Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Well, Elf, no. I won’t take you to Switzerland.

Please, Yoli, I’m asking you to do this one last thing for me. In fact, I’m begging you.

No. And don’t say one last thing . That’s so morbid.

Do you love me?

Yes! Which is why!

No, but Yo, if you truly love me …

Does it work that way? Don’t you have to have a terminal illness?

I do.

You don’t.

I do.

Well, no, you don’t.

Yolandi.

Elfrieda! You are asking me to take you to Switzerland to be killed. Are you out of your fucking mind?

Yoli, said Elf. She was whispering. She mouthed the word please and I looked away.

Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?

I remembered something I’d read, after my father’s suicide, in Al Alvarez’s book The Savage God . It had to do with some of the writers and artists who lived, and killed themselves, under Russia’s totalitarian regime: “And, as we bow in homage to their gifts and to their bright memory, we should bow compassionately before their suffering.”

I asked Elf if she was thinking at all of reasons to stay alive or if she was only trying to figure out an exit. She didn’t answer the question. I asked her if those forces were constantly battling it out in her mind and she said if they were then it was a lopsided fight like Rodney King versus the LAPD. I asked her if she had any idea how much I would miss her. She looked at me. Her eyes filled up with tears. I shook my head. She didn’t speak. I left the room. Then she called my name and I stopped and said, What.

You’re not a slut, she said. There’s no such thing. Didn’t I teach you anything?

I went to the nurses’ station and asked to speak to Janice. She came out of a little office holding tubes of paint and rolls of paper. Art therapy, she said. People love it. Yeah? I said. It’s easier for a lot of our patients to express themselves with these — she waved the tubes around — than with language.

She took me into a little room with a gurney in it and a calendar and a chair that wasn’t ripped. She pointed to the chair and I sat in it and she came over and put her hand on my shoulder. I took big breaths. She asked me how I was doing. I shook my head for such a long time. Just sat there with my index finger pressed to my lips, locking in the words, the way my father used to, staring at the calendar that was still in March when it should have been April and shaking my head. I wondered if she’d offer me a tube of paint and a piece of paper. She didn’t move her hand from my shoulder. Finally I asked Janice about the pills. I asked her what was in them. What was the active ingredient? Do they give her the impression that there is meaning to life or do they flatten her to the point where she doesn’t care if there is or isn’t? Or do they enhance what is already in her mind and make it all right so that Elf could conceivably jump out of bed some morning and say hooray, it’s true, there is no meaning to life but it’s okay and now that I really know it and have had it confirmed and can stop searching for it I can go on living!

Janice told me that she didn’t really know. She told me that it also didn’t make much difference because Elf was refusing to take them anyway. Yeah, I said, she either takes an awful lot of pills at once or none at all. Janice was trying to make me feel better now too, so she patted me on the shoulder and then told me to go home and sleep.

I said I’d go say goodbye to Elf first but she told me just to go and that she’d tell Elf I’d be back soon. I was staring at the calendar and Janice followed my gaze and then walked over to it and flipped the page so it was showing the right month.

She said well, we’ve taken care of that now and I said, Yes, thank you.

I took the stairs to the basement by accident — two, four, six, eight — and ended up locked in a tunnel. I walked for a while and pushed on several doors but none of them would open. I wondered how long it would take before I was found. I checked my BlackBerry but couldn’t get a signal. I saw footprints painted on the concrete floor. I followed them. They brought me to another locked door. I sat down in the tunnel and held my plastic Safeway bag in my lap. I looked up at the large pipes hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel. Then I took out my manuscript and held it in my hands for a while. I snapped the elastic holding it together a few times and put it back into the bag. I wondered if I would starve to death in the tunnel. Irony. Elf would feel bad, no? Jealous? A taste of her own medicine?

I got up again and walked in the opposite direction to the footprints and found another door. It was locked too. I went back to where I’d been sitting, following the footprints again, and then beyond that to a fork in the tunnels. I turned right and walked a while until I came to another door and I pushed on it and it opened. I was in an industrial kitchen or maybe I was in the morgue. Everything was made of stainless steel and the whole room hummed and shone. I walked through this room and through another door and straight into the emergency ward waiting room. A cop stood guarding something, I’m not sure what it was, but he told me to wash my hands. I told him they weren’t dirty and he said that he had to ask everyone to wash their hands. He pointed at a makeshift handwashing stand. I asked him if he could hold my bag then for a minute while I washed my hands and he nodded and took it. I washed my hands very slowly, very thoroughly, and while I was washing I looked at the cop holding my manuscript in his hand. It felt safe there. I wanted to leave it with him but I dried my hands and took the bag and thanked him for holding it and walked out to the wrong parking lot in search of my mother’s car.

Occasionally I sit in my mother’s car and grip the steering wheel as hard as I can until my knuckles go white and I breathe out the word Ellllllfffff . I’d punch a hole through the windshield if I didn’t think I’d break my hand. And if it wouldn’t create a big insurance nightmare, and a wicked draft in the winter. As a kid I used to go out to my bike and sit on it while it was in its stand going nowhere and I’d try out new swear words. I’d mutter them quietly under my breath, over and over, until they lost their sting and became ridiculous like Elf’s one-time mantra of love. This car thing is similar to that. It feels like a controlled experiment. My own mobile laboratory of rage. If I can say things over and over they’ll eventually lose their meaning and my anger will disappear. Elf, what are you fucking doing? I feel safe in the car, alone and protected. I can see people milling about in the parking lot but they can’t see me. Well, they can but they think I’m insane so they look away which is the same as being invisible.

I met Nic for a beer on his way home from work. He told me he’d had no luck getting a hold of any of the care-team members except for one social worker who said that she wasn’t sure there was still funding for that sort of thing. Nic had told her that he would pay for it himself, this team of bodyguards. The social worker wasn’t sure it worked that way and Nic had asked her then in which way does it work? He talked to me about his kayak, its progress. He needed to have certain bolts mailed to him from Minneapolis. He was quite sure that he’d be in the river by May. But maybe it’s just futile, I told him. To have her watched every second of the day. He agreed but what else were we supposed to do?