The Ministry for the Future

96

In the weeks that followed she began to take her pad with her to the clinic where Frank was being cared for. A period of surgeries and interventions had given way to a routine of palliative care. He could get out of bed, and with help shuffle out into the clinic courtyard, a pleasant walled space dominated by a big shade tree, a linden. He would sit there looking up into the leaves and the sky. There were flowerbeds, well-tended, but he never seemed to look at these. As far as Mary could tell, his ex and her daughter never came back to visit again. Once she asked him about it and he frowned and said he thought they had come by once or twice, but he couldn’t be sure when it had been. She even asked one of the nurses about it, and was told it was not information they could share, that she would have to ask him.

It didn’t matter. Acquaintances from the apartment co-op he had so briefly occupied came by, and friends from jail. So he said. Whenever she came by he was alone and seemed like he had been that way for the whole of that day, no matter when she came. It could have just been his manner, which was getting more and more withdrawn, but she began to think her impression was right; he was seldom visited. As his condition worsened, and he was more and more confined to his room and even his bed, on an IV drip of pain meds and who knew what else, she began to spend more and more time there. She realized that she believed, as much as she believed anything, that when someone was dying, it wasn’t right that they be left alone, stuck in a bed, attended only sporadically by nurses and doctors. That wasn’t proper; it wasn’t human; it should never happen.

And so she began to make his room her office. She brought in a music box; found a small chair she could borrow from the clinic to use as a footstool; added a pillow to the chair she sat in, to give her back more support.

After that she began every day with a quick breakfast in her safe house, filled a thermos with coffee, then went to the office to check in, then continued on to Frank’s room. There she settled into her chair with her pad, started Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on the music box to announce her arrival, and got to work on her pad. If she had to make a call she stepped out into the hall and spoke as briefly and quietly as she could. Her bodyguard detail, almost always Thomas and Sibilla, got comfortable in their own ways out in the clinic reception area. Their job had to be boring, she judged, but they did not complain. When she mentioned it they just shrugged. We like it that way, they said. Better that way. Hope it stays that way.

These days, Frank spent most of his time asleep. This was a relief to both of them. When he woke, he would stir, groan, blink and rub his eyes, look around red-eyed and confused. His face was swollen. He would see Mary and say “Ah.” Sometimes that was all, for minutes at a time. Other times he would ask how she was doing, or what was happening, and she would reply with a quick description of the latest news, especially if it pertained to the refugee situation. If it was about Switzerland in particular, she read to him off her pad, so he could get as much information as there was. Otherwise she gave him her impressions.

Most of the time he slept, uneasily, fitfully. Drugged. Sometimes he lay still, but often he shifted restlessly, trying to find a more comfortable position.

Sometimes he would come to suddenly and seem fully awake, although eyeing her from a great distance. Once when he was like this, he said out of the blue, “Now you’ve got me kidnapped.”

She growled at that, a little nonplussed. “A captive audience is never very satisfying,” she replied at last, trying to keep it light.

“You could help me escape.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“You’re not very good at it.”

“Well, you’re in maximum security here.”

“Still visiting me in jail then.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Another time he woke and stared at her, then knew her, and where he was. He said quietly, “I’ll be sorry not to see what happens next. It sounds like things are getting interesting.”

“I think so. But, you know. No one will live long enough to see an end to it.”

“More trouble coming?”

“For sure.” She looked at her in-box; she would have to scroll down for a couple of minutes to get to the bottom of it. “Something this big is going to go on for years and years.”

“Centuries.”

“Exactly.”

He thought it over. “Even so. The crux, you called it once. The crux is a crux. You might see an end to that anyway.”

She nodded, watching him. Instinctively she always shied away when he talked about his death. She recognized that fear in her—that some barrier would crack and they would fall together into an unbearable space. But she had learned to stay quiet and let him go where he would. There was no point in keeping someone company if you wouldn’t follow them where they wanted to go.

This time, he fell asleep while still formulating his next thought. Another time when she walked in he was already awake, sitting up and agitated. He saw her and reached out for her so convulsively she thought he might fall off the bed.

“I just jumped through the ceiling,” he exclaimed, wild-eyed. “I woke up and I was standing on this bed, and then I jumped up through the ceiling, right up there!” Pointing up. “But then I still couldn’t get away. I tried to but I couldn’t. I fell back down and then I found myself here again. But I jumped right through the ceiling!”

“Wow,” Mary said.

“What does it mean?” he cried, transfixing her with his look, his face vivid with dismay and astonishment. “What does it mean.”

“I don’t know,” she said immediately. She reached out and touched his hand, both twining her fingers with his and shifting him back toward the middle of the bed. “Sounds like you had a vision. You were trying to get out of here.”

“I was trying to get out of here,” he agreed.

She let go of him and sat in her chair. “It’s not time yet,” she ventured.

“Damn,” he said.

“You’re a very strong person.”

“So I should be able to do it,” he objected.

She hesitated. “Well,” she said. “It cuts both ways, I guess. It wasn’t your time yet.”

He stared at her, still completely rattled. Of course, to have a real vision—to hallucinate—to try to fly out of this world—it was bound to be upsetting.

She didn’t know what to say. Now he was weeping, looking right at her still, tears rolling down his cheeks. Seeing it she felt her eyes go hot and tears well up. Something leaping the gap from face to face, some kind of telepathy, some primate language older than language. It was like seeing someone yawn and then yawning yourself. What could you say?

She tapped on the music box and got Kind of Blue going. Their theme music now, this album, flowing along in its intelligent conversation. She sat back in her chair, let the familiar riffs flow over them together. She reached out and they held hands for a while. He clutched her hand from time to time. After a while he relaxed, fell asleep, and was deeply out the rest of the day.

Another day, struggling unconscious on his bed, writhing even, he suddenly came up from under, as if to breathe, and saw her there and turned his head aside, pained somehow. He was drugged, confused, only semi-conscious if that. Out of that condition she heard him mutter, “It’s only fate. It’s only fate.”

She stared at him. His face was sweaty, both bloated and drawn at the same time. His breathing was labored; he pulled in air with desperate heaves, as if he could never get as much as he needed. When she was sure he was fully out, she said, “My friend, there is no such thing as fate.”

Then one morning she came in and there were two hospice nurses in there, women attending to him—but no; cleaning up the scene.

One looked up and saw her and said, “I’m sorry, he’s gone.”

“No!” Mary said.

That one nodded at her, the other shook her head.

The one who had spoken said, “They often slip away when no one’s around. Seems like some of them want it to be that way. A kind of privacy, you know.”

She was not upset, as far as Mary could see. Not even alarmed. This was her job. She helped people at this point of life, helped them get to the end with a minimum of pain and distress. Now this one was gone.

Mary nodded absently, regarding Frank’s still face. He looked to her like he had when he was sleeping. She had been coming by for two months. Now he was very still. She took in a big breath, felt herself breathing. Felt her heart beating. She was confused; she had thought there would be a struggle, a final clutch at life. She had thought it always went that way. As if she knew anything about it. It had been a long time since she had attended a death; and there hadn’t been that many.

“We can take care of him now.”

Mary nodded. “Give me a moment with him,” she said.

“Of course.”

They left. Mary arranged his stiff curled hands on his chest. They were cold; his chest was still warm. She leaned over and kissed him very lightly on the forehead. Then she picked up her pad, put it in her bag with the rest of her things, and left him. She walked out of there and wandered over to Bahnhofstrasse, and turned toward the lake.

She walked the handsome prosperous streets of Zurich both sightlessly and seeing things she hadn’t noticed in years. Mind skittering, feelings blank. The chipped heavy stone blocks that formed the buildings flanking Bahnhofstrasse. They were amazingly regular geometrical objects, not perfect, lightly pocked and nobbled to give the faces of the buildings texture, but regular in that too, and set so perfectly that it was hard to imagine the process that would manage to accomplish it. In the end it had been the human eye, the human mind. Swiss precision. Buildings from a time when stone masons still did most of this kind of construction by hand. Artists of a very meticulous aesthetic, maybe even fanatics. Monomaniacs of cubical form. Stolid. Permanent. Many of these buildings had been here since 1400. Their stonework repaired probably in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but maybe not. Maybe set in stone for good.

Unlike a human life. A mayfly thing, a wisp of smoke. Here then gone. Frank May was gone. Well, now she would never wake up one night to find herself being murdered by him. She shook off that thought, shocked by it. The one who lives longest wins. No. No. Never again his spiky rebukes. The pleasure in an Alpine day, the rare moment of peace, the dark brooding anger, the ceaseless, useless remorse. He was released from that at last. Thirty years carrying that burden, manifesting whenever he let down his guard.

A PTSD sufferer. If that was really the way to think of it. Weren’t they all post-traumatic in the end? So that it was just a way of pathologizing being human? Martin had died on her just like Frank—hospice bed, painkillers, suffering through the final breakdown of his body’s functions, the end of his life, at age twenty-eight, when they had only been married five years; wasn’t that trauma? It most definitely was! She could see all that as if it were yesterday, and of course sitting with Frank had brought it all back in ways she hadn’t felt for years. So wasn’t she post-traumatic too?

Yes. But PTSD meant someone whose trauma had been—brutal? But death was so often brutal. Violent? That too. Shocking, bloody, premature, evil? Something cruel and unusual, so that the person who survived it couldn’t get it out of their minds, kept having flashbacks to the point of reliving the experience, as in some nightmare of eternal recurrence? Yes.

Maybe it was a matter of degree. Everyone was post-traumatic, it was universal, it was being human, you couldn’t escape it. Some people had it worse, that was all it came down to. They were haunted by it, stricken, disabled. Sometimes it was bad enough they killed themselves to get free of it. Not uncommon at all.

What a thing. Death and memory. Martin had been young, he had struggled against death with a kind of furious resistance, with a sense of injustice. Right to the end he was never reconciled to it. Long after he had lost consciousness for the last time his body had fought on, the lizard brain in the cerebellum rallying every last cellular spasm to the cause. Those last hours of labored gasping breaths, what used to be called the death rattle, would never leave her. It had gone on too long. She seldom thought of that, she had learned to forget most of the time. This was the key, maybe, that ability to forget; but she dreamed of it sometimes, woke gasping and then remembered, as of course she always would. One didn’t forget but rather repressed. Some kind of boxing up or compartmentalization; what that meant inside the brain and the mind she had no idea. Somehow they managed not to think of certain things. Maybe that was what PTSD was—the inability to do the work of forgetting, or of not recalling.

Not working at all for her now, she had to admit. The trigger in her brain had been pulled, and she was shot. Poor Martin. She wandered in an abreaction, through this handsome stone city that she quite loved. Remembering Martin. It wasn’t so hard when she let herself. In fact it was easy. How she had loved him. Ah Zuri Zuri my town, my town. Some old poem from her German class. This was her town. Martin and she had lived in London, in Dublin, in Paris, in Berlin. Never in Zurich or anywhere in Switzerland. She loved it for that. Really she was very fond of this town. She even loved it. The way they could make her laugh with their Swissness. Their stoicism, their insistence on order suffused by intense feelings of enthusiasm and melancholy. That peculiar unnameable combination that was a national affect, a national style. It suited her. She was a little Swiss herself, maybe. Now aching with old pain, heartsick at the loss of someone gone now forty-four years.

She wandered the narrow medieval streets around Peterskirche and the Zeughauskeller. There was the candy shop where Frank had bought them candied oranges, proud of them, how good they were, how much an example of Swiss art at its finest.

Down to the lake. She headed toward the park with the tiny marina below it, intent on visiting the statue of Ganymede and the eagle. Ganymede perhaps asking Zeus for a ride to Olympus. It wouldn’t be good when he got there, but he didn’t know that. The gods were godlike, humans never prospered among them. But Ganymede wanted to find out. That moment when you asked life to come through for you.

It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn’t seem possible. She saw why people might believe in souls. Souls popping in and out of beings, in and out, in and out. Well, why not. Anything might be true. All things remain in God. Some saint’s line, then Yeats, then Van Morrison, the way she knew it best. All things remain in God. Even if there was no God. All things remain in something or other. Some kind of eternity outside time.

As she stood there above the little marina she heard a roar, saw smoke across the lake to the left. Ah yes: it was Sechseläuten, the third Monday of April. She had completely forgotten. Sachsilüüte, to put it in Schwyzerdüütsch. The guilds had marched in their parade earlier, and now a tall tower erected in the Sechseläutenplatz had been set on fire at its bottom. Stuck on top of the tower would be a cloth figure of the Böögg, the Swiss German bogeyman, his head stuffed with fireworks that would explode when the fire reached them. The time it took for this to happen would predict whether they would have a sunny summer or a rainy one; the shorter it took, the nicer the weather would be.

Mary hurried across the Quaibrücke to Bürkliplatz, past the squeak and squeal of the trams over their tracks. If the Böögg went fast she wouldn’t get there in time. Had to hope for a bad summer if she wanted to see the fireworks burst out of its head.

She got there sooner than she thought it would take. The platz was jammed with people, as always. The cleared circle they kept around the burning pyre was smaller than any other people would have kept it; the Swiss were strangely casual about fireworks. Their independence day in August was like a war zone. Some kind of wanton pleasure in fireworks. In this case they were at least going to go off well overhead, as opposed to August 1 when they were shot off by the crowd into the crowd.

The tower in the center of Sechseläutenplatz was about twenty meters high, a flammable stacking of wood and paper. On top, the humanoid big-headed figure of the Böögg, ready to ignite. The crowd was thick to the point of impenetrability, Mary was as close as she was going to get.

Then the Böögg went off. A fairly modest explosion of colored sparks bursting from out of the head of winter’s monster. Some booms, then fireworks pale in the late afternoon light, then a lot of white smoke. Giant cheer from the crowd.

The smoke drifted off to the east. She walked over to the lakeshore, just a few blocks from her schwimmbad. It was near sunset. She could see three ridges to the south; first the low green rim of the lake, then the higher, darker green ridge between them and Zug; then in the distance, far to the south, higher than the world, the big triangular snow-splashed peaks of the Alps proper, now yellow in the late light. Alpenglow. This moment. Zurich.