“A bit of a coincidence, although she’d call it divine intervention. I prefer coincidence, because I’m not really sure whether I believe in God. Full disclosure—I was drunk at the time, so I don’t remember much about our initial talk. But she gave me her address, and we began corresponding. I sent her my contact info in a letter, and then she called my cell phone out of the blue and I began to visit her. We talked. She confided in me. And I eventually ended up making her a promise that I intend to keep.”
“What did you promise her?”
“That I would save you.”
As I sit at the table, Portia Kane dries my dishes.
Could this day get any more ridiculous? She’s clearly insane, I say to Albert Camus in my mind, and then I chuckle like hell.
“What are you laughing at?” Portia Kane says.
“Everything,” I say. “And I can’t wait to see how you ‘save me.’ Do you even have a plan? Did Mother send you up here with some sort of Catholic idol, rosary beads, and a bunch of prayer cards? Maybe a flask of holy water? A swath of some saint’s jockstrap? Did she tell you about her ‘visions’? What a crock of shit. All of her religious mumbo-jumbo hasn’t made a bit of difference in my life, or anyone else’s so far. But what the hell? How is my dear old mother anyway, the righteous, self-indulgent ancient bitch?”
“She’s dead. I attended her funeral yesterday.”
CHAPTER 11
“My mother. She’s really dead? Dead dead? You’re serious about this?”
She nods solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t anyone contact me?”
Portia tosses down the dish towel and tries to soften her face, but this just makes her look even angrier. “When’s the last time you checked your PO box? Because it’s full of letters from nuns—a few from your mother. She’d been working on your salvation for years—and not just your soul, but you here right now in this world too. Her words, not mine. We quickly found that we had a common goal: we both wanted to resurrect you.”
It’s been months since I’ve been to the post office. I prepay my bills for electricity and water six months in advance, I pay my yearly property taxes in full down at the town hall every February, my retirement checks are direct deposit. I do all my banking in person, I own no credit cards, and everyone else who does odd jobs for me—like the plow guy and handyman—I pay in cash. I have to admit, I’m curious now as to what the old lady wrote. I have a sudden desire to go to my PO box, a feeling I haven’t felt in many months. I have so many questions now, and pressure is building in my throat. It feels maybe a little like regret, even though I didn’t do anything wrong and was perfectly entitled to cut her out of my life after she laid that easy religious mumbo-jumbo on me when I needed her most—her, not some ideas about the origins of mankind and some fairy-tale benevolent spaceman controlling our destinies. Her earthly leader wears flamboyantly large hats and extorts money from the poor and uneducated while living in a palace, probably eating off plates made from gold, even though his own god said it was harder for a rich man to enter into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But I digress.
“How did she die?” I ask.
Portia tells me and then adds, “It happened fast. She was planning on making a trip up here, but her doctors forbade her, and she simply didn’t have the strength, so she wrote because there was no other way to contact you. She even overnighted the letters in the hopes of reaching you in time. And she wasn’t sure you were still here, or else maybe she would have come looking for you. She tried to contact you—very hard. Finally, she ‘gave you to God,’ her exact words. Check your PO box. It’s all there.”
“Okay,” I say, although I’m not sure why, because it’s not okay in any sense of the word.
A wave of guilt overcomes me.
I don’t feel like crying so much as vomiting, which is confusing, because maybe it means I am just still hung over.
“You’re having a hell of a week,” Portia says. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe you will find this a bit strange, but I’m not sure I can handle any more information,” I say. “I just don’t want to hear any more right now, okay? I’m sorry. But I need time to digest all of this, and . . .” I don’t finish my sentence. I have no idea what else to say.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know whenever you’re ready, but of course it doesn’t have to be right now, if you’re feeling overwhelmed. My showing up here like this and dropping the news on you—it would be a great shock for anyone under any circumstances. And we can start saving you in a few days. I’ve set some time aside for this.”
“I don’t need—,” I say, but no more words follow, because I absolutely need some sort of help if I am to keep breathing and thinking and occupying space here on earth.
To her credit and my great surprise, Portia respects my request and doesn’t push it, which makes her very unlike my deceased mother—and actually helps me to trust her a little.
Sitting on my couch, we both look out the window at the mountains in the distance and act like mountains ourselves—breathing stoically, silently.
Unmovable—if only for a time.
A long time, actually.
And I begin to respect Ms. Portia Kane’s ability to just sit and be.
At first I’m mentally challenging her to beat me at this stillness, this passiveness, this giving up—and I’m looking forward to her failure. But somewhere along the line, I start to draw support from her, much like I did from Albert Camus, and if I am being honest, some part deep down inside me begins to worry that she will leave before I am ready to be alone, just like my best four-legged friend did—that no living thing is able to be around me in my present condition.
But of course we eventually get up off my couch and begin moving about again.
Albert Camus once wrote, “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” And that is exactly what Portia Kane and I do for a few days as we take walks together, share meals, wash and dry dishes, stare at sunsets, and avoid speaking about anything of consequence whatsoever. We rely on politeness, common courtesy, to get us through the hours. It’s almost like we are playing estranged father and daughter who are suddenly forced to spend awkward time together in the Green Mountains of Vermont—although neither of us would put it that way.
I think I am mourning my mother, but I can’t be sure.
I’m definitely mourning Albert Camus, who was much more in tune with my emotions and feelings than my mother ever was. My dog was there for me, and even though he might have committed suicide to escape my existential crisis, he loved the real true me in his own way.
I’m not quite sure what I am doing allowing this former student to sleep on my couch and live in my house.
In no way whatsoever does it seem smart.
I sometimes think maybe she’s just as sick as Edmond Atherton, but masking it to heighten her inevitable betrayal; she will kill me in my sleep and end all of this thinking I am doing—take the first question off the table permanently.
But after a few days it becomes clear that this woman is pure of heart, and her intentions—albeit delusional and wildly misguided—are driven by a need to make things right, if only in some simpleminded way. It’s obvious that she has been deeply wounded, broken by life, and is now attempting to live by a code. And there are moments I find myself thinking back to when she was in my class, remembering snippets of why I spent so much time with her when she was eighteen, maybe because she showed promise simply as a human being. She had the altruistic heart of a dreamer and unchecked ideal notions about the world—the perfect fool, smiling up at the sky with one foot already over the edge of the precipice. For some reason the dreaded word extraordinary keeps popping up in my mind, and I try to kill it every time, even though a former student showing up at my exact moment of need—just in time to save my life, actually—
is indeed out of the ordinary.
Could she be Edmond Atherton’s antithesis?
The universe evening things out?
Some sort of cosmic order?
Or maybe Portia and I are each silently daring the other to speak first, to open up, to be prematurely vulnerable so that the other can strike first, wound deeply, and win.
Regardless, I don’t ask questions and she doesn’t offer answers.
We just politely exist together for a time, in a heavy silence that sometimes feels like being buried alive under twenty feet of snow—a foot or so for every year since we last danced this number. It’s as if we’re in a hollowed-out snow cave heated by the flame of a single candle, and we’re wondering if some emotional rescue team will ever arrive with the metaphorical equivalent of Saint Bernards wearing small barrels of brandy around their necks, and yet we have no way of knowing for certain if anyone even knows we are still alive. I come to appreciate this trapped, helpless, loss-of-control give-up-to-inevitability feeling more than I thought was ever possible.
It’s almost liberating, to the point where I no longer even want to be rescued.
One morning, as we bundle up—I offer her an old down vest that’s too big for her, but she wears it anyway over her jean jacket—and walk the quarter-mile dirt road together to the frozen pond, I wonder if she might be a quasi reincarnation of Albert Camus, or maybe his ghost taking on a womanly form, because she leads me there just like my little dog did, forcing me to cane my way a bit more quickly than usual—always pushing me to be more mobile and cheery than I thought possible.
But just when I’m about to buy into the fantasy, my sanity points out the fact that she has a rental car with New Jersey plates and I’ve touched her hand on several occasions when she’s handed me dishes to dry, so she is not ethereal.
She also consumes food and much wine, so I know she is no ghost.
As we’re sitting on my deck one night, bundled up in hats, gloves, and quilts, drinking said wine, I say, “Okay, tell me the story of how you came to know my mother.”
She keeps her gaze on the many stars above, rocking back and forth on the old wooden Mission rocking chair I purchased at a flea market in town. “You’re ready to talk about this? Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Okay, then.”
My former student goes on to tell me the most unbelievable and frustrating story I have ever heard, one that makes me never want to read the letters my mother allegedly sent to my PO box. Wild coincidences. Mystical forces. The Virgin Mary supposedly appearing on an office-building window in Tampa Bay.
She even uses the word miracles!
It’s absolutely laughable, even for my mother, until my former student gets to the end where the old woman dies, which unfortunately is the most realistic part, and I’m pretty sure Portia Kane doesn’t believe half of what she’s told me because she keeps saying, “I know it sounds crazy, but . . .” and “I don’t even believe in God, and yet . . . ,” chopping her thigh with her right mitten as her wine sloshes around in her glass.
“Why didn’t my mother ask her almighty and powerful God to save her life when she found out she was sick?” I say. “Did she ever think of that?”
“She asked him to save you instead.”
“I see.” It feels chilly to be on the other side of Mom’s religious delusions. She always used to say it was me who was to do the saving, with my teaching. What a laugh!
“She absolutely thought that her death was part of her god’s plan,” Portia says. “I’m not saying I believe it is all part of any god’s plan, but you have to admit, it’s a strange coincidence at the very least. Your mother believed that this was all meant to be. And I did save you from choking to death. That is a fact we can both agree on, right? That I arrived at precisely the right moment. Just a mere five minutes later, and we might not be having this discussion. What we do with that information is still up for debate in my mind. But here I am regardless. And here you are too. Together. Despite the odds.”
Portia seems to be taking a rather objective view of my mother’s madness, and I must say that I’m impressed by her ability to consider both Mom’s religious nonsense and my current and preposterous lot in life—and also the link that we have now formed, Portia and me, whatever is going on here, right now. She seems to be absorbing all of it in stride, without getting emotional.
I think about Portia Kane showing up after twenty years simply to turn me over just before I choke to death on my own vomit. How it’s undeniably true that I might very well be dead if she hadn’t met my mother on a plane, been given my Vermont address, and been convinced to drive eight hours north to “save” her former high school English teacher, who she had mistakenly put up on a pedestal to represent the goodness of all men.
Absurd.
These are the uneducated thoughts of wacko mystics, the mind tricks of charlatans eager to control and separate the masses from their wallets, not the sort of stuff you should allow into your thought process about anything, let alone the first question.
Albert Camus would want me to answer the first question with reason and objectivity, not superstition and convenient religious mysticism.
“You know what my mother said to me when I was in the hospital, after one of my very own students beat me to within an inch of death with a baseball bat? When I looked up at her, frightened and desperate and wounded and with nothing left to give whatsoever, let alone anything left to defend myself with, not even dignity? Do you know what she said?” I ask Portia, who is now sitting comfortably with her legs up on the arm of my couch, back inside my house. “She said my attack must have taken place for a reason. Can you believe that? Isn’t that sick? Isn’t that just cruel? Can you imagine saying that to someone who has experienced such brutality? That the actions of a sick mind are actually part of some divine plan for the universe—that Edmond Atherton’s mental illness was an intentional part of some god figure’s plan. That god said, Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea to scramble some teenager’s thoughts to the point where he is willing and able to commit a chilling act of violence so that it will begin an otherwise impossible chain of events? Because it would be far too easy just to communicate directly with mortals. I am all-powerful, capable of doing whatever I want, so let’s make this into a bit of a challenge. Just for fun, or maybe a laugh. Is that not ridiculous at best and abusive at worst? It would make God either the laziest being in the universe or the most sadistic.”
Portia offers no rebuttal, but stares at the snowy mountains in the distance.
“Can you imagine? Your very own mother says this to you at your absolute lowest point. That her god meant for you to be beaten with a baseball bat? That it was an intentional part of something larger? That’s exactly when I cut Mother out of my life. Her Jesus talk crossed the line that day. Went from ridiculous to dangerous. I don’t trust religious people. Period. Don’t want them around me.”
“Listen,” she says. “I’m not a religious person. I’m really not.”
“What’s that crucifix hanging around your neck, then?” I point to a medieval-looking cross I haven’t noticed before, maybe because I was drunk and then hung over.
“Your mother gave it to me. It was a parting gift. It looks sort of metal, and well, I grew very fond of your mother, truth be told.”
“Metal?”
“Heavy metal. I’m a metalhead.” She raises a fist, only the pinkie and index fingers are extended like bullhorns. “Heavy metal, religion—just two different shows really. You’d be surprised how much they overlap. High dramatics. Cultlike followings, cool pendants, mystical, esoteric, and often nonsensical prose, men with long flowing hair—”
“I want to be Zagreus again. Kill me, please.”
“Okay, I’ve been here for almost a week now, and I need to say this: Would you stop being such a pussy?”
I’m stu
nned by her use of that word.
I didn’t think women used that word—ever.
“As hard as this may be to believe, I vowed to save you before I even started writing your mother,” she says, “before I knew she even was your mother—and since I too don’t believe in God or mystical forces, this isn’t exactly easy for me either. I can’t explain how I ended up here to save your life, but I did, and here I am. We don’t have to understand what led to this very moment, but I suggest we use it to do something positive. Don’t you remember that paper airplane lesson you used to give on the first day of school? How you demonstrated the power of positive thinking and resisting Pavlovian impulses? Have your responses become conditioned for the worse? Are you going to piss on everything even before you know whether it’s good or bad for you? Eternally raise the middle finger high in the air just because a few things haven’t gone your way?”
I’m surprised she remembers that paper airplane lesson I used to give; I’d almost forgotten about it myself. I stopped giving it long before Edmond Atherton ended my career, mostly because it seemed sort of hokey after so many years of doing it, and also administration didn’t like me encouraging kids to throw anything out of the windows. I had been sternly warned on several occasions. Other teachers complained that I was interrupting their classes—that their students were distracted by my class moving through the hallways, and also by all of the airplanes flying in plain sight past the first-floor classrooms’ windows. I endured a lot of bitching about that little lesson over the years, and eventually it was just easier to hand out a syllabus on the first day of school and act like all of the other resigned and apathetic veterans—much easier, actually. Pragmatism won out in the end.
I’m a little touched that Portia remembers that paper airplane–throwing business, which I once considered one of my best lessons. And yet there is still enough piss and vinegar in me to say, “I was beaten with a baseball bat in front of my students. My dog has committed suicide. And now I’m being haunted by the misinformed and untested optimism of my youth in the form of a delusional former student who can’t even take care of her own problems, let alone mine.”