Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
Here I am in yet another form of isolation—a bubble, no less. What is the universe trying to tell me?
Dr. Vogel gave me an English-language medical book, but the section on radiation was too depressing. The symptoms are so similar to those of MS—all that’s different are the rates at which they occur, and an overall sense of never quite knowing for sure if the end is really the end. Being in the Bubble only makes it worse. People look in and smile and wave at me as if I were a puppy or kitten—and the moment they pass, I bet they make a sad face at the person coming the other way: Poor doomed woman in the Bubble.
Near sunset, William walked into the room outside my bubble, his suit crinkled, a small tomato juice stain on his lapel. “Christ, Lizzie, what the fuck did you do to these people?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Some, not all. You’re in a fucking bubble.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you sick?”
“Me? No.”
“Why the bubble?”
“Technically, to protect me from you. They won’t let me out until my white blood cell results come back. Pull up a chair.”
William did so. “I drove down to your condo and the building was covered in white plastic. Guys with moon suits were going in and out, like at the end of ET. You’re going to have some pretty pissed neighbours when you get home.”
“That’s occurred to me. You look tired.”
“I haven’t slept in twenty-eight hours. I’m used to it.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“So tell me what happened, okay?”
And so I did, leaving out the part about Herr Bayer and Klaus Kertesz.
William said, “That’s our Lizzie—if you’re not finding a transvestite sliced in two, it’s a chunk of plutonium.”
“Not plutonium—I believe it’s enriched uranium.”
He relaxed his chest and let out a whoosh of air. He looked around. “You know what? I’ve bought blood from someone in this hospital before.”
“That’s a coincidence.”
“Some of these Krauts chug along forever. This one woman remembered the invention of cars.”
“Imagine having all those memories.”
“She’s got DNA like a dog’s chew toy. She’ll live to see World War Four.”
“William, when you meet these people and you pay them for their blood, do you ever ask them anything?”
“Medical info only—smoking, drinking, diet—what their work was, how old their relatives are.”
“Do they have anything in common?”
“They all say they don’t worry very much—and weirdly, they tend to not like vegetables. It’s true.”
“I meant, do they ever say how they cope with having all those memories in their head?”
“Never. It’s usually farmers, or people who live in small villages where nothing ever happens. People in cities never reach 105, let alone 110.”
“Have you found anything yet that links them all together?”
“Maybe. We think there may be some gene markers, but the big money is going to be in, uh, other kinds of cells—but I’m not the one who told you that. We don’t take just blood any more.” He rubbed his eyes, winked and said, “I have to go sleep. How long are you here for?”
“If all goes well, I should be discharged in the morning. I have no clothes—my luggage is being buried as toxic waste—so I have to buy everything new.”
He gave me the number of his hotel and we agreed to meet after my release. As he was walking out of the room, he looked back at me in my bubble. “This is a bit like it was with Jeremy, isn’t it?”
I said that it was.
He said, “See you in the morning, Lizzie.”
* * *
I am determined to fly to Vienna quickly. As William doesn’t know the real purpose of the trip, my determination to go leaves him confused. “Vienna? Just go home, Lizzie. You’ve had enough excitement already.”
“No. I want to see Vienna.” I was a free woman, my white blood cell count was fine and we were in the hotel’s dining room, eating what can only be described as A Salute to Meat—veal stuffed with shrimp, pork stuffed with beef. But meat suddenly seemed different to me; it was flesh, perhaps radioactive flesh. The German word on the menu, fleisch, didn’t help matters. I ended up eating a salad.
William was scheduled to fly home the next morning, and was giving me what he thought was good advice. “Vienna’s a big old city filled almost exclusively with senior citizens. Trust me, I know old people, and that’s all the city has—granted, not a 105 in the bunch. Is it the money you’re worried about? Is your trip non-refundable?”
“It’s not the money. I just want to go on principle.” I was fiddling with my hair—or rather, the lack of it. That afternoon, before stocking up on my new hausfrau look, I’d impulsively gone into a salon and had it lopped off.
“And why on earth did you cut off your hair? It’s your best feature.”
“I’d rather do it myself than have chemo do it for me.”
“Who said anything about chemo? Your white blood cell count was normal.”
He was entirely correct, but it was easier to use chemo as an excuse instead of saying that I was really sick of being me and that I wanted to be someone else, if only for a little while. I think that’s true of most people who radically cut their hair.
William finished the last veal on his plate. “Just make sure I’m there when Mother sees you for the first time. When are you off, then?”
“Tomorrow. I’m taking the train.”
“Not flying?”
“No.”
“The city of Frankfurt thanks you. Oh—I meant to ask you, do you get to keep your meteorite?”
“Of course not.”
“It would make an interesting lawsuit if you tried to hold on to it.”
“Be realistic, William. They’d simply have me shot.”
We both stirred thick coffees. I was thinking over Dr. Vogel’s prognosis for me. It wasn’t bad, nor was it good. I’m slated to spend the rest of my life wondering whether a bit of fatigue is the start of something sinister, or if a bruise denotes underlying bad news.
I had asked the doctor, “You can’t just do a blood test?”
“Miss Dunn, you could have one blood test a month for the rest of your life—maybe a white blood cell count, most likely—but then what would you do with the results?”
“You tell me.”
“You’d just end up living in a state of hypochondria, which I think is far worse for your body than most diseases out there.”
“So I’m supposed to forget about it?”
“In a word, yes. And no.”
I said good night and goodbye to William from the elevator. This is my journal up to now. I just swallowed a big German sleeping pill. Tomorrow: Vienna.
* * *
Once Jeremy’s elevator started going down, it never came up again. It just fell and fell, into the centre of the earth, and then deeper some. After that first round of flu, he lost much of his mobility. A cold two months later stripped his face of much of its animation.
Sometimes I’d walk into the room and he’d be whispering to himself. I’d move in close to hear his words—always nouns, frightening in the way they formed into lists: … black cotton … lemon groves … darkness … vinegar … broken bones … milk-white horses … nakedness. When he stopped making his own jottings, I sometimes wrote down the words. I’d ask him about them, but when he was feeling more himself, he had no idea of their meaning.
I’m trying hard here not to overstate the boundaries of how well I came to know my son. Jeremy was damaged, complex and confused, and there’s only so much one can learn about a person in a fixed amount of time. You can fake many things in life, but twenty years of history isn’t one of them.
I have this theory about life and its shortness. I think that in order for us to take in everything there is for us to learn as human beings on this plan
I ran this by William one night while Jeremy was semi-asleep. He said, “Lizzie, you’re pissed because you think you had a chance to know your kid but you blew it. Get over yourself. Look at me—I’ll never really know my two brats. I know all the usual dad shit, but how far does that take me?”
Jeremy heard this. “Your kids are monsters. You don’t discipline them—they’re barn cats.”
I said, “Jeremy!”
“Liz, my kids are monsters. I was one too. So were you.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a monster.”
“Lizzie the burglar.”
This took me aback. “Burglar?”
“We all knew about you breaking into houses.”
Jeremy lifted his head for that one. “She what?”
My ears were burning.
“In the summers. Your mother went into houses when people weren’t there, and she’d just sit around.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. She just went into people’s houses and sat in them.”
I asked him, “How long have you known about this?”
“The police came around once when you weren’t home. A woman from Social Services said it was just a phase, that we should ignore it. Mother took that advice very seriously.”
Jeremy said, “Wait—the authorities allowed you to break and enter?”
In unison, William and I said, “It was the seventies. Things were different.”
Jeremy looked at me. “So, Mom—did you steal anything?”
“No. That wasn’t the reason.” I confronted William. “Why did nobody ever tell me they knew?”
“My point exactly. There’s much to be said for simply leaving your kids be.”
Whatever they said next passed me right by. I was pink with embarrassment, and felt foolish for having thought I’d gotten away with something.
Wait—
Wait—
It was nothing—just a few of those European ambulances buzzing by outside the hotel window. Actually, my digs here in Vienna consist of a three-room suite—big and expensive, and I don’t care. I just couldn’t face the prospect of a single room, even a deluxe one. Not that I minded my night in prison and in the Bubble; I just don’t want to be alone in one more single room this particular week.
The train floated from Frankfurt to Vienna, and the taxi ride from the station also couldn’t have been more charming: chocolate- and cream-coloured pigeons, precisely coiffed grey hair, cement ornaments like cake frosting, and cookies on doilies looming around every corner. Vienna was never wrecked by war, so, like Rome, it’s old and curlicued. Frankfurt was bombed to smithereens, so everything there is new and rectangular. Everything back home is new and rectangular, but only because it’s the cheapest way of building; how nice to have had a curlicued patch somewhere out here in the world.
It’s also odd to visit a city more by happenstance than by desire. Walking through Vienna’s streets, I think, Isn’t that pretty. Oh my, look at that. I see picturesque things, but nothing sticks to my brain, nor do I want things to. I’m detached.
Mostly I just looked in shop windows. Centuries of tweaking have rendered them irresistible, and even a cobbler’s shop had a beautiful colourful display that made me pine for soles in need of releathering. After some hours I returned here to my suite. I was on my bed, holding my shoes, studying their heels, when my phone rang. It was Herr Bayer. I’d left a message on his machine. I’d forgotten to phone from the German hospital to announce my lateness; he must surely consider me a flake.
“Good afternoon, Miss Dunn.”
“Herr Bayer, hello. I’m sorry I didn’t call you before this. I was … delayed.”
“I am honoured to have an international crime superstar on the phone with me in my humble office.”
I played it dumb. “Oh?”
“I hear that the city of Frankfurt chased you out of town with stones and buckets of tar.”
He found my story amusing, and my pride was pricked. “How did you find out?”
“This is Europe, Miss Dunn. We share information here. I’m assuming you are okay after prison. What are you doing for dinner?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Then you must please join me.”
We agreed to meet in the downstairs restaurant at eight o’clock, but I wondered if that was too early, too gauche—the Viennese probably start dinner at ten. Screw it. I looked at my short hair in the mirror. What have I done? Well, long hair didn’t take you far, Lizzie. I realized I felt like I was primping for a date, and in so doing, alarm bells went off. Liz Dunn has never been out on a date. I knew almost nothing about Herr Bayer, and I suspected he was only out to cadge a dinner he could expense.
I rode down to the lobby in the elevator—a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang brass job that did everything but boil water and make tea. As I rode, I considered the conversation that was to come, and I felt somehow unarmed. Herr Bayer must surely have done his research on me. Did he know about Jeremy? He seemed like he’d know everything. I knew almost nothing. But we each had what the other needed, or that was my impression.
Down in the lobby, the hotel continued to be a dream. I remembered seven years back, watching daytime TV with Jeremy, and how, whenever somebody won a trip to France or someplace European, their hotel was always described as “sumptuous.” This place was sumptuous. No surface was without lace, carved pearwood, bevelled mirrors, dark, oily paintings, thick fabrics, or whipped cream and a cherry. It was the opposite of my German jail cell. I felt alien, but when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I thought, Oh, there’s an Austrian person—but then of course it was me being unfamiliar with my new short haircut and my new, non-radioactive outfit.
I felt like me, but not me. I suppose it’s why we like travelling; it’s why cults target airports, why train stations sell the flags of all nations. Travel dissolves you. It makes you need to rebuild yourself, forces you to remember where you’re from.
“Miss Dunn?”
I turned around to see a man my age, average height, a beard and moustache, and slightly old-fashioned clothes. “Herr Bayer …”
We shook hands. “Please, the restaurant is this way, shall we go?”
He escorted me by the elbow, which nobody had ever done for me before. The gesture was corny yet reassuring. He reminded me of a cab driver I once met in Seattle, a bearded grump who said he was once Director of Theoretical Astrophysics at Kiev University.
The head waiter didn’t look at me, but since I was escorted by a man, we didn’t even break our pace and went directly to a table. By myself, I would have read the day’s paper three times before being smuggled to the rearmost table.
We sat down.
“It is a pleasure finally to meet, Miss Dunn.”
“Likewise.” Heavy white napkins were unfurled on our laps. “It’s nice to visit the city where the subconscious was invented.”
He looked at me darkly. “Miss Dunn, the subconscious was not invented. It was discovered.”
“Oh. Sorry. I hadn’t given it much thought. I’ve always thought we had our day-to-day personality and then we also have this big rat’s nest inside of us called our subconscious.”
“What makes you think of it as a rat’s nest?”
“Well, if our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn’t have to bury it down deep inside ourselves. It’d be just another feature on our face, like our nose.” I could see Herr Bayer thought I might be joking, but
“I think maybe four.”
“What would you call them?”
“Miss Dunn, you already know that—your public self, your private self and your secret self.”
“That’s only three.”
“The fourth is the dark self—the one that drives the car; the one that has the map; the one that is greedy or trusting or filled with hate. It’s so strong it defies speaking.”
Menus were given to us, and I snapped out of what felt like a trance. “How did we get here so quickly?”
“I think you were driving the car, Miss Dunn.” He smiled, then ordered mineral water for us. A beautiful basket of bread appeared, with butter.
To compensate for such an off-kilter start, I prattled on about how beautiful Vienna was, and recounted, quite boringly, everything I’d seen that afternoon. In response he said, “You’ve a touch of sun on your face.”
After my afternoon walk, my cheeks had the nice, slightly pulled-tight feel to them. “Oh. I suppose.” I added, “But the sun is overrated, you know.”
“Why is that, Miss Dunn?”
“Here you have this vast globe of flaring plasma that can be seen from trillions of light years away, and yet all it has circling it is a dozen or so rocks. You’d think something that cosmic would have a bit more going for it.”
“Your way of looking at the universe is unique, Miss Dunn.”
“I try to be realistic about things.”
“The menu here is excellent.”
“It’s in German, Herr Bayer. Could you order for me?”
“Please, call me Rainer. And yes, I will. Are you allergic to anything?”
“No. But I have trouble with any meat whose name also describes what the meat used to do before it became meat.”