Janice told me that she didn’t really know. She told me that it also didn’t make much difference because Elf was refusing to take them anyway. Yeah, I said, she either takes an awful lot of pills at once or none at all. Janice was trying to make me feel better now too, so she patted me on the shoulder and then told me to go home and sleep.
I said I’d go say goodbye to Elf first but she told me just to go and that she’d tell Elf I’d be back soon. I was staring at the calendar and Janice followed my gaze and then walked over to it and flipped the page so it was showing the right month.
She said well, we’ve taken care of that now and I said, Yes, thank you.
I took the stairs to the basement by accident — two, four, six, eight — and ended up locked in a tunnel. I walked for a while and pushed on several doors but none of them would open. I wondered how long it would take before I was found. I checked my BlackBerry but couldn’t get a signal. I saw footprints painted on the concrete floor. I followed them. They brought me to another locked door. I sat down in the tunnel and held my plastic Safeway bag in my lap. I looked up at the large pipes hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel. Then I took out my manuscript and held it in my hands for a while. I snapped the elastic holding it together a few times and put it back into the bag. I wondered if I would starve to death in the tunnel. Irony. Elf would feel bad, no? Jealous? A taste of her own medicine?
I got up again and walked in the opposite direction to the footprints and found another door. It was locked too. I went back to where I’d been sitting, following the footprints again, and then beyond that to a fork in the tunnels. I turned right and walked a while until I came to another door and I pushed on it and it opened. I was in an industrial kitchen or maybe I was in the morgue. Everything was made of stainless steel and the whole room hummed and shone. I walked through this room and through another door and straight into the emergency ward waiting room. A cop stood guarding something, I’m not sure what it was, but he told me to wash my hands. I told him they weren’t dirty and he said that he had to ask everyone to wash their hands. He pointed at a makeshift handwashing stand. I asked him if he could hold my bag then for a minute while I washed my hands and he nodded and took it. I washed my hands very slowly, very thoroughly, and while I was washing I looked at the cop holding my manuscript in his hand. It felt safe there. I wanted to leave it with him but I dried my hands and took the bag and thanked him for holding it and walked out to the wrong parking lot in search of my mother’s car.
Occasionally I sit in my mother’s car and grip the steering wheel as hard as I can until my knuckles go white and I breathe out the word Ellllllfffff. I’d punch a hole through the windshield if I didn’t think I’d break my hand. And if it wouldn’t create a big insurance nightmare, and a wicked draft in the winter. As a kid I used to go out to my bike and sit on it while it was in its stand going nowhere and I’d try out new swear words. I’d mutter them quietly under my breath, over and over, until they lost their sting and became ridiculous like Elf’s one-time mantra of love. This car thing is similar to that. It feels like a controlled experiment. My own mobile laboratory of rage. If I can say things over and over they’ll eventually lose their meaning and my anger will disappear. Elf, what are you fucking doing? I feel safe in the car, alone and protected. I can see people milling about in the parking lot but they can’t see me. Well, they can but they think I’m insane so they look away which is the same as being invisible.
I met Nic for a beer on his way home from work. He told me he’d had no luck getting a hold of any of the care-team members except for one social worker who said that she wasn’t sure there was still funding for that sort of thing. Nic had told her that he would pay for it himself, this team of bodyguards. The social worker wasn’t sure it worked that way and Nic had asked her then in which way does it work? He talked to me about his kayak, its progress. He needed to have certain bolts mailed to him from Minneapolis. He was quite sure that he’d be in the river by May. But maybe it’s just futile, I told him. To have her watched every second of the day. He agreed but what else were we supposed to do?
We drank our beer. He told me that Elf’s book had arrived in the mail. It was Final Exit, the book on how to kill yourself with plastic bags and whatnot. I said oh my god, throw it away! But he said he couldn’t do that because it would be an invasion of her privacy and an attack on her personal rights and freedoms. You don’t just throw out someone else’s mail. I argued with him for a while and he said maybe he could hide it away in a closet until she stopped being suicidal. And then what? I said. Haul it out and give it to her as a birthday surprise? Just throw the goddamn thing in the garbage. I can’t throw a book, any book, in the garbage, he said. I said okay, then mail it back to Amazon or wherever it came from. But it’s not mine, he said. All right, let me throw it out, I said. He said he can’t let me do that, it’s still not right.
Oh my god, Nic and I are having a fight. We don’t want to have a fight. Or maybe we do if it makes us feel like we’re doing something, getting somewhere, solving problems. Nic and I are approaching the task of caring for Elf from two entirely different angles, from a sterile laboratory and from the dark side of the moon. He is pragmatic, scientific, and believes in prescriptions, in doctors’ orders and in their omnipotence.
One of my latest ideas for saving Elf’s life is to have her parachuted into a strange and brutal place like Mogadishu or North Korea where she’d be forced to survive on her own in ways like never before. It was a risky plan. She could throw herself on the mercy of a child soldier and just get herself shot and that would be that or she could be jolted into a completely new notion of what it means to be alive and what is required to stay alive. Her adrenal gland would begin to work overtime and she’d be lifted up, energized, hunted, and desperate to outwit her attacker and survive. She would be utterly alone in this violent setting — though I would somehow have attached a live webcam to the side of her head or something like that so that I could track and monitor her progress. When I was convinced that she had established new parameters to living, found a new life strategy, as my father put it a couple of days before he ended it altogether, that she had come to thrive on the challenge, on the game of living, when she had come to the point of realizing that, like a normal person, lo and behold, she really didn’t want to die, I’d have her helicoptered out and we could go on like before, laughing, walking, breathing, getting pedicures, making plans for next week and Christmas and the spring and old age. But Nic prefers the idea of medication and regular exercise and he’s her primary caretaker, her husband, her immediate next of kin, so Elf won’t be jumping out of a plane into downtown Mogadishu with nothing but the shirt on her back and a camera strapped to her head any time soon.
Nic and I stare off at the red booths of the restaurant and sip our beer and wonder and think. We have stopped arguing. I tell Nic that Claudio called me at the hospital, that he suspects something isn’t right. I tell him that one of us definitely has to call him back. Nic sighs and says yeah, he knows, but what if she changes her mind and I remind him of how many millions of times she’s said she can’t do the tour and Nic says yeah, she always says that and then she does the thing and she’s on top of the world. But only because she’s survived it, I say. But then it doesn’t take long before she realizes that she hadn’t wanted to be rescued in the first place. I think that when she feels like she can’t play anymore then her life is over.