Almost eighteen years had passed, but the fear of her death never quite left me. Deep down the child is still hiding in a closet, fixing up appliances in an attempt to prevent her death. We believe that experience works in our favor, that all the horrible moments and fuckups of our lives will give us perspective, but they don’t. Adult life stumbles on-screen like a haze of meaningless jumble while the focus remains on the backdrop, distorting everything mounting up ahead. Sometimes the anxiety goes into hibernation and the set is ablaze with fantastic extravagance: drinking games, investments, and experimental intercourse with strangers. The havoc we wreak upon our own body makes sure no one ever suspects you to carry such primeval grief; that behind the calloused skin, guilt the size of a small child still survives. People tend to assume that a man who looks like that has experience enough to bury his childhood. But the closer I came to Highland, the heavier my steps were with the anxiety of seeing her so sick. It was a relief to see Ramji’s Ambassador in the driveway with Frederik and Duncan huddling over the trunk.
“Willyson, my dear friend,” the doctor called out and walked briskly toward me. “How splendid to have you here to see our patient. There are a few things we need to discuss now, the rest can wait. The Ukrain has failed. There is nothing we can do about that now. This is a tragedy for us all and especially for you, my dear friend. For you and your mother. There is no cure that can stop this train. All we have now is the morphine.”
“How has she been today?”
“She’s a fighter. If we’re lucky she’ll have many good days. A few weeks, even months. You never know with this disease. My gut tells me that we’ll see sooner than later what to expect. This is the situation. We still have time to plan but we shouldn’t leave it until it’s too late.”
“We came here to have this choice if it would come to this.”
“Good, good.” The doctor tapped a finger to his chin. “Well, there is something . . . do you know Dita van der Lingling? No? Dita was the first one to marry one of our patients. This was a long time ago. We don’t really talk about it even though we sometimes find it handy. Tim Wallace died a married man. He died a Dutch citizen.”
“Of course,” I said, understanding where he was going with this. “And that’s how you get around the euthanasia law?”
“Yes. I don’t think we can send you to Switzerland. Duncan would never agree. I’ve given this a lot of thought and found a solution that suits everyone. Don’t you agree, Hermann?”
I nodded my head and felt the strangeness of this all crawl over me, the grief that still was a distant shadow rather than a concrete feeling with consequence and meaning. We walked up the drive and talked in more detail about the next steps, but then I said good-bye and entered the building. The aroma of cooking and wine was coming from the kitchen. The faint smell of autumn leaves seeped through the open window in the lounge. Helena was nowhere to be seen so I walked straight into the corridor leading to Mother’s bedroom. I didn’t want to be there, not tonight. I wanted to run back down to the gate, get into the car with the other men, drive around Holland and return when Mother had been healed by a miracle in the night. She would sit out on the lawn telling journalists and reporters all about the wonder that erased the evil cells, like the healing hand of Jesus, like the soothing touch of Buddha, and the living cosmos blessing the steadfast. Walking into that room was an act of duty that would only take a moment. I would pat her on the back, disappear into the corridor and find Helena. Mother would be better in the morning. Didn’t Frederik say that you could never tell with this disease?
I opened the door and took a seat next to the bed where she lay sleeping. The Sphinx who had sat smoking on the balcony of Hotel Europa with a glass of red wine and the stupendous beauty of the night sky was gone. In its place was a drowned cat, the mane wet with sweat and the body emaciated, beaten by the crashing waves of the deep. I was seized by a vulnerability that seemed to run through an invisible umbilical cord from her to me. The sedative effects of the morphine were ruthless to her face, making it droop on the side she lay on, emphasizing the proximity of death. I sat there trying to get used to it, trying on her illness, feeling the weight of its smell and snoring, and didn’t get up until my tremors had subsided and my body had tuned into the confined stillness of these circumstances that I knew would persist until the end. When I stopped weeping I held her to me, absorbing her mumblings, tried to swallow them like food and keep them down, scared of my gut, as if the party had been a hoax from the start, all the pork legs, the special drinks, all the joy that dozed off into dreams that were more beautiful than waking life. Because this was life, wasn’t it? Life that didn’t manifest in all its magnitude until the party was over?
“Hi, Trooper,” Helena said when I walked into the lounge. She sat playing guitar, but put away the instrument and gave me a hug. “Did you go see her? Frederik says she needs rest. He’s going to stay over tonight. He went with Duncan to Lowland to get his stuff.”
“I know, I met them outside.”
She got me a glass and poured me some white wine. I sat down, stood up again, took a deep breath by the window, and returned.
“I know how you feel,” she said after a while. “I was just a kid when mom died but I totally understood what was going on. I know what it’s like to watch your parent get sick.”
“It’s awful. To see her like that. Like she’s been robbed of everything that makes her her.”
“I don’t know what it is about the illness that makes us so scared. You just don’t want to face it. You want to run.”
“But that’s not an option. And then it’s over, and you never quite get over it, do you?”
I told Helena that deep inside I had never believed Mother would get better. That everything would go back to normal and that we’d return home. But I didn’t expect her to get so sick so soon.
“Maybe she knew for a while. Don’t blame yourself. It’s quite common for patients to cover up how bad it really is while they still can. But I’m really sorry, Trooper. Really. Even Frederik thought your mom had a chance.”
We sat for a while and chatted until Helena said she had to return an amplifier she had borrowed from a neighboring farm. I was desperate to get out of the house and told her I’d join her and talk to Frederik in the morning.
“What about your mom?”
“They’ll call me if anything changes. I’ll be quick.”
As we set out we saw Ramji coming up the driveway. It was getting dark. A cold breeze came across the meadow of the farm where we turned off the road onto a path cutting through the woods. A few pines grew in random formations among the deciduous trees that had succumbed to the fall. They were like chaperones at the orgy, life that clung to its existence in a world where everything was expiring. The earth was covered by a red and gold blanket, and aside from a lone bird answering the rustle of our footsteps, the woods were still. The setting sun cast little pools of light between the tree trunks, but it was cool and crisp in there, the sun rays cut the shadows with soft shards of light until it retreated and finally disappeared in the outskirts. It was the first time on the trip there I saw no buildings or traffic. For a moment it was as if a distant echo of the past had been blown our way, a reminder of how things had once been. Everything was exaggerated and illuminated in the dying light. I hadn’t been out in nature for months and being suddenly surrounded by it sent an electric current surging through me.
“There’s the farm,” Helena said. “I don’t want to stay. She’s a bit cuckoo and won’t stop talking if you let her invite you in. I’d much rather head back to Lowland and have a beer with you before I go back home.”
She returned the amplifier and we walked back through the darkness. We sat for a while at the bar and then she left. I went to my room and lay there staring at the ceiling, counting the gnarls in the wood until I dozed off.
Chapter 17
I woke up late and was seized by an overpowering feebleness. After a brief struggle w
ith a bottle of pills, I called Mother, who insisted that she didn’t feel bad at all, that no living person enjoyed such luxuries as she did, and that the room service at Hotel Europa could not hold a torch to the pampering she was receiving from Helena and Duncan. Frederick would not have a flu-man near his cancer patients and was happy to agree when I suggested leaving Lowland while I got over the worst of it.
I decided to take a bus up north, let the gray landscape lull me to sleep and ease my mind. The dark gray clouds skated across the hemisphere. It was the kind of sky that could be painted any which way. As soon as the bus took off, the world became new, not Lowland, I glued my head to the window and disappeared into my thoughts. Both hemispheres of my brain displayed fireworks of long-gone cake and coffee parties, a fermented past wrapped in asparagus and ham, held up by Willy Nellyson’s carved wooden cock. All this occupied my mind. I stared out the window. In Wormer, a squirrel hung straight out from a tree with pantyhose twisted around its feet; before he managed to free himself, the wind snatched at the nylon and the squirrel flew 10-12 feet before biting the dust. It was seriously windy. I felt as if I wasn’t the only one who was at odds with reality. Outside, people were eating canned foods as if the Netherlands were the great disappointment in life, as if they’d come here from some former republic and thought that everything would be fine, but instead found a home on the side of the road. Everything was death. The phone wouldn’t stop chirping text messages telling me that Iceland was on the highway to hell, that everything was lost and gone, that there was an exodus of private jets taking off with the goods before the country went bankrupt. I had given Iceland little thought in the past weeks and couldn’t imagine that this was anything more than yet another circus act in the most pathetic play in history, starring Daniel Klambra. But the ATMs stood empty. The Bankers’ Ball was over. A small wad of Króna notes was not worth much to the currency broker in Purmerend. I was penniless in a small town under sea level in a country I knew only a small corner of. I waited for the flood. A nap in a communal garden ended in an interrogation room at the police station where my passport was handled like a filthy magazine and I was treated like I was personally responsible for the greatest financial crisis to hit the area in modern times. The chief called his boss in Haarlem, the county capital, who confirmed his suspicions; if the man was Icelandic he should be incarcerated immediately. The entire savings of Holland had disappeared into the sewers of that nation. I suggested to the chief that they have a look in a golf lodge in Bulgaria, you just never know—they might just find some of those billions on the two Icelandic barbarians practicing their swing in the company of call-girls. I was told not to sleep in the train station but got permission to take a little nap out front while I waited for Helena to come and pick me up. She was alone. She was unhappy. Eila, her Faeroese girlfriend, had left her.
“I didn’t know that you were gay,” I said.
“Neither did I, not until I met Eila. I cursed and said fuck this, carpet muncher, fuck. But you know what? It’s okay once you get used to it. The only drawback is watching the person you love shoving her tongue down someone else’s throat. She took all the noise away, all the pain, all the useless shrink appointments, and I believed in her. I thought she was different from all the other people who’ve messed with my head. You can tell yourself that there are more fish in the sea. That you’ll go on even though it seems impossible. But what if all the others won’t do? You sit there with all your needs, all your misunderstandings and mess, until someone comes and kisses you and for the first time in your life you don’t feel completely pathetic. What if you always get betrayed? What if life is nothing but one disappointment after another?”
“Then you just have a lifesaver and try to have fun.” I took her in my arms and held her while she cried. I tried to console her by telling her anecdotes from my own life, that I didn’t cry myself to sleep anymore over Zola, but that I believed that life had a paradox of endless possibilities. That one of these days maybe, in the future when your mind was clearer and you no longer limped across the surface of the earth like a stagnant form of the worst version of your dreams, then it would all come back, everything you’d lost, you’d get to love someone who smelled good, who always smelled of shampoo and who looked up every now and then from whatever she was doing and smiled if you were there. Because it just had to be, that somewhere in this sea of people wanting something completely different from what they had, there had to be someone who understood you, who understood your fragments, and I told her that I didn’t see it often any more, I saw it rarely these days because there was darkness over the world. Mother was dying and I wanted to drown in my own tears, but I did see it once in a while, the possibility would fly through my mind and I’d feel slightly better, like now—I felt slightly better now.
“Is that why we do this? Because we think we can plaster up the holes? You could have let her die in Iceland, skipped the treatment, skipped it all. But you decided to come here. To be free when she left? To make up for something you feel is your fault?”
“I came to support her and because we can’t do this sort of thing back home. I’m doing this because I have to, because it couldn’t be avoided.”
“It’s so sad,” she said. “They’re both going to die and we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves.” She drove me to the city, passing by Lowland. I still had a few euros stashed away and wanted to get them out before they disappeared too.
“Make sure not to stay too long, Trooper,” she said. “What ever you do in Amsterdam, don’t forget why you came here. Promise me?”
“Promise,” I said and gave her a little kiss on the mouth, but of course I knew I was lying.
*
My journey into the abyss started with a three-thousand euro annihilation at the post office. I took a taxi to Hotel Europa and checked into my old room, promptly emptied the minibar and rushed down to the lobby. The darkest, deepest sewers of the world were undefined dimensions awaiting me. The night was still collecting darkness. The city was overflowing with wine.
To commence my trip en punto I killed a row of shots from Dimitri and became instantly drunk, stumbled into the Red Light District and found a strip bar, got a special drink called Apocalypse and watched two dancers perform nude ballet to Swan Lake. A topless stripper in a G-string asked if I’d buy her an Apocalypse but I told her that my apocalypse was a private affair, my time was reserved for drinking. I was going to explore the world’s extent of hard liquors, the endless types and tastes, like a voyager who sets out to sea and sails without stopping. I was going to discover a new continent and become a pioneer, fight the beasts of the underworld until I died and was reborn, more powerful than ever before.
Out on the street corner, delicate movements in a mini skirt connected my brain to the past. It was Shaloo from Thailand who didn’t do bondage sex and had once been a man. I was overcome by a sense of loss that catapulted me into her radius and the swaying of her skirt. If only the world still was a racist ball and a hangover, futility in tall glasses with the sound of laughter and denial. Then everything would be fine. Then nothing would be doomed. Her sleek, black hair was like background music in a soap commercial, her face bestowed with a symmetry that magnetized love of men, because this was femininity in all its glory, beauty that made men abandon reason and judgment, the very foundations of existence, until the mess took over, everything fell apart, the core was ripped out and torn to pieces, marriage, family, and day-to-day life.
“Shaloo!”
She turned around, looked right through me and stared for a while as if all the triviality of the world was embodied in me. As soon as she turned away the insanity of my outburst crept into my soul and I took off in the other direction. It didn’t matter how much this raised me on Mother’s Gay Scale in other ways than to show how delusional I had become. Three men in a rubber speedboat brought home the fact by spraying me with foul canal water. My sorrow deepened, death and darkness took hold of me. Half awake, half
with my senses drenched in Zodiac-waste, I walked aimlessly toward Achterburg, where the prostitutes posed in the windows. My mind fluttered to the possibilities of taking part. A short visit to a world where all men were animals and dragons convulsing in proportion to the mistakes they were capable of making. Not to think of what Zola said about sex with hookers. Rather think about Daniel Klambra. He did this. He never noticed the world sinking into the mud. His mouth didn’t fill with sand. The fog didn’t creep in. Darkness didn’t fall. I could do this. Just carry on and don’t think, seize the moment and go for it!
The Last Days of My Mother Page 15
