Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

Out on the street corner, delicate movements in a mini skirt connected my brain to the past. It was Shaloo from Thailand who didn’t do bondage sex and had once been a man. I was overcome by a sense of loss that catapulted me into her radius and the swaying of her skirt. If only the world still was a racist ball and a hangover, futility in tall glasses with the sound of laughter and denial. Then everything would be fine. Then nothing would be doomed. Her sleek, black hair was like background music in a soap commercial, her face bestowed with a symmetry that magnetized love of men, because this was femininity in all its glory, beauty that made men abandon reason and judgment, the very foundations of existence, until the mess took over, everything fell apart, the core was ripped out and torn to pieces, marriage, family, and day-to-day life.

“Shaloo!”

She turned around, looked right through me and stared for a while as if all the triviality of the world was embodied in me. As soon as she turned away the insanity of my outburst crept into my soul and I took off in the other direction. It didn’t matter how much this raised me on Mother’s Gay Scale in other ways than to show how delusional I had become. Three men in a rubber speedboat brought home the fact by spraying me with foul canal water. My sorrow deepened, death and darkness took hold of me. Half awake, half with my senses drenched in Zodiac-waste, I walked aimlessly toward Achterburg, where the prostitutes posed in the windows. My mind fluttered to the possibilities of taking part. A short visit to a world where all men were animals and dragons convulsing in proportion to the mistakes they were capable of making. Not to think of what Zola said about sex with hookers. Rather think about Daniel Klambra. He did this. He never noticed the world sinking into the mud. His mouth didn’t fill with sand. The fog didn’t creep in. Darkness didn’t fall. I could do this. Just carry on and don’t think, seize the moment and go for it !

I’d walked past five to six windows with beautiful girls in their twenties before finally bolting like a man under fire into a dimly lit first-floor room where a chubby, tired looking woman stuck her tongue out at me. Her shabby, plump body ground on top of me, lying half-naked in this pocket of time, the moment it took for me to undress and, short of breath, tell her about my life, the loneliness and the beauty, until I realized I was incapable of sex and she told me not to worry, this happened all the time, I could watch her while I jerked off or talked, I had fifteen minutes left on the clock and was free to do with them as I pleased.

In order to forget this incident as soon as possible, I decided to go and find Steven at the Cannabis Museum, take a hit from the bong and embrace my depression. But Steven wasn’t there, the museum was closed, and no one I knew was on Warmoestraat. My only interaction with the world was to silence my constantly ringing phone. Helena called, as did Duncan, Helga, and finally the doctor — but I couldn’t answer. The squall of phone calls receded into a number of bobbing text messages I didn’t read or understand. Mountain Lady? Democracy Baby? As long as I ignored this, the world would stand still. As long as there was silence, everything was okay.

I was blitzed by the time I reached Chinatown, where I bought a spring roll, found a whisky bar, and forgot about time, drifting as far away as I possibly could from all that concerned me: the disease, morality, and my role in this farce called life, in its constant proximity to death, ever drawing near. Because everything disappeared and receded, everything grew dark and the day crawled toward the night. I had to take the power back. I had to wipe out the meaning by ending this. Don’t quit now. That would be a betrayal to the pain. I had to cross the ocean that changed me. This was a war with futility and frivolity. I had to drink until I dropped dead.

That’s how my first day went. I drank and told myself not to eat until someone found me in the gutter and force-fed me solids with a funnel. I ate the sky for breakfast, digesting the stars before lunch. For dessert: a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a foot-long row of tequila shots. Dawn poured out of me and flowed into the gutter with the night. I threw up between car bumpers that exchanged information about my soul. I was Timothy Wallace before reason reached his ears. Mother before her first AA meeting. The world with a broken heart. All those who’d ever tried to destroy their own life with alcohol.

After three days the exercise had just about delivered me to my goal. I was in no shape to survive the day without pouring more alcohol into my body. Immediately, my mind disappeared into slurred hallucinations that howled at me with the same lack of pitch as the herds of English girls roaming the city’s karaoke bars in little hen parties. Mother was the hen and Death her groom, flying together into eternity. I sang along, having forgotten the lyrics, lost my party and everyone in it, and I snored loudly when I was unconscious, at least that was what the hotel maid told me with her compassionate expressions and questions about difficult nights. As soon as she left I jumped across the room, attacked the reloaded minibar and ventured out into the daylight on the wings of newly drunk beers. The messages kept coming, so did the phone calls. Where are you, Trooper? We need to get a hold of you . My eyes stole a peek at the screen in a fit of early morning forgetfulness, but then I remembered I mustn’t read them. The room is welling up with wailing . . I threw the phone into the next trashcan. My lungs dissolved into the drumbeats of the coffee shops. Mother had to be dead by now, coffined, incinerated, or in the ground already. Anywhere but here with me, I was everywhere but with her. Because I had run off. I kept on running away, as far as I could into the night.

And so a week passed in Hotel Europa with random visits to the gutter. Finally I broke. I broke the string of the bow that quivered in my heart with all its arrows. I howled into a nauseating vacuum and screamed at it, fraught with helplessness and self-pity over all the things I would never be able to make up for or fix, a cumulative nervous breakdown of all these months and weeks. I’d come to do good, to do everything I could for Mother and attempt to put right all that had gone wrong, polish away all the smut of yesteryears’ Christmases, whisper silence over the screaming that preserved the suffering and pain. We were supposed to believe, when all was said and done, that we’d never been ill in the soul, that we’d never thrust daggers into each other’s hearts and twisted them in the wounds, laughing about it, that we’d never pretended like nothing was wrong. Mistakes were like new grass in spring, mowed down and filling the world with the most beautiful fragrance there is. That was how the memory would be when everything that created it was put together. We lay there in the grass with white-wine spritzers, foie gras, and this memory, and a good day, and our dreams. Daylight like it had been sieved through the darkness of the soul, new again to us.

Now the scene was crumbled, grinning ghoulishly at me. Bits and pieces strewn all over like flotsam and jetsam. The wind pushed me down into the dirt and I whimpered. I broke down. It was over, I had fucked up. Like everything else in my life, I had fucked up, I’d taken on this journey and gutted it, ripped it apart in the final lap to ensure that Mother went crying into her grave, so that my life would always be this raging storm and I would have to live with this anxiety, unhappiness, and the resolution that would never be.

Barely conscious, half asleep on the bathroom floor, I rose to my feet when I heard shuffling from the door that penetrated my nightmare. The room was a maelstrom of light, full of things flying into a screaming silence. I felt for painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, washed them down with a large bottle of water from the minibar, paused in front of the door and listened. Then I opened it.