A little under an hour later, back in his apartment, he finally sat down, shut the notebook, and switched on his computer.
It was easy to find two or three reliable sources to confirm that butanediol had indeed been and still was being produced in Lendava, not far from the northern Croatia-Slovenia border, at an artificial fertilizer plant. This substance—this very 1,4-butanediol—had psychotropic properties; it could exacerbate depression and hallucinations and contaminate the groundwater. He quickly changed into dry clothes and then drove—forcing himself to focus on the traffic—to the state agency where he worked. He said hello to the doorman and headed to his office. He reached into a drawer and, after fumbling around, pulled out a sealed document, which he ripped open.
Two weeks earlier, he’d been leafing absently through a report about a research project studying an unusual series of suicides in the early nineties. The report had lingered at the margins of his consciousness, nothing more than a curious footnote. Which was strange because the study was conducted in the very village where he’d grown up, in northern Međimurje, and the conclusion specifically mentioned local people linking the deaths to a boy, a seven-year-old, whose initials were M. D. But Matija had been obsessing over what Gita would say about the novel, so none of this had raised a red flag. He’d skimmed through the report, taking breaks to surf the internet. He jotted down that the project had had an equal number of male and female subjects (within a 12 percent deviation, as required by EU regulations) and stuffed the report in a drawer he cleared out every three months. For the rest of the day, he’d felt dismal, loathing everything around him, but that was nothing unusual.
Now he devoured sentence after sentence and began cursing under his breath while scribbling, already on the seventh page of the notebook.
When he left the office, it was evening. The street was quiet. Nothing particularly remarkable had happened that day in Croatia, bad news had been taking a long weekend. The only item of interest was of an unusual blue-and-red flash of light that appeared in the sky between 7:30 and 8:15 p.m., which could be seen from almost all of northwestern Croatian and a part of Slovenia. Several photographs of it circulated across social media that evening, and several people who’d seen it described it for the late news. One of them said it was incredible that the aurora borealis could be seen this far south, others wondered what the hell it was. The next day the papers ran a few of the pictures and a brief commentary.
The scientific fact of the butanediol freed him of the blame he’d been carrying.
He walked calmly, as if actually seeing the city around him for the first time. He was all tied in knots. It’s not that he felt relief—that would have been too strong a word. He felt clear. What he’d written and what he’d write over the next three days, only stopping to sleep when he had to, when he nodded off inadvertently, was all addressed to Dina Gajski.
He walked into the apartment, locked the door, and took out his cell phone with his left hand because he was clutching the pad he’d been writing on in his right. He called his sister’s friend, said, “It’s Matija,” and, without waiting for a response, went on:
“I thought I’d killed them. That’s why I forgot. Things you’ve forgotten bide their time. They keep an eye on you, poke each other in the ribs, and snicker softly so as not to disturb the sanctity of the delusion. They only start getting louder when you begin to stagnate, when there’s no forward movement, and that’s when they go after you, seething because you’ve forbidden them from coexisting with all the new things you neatly pack into the storage unit known as your life. I can finally see them clearly, and I’m walking toward them. Still… I can’t help but wonder… what if this is just another lie? Well, even if it is, what recourse do we have? We only settle for a lie that’s good enough.”
The voice on the other end of the line tried several times to interrupt the groggy, insular flow of Matija’s words. What made sense to Matija was just a garbled string of syllables to the person on the other end of the line. But that he was speaking backward didn’t matter. Because he was writing forward.
I turn and see a gallery of familiar faces, like portraits I painted fast, with no skill, in the heat of the moment when I thought I’d have them with me forever. When the models were right there in front of me, I slopped on the paint, thinking I’d refine the faces at some point, so none of them would ever get away, but every single one of them is lost. Now I suddenly wish I could rework them all, if only I could have one of my canvases back so I could finish it properly. I’m sure I’d make my one and only masterpiece, if only I could have the sketch back.
And no, that’s not why I’m writing, I’m not that rude. I’m writing because now I think I can tell you the one story about myself you wanted to hear. You’ve earned it. I’m writing to you, to myself, to the stranger I’ve been carrying around inside me all these years, to everyone who has been touched by this, whether living or dead or somewhere between… And I’m burning to tell all of us—whether or not I’m to blame—that I’m sorry, so goddamn sorry. This is my excuse for confessing. If this story is about anything, it is about a time when I knew courage, seeking, fear, and ultimately—always—love. Now I feel as if I have been loving only in fits and starts with an imagined, alien self, hoping to gloss over the dark, accursed part of me that no one (except you, a few times) has ever seen. And that’s the only part of me that’s able to love fully. Only that part can.
HOW TO DRAW YLENOL
1.
It would be impossible to describe the strange occurrences of my childhood, some of them truly bizarre, without first recounting a legend told by the people living in the region of Croatia known as Upper Međimurje. There in the North, the older folks often told a story about how, in the beginning—when the world was still light and young and made so much more sense—God gave each of his children one part of Earth. He divvied it all up, save one little chunk that he kept for himself. The loveliest and greenest place: a highland with rolling forested hills, redolent with the fragrance of resin and green grapes, and a lowland with meadows, hayfields, and rich tillage. These lands were divided from the rest of the world by two tame, clear-running rivers: the Drava to the south and the Mura to the north. Satisfied, when God saw he’d finished his work, he breathed a sigh of relief and sat down on Mohokos, the highest peak in the beautiful terrain. He soon felt something wriggling between his toes. These were the smallest but also the hardest-working and friendliest people who, not wishing to disturb their good Father, had begun to till the fields of God’s land. The only one who spoke was a child, who whispered: “Dear Father, dear God, how will you reward us for our loyal service?” God was sorry he’d forgotten the dearest and humblest of all of his children, so he gave them the piece of Earth he’d set aside for himself. And so it was from that day forth that this gentle place was known as Međimurje, meaning “land lying between waters.” It was home to a peaceful people who never left their little piece of earth except when forced to by hunger and privation.
However, peace and prosperity don’t last forever. From the north came big, wild men, ogres, with no home of their own (for they’d never been God’s children). Mercy was foreign to them; they had long stringy hair that had been tangled and matted by sweat and dust, their eyes were bloodshot, their bodies were caked in mud, and their arms were crusted to the elbow with the gore of people they’d slaughtered in their aimless wanderings. They rode giant horses and astride them forded the Mura. Ever since that day, the river had become murky and was rife with dangerous eddies. This was because they’d rinsed the blood of the innocents from their arms and their swords and their axes, and turbid and rusty the water remained; the ruts gouged out by their immense horses in the riverbed had made the currents unpredictable and treacherous. The Mura often shifted course, as if impelled by the uneasy eternal sleep of the innocents. In its whirlpools and sudden drops in depth, many had disappeared, and many a parent mourned a child who’d been swept away by the river.