Kamikaze Lust (38 page)

I went to Aunt Lorraine’s bed and sat beside her. Poor baby, I thought. If only I’d been faster with the Bailey’s. Some people need the alcohol to speed up the barbiturates, and some, like the lineage of dead musicians, need the pills or dope to accelerate a death by alcohol. It had taken my father close to thirty years to kill himself with his drinking, and he’d had a massive head injury to help him along. Then someone like Janis Joplin sponges too much heroin one night and pukes herself to death at age twenty-seven.

My poor baby, I thought again. Look at her lying there, immobile, with her thin, violet eyelids shut and mouth propped open like a sickly marionette. Nobody would have blamed me if I put a pillow over her face and set her free. But I couldn’t do it, at least not yet. For as strongly as she may have wanted it, death in close-up had to make letting go more difficult. I couldn’t hurry the journey, wherever she might be going.

As for me, I do not readily accept that something awaits us on the other end. I know only that if heaven were a state it would be like the best of Las Vegas: fun and flashy, energized and addictive, without clocks or windows so you would never know the time, without mirrors so you wouldn’t be bogged down by the body. But it would have a New York sensibility: vibrant neighborhoods, good restaurants, and blocks lined with movie theaters. More than one game in town.

Imagining Aunt Lorraine at a big poker table, I finally lay down next to her and put the stethoscope to her chest. Time was immeasurable, incalculable: bump-bump; bump-bump; bump-bump said the tell-tale heart. Until the pounding began to slow, having a surprisingly tranquil effect upon me. I felt relaxed, as if we were floating in the middle of a lake on a sunny afternoon. A place far from the flat-line buzz of Hollywood emergency rooms. A place out of the prying purview of the media. Nothing but the two of us in Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom. Nothing but my ear and her fading heartbeat.

Lauren Sanders is a novelist and journalist. Her writing has appeared in
Time Out/New York, The American Book Review, Poets & Writers Magazine,
and numerous other publications. She is co-editor of the anthology,
Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey
. She lives in the East Village of Manhattan, and is currently at work on another novel.