The Last Days of My Mother (22 page)

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.

“Here you are! Duncan and I have been looking all over for you! Oh, Trooper!” Helena followed the stench of ethanol secreting from my body and gently patted my head as I let it hang over the side of the bed. “Eva was asking for you. She went on and on about some mountain lady and cried over not being the child of the republic or something we didn't understand. Democracy Baby? She said it over and over.”

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No, Trooper . . . she's not dead! We needed to get a hold of you because she and Duncan decided to get married.”

I looked up with two black holes for eyes, caught in a debate with comprehension.

“I was thrilled to marry Eva,” Duncan said, “even though the reason was a matter of convenience.”

“You got married? You've actually had a wedding?”

“We need to make sure the citizenship goes through in time. We just didn't get what she meant with not being Icelandic anymore, not being a mountain woman. She cried so much. She didn't want to do this without you.”

I felt the tears well up in my eyes and Helena's hands on my face, bloated and cried out, until she held me tight, looked into my eyes, and hugged me. “Come with us, Trooper. Okay? Everything is going to be fine. Please, come with us and finish what you came here to do.”

“Yup, yes,” I started, but my voice was unstable, a quivering needle on a seismograph preparing for an explosion, wanting to explode. “I just needed some rest,” I tried to say but couldn't. I gasped for breath in the presence of these people who I had just recently learned to know. I felt like I needed to pull myself together in front of them, maintain the mask we insist on calling self-respect when the truth is we're all broken underneath it, full of repressed angst and neuroticism that inflates like a balloon until it explodes and drives us over the edge, our insides spilling out into the world like a Biblical torrent, a liberating force turning you into a baby, crying uncontrollably and passionately. “I was on my way . . .” I bawled, crying like a kid who's been caught eating all the popsicles in the freezer, all the cookies in the attic, and all the soda in the pantry.

“I know it's not easy, son,” Duncan said, infusing my weeping with a warmth that only served to heighten my hysteria, so I fell completely silent, choking on my own crying, keeling over,
overwrought by sobs. My lungs were about to explode into Duncan's kind face staring down at mine, distorted by lament, threatening to rip my expressions apart, peeling away my skin, red like the furious flames of Hell. He placed a hand on my shoulder and looked at me with that gentle Santa Claus look, which had to be what all living creatures would like to see in their dying breath, all those hung over and dejected, because it wiped away fear, brought pure tranquility to all things, and calmed the heart so that all did not seem lost anymore: nothing was completely impossible if you just managed to pull yourself together.

“We understand this has not been easy for you. I know it and my Helena knows it. That's why she's coming back to Highland, to help out. Don't you think it's best that you come and see Eva, too? We'll cook something good to get the poison out of your system. I know the state you're in, I've been there numerous times myself, and I suppose your mother knows it too. She's just waiting for you to return.”

I slept in Helena's room that night, in her double bed in Lowland. The sheets were drenched from sweat and spit and the cold cloths Helena used to wash my face while I tossed and turned, and she stayed awake telling me stories from her life, trips to the Faroe Islands, and her love for Eila. Eila whom she'd get over, Eila who would be a gauge for the past, Eila who would no longer be sadness, but a new beginning. Because there was light up ahead. There would be still mornings and dawns that would wake us with a vastness enabling us to take on life. When I came to, the morning was my negative—bright and high—I gaped at it, crazed by the emptiness echoing in my head, carried on the shoulders of the horror and pain in my body as if the world had defecated on me, made
me a gutter for all the shit oozing out of its endlessness, and yet promised to return me to the purging light. Because there was still hope after all. A sliver of hope, despite everything, to fix what had been broken.

Chapter 18

E
ven the most spectacular hangover can't dull the panic of suddenly being poor. I would have lost myself in the vacuum, disappeared down a bag full of chocolate and the complete collection of
Liebe Sunde
if the situation had just been the aftermath of heavy drinking. But as I walked over to the Mansion at the crack of dawn with my head full of the online news about the disaster in Iceland, so infinitely worse than any message in Haarlem had conveyed, I was seized by such anguish over the future that I wanted to run to the woods, evaporate into the canopy, and not return until the world was new again. It wasn't the fact that Iceland was down, the banks busted, and the Prime Minister had resorted to asking for God's blessing for the country as it tanked, but the thought of having Mother's illness to deal with and no money to do so was something I hadn't prepared for. I'd eaten the last euro in the form of a sandwich during the trip from Amsterdam to Lowland. I was no longer a stranger to the world's deepest and darkest cesspools. We had pushed aside all hindrances to agitation and anxiousness, and laid down in the dirt. Now we'd bury our sorrows by heading penniless into the future.

I found little comfort in the fact that this catastrophe was not mine alone. The governor of Holland claimed to have transferred one hundred and twenty thousand Icelandic documents and files to the Bank of Holland that had turned out to be devoid of all significance and meaning. This pressed tree pulp from the North-Atlantic would be best used for ass-wiping as it was of no use as currency in places of business. The savings were lost. The Bank of Holland had hired sixty experts to sort through the paperwork on the second floor of the bank's HQ on Westeinde, but had to relocate the operation because the building couldn't support the weight of the great bulk of paper. Never before in the history of civilization had people fled their houses on account of paper. Iceland was subjected to anti-terrorist legislation, thus joining a list including al-Qaeda and North Korea. In my inner world the lists were reserved for the adventures of my hangovers. I was not at all sure how long I would survive as I crawled up the steps to the old mansion.

Dr. Fred welcomed me in his green coat, ready with a saline drip and vitamin remedy. He told me I just needed to lie down while the solution trickled through and replenished my stores. That left the more serious and pressing matter of the relentless itching around my genitals. The good doctor whipped out his magnifying glass and let out a delighted cry.
Pthirus pubis pacificus!
If he was not mistaken this was one of the rarest genus of crabs in the Netherlands, known to have been originally transmitted by Dita van der Lingling.

“Are you implying that I had sex with Dita van der Lingling?”

“Well, the little buggers may have claimed a larger territory in the past few years, but for the longest time they could almost always be traced back to Dita. She has a man in the Pacific. It's a peculiar world, the sex industry.”

“No shit.”

Dr. Fred assured me that there was no need for drastic measures, all I needed was to rub a bit of Permetrine on the area and wash all clothing that may had been in contact with Petirus.

“By the way, your name has come up quite a lot this morning,” he said.

“Oh?” I felt my heart break because I was sure I knew what was coming.

“Because of that bank that Helga wanted to deposit our savings into,” he continued and my apprehension grew. “Wasn't it run by your compatriots? Well, Helga tells me that it's all gone to hell, and therefore we count ourselves extremely lucky that you warned us about it. The savings in Lowland are nothing to brag about but at least they are here, safe and sound.”

*

M
other wasn't angry when I showed up again. She reached out to me and smiled, asked me to sit with her, patted her eiderdown and squeezed my arm.

“I didn't mean to be gone so long,” I started. “I just . . .”

“No need to apologize, love, Duncan has been such a blast while you were away. Did they tell you we got married? I never imagined I'd get married so late in life.”

“Duncan's lucky to have found himself such a wife.”

“And so am I, Trooper, so am I.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't with you.”

“We'll find time to drink to that—don't you worry. There are still things to celebrate here in Lowland even though Iceland is upended. I got a letter from cousin Matti. Apparently everything is crazy back home, have you heard? No culture and endless money
cults, like I've always said. We were lucky to get out in time.” She gently pinched my cheek. “You look a bit groggy . . . you kind of remind me of a Munch.”

“A monk?”

“Edvard Munch, the grand master painter of the soul. You kind of look like one of his paintings, just duller—more gray.”

I had a hard time keeping what had happened from Mother and ended up telling her everything that I'd been through, my drinking in Amsterdam, days I spent with me and myself, my dallying with the sordid side of life and the abyss. The fact was that there aren't many people who can listen as intently to other people's tales of woe as Mother. Her take on the matter was that I'd taken one for the team and was in fact ecstatic that my excursion—this testament to our stay in Amsterdam—had ended in the arms of a prostitute.

“Ran out on her fully clothed and yet you managed to get crabs!” She howled with laughter. “Just like your dad, in and out of whorehouses with his pants around his heels. It's just in your DNA. I mean, what else have you been doing out at night, all by your self, if not roaming the Red District? I was sure you were out there getting your rocks off.”

I couldn't help but laugh and we sniggered together for a while until I had to get back to Lowland to tend to my hangover. It was a mammoth task, but one at which I was determined to succeed. I was, after all, an expert when it came to the aftermath of drinking, fully schooled in the psychological and cultural aspects of it. Crippled offspring ambushed my dreams like deformed flakes: somehow me, but child sized, and with abscesses everywhere. Screaming, wolf-faced women in the inner most circle of Hell, mid-coitus. Above the haze a starlit canopy shimmered, pressing into my eyelids and shaking me. I had rarely been so harassed as these nights
when I tossed and turned, trembling from going cold turkey. All the sleepless nights, the fits and sweat. When it came to hangovers, I was king. When it came to hangovers, I was Edvard Munch, grand master painter of the soul.

In the end the colors stopped burning and everything became gray and lumpy like a porridge of surroundings, blowing leaves, and raindrops falling down my back. The tone scale was a silent bass reminding me of the couple of minutes before Christmas, the moment when all went still, even the radio. I told myself that I would never drink another drop of alcohol. That it was not for me, but for people like Duncan and Mother who knew how to handle it, understood its many dimensions and uses. From now on I would deal with my anxieties without resorting to alcohol. Nothing was of any importance except Mother's illness.