“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.”
*
Mother 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.
I continued to surf the Internet and sank deeper each day into the disaster unfolding in Iceland. The misery bled into my grief over the illness, and the fusion reached completion in a story I found on a website with the heading Icelandic Woman Ends Her Own Life in Hospice Abroad. I stared at the screen, overcome with sadness because we had told no one of our plan. No one but cousin Matti, who would never have gone to the papers. Farther down the page was a link to related articles. I clicked the link and saw the face of Danni Klambra spread over the screen. He smiled his white-toothed grin underneath text about Vikings, Iceland booming, Fixrenta conquering the buy-to-rent market, Bulgaria being silicon, there you could live the high life, but the Netherlands was the place to be if you wanted to enjoy your final days, Icelanders went there for medical care, there was an Icelandic woman there receiving palliative care, didn’t that tell you something about the quality of Fixrenta’s services in the Netherlands? It’s even nice to die here.
The article had been published a few days before the Klambra boys went under. Since then the reporter had managed to dig up our names and published a photo of Spítala Street 11. The house had been sprayed: Blasphemist, Suicide is a crime. A spokesperson from a Christian sect felt the need to defend the defiling of the house while others defended Mother. People with wooly hats and mittens in colorful clothing stood in front of Spítala Street with a signs saying: One Life — One Choice! God is Dead! Eva’s Choice!
I called Matti who said he had tried to phone me. The situation had spiraled quickly out of control. People stood out there in the cold in support of Mother. Protests were taking place all over the city center, cars were set on fire and politicians didn’t leave the house without bodyguards to protect them from the Public’s accusations of treason.
“Are all these people protesting because of me?” Mother asked, looking over my shoulder at the protest on screen. For a second I almost gave in to the truth, to tell her that Iceland had fallen, had sunk into the Atlantic. The people standing there were the people who couldn’t get a ticket out of there. People who never had private planes at their command, no condos in Bulgaria. That these were the single moms with their rolling pins and pans, the eczema-plagued children longing for zinc cream, the dogs needing flea shampoo and Pedigree, the IceTaxi people demanding justice, the street people suffering from soaring wine prices, guitar people in need of amplifiers, people who solve puzzles in Excel, people who want vitamins for their children, teenagers wanting DVDs, the elderly needing meds, and the whole nation wanting to reclaim its country after the bombardment and self-jets. All the commies, Mother, all the commies! But I didn’t want to hurt her. Why couldn’t these people just as well be protesting because of Mother?
“Well, I never thought I’d become this famous. Imagine, all these people standing there thinking of me. I feel a bit like I did in Montparnasse back in the day. I think I’ll have a glass of red and a cigarette. I feel much better now.”
I gave her a light, wiped the sweat off her forehead and the toxins oozing out through her skin producing that distinct whiff of illness, the heavy odor constantly reminding us of death. She was like a tiny chemical plant, the smoke like a tiny factory cloud over a building that was falling apart. I didn’t know what went on in there, what kind of sound travelled in a house doomed to fall, but it was more than crying. Music, long-gone parties, drives up mountainsides, and adventures, this was the hint of happiness that constantly flickered up ahead and made the point apparent, even though the hand never quite grasped what it was reaching for. Mother participated in order to collect memories, enjoyed in order to feel the loss, and even though reality tormented her and ordered her to bed, she possessed a serenity that I had a hard time defining as surrender.