Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

I sat on the balcony with my laptop and read that pentobarbital is Nembutal and that the brand names are Sedal-Vet, Sedalphorte and Barbithal. They’re used to put animals to sleep and you have to go to Mexico to buy them but not to the border towns like Tijuana because the cops are suspicious now of these “death tourists” as they’re called. You have to go deep into Mexico, into the interior, to out-of-the-way places. And then you just find the nearest pet store and go in and ask for it. I thought it was funny that some of the people writing about their efforts to purchase the drug were warning readers to avoid dangerous back streets. What’s the worst that could happen? I wondered. You’d be killed?

A dose of Nembutal is about thirty bucks and you need two one-hundred-millilitre bottles to ensure speed and death with absolute certainty. And you have to take some anti-nausea pills beforehand, “travel sickness” pills, so that you don’t throw up when you take the Nembutal. They’re anti-emetics. You take one every hour for twelve hours before taking the Nembutal. They’re sold over the counter and have brand names like Compazine or Dramamine. After you take the Nembutal you’ll die in half an hour, unless you’re a large person in which case it might take forty-five minutes to an hour. It will be painless. You’ll fall asleep quickly and there will be no time for speeches or to finish your drink.

The problem, I read online, was not getting the drug but bringing it back over the border. So then, I thought, I had to get Elf to Mexico rather than the drug to Elf. Also, just opening the bottle for Elf would make me guilty of manslaughter. Some of the anonymous writers said that even a suggestion to the person wanting to die — all right, well how about we get that bottle now — could make you an accessory to manslaughter.

I switched off my computer and closed my eyes. I heard sirens on the Osborne bridge but I imagined a beach, a thatched roof hut, palm leaves gently undulating in a Caribbean breeze, my sister finally getting her wish, Nic, my mother (my father too, even though he’s dead, because this was a fantasy and I could have dead people in it if I wanted), me, my kids, holding her, touching her, smiling, kissing, saying goodbye, saying Elfie, you, you have made an incredible difference to our lives, you have filled us up with joy and kept our secrets and made us laugh so hard and we will miss you terribly, adios, CIAO! saying it properly, together, and Elf drifting off so peacefully on a soft cloud of eternal love.

I phoned Nic but when he answered I lost my nerve entirely. I had been planning to ask him if he’d be interested in a trip to Mexico whereby we kill his wife. Instead I asked him if my mom and I could borrow his car for a few days because hers had broken down for good. He said she could keep it for as long as she needed to get to the hospital and all that, because he preferred to ride his bike. I asked him if he was still at the hospital. He said yeah.

And? I said.

Same, he said. She had some dinner. Her throat is better. And Tina’s asleep in her ward. All quiet on the western front. He asked me if I was okay and suddenly I was choking. Yoli? he said. I’m okay, I said, sorry about that.

Then he told me that he was planning to go to Spain after all. I hadn’t known that he’d been planning to go to Spain at all. He said he hadn’t known if he should cancel or not but now he was definitely going to go — tomorrow.

Tomorrow? That’s soon.

I know, he said. Elf said I should go. She said I had to go. Just for … you know.

Yeah, no, you should …

And I can’t get a refund on the ticket now. I’m going with my dad, you know, he had this idea for years to go to the …

For how long?

Ten days.

Well, cool, okay …

I know, the timing is weird. But it’s his dream. And she’s not coming home before that, the doctor was clear on that.

Well …

You’re planning to stay in the city for at least that long though, right, Yoli? I mean, so you’ll be here—

Yes, I am. No, you should definitely go. God knows, you need a break.

You do too, everyone does, but …

No, go! Definitely! Definitely.

Though it just seems absurd to me to be wandering around Barcelona taking pictures of Gaudí stuff while Elf is in the hospital.

I know but everything is absurd right now and if you don’t get a break soon you’ll crack right up, my friend.

Well, he said. I suppose.

I mean it’s not just you, it’s all of us, I said. It’s like how we’re told to give ourselves oxygen first on planes and then give it to our kids.

I guess … he said.

You have to go, for the same reason we forced my mom to go on the cruise. We have to tag off periodically or we’ll all end up in psych in bed with Elf.

I’d like that, said Nic. Did you see the paper today? There was a thing in the arts section about Elf bailing from her tour due to exhaustion. It said her family has asked for privacy.

We did? I said. Is anyone talking to them?

The press? said Nic. No, not as far as I know. Claudio’s the only one dealing with it. He’s the one who told them she was exhausted. His press release.

He had to tell them something. Nic, you really should go. Seriously. You have to go.

But that guy, Danislov or whatever, that Slovakian oboe guy who lives in Winnipeg … he went to the hospital yesterday to visit her.

Oh, so everyone’s gonna know now, I said. Did he talk to her?

It doesn’t really matter, said Nic. I mean the truth is the truth. I just want … I was hoping to protect her.

You have been, I said. You’ve been protecting her. You’ve always protected her. He was crying now. He was crying like a man, gulping everything back.

It’s okay. I was trying not to cry too — we have to take turns breaking down or everything is lost. It’s okay, I said. I drove my fists into my eyes.

It could be anywhere, he said. I don’t care about Spain. I could go to Montana or something right now, just about anywhere. Sometimes I want to be four again, in Bristol, walking down the high street with my mudder.

That was how Nic said mother . When he said it I was lost too. We just hung up finally without saying goodbye.

JASON HAD SUGGESTED I COME to the garage that evening before they closed at nine p.m. I waved goodbye to my mother who was still on the phone and she blew me a kiss. I walked the three blocks to the garage and found a man peering into my mother’s car. All I could see was his curved back and some thinning brown hair. I said hi and he stood up. He was wearing a T-shirt that had an old copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans emblazoned on the front of it. Then I realized that he was the Jason I’d known in first-year university at the University of Manitoba, the guy from my CanLit class who borrowed my notes all the time and wore yellow cords and gave me pot as payment. We called him Sad Jason then because his girlfriend had broken up with him and he couldn’t concentrate on anything.

I thought it might be you when you said your name was Yolandi on the phone, he said. It’s not like there’s a plethora of them around.

And then all I could think of was my younger self, the person I was before I’d become all of these other selves: a soon-to-be-divorced woman in her forties who’d clumsily left her husband even if for reasons I’d thought were valid at the time, a grotesquely undiscerning lover, an adult daughter who nagged her elderly mother about the use of clichés, a sister who couldn’t say the right things to save a life and thereby was flipping over to becoming homicidal, a writer who bogusly claimed to know about ocean freighters and a “death tourist.” I stood there in Sad Jason’s garage and wept until he awkwardly came over to where I was standing and gingerly put his greasy arms around me and said hey, it’s okay, don’t cry. It’s just a car.