Portia offers no rebuttal, but stares at the snowy mountains in the distance.
“Can you imagine? Your very own mother says this to you at your absolute lowest point. That her god meant for you to be beaten with a baseball bat? That it was an intentional part of something larger? That’s exactly when I cut Mother out of my life. Her Jesus talk crossed the line that day. Went from ridiculous to dangerous. I don’t trust religious people. Period. Don’t want them around me.”
“Listen,” she says. “I’m not a religious person. I’m really not.”
“What’s that crucifix hanging around your neck, then?” I point to a medieval-looking cross I haven’t noticed before, maybe because I was drunk and then hung over.
“Your mother gave it to me. It was a parting gift. It looks sort of metal, and well, I grew very fond of your mother, truth be told.”
“Metal?”
“Heavy metal. I’m a metalhead.” She raises a fist, only the pinkie and index fingers are extended like bullhorns. “Heavy metal, religion—just two different shows really. You’d be surprised how much they overlap. High dramatics. Cultlike followings, cool pendants, mystical, esoteric, and often nonsensical prose, men with long flowing hair—”
“I want to be Zagreus again. Kill me, please.”
“Okay, I’ve been here for almost a week now, and I need to say this: Would you stop being such a pussy?”
I’m stunned by her use of that word.
I didn’t think women used that word—ever.
“As hard as this may be to believe, I vowed to save you before I even started writing your mother,” she says, “before I knew she even was your mother—and since I too don’t believe in God or mystical forces, this isn’t exactly easy for me either. I can’t explain how I ended up here to save your life, but I did, and here I am. We don’t have to understand what led to this very moment, but I suggest we use it to do something positive. Don’t you remember that paper airplane lesson you used to give on the first day of school? How you demonstrated the power of positive thinking and resisting Pavlovian impulses? Have your responses become conditioned for the worse? Are you going to piss on everything even before you know whether it’s good or bad for you? Eternally raise the middle finger high in the air just because a few things haven’t gone your way?”
I’m surprised she remembers that paper airplane lesson I used to give; I’d almost forgotten about it myself. I stopped giving it long before Edmond Atherton ended my career, mostly because it seemed sort of hokey after so many years of doing it, and also administration didn’t like me encouraging kids to throw anything out of the windows. I had been sternly warned on several occasions. Other teachers complained that I was interrupting their classes—that their students were distracted by my class moving through the hallways, and also by all of the airplanes flying in plain sight past the first-floor classrooms’ windows. I endured a lot of bitching about that little lesson over the years, and eventually it was just easier to hand out a syllabus on the first day of school and act like all of the other resigned and apathetic veterans—much easier, actually. Pragmatism won out in the end.
I’m a little touched that Portia remembers that paper airplane–throwing business, which I once considered one of my best lessons. And yet there is still enough piss and vinegar in me to say, “I was beaten with a baseball bat in front of my students. My dog has committed suicide. And now I’m being haunted by the misinformed and untested optimism of my youth in the form of a delusional former student who can’t even take care of her own problems, let alone mine.”
“You are my problem now!” Portia says, and I notice that her eyelids are quivering. “I’m not leaving until we solve you. Like in those old kung fu movies—I saved your life, and now I’m responsible for it.”
“Kung fu movies? Why do you want to solve me all of a sudden, when you were happy to leave me undisturbed for two entire decades? Why now?”
“Remember when you asked for volunteers to go down to the soup kitchen in Philly and read books to the kids in the day care there? More than half the class signed up because they were inspired by you.”
I sigh. “If your life was happy and fulfilling, you wouldn’t be here right now, would you? Don’t you see the irony of what you’re saying? You were my student, you believed what I told you, and it led you where?”
“Here! Remarkably, I’m right here with you right fucking now—even though you’re being impossible.”
“You are here because you want me to be something I’m not.”
“You’ve just forgotten who you are.”
“Enough semantics,” I say. “I’ve given you my proposition. We reenact Camus’s A Happy Death, with me playing Zagreus the old cripple, done with life, and you playing Patricia Mersault, the hedonistic young person who kills the old for money and a chance to exist free and clear of the average working person’s life. That’s my solution. Now what’s your counterproposition?”
A tear rolls down her flushed cheek, and that’s when I know I am breaking her—that I am winning.
“I want to bring you back to life—make you flesh and blood again.”
“That sounds a lot like Mom’s religious hocus-pocus crap.”
“You used to be so alive! And now you’re a ghost. Living like you’re already dead.”
“I want to be dead!”