“I’m not doing this for me,” she says. To her credit, she does a good job of appearing to be completely astonished.
“Okay then. You really want to help me? This is about me for a change? I get to be on the other side of the teacher-student relationship? Are you sure?” I stretch and yawn here, because I’m exhausted.
“Absolutely,” she says, clearly choosing to ignore my indifference. “I owe you a gigantic debt of gratitude.”
“Then help me kill myself. I entered into a suicide pact with my dog, Albert Camus. He kept his end of the bargain two days ago by jumping out of my bedroom window. In a dream last night he said you’d come to help me. I want to be Zagreus—the cripple from Camus’s A Happy Death. You can be a female Patrice Mersault. Patricia Mersault, maybe. Kill me, and you can have my house and all of my money. We can draw up a will, even. You can sell this dumpy place, which has appreciated remarkably since the local skiing mountain has expanded, and you can buy a beautiful house on the beach and begin your search for happiness and meaning, completely free of responsibility for the rest of your life.”
“You need to teach again.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You have a gift, Mr. Vernon.”
“I most certainly do not, and more importantly, I no longer even care.”
“There are kids who need you. Troubled kids who need to believe in good men and hope.”
“Look at me—take a long hard look.” I wait for her to take in my disheveled, puke-covered, and still legally intoxicated appearance. I haven’t shaved in days. I must look and smell like a homeless person babbling nonsense on the side of a highway on-ramp. “I am not a good man, Ms. Portia Kane. My dog committed suicide, most likely because I blathered on and on at him night and day, spilling the poison of my brain indiscriminately. And I am done giving. I have nothing left.”
“You are a good man,” she says quietly.
“How would you know that, when we haven’t even spoken in decades? Tell me. Please.”
“I remember your classes and all of the time you gave me during my senior year when I was going through a really—”
“That was twenty years ago. Are you the same person now? Has time not changed you? You’ve romanticized your high school experience—and me. Whatever horrors you’ve faced in the last two decades are easily trumped by imagination and—Why am I even having this conversation with you?”
“Because you care.”
“I absolutely do not, Portia Kane. Maybe I did once, when I made you this card.” I glance down at the face of eighteen-year-old Portia Kane, and my heart softens for a second. I vaguely remember now a Christmas Eve when she showed up uninvited at my apartment and spent an hour or so sobbing in my arms, and we somehow ended up listening to Frank Sinatra holiday songs on AM radio as we sipped nonalcoholic eggnog and watched snow fall from the tenth-floor apartment window. Did she call me the father she never had? And do I remember thinking she was entirely unstable but in great need of kindness? I hand the card back to her. “When you are beaten almost to death for caring about young people, it takes a rather hefty toll.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she says. “That’s what this is about!”
“I’m afraid you may be a bit too late. I’m sorry. I don’t know what sort of fantastical idea made you go digging through your memories to find me, but—”
“You would have choked to death on your own vomit if I hadn’t—”
“I wanted to choke to death on my own vomit!”
Her mouth is open, her eyes well up, and then she is in my kitchen washing dishes.
This is the absurd, I say to Albert Camus in my mind as I sip my stronger-than-I-like coffee. My suicide attempt results in being stuck in my own home with a former student who wants me to teach again. This is any retired teacher’s hell. It’s like that Stephen King novel. My own personal version of Misery.
My dehydrated brain begins to throb, and so I just sit on my couch, staring through the windows at the distant mountains.
But then my own stench overpowers me, so I shower and change my clothes before resuming my sulking on the couch, now wrapped in a fleece blanket.
I sit in silent protest.
Portia Kane begins to clean the rest of my home once she is done with the kitchen. She’s found my cleaning supplies, and she scrubs and wipes and vacuums and mops for hours as I sit and stare, completely dazed and apathetic and resigned as Gregor Samsa. Turn me into a cockroach, and I wouldn’t even blink. At one point she even goes outside with pots of boiling water and washes my vomit off the deck.
“Cleaned up all the shit on the floor,” Portia Kane yells down from the loft above.
“That was Albert Camus’s excrement, not mine,” I yell back.
“He jumped from this window in the bedroom?” she yells down. “Why was the window open?”
“He was jumping and scratching at it in the middle of the night, which was unusual. I wanted to see what was out there, so I opened the window.”
There is a long pause.
She yells down, “Why didn’t you stop him from jumping?”
“He was very fast about it. I tried. Don’t you think I tried?”
“That must have been horrible. I’m so sorry.”
“You have no idea.”
When Portia Kane finishes cleaning my entire house, it’s midafternoon, and I am still on the couch, staring at the distant mountains.
She brings me a sandwich—turkey and American cheese on marbled rye with pickles and lettuce.