can you stop saying that? We know it’s bad. It’s we’re-all-going-to-die bad. You think saying that is helping any?”

  Alfred put up his hands for calm. “I did not mean to alarm anyone. There might be an explanation besides worst-case scenario. Though I see you’ve already anticipated worst-case scenario.” He was referring to Aggie’s mask.

  Hannah produced one from her backpack and started kneading it in her lap.

  Isifrid covered her face. I bet she wanted to smoke real bad. I could imagine her departing for another room, but I couldn’t see her mounting the chair to get her wings. Even a crackhead can’t explain away that kind of behavior. But off she went. We had a view right into the kitchen. She said she needed the popcorn maker that’s in the back, and who wanted popcorn? She even loaded the thing with kernels before excusing herself.

  Alfred said he really needed this story, so could we get started with the background info? Background info? I felt like he was not appreciating the significance of the Minnesota Man. On the other hand, did I really need to be the one to scare the crap out of him? He must have been eighty. I bet he wanted for bladder control. And he was mangling his cassette tape with a pencil, which spoke to the considerably worse problem of wha
t happens when progress sloughs you off. Who still uses cassette tapes? If Alfred lost his job, he’d be qualified for nothing else.

  Aggie removed her mask, ready to accommodate. Alfred said thanks because he had no idea what she was saying before. He asked about her past. She did not even hesitate, and said her life had two distinct parts, before cardiac surgery and after. She was certain she’d woken up in the hospital a different person from the one who came in.

  “How do you mean?”

  Even I wanted to know. I’d never heard this before.

  “After they stopped my heart, something went wrong with the ventilator or blood pump, I’m not sure which. They say that technically I was dead for a couple minutes.”

  “But then you were fine?”

  “I was different. It was 1950. Isifrid was about six. I had a romance with an American navy officer. We tried to elope to Mexico, but my husband found me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was not myself. And that’s when I began to believe in reincarnation. Because it felt like a new soul had entered my body.”

  “Did you ever see the guy again?” This from Hannah, who was still kneading.

  “I did. Once. At a V-day dinner in Paris at the American embassy. He was there with his wife, who was very pretty.”

  “Did you talk? Was it horrible?” This from me because what a story!

  “He pretended not to know me and I did the same. But the look we exchanged …”

  Alfred wanted to know if she ever told my grandfather. The answer was no. And her other children? Four dead, one a manners coach at a school for girls, and one a housewife in a suburb of Detroit.

  Hannah was not satisfied with the close of this story. “Do you have regrets? Do you think what might have been if you’d stayed with the navy guy?”

  But Aggie had replaced her mask, which meant she was done.

  Just as well, since in came Isifrid. I believe she was dancing, which seemed to fit the yellow room. She asked Alfred to join her. Poor guy, I don’t think he’d ever seen anyone on crack. He asked if she was all right. I nodded, thinking we had about six minutes before this got ugly. I suggested he attempt to interview her now. The maverick in Alfred had some pull, and up he went. Problem was, Izzy wouldn’t quit the tango and Alfred was in no shape to prosecute the dance of love. And anyway, she’d mounted a chair that stood one.

  I’d long felt that in these moments, Isifrid was the person she wanted to be. A little demagogue, a little Mussolini. The antsy fasci. She certainly has dictator pretensions and strut. Also a prominent chin that would have made a court sculptor blush. For Alfred, she was wearing breeches and riding boots, which complemented her posture: erect and formal. It was not often I really looked at her anymore. The woman in my head had been gone so long, I seemed to forget Mother didn’t die with her. Surely no one would believe they were the same person. The woman in my head could open a beer bottle with her teeth. No chips or cracks. She’d leave the house with no makeup and get praised for it. A guy who made wigs for celebrities frequently petitioned for her thicket of hair, which she could wrap around her neck like a scarf. How long since I’d seen that woman? At least fifteen years. But I still missed her.

  Alfred took notes, Izzy speechified. Said it took savvy to marshal your needs so that at least some could be met. He asked if I knew what she was talking about. I said I’d like to get her to her room within the next two minutes.

  He returned to the couch. Moisture was beading along his forehead, which occurrence he’d foreseen, given the bounty of tissues that escaped his pocket the moment he reached for one. I saw that his shoelaces were different colors—one black, one brown. Perhaps he should try Hannah. I’d noticed that in the last couple days, she’d been gazing at mayhem the way some people stare at water. Mother’s performance had not riled her in the least. The kneading was just a tic.

  They began to talk.

  “I turned twelve last month,” she said. “For my birthday? My dad. How about you bring back my dad? Or should I just write Santa.” Her contempt was so bald, it was jaw dropping.

  “Yes, about your dad,” Alfred said. “Did he ever talk to you about his work?”

  “He was an eraser,” she said, as if she’d like to erase him.

  “I hear you’ve got quite a healthy respect for disease, yourself.”

  Hannah whined my name, which meant: Get me out of this.

  “Would you like to show me your West Nile map?”

  Okay, now she was riled. “How do you know about my map?” She looked from me to Aggie because Mother, per usual, was exempt.

  Alfred smiled. He had his ways, his spies and moles.

  “How is it only you seem to know about the man in Minnesota?” I said.

  I got the same smile.

  Isifrid chose to fold up in the fireplace. This one actually worked, which meant ash was getting all up her breeches. I didn’t think anyone wore breeches these days. She was like one of the Four Horsemen.

  The house phone rang. It had the most strident ring ever, as if to say: With every visitor comes an uproar.

  “At last,” Alfred said. “The photographer.”

  Seven

  Eric is still my closest friend. This doesn’t mean we talk but that whatever I do, I seem to be addressing myself to him. He is my interlocutor, my soundboard. When I shop, I buy clothing I know he’d like. If I go to the movies, we talk about our impressions in my head. Excepting drugs, I try to behave in a manner he’d endorse. It’s funny how obsessive conduct turns acceptable the second you actually date the guy. Then no one thinks you’re nuts. I’d argue that love accomplished is insanity next, but I do not have enough experience to know for sure.

  When we first met, his affianced was working on a Fulbright in Berlin. Public art or something. They’d been engaged a year, and together for eight. To his credit, she was none too happy with the relationship, either. There were flings in Berlin. An urge to live in Berlin. Inability to discuss anything but Berlin. He went to visit. He slept on the couch.

  We’d play video games in Chinatown. We’d busk on the Staten Island Ferry. Castanets and harmonica. He’d take two hundred photos of my elbow. His mother used to be an actress until liposuction gone wrong. His father ran a company that made pantyhose. That scar on his thumb came from trying to carve a turkey when he was nine. That scar under his chin he doesn’t remember. Because he was engaged, mostly we talked. But it was only a matter of time. Pictures of Monique started to disappear from his apartment. One day I noticed her clothes in a box.

  “Berlin bound,” he said. “It’s over.”

  And something about his stance, maybe the way his arms hung at his sides, the whole thing said: I’m ready.

  Sex with a stranger is awkward. Friend sex is worse. I tried to remember everything he’d told me about encounters with other women. Not so into the testes. Has insensate nipples. Never been rimmed, but in an always-a-bridesmaid sort of way.

  Antidepressants gave me dry mouth, so I had to be drinking liquids at all times. He had nothing in the fridge but orange juice with Lots of Pulp. I forgot that spermicide is a numbing agent, so when we took a break from sex and he ditched the condom, it was a bad scene for me. My tongue felt like sausage. And because I couldn’t seem to taste anything, I could not sample my body before letting him at it. Plus I’d eaten asparagus for lunch. Only how not to seem prudish? Or self-denying?

  He had trouble with my jeans. Button-fly. I had trouble with the juice. Lots of Pulp. Whole thing lasted half an hour.

  But after! We culled animals from the swirl pattern on his ceiling. We talked about the election. How the country’s going to shit. Five famous dead people we’d like to sleep with. I said William McKinley. He said Yul Brynner.

  I said, “You’re a nut.”

  He said, “And you’re my buttercup.”

  I said, “Are you rhyming? Because rhyme is what guys who can’t be intimate do to make fun of everything.”

  He said, “I love how you’ve got d
ata on this. Buttercup.”

  I socked him in the arm. “Yul Brynner, huh? Is it the bald thing?”

  “Do I look shallow? Of course not. It’s those Vulcan ears and high cheekbones.”

  I laughed and touched my foot to his. “Let’s just stay here awhile, okay? Let’s just not move.”

  He turned to face me. “Where else would I want to go?”

  We were ridiculous. A quality date was Play-Doh and curl-up time in his lap. It was the happiest I’d ever been.

  That night we went to a free concert in the park. German lieder, Schumann. I know squat about opera, which might be why it sounded so good to me. We were sitting on a bald patch of lawn with a bottle of white between us. Someone had let loose a tie of balloons. A baby slept, a toddler slept, and all around came news from the stage, a melancholy so sweet it sidled up to you like a boy at the sixth-grade dance.

  And here is what I have learned: the more touched you are, the sooner you break. I looked at Eric and I looked at me and knew for certain that I was alone on this earth, without purpose.

  He caught my eye. “What’s the matter? Why are you so pale?”

  We did not have sex after that, but I slept in his bed every night. And every night I wept. He’d stroke my hair and promise it was okay, but I knew it wasn’t. He’d say, “Can you talk to me about it? Can I help?” And I’d say no. “Can you see a doctor? I don’t want to sound pat, but I hear exercise can make you feel better.” And I’d say, “I know.” Some nights he’d say I wasn’t trying and that was the problem. Other nights he’d say nothing at all.

  I was wearing him down. Surely he had not split from Monique for this. And therein lies the rub of depression. You can’t just take a pill and make it better. You can’t just fix it, which is what we all want for each other in the end. I was going to be unwell for the rest of my life.