And yet I could no longer ignore what was happening. I could no longer pretend not to see that which demanded my full attention; the pain that burned through Mother’s bones, the agony that made her cry and shout at me that she wanted to do it now, drink acid or anything that would make her disappear from the face off the earth. She could drink moonshine, like the stuff that killed Grímur, Great Aunt Edda’s father, first by blinding him and then by burning a hole in his stomach. She would do it. Anything but this. We knew the end was drawing near. We could not postpone this much longer. Even though the heart calmed down and the pain receded, it was always looming. Always returning, until she died. Until she faded and disappeared. She was pain. She was a distorted face and the hate for that which distorted it.
That was how the week after my return from the abyss in Amsterdam passed. All I could do was wipe away her tears and sweat, administer morphine and wait for the party to be over, for the constant rave-hopping of the mutated cells to stop. Sometimes she would ask Duncan to lie down beside her, he told such wonderful stories, possessed a kindness that was more important than muscles and chest hair, and even though it had taken cancer and old age for her to learn this lesson. . was it maybe always meant to end like this? Until now there had been no Duncan. We knew that the time they had together was limited, full of hindrances and howling into the silences, suffering that chewed up the darkness and set the room on fire without notice. It grew colder and Mother got worse. She didn’t say much, filling her presence with something that was the negative of who she was, as if life was sucking out everything that made her herself. Duncan said that when people stopped crying over their own past it finally became the past, insignificant and useless, no longer a thing to measure life against, no longer a tool for evaluating everything you wanted back, only that which has passed. At the same time you felt the weakness that made you give up. Like Mother, he was dying. He had about three months left, maybe less.
Mother told me to keep a record. Told me that I should tear out the pages of her journal and eat them if that helped me make any sense of them. Life was one big crime novel and it had to be put into words. The bombardments of the self-jetters should be recorded. The torture of patients in modern times was a vital topic to write about, for outdated injection techniques did nothing but make you want to kill yourself as soon as possible. But there was also joy in the world that needed mentioning as well. Hotel Europa had to live on in the minds of others, the breakfasts and the shopping trips, all the museums we visited with her lifesaver in hand, that wonderful companion, and Timothy and Duncan had to be mentioned, never forget how much fun there is to be had, drink some calamus in a crazy jazz orgy and dance. In between all of this her own personality would achieve immortality, the best height of imagination when all was said and done, even though the world was too dumb to appreciate it.
November brought rain and the rotten fall engulfed everything. The smell of decomposing leaves stroked the plains, the wind picked up, and the last of the summer flowers yielded to the ground. If Mother perked up, the delight only lasted a short while. She raged at the changing of the seasons and this inexplicable life. The days with Duncan became memories, empty glasses, forgotten embraces on the lawn, and nothing could change the fact that everything was lost. I watched her face break and the corners of her mouth droop toward the trail of death. She shouted away the squirrels in the meadow and screamed the knots out of the wind so the countryside went completely still, and then she instantly fell in love with the world again. She praised my calm temperament, reached for my hand; a skeleton craving water, flesh and blood, broke down and got angry with herself. Maybe the look of hate is most potent when it is directed inwardly. Sometimes her expressions betrayed an unbearable regret of not having done things differently. She cried over the injustice she had thoughtlessly caused me, inconsolable over mistakes that threw happiness out with the trash. She mourned disposable opportunities and unrecyclable pleasures, a forgotten birthday. When she was haunted by thoughts of all the things she hadn’t done, painting lessons, suing the conservatives for treason, it was like all the days of history wouldn’t suffice to grieve over what would never be. Life was a wreck no matter how long it was. She had never enjoyed any of it. Existence was a merciless narrow path to damnation and hell. She hated it. She hated existence and all its ruined days more that her own useless bones.
When she came to, she remembered where she was and that most of this was over and done with, long forgotten and that everything else was more important — to rest her feet for half an hour in Duncan’s lap and sleep — and at such moments joy settled over everything around Highland. The grass was glad to die underneath the frost. The cattle happily chewed on the wire fences. Fantasy and wonder skated hand in hand over her features, like a drunken couple that has always loved each other, but never fully understood the other. In her blood was a tremor she considered a betrayal of happiness, and it was that very tremor that called the whole world to its service and attracted people who gave her their love. I read to her and she fell asleep listening, woke up wanting cotton candy, maybe a Liebe Sunde, some Icelandic flatbread with onion pâté. She babbled on and on, salivating at the mouth, her voice rattling, black, white, black, white, black: her consciousness flickered, moving in and out of existence without any discernable rhythm. Events swirled out of control in her mind, constantly on repeat. Everything was new, even things that had happened before, so the reverberation of progress didn’t intensify the monotony but rather hampered it. Each hour was the last, but also the first, a constant recurrence of the eccentricity of the disease. Sometimes she would recognize the beauty by cursing the lack of jenever, but I knew she didn’t have the stomach for it anymore, and that was all I knew. Her mortality was beyond everything that my mind could perceive, but each time it hit me I was overwhelmed by sorrow and obsessed with a need to be especially kind to her. I craved confirmation of this one thing more than anything else: that I’d done everything in my power. No matter how deep the sorrows, there had been someone ready to appease them. And that she would say it: You did good, Trooper. Better than anyone else.
My worst fear was to live with the possibility of having failed her. I convinced myself that death justified everything, framed everything, and if we did it right the doubts would never haunt me again. Helena was in the same situation. She led Duncan through the days, tried to support him, tried not to break under the pressure from unfair feelings belting drinking songs from the deepest corners of her soul, convincing her that she had failed. Because there is only so much you can do. The roads that people traveled were many, long, and different. Not everyone came to the same crossroads at the end of the road.
“Don’t think you failed, Trooper, just because other people think differently.”