Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

She added that she felt a certain empathy and closeness in the company of a dying person. She and Tim shared something that I unfortunately — or rather fortunately, perhaps — could not understand, and even though she had every intention of beating the illness, she felt there was something remarkable in meeting Timothy Wallace, a cancer patient from Missouri, and to share with him a certain fate. I smiled at the man and looked for coded signs in his face asking to be rescued from this situation, but he seemed to be enjoying it and told me he would try to keep Mother out of trouble.

We said our good-byes, and after walking a few times around the alleyways of Warmoerstraat I found the Cannabis Museum in a low building on the corner of Pijlsteeg. Before I got to the door, a large group of Mexicans piled in and I ended up at the back of a long, slow line in the dimly lit entrance. The lighting reminded me of Daniel, my former colleague, strangely gray and diluted, yet persistent. To heighten my torment, Céline Dion’s face filled a screen in my line of sight with the accompanying sinking-ship-music blasting from the speakers overhead.

“Six-fifty,” the girl at the ticket desk said, handing me a ticket.

“I’m here to see Steven Turtleman,” I said. “Please let him know that I’m here.”

She didn’t react at all, just stared at me through a month’s buildup of make-up and then finally pointed to the bandage on my temple and asked if I’d been in a fight. I explained to her that apparently my face was an appealing destination for fungi and repeated that I wanted to see Steven. I looked around the lobby while I waited, managed to get tangled up in a display of teas, and stumbled through a side door with a no-entry sign between my legs.

“Sir,” the doctor’s son came to my rescue, clamping a steadying hand on my shoulder. He helped me out of the closet and led me through a room with an herb garden and a relief of the Chinese Opium Wars. Our journey ended in an office with red walls, where he took off his jacket and offered me a seat.

“BodySnatch,” he said and held up a small container, “is the only stuff that truly works for burning body fat. You know all these products: Fatodity, Feroxycut, all these countless thieving drugs on the market. Because that’s what this shit does — steals your money and stashes it in some offshore account! But not BodySnatch.” I had no idea where he was going with this so I just sat quietly and let him go on about the merits of the magic in the small container. “You were thinking of thirty boxes,” he said, “I think you should take sixty.”

“You think she really needs that?” I asked, realizing he might be confusing me with someone else. “I’m Hermann Willyson, Eva Briem’s son. I’m here for the grass.”

Steven’s insistence gave way to surprise, his jaw hanging half way down his chest as he shuffled through some papers. “Willyson!” he finally exclaimed, realizing with relief that I was not Mr. Bryn Robben from Trim Center, but the man he’d met last Friday by Ramji’s car. “Wow!” he said, “To be honest I’m not so sure that BodySnatch really works, so it’s good that you’re not Mr. Bryn Robben.”

I asked him what would happen when the real Mr. Robben came knocking and he said he was going to fatten himself up. Retailers of fat burning supplements would be fascinated by the ad campaign he had planned for BodySnatch.

“ Before and after BodySnatch . I’m going to get some after shots done now, then I’ll put on 20–25 pounds and do the before shots. Mr. Bryn Robben won’t be able to resist. He’ll go for sixty boxes.”

He went on talking about his brilliant business plan and pointed to a La-Z-Boy with a double wire system attached to it. One of the systems was hooked to a cooler containing cream and a mobile funnel while the other one was tied to a tap to rinse the funnel after use. The whole set up reminded me of a story I’d read in Derek Humphrey’s The Final Exit . It was about an electrician in Seattle who wanted to take his own life. He placed a light sensor in the windowsill of his hotel room, hooked it to explosives in his hat and then waited for the sun to rise. When it did, the wire got hot, detonating the explosives, which in turn blew off his head. Steven’s cream machine was not as sinister a weapon, but the mechanisms were similar. When he sat back in the chair and popped up the footrest it pulled on a wire, moving the funnel to his mouth and the liquid poured straight down his throat, no swallowing needed. I pointed out that gorging on Spätzle und Sauerkraut in addition to regular sherry marathons for a few weeks would have pretty much the same effect, and might even be a healthier way to obesity, but he dismissed the suggestion with an aggressive wave of his hands.

“I hate food.”

He stood up, retrieved an envelope with some grass, poured us tea, and began recounting his life story with the same enthusiasm as during our first meeting. In a relatively short time he’d lived in six foster homes, spent four months as an errand boy on a chicken farm, and a couple of months as a part of Dick Cheney’s security team. His love for older women was laced with memories of a summer job in an underground bunker, where the only piece of furniture was a massage bench. He admitted that even though his native country was one of the greatest places on earth, it also contained some of the strangest people on the planet. It was good for business that Europeans were gradually catching up in weirdness, but there really was little comparison. For instance, he doubted that there were many Dutch men who would have their penises surgically removed and grafted onto their arms as a number of his compatriots had done.

“What? Why?” I asked, gaping more and more as our talk went on.

“Daddy Harold was an expert in penis enlargements. Had his own practice. The penis is grafted onto the arm so it won’t die during the procedure.”

“What if Harold died during the procedure? Would the patient have to leave with his penis on his arm?”

“Precisely, Mr. Willyson,” Steven said and nodded his head knowingly.

The next couple of weeks passed quite peacefully. Mother would kick-start the day with a dose of Ukrain, we’d have doughnuts and coffee at the hotel, take a walk, visit a museum, or catch a canal bus. I’d drop in on Helena at the Pleasure Fountain for a chat, and acquaint myself with Steven’s stock of various supplements. Smoking sessions on the small balcony ensured smooth sailing into the realm of dreams after an evening out at one of the local bars. Then a new morning would break and the worldview was as round as the planet turning on its axis.

I decided to swallow my pride and reward Mother for her gallant and stoic resignation to the Ukrain treatment and take her to the Nazi ball. My drinking session started early in the afternoon with a private one-man Vodka Tournament in the hotel bar. Dmitri, my friend behind the counter, mixed up an orgy of fruit in his shaker and poured me shots like both our lives depended on it, and agreed that if there ever was a need to get shitfaced to survive an evening, this would be the occasion. A young Asian girl sat at the other end of the bar, petite and lithe, with suntanned legs that seemed to go on forever from underneath her red dress. I had been staring at them for a while when she came and sat next to me.

“You like Shaloo? Shaloo not free. Shaloo expensive . Shaloo make change .”

I stared at her. I had supposed that such a feminine transsexual would choose to go stealth, but Shaloo had no qualms about having once been a man. She took a different stance.

“Shaloo always be woman. Dick no difference, she reverse it.”