Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

I got back to the house very late that evening, and even though I’d had a lot to drink I was not drunk. I sat in the kitchen and played Bach again — partita for guitar — on Walter’s little stereo: for some reason this was the music that Walter was listening to most. Then I played some Vivaldi. I closed the kitchen door so I could listen with the volume up: I was drunk and tired, and this helped me appreciate the music without much thought. When I go back to Dublin, I know that I will play this music quietly over dinners and while working; it will drift into the background. Here, in Walter’s apartment, I remove distractions. I do nothing I can set to music; the music is all that there is. I poured a glass of wine and drank under a dim red lamp. And when I came very close to something I cannot describe at all, a proximity to the music that felt almost like a possession, I shook my head clear. All this would be gone in ten days. I staggered into my bedroom, pulled off my jeans and shoes and wrestled the shirt off me, and slept. When I woke, at ten, the snow was roaring past my window.

An afternoon at Christl and Erich’s — the friends I spent New Year’s Eve with. They are in their sixties, but you wouldn’t notice. I woke up around eleven, after taking my first night off drink since early December, and I had never felt so tired. My body was sore and stiff. I had black circles under my eyes and felt nauseated. But my mind was a little more awake. The hot water was gone because it was so late, so I filled the bath with lukewarm water, then boiled four large pots on the stove and tossed the boiling water in. I put on Scriabin and Glazunov, and, through the open bathroom door, through the corridor, through my room, I watched the snow float down like fat feathers. It had snowed all night, and it was supposed to snow all day, and the next.

I met Walter after a trip to the doctor — he receives an infusion and massage therapy every day. He was not doing well. He was doing, in fact, much worse. I asked him how the appointment went. He said the therapist — not the regular therapist, but someone new — had grown frustrated because he could not relax, and he had cried for half an hour. The therapist left him alone, and he had cried on his own — and he had no idea why. It was something he could not identify. Something Existenz , he said. The uncertainty was making him worse by the minute. We took the bus as far as we could take it — Walter was in no condition to walk the half-hour up the hills to Baumgarten. We stepped out at a large cemetery. It was pure white — the hillsides rolling upward on one side of us, and the white graves rolling downward on the other. By the time we got to Christl and Erich’s, Walter couldn’t get his coat off.

Christl and Erich live in a large house that is curiously decorated and very cold. It is grey, black, and white, and the abstract art on the walls is very dark, morose, and sexual: greys, maroons, browns. There are also shelves full of strange collectibles: hundreds of little ink pots, or sugar dispensers, and, in the stairwell, on the window sill and on two large tables, thousands of weights, from the size of an ant up. I thought I’d heard from Walter that they sleep in separate bedrooms, but Christl showed me a room on the second floor with a futon and a shelf with a stereo and a bunch of untidy CDs. This is where she and Erich go, she said, when they want to be like poor students who live on music and passion.

They made a large lunch for us. I was forced to eat two full plates of food and drink a beer, even though my stomach was upside down. They gave Walter three glasses of diluted magnesium for his neck, and forced him to lie down on a magnetic-field bed for eight minutes — no more, no less. Walter and I asked what a magnetic-field bed was, and Christl explained, but I didn’t understand the explanation. Erich is the kind of man who makes me feel inferior: he builds. He takes things apart and puts them back together. He bought the house next door, which was full of trash, emptied it, and renovated it — but Christl loves the garden behind so much that she won’t let him rent it out. He landscaped that garden, built a giant garage by himself, and put a swimming pool in the basement of his own house. He let me see a few rooms in the house next door in which he stores hundreds of model ships and airplanes. And later, when Christl and Walter were inside having a second cup of coffee, Erich took me to a spot in his garden, which was under large evergreens covered in snow, to show me some sculptures he created — large stones somehow fastened to small steel foundations. He simply found the stones beautiful, and wanted to make art out of them. I agreed they were beautiful, and that presenting them in the way he did made art out of them. Yes, he said, that is what I did.

Christl is also an eccentric. If she had had a daughter, she would have been one of those mothers who is much more fun than the daughter, and disappointed by the daughter’s seriousness. Every story you tell her, she retells to all her friends for eternity, as though it is the most interesting thing that ever happened. She finds it endearing that Erich is a hound dog when it comes to other women, and, in a tour of the house, laughed at all the evidence of his obsession with large breasts. She gave me, as a present, the shirt they put her son in the day he was born, and which has been passed down many generations.

Erich gave us a lift home, since the snow was getting worse, and Walter had deteriorated. We had a concert in the Musikverein that night, a French string quartet playing in the Brahms Saal: Mozart, Bartók, and Dvořák. Erich dropped us off at the Testarellogasse bridge. We got out, and a woman in a long black coat walked by. It was dark by then, but she was lit by the bright windows of an office building beside us. She had long black hair and dark eyes. She glanced at me and then away. I watched her walk away from me. She was beautiful, I told Walter. Walter said, Yes, I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful.

I am writing now in the mid-afternoon. My hands are trembling and I am in the thick of a cold sweat. I have had half a dozen cups of coffee and a bowl of fruit. I am thinking of naked bodies. I am thinking of Maxine’s legs, of her on stage in Linz today. I am thinking of my hand on Astrid’s ass, of lying in bed with her and her sister. I imagine Clare at home with a finger inside herself, coming, thinking of what we will get up to when I return. It’s always like this when I am hungover.

I am not in the best condition to write, but last night may slip away from me if I do not record it, and John arrives in three hours. I shall try to do it some justice. After the concert, Walter and I went to Motto to see Lucy DJ. Motto is a mixed bar not far from the U4 station Pilgramgasse. I had never seen so many beautiful women, nor so many gay men in white shirts and slicked-back black hair and sunglasses. The bar was dark and violet. Lucy was wearing a tight black dress and red wig. We sat down at the bar beside two women. One was blonde, tall, and wore shorts over black tights and purple boots; the other was short and round and black-haired and looked a bit like Joan Jett. I smiled at the blonde girl when I first arrived, and she turned her head and pulled her hair down. But later, Lucy introduced us: the blonde was Maxine, the black-haired girl was Barbara. Lucy told them I was from Texas but lived in Ireland. Barbara said, in English, Where in Ireland?

Dublin, I said.

Never been there, she said. Never been to Ireland. I’m from London.

You’re from London, and you’ve never been to Dublin?

Darling, I’ve never been to parts of north London.

Barbara was a singer and actress, and knew Lucy from a show they’d done together. Maxine, who is Viennese, leaned over and said: She’s very good — a wonderful singer. Lucy agreed — she said Barbara’s voice gives you an erection, though she said so indirectly and very politely. They were on the way out, but Maxine said I could buy her a drink. We chatted for a while. Carolin arrived, and Walter spoke with her while I spoke to Maxine and Barbara.