Love May Fail (14 page)

I forgo the artifice of the glass and drink directly from the bottle as the sun sets, puffing defiantly on my Parliament Lights, which have long ago ceased to offer any sense of comfort or pleasure. The smoke now assaults my esophagus and lungs, and yet I puff and puff like a magic dragon who has slipped into his cave after losing the one little boy who believed in his existence.

My vision is blurry, but I believe I count four bottles by my feet.

“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Albert Camus! Where are you, little buddy? Is there a heaven for dogs? Are you already reincarnated? I miss you! I’m sorry! I am a shit for brains! I am selfish! I am foolish! I should not be alive! I never should have been born! I am truly and utterly sorry!”

I listen to the word
sorry
echo over the bare maples and oaks that cover the downward slope of land behind my deck and race toward the base of the small mountains in the distance.

“Beautiful view,” the Realtor said when he showed me this place.

“Perfect view for ending it all,” I say now, and laugh. “A good place to die. This will be a happy death, and I will now play Zagreus, the old cripple.

“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Edmond Atherton was right! My class was all bullshit! Everyone can’t be extraordinary! It defies the very definition of the word! It’s absurd! And there is no meaning! No meaning at all! It’s just a cruel joke! That’s the answer to the first question! Just a joke! So why not kill yourself?”

I swig more wine, feel red rivers burst from the corners of my mouth and run down my neck before being absorbed into my sweater. I swallow down my need to vomit, and then I’m crying again.

I must be even drunker than I thought, because—before I know what I’m doing—I start to pray.

My estranged mother is a religious woman—she actually became a nun after she was done raising me. Had a “vision” shortly after I graduated from high school. Told me that both Mother Mary and Jesus visited her. They apparently told her she was meant to join a religious community. I thought she had gone insane. The Catholic Church took her in. She raised me Catholic, and I had already unequivocally renounced my faith. I’ve since renounced my mother, mostly because I hate her. But we fall back on what we know when we are weak—and especially when we are drunk.

“What the fuck, God?” I scream up at the sky. “Can it get any worse? I’m not a praying man, but I’m going to ask you just once for help. If you’re up there, give me a sign. If you don’t, I’m going to end it, once and for all. And who could blame me? Help me please, if you exist. Fuck you, if you don’t!”

God doesn’t speak to me as I finish my fourth (or fifth?) bottle of wine and the sun dips down below yonder mountain.

I don’t remember when it happened, but I must have fallen out of the chair, because my left cheek is pressed firmly against the wood deck now, and I don’t seem to be able to get up.

It gets colder.

When my right eye gazes up, it sees that the stars have come out and are shining particularly hard and bright.

“Need to do a little better than that, God,” I mumble.

I shiver in the fetal position, too drunk, too apathetic, to roll inside where there are blankets and heat.

Maybe I will freeze to death, I hope, and then I somehow manage to light up another cigarette, which I let dangle hands-free in my mouth as I lie there on the deck.

I’m on my back now, but I have no idea where my lit cigarette went.

Vision is blurry at best.

I blink several times.

I think I see a shooting star rip through the sky at one point, but I’m too drunk to know what the hell I’m seeing anymore.

And then—once again—everything goes black.

“Mr. Vernon?”

I blink, and a woman is slapping my face.

“Mr. Vernon? Wake up. Are you okay?”

I close my eyes and try to disappear again into sleep.

I’m spinning.

I’m being rolled over onto my side.

“You’re going to choke to death on your own vomit,” the woman’s voice says, and I wonder if she is an angel.

I remember angels coming to save people in the biblical stories my mother told me when I was a child—and I also vaguely remember praying before I passed out.

I’m still drunk enough to believe in such things.

But then I’m vomiting onto my deck—all wine and bile tinged with cigarette tar.

“You have a little party?” she says. “What happened here?”

“Albert Camus,” I whisper. “He’s dead.”

“Um, yeah. For half a century now.”

“You don’t understand,” I say, feeling the damage I’ve done to my throat. It burns like someone sandpapered my entire respiratory system. “I killed him.”

“What the hell have you been drinking?”

I blink and try to look at her face.

The floodlight is right behind her head now, so all I see is her silhouette outlined in white.

“Are you an angel?” I say. “Did God send you?”

She laughs. “Um, I’m not really religious, Mr. Vernon.”

“So you’re not an angel?”

“I believe you may be intoxicated.”

“I’m Zagreus, the old cripple. You have to kill me. Like in the book
A Happy Death
. By Camus.”

“I don’t want to brag, but I may have just saved your life. Never pass out on your back, Mr. Vernon. They teach you this in health class. You can choke and suffocate on your own vomit when you’re passed out, which was what you were doing when I found you here.”

“I was supposed to die. I made a suicide pact with Albert Camus.”

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get you inside. Maybe put on some coffee. Get some water in you. Change your shirt.”

“You won’t kill me? What if I give you my money—all I have? Would you be my Patrice Mersault? Like in
A Happy Death
.”

“Isn’t Meursault the protagonist of
The Stranger
?”

“There are two
u
’s in Meursault from
The Stranger
,” I whisper. “Only one
u
in Patrice Mersault. Just let me die out here. Because I killed Albert Camus. I’m sorry, but I have to pay with my life.”

“Okay, drunk man. Let’s sit up.”

She’s behind me now, forcing me to do a sit-up, pushing my shoulder blades with her palms.

“Here’s your cane. Use it, because I don’t think I can carry you. Let’s just make it inside. Three feet, we have to travel. Just thirty-six tiny inches.”

“I can’t stand,” I say. “Too drunk. Legs won’t work.”

“Then you’ll crawl, because it’s too cold out here.”

“No,” I say. “Let me freeze to death. I don’t deserve to live.”

“Get your ass inside that house now,” she says and then kicks my thigh.

“Ouch!”

“Move!”

Mostly because I am now terrified of this woman angel, I fall forward and crawl toward the sliding door, which is open. My head is pounding, and it takes a long time, but I manage to drag my body inside. She slides the door shut behind us and locks it.

“What happened to you?” she says. “My god. You’re a mess.”

“I killed Albert Camus.”

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” she says, and then she starts to cry, which alarms me.

Do angels cry?

She seems vaguely familiar. I wonder if I have run into her, shopping at Harper’s. Maybe she frequents my favorite pizza shop, Wicked Good Pie, or perhaps the local gas station—but I can’t place her in my drunken state, let alone figure out why she would come to my home. She’s beautiful though, in her late thirties, I would guess. Long brown hair. Slim figure. Although she seems to be wearing outdated clothes—a white jean jacket with rock-star pins on it. I haven’t seen people wearing rock-star pins on jean jackets for decades.

“Why are you crying?” I say.

“I didn’t think you’d be
this
fucked up.”

I feel guilty for disappointing her, even though I didn’t even know she was coming, let alone who she might be. It all adds to the sense of responsibility I feel for Albert Camus’s death, and I instantly remember why I have sequestered myself.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“I came to save you.”

“How did you know I needed saving?” I say, uncomfortably remembering my prayer.

She covers her eyes with her hand and sighs deeply.

“Are you really an angel?” I say.

“Would you stop fucking saying that please?”

“Angels don’t use profanity, do they?”

“You need to hydrate,” she says, and then she’s opening cabinets and turning on the tap and thrusting the rim of a glass at my teeth.

I sip just to be nice.

I wonder if I might be hallucinating, or maybe I have died and gone to some sort of hell or purgatory where attractive women force you to crawl and drink excessive amounts of water.

“What’s going on here?” I say, still sitting on the floor just inside the sliding glass door.

“Drink.” She lifts the bottom of the glass up, so that water fills my mouth.

Suddenly, I realize that I am very thirsty—also my throat is screaming from so many cigarettes—and so I gulp the water down until the glass is empty.

“Good,” she says. “Let’s do one more.”

I watch her fill the glass a second time, and when she approaches me, I say, “Who are you?”

She doesn’t answer, but pours water down my throat again, and I do my best to consume it, but immediately feel as though I might vomit again. The woman must have read my face. “Try to keep it down,” she says, and then she’s in the kitchen again, rifling through my supplies.

“Heavily buttered toast,” she says as she sticks two slices of rye bread into the toaster. “That’s what you need now. Get some grease in you.”

Before long she’s sitting next to me on the floor, holding warm bread up to my lips.

Even though I just vowed to starve myself to death, I take small bites—hearing the crunch of my teeth breaking through crispy nooks and crannies—and feel the warm velvety melted butter on
my tongue. My nausea dissipates with every swallow, which seems miraculous.

Once the toast has been consumed, she cleans my face and neck with towels soaked in warm water, and it feels so good that I close my eyes and try to forget that I have a strange woman in my home, making me do things against my will.

Maybe because I’m drunk, I pretend I am an infant again, and my mother is taking care of me.

You are a baby.

You have no control.

You also have no responsibilities.

Nothing can be your fault.

Then I’m on the couch, she’s covering me with blankets, and I’m mumbling, “I didn’t mean to kill Albert Camus. I really didn’t. I’m so sorry. Won’t you kill me in my sleep? Please. Just kill me. End this.”

“Sleep it off,” she says. “We start saving you tomorrow.”

“You already saved me—whoever you are. Even though I didn’t want to be saved.”

“No,” she says. “We’ve only just begun.”

I hear anger in her voice, but—even though the warm butter is working its way through my system—I still feel drunk and tell myself that four bottles of wine is enough to make anyone hallucinate.

“I wish you were real,” I say. “I’m sorry you’re not real.”

“Go to sleep, Mr. Vernon.”

“Why do you call me by my last name?”

“Shhh,” she says. “It’s okay. Just sleep.”

My eyelids are too heavy to open, even when I hear her crying.

Why is this woman crying?

Why is she here?

Who is she?

“You’re an angel,” I mumble. “A prayer answered. There’s no other explanation. Simply none. Maybe a curse too. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. May . . .”

And then I’m gone again, dreaming of Edmond Atherton.

In my dream he’s chasing Albert Camus with the aluminum baseball bat, and I’m looking down at the scene from a high tower that doesn’t seem to have stairs or an elevator or any way down at all, except jumping out the window.

Albert Camus is running in circles below, and every time Edmond Atherton swings his bat, he gets closer and closer to killing my dog—so, even though it makes no sense at all, I jump out the window, feel my stomach drop. But just when I’m about to hit the earth and splatter to death, the entire world disappears and Albert Camus and I are in my living room again, sitting on the couch.

Edmond Atherton has vanished, along with his bat.

“I’m sorry, Albert Camus,” I say.

He jumps into my arms and licks my face.

“Why did you jump?” I ask.

You were the one who jumped in this dream!
he says, although his lips do not move.

“Why did you jump in real life? From the bedroom window. Were you acting on the suicide pact?”

Remember in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, when Clarence the angel jumps off the bridge to trick George Bailey into saving him? He says something like, “I knew if I jumped in, you’d save me. And that’s how I saved you.” We watched that movie together the past two Christmases. You sobbed both times. Remember? That’s where I got the idea—figured out how to save you.

“You jumped to save me?”

Albert Camus licks me once right on the lips, as if to say yes.

“But I didn’t save you back.”

You didn’t kill yourself either
.

I hold Albert Camus close to my chest, smell the familiar slightly metallic scent of his fur, and feel the beating of his little heart against my ribs as his tail repetitively taps my stomach.

“Regardless of whether this is real or not, I love you, Albert Camus. You were the best dog in the world. You were a wildly gifted emotional support animal.”

This is just a thought—but if you ever get another dog, please name him something a bit less intense, less absurd. Something happier—maybe something uplifting like Yo-Yo Ma. You name a dog Albert Camus, and you yoke him to a certain fate. That’s just the way it is. No offense.

“There’s only one dog for me,” I say as I scratch Albert Camus behind the ears and kiss the hard spot between his eyes. “I could never get another to replace you.”

Beautiful sentiment, Master Nate. I appreciate it. But you have to move on.

“Do you think the woman on my couch could really be an answer to prayer—could she be a wingless angel like Clarence? Sent by God?”

Dogs don’t really believe in God, Master Nate. We believe in regular feeding times, car rides with the windows down, a good scratch behind the ears, a walk in the woods, and chasing small mammals, shaking them to death in our teeth. Our brains are no bigger than peaches, so we keep it simple. No God or anything heady like that. Give us a car ride with the windows down over a deity any day. Tell you what, let’s just snuggle this one last time and simply enjoy the sun streaming through the window in all of its full frontal nudity.

We snuggle cheek-to-cheek and belly-to-belly.

“I love you, my furry little buddy.”

Yeah, you too, Master Nate.