Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Jason was in the process of getting a divorce from his wife who had stopped seeing him in a romantic light and he was currently sort of dating a clown who worked for the Calgary Stampede luring bulls away from fallen cowboys. I told him that I’d been involved in rodeos too, in a way, and that I was also divorced, almost, living in Toronto, here to see family and things weren’t going too well at the moment but you know, tomorrow and tomorrow and … He suggested we pick up a six of something and drive out to the floodway to catch up and to watch the river rise and the northern lights that the CBC had said were happening tonight at the edge of town. Well, they’d be happening elsewhere, he acknowledged, but we had to get away from the lights of the city in order to see them.

Jason and I had within a moment become something we hadn’t foreseen back in that CanLit class a hundred years ago. We were so old. The word no flooded my senses and all of my better instincts and I said yeah, sounds good. In his car I asked him if he still smoked pot and he said no, not so much. Well, lately, because of the relationship thing, but otherwise not really. We drove into the darkness of southeastern Manitoba.

We parked by the floodway, under the stars, and drank beer and talked about the past. Does it all kind of kill you? he said. It does, I agreed. We tried but failed to see the northern lights. I sat back in the passenger seat and put my legs up on his dashboard and I closed my eyes. It smelled like vanilla in his car. He had a million air fresheners hanging from his rear-view mirror. He told me he was sorry about all the dog hair in the car. It was really dark. We weren’t listening to music. He sat with his hands on his thighs and peered out the windshield. He rolled down the window and then asked if it was too cold. I asked him if he’d ever been to a port city like Rotterdam. He said yeah, actually, he had, good times, good times.

I apologized for being strange. He told me it was okay, it’s how he remembered me. He kissed me very softly on my cheek. I kept my eyes closed and smiled. I took his hand and put it on my leg and he asked me about my boyfriend or my husband or you know. He stroked my leg. Same as you, I said, this is nothing. He stopped touching me and kissing me. I opened my eyes and apologized again for saying the wrong thing, a stupid thing. I told him it was nice to talk. He didn’t say anything but he nodded and then I started kissing him and he didn’t stop me. I asked him if he remembered coming over to my squalid apartment in Osborne Village with a suitcase full of knives. He said oh, was I planning to carve you up? I said no, you were cooking! Oh, yeah, he said, he remembered. We were clumsy and straightforward. I sat on his lap and then felt around for the lever on the side of the seat and pulled it up so that he fell backwards fast, horizontal now, and the moon lit up one corner of his face. Sorry, sorry, I said. I imagined that we were young and horny and very happy.

Afterwards he asked me why I’d asked him about Rotterdam. I told him that I was trying to write a book in which, at the end, one person was marooned at sea, helpless, and the other person was standing on the shore, hurt and mad. He told me that sounded really good, interesting, and I thanked him. Then, driving back into the city, he said no offence but wouldn’t he be able to explain to her that he was trapped on this boat? In these times with technology and stuff? A text or whatever? I know, I said, but for some reason he can’t. Okay, said Jason, but what reason? I told him that I was having structural problems and he said he told me he thought my structure was amazing and worked really well and I said ha ha, thanks, yours too. (Oh boy.)

I think the main thing, he said, is that it should really rock.

What should rock? I asked him.

The story, he said, it should just move really fast, like pedal to the metal, so it doesn’t get boring. Plus, it’s hard to write, right? You want to go in, get the job done, and get out. Like when I worked for Renee’s septic tank cleaning.

I considered this and realized that it was the best writing advice I’d received in years. In all my life. When he dropped me off and asked if maybe we could see each other again while I was in the city, grab a coffee or something, a movie, I told him I wasn’t sure how long I’d be there. I hadn’t told him about Elf. Cool, he said, let’s keep in touch. We kissed. I went into the lobby and waved goodbye to him through the tinted window, smiling and letting out a barely whispered monosyllabic admonishment to myself. Stop.

I took the stairs two at a time all the way up to my mom’s place, repeating my incantation — stop, stop, stop — with every angry footfall and trying to remember what my friend in Toronto had told me recently: that in ten years time shame will be all the rage, talking about it, dissecting it and banishing it. We’d had a bit of an argument then because I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too. But now, as I climbed these concrete steps holding my hands and fingers to my nose to check if I reeked of sex or motor oil, I longed for a life without shame.

I found my mother playing online Scrabble with a woman from Romania whose code name was Mankiller. The games are timed and she had to make a move quickly. But Yoyo, she said as I moved past her, Nic’s going to Spain tomorrow. I nodded and told her I knew that.

I went to my room and googled purchasing Nembutal in Spain but only found references to injectable Viagra. Then I googled euthanasia for mentally ill and found out that in Switzerland it’s legal but hasn’t been exercised that much. It’s legal to help a person kill herself in Switzerland if there isn’t any selfish motivation behind it. And you don’t have to be a Swiss citizen to be protected under the law. Aha! Now I understood why Elf had begged me to take her there.

I weighed my options. They were heavy. Get Elf to Mexico and buy Nembutal in a pet store on a dusty side street of a sleepy, non-touristy town and then make sure she opens the bottle herself and that I don’t encourage her in any way. Although the definition of encouragement might be cloudy under these circumstances. Get Nic and my mom to agree to this plan. Or: Take Elf to Zurich and do it all legally except that it might not work if the doctors decide that her pain is not great enough to warrant a mercy killing. Get Nic and my mom to agree to this plan. Suddenly I was feeling hopeful. But I wasn’t sure if I should be hedging my bets, telling Elf that I was thinking of going with her to Switzerland or Mexico but also encouraging her to live. If I told her about the Nembutal plan she’d have only one thing on her mind, and even if there had been only tiny amoeba-sized hopes inside her, of wanting to live, they’d disappear immediately in the light of this new possibility. Also, there was nothing stopping her, when she was released from the hospital, from going to Switzerland or Mexico on her own, except that it would defeat the purpose of not being alone in her last moments of life and if Nic wasn’t on board he’d notice she was gone and that money was missing from the account and he would try to stop her. What would she do?