Eleanor Rigby (27 page)
“Liz, I look at the man who I was even a month ago and I am depressed and sick to my soul.”
Klaus was eating thymus glands (yes, sweetbreads) in a rooftop restaurant that was well concealed from anybody non-Austrian. It was a young and warm night, and the seating area was lit by hundreds of little white Christmas lights that covered the trees and the air above us.
Klaus said, “Because of my obsessive disorder, I never had a proper girlfriend, let alone a wife. Because of it, I never made long-lasting friendships. I feel like I’m starting my life over from the beginning.”
“It can’t be as extreme as all that.”
He lowered his fork. “As of today, what do I have in my life?” He flashed me his winning smile. “Teeth. Thousands of teeth every day. The good thing about teeth is that they kept me sane. You’ve heard of people with Tourette’s syndrome? Some of them become doctors and perform twelve-hour surgeries, but the moment they take off the gloves, the
fucks
and
shits
start right up. A man’s life is thrown away because of too much or too little of some stupid molecule in his frontal cortex or his hypothalamus. Molecules. That’s all it ever was—molecules.”
I asked, “What was it you felt was so important to tell all these women in the street?”
“Those poor women.
Ach
—the embarrassment. I’d buy them all flowers and thank-you cards, but they’d take it the wrong way. They should all be allowed to boot me in the testicles. I deserve it.”
“Klaus, be reasonable. You couldn’t control yourself. Yes, you did all that crazy stuff, but at the same time it
wasn’t
you.”
“I accept no excuses.”
“If I were you, I’d blame all those Freudian therapists who sucked in your money for all those years. I’m shocked that not once in all that time did they send you to a certified psychiatrist who could prescribe medications.”
“Liz, Vienna has much history invested in Freudian—”
“Klaus, shut up. Just shut up.” I was suddenly in a foul mood. Me, having dinner with the handsomest man in Europe at a chic rooftop restaurant, and I was in a foul mood. “You never said what it was that was so important that you had to badger all of those women.”
Klaus’s English had bad patches. “It was never an angry badgering that I did.”
“What was it that was so important?”
He leaned back in his chair, and the eyes of everybody in the room were silently looking at him, as if his lovely face might yield a pearl. “I was always attracted to women who thought they were one hundred percent happy with the world, or what the world had to offer them. Not sexually attracted—morally attracted—though that sounds awful. I felt that I could make them aware of something far grander than what modern Vienna had to offer them.”
“What would that be?”
“I no longer know.”
Klaus was Jeremy’s father in many ways. Their shared genetic strengths and weaknesses were fated to end at the same psychic cul-de-sac. I’d lost my appetite. My napkin dropped to the floor, but I didn’t pick it up.
“Elizabeth, what has come over you?”
“Don’t talk to me. Not right now.”
“Gott.
Have I lapsed and become compulsive in some way?”
“No, Klaus, you haven’t.” I was angry that I never got to witness him in his pre-paroxetine days—and I was angry because I know that if I had, I’d have seen the same Jeremy flash in the eyes, the same determination, the burning sun at the end of the highway, something that would make me willingly fall to my knees and crawl on pavement. He’d handed that role over to me, and nothing ever came of it. I felt cheated. I asked Klaus, “Have
you
ever had visions?”
“What do you mean, visions?”
“Visions. Have you seen things that were not real, but not dreams either—visions that showed you … I don’t know—things humans have never seen before?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I would love to have done so.”
“Jeremy saw visions.”
Klaus raised his eyebrows.
“Yes, he did.”
“What did he see?”
“Lots and little. I wrote down everything I could. It might have been poetry, or maybe it was merely his brain decaying, but I doubt it. The things he saw were always interesting to me. There was this one stream that started when I first met him, just before he became very sick.”
“What was it?”
“He saw visions of farmers in the Prairies, wheat farmers. It was spring, but they weren’t planting their fields.”
“Go on.”
“These farmers believed that the world was going to end that winter, so they didn’t bother sowing their grain. I think they set fire to their seeds. The farmers believed it was the end of time. Their wives and children were on the porches of their houses, and they were throwing away all of the jarred preserves and dried foods they’d made the year before.”
“And?”
“A voice came down from the sky. It told them that the world could only ever be full of sorrow, and that calamity and disaster will happen, always, either by their own deeds or by God’s choice. That’s why they shouldn’t be afraid—because the end is going to happen no matter what.” I stopped and took notice of how cheerful the rooftop restaurant looked, each of its tiny white lights tinkling my brain like a child’s xylophone. The restaurant was the opposite of how I felt. I said, “Klaus, I’ve thought about Jeremy’s visions many times now. I know them by heart.”
He said nothing, so I continued.
“The farmers heard a woman’s voice from the sky, telling them there was a gift awaiting them. They were told they would soon be given a signal—and that they’d soon receive this gift. But then the voice said that the farmers were unable to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep. She told them they’d lost their belief in the possibility of change. She said that death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was. The farmers and their wives and their families were told that they weren’t going to be receiving their gift—not that year. But by then it was too late to plant seeds. Their stored foods had been destroyed. They knew winter would arrive, and they had no idea what came next.”
Klaus’s listening was intense, almost aggressive.
I continued. “So the farmers stood on the road, a dirt road covered in dust. They stood there and prayed for a sign that would tell them they hadn’t been abandoned.”
“And?”
“A big string came down from the sky, as if dangled from outer space. There was a human bone hanging at the end. The farmers then saw another string lower to earth, and it had a skull tied to its end. Then there were more and more strings—hundreds of bones that all clattered like wind chimes. The farmers knew they’d received their message. They were forsaken, and they were in the wilderness. They felt that they weren’t even human any more, just scarecrows or showroom mannequins, stripped of souls. Their only salvation lay in placing faith in the very entity who had forsaken them.”
“And?”
“And that’s where that vision ended. That was his biggest story, but he never finished it.”
“My son was a mystic, then.”
“You might say so.”
Music was playing—Strauss. It sounded like music from a thousand years ago.
Klaus looked at me and said, “I am the same as our son. I can see that. He and I both reached the same point before we stopped. Hit the wall, as I think you say.”
I was crying.
“I’m sorry, Liz.”
“Why is life never what you want it to be?” I was tired. I wanted to go home, but home wasn’t home any more. I could no more live in my condo again than on Mars. It was a box, just a box.
The waiter came and asked us if we wanted dessert. We passed. Klaus sat there looking at the tabletop, shiny, reflecting all those pretty little white lights. And here’s where I made a leap. I said, “Klaus—”
He said, “Yes,” but didn’t look up at me.
I placed my hand on the table in front of him. I said, “Klaus, you’re lonely too, aren’t you?”
Again he said, “Yes.” He took my hand in both of his, kissed it. He looked in my eyes, and that’s when we fell in love. He knew, and I knew. It changed nothing, and yet it changed everything.
So this is what everybody’s been talking about.
* * *
The world is a strange place. I’m flying above it right now, in a
777
, with Klaus. I suspect this journal is coming to an end—or at least the end has arrived for the Liz Dunn who used to be, the Liz Dunn who was too lonely to live, and too frightened to die.
We’re flying to Vancouver to stay in a hotel for a week while we throw away everything I own and sell my condo to the first person who bites. I’m trying to think of anything I want to keep, but come up blank. Perhaps one of Jeremy’s leftover prescription bottles now filled with dust. Some photos. His scraps of paper with words written on them.
Here’s something: Klaus has never flown before—imagine that! I’m allowed to witness someone seeing the world for the first time. What a rare treat.
It’s been a busy three months for me. Klaus got the information from the German government, detailing the amount and types of radiation I’d been exposed to. I’m afraid to say it wasn’t good news, but I was flattered by Klaus’s anger at God. I told him, “Look, Klaus, just let it go. I’m not angry—so don’t you be angry.” But of course he stews, yet I’m quite serene about it all. I have headaches and I vomit every so often, but I’m also pregnant—surprise!—so in my head and my body there’s this race between life and death going on. But then isn’t that the case for everybody who’s ever lived, forever and always? Isn’t that the nature of being alive?
Klaus has a window seat. The captain says we’re over the Orkney Islands right now—what a funny name, the Orkneys—like the name of problem neighbours who have too many Rottweilers. Like a child, Klaus has just pointed out to me another jet off in the distance:
Two jets in the air at once!
To think that all this cosmopolitan grown man ever had to do to see the world was simply to go and buy a ticket.
* * *
A few weeks ago, on the same day I confirmed my pregnancy, I had a headache so big it seemed like it could change the weather. I was screaming for something, anything, to make it go away, so Klaus gave me a snack from his dental lunch box that he assured me wouldn’t hurt the baby. It killed the pain, but it did something else to me too. Suddenly I was in the Prairies, and I was with the forsaken farmers who were watching as giant wind chimes made of bones tinkled and clattered in a breeze no bigger than a child’s whisper.
And then I was up above the farmers—I was above the Prairies, and I was looking at them and their wives and children, and then I realized that I was the voice speaking down from the sky.
I said to them, “People, you’re now in the wilderness. You have a choice before you, and you have a winter of cold and starvation during which to make that choice.”
They asked me, “What is our choice?”
And I said, “You have to decide whether you want God to be here with you as a part of your everyday life, or whether you want God to be distant from you, not returning until you’ve created a world perfect enough for Him to re-enter.”
“That is our choice?”
And I said, “That’s it.”
I snapped my fingers, and with that the bones and strings fell from the sky, making cones of thread on the road and in the stubbled fields. When I came to, my head felt like a room with all the windows open, letting in gusts of cool fresh air.
* * *
The captain tells us we’re just about to pass over Reykjavik, and so I think this is where things really do end, and what’s so wrong with things ending? It’s kind of nice not to know for sure what happens to us before we’re born or after we die—or to be unsure of what will happen to us in that nervous, iffy time that exists between the point at which we decide to change our lives and the point where our lives actually change.
Klaus just tugged my sleeve and pointed out some stars above Iceland, visible in the day. Will wonders never cease? I look at those stars and I pluck them from the sky, and flick them at you like diamonds, like seeds.
You are the everything, and everything is in you.
Goodbye, all of you.
Your friend,
Liz.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2005
Copyright © 2004 Douglas Coupland
Special Features Copyright © 2005 Random House of Canada Ltd. and Douglas Coupland
Excerpt from
jPod
Copyright © 2005 Douglas Coupland
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States by Bloomsbury, and in the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Coupland, Douglas
Eleanor Rigby / Douglas Coupland
eISBN: 978-0-307-37537-7
I. Title
PS8555.O8253E54 2004 C813′.54 C2005-901314-1
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot, © 1976 Moose Music. Used by permission.
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