What was the point?
And what is the point of sitting around drinking wine and smoking cigarettes now that I’ve decided that I am finished with this life?
Why prolong this?
I go up into my guest bedroom and pull out the old photo albums I’ve kept for some reason I cannot name, and I take in my mother’s face before she became a nun, when it was just her and me, before she made Jesus her “husband.”
Some instinctual core of me regrets not having the chance to say good-bye to the old woman, but I don’t feel like crying or anything like that.
The photos I have are pretty typical mother-and-son shots, mostly snapped during birthday celebrations, Christmas and Easter dinners, vacations and the like. I’m sure you have all the very same photos, just with you and your own maternal figure inserted where my mother and I are in mine, so I won’t bore you with the specifics.
I wonder if it’s wrong to miss my dog much more than I miss my mother, and then I contemplate retrieving the letters from the PO box before I remember I have no working vehicle—my truck is still wrapped around the tree at the bottom of my driveway—and a limp that requires the use of a cane, which limits me to half-mile walks at one stretch on Vermont’s seldom-flat roads. The post office is a good twelve or thirteen miles away, which means I will die without reading Mom’s farewell to me.
Just as well, I think, as it was probably a guilt-inducing rant about my soul and ending up in hell if I fail to buy into what she bought into. I smile because I have already been to hell and survived, with the help of a little toy poodle who looked like Bob Ross. Or maybe hell is living on after your dog commits suicide.
“Pussy,” Portia had called me.
Portia Kane’s hardly a feminist, using that word.
But maybe I have been unmanly in my efforts to solve my problems. I feel my cheeks start to burn with some testosterone-fueled sense of self-worth or respectability, because killing myself is at least an action.
In the medicine cabinet I find an almost full bottle of aspirin, a bottle of NyQuil, an expired bottle of Percocet left over from my physical therapy days, some laxatives, a few antidiarrhea pills, and some Maalox.
In the kitchen, I dump all of the pills into a wineglass, pour the mysterious-looking green NyQuil over the multicolored fist-size ball of meds, and then retrieve a picture of my mother and one of Albert Camus from my bedroom.
He’s sitting erect with his one eye sparkling, looking out over the pond at sunset. The water is aflame with twilight.
Mom is making homemade crust for her delicious rhubarb pie, leaning down on a wooden rolling pin, flour smudged across her left cheek and her still golden hair up in a loose bun.
Back in the kitchen, I place each picture on either side of my hopefully lethal cocktail. “Albert Camus, a pact is a pact. Mother, this is to prove once and for all that your god is a fairy tale; you were wrong.”
I lift the glass to my lips, intending to down the entire contents as quickly as possible, hoping that many of the pills have already dissolved, not quite sure what the hell I am doing, wondering if I will even be able to get this green semi-liquid concoction down into my stomach with one tilt of the wrist and then quell the gag reflex long enough to keep it there—but just before the rim touches my lips, the kitchen door flies open with a bang and I drop the glass.
It topples over.
Goopy liquid and wet meds spill out across the table like a tiny forest-green tsunami full of pill-shaped debris.
Portia takes in the scene, examines the contents of my lethal cocktail. “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” I retort.
“You were really going to kill yourself? Really?”
“Have I not been clear on this point?”
She strides toward me, lifts her hand back behind her head, and smacks me hard enough to twist my head ninety degrees.
“Fuck you!” she screams.
I touch my cheek with my palm. “Ouch!”
She slaps my other cheek even harder.
“Why are you doing that?” I yell. “It hurts! Please stop hitting me!”
“FUCK YOU!” she screeches even louder. “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK!!! . . . YOU!!!”
Then she starts smacking my face with both hands at the same time, screaming, “You liar! You told us to be positive! I believed you! I trusted you! FUCK YOU, you have a responsibility to your students! FUCK YOU, you have a responsibility to yourself!”
“Why?” I yell. “Why? If you can tell me, I’d be most grateful. I was just a high school English teacher. No one cared! No one at all! The world does not give a flying hoot about high school English teachers! Why do I have a responsibility to anyone? What responsibility do I have?”
“To be a good man! Because you changed the lives of many kids. Because we believed in you!”
“Bullshit,” I say. “I introduced you and others to the classics and helped you get into college. Handed out a few pointers about life—platitudes mostly, which you could have easily discovered by opening up Hallmark cards. And then all of you went your merry little ways and forgot all—”
“We didn’t forget! I’m here!”
“My mother guilted you into this, and—”
“You believed in what you taught us! That’s what made you different. I know you did. You believed!” She punches my chest hard enough to make me cough. “You can’t fake belief. Not in front of teenagers, you can’t!”
“Stop hitting me!” I yell.
She punches me again. “Fraud!”